Hortense Powdermaker

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Hortense Powdermaker (born December 24, 1896 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania ; died June 15, 1970 in Berkeley , California ) was an American anthropologist . Her main research interests were social movements , the mutual relations of ethnic groups in the USA, discrimination , racism and anti-Semitism as well as studies of the American film industry .

life and work

Hortense Powdermaker grew up in Philadelphia, Reading and Baltimore . She was the daughter of Louis Powdermaker and Minnie Powdermaker geb. Jacoby. Her grandparents came from Germany and England . She had three siblings: an older and a younger sister and a younger brother.

Powdermaker studied history at Goucher College and graduated in 1919. She then worked for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America union for several years . As a teenager she had already turned to socialist ideas. During her studies, she had joined the Women's Trade Union League after working in a clothing factory on vacation.

In 1925 Powdermaker moved to London to study anthropology at the London School of Economics . There she belonged to the inner circle of Professor Bronisław Malinowski . Powdermaker obtained her Ph.D. in 1928. for her work on rulership structures among the Aborigines in Central and South Australia . She then traveled to the Southwest Pacific for ten months , where she researched the social structures on the island of New Ireland .

From 1930 to 1937 Powdermaker worked at Yale University , where Edward Sapir promoted her interest in psychological anthropology . From 1932 to 1934 she lived in Indianola , a small town in the state of Mississippi . From her participatory observation studies arose her book After Freedom , which is considered to be a pioneer in the study of the relations between the ethnic groups of the USA.

In 1938, Hortense Powdermaker began teaching at Queens College in New York . She continued to research forms of discrimination against different social groups in the USA. In her textbook Probing Our Prejudices , which was published in 1944 and is aimed at a young readership, she examined racism, anti-Semitism and hostility to migrants from an anthropological and psychological perspective.

From 1944 to 1946, Hortense Powdermaker was Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences . From 1945 to 1947 she was first vice president, then president of the American Ethnological Society .

Powdermaker's next research project was the social structure of the mainstream film industry in Hollywood . In her book Hollywood, the Dream Factory , published in 1950, she criticized the film industry for its stuck structures, which she described as totalitarian , and their effects on the image of man conveyed in the films. Powdermaker later distanced herself from her approach in this book, which she, in retrospect, viewed as more politically than scientifically motivated. In 1953 Powdermaker started a new field research project. She traveled to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia ), where she examined the interactions between communication media and social movements using the example of the workers' movement in the copper mines there. Her book Copper Town emerged from the project .

In 1954, Hortense Powdermaker became a professor at Queens College, where she taught until her retirement. She has also lectured at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology , New York College of Medicine, and Yale University.

In her autobiography Stranger and Friend. The Way of an Anthropologist , published in 1968, Hortense Powdermaker reflects on her life as a researcher in connection with her social and cultural background. Dealing with the question of how the personal background of scientists affects their research set standards for anthropology.

Hortense Powdermaker spent the last years of her life in California . She was unable to complete her research project on youth culture in Berkeley before she died of a heart attack in 1970 .

Honors

Powdermaker Hall of Queens College, City University of New York

In 1957 the Goucher College awarded Hortense Powdermaker an honorary doctorate . Queens College named its social science building after her.

Fonts (selection)

  • Leadership Among the Aborigines of Central and Southern Australia (1928)
  • Vital statistics of New Ireland (Bismarck Archipelago) as Revealed in Genealogies (1931)
  • Mortuary Rites in New Ireland (Bismarck Archipelago) (1931)
  • Feasts in New Ireland. The Social Function of Eating (1932)
  • Life in Lesu. The Study of a Melanesian Society in New Ireland (1933)
  • After Freedom. A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939)
  • The Channeling of Negro Aggression by the Cultural Process (1943)
  • Probing Our Prejudices. A Unit for High School Students (1944)
  • An Anthropologist Looks at the Race Problem (1945)
  • Hollywood, the Dream Factory. An Anthropologist Studies the Movie Makers (1950)
  • Communication and Social Change, Based on a Field Study in Northern Rhodesia (1955)
  • Copper Town. Changing Africa, the Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt (1962)
  • Field Work , entry in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968)
  • Stranger and Friend. The Way of an Anthropologist (1968)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Online edition ( Memento of the original from July 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; PDF. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / s1.downloadmienphi.net
  2. ^ Powdermaker Hall on the Queens College website, accessed February 10, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Powdermaker, Hortense
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH June 15, 1970
Place of death Berkeley , California