The Making of a Woman Anthropologist: Monica Hunter at Girton College, Cambridge, 1927–1930

Abstract

This article is based on an approach towards the history of anthropology that privileges the personal and that recognises the decisive contribution of women social anthropologists in the interwar years in particular. Monica Hunter Wilson was one of the leading women ethnographers of this Golden Age (to use Hammond-Tooke's term) and this article explores the background to her anthropological career. That background has usually been associated with her missionary origins, her Lovedale schooling, and her later participation in the famous Malinowski seminars at London University during the early 1930s. In this article I make a case for the decisive influence of her undergraduate years training at Cambridge University between 1927 and 1930 in shaping her subsequent career. I begin by analysing her experience of the small ‘tribal’ world of Girton College (to adopt Paul Deslandes's ethnographic approach to college life) and its distinctive rituals, language and notions of kinship. I then demonstrate that her decision to switch from History to Social Anthropology was an eight-month process, which was closely associated with her immersion in a rigorously intellectual and unusually cross-cultural Labour Study Circle that was led by the South African Communist Party member Eddie Roux. Thirdly, I argue that her lecturers in Social Anthropology at Cambridge, Thomas Calland Hodson and Jack Herbert Driberg, were very much more influential in shaping her orientation towards the new discipline than has hitherto been acknowledged.