Hortense Powdermaker

1896-1970

 

wpe7.gif (249217 bytes)
"We would gather at her home frequently...at these 
informal gatherings many of us learned the human 
aspects of being an anthropologist" (Traeger, 1971). 

    Powdermaker wanted to study a segment of her own 
society and decided on a community in the Deep South.  From 1932-1934, funded by a fellowship  from the Social Science Research Council, she conducted fieldwork in Indianola, Mississippi, (the site of the White Citizens Council in the '50s)  the  first study of a modern American community.  Her analysis of racial interaction was a watershed study for that time. She became a member of Queens College faculty in 1938, founding its Department of Anthropology and Sociology.  At the end of  World War II,  Powdermaker went to Hollywood to conduct an anthropological study of the film making community.

   In 1953 she returned to the field in Northern Rhodesia in the mining town of Luanshya in the Copperbelt.  Her book CopperTown (1962) received negative reviews from social anthropologists and points to the difficulties of field research without adequate linguistic preparation.

pguineapowdermaker.jpg (29704 bytes)
Map including Bismark Archipelago, site of Powdermaker's 
research of Lesu.
 

Links of  Interest:

*Pacific Islands Flags
*Melanesia Archive-UCSD
*American Ethnological Society
 
 

Sources:

Powdermaker, Hortense
1933  Life in Lesu:  The Study of a Melanesia Society in New Ireland.   New York: W.W.Norton.
1962  Copper Town: Changing Africa, the Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt.   New York: Harper and Row.

Silverman, Sydel
1988  Hortense Powdermaker.  In Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary. Eds.,  Ute Gacs, Aisha Khan, Jerrie McIntyre, Ruth Weinberg. Pp. 291-296. New York:  Greenwood Press.

Traeger, George
1971   Hortense Powdermaker: A Tribute. American Anthropologist 73:786-87.

Wolf, Eric
1971    Hortense Powdermaker, 1900-1970. American Anthropologist   73:783-86.
 
 

TOP OF PAGE

      In the field of anthropology,   Hortense Powdermaker was well known for her diverse and wide-ranged interest of research. Her field studies were of Melanesia, Mississippi, Hollywood, and Northern Rhodesia.

  She was one of four children born to a German-Jewish middle-class family from Philadelphia.  Powdermaker obtained a B.A degree from Goucher College in 1921, whereupon she worked for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers as a labor organizer for two years.   She viewed this time as her introduction to fieldwork.

wpeA.gif (2613 bytes)
Northern Rhodesia Flag

    In 1925 she began her studies in England at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  It was  there that she met Bronislaw Malinowski, a powerful  influence on her decision to study social anthropology.  She was awarded a Ph.D. in 1928 in anthropology.  In 1929 Malinowski arranged for her to receive a small grant from the Australian National Research   Council to do fieldwork in the village of Lesu, on the coast of  New Ireland, in the Bismark Archipelago.    Her first book, Life in Lesu (1933) came from this fieldwork.
 
 

   Horstense Powdermaker received many honors:  the presidency of the American Ethnological Society, an honorary doctorate from her alma mater Goucher College, and Distinguished Teacher Award from the Alumni Association of Queens College.  We celebrate Hortense Powdermaker, a scientist, an anthropologist, a courageous and deeply humane person, with an indefatigable spirit for new horizons.

Selected Works by Hortense Powdermaker:

1928  Leadership Among the Aborigines of Central and Southern Australia.  Economica 223;168-90.

1944a  Probing Our Prejudices.  New York:  Harper and Rowe.

1950  Hollywood, the Dream Factory:  An Anthropologist Studies the Movie Makers. Boston:  Little, Brown and Company. 

1966  Stranger and Friend:  The Way of an Anthropologist.  New York: W.W. Norton and Co.
 
 


side_logo.gif (3912 bytes)








"...anthropology was what I was looking for without knowing it."