This article is part of Misseda series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In 1952, anthropologist Ethel Lindgren made a decision that would change the face of the Scottish Highlands for decades to come: She imported a herd of reindeer. Reindeer, although indigenous to Britain, have not been seen there since the 12th century, when they were hunted to extinction.
Lindgren made the case to government officials that the animals were important sources of meat and fur. And with the looming threat of a conflict with the Soviet Union, he said, reindeer could be useful in military transport.
But his motivations were also romantic: It was, he wrote in a letter, a chance to “see against the Scottish skyline a magnificent animal.”
He began by importing seven reindeer — two bulls and five cows — on a Swedish ship, the Sarek. They were quarantined for almost a month at Edinburgh Zoo before being released to the Cairngorms, a mountain range in the Highlands, where their progress was monitored. The climate is favorable; indeed, the unique subarctic characteristics of the Cairngorms make it the only place left in Britain that can support livestock. More reindeer were imported in the following years; their descendants still roam the Highlands to this day.
Lindgren is best remembered for his reindeer experiment, but he made many contributions to the field of anthropology during a long career that has largely been lost to history.
Ethel John Lindgren was born on Jan. 1, 1905, in Evanston, Ill., to an American mother and a Swedish father. He was 11 when his father, John R. Lindgren, the founder of the State Bank of Chicago, died. He gave most of his fortune to charitable institutions but left his daughter an annuity to finance her education and, ultimately, her fieldwork.
When Ethel was young, Ethel watched trains pass through her town and dreamed of traveling east. The opportunity came after his mother, Ethel Roe Lindgren, a pianist, married Henry Eichhorn, an ethnomusicologist and composer known for incorporating instruments he had collected during his visits to China and Japan. At 17, the younger Ethel took a year off from her studies at Miss Lee’s School in Boston and traveled east with her mother and father.
At the Great Wall in Kalgan, China (now Zhangjiakou), overlooking Mongolia, he gazed out over the expanse of “dun-colored land stretching to the horizon” and marveled at “a great sense of stillness, of nothingness until,” he wrote in his diary. The experience instilled in him a fixed goal: One day, he would return.
An unprecedented number of women entered anthropology during the interwar period. While some argued that fieldwork was too dangerous for women, anthropologist Lyn Schumaker wrote in a chapter of “A New History of Anthropology” (2008), edited by Henrika Kuklick, that they were thought to be possesses many of the qualities – “sympathy, tact, adaptability”— essential for fruitful work in the field.
During this time Lindgren attended Newnham College, University of Cambridge, where he studied Chinese and social science. He then earned a research fellowship and Ph.D., also from Cambridge. Five years of fieldwork in Manchuria formed the basis of his thesis.
Its subject is shamanism among the Reindeer Tungus, a collective of reindeer-herding peoples Indigenous to sub-Arctic Asia and better known today as the Evenki. A towering 6 feet 2 inches tall, with cropped red hair and an intimidating self-confidence, Lindgren cut a formidable figure among the Evenki, who called him “mangus,” or “giant .”
She brought the man who would be her first husband, Oscar Mamen, a Norwegian adventurer and salesman living in China. He offered protection and technical assistance by bringing his cameras and taking photographs.
Together they produced a massive, and enormously valuable, trove of more than 8,000 photographs and 300 films. They are among the surviving photographic records of traditional Solon and Manchu culture, before life changed with the takeover of Chinese Communism.
Lindgren was 24 in 1929 when he and other expatriates were expelled from Manchuria by the looming Soviet threat. He was crushed. He wrote to a friend: “Behind and above and outside I see only the barren hills and, at night, the stars in a metal disk of the sky outlined by the round hole in the top of the felt yurt – and in my soul are tears. .”
Back in England, Lindgren and Mamen married and had a son, John. But soon they broke up.
In 1938, she became the first woman appointed editor-in-chief of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, a pre-eminent publication in the discipline. By the time he stepped down in 1948, his 11-year tenure had supported the publication through wartime shortages and austerity measures.
Lindgren’s scholarly interests include fieldwork methods, social psychology, shamanism, human-animal relations and material culture. He believed that the psychological profiles of fieldworkers could affect their interpretation of data and urged researchers to undergo psychological training to target their biases, long before such reflexivity was common in the sciences. society.
In 1949, he took up a lectureship in the department of anthropology and archeology at Cambridge, but he quit two years later because the subjects he covered – his focus was on Central Asia and Northern Europe – were considered less important to the colonialists. cadet rather than studying. about East Africa, India and the Middle East. He never returned to academia.
Lindgren was naturalized in 1940. He channeled his skills as a social scientist into tireless war service — first at the Ministry of Information, then as a liaison officer for the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Peace, Lindgren wrote in a letter, could be achieved by “bringing cultures together.” The easy integration of Cossacks, a Slavic people, and Evenki is ready evidence that “the exchange of cultural characteristics is a very important background for intergroup friendship.”
He had an opportunity to test this hypothesis in 1939, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the United States asked him to report on the feasibility of a resettlement project in Alaska, a largely forgotten attempt under the New Deal of Roosevelt administration to move Jewish refugees to Alaska, where federal immigration quotas did not apply. His interviews with locals revealed that widespread antisemitism was not spared in Alaska. For this and other reasons, the plan did not materialize.
In 1950, Lindgren married a second time, to Mikel Utsi; it was a lasting love in the middle ages that made way for his most important legacy.
He met Utsi, a reindeer breeder, while in Swedish Lapland to study the Sami, another Indigenous reindeer-herding people.
On a scenic train ride with Lindgren and her son, Utsi first takes in the rolling landscape of the Cairngorms and notices its resemblance to her homeland. He exclaimed, “There must be reindeer moss here!,” referring to the popular grazing area for the animals.
Today there are 150 reindeer that roam freely on over 10,000 hectares in the Highlands. They are followed by Cairngorm Reindeer Company, an educational center founded by Lindgren and Utsi. The herd celebrated its 70th anniversary last year.
Lindgren and Utsi lived between the Cairngorms and Cambridge, where he was a founding fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, established at the University of Cambridge in 1965. They remained together until Utsi’s death in 1979.
Lindgren was the secretary of the Reindeer Council of the United Kingdom and the Reindeer Company until his death, on March 23, 1988. He was 83 years old. Since then, the flock has been managed by Tilly Smith, Britain’s only female shepherd, and her husband Alan.
