Do we need a written constitution, too?

The Prix Pictet is an award for photography concerned with social and environmental challenges. It would be very weird indeed, then, if this year’s theme had not been crisis-related. Confinement collates shortlisted work by 43 artists from 20 nations, including this photo-cumpainting-cum-performance piece by Robin Rhode, one of a series the South African artist made in collaboration with the residents of a Johannesburg township. (teneues.com, £34.50)

In 1910, Barbara FreireMarreco, the daughter of a Woking accountant, left England behind and lived and worked among a tribe of Pueblo Indians in New Mexico. Three years later, Katherine Routledge sailed to Easter Island to carry out the first true survey of the land and its people, while also attempting to broker negotiations between increasingly angry islanders and the Englishman who managed the farm that formed the island’s economy. (She didn’t make much headway, but she was given chickens and potatoes.)

The following year, Maria Czaplicka trekked across 3,000 miles of frozen Siberia gathering information about its indigenous people. Freezing cold and lost in a snowstorm, she finally understood the allure of gulping down the stillwarm blood of a freshly slaughtered deer. She was the first white women many of the Siberians had seen, and they joked that she and the other two women of her team were “suffragettski: banished to Siberia by the British government”.

In 1920, after 15 years of studying the country, 48-year-old Winifred Blackman finally made her first trip to Egypt; she would spend half of each year there for the next two decades, living in a mud-brick house amongst the fellahin, or agricultural peasants. By dispensing everyday English remedies wherever she went, she became known as a “miraculous healer”. Some, however, remained suspicious of this outsider. When her Egyptian assistant was murdered, she knew it might have been because of her.

Then there was Beatrice Blackwood, who, from the late 1920s, made a series of expeditions to Melanesia, including a trip to New