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When Charles Seligman invited his wife, Brenda, to share his tent in 1907, he sanctioned a professional place for female fieldworkers in anthropology. Seligman was a groundbreaking pioneer of ethnographic work in Oceania and Africa. He treated shellshocked soldiers, he amassed museum collections and he fathered a generation of exceptional students. Brenda, his first student, became a scholar in her own right. Eighty years after his death, the Seligman legacy was deleted from the institution he began. Two Against the Tide explores how as wealthy Anglo-Jews, Charles and Brenda Seligman built a shared career through secret benevolence and silent endurance of hardship.
“I found the book hard to put down. It ranges widely and confidently across a breathtaking range of topics: from the rise of fascism to collecting, from Seligman’s Semitic/Hamitic thesis to Brenda’s mental health. The author does a great job of drawing together a wide range of sources, making the most of her previous scholarship, her own personal knowledge and scholarly connections.” • David Mills, University of Oxford
“I was fascinated by the double biography of Brenda and Sligs, a distinguished but not untypical academic couple working in European universities between the two world wars. The story of their marriage, their joint adventures in far-flung places, the tragic fate of their children, is fascinating and well-told.” • Adam Kuper, London School of Economics and Political Science
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Lesser Mortal among the Men from Cambridge
Chapter 2. The Most Remarkable Major William Cooke Daniels
Chapter 3. The Ascent of a Bride with a Blue Pencil
Chapter 4. The Brotherhood of Brides
Chapter 5. Brenda’s Search for Her Place in the Sun
Chapter 6. The Watershed Year of 1911, Race Science, and World Peace
Chapter 7. Out of Egypt
Chapter 8. The Making of Malinowski
Chapter 9. Losing Her Mind
Chapter 10. Shellshock and the Joyful Reunion
Chapter 11. Seligman’s Error
Chapter 12. Finding Life after Olivia
Chapter 13. Mandarins
Chapter 14. The Constant Collectors
Chapter 15. The Unthinkable: Race, Science and Genocide
Chapter 16. Conclusion
References