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Winifred Blackman

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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

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Blackman 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

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Blackman spent much of the 1920s and 1930s living and conducting fieldwork in rural Egypt, including leading the 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 the 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

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References

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  1. ^ a b Blackwood, Beatrice (27 January 1951). "Obituaries: Miss W. S. Blackman". Nature. 4239: 135. doi:10.1038/167135b0. S2CID 4210965.
  2. ^ a b c Petch, Alison. "Winifred Susan Blackman". The Other Within Project, Pitt Rivers Museum. Retrieved 18 June 2019.
  3. ^ Larson, Frances (4 March 2021). Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology. Granta Publications. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-78378-333-5.
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ "Hidden Figures: Winifred Blackman (1872-1950)". University of Liverpool. Retrieved 6 October 2024.
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ Moore, Caroline (8 April 2021). "Working remotely: five formidable female anthropologists". The Spectator. Retrieved 5 October 2024.
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ a b c Blackman, Winifred Susan. (2000). The fellahin of Upper Egypt. American University in Cairo Press. ISBN 977424558X. OCLC 123286957.
  10. ^ 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
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ Montserrat, Dominic (1996). Sex and Society in Græco-Roman Egypt. Routledge. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-7103-0530-5.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ Angel, Gemma. (2012). Tattooing in Ancient Egypt. UCL Researchers in Museums. Retrieved 4 October 2024.
  15. ^ 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.
  16. ^ Shaw, Ian; Bloxam, Elizabeth (11 May 2020). The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology. Oxford University Press. p. 272. ISBN 978-0-19-927187-0.
  17. ^ 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.
  18. ^ 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.
  19. ^ 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.
  20. ^ 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.
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