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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.
Notes
I am deeply grateful to Clive Glaser for his faith in this article and patience unto the eleventh hour. Thanks also to my wife, Anja Macher, for assistance and moral support on a fieldtrip to Girton College in June 2007, to Russell Martin for invaluable editorial suggestions across numerous drafts of this article, to Paul Deslandes and Peter Lekgoathi for detailed and incisive comments on an earlier version, to my UWC colleague Alannah Birch for preliminary research in the Girton College Archive in March 2007, to the college archivist, Kate Perry, for generously sharing materials, and to Susan Pennybacker for guiding my reading on Labour politics in the late 1920s.
University of Cape Town, Archive and Manuscripts Department, Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection (BC880), B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 19.2.1928, here on the occasion of Monica attending her first meeting of the ODTAA, known to her and her colleagues as ‘One Damn Thing After Another’.
These letters are to be found among the correspondence section (B) of the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection at UCT. There are 360 surviving letters from Monica Hunter to her father, written between 1918 and 1947.
Bradbrook, M., 1989, Girton College Archive, GCRF 8/4/5.
Interviews with Monica Wilson by Francis and Lindy Wilson, January and July 1979 on the subjects of ‘Childhood’ and ‘Pondoland’, copies in the Archives and Manuscripts Department, University of Cape Town.
Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 18.3.1926.
BC880, A2.2, Pocket Diary, 1927.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 13.3.1927 and 2.6.1927.
BC880, N2 Photographs in groups.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 30.10.1927.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 13.11.1927.
Girton College Archive, Memories from Muriel Bradbrook on a tape (with transcript) she compiled in the 1980s entitled ‘Strong Minded Dons’.
BC880, B5.1 Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 18.12.1927.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 4.10.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 21.10.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 4.1.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 29.1.1928.
BC880, David and Jessie Hunter Papers, EE7.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 18.12.1927.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 19.2.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 24.5.1928 and 17.6.1928.
BC880, B5.2, Monica Hunter to Jessie Hunter, letter posted from Ngqeleni 2.11.1931.
BC880, B5.5, Dover Wilson to Monica Wilson, 1948 on the ordering of an academic gown.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 15.10.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 13.1.1929.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 7.6.1928.
Girton College Archive, Memories from Muriel Bradbrook on a tape (with transcript) she compiled in the 1980s entitled ‘Strong Minded Dons’.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 28.7.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 6.7.1927.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 20.3.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 20.3.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 14.11.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 9.1.1928.
BC880, A2.4 Address Book of Monica Wilson.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 19.10.1927.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 19.10.1927.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 30.10.1927.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 20.11.1927.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 9.12.1927.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 9.2.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 27.5.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Attachment to letter, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 8.4.1928.
BC880, B5.1, 21.10.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 14.11.1928.
BC880, B6.15, Eddie Roux to Monica Hunter, 5.12.1931.
Monica Wilson interviewed by Francis and Lindy Wilson, Hunterstoun, July 1979.
Ibid.
Cambridge University Examination Papers: Michaelmas Term 1929 to Easter Term 1930, vol. 54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 1179.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 6.5.1928.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 3.5.1928, 24.5.1928.
Who Was Who vol. 5, 1951–1960 (4th edition). 1984. London: Adam and Charles Black.
BC880, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 27.11.1927.
Interview with Monica Wilson by Francis and Lindy Wilson, Hunterstoun, July 1979.
BC290, Goodwin Papers, UCT Archives and Manuscripts, Letters from A.C. Haddon to John Goodwin, 1929, 1935.
Girton College Archive, GCAC 2/4/1/8, T.C. Hodson to The Mistress of Girton College, 7.6.1932.
BC880, G1 Student Essays, ‘Communal Elements of South African Native Life’.