She leads expediction: Maria Czaplicka trajectory in the history of anthropology

Abstract

In the book “Maria Czaplicka. Gender, Shamanism, Race. An anthropological biography” (2020), Grazyna Kubica presents the biography of the Polish anthropologist Maria Czaplicka (1884-1921), contemporary of Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics. Both left their country to study anthropology from a new perspective, since in Poland it was still perceived as a physical science (Kubica, 2020). The book launched in 2020 is defined by the author as a “history of critical and feminist anthropology”, and her choice to look at Maria Czaplicka’s trajectory is justified by the enigmatic figure of this woman in the history of anthropology. With almost 700 pages and about 31 chapters, it is a breath-taking survey within the field of historiography. The author is a Polish anthropologist who, for years, carried out documentary research around the world, and in this work she proposes a more panoramic perspective that crosses national lines and argues that the historiography of anthropology needs a theory that goes beyond the dichotomy between presentism and historicism. established by George Stocking in the 1960s1