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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.