Review: The Wild Adventures of Women in Anthropology (opinion)
Ursula Graham Bower was one such early anthropologist—and boy did she swashbuckle. In 1937, she left Britain to visit a friend in the colonial government of India. Instead of finding a husband, as she was expected to do, Bower fell in love with Nagaland, a hilly and unruly frontier zone where her friend was stationed. She spent a decade doing full-time anthropological research there. Although Nagas had a strict gender hierarchy, Bower became an "honorary man" to them by showing off her rifle skills on the hunt.
Then Japan invaded the British Empire in 1942. Bower partnered with a Naga leader named Namkiabuing to form "V Force," a special operations unit that battled Japanese infiltrators. Everyone involved expected to die. The men of V Force went into battle wearing their funeral beads, and the Japanese army put a bounty on Bower's head. But she survived the war and became a celebrated author in Britain.
Intrepid Women: Adventures in Anthropology, a coffee table book published jointly by Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and Pitt Rivers Museum, is filled with characters like Bower. Mākareti was a Māori noblewoman who built up New Zealand's tourist industry and became a high-society celebrity in the 1900s before beginning serious academic work on Polynesian culture. Elsie McDougall was a widow who, with no academic training, became a world-class expert in indigenous Central American textiles and survived a 1935 shipwreck. These stories of a more adventurous time are illustrated with photos of strange and beautiful artifacts from the museum.
The post Review: The Wild Adventures of Women in Anthropology appeared first on Reason.com.
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