Taylor M. Moore will join us from The Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and the Department of History at University of California--Santa Barbara. We will workshop a chapter of her book manuscript in progress, Amulet Tales: Race, Magic, and Medicine in Egypt.
"Living Room Magic: Ritualistic Ethnography, Esoteric Intimacies"
This chapter uses the letters and field notes of British anthropologist Winifred Blackman to argue that British anthropology was an occult science. The chapter turns to the gendered, domestic space of the living room to show how Egyptian wise women contributed to the development of global anthropology and folklore studies during the interwar period. It highlights two pivotal points in Blackman’s fieldwork—in the tomb-chapels of Meir in 1921 and her apartment in Shoubra—when the anthropologist was able to provide wise women and their patients with a private space to conduct their practice. Within these spaces, Blackman forged what I term “esoteric intimacies” with these women that facilitated her field work. They provided Blackman with an opportunity to observe and record these women’s work, codifying the previously unwritten wisdom of the old wives into ethnographic material. Yet, Blackman’s research method functioned much like an apprenticeship. Her ritualistic ethnography and access to sacred objects made her famous in many villages as a healer in her own right.
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