Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation focuses on the role of oral practices of discussion, text elaboration, and dictation in Malinowski’s writing process. By showing documents from the archives, it aims to recover Masson’s contribution to her husband’s work helping to un/doing histories of anthropologies.

Paper Abstract:

As many biographical sources and the MFEA research have highlighted, Elsie R. Masson (1890-1935) supported her husband, Bronislaw K. Malinowski (1884-1942), as an informal assistant, a reader, a discussant, and a copy-editor. Several parts of Malinowski’s manuscripts, both those which were eventually published and the unpublished ones, held in the archives, are written in Masson’s hand, as he used to dictate his papers and chapters to her. But how did this dictation process work? To what extent could have Malinowski and Masson rearranged orally some parts of the texts? Could Masson have participated actively and creatively to this writing process? Although Malinowski and Masson’s voices had got missed in the very process of dictation, by analyzing material from the archives it is possible to speculate on their collaboration in discussion and even dictation. As a part of an ongoing research, on the one hand, this presentation focuses on the role of oral practices of discussion, text elaboration, and dictation in Malinowski’s writing process. On the other, by showing documents from the archives, it aims to recover Masson’s contribution to her husband’s work, thereby continuing searching for her missing voice to un/doing histories of anthropologies.