Marginal anthropology? Rethinking Maria Czaplicka and the development of British anthropology from a material history perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the history of British anthropology at the start of the twentieth century through a biographical focus on Maria Antonina Czaplicka (1884-1921). The title calls into question the marginalisation of people and processes in the history of anthropology that do not explicitly contribute to the dominant lineage of British social anthropology and offers to add depth and nuance to the narrative through analysis stemming from material sources. I use Czaplicka as a case study to demonstrate how close attention to a seemingly marginal person with an incomplete and scattered archival record, can help formulate a clearer picture of what anthropology was and what it can thus become. My research contributes to the understanding and appreciation of women’s involvement in anthropology, calls into question national borders of the discipline at this point in time, highlights the networks that nurtured it, and demonstrates the potential that museum collections have for an enriched understanding of the history of anthropology. I propose that history of anthropology is better understood through a planar approach that allows multiple parallel developments to exist together rather than envisaging a linear evolution towards a single definition of social anthropology. The project lays the groundwork for further research into the role that museums can have for understanding anthropological legacy and the possibilities they may have in creating fresh understandings of the contemporary world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".