Five hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a bitter winter gale, a team of reindeer collapsed with exhaustion on the Siberian tundra. It was mi

‘Undreamed Shores’ Review: The Women Who Changed Anthropology

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2021-06-19 07:30:04

Five hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a bitter winter gale, a team of reindeer collapsed with exhaustion on the Siberian tundra. It was midwinter 1914. The sun had not risen for weeks; the air was hazy with diamond-hard snow. A furclad figure pulled her numb legs out of a buckskin bag, then struggled to get off her wooden sled as her guide admitted they were lost. Chilled and starving, Maria Czaplicka fantasized about killing one of the reindeer so that she could drink its warm, nourishing blood. She wondered if there was any hope of achieving her goal: to make contact with the Tungu people, known today as Evenks—nomadic reindeer-herders who had never met a European woman.

Czaplicka is one of five fascinating, intrepid women pulled from the shadows of history by Frances Larson in “Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology.” Ms. Larson is an honorary research fellow in anthropology at Durham University in England. After completing her doctorate, she was a research associate at Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, home of an extraordinary archaeological and anthropological collection. The museum was established in 1884, and a condition set by its benefactor, Gen. Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, was that the university should appoint a lecturer in the new science of anthropology.

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