Phyllis Kaberry and me

"Phyllis Kaberry was one of an early - and largely forgotten - group of women anthropologists in Australia. Her pioneering fieldwork, later published as Aboriginal Women: Sacred and Profane (1939), led her to a distinguished academic career in London, where she died in 1977. Kaberry's approach was then a most unusual one: she investigated life from the vantage point of women, although not to the exclusion of men." "Fifty years later, Sandy Toussaint undertook her own fieldwork in some of the same communities, where she found people who still remembered Kaberry. In revisiting and re-evaluating Kaberry's work and intellectual legacy, Toussaint also caught glimpses of the private person behind it - eccentric, a little mysterious, with a restless, passionate mind." "Phyllis Kaberry and Me raises questions about the nature of biography, the doing and writing of ethnography, the representation and interpretation of culture, and the changes and continuities in Aboriginal Australia."--Jacket.