oursin | Anthropology of anthropologists (Reply)

This sounds like a fascinating book: Hugh Firth, Loulou Brown. Love, Loyalty and Deceit: Rosemary Firth, a Life in the Shadow of Two Eminent Men. Berghahn Books, 2023:

an engrossing account of the productive and, at times, destructive relationship between three figures in the history of British social anthropology: Raymond Firth, Rosemary Firth, and Edmund Leach. While Raymond and Edmund’s impacts on the discipline are relatively well known, at least within the scholarly community, Rosemary’s place in the development of the discipline has yet to be fully interrogated. This book makes great strides in addressing this historical lacuna. Though the authors appear to be operating at a distance from formal disciplinary history and enduring debates concerning microhistorical approaches, the use of egodocuments—namely personal letters and diary entries—coupled with contextualizing commentary from the authors will be familiar to those who are more immersed in this literature. For those who might be coming to the book from anthropology (understandable given the disciplinary affiliation of its primary historical actors), its form is likely to appear novel and refreshing.

I'm not saying the reviewer doesn't get out much, because I assume that the discipline he's in rather requires it, but I do feel that his perspective is, shall we say, a leeeetle limited? and a tad condescending

E.g.

I will admit that I came to this book with some reservations. The history of anthropology already has a penchant for the salacious, especially when pitched for a more general audience. Charles King’s recently published and much-lauded Gods of the Upper Air offers something of a case in point.

Historian of sexology and censorship of same remarks that anthropology had a reputation for salacity, in fact, we might consider that it has some murky Male Clubland roots, O Hai Sir Richard Burton and The Cannibal Club and that the classic works had a habit of a) turning up in the catalogues of ahem 'specialist' booksellers, and b) being trawled by authors of pop sexology (as well as more serious students of the subject).

The work is surely part of a current ongoing recuperation of overlooked women in various academic and creative fields - and not the first to be undertaken by someone with a personal and familial connection to at least one or other of the relevant players:

The fact that Rosemary did not obtain a university post or admittance into the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) until 1966 is a story all too familiar. But what this book does is give us an insider’s view of the imbalance. We see how Rosemary’s achievement of her late-in-life academic success came with great personal cost. Her marriage was failing, and Raymond appears to have provided only tentative support for Rosemary’s career pursuits. And despite the protracted and impassioned nature of her relationships with Edmund, we learn that he never quite viewed her as an intellectual equal.

'Only tentative support' suggests 'of course I'm happy for you to pursue a career darling, once you've finished the housework', but maybe I'm being cynical.

There was clearly a complex emotional entanglement going on between the 3 protags in the story, but I must say it sounds to me Not Untypical of a certain type of British intellectual, in fact I was a bit 'just like....' and 'same old story....'. (The 'going to China and coming back years later and resuming their liaison' was indeed, very similar to William Empson, the poet and critic, and Alice Stewart, the epidemiologist, who said 'the dance went on'.) You perhaps need to be as immersed in those sort of circles as I am to pick up on that?

Anyway, the book sounds fascinating and the p/back not inordinately expensive by Berghahn's usual standards.