This text is a part of Ignored, a sequence of obituaries about exceptional folks whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Instances.
In 1952, the anthropologist Ethel Lindgren decided that will change the face of the Scottish Highlands for many years to come back: She imported a herd of reindeer. Reindeer, whereas native to Britain, had not been seen there for the reason that twelfth century, once they had been hunted to extinction.
Lindgren made the case to authorities officers that the animals had been necessary sources of meat and fur. And with the looming risk of a battle with the Soviet Union, she stated, the reindeer may very well be helpful in army transport.
However her motivations had been additionally romantic: It will be, she wrote in a letter, an opportunity “to see in opposition to the Scottish skyline a really stunning animal.”
She began by importing seven reindeer — two bulls and 5 cows — on a Swedish ship, the Sarek. They had been quarantined for practically a month at Edinburgh Zoo earlier than being launched within the Cairngorms, a mountain vary within the Highlands, the place their progress was monitored. The local weather was favorable; actually, the distinctive subarctic qualities of the Cairngorms make it the one place left in Britain that would help the animals. Extra reindeer had been imported within the years that adopted; their progeny nonetheless roam the Highlands as we speak.
Lindgren is greatest remembered for her reindeer experiment, however she made many contributions to the sphere of anthropology in an extended profession that has largely been misplaced to historical past.
Ethel John Lindgren was born on Jan. 1, 1905, in Evanston, Sick., to an American mom and a Swedish American father. She was 11 when her father, John R. Lindgren, the founding father of the State Financial institution of Chicago, died. He gave most of his fortune to charitable establishments however left his daughter an annuity to offer for her schooling and, ultimately, her fieldwork.
As a younger woman, Ethel would watch trains whistle previous her hometown and dream of touring east. The chance got here after her mom, Ethel Roe Lindgren, a pianist, married Henry Eichhorn, an ethnomusicologist and composer recognized for incorporating devices he collected on his visits to China and Japan. At 17, the youthful Ethel took a 12 months off from her education at Miss Lee’s Faculty in Boston and traveled east along with her mom and stepfather.
On the Nice Wall in Kalgan, China (now Zhangjiakou), overlooking Mongolia, she gazed over the expanse of “dun-coloured land persevering with to the horizon” and was awed by “an important feeling of serenity, of eternity,” she wrote in her diary. The expertise impressed on her a hard and fast goal: Someday, she would return.
An unprecedented variety of girls entered anthropology through the interval between the world wars. Whereas some argued that fieldwork was too harmful for girls, the anthropologist Lyn Schumaker wrote in a chapter of “A New Historical past of Anthropology” (2008), edited by Henrika Kuklick, that they had been thought to own most of the qualities — “sympathy, tact, adaptability” — important for fruitful fieldwork.
It was round this time that Lindgren entered Newnham Faculty, College of Cambridge, the place she studied Chinese language and social science. She then earned a analysis fellowship and a Ph.D., additionally from Cambridge. 5 years of fieldwork in Manchuria shaped the premise of her thesis.
Its topic was shamanism among the many Reindeer Tungus, a collective of reindeer-herding peoples Indigenous to sub-Arctic Asia and higher recognized as we speak because the Evenki. A towering 6 ft 2 inches tall, with cropped pink hair and a fearsome self-confidence, Lindgren lower a formidable determine alongside the Evenki, who referred to as her “mangus,” or “large.”
She introduced alongside the person who would develop into her first husband, Oscar Mamen, a Norwegian adventurer and salesman working in Mongolia. He provided safety and technical help by carrying her cameras and taking pictures.
Collectively they produced an infinite, and enormously precious, trove of over 8,000 pictures and 300 movies. These are among the many solely current photographic information of the standard Solon and Manchu cultures, earlier than life modified with the takeover of Chinese language Communism.
Lindgren was 24 in 1929 when she and different expatriates had been ousted from Manchuria by the looming Soviet risk. She was crushed. She wrote to a pal: “Behind and above and past I see solely the barren hills and, at night time, the celebs in opposition to a metallic disk of sky outlined by the spherical gap within the prime of the felt yurt — and in my soul are tears.”
Again in England, Lindgren and Mamen married and had a son, John. However they quickly divorced.
In 1938, she grew to become the primary lady to be appointed editor in chief of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, a pre-eminent publication within the self-discipline. By the point she stepped down in 1948, her 11-year tenure had supported the publication by wartime shortages and cost-saving measures.
Lindgren’s scholarly pursuits included the methodologies of fieldwork, social psychology, shamanism, human-animal relations and materials tradition. She believed fieldworkers’ psychological profiles might affect their interpretation of knowledge and urged researchers to bear psychological coaching to focus on their biases, lengthy earlier than such reflexivity was commonplace within the social sciences.
In 1949, she took up a lectureship within the division of anthropology and archaeology at Cambridge, however she was terminated two years later as a result of the matters she coated — her focus was on Central Asia and Northern Europe — had been deemed much less precious to colonial cadets than studying about East Africa, India and the Center East. She by no means returned to academia.
Lindgren was naturalized in 1940. She channeled her aptitude as a social scientist towards tireless struggle service — first on the Ministry of Data, then as liaison officer for the Royal Institute of Worldwide Affairs.
Peace, Lindgren wrote in a letter, may very well be achieved by a “mixing of cultures.” The simple coexistence of Cossacks, a Slavic folks, and Evenki was prepared proof that “the interchange of cultural traits is a vital background for intergroup friendships.”
She had event to check this speculation in 1939, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs in america requested her to report on the feasibility of the Alaska resettlement venture, a largely forgotten try below the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal to relocate Jewish refugees to Alaska, the place federal immigration quotas didn’t apply. Her interviews with locals revealed that far-reaching antisemitism had not spared Alaska. For this and different causes, the plan by no means materialized.
In 1947, Lindgren was married a second time, to Mikel Utsi; it was an enduring love in center age that allowed for her most necessary legacy.
She met Utsi, a reindeer breeder, whereas in Swedish Lapland to review the Sami, one other Indigenous reindeer-herding folks.
On a scenic practice experience with Lindgren and her son, Utsi first set eyes on the rolling panorama of the Cairngorms and seen its similarities to his homeland. He exclaimed, “There should be reindeer moss right here!,” referring to the favored pasture among the many animals.
Right now there are 150 reindeer who roam freely over 10,000 acres within the Highlands. They’re noticed by the Cairngorm Reindeer Firm, an academic heart that Lindgren and Utsi based. The herd celebrated its seventieth anniversary final 12 months.
Lindgren and Utsi lived between the Cairngorms and Cambridge, the place she was a founding fellow of Lucy Cavendish Faculty, established on the College of Cambridge in 1965. They remained collectively till Utsi died in 1979.
Lindgren was the secretary of the Reindeer Council of the UK and the Reindeer Firm till her loss of life, on March 23, 1988. She was 83. Since then, the herd has been managed by Tilly Smith, the one feminine herder in Britain, and her husband, Alan.