Pioneers of the Field
South Africa's Women Anthropologists

"Original, meticulously researched and eminently readable, Andrew Bank's landmark study in the history of South African anthropology in its formative phase is a major corrective to the male-dominated view in which the achievements of women anthropologists were greatly undervalued. Aside from its main thesis, the compelling human interest of this book lies in the finely drawn and richly documented biographical portraits of six talented women, "foremothers" of the Wits anthropology department. Four of these remarkable women were star pupils of Bronislaw Malinowski, whose innovative fieldwork methods they deployed to great effect in their ethnographic accounts. Andrew Bank has succeeded brilliantly in bringing their lives and works together in an engagingly written narrative celebrating their humanist legacy."
Michael Young, Australian National University, Canberra

"Andrew Bank's insightful scholarship provides a much-needed revision not only to the history of South African anthropology, but to the history of socio-cultural anthropology in general. His vivid portraits of six outstanding South African women social anthropologists beginning with the dynamic Winifred Hoernle and continuing with her exceptional female students - lead us to amend the heretofore androcentric history of social anthropology in South Africa. But perhaps even more significantly, Bank presents a compelling argument that causes us to appreciate the important role these women - and by association, social anthropology - played in the anti-apartheid movement and the transformation of race relations in twentieth-century South Africa."
Nancy Lutkehaus, University of Southern California

"This penetrating study of pioneering women academics in South Africa and beyond explores the tensions between personal, scholarly and political engagements. A major contribution to African studies, it will also enrich - and complicate - current debates about the public role of anthropology."
Adam Kuper, Centennial Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science

'[In] Pioneers of the Field Bank has made an important contribution to the history of social anthropology by reclaiming the place of its foremothers.' Anne Heffernan, Africa at LSE Blog (www.blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse)

‘Andrew Bank has provided us with a panoply of new stories and a range of far-reaching analyses that will, for many years to come, inform our teaching, research, writing and, perhaps, even our sense of what on earth anthropology was and is all about.’ Joanna Davidson, Journal of Southern African Studies