- Caroline Furness Jayne
Caroline Furness Jayne (1873-1909) was an American
ethnologist . She wrote perhaps the first, and best-known, book onstring figure s, "String Figures and How to Make Them".A graduate of
Philadelphia 'sAgnes Irwin School , she was the wife ofHorace Jayne , a biology professor at theUniversity of Pennsylvania . Her brother,William Henry Furness , received his M.D. from Penn and was an "extensive traveler" and a fellow of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain.Her string figure mentor was
Alfred Haddon , a Cambridge ethnologist who began the introduction to her book by noting that "in ethnology . . . nothing is too insignificant to receive attention" He then goes on to defend the research invested in the unpromising amusement of string figures. Jayne, an extensive traveler herself, was the first to create a popular study of string figures building on dry academic papers which appeared in journals like "The Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology" and the "Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society" as well as in a variety of foreign language anthropological journals."String Figures and How to Make Them" was first published in 1906 (ISBN 0-8446-2318-0), and was reprinted by Dover in 1965 (ISBN 0-613-81171-2 and later ISBN 0-486-20152-X).
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