Gene Weltfish

Gene World Fish (born on 7. August 1902 in New York City as Regina World Fish ;. Died on 2. August 1980 ) was an American anthropologist and historian , focusing on the history and culture of the Pawnee had specialized. She taught and researched at Columbia University and Fairleigh Dickinson University . Her work The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture , published in 1965, is still considered a standard work today.

Life

Childhood, youth and education

Regina Weltfish was born in 1902 as the first of two daughters of the lawyer Abraham Weltfish and his wife Eve Furman on the Lower East Side in New York City and grew up speaking German. Her father, with whom she was closely related, died when she was 13 years old. Encouraged by her grandmother, she went to the synagogue daily during the seven days of mourning and prayed the kaddish for him - an act of respect normally reserved for a son of the deceased. Without the father, the family got into a difficult financial situation. Since he died without a will, the state was given control of the inheritance. So the mother had to submit applications for each issue. To help the family, Weltfish started working as a school secretary when she was 14 and attended high school in the evenings.

In 1919 Weltfish graduated from high school and attended Hunter College . She chose journalism as her main subject. She then continued her studies at Barnard College at Columbia University , where she took philosophy as a second subject under John Dewey . In 1925 she successfully completed her studies and began studying for a doctorate in anthropology . Franz Boas became her doctoral supervisor.

During this time she married the doctoral student Alexander Lesser , who also studied with Boas and later researched the Sioux- speaking Indian tribes as an anthropologist . The couple had been married for 15 years and had one daughter. Their first joint field research trip took them to Oklahoma, where they examined the relationships between the Sioux tribes .

After meeting the Pawnee Indian Henry Moses in New York, Weltfish decided to choose his tribe as a dissertation topic. She traveled to the Pawnee Reservation in Oklahoma. There she studied handicrafts in particular and learned basketry, which was traditionally reserved for Pawnee women. Her doctoral thesis was The Interrelation of Technique and Design in North American Basketry . She submitted the work as early as 1929, but it was not until 1950 that she received her doctorate. It was only at this point that the university changed its doctoral regulations, cut the printing costs of $ 4,000 and accepted simple copies.

In 1935 Boas invited Weltfish to teach at Columbia. It remained with annual renewals until 1953. Columbia University never granted Weltfish a lifetime position, which many attribute to discrimination against women. So also was Ruth Benedict in 1938 the first woman to an extraordinary professorship at Columbia, but only in 1948, a few months before her death, was a Department granted her. At Weltfish's request, Benedict stood up for the young scientist at a board meeting of the university when the board wanted to end Weltfish's employment.

The Races of Mankind

In 1943 Weltfish published together with Benedict The Races of Mankind , which was intended as an educational brochure for the US troops. In simple language and illustrated with cartoons, the booklet provided scientifically substantiated arguments against racism. The publication sparked a heated political debate in which Weltfish was accused of socialist propaganda.

Weltfish and Benedict published results of intelligence tests carried out by the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) during World War I. Whites in the southern states were inferior to blacks in the rest of the country. The authors argued, "The difference [...] [arose from] the gap in income, educational attainment, cultural advantage, and other factors," because schools in the southern United States spent a fraction of what schools in the rest of the world spent of the country invested. This statement led to an outcry among the military, as many southerners served here. Weltfish and Benedict used much of the brochure to explain that the intellectual differences in the two groups were mainly due to social and cultural factors, not biological ones.

The Races of Mankind primarily represented Boas' view of the subject of "race", which later became the standard of modern anthropology and was thus included in the UNESCO declaration of 1948.

More than 20 years later, Weltfish explained why they wrote the brochure:

"" During the first four years of my studies at Columbia, Hitler came to power and justified his heinous acts with a completely distorted anthropology. Franz Boas 'books were burned in Germany. After [Boas'] death in 1942, Ruth Benedict , my older colleague in anthropology, and I feel we had to take the race issue further. In 1943, Ruth Benedict and I worked together on The Races of Mankind, published by the Public Affairs Committee. The brochure was Originally written at the request of the United Service Organizations , to be distributed to members of the armed forces who had to fight side by side with allies such as the Hukbalahaps in the Philippines and the people of the Solomon Islands . "The Races of Mankind" was not just for enlightenment used by the Army, but also for the denazification programs in Germany after the war. ""

- Gene Weltfish, October 24, 1967

To this day, far-right groups in the United States believe that Weltfish's work is part of a conspiracy by Boaz and his students to prevent investigations into races in psychology and anthropology in order to "prepare for the defeat of white civilization by the Jews."

In the McCarthy era

The FBI had taken an early interest in Weltfish's political activities and in 1944 the head of the anthropological department, Ralph Linton , reported them to the FBI for "sympathy for communism". The FBI investigated Weltfish's activities such as her involvement in the Congress of American Women , her signatures for civil rights petitions, and her involvement in WNBC radio broadcasts . The police had counted the Congress of American Women, of which Weltfish was once president, among the subversive organizations in the 1940s after a spokeswoman criticized Harry S. Truman for its foreign policy.

In 1952, Weltfish repeated in the Daily Worker a claim by Soviet critics that the US Army had used biological weapons in the Korean War . Shortly thereafter, she was summoned in writing to testify before the McCarran Senate Judiciary Committee . She refused to answer questions about her political views, but when asked about the Daily Worker article , she said she was misquoted.

