ABSTRACT

The thumb belongs to Kathleen Haddon, a zoologist, photographer, collector of string figures and the 26-year-old daughter of the celebrated British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon. Kathleen took this image in 1914 with her portable folding Vest Pocket Kodak (VPK), while travelling with her father as the official photographer on their three-month survey trip along the southern coast of Papua. By 1914 the development of more portable and less intrusive cameras allowed Kathleen to realize aspects of her father's call, whilst also exploring her own visual interests. While looking at the 1914 photographs with Kathleen's daughter Margaret Rishbeth, she recognized several images of Papuan children that her mother hung within their home in Cambridge. Whilst the Functionalist refashioning of the discipline ultimately eclipsed the results of their salvage-survey work, their 1914 trip remains an important moment in the anthropology of Papua and Oceania more widely.