A Woman in the Field
Susan Drucker-Brown’s photographs and anthropological fieldnotes (Mexico, 1957-1958)
This exhibition will display photographs and ethnographic fieldnotes produced by Cambridge-based anthropologist Susan Drucker-Brown (1936-2023) in the Mixtec-speaking village of Jamiltepec (Oaxaca, Mexico) in 1957 and 1958. She was one of the first women anthropologists in Mexico, and a pioneer in the study of women's clothing and the changes they were undergoing, with the replacement of handmade (loom) clothing by industrial one. The exhibition not only presents this little-known aspect of Drucker-Brown's work. It also invites us to reflect on three aspects: Firstly, the processes of mestizaje, indigeneity and modernisation experienced in Mexico in the mid-twentieth century at an indigenous and rural locality. Secondly, the everyday life of ethnographic research and, in particular, the role of women in fieldwork. And thirdly, the afterlives of the materials produced during fieldwork, either as collections in museums or archives, or as part of restitution processes to the villages where the anthropologists worked. The exhibition will be hosted both in the Department of Social Anthropology and at CRASSH from 22 April to 31 May.
To launch the exhibition there will be a symposium on Monday 22 April, entitled Rethinking anthropological fieldwork in historical perspective, further details and how to register here. The symposium includes a talk by Dr Alicia Fentiman, entitled Susan's Ethnographic Research Amongst the Mamprusi of Northern Ghana, at 11am in the Edmund Leach room, Department of Social Anthropology, on Monday 22 April.
Photo credit: Susan Drucker-Brown, © Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova
Research and curatioral work: Paula López Caballero (UNAM, Mexico)
Paula López Caballero is a Mexican historian and anthropologist working as a full-time professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and as a research associate at the Centre for Latin American Studies (University of Cambridge). She has been awarded the Baxandall Visiting Fellowship for a research stay at Robinson College (University of Cambridge) in the spring of 2024. She is currently preparing a new monograph, tentatively titled Experts of Everyday Life. A Transnational History of Fieldwork Practice and Indigeneity in Mexico (1940-1960), in which she tells the story of how the intimate experience of everyday life in specific localities during anthropological fieldwork became a new sphere of scientific data production, and how these experiences were crucial in carving out an indigenous alterity.
https://www.latin-american.cam.ac.uk/staff/associatestaff#Paula%20L%C3%B3pez%20Caballero
With the support of:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova, Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Oaxaca, Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, Brown Family
The exhibition will be held in both the Alison Richard Building, Sidgwick site and the Department of Social Anthropology, Common Room.