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Last modified on Fri 16 Apr 2021 05.15 EDT
When Maria Czaplicka first encountered the indigenous hunters and herders of northern Siberia it wasnât clear who was doing anthropology on whom. The Oxford-based scholar had spent much of 1914 sledging over the Arctic steppes to reach the Evenks in order to ask them about their kinship structures, marriage customs and the right way to eat a reindeer. They in turn wanted to know which tundra she had come from and how she made a living without any fox skins to trade. And why did such a young person have such old hair (her blondness struck them as the grey of middle age), and then, the question that women still get: where were her children? The queries that hurtled back and forth were fearless but fertile and produced the rich data that Czaplicka marshalled so brilliantly in
Suffragettski : Maria Czaplicka travelling in a wicker carriage in
Siberia, summer 1915
Credit: Pitt Rivers Museum
In 1910, Barbara Freire-Marreco, the daughter of a Woking accountant, left England behind and lived and worked among a tribe of Pueblo Indians in New Mexico. Three years later, Katherine Routledge sailed to Easter Island to carry out the first true survey of the land and its people, while also attempting to broker negotiations between increasingly angry islanders and the Englishman who managed the farm that formed the island’s economy. (She didn’t make much headway, but she was given chickens and potatoes.)
The following year, Maria Czaplicka trekked across 3,000 miles of frozen Siberia gathering information about its indigenous people. Freezing cold and lost in a snowstorm, she finally understood the allure of gulping down the still-warm blood of a freshly slaughtered deer. She was the first white women many of the Siberians had seen, and they joked that sh