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 was a Senior Lecturer in social sciences at Charles Sturt University (CSU) in Bathurst, NSW for fourteen years. She is now Adjunct Senior Research Fellow of CSU School of Theology, Canberra. This book emerged from her time at the London School of Economics' anthropology department as a visiting scholar.