Few anthropologists have entered the gates of Siberian Studies without first taking up the early twentieth-century work of the enigmatic Polish scholar, Maria Czaplicka. Alongside her compatriot, Bronislaw Malinowski, who would go on to become among the most influential fieldworkers of their generation, she moved to the UK in 1910 and took up study at the London School of Economics (LSE). In just a few short years, she released two widely read books that effectively introduced the giant territory east of the Urals to English-language readers for the first time. The first, Aboriginal Siberia (1914), a library study, proposed new logics for sorting the vast area's diverse range of peoples, while the second, My Siberian Year (1916), a popular travelogue, recounted an expedition she led up the Yenisei River. Yet despite having been, by all accounts, a respected colleague and celebrated personality, many held her at arm's length for much of her career. In her native Poland, jobs went to those more directly focused on Polish life; in the UK, she struggled continually for access to the same funding resources extended to her male colleagues. Having finally landed a permanent position to build the first program in anthropology at the University of Bristol, she tragically took her own life in 1921 at the age of thirty-six. She left no note, no memoirs, and no special archive, only a trail of papers scattered across the UK, US, Russia, and eastern Europe. Today, thanks to the remarkable detective work of anthropologist and intellectual historian Grażyna Kubica, a complete study of Czaplicka's life and work are at hand.

Maria Antonina Czaplicka (pronounced CHAP-lits-ka) was born in Warsaw in 1884 into a Polish noble family of diminished means. Her parents ensured the fullest education available to their children, with Maria taking courses at the city's Uniwersytet Latający or “Flying University,” a quasi-underground institution whose graduates included a young Marie Curie. She eventually worked widely as a teacher, including at Warsaw's University for All.

As a biographer, Kubica resolved to sidestep the typical “life and work” format that begins with “a usually brief and superficial biography, written almost with a sense of embarrassment . . . [followed by a] solemn and static main part, discussing the individual works or topics that occupied the hero” (9). Instead, at every turn, she presents a richly transnational history of the production of knowledge across one woman's life and her times. Academic pursuit for women of Czaplicka's generation was largely limited to those with family fortunes sizeable enough to fund their studies when universities themselves would not. Female ethnographers had a slight edge over women in other fields, not because anthropology was especially emancipated but because their senior male colleagues realized that they would make little headway into describing the lives of others without access to information from both genders. “Investigating the tales of rural women always caused me great difficulty,” wrote one prominent Polish Slavist, Zorian Dolęga-Chadakowski, almost a century before them. Solving the problem by finding a wife, he conceded, “I married for these reasons and I am happy” (5). A century later, familiar restrictions were still firmly in place: male scholars were advised to marry in a timely fashion so as to cover their bases; matters of sex could not be discussed at public meetings with ladies present; and in their publications, women routinely strained to demonstrate their connections to influential men. Men dominated London's Royal Anthropological Institute, while women found readier welcome in the (not royal) Folklore Society. Raising money for field research—which Czaplicka's LSE professor Charles Seligman likened for anthropology to the “blood of martyrs for the church”—was the final frontier. Thankfully, British supporters of Czaplicka, who knew her as “Marie Antoinette” or “Chip” (from variously fumbled efforts to pronounce her last name) were legion. In a promotional blurb, her agent insisted that “Miss Czaplicka could not be dull if she tried” (362). Charming? She had to be.

Czaplicka's abundant energy, as well as her frustrations, are evident throughout this book. Having met Russian scholars Vladimir Iokhel΄son and Lev Shternberg, whose early political activity had sent them into exile in the Russian Far East where they undertook lengthy ethnographic study, she labored to rework theirs and a wide range of related works into an accessible overview for English-language readers. Aboriginal Siberia, a work of ethnology rather than ethnography, where she refashioned the field results of others into a new framework, became her best known scholarly study. On the one hand, it became an instant classic, making an entire world area newly available to non-Russian readers. At the same time, as Kubica so thoroughly demonstrates, she found herself caught between rapidly changing scholarly norms. The “armchair anthropology” tradition of ethnology was soon to lose ground to more glamorous-seeming ethnographic fieldwork, dominated by the romantic image of the lone ranger with a notebook, popularized by Malinowski and others. So, too, would Czaplicka's ambitious division of indigenous societies east of the Urals into “Paleosiberian” and “Neo-Siberian,” organized on grounds of geographic determinism and historical contact with European settlers, be eclipsed by more detailed studies from those who spent significant time on the ground. Only the book's most enduring contribution, a closing chapter on “Arctic Hysteria,” which has been read for generations as evidence that shamanism is fundamentally tied to mental illness, proved a paradoxical hit. Readers already tuned to nineteenth-century notions of female hysteria proved more than ready to transfer their interest from gender to race. Yet as Kubica so readily shows, Czaplicka herself was ambivalent about this thesis, presented it squarely as the work of others, and never took it up again.

Upon completion of Aboriginal Siberia, Czaplicka set about trying to launch her own field career, but the deck was largely stacked against her. Without a formal degree or comfortable affiliation, she scraped together enough money to set off in September of 1914 for the Siberian northwest, traveling up the Yenisei River with other scholars and traders. While it afforded her introductions into the passing worlds of indigenous Evenks, Dolgans, Kets, Nenets, Nganasans, as well as the wider community of Slavic settlers across the region, the journey also proved a giant and time-consuming organizational task. She was the only Russian speaker in the group, and was expected to translate and facilitate the work of others at every step. She briefly studied the Evenk language along the way, and managed to amass a small collection of indigenous artifacts on behalf of some of her institutional sponsors. The book is arguably most insightful for its portraits of “Sibiriaki,” the varied non-indigenous settlers of multiple mixed backgrounds.

Upon publication in 1916 of My Siberian Year, the die was again cast. Kubica explains that this time it was not madness but sex that captivated reading audiences, with Czaplicka's pioneering observations about the gender fluidity of shamanic actors. London's Daily Chronicle cast her as the “Intrepid Lady Explorer” (347); the Daily Sketch followed with “Brains and Beauty at Oxford” (407); later in America while attempting to win employment, she was greeted with “Woman Thrills Scientific World by Penetrating Arctic Siberia” (446).

If post-war America proved a disappointing place to find a job, even with the fulsome support of Columbia's Franz Boas, Czaplicka's British admirers had not forsaken her. Upon return to the UK in 1920, she found a long-sought position as a Lecturer in Bristol, among the first of the universities in the UK to welcome both men and women. The inaugural hire in a new berth for Anthropology, she was its presumed architect. Czaplicka set about building the program with characteristic energy, but by the end of the academic year, other forces appear to have caught up with her. Whatever the cause of her despondency—perhaps a debt she had accrued over her American voyage, disappointment over fresh news at being passed over for a prominent fellowship, or a longer-standing heartbreak—Czaplicka swallowed a lethal dose of poison on the afternoon of May 27, 1921. Efforts from a colleague in the Department of Anatomy to come by her rooms at almost the very same hour, to let her know that the university was planning on doubling her salary, were thwarted by a polite note she sent down through a porter, saying that she had a headache. She died that evening.

What emerges from this voluminous study is a story of achievement in the face of great odds, matched only by the potential for the even greater recognition that Czaplicka and so many other women in similar positions might have met had they been afforded the same considerations and resources as their male peers. Her work on shamanism and gender, as well as on the long under-appreciated racial and social mixing in a decidedly non-European Russia beyond the Urals, proved a launching pad for the many who followed her. Kubica's ambitious study fully brings this long-lost scholar back into the light.