Pioneers of the Field

Andrew Bank is a professor in the History Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He was commissioning editor of the journal Kronos: Southern African Histories from 2001 to 2015 and is a member of the editorial board for the South African Historical Journal. He is also the co-editor of Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and her Interpreters (Cambridge, 2013). His previous monographs are on slavery in Cape Town (1991) and the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman folklore (2006).

'Andrew Bank has made a major contribution to intellectual history in a volume that recognises the role played by six women anthropologists who were major contributors to the creation of a distinctive South African voice in anthropology: Winifred Hoernle, Audrey Richards, Monica Hunter Wilson, Hilda Beemer Kuper, Ellen Hellman and Eileen Jensen Krige. All, with the exception of Audrey Richards, were South African by birth. They were headed by Winifred Hoernle, founder of the anthropology department at the University of Witswatersrand. She was an inspiring teacher and mentor who encouraged her students to read widely, think deeply, and do superb ethnographic studies that focused on the contemporary world of Southern Africa with its reserves, farms, small towns and mining centres. Somehow these women have largely been forgotten by successors who owed them much but did not know it. This work celebrates their enduring contribution to the study of African life and the development of the anthropological discipline.' Elizabeth Colson, University of California, Berkeley

• Introduction: rethinking the canon; 1. Feminizing the foundational narrative: the collaborative anthropology of Winifred Tucker Hoernle (1885–1960); 2. An adopted daughter: Christianity and anthropology in the life and work of Monica Hunter Wilson (1908–82); 3. Anthropology and Jewish identity: the urban fieldwork and ethnographies of Ellen Hellmann (1908–82); 4. 'A genius for friendship': Audrey Richards at Wits, 1938–40; 5. Historical ethnography and ethnographic fiction: the South African writings of Hilda Beemer Kuper (1911–92); 6. Feminising the discipline: the long career of Eileen Jensen Krige (1904–95); Conclusion: a humanist legacy.