Pioneers of the field

Looks at the relationship between the history of anthropology and gender from South Africa

Abstract

Pioneers of the Field: South Africa's Women Anthropologists, a book by the South African historian Andrew Banks, is a work that relates history of anthropology and gender relations based on the constitution of anthropology mainly in South Africa. The book, still unpublished in Portuguese, brings together a detailed analysis of documents and the personal and professional trajectory of six women anthropologists who worked mainly in the first half of the 20th century in the country. Despite the institutional and academic contributions of their work, these anthropologists remained sillenced face the production by their male colleagues from the same period. Therefore, Banks' publication helps us to go beyond a simple recognition of these particular trajectories, encouraging us to reflect on the mechanisms of acclamation and silencing in the constitution of official histories of anthropology and on how we can develop a historiography of the discipline which is more attentive to these mechanisms.