Powdermaker, Hortense (1896–1970)

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Powdermaker, Hortense (1896–1970)

American anthropologist, ethnologist, and educator. Born on December 24, 1896 (some sources erroneously cite 1900), in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died on June 15, 1970; daughter of Louis Powdermaker (a businessman) and Minnie (Jacoby) Powdermaker; Goucher College, B.A., 1919; London School of Economics, University of London, Ph.D., 1928.

Selected works:

Life in Lesu (1933); After Freedom (1939); Probing Our Prejudices (1944); Hollywood, The Dream Factory (1950); Copper Town (1962); Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (1966).

Born into a family of German-Jewish ancestry in Philadelphia on December 24, 1896, Hortense Powdermaker was the second child of Minnie Jacoby Powdermaker and Louis Powdermaker. She had a younger sister and brother, and an older sister, Florence Powdermaker , who would become a well-known psychiatrist. Louis was a middle-class businessman whose income fluctuated a great deal, particularly in comparison to the incomes of Hortense's grandfathers, who were quite prosperous businessmen. She grew up, in essence, in an extended family whose upper-middle-class existence was not quite within the reach of her own father. An impressionable, perceptive youth, Powdermaker grew up to be deeply sensitive about social distinctions. She was very much aware of the capitalist values and the social pressures and snobbery that were prevalent in her family. After moving to Reading, Pennsylvania, when she was five, the family settled about seven years later in Baltimore, Maryland, where Powdermaker was confirmed in a Reform synagogue and attended Western High School.

After graduation, she attended Goucher College, majoring in history. As a Jew on campus, she was ostracized at times, and her already keen social awareness was further heightened when she was not invited to join a sorority because of her Jewish background. While she was a student at Goucher, she became interested in socialism and the labor movement, and for a short time worked in a shirt factory. After earning her B.A. in 1919, Powdermaker moved to New York City and found employment with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, where she became a union organizer. In 1925, she sailed for London to attend the London School of Economics. While there, she had an experience that helped determine her path; she registered for an anthropology class taught by the distinguished anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who became her mentor. Malinowski, who was just beginning to develop his theory of functionalism, was exploring the relationship between anthropology and psychoanalysis. "Anthropology was what I had been looking for without knowing it," said Powdermaker, and she earned her Ph.D. from the University of London in 1928.

Powdermaker's first independent field study was funded by a grant from the Australian National Research Council, and with it she became the first woman ethnologist to have lived alone among the Melanesian population of New Ireland, an island belonging to the Bismarck Archipelago in the Southwest Pacific. She lived in a small village for ten months, studying the local stone-age culture's customs and rituals, and published her study, Life in Lesu, in 1933. After she left New Ireland, Powdermaker worked at Yale University's Institute of Human Relations with the National Research Council from 1930 to 1932. Her commitment to social justice often guided her choice of topics for field research, and in 1932 she was granted a Social Science Research Council fellowship which enabled her to

conduct a study of rural Indianola, Mississippi. She received encouragement for this study from the well-known cultural anthropologist Edward Sapir, whose theories about culture and language influenced her own. Powdermaker's was the first community study to be conducted by an anthropologist in the United States. She also helped psychologist John Dollard survey Indianola, and, although Dollard published his study first (Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 1937), Powdermaker's publication of After Freedom (1939) was a more in-depth survey of the social structure of the black and white communities of that town, and remains in print. Presenting herself as a visiting teacher, she lived in Indianola (the name of the town was disguised as "Cottonville" in the book) for about a year, interviewing people in both the black and white communities and studying the attitudes and lifestyles of blacks and whites living in the city and in the surrounding, cotton-growing areas. The study also addressed the issue of biracial relationships, a topic that was taboo at the time, and included information regarding the sociological impact of the African-American church. Later, she wrote a related article, "The Channeling of Negro Aggression by the Cultural Process" (American Journal of Sociology, May 1943), which reflected the psychoanalytic influence of Malinowski.

In 1938, Powdermaker became part of the teaching staff at Queens College in New York City, where she would become a full professor in 1954 and teach anthropology until her retirement in 1968. She founded a joint anthropology-sociology program at the college, and was extremely popular with her students. She was an enthusiastic lecturer who had a talent for reaching her audience and drawing her listeners in. Putting those talents to further use, she published a book for high schoolers, Probing Our Prejudices (1944), which attempted to clarify the issues surrounding prejudice. Powdermaker was often invited to lecture and teach at other colleges, and offered a course on cultural anthropology at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology (1944–52) and in the psychiatry department at the New York College of Medicine (1958). She also lectured and taught at Columbia, the New School for Social Research, the University of Minnesota, and the University of California at Los Angeles. After World War II, she continued to study the complexities of racism and published several articles on the topic.

During the years 1946 and 1947, Powdermaker focused on the movie-making machine in Hollywood, about which she had become curious years earlier; while conducting her field research in Mississippi, she had realized how powerful the film industry was by observing the ease with which movies influenced the citizens of Indianola. In 1947, she received a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation of Anthropological Research to study how the social structure of Hollywood ultimately affected both those who were involved in making movies and the type of movie that was produced. Hollywood, The Dream Factory (1950) was quite popular with the general public and is still considered a valuable portrait of the era. The book describes how the primary force behind making a film is profit; producers know which movie-making formulas work best, follow the formula, and therefore reflect prevailing social attitudes. The book also examines totalitarian aspects of the Hollywood culture, in which people were considered property, and explains the ways in which the industry usually portrayed life experiences as a result of "accident" or "luck" rather than showing the process of success or of destruction. After Powdermaker finished this project, she kept her focus on the ways in which mass media affects culture. In 1953–54, with a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, she spent a year in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia), Africa, studying the relationship between mass media and social change. The results of this study were published as Copper Town (1962).

Two years before her retirement from Queens College, Powdermaker published her last and most important book, Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (Norton, 1966), in which she described her experiences in conducting field studies and explained the importance of understanding other cultures. Powdermaker was a member of numerous anthropological societies, including the American Ethnological Society (for which she served as president from 1946 to 1947), the American Ethnological Society, and the American Anthropological Society, and was awarded an honorary D.Sc. degree by Goucher College in 1957. She loved to cook and entertain, and her "family" consisted of her colleagues, many students, and her foster son Won Mo Kim. Powdermaker was studying women of post-retirement age when she died of a heart attack at age 73 on June 15, 1970.

sources:

Bailey, Brooke. The Remarkable Lives of 100 Women Healers and Scientists. Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams, 1994.

Current Biography 1961. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1962.

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980.