THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, June 19 - 20, 2021 | C9 BOOKS ‘Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.’ —MARGARET MEAD Revolutionary Anthropology Undreamed Shores Yet Ms. Larson has no doubt that By Frances Larson Czaplicka “was liberated by her Granta, 337 pages, $25.99 strangeness and found a sense of auton- omy” in her “voluntary exile.” BY CHARLOTTE GRAY Blackwood was similarly fearless. Hysteria about native attacks on white IVE HUNDRED MILES women permeated colonial outposts north of the Arctic Circle, in the Solomon Islands, and although in a bitter winter gale, a there were no reported incidents of team of reindeer collapsed women anthropologists being molested, with exhaustion on the a colonial administrator refused her FSiberian tundra. It was midwinter 1914. requests to travel inland. She ignored The sun had not risen for weeks; the air him and, in homemade breeches (skirts was hazy with diamond-hard snow. proved impractical in the jungle), strode A fur-clad figure pulled her numb legs off beyond the government-controlled out of a buckskin bag, then struggled to area to visit villages where tribesmen get off her wooden sled as her guide still used stone axes. “She did suffer admitted they were lost. Chilled and from anxieties,” writes Ms. Larson, but starving, Maria Czaplicka fantasized “only about her academic work.” about killing one of the reindeer so that Sometimes, as with Blackwood, quiet she could drink its warm, nourishing persistence was the most effective blood. She wondered if there was any weapon. In contrast, Routledge was hope of achieving her goal: to make bossy, demanding and insufferable; only contact with the Tungu people, known her private income and determination today as Evenks—nomadic reindeer- allowed her to overcome the difficulties herders who had never met a European she faced. woman. Perhaps the most poignant aspect of Czaplicka is one of five fascinating, these stories is that only one woman intrepid women pulled from the was able to pursue a career in anthro- shadows of history by Frances Larson pology. Blackwood would become a in “Undreamed Shores: The Hidden legendary curator and teacher at the Heroines of British Anthropology.” Ms. Pitt Rivers Museum. The others found Larson is an honorary research fellow their ambitions stymied: One commit- in anthropology at Durham University ted suicide, one was committed to a in England. After completing her doc- psychiatric hospital by a husband eager torate, she was a research associate for her capital, and two quietly with- at Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Mu- drew. Apparently none had children. seum, home of an extraordinary ar- Meanwhile, far from the Pitt Rivers chaeological and anthropological col- Museum, a new generation of anthro- lection. The museum was established pologists was also discarding the histor- in 1884, and a condition set by its ical-collection methodology in favor of benefactor, Gen. Augustus Henry Lane- ALAMY(2) OXFORD; OF UNIVERSITY MUSEUM, RIVERS PITT LIVERPOOL; OF UNIVERSITY ARCHAEOLOGY, OF MUSEUM GARSTANG PHOTOS: JOURNAL, STREET WALL THE FOR MCCABE SEAN BY ILLUSTRATION PHOTO more systematic study of contemporary Fox Pitt-Rivers, was that the university WOMEN OF CONSEQUENCE Clockwise from top left: Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood, Barbara Freire- foreign cultures. The star of this ap- should appoint a lecturer in the new Marreco, Katherine Routledge and Maria Czaplicka. proach was Bronisław Malinowski, a science of anthropology. dashing figure whose prose was imagi- The discipline’s male founders were ain’s first female anthropologists, achiev- living with the agricultural peasants of and “escaped their own society in the native and seminars were legendary. eager to chart and categorize the ing groundbreaking research in some of Upper Egypt. Fights between villages name of scholarship.” Ms. Larson is an Malinowski insisted that anthropolog- world’s cultures. At first, these mu- the most remote corners of the world. were common, and her most reliable elegant writer not given to hyperbolic ical knowledge had to be generated in seum-based anthropologists relied on Katherine Routledge, the daughter guide was murdered. But instead of gush. Her primary sources are scanty, the field. This was the kind of work travelers’ reports and letters from mis- of a North England industrialist, com- fleeing from such conflicts, she dodged but she animates her subjects by careful these five women were already doing, sionaries for details of “primitive” peo- missioned her own boat and sailed to about, making notes and taking photos. reading and close observation, and she but, Ms. Larson points out, Malinowski’s ple’s beliefs, ceremonies, appearance, Easter Island, in the South Pacific, one Beatrice Blackwood, the single-minded draws out their complexities with deli- “clear sense of his own destiny was houses, food and artifacts. They rarely of the most isolated communities in the eldest child of a widow, traveled into cate sympathy. I found myself gasping a privilege available only to men.” thought it necessary to spend time with world. There she compiled the first sys- the unmapped jungles of New Guinea. at the sheer nerve of these women. Disinterring the stories of long- the people they studied. But once an- tematic map of the great stone statues She also met, and heartily distrusted, forgotten women is challenging when thropology became a university course that covered the island. Barbara Freire- the reigning star of female anthropol- there are few letters, journals or pub- with its own lecturer, it needed stu- Marreco, from a comfortable and con- ogists, Margaret Mead. The discipline’s male lished papers available, and the women dents. Those students would help ventional middle-class home in Surrey, These women would have wanted to didn’t achieve the star status that change the way that anthropological worked and lived in the adobe pueblos be remembered for their professional founders studied their generates headlines. So group biogra- research was conducted. of New Mexico and Arizona. She im- achievements alone, but, as Ms. Larson subjects at arms’ length. phies—building a composite picture As a new program, the anthropology mersed herself, as no male anthropolo- writes, “before they were adventurers through several disparate lives—make diploma was more accessible to women gist could have done, in the work ex- and intellectual pioneers, they were These five women were sense. There have been several such than the established programs were. pected of women in those communities women, and as women they faced among the first to insist biographies recently, including “Square Between 1907 and 1918, 27 women —maize-husking, needlework, the pre- entrenched prejudice and constraint at on the importance of Haunting: Five Writers in London Be- (compared with 103 men) registered, paring of traditional medicines—even every turn.” Compared with their male tween the Wars” by Francesca Wade joining the few hundred women study- as their way of life was eroded by white peers, most of them hadn’t attended an fieldwork. and “Virginia Woolf and the Women ing at Oxford in the early 20th century settlers. Polish-born Czaplicka trekked academic high school. They also had to Who Shaped Her World” by Gillian Gill. who were barely acknowledged by their 3,000 miles through the Siberian winter work much harder to find funding for “Undreamed Shores” is a particularly male peers and who could attend lec- to learn the traditions of hunters who their fieldwork trips and found upon Czaplicka’s Arctic travels are per- absorbing, well-constructed addition tures only in chaperoned parties and on spent much of the year in darkness. She their return that their career paths haps the most hair-raising. In one to the genre. condition of silence. They were ex- observed a culture in flux, changed for- were barricaded against them. The few nightmare episode, she and her com- pected, Ms. Larson tells us, to be “pe- ever in 1904 by the completion of the jobs available went to men. panions took 10 freezing hours to cross Ms. Gray is the author of 11 books ripheral, clerical and grateful.” The five Trans-Siberian Railway. Winifred Black- Ms. Larson’s subjects handled such a foaming, roaring river in a small of nonfiction, including “Sisters in women of “Undreamed Shores” over- man, from a genteel but impoverished obstacles with teeth-gritting persever- wooden boat. She became so exhausted the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna came these attitudes and became Brit- Anglican vicar’s family, spent 19 seasons ance as they defied social expectations while bailing that she vomited blood. Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill.” Covenant, Crucible and Creed ON ELECTION NIGHT in 2016, a globalized economy for the himself was one of those The belief that inhabitants of idea, or ideas: As long as you the intellectual classes of Europe benefit of all. Accordingly he candidates in 2012, and his the New World bore a covenantal believed in certain ideals—liberty, and North America were ready wants to “reclaim what is valid campaign, such as it was, fizzled duty to God to create a nation equality, the rule of law—you to turn out books and think in nationalism . from both early. He would have fizzled rooted in liberty dominated the could be an American. At home, pieces on the inexorable advance the cosmopolitan liberals who again in 2016 without the insane American imagination from the Mr. Goldman writes, the creedal of transnational progressivism. believe in a borderless world aggressions of cultural leftism: Puritans to the turn of the 19th vision “pointed toward the Instead they were obliged to and from the rightwing populists campus riots, militant political century. Over time, Mr. Goldman realization of racial equality write about a reinvigorated who have coupled a concern for correctness, overt anti- explains, blood lineage began to through gradual but consistent nationalism, and they were ill- their nation’s workers with Americanism in the media, replace religious profession as reform.