Short Abstract

Aiming to overcome polarised histories of anthropologies, the panel explores the multiple roles of female scholars in the development of the emerging disciplines of ethnography and folklore between the mid-19th and the early 20th centuries.

Long Abstract

Between the mid-19th and the early 20th centuries, fostered by scientific societies and museums, ethnography and folklore studies developed as empirical disciplines in several national traditions, acquiring different denominations over time and space. What was the role of female figures in this process? In which ways did they contribute to the production and circulation of ethnographical and folkloric knowledge? To what extent such knowledge emerged through practices and representations marked by gendered asymmetries? What women’s lives, careers, and research tell us on the relationship between male and female scholars, between researchers and their objects of study, and on the interconnectedness between ethnography and folklore studies?

Inspired by the posthumous publication and translation on Berose – International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology of a manuscript by Mariza Corrêa (2024) summarizing her research project on women anthropologists in Brazil – a sort of feminist counterpart to Adam Kuper’s Anthropologists and Anthropology (1973) – this panel aims to map and reappraise female scholars between the mid-19th and the early 20th centuries, in order to understand and overcome male-polarisation in studying and reconstructing the development of the emerging disciplines of ethnography and folklore.

Expanding Corrêa’s project to folklore studies and adopting a broad transnational perspective, which will allow us to go beyond the Western European and Anglo-American traditions, we propose to analyse the multiple roles of women as observers, data collectors and/or compilers, theoreticians, savantes and/or museum practitioners as well as crucial intellectual brokers between cultures, research traditions, institutions, social and scholarly networks and actors. By examining female participation and agency, we aim to uncover practices of interconnectedness between genders and traditions of inquiry in knowledge production and circulation which may inspire dialogical approaches to envision more entangled histories of anthropologies.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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