Citation for 1995 Dissertation Prize: Lynette Schumaker, "The Lion in the Path: Fieldwork and Culture in the History of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1937-1964," Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1994. [This dissertation was published as Lynette Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)]

The Lion in the Path is a study of the first research institute for social and cultural anthropology in southern Africa, founded in 1937. In her study, Lynn Schumaker deliberately takes an approach opposite to that taken in more traditional historiography of science in colonial settings. Previous accounts of the Rhodes-Livingston Institute emphasized the Institute’s "Output," particularly the contributions of its founders to the Manchester school of functionalist social anthropology in the 1940s and 1950s. In contrast to the “metropolitan” perspective, Schumaker offers an Africa-centered history, employing locally available archival materials as well as some oral history accounts by Africans who worked with or were studies by the Institute.

The thesis provides a subtle account of the interactions and role confusions between anthropologists and colonial administrators. Especially innovative is a detailed analysis of what Schumaker calls "the material culture of fieldwork," including the symbolic significance of tools, camping equipment, clothing, even the choice of campsites for fieldworkers as well as the social composition of research teams. Important and attractive is Schumaker’s reminder that what "the natives" let the anthropologists do and wear could be just as important for research as what the researchers though they were "getting" from "the natives."

The dissertation opens up provocative new perspectives that will surely be important not only for the history of the human sciences, by also for the general history of science in colonial settings.