Seligman, Charles Gabriel

Following their marriage in 1905, Charles and Brenda Seligman became a formidable anthropological team, researching and writing about communities in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Egypt, China and Japan, and travelling to many parts of the world together. Although Charles enjoyed a higher profile, as Professor of Ethnology at the London School of Economics, he had such a close working relationship with Brenda that it is often difficult to unpick their individual contributions to their books, and almost impossible to do so when it comes to their ethnographic collections.

Charles Seligman was born in London in 1873. In 1892 he gained an Entrance Scholarship to St Thomas's Hospital. He earned his first medical qualification four years later, in 1896, and received the Bristowe medal in pathology that same year.

In 1898, at the age of twenty-four, Seligman approached Alfred Cort Haddon and asked whether he might be allowed to join the Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition planned for later that year. He offered to pay his own expenses in an effort to persuade Haddon to include him despite the fact that the expedition team was already finalized. His efforts were successful and, although he initially joined as a pathologist and specialist in tropical diseases, he soon expanded his research into the realms of physical anthropology, ethnology and collecting work. (Pitt Rivers Museum, www.history.prm, 2011-02-16)