Hilma Granqvist

Hilma Natalia Granqvist (1890 to 1972) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish anthropologist who carried out long field studies of Palestinians, and a student of Edvard Westermarck. She went to Palestine in the 1920s to research the women of the Old Testament, hoping to find the Jewish ancestors of Scripture, and instead found in the village of Artas, near Bethlehem, a people with a distinct culture and way of life. She changed her focus to a full study of the customs, habits and ways of thinking of the villagers and stayed until 1931, recording village life in detail and taking hundreds of photographs. Her publications include Marriage Conditions in a Palestinian Village (1931 and 1935), Birth and Childhood among the Arabs (1947), Child Problems among the Arabs (1950) and, from a village in Jordan, Muslim Death and Burial (1965); a selection of her photographs was published in 1981 as Portrait of a Palestinian Village.