Winifred Susan Blackman (1872–1950) was a pioneering British Egyptologist, archaeologist and anthropologist. She was one of the first women to take up anthropology as a profession.[1]
Family and education
editBlackman was born in Norwich to Rev. James Henry Blackman and Mary Anne Blackman (née Jacob). She was one of five children, and her brother Aylward M. Blackman also became a noted Egyptologist. The Blackwood family later moved to Oxford.[2]
Blackman registered to study at the Pitt Rivers Museum from 1912 to 1915, taking the Diploma in Anthropology at the University of Oxford.[3] She also worked as a volunteer on cataloguing collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum between 1912 and 1920, and donated 14 objects to the museum.[2][4]
Academic career
editBlackman spent much of the 1920s and 1930s living and conducting fieldwork in rural Egypt, including leading the Percy Sladen Expedition to Egypt between 1922 and 1926.[5] She and her brother Aylward often collaborated,[6] such as during a study of ancient burial sites at Meir.[7] She was also a contemporary of the German ethnographer Hans Alexander Winkler and encouraged him to pursue his work in Upper Egypt, despite others discouraging him and his "radical" views.[8]
Unusually for the time, she chose to focus on the habits, beliefs and customs of contemporary (rather than ancient) Egyptians.[9][10] She had a particular interest in the "magico-religious" ideas and practices of Upper Egypt[1] and the experiences of ordinary rural peasantry, the fellaheen.[11] She recorded women's fertility rituals,[12][13] belief in the healing properties of tattoo marks (made by instruments of 7 needles fixed to the end of a stick)[14] and methods for treating spirit possession.[15] In 1927 she published The Fellahin of Upper Egypt, which became a standard work on the ethnography of the region[6] and was reprinted in 2000.[16] She also wrote about the notion of southern Egyptian liminality[17] and how both Muslims and Copts shared many of the same saints.[18]
Later in 1927 Blackman also began collecting folk medicine items for the wealthy pharmaceutical magnate and collector Sir Henry Wellcome of Burroughs Wellcome and Co. (BWC).[6] She was forced to accept stringent conditions in return for his support (including a promise not to collect anything for anyone else, including herself).[6] She was provided with BWC manufactured travelling medicines chests when collecting and exchanged "modern" pharmaceutical products for ethnographic objects.[19] She collected an estimated 4,000 individual items, such as amulets, charms and figures,[4] for Wellcome between 1926 and 1933.[20] The items are now held in collections of the Garstang Museum of Archaeology, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Science Museum and the Wellcome Collection.[4]
She was a member of the Folklore Society, Royal Anthropological Institute, Royal Asiatic Society and Oxford University Anthropological Society.[2]
After the Second World War broke out in 1939, Blackwood returned to Britain.[9] In 1950 she was committed to a mental hospital after suffering a mental and physical breakdown after the death of her younger sister Elsie.[9] She died shortly afterwards, aged 78.[20]
Works
edit- 'The Magical and Ceremonial Uses of Fire' Folklore Vol. 27, No. 4 (1916), pp. 352–377
- 'The Rosary in Magic and Religion' Folklore Vol. 29, No. 4 (1918), pp. 255–280
- 'Traces in Couvade (?) in England' Folklore Vol. 29, No. 4 (1918), pp. 319–321
- 'Some Occurrences of the Corn-‘Arūseh in Ancient Egyptian Tomb Paintings' The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Vol. 8, No. 1 (1922), pp. 235-240.
- 'Some beliefs among the Egyptian peasants with regard to 'afarit'' Folklore Vol. 35, No. 2 (1924), pp. 176–184
- 'Sacred trees in modern Egypt' The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Vol. 11, No.1 (1925), pp. 56-57.
- 'The Karin and Karineh' The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Vol 56 (1926), pp. 163-169
- The Fellahin of Upper Egypt: Their Religious, Social and Industrial Life To-Day with Special Reference to Survivals from Ancient Times (1927) [later translated into French (1948), and Arabic (1995)]
- 'Some Further Notes on a Harvesting Scene' The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Vol. 19, No.1 (1933), pp. 31-32.
References
edit- ^ a b Blackwood, Beatrice (27 January 1951). "Obituaries: Miss W. S. Blackman". Nature. 4239: 135. doi:10.1038/167135b0. S2CID 4210965.
- ^ a b c Petch, Alison. "Winifred Susan Blackman". The Other Within Project, Pitt Rivers Museum. Retrieved 18 June 2019.
- ^ Larson, Frances (4 March 2021). Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology. Granta Publications. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-78378-333-5.
- ^ a b c Hicks, Dan; Stevenson, Alice (8 March 2013). World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: A Characterization. Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. p. 100. ISBN 978-1-78491-075-4.
- ^ "Hidden Figures: Winifred Blackman (1872-1950)". University of Liverpool. Retrieved 6 October 2024.
- ^ a b c d Larson, Frances (2009). An infinity of things how Sir Henry Wellcome collected the world. Oxford University Press. pp. 213–4. ISBN 9780199554461. OCLC 838260896.
- ^ Moore, Caroline (8 April 2021). "Working remotely: five formidable female anthropologists". The Spectator. Retrieved 5 October 2024.
- ^ Winkler, Hans Alexander (2009). Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt: A Study of Spirit Possession. American Univ in Cairo Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-977-416-250-3.
- ^ a b c Blackman, Winifred Susan. (2000). The fellahin of Upper Egypt. American University in Cairo Press. ISBN 977424558X. OCLC 123286957.
- ^ Morrison, Heidi (2015), Morrison, Heidi (ed.), "Child-Rearing and Class", Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 62–84, doi:10.1057/9781137432780_4, ISBN 978-1-137-43278-0, retrieved 4 October 2024
- ^ Manley, Deborah (1 September 2013). Women Travelers in Egypt: From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Century. American University in Cairo Press. p. 192. ISBN 978-1-61797-360-4.
- ^ Montserrat, Dominic (1996). Sex and Society in Græco-Roman Egypt. Routledge. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-7103-0530-5.
- ^ Tassie, Geoffrey John (15 November 1996). "Hair-offerings: an enigmatic Egyptian custom". Papers from the Institute of Archaeology. 7: 59–67. doi:10.5334/pia.94. ISSN 2041-9015.
- ^ Angel, Gemma. (2012). Tattooing in Ancient Egypt. UCL Researchers in Museums. Retrieved 4 October 2024.
- ^ van Roode, Sigrid (2024). Silver of the Possessed: Jewellery in the Egyptian zār. Sidestone Press. hdl:20.500.12657/92041. ISBN 978-94-6428-072-2.
- ^ Shaw, Ian; Bloxam, Elizabeth (11 May 2020). The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology. Oxford University Press. p. 272. ISBN 978-0-19-927187-0.
- ^ Takla, Nefertiti (2021). "Barbaric Women: Race and the Colonization of Gender in Interwar Egypt". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 53 (3): 387–405. doi:10.1017/S0020743821000349. ISSN 0020-7438.
- ^ Albera, Dionigi; Couroucli, Maria (20 February 2012). Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries. Indiana University Press. p. 159. ISBN 978-0-253-01690-4.
- ^ Hill, Jude (2006). "Globe-trotting medicine chests: tracing geographies of collecting and pharmaceuticals". Social & Cultural Geography. 7 (3): 365–384. doi:10.1080/14649360600715029. ISSN 1464-9365.
- ^ a b Stevenson, Alice (2013). "'Labelling and Cataloguing at Every Available Moment': W. S. Blackman's Collection of Egyptian Amulets". Journal of Museum Ethnography (26): 138–149. ISSN 0954-7169. JSTOR 43915843.