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Paper short abstract

Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women played central yet precarious roles in the production of ethnographic and folkloric knowledge. Drawing on research, collecting, and museum practice, this paper examines how gendered asymmetries shaped disciplinary participation and recognition.

Paper long abstract

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were active participants in the formation of ethnography and folklore studies, contributing through travel, research, collecting, teaching, and institutional labour. Yet their work was often channelled into forms of participation that produced ethnographic knowledge without consolidating disciplinary authority. This paper examines women’s roles in the production and circulation of ethnographic and folkloric knowledge across scientific societies, museums, and universities, with particular attention to the gendered asymmetries that shaped access, recognition, and professional trajectories.

Focusing on research practices, expeditions, and ethnographic collections, the paper analyses networks of mentors, funders, intermediaries, and collaborators that facilitated women’s work while also tethering them to forms of patronage, disciplinary expectation, and institutional obedience. The material legacies of this research—formed through entangled agencies—speak to multiple disciplinary histories, but also to forms of disciplinary non-arrival, in which productive anthropological work failed to consolidate into stable institutional positions or canonical forms.

Drawing on case material including Maria Czaplicka and other women active in early British anthropology, the paper develops a collections-based approach attentive to material density, archival absence, and the afterlives of interrupted research. In doing so, it contributes to feminist reappraisals of ethnography and folklore studies by foregrounding women’s roles as observers, collectors, and intellectual brokers, and by reflecting on what women’s lives and careers reveal about relationships between male and female scholars, between researchers and their objects of study, and about the interconnected histories of emerging anthropological disciplines.

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Paper short abstract

This paper shares the life story of Florence Shotridge (1882-1917), or Kaatxwaaxsnéi, who is the first recorded Indigenous American woman to formally lead an anthropological expedition which she co-led with her husband, Louis Shotridge, on behalf of the Penn Museum.

Paper long abstract

This paper shares the biography of Florence Shotridge (1882-1917), or Kaatxwaaxsnéi, a Tlingit woman, educator, and ethnographer. She is the first known Indigenous American woman to formally lead an anthropological expedition, alongside her husband, Louis Shotridge. Louis is a well-known Tlingit ethnographer and collector, but much of his work in his early career was done in collaboration with Florence—yet her contributions are often not mentioned in these early years of his work. In this paper I will discuss Florence's early life, Chilkat weaving skills, the expositions and musical performances she participated in with Louis across the U.S., career at the Penn Museum, and untimely death at the age of 35. I piece together her life history using her two published articles, the two Tina’a Chilkat blankets she wove, archival photographs, newspaper interviews, the museum objects she collected on her expedition for the Penn Museum, and interviews with two contemporary Tlingit women and storytellers today -- Donna Beaver and Lily Hope. I argue that Louis' career in the field of anthropology would not have been possible without Florence's Chilkat weaving and English-speaking skills, which forged early connections with key figures who propelled the couples' career. This paper seeks to fill in the historical gaps on Florence’s life history, highlight her contributions to her husband’s career, and discuss her own contributions to the field of anthropology.

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This paper revisits Zora Neale Hurston’s multi‑media ethnography and its recent cinematic reassemblies to show how Black joy, autoethnography, and synesthetic media unsettle male‑polarised histories of ethnography and folklore between the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Paper long abstract

This paper revisits Zora Neale Hurston as a crucial, yet still marginalised, figure in the intertwined histories of ethnography and folklore between the early and mid‑20th century. Drawing on an essay titled “Black Joy Through Media: Zora Neale Hurston’s Ethnography,” the paper argues that Hurston’s multi‑media fieldwork—fiction, plays, ethnographic films, song and voice recordings, letters, autobiography—constituted an experimental, sensorial ethnography that exceeded the gendered and racialised constraints of Boasian anthropology. Returning to Eatonville and other Black communities as an autoethnographer rather than a distant “scientific” observer, Hurston crafted what Lindsey Stewart calls Black joy, foregrounding agency, pleasure, and everyday complexity rather than framing Black life primarily through resistance to White supremacy.​

The paper traces how recent documentaries such as Sam Pollard’s Jump at the Sun (2008) and Tracy Strain’s Claiming a Space (2023) reassemble Hurston’s dispersed media into synesthetic narratives that challenge dominant visualist canons of ethnography and folklore. Using work by Laura Marks, David MacDougall, and Faye Ginsburg, the analysis shows how these films activate the haptic, sonic, and affective dimensions of Hurston’s archive, inviting viewers into an embodied experience of Black cultural worlds. In doing so, they also expose the gendered and racial exclusions that structured Hurston’s reception compared with contemporaries like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.​

By foregrounding Hurston’s media practice and its cinematic afterlives, the paper contributes to “beyond polarised histories” by situating a Black woman folklorist–ethnographer as a central theorist of method, whose work invites more entangled, sensorial, and de‑polarised histories of anthropology and folklore.

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Paper short abstract

I will focus on the very first woman collector in Finland, Charlotta Europaeus by shedding light on her writings and folklore collection to shape her ideas of folklore. Very little is still known about her and she has not been recognized in key sources of folklore research or collecting history.

Paper long abstract

Despite activities in the field, female scholars have remained largely unacknowledged, or if recognized, this was very often due to their relationship with a male family member or close male associate. Further, in the Finnish context, epic songs of male heroes and the Eastern part of the country have been considered the most admired part of the history of folklore.

