Maria Czaplicka (1884-1921), an early graduate of the Oxford Diploma in Anthropology course, leader of the ethnographic expedition to Siberia, and ethnology lecturer at Oxford and Bristol Universities, offers a unique insight into the conditions under which women participated in the making of early twentieth-century Oxford anthropology. Focusing on Czaplicka’s research, the 1914-15 Yenisei expedition, and the collection she assembled for the Pitt Rivers Museum, I examine networks of mentors, funders, intermediaries, and collaborators that facilitated this work but also precariously tethered women to different forms of patronage, disciplinary expectation, and institutional obedience.
The material legacies of Czaplicka’s research, formed through entangled agencies, speak to multiple histories, but also to forms of disciplinary non-arrival within anthropology. Developing a collections-based ethnography attentive to material density, archival absence, and the afterlives of interrupted research, I ask how we might better imagine the disciplinary formation of anthropology, past and present.
Departmental Seminar Series Hilary Term 2026
Theme: Hidden Histories of Oxford Anthropology
3pm, Fridays of Weeks 1-8, Lecture Room at 64 Banbury Road
Convened by Paul Basu, Clare Harris, David Pratten, Alpa Shah
