Camilla Wedgwood

The Hon. Camilla Hildegarde Wedgwood (25 March 1901 Barlaston, England - 17 May 1955) was a British anthropologist best known for research in the Pacific and her pioneering role as one of the British Commonwealth's first female anthropologists.

Biography

Wedgwood's father was Josiah Wedgwood later the first Baron Wedgwood. Her mother, Ethel Bowen Wedgwood, was the daughter of a Lord Justice of Appeal, Charles Bowen. She was a member of the extensive Wedgwood family.

A well-known intellectual in the mould of Virginia Woolf, she attended Orme Girls' School in Staffordshire, Bedales, and then studied English at Bedford College and Newnham College, Cambridge. During her childhood, her parents separated and later divorced.

It was at Cambridge that she studied under Alfred Court Haddon, one of the most recognized anthropologists of the time. As a result she decided to become an anthropologist. One of her first tasks after graduation in 1926 was to edit the manuscript of Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides by the late Arthur Bernard Deacon (another of Haddon's students) for publication after Deacon's death in 1927. She taught anthropology briefly at Bedford before moving to Sydney University, where she took up a position in that institution's newly-founded department of anthropology in 1928. She also taught at the University of Cape Town before returning to England in 1931 where she worked as a lecturer and personal assistant to Bronisław Malinowski at the London......
Read More