In 1953, the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations held hearings to investigate whether "un-American literature" had been purchased from American libraries. Weltfish was asked about her role in The Races of Mankind , which the committee had classified as "subversive". Two weeks before the hearing, Columbia University announced to Weltfish that their contract would not be renewed at the end of the year. As a reason for the termination, the university stated that it could no longer be employed due to new statutes against the abuse of annual contracts. However, other lecturers were not dismissed, but hired for an unlimited period. Weltfish suspected she was fired because she was a woman. Later it was suspected that Weltfish was no longer interested in employing it because the university board of trustees feared that Weltfish's political views could hinder the fundraising process.

On April 1, 1953 Weltfish was interviewed by the McCarran Committee with Roy Cohn , Joseph McCarthy , Karl Mundt , John McClellan and Stuart Symington . Weltfish refused to name colleagues with sympathy for communism. When asked about her own political preferences, she refused to answer, referring to the 5th Amendment to the United States Constitution . Weltfish only said that she considered herself a good American and acted to the best of her knowledge and belief. When asked about the claim that some blacks in the north had higher IQs than whites in the southern states, all she replied was that the data came from US Army holdings.

Weltfish was unable to find employment for the next eight years. The Nebraska and Bollingen Foundations gave her financial support that allowed her to accept an invitation and study materials from the Pawnee Collection at the University of Nebraska Museum . Based on this and previous studies, she wrote The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture in 1965 on the history and ethnography of the Pawnee.

Late years

In 1961, Weltfish started as a research fellow at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. In 1964 she became an associate professor and in 1968 she was finally given her own professorship, where she worked until the age limit of 70 in 1972. She then worked part-time for the New School for Social Research and the Manhattan School of Music in New York City, and as a visiting professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick . At Rutgers University she researched and taught in a gerontology program.

Fonts (selection)

• rehistoric North American Basketry Techniques and Modern Distributions . American Anthropologist No. 32, 1930 pp. 454-495
• Coiled Gambling Baskets of the Pawnee and Other Plains Tribes . In: Indian Notes and Monographs Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, No. 7, 1930, pp. 277-295
• Pottery Implements of the Ancient Basket-Makers . In: Plains Anthropologist 33, 1931, p. 263
• White-on-red Pottery from Cochiti Pueblo . In: Plains Anthropologist 33, 1931, pp. 263-264
• Preliminary Classification of Prehistoric Southwestern Basketry . In: Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections , Vol. 87, No. 6
• Problems in the Study of Ancient and Modern Basket Makers . In: American Anthropologist No. 34, 1932, pp. 108-117.
• with Alexander Lesser: Composition of the Caddoan Linguistic Stock . In: Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections , Vol. 87, No. 6
• The Vision of Fox Boy, a South Band Pawnee Text, with Translations and Grammatical Analysis . In: International Journal of American Linguistics No. 9, 1936, pp. 44-75
• Caddoan Texts: Pawnee, South Band Dialect. (= Volume 17 of the publications of the American Ethnological Society), 1937
• with Ruth Benedict The Races of Mankind . The Public Affairs Committee, New York 1943
• The Origins of Art. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis 1953
• The Perspective for Fundamental Research in Anthropology . In: The Philosophy of Science No. 23, 1956, pp. 63-73
• The Linguistic Study of Material Culture . In: International Journal of American Linguistics No. 24, 1958, pp. 301-311
• The Anthropologist and the Question of the Fifth Dimension . In: Stanley Diamond (ed.): Culture in History , Columbia University Press, New York 1958
• The Question of Ethnic Identity, an Ethnohistorical Approach. Ethnohistory 6, 1959, pp. 321-346
• The Ethnic Dimension of Human History: Pattern or Patterns of Culture? In: Anthony C. Wallace (ed.): Selected Papers, Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences , University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1960
• The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture . Basic Books, New York 1965
• The Plains Indians: Their Continuity in History and Their Indian Identity . In: Eleanor Burke Leacock, Nancy Oestreich Lurie (Eds.): North American Indians in Historical Perspective , Random House, New York 1971

Web links

• Inventory of the Gene Weltfish Pawnee Field Notes, 1935 at the Newberry Library
• Gene Weltfish (1902-1980) , Webster University

Remarks

1. ↑ Pathe writes in 1988 that Weltfish was released in 1952, but Price explains in 2004 (p. 132) that she was only released in 1953

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l} R. A. Pathe: " Gene Weltfish (1902-1980) ", In: U. Gacs, A. Khan, J. McIntyre, and R. Weinberg (Eds.): Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary , Greenwood, New York 1988, pp. 372-381
2. ↑ Joy Harvey, Marilyn Ogilvy: Weltfish, Gene . In: The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: LZ . Taylor & Francis, 2000, pp. 1364-1366
3. ^ Sydel Silverman: Totems and Teachers: Key Figures in the History of Anthropology . Rowman Altamira, 2004, p. 118
4. ↑ Ruth Benedict, Gene Weltfish: The Races of Mankind . Public Affairs Committee Inc., New York 1943
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} David H. Price: Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists . Duke University Press, 2004
6. ^ AS Winston: The Boas Conspiracy ": The history of the behavioral sciences as viewed from the extreme right . In: History & Theory of Psychology : Evening Colloquia 2000/01, York University, Canada
7. ^ Lee D. Baker: The Cult of Franz Boas and his "Conspiracy" to Destroy the White Race . In: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , Vol. 154, No. 1, March 2010, pp. 8-18 ( Online as PDF ( Memento of the original from February 14, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ) 
8. ↑ Charles Grutzner: Senate Inquiry Red 'Visitor' Put on stand as Spy Suspect , The New York Times, September 26, 1952
9. ↑ Will Lissner: Columbia is Dropping Dr. Weltfish, Leftist , The New York Times, April 1, 1953
10. ↑ Haig Bosmajian: Freedom Not to Speak . NYU Press, 1999, pp. 134f.