Frederick William Hasluck

Frederick William Hasluck (1878-1920) is not usually known to anthropologists outside the geographical area, mainly the Balkans and Anatolia, where he worked and studied. However, he deserves much wider renown for a quite remarkable oeuvre. Indeed, seemingly independently of mainstream anthropological thought, he reached conclusions which are still mined today for their prescient insight. In brief, Hasluck was a classicist trained at Cambridge at a time when the Classical Tripos was looking to expand the kind of material that was being examined beyond the purely textual. He was also exposed to the fertile group of modernists such as E. M. Forster and Clive Bell who were undergraduates there as contemporaries or near contemporaries.

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Hasluck himself was by inclination a non-conformist, but a sceptical one, and very early on in his career showed himself more interested in the interactions between different religions and groups than pursuing grand narratives about them. He went out to Greece, to the British School at Athens, after graduating and worked there as Librarian, Assistant and Acting Director until shortly before the Great War. Eventually dismissed from his post after emerging the wrong side of office politics engineered by Wace, the eventual Director, he stayed on in Athens, gradually declining from consumption until going to a sanitorium in Switzerland where he died in 1920.

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During his lifetime, he published a monograph on Cyzicus, and many articles in the annual of the British School at Athens. Subsequently, his widow Margaret Hasluck brought his literary remains together in two volumes as Christianity and Islam under the Sultans. Most readers now encounter his work through those two volumes, the first long essay of which contains a strikingly modern interpretation of religious association, wherein he denies the possibility of relying on the transmission of religious sanctity and emphasises the role of societal factors in assuring the perpetuity of the numen of any particular site.

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An extensive traveller and by all accounts fluent in modern Greek, there is no doubt that had he not succumbed to the debilitating illness so early, he would have written ever more extensively based on fieldwork combined with the fine library reading that characterises his writings. As it is, his sensitivity to the interactions between cultures provides a source of stimulus today to a great many of those who specialise in the history of the Balkans and Anatolia, and indeed in historical relations between Islam and Christianity.

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References

Hasluck, F. W. 1910 Cyzicus: being some account of the history and antiquities of that city, and of the district adjacent to it, with the towns of Apollonia Ad Rhyndacum, Miletupolis, Hadrianutherae, Priapus, Zeleia, etc, F.W. Hasluck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hasluck, F. W. 1925 Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, edited by Margaret Hasluck, two volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Shankland, D. (ed.) 2004-2013. Archaeology, Anthropology and Heritage in the Balkans and Anatolia: the life and works of F.W. Hasluck, 1878-1920, Istanbul: Isis Press, Three volumes.

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Shankland, D. 2006 ‘Scenes pleasant and unpleasant: the life of F.W. Hasluck (1878-1920) at the British School at Athens’, in Scholars, Travels, Archives, 2006 edited by Michael Llewellyn Smith, Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Eleni Calligas, Athens: British School at Athens, 91-102.