Miscellaneous

UNDREAMED SHORES

THE HIDDEN HEROINES OF BRITISH ANTHROPOLOGY

FRANCES LARSON

Granta 352pp, £20

Between 1907 and 1918 nearly 30 women registered for the new diploma in anthropology at Oxford. Undreamed Shores tells the story of five of these students, who all threw themselves into fieldwork in areas remote from foreign intrusion.

The Siberians joked that Maria Czaplicka and the other women on her team were suffragettski: banished to Siberia by the British government. Katherine Routledge’s visit to Easter Island saw her intervening in the islanders’ revolt over indentured labour in Peru; Winifred Blackman’s key informant was killed during the Nile uprisings among the fellahin; Beatrice Blackwood, having sidestepped the protection of the colonial anthropologist, spent nine months with the Anga warriors in New Guinea.

Caroline Moore in the praised as a ‘fascinating book. Occasionally it seems a struggle to contain five such varied lives in one volume; but that frustration is precisely because Larson