Women

Review: The Wild Adventures of Women in Anthropology

Anthropology was once built around freewheeling interactions with alien peoples in far-flung lands.

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minis_intrepidwomen | Photo: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
(Photo: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)

Today the stereotypical anthropologist sits all day philosophizing about the most basic human interactions while waiting for layers of ethics committees to approve any contact with real people. But anthropology was once a swashbuckling, adventurous field, built around freewheeling interactions with alien peoples in far-flung lands.

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.