Introduction: Biographies of Anthropologists as Anthropological Data

Biographies of anthropologists are widely recognized as useful for the history of science and the discipline. Introducing this special issue “Biographies of Anthropologists,” I argue that they not only provide information about anthropology, but also data for anthropology because they are studies of human agents enmeshed in social and cultural contexts, comparable to life histories of ethnographic informants. Biographies of anthropologists are of similar importance for empirical and theoretical anthropology as ethnographies, grammars, and monographs in archaeology and biological anthropology. They depict cultural dynamics from a person-centered, intimate, experience-near, and diachronic perspective on anthropology's cluster of sodalities.     

Performing science amongst the filing cabinets. Women,anthropology and museums in Belgium (1930–1970)

I trace the scientific trajectory and identity of Olga Boone (1903–1992), the first female scientist working in the Belgian Congo Museum's ethnography section. Uncovering Boone's relatively unknown and remarkably diverse research in ‘ethnic’ geography, musicology and bibliography, and her fieldwork in Congo, serves as a point of entry into a less well-known period in and ‘unofficial’ history of Belgian twentieth-century anthropology. It also provides a window into museums as gendered spaces, particularly aspects of (in)visibility and materiality in collections and archives.

Abbreviations: AA: African abstracts; BCM: Belgian Congo Museum; ESA: Ethnographic survey of Africa; IAI: International African Institute; IRCB: Institut Royal Colonial Belge; IRSAC: Institut de Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale; MFA-AA: Ministry of Foreign Affairs – African archives; OB: Olga Boone; RMCA(A): Royal Museum for Central Africa (archives)