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Paper Short Abstract:

The case of Alicja Iwańska (1918-1996), a Polish born American scholar, is very informative for the alternative history of anthropology, and shows: precarity of career, gender injustice, rigid professional boundaries, emigre status as an obstacle, though in fact it was a great advantage.

Paper Abstract:

I have analyzed the issue of a failure in my anthropological biography of Maria Czaplicka (2020). I have also proposed a concept of an "alternative history of anthropology" that would focus on marginalised and forgotten figures to present a broader concept of our discipline as practice.

The present proposal draws attention to another emigre Polish female scholar - Alicja Iwańska (1918-1996), who escaped to the US in the late 1940s, studied sociology at Columbia, collaborated with Sol Tax at Chicago anthropology. She conducted many research projects. The most important were: in Washington State among farmers in the 1950s, and in Central Mexico among Mazahua Indians in the 1960s. Both resulted in very penetrating ethnographies.

Her position in American academia was marginal for several reasons. First of all she was an emigrant and her writing output was bilingual: she wrote her academic texts in English, but her literary works in Polish (primarily her "ethnographic novel" Translated World). She was a woman-academic in the time when American universities only started to accept women. She had her PhD in sociology, and due to rigidity of American notion of professional qualification, she had to work at sociology departments though she was really an anthropologist.

The case of Iwańska is very informative for the alternative history of anthropology, and shows: precarity of career, gender injustice, rigid professional boundaries, emigre status as an obstacle, but in fact it was a great advantage (what was raised by Sol Tax in his introduction to Iwańska's Mexican monograph).