No longer overlooked: Ethel Lindgren, anthropologist of reindeer herding cultures

This article is part of Overlookeda series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported 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 native to Britain, had not been seen there since the 12th century, when they were threatened with extinction.

Lindgren made it clear to government officials that the animals were important sources of meat and fur. And with the looming threat of conflict with the Soviet Union, she said, the reindeer could be useful in military transport.

But her motivations were also romantic: it would, she wrote in a letter, be a chance “to see a very beautiful animal against the Scottish skyline.”

She started by importing seven reindeer – two bulls and five cows – on a Swedish ship, the Sarek. They were quarantined at Edinburgh Zoo for almost a month before being released into the Cairngorms, a mountain range in the Highlands, where their progress was monitored. The climate was favorable; in fact, the unique subarctic properties of the Cairngorms make it the only place in Britain where the animals can live. In the years that followed, more reindeer were imported; their descendants still roam the Highlands.

Lindgren is best remembered for her reindeer experiment, but she made many contributions to the field of anthropology in a long career that has been largely lost to history.

Ethel John Lindgren was born on January 1, 1905 in Evanston, Illinois, the son of an American mother and a Swedish father. She was 11 when her father, John R. Lindgren, the founder of the State Bank of Chicago, died. He donated most of his fortune to charities, but left his daughter an annuity to finance her education and eventually her fieldwork.

As a young girl, Ethel saw trains whistling past her hometown and dreamed of traveling east. The opportunity came after her mother, Ethel Roe Lindgren, a pianist, married Henry Eichhorn, an ethnomusicologist and composer known for using instruments he collected during his visits to China and Japan. At the age of 17, the younger Ethel took a year off from her education at Miss Lee’s School in Boston and traveled east with her mother and stepfather.

At the Great Wall in Kalgan, China (now Zhangjiakou), overlooking Mongolia, she gazed across the expanse of “dark-colored land stretching to the horizon” and was impressed by “a great sense of serenity, of eternity” , she wrote in her diary. The experience solidified her purpose: one day she 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 possess many of the qualities – ‘sympathy, tact, adaptability” – essential for fruitful fieldwork.

It was around this time that Lindgren attended Newnham College, University of Cambridge, where she studied Chinese and social sciences. She subsequently obtained a research fellowship and a PhD, also from Cambridge. Five years of fieldwork in Manchuria formed the basis of her dissertation.

The subject was shamanism among the reindeer tungus, a collective of reindeer herding peoples native to subarctic Asia and better known today as the Evenki. With a towering height of 6 feet 10 inches, close-cropped red hair, and fearsome self-confidence, Lindgren cut a formidable figure next to the Evenki, who called her “mangus” or “giant.”

She brought with her the man who would become her first husband, Oscar Mamen, a Norwegian adventurer and salesman living in China. He provided protection and technical assistance by carrying her cameras and taking pictures.

Together they produced a vast and enormously valuable treasure of over 8,000 photographs and 300 films. These are among the only existing photographic documents of the traditional Solon and Manchu cultures, before life changed with the takeover of Chinese communism.

Lindgren was 24 in 1929 when she and other expatriates were driven out of Manchuria by the looming Soviet threat. She was crushed. She wrote to a friend: ‘Behind and above and beyond I see only the barren hills and, at night, the stars against 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 they soon divorced.

In 1938, she became the first woman to be appointed editor-in-chief of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, a leading publication in the field. By the time she resigned in 1948, her eleven-year tenure had propped up the publication through wartime shortages and cost-cutting measures.

Lindgren’s scholarly interests include the methodologies of fieldwork, social psychology, shamanism, human-animal relations, and material culture. She believed that the psychological profiles of fieldworkers could influence their interpretation of data and urged researchers to undergo psychological training to confront their biases, long before such reflexivity was commonplace in the social sciences.

In 1949 she was given a lectureship in the department of anthropology and archeology at Cambridge, but two years later she was dismissed because the subjects she covered – her focus was on Central Asia and Northern Europe – were considered less valuable to colonial cadets than learning . about East Africa, India and the Middle East. She never returned to academia.

Lindgren was naturalized in 1940. She channeled her skills as a social scientist towards tireless war service – first at the Ministry of Information, then as a liaison officer to the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Peace, Lindgren wrote in a letter, could be achieved through a “mingling of cultures.” The easy coexistence of Cossacks, a Slavic people, and Evenki was clear evidence that “the exchange of cultural traits is a very important background for intergroup friendships.”

She had the opportunity to test this hypothesis in 1939, when the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs asked her to report on the feasibility of the Alaska resettlement project, a largely forgotten effort under the administration’s New Deal. Roosevelt to move Jewish refugees to Alaska. where federal immigration quotas did not apply. Her interviews with locals revealed that far-reaching anti-Semitism has not spared Alaska. For these and other reasons, the plan never came to fruition.

In 1950, Lindgren married Mikel Utsi for the second time; it was an enduring love in middle age that made her most important legacy possible.

She met Utsi, a reindeer breeder, while in Swedish Lapland studying the Sami, another reindeer-herding indigenous people.

On a scenic train ride with Lindgren and her son, Utsi saw the rolling landscape of the Cairngorms for the first time and noticed the similarities with his home country. He exclaimed, “There must be reindeer moss here!”, referring to the popular pasture among the animals.

Today, 150 reindeer roam free across 10,000 hectares in the Highlands. They are observed by the Cairngorm Reindeer Farm, an educational center that Lindgren and Utsi founded. Last year the herd celebrated its 70th anniversary.

Lindgren and Utsi lived between the Cairngorms and Cambridge, where she was a founding member of Lucy Cavendish College, founded at the University of Cambridge in 1965. They remained together until Utsi died in 1979.

Lindgren was secretary of the Reindeer Council of the United Kingdom and the Reindeer Company until her death on 23 March 1988. She was 83. Since then the flock has been managed by Tilly Smith, the only female shepherd in Britain, and her husband Alan.