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Paper short abstract:

This paper looks into the life and ethnographic work of Leonore Kosswig, who lived in Turkey as a German exile (1937-1973). Relying on her publications and ego-documents, we situate her work within history of ethnography and focus on gendered knowledge production during displacement and emplacement.

Paper long abstract:

Leonore Kosswig (1904-1973) studied biology in Münster, where she met her future husband, Curt Kosswig, at the “Zoologische Institut”. Working together on genetics, they were pioneers of their field in Germany, until their exile to Istanbul in 1937. While Curt became a prominent scientist in Istanbul University, Leonore had no institutional affiliation. However, she traveled with her husband around rural Anatolia and joined his fieldwork, during which she developed an interest in local customs and the daily life of villagers and nomadic tribes. Leonore decided to stay in Turkey after Curt’s return to Germany in 1955. Her excellent command of Turkish and experience in traveling around Anatolia allowed her to engage with fieldwork and to become one of the first women to conduct ethnographic research. Until her death, she pursued several pioneering researches on wedding customs, boardweaving, nomadic life, and “ownership signs.”

For Leonore Kosswig, exile turned out to be a new beginning, leading to her transformation from a trained biologist to an ethnologist. Engaging critically with Kosswig’s research publications, we aim to situate her scholarship within the history of ethnography in the 1960s and 70s in Turkey. Furthermore, relying on ego-documents, such as letters and travelogues, we employ a biographical approach to search for repeated encounters of “foreignness” and “localness” in Kosswig’s life trajectory. This approach also allows particular emphasis on the more “mundane” forms of gendered knowledge production during displacement and emplacement, which are not accessible via the iconic figure of “exile” as the male displaced intellectual.