Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (* 1931 ) is an American ethnologist and author. She lives in Peterborough , New Hampshire .

Life

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was born to entrepreneur Laurence Marshall and English teacher Lorna Marshall . Her father founded the refrigerator manufacturer Raytheon in 1922 , which later made the first microwave ovens and armaments during World War II and is now one of the largest armaments companies in the United States. Marshall Thomas has a brother named John Marshall .

She began her studies at Smith College in 1949 , which she soon interrupted. When her father retired, from 1950 onwards he traveled several times with the entire family, accompanied by ethnologists and biologists, to the African Kalahari desert to examine the Juwa (Ju / wasi), a tribe of the San . This contact with the San culture shaped the entire family. Both the mother Lorna and the two children studied ethnology. The mother published two now classic works about the Juwa. Laurence Marshall spent years assisting the San with state governments, in which his son later succeeded him.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas returned to Smith College, where the future poet Sylvia Plath also studied. Elizabeth later moved to Radcliffe College and began writing about her experiences in Africa; she received an award for a short story about the San culture at Mademoiselle's short-story contest . Sylvia Plath also submitted an award-winning short story. Elizabeth was then asked by a publisher to publish a book on the subject.

However, work on this book was delayed when she married the present-day historian and political advisor Stephen Thomas . She herself later described it as typical of the 1950s that she put her own interests aside in favor of her husband's studies and caring for the two children. It wasn't until 1959, after the birth of her second child, that her book The Harmless People was published. Critics were amazed at the fluid, understandable style; the book is reprinted to this day. This was followed by a research stay with indigenous peoples in Botswana and a one-year stay with the cattle breeding Dodoth in Uganda, about whom she published the work Warrior Herdsmen in 1965 .

Another area of interest was biology. She did research on elephants in US zoos and Namibia , working with biologist Katy Payne , who showed that elephants communicate via infrasound . She also took part in an expedition to Baffin Island , where she observed wolves . This was followed by Reindeer Moon (1987) and The Animal Wife (1990), two works on the life of Stone Age societies. For marketing reasons, Reindeer Moon was compared with the novels by Jean M. Auel . Marshall Thomas, however, distanced himself from their works, which from their point of view idealize Stone Age societies and would project the manners of civilized societies onto them. She started working on Reindeer Moon before Auel's first work (1980) was published.

This was followed in 1993 by a work on domestic dogs, The Hidden Life of Dogs , which was based on meticulous observation that was rendered in clear language. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for almost ten months. Here, too, her critics certified a very realistic representation; However, she also received outraged comments from the “dog breeder scene”, which accused her of anthropomorphism . A year later, she published her work on cats, The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture , the centerpiece of which reproduces observations on lions in the Kalahari, and also reports how their behavior changed when the Namibian government resettled parts of the indigenous population.

In 2000, she published The Social Lives of Dogs: The Grace of Canine Company , which, like The Hidden Life of Dogs, is based on observing your own and neighboring dogs.

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Among other works she wrote

The Harmless People (1959)
- dt. My friends, the Bushmen: among the nomads of the Kalahari (1962)
Warrior Herdmen (1965)
Reindeer Moon (1987)
The Animal Wife (1990)
- German The Hunter's Wife (1995)
The Hidden Life of Dogs (1993)
The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture (1994)
Certain Poor Shepherds: a Christmas Tale (1996)
The Social Life of Dogs (2000)
Wild Discovery Guide to Your Cat: Understanding and Caring for the Tiger Within (2000)
The Old Way: A Story of the First People (2006)
The Hidden Life of Deer (2009)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Marshall Thomas, Elizabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American social scientist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH	1931