Aboriginal Siberia. A Study In Social Anthropology. Czaplicka, Maria Antonina.

First edition, first impression, rare, of the first work by Maria Czaplicka, the trailblazing Polish anthropologist and the first full-time female lecturer at the University of Oxford. Czaplicka (1884-1921) devoted her academic career to north Russia and Central Asia. This publication, a study of the literature on Siberian anthropology, laid the foundations for her leadership of an Oxford University-University of Pennsylvania joint expedition to study the nomadic reindeer herders living north of the Arctic Circle. In 1916, following her return to Britain, she published an introductory account of her experiences (My Siberian Year) and was appointed lecturer in ethnology at the University Museum - a reflection of her status as one of the leading field researchers of her day. Inhibited, however, by renewed discrimination against women in British academic life in the post-war period, she committed suicide in 1921, a much-anticipated scholarly monograph on her Siberian explorations still unfinished. Czaplicka began studying at the LSE in the same year as her Polish compatriot, Bronislaw Malinowski, and played a small but important part in his rise to academic fame. In 1914, Czaplicka helped convince her Oxford mentor Robert Marett - who contributed a preface to Aboriginal Siberia - to fund Malinowki's plans for an extended research trip to Melanesia. The fruits of this fieldwork, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), fundamentally reshaped the paradigms of Western anthropology. Provenance: Sir William Ridgeway (1853-1926), Cambridge University's Disney Professor of Archaeology from 1892 to 1926, with his bookplate. Ridgeway shared research interests and corresponded with Barbara Freire-Marreco (1879-1967), Czaplicka's good friend and fellow recipient of the Mary Ewart Traveling Scholarship. Freire-Marreco was the first female graduate student in anthropology at Oxford. Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, panels blocked in blind. With 16 half-tone plates and 2 folding maps. Spine sunned, extremities rubbed and bumped, last two plates sometime tipped back in and a little tight at gutter, top edges of printed area slightly impacted, maps lightly foxed.