Eleanor Leacock

Eleanor Burke Leacock (born July 2, 1922 in Weehawken , New Jersey , † April 2, 1987 in Honolulu , Hawaii ) was an American anthropologist who studied the egalitarian societies of the North American and polar indigenous peoples and their kinship systems. Gender issues were at the center of her research and publications .

Life

Leacock's father, Kenneth Burke, was a well-known poet, critic, and social philosopher , while her mother, Lily Burke, was a math teacher. The family, who lived in rural New Jersey, had an unconventional gender role distribution. There were a number of radical socialist and Marxist thinkers around the family, as well as in Greenwich Village , where Leacock later lived . In this way she learned to appreciate both handicrafts on the farm and the intellectual independence of the artist and intellectual scene, and she turned against racist, gender and class-specific discrimination early on. As a student she got to know the work of Vere Gordon Childe , Henry Lewis Morgan , Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels . At Barnard College , she herself experienced professional discrimination for being denied a job as a woman. In 1944 she wanted to take part in the journalistic fight against National Socialism with Ruth Benedict in the Office of War Information , but was rejected by the FBI for political reasons because of her previous contacts with radicals. In 1952 Leacock earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University . There, too, as a married woman with two children, she was professionally discriminated against. From 1963 to 1972 she was a professor at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and from 1972 until her death a professor at the City College of New York .

Leacock was married to James Haughton and had five children.

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Leacock started her field research with the Inuit Labradors , who were badly affected by the consequences of colonialism . She drew attention to the fact that in the subsistence economy prevailing there, important resources were still largely shared with Europeans and white North Americans even after centuries of exchanging goods. Using the example of the Montagnais - Naskapi tribe , she found that these and similar hunter-gatherer societies used to be matrilocal - contrary to the prevailing opinion that hunter-gatherer societies must be male-dominated. In her dissertation from 1954 she showed the devastating consequences of the colonization of the North American indigenous peoples, which had been glossed over by the acculturation theories prevailing among anthropologists at the time . It was the fur trade with the whites - according to their findings - that led to the emergence of chief hierarchies and male dominance: Since the beginning of the fur trade, more and more female slave workers were employed; at the same time large private fortunes arose which were hoarded.
After her appointment to the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (today: New York University Tandon School of Engineering ), she reintroduced the long-ignored concepts of Engels and Morgan into the anthropological discussion in her publications and advocated the thesis that the subordination of women and the male dominance is closely related to the emergence of the state. Leacock can be seen as the founder of a feminist anthropology. Although she also mentioned examples of societies that were patriarchally organized even before contact with the Europeans (e.g. the Aztecs ), she neglects these findings in favor of her colonialism thesis. Leacock also stated the existence of female chiefs in tribal societies, but avoids the term matriarchy and vehemently defended the egalitarian theory.
Leacock also commented on the controversy between Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman . Freeman's criticism of the apparently over-idealistic picture of Samoa drawn by Mead is based on a biological determinism ; he ignores the cultural change in Samoa and the historical causes of aggression. But Mead's image of peaceful Samoa is also ahistorically and infantile distorted.
In various publications Leacock examined the causes and consequences of racism and discrimination in American cities and especially in schools.

Awards

• New York Academy Sciences Award for the Behavioral Sciences 1983 (first woman ever)

Fonts (selection)

• The origin of the family, private property and the state. In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, With an Introduction and Notes by Eleanor Burke Leacock. New York 1972.
• Women's Status in Egalitarian Society: Implications for Social Evolution. In: Current Anthropology. Volume 19, 1978, pp. 247-255.
• Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally, Chicago: Haymarket 2008 (First published: Monthly Review Press 1981).
• with Helen I. Safa & Contributors: Women's Work. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers 1986.
• Conceptual and historical problems of interpreting gender inequality. In: Institute for Marxist Research (IMSF) (Ed.): Theory and Method VIII. Matriarchy and Patriarchy. The genesis of the family. IMSF: Frankfurt am Main 1986.
• The Montagnais "Hunting Territory" and the Fur Trade. American Anthropologist Memoir 78, 1954.
• as ed. with Mona Etienne: Women and Colonization. Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Prager Publishers 1980.
• Behavior, Biology and Anthropological Theory. In: Gary Greenberg and Ethel Tobach (Eds.): Behavioral Evolution and Integrative Levels. The TC Schneirla Conference Series. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 1984.
• as ed. with Richard Lee (ed.): Politics and History in Band Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1982.

Web links

• Biography Leacock on the website of the University of Indiana (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ The Montagnais "Hunting Territory" and the Fur Trade , American Anthropologist Memoir 78, 1954
2. ^ Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally. Chicago: Haymarket 2008 (First published: Monthly Review Press 1981).
3. ^ Anthropologists in Search of a Culture: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman and All the Rest of Us. In: Central Issues in Anthropology , Vol. 8. Issue 1, 1987.
4. ^ Teaching and Learning in City Schools. New York: Basic Books 1969; Culture of Poverty: A Critique. New York: Simon and Schuster 1971.