Two Against the Tide: The Shared Career and Lost Legacy of Brenda and Charles Seligman

When Charles Seligman invited his wife, Brenda, to share his tent in 1907, he sanctioned a professional place for female fieldworkers in anthropology. Seligman was a groundbreaking pioneer of ethnographic work in Oceania and Africa. He treated shellshocked soldiers, he amassed museum collections and he fathered a generation of exceptional students. Brenda, his first student, became a scholar in her own right. Eighty years after his death, the Seligman legacy was deleted from the institution he began. Two Against the Tide explores how as wealthy Anglo-Jews, Charles and Brenda Seligman built a shared career through secret benevolence and silent endurance of hardship.

Ann Lazarsfeld-Jensen is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow of CSU School of Theology, Canberra. She was also a Senior Lecturer at Charles Sturt University (CSU) in Bathurst, NSW for fourteen years. This book emerged from her time at the London School of Economics’ anthropology department as a visiting scholar.