RAI Research Seminar: Aleksandar Bošković

RAI Research Seminar

Women in history of anthropology:
Forgotten or marginalized?

Aleksandar Bošković, Institute of Archaeology, Belgrade (Serbia)

Recent research in the history and theory of anthropology brought to light more data about the role of women in the history of our discipline. Even in cases where female scholars were instrumental for the establishment of a discipline (like Winifred Hoernlé in South Africa), they were – until very recently – curiously omitted from many narratives of anthropology’s heroic past. Of course, anthropological research is very much influenced by the attempts to understand the discipline’s history and different trajectories that led to its institutionalization in different cultures and different cultural and social contexts. At the same time, these attempts take place amid complex sociopolitical crises that lead to questioning of the dominant ideological narratives. In recent years, scholars like the Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui have questioned the “decolonial” narratives that were trying to explain the lives and histories of indigenous nations of the Americas. Like any other segment of human life, anthropology is influenced by the actual political narratives, and some of them will be examined in this presentation.

In the present lecture, a particular emphasis will be placed on the trajectories of several scholars, like Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Landes, and Germaine Tillion – and the ways in which they carved the place for themselves. Some other examples (renaming of the Kroeber Hall at Berkeley) will also demonstrate some – more or less – subtle attempts to erase women from anthropology’s history.

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Images in the public domain:
Zora Neale Hurston; Ruth Landes at Museu Nacional (cropped); Germaine Tillion carte d’étudiante 1934.