In my paper I will focus on a very first woman collector, Charlotta Europaeus (1794–1858) in Finland in the 19th century. She transcribed diverse folklore material from the South-East part of Finland, described her field work in her writings, was active in translating folk lyric and wrote fiction based on folklore. As a woman, she had no possibility to make long collecting journeys. She did what she could, collecting folklore from near to her own life environment. With no institutional connections, she sent her collections to one of the male collectors and was reliant on his goodwill about passing on her folklore documents.

Very little is still known about Charlotta Europaeus, and she has not been recognized in key sources of folklore research or collecting history. By shedding light on personal writings as well as the folklore collection of Charlotta Europaeus, I shape her ideas of folklore and further, her role in knowledge production in folkloristics. Further, I ask to what extent and by whom her folklore collection represents silenced heritage as her documents, preserved in the archives, form the early female vernacular tradition and history of folklore studies.

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The paper examines Helmi Reiman-Neggo and Helmi Kurrik as pioneers of Estonian ethnology before WWII, situating their work on folk art and costumes in a broader socio-political context, and asks about the other women who were involved in ethnological work in the first half of the 20th century.

Paper long abstract

Two women stand out in the history of Estonian ethnology before the Second World War: Helmi Reiman-Neggo (1892–1920) and Helmi Kurrik (1883–1960). Both focused their research on folk art and folk costumes, and worked at the Estonian National Museum, but at different times. Reiman-Neggo published several theoretically innovative studies on folk art that were ahead of her time. However, her work did not gain recognition in the 1920s from Ilmari Manninen, the first associate professor of ethnology in Estonia, and her scholarly approach influenced Estonian folk art studies more substantially only after the war. Kurrik, by contrast, became a widely acknowledged expert on Estonian folk costumes in the 1930s. Despite their contributions, broader recognition of both women in the historiography of Estonian ethnology emerged only from the 2010s onward.

The presentation situates the biographies and scholarly contributions of Reiman-Neggo and Kurrik within the cultural, historical, and social context of their time. Both can be seen as representatives of the first generation of "new" active women in Estonian history who perceived themselves as equal to men and acted accordingly. Their primary ideological framework, however, was not radical feminism but cultural nationalism. The presentation also addresses other women active in Estonian ethnology during the first half of the 20th century – largely unknown figures who participated in the collection of folk traditions and enrolled at the University of Tartu once women were admitted, yet often faced significant obstacles in completing their studies or pursuing professional careers.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how women shaped folklore knowledge in Turkey, from female storytellers to early folklorists, and how their labour became less visible with the institutionalisation of the discipline.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the historical transformation of women’s roles in the production and circulation of folklore knowledge in Turkey. It proposes a threefold epistemic trajectory, moving from female oral narrators (“storytelling women”) who functioned as constitutive subjects of narration, to women collectors involved in folklore documentation during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, and finally to early female folklorists participating in the institutionalisation of folklore as an academic discipline. The central argument of the paper is that folklore knowledge was largely produced through women’s labour of narration, transmission, and mediation, yet this labour became increasingly marginalised as the discipline gained institutional and academic authority.

The paper is structured around three epistemic figures: (1) female storytellers who actively shaped and transformed narratives according to context, (2) women collectors who transferred oral knowledge into written and archival forms, and (3) early female folklorists who contributed to the academic redefinition of folklore knowledge. Drawing on feminist histories of anthropology and folklore, the paper does not romanticise continuity between these figures, but instead analyses how women’s epistemic positions were redefined and rendered invisible through gendered hierarchies at different stages of knowledge production.

By situating Turkey as a semi-peripheral and transnational case, the paper challenges male-centred and Western-dominated histories of ethnography and folklore. It aims to foreground women’s foundational yet often overlooked roles in the making of folklore knowledge and to contribute to more relational and entangled histories of anthropology.

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Paper short abstract

My paper examines the tension between women’s fundamental role in creating ethnology in Poland and their marginal position within its institutions. I trace the dynamics of this tension over time until the period, when female professors of anthropology played an important role in Polish academia.

Paper long abstract

As the historian of Polish ethnology Zbigniew Jasiewicz observed, in the nineteenth century “the emerging Polish ethnology, on the one hand created obstacles to women’s scholarly activity, while on the other hand enabled them to participate more broadly and revealed a number of active women unimaginable in any other field.”

This paper examines the tension between women’s significant involvement in laying the foundations of ethnology in Poland and their marginal position within its institutions. Women’s participation was shaped by a gender-based division of labour that existed within the discipline from its very beginnings. Natural candidates for ethnographic work were women living in rural noble manors, who maintained daily contact with peasant women. Many of them took part in the largest ethnographic enterprise of the era – the monographic folklore-collecting project led by Oskar Kolberg (1814–1890).

Despite this extensive engagement, the first Polish professional woman ethnographer, Stefania Ulanowska (1839–ca. 1912), who conducted long-term, stationary field research among rural communities in Latvia, was denied admission to the Academy of Learning, an exclusively male institution. Only a few decades later, however, Cezaria Baudouin de Courtenay-Ehrenkreutz (1885–1967) became the first female professor in Poland (1927) and went on to head departments of ethnology at the universities of Vilnius and Warsaw.

The shift of women ethnographers from the margins to the center of the discipline became fully visible after World War II, when numerous outstanding female professors of anthropology played a central role in Polish academic life.