Ruth Landes

Ruth Landes (born October 8, 1908 in New York City ; died February 11, 1991 in Hamilton , Ontario , Canada ) was an American cultural anthropologist . She is considered a pioneer in the field of research into gender relations and the social position of ethnic minorities.

Life

Ruth Landes (center), Claude Lévi-Strauss (left in the picture), Charles Wagley (right in the picture) during a visit to the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, probably at the end of the 1930s .

Ruth Schlossberg was born in Manhattan in 1908 as the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants . Her father Joseph Schlossberg was a co-founder and for many years General Secretary of the textile union Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America . Landes graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology in 1928 and a Masters degree from the New York School of Social Work (now part of Columbia University ) in 1929 . She then received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. Her doctor's mother, Ruth Benedict , had a great influence . Even Franz Boas affected country strong.

During her studies she worked as a social worker in Harlem . During this time she married the medical student Victor Landes. But the marriage was short-lived. When Ruth Landes decided against her husband's will to do a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University, the couple separated after only two years.

In 1939, Landes worked briefly as a researcher for Gunnar Myrdal's study on African American people. In 1941 Landis became head of research at the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and was an advisor for African-American and Mexican-born Americans on US President Franklin D. Roosevelt's committee for fair working conditions until 1945 . At the same time she began studying with the Acadians in Louisiana . From 1948 to 1951 she was head of research at the American Jewish Commission in New York. From 1948 to 1951 she advised Ruth Benedict on Jewish families in New York on their research study on contemporary cultures. From 1950 to 1952, Landes studied the problems of African and Asian immigrants in the United Kingdom. In 1946/47 and the late 1940s, Landes lived in California and worked for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Welfare Council on a study of gangs. This is how she became aware of the culture of Hispanics and Latinos . After the end of the contract she went back to New York and worked for the American Jewish Congress. In 1951/52 she lived in London for a year on a Fulbright grant and studied the situation of African and Asian immigrants in the country. She was also increasingly interested in comparative cultural studies on the education of minorities and the processes and effects of getting older. In 1968 she began an investigation into bilingualism and biculturalism based on the independence efforts of the province of Québec in Canada. The project took them to the Basques in Spain, quadrilingual Switzerland and South Africa.

Until 1965, Landes was only briefly employed at universities. So she worked in 1937 at Brooklyn College and 1937/38 at Fisk University . She had come here to use the extensive library of material on Africans and Afro-Americans. In 1953/534 she taught at the William Alanson White Psychiatric Institution in New York and from 1953 to 1955 at the New School for Social Research . In 1957 she was visiting professor at the University of Kansas and from 1957 to 1962 at the University of Southern California . From 1959 to 1962 she was visiting professor and head of anthropology and the educational program of the Claremont Graduate School . In 1963 she taught at Columbia University and Los Angeles State College , was visiting professor at Tulane University in the first months of 1964 and visiting professor at the University of Kansas in the summer of that year. In 1965 she became a full professor at McMaster University in Hamilton. After her retirement in 1977, she continued to work until her death in 1991.

Ruth Landes died in Ontario in 1991 at the age of 82. Her estate, which includes photos and artifacts, is held in the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives in Washington, DC .

plant

In her social science dissertation on black Jews in Harlem, Landes began to research the social organization and religious practices of marginalized social groups . Looking for a way to improve her analysis, Boas advised her to turn to anthropology. Under Benedict, Landes became more and more interested in the Indians of North America. Between 1932 and 1936 she worked with the Ojibwa of Ontario and Minnesota , the Santee in Minnesota and the Potawatomi in Kansas . As a result, she published numerous important papers such as her dissertation Ojibwa Sociology (1937) and Ojibwa Woman (1938). Years later she published Ojibwa Religion and the Midewiwin (1968) and The Mystic Lake Sioux (1968). In Ojibwa Sociology , Landes describes kinship, religious rites and social organization, in Ojibwa Woman she shows how women were able to achieve economic and social autonomy through gender roles. In Ojibwa Religion and The Mystic Lake Sioux , Landes discussed the Indians' strategies to sustain their religious and cultural needs while adapting to the rapid changes in their cultural and political environment.

In 1938/39 Ruth Landes worked at the invitation of Benedict in Bahia , Brazil , to investigate syncretism and the development of an identity among the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé . She described that the matriarchal religion was a great source of strength for the disenfranchised blacks and enabled them to act out their identity, which she called "passive homosexuals". In her publication City of Women (1947), Landes describes how many Candomblé practices developed under the racial politics of Brazil. In 1966 she returned to Brazil and studied the urban development of Rio de Janeiro .

Honors

McMaster University donated the Ruth Landes Prize in 1982 for exceptional student work in the field of anthropology. The Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund also awards grants for work in the field of anthropology.

Fonts (selection)

• Ojibwa Sociology . Columbia University Press, 1937
• The Ojibwa Woman . Columbia University Press. New York 1938, ISBN 0-8032-7969-8
• The City of Women . Macmillan, New York 1947, ISBN 0-8263-1556-9
• Culture in American Education: Anthropological Approaches to Minority and Dominant Groups in the Schools . John Wiley & Sons, New York 1965
• Latin Americans of the Southwest . McGraw-Hill, New York 1965
• The Mystic Lake Sioux: Sociology of the Mdewakantonwan Sioux . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1968
• Ojibwa Religion and the Midewiwin . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1968
• The Prairie Potawatomi: Tradition and Ritual in the Twentieth Century . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1970

literature

• Sally Cole: Mrs. Landes meet Mrs. Benedict: Culture Pattern and Individual Agency in the 1930s . American Anthropologist 104 (2), 2002, pp. 533-543
• Sally Cole: Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology . University of Nebraska, 2003

Web links

• Ruth Landes in the Jewish Women's Archive

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Shifra Epstein: Ruth Schlossberg Landes in the encyclopedia of the Jewish Women's Archive, accessed on February 12, 2017
2. ↑ Ruth Landes Is Dead; Anthropologist Was 82 , New York Times , Feb. 24, 1991
3. ↑ Guide to the Collections of the National Anthropological Archives (# L1) ( Memento from February 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
4. ^ ^{A b} Sally Cole: Mrs Landes Meet Mrs. Benedict . American Anthropologist 104.2 (2002), pp. 533-543
5. ↑ ^{a b} James R. Glenn: Register of the estate of Ruth Landes . National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, accessed February 12, 2017
6. ^ Register to the Papers of Ruth Schlossberg Landes ( Memento of July 6, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
7. ^ Landes, Ruth , Jewish Virtual Library, accessed February 12, 2017
8. ↑ http://thereedfoundation.org/landes/ Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund