CLAUDINE COHEN (École Pratique des Hautes Études & École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris): Power, Authority, and Gender in Fieldwork (Keynote)

Fieldwork is essential to the establishment of knowledge in many natural and social sciences. It engages the researcher’s body in a particular type of commitment, which requires moving towards the “object” that he/she must observe and study. It requires encounters with new environments, peoples and languages, mastery of particular techniques, implementation of rules and of survey protocols. It involves the acquisition of adapted equipment, and an administrative and financial organization that can be cumbersome. When it comes to expeditions to distant lands, it requires the physical and moral courage to leave one’s home for long periods of time, to accept unusual lifestyles and sometimes inhospitable places, to face hardness and dangers. Fieldwork implies a particular way of life that involves, more than any other form of scientific investigation, a true community of life and particular modes of human relationships, in which intimacy and promiscuity play their part. It also implies the exercise of power and authority on the background of gender relationships.

In this paper, I will analyze the growing part played by women in prehistoric archeology fieldwork in the first half of the 20th century, and try to show how, through their presence in the field, they have invested new roles of academic power and authority, with different implications for gender roles and relationships.

As an example, I will study the personality and scientific works of Dorothy Garrod (1892–1968), who, besides being the first elected woman professor at the University of Cambridge (1939), played a prominent role in conducting major field research, especially in collaboration with other women, and exerting personal and scientific authority in this domain.

Claudine Cohen is a philosopher and historian of Life and Earth Sciences. She owns a double professorship, in Science at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Life and Earth Science Section, Laboratoire Biogéosciences), and in the Humanities at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Centre for Language and Arts) in Paris. She is also a former member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.