OBITUARY

HORTENSE POWDERMAKER 1900-1970

HORTENSE POWDERMAKER, born, December 24th, 1900, in Philadelphia, died in Berkeley, California, on June 16th, 1970. These seven decades spanned a life of dedicated commitment and productivity, and of a consistent effort to increase her awareness of herself as a human being and as a field worker. Those who knew her will always remember her for her essential rationality, for her sense of humor, and for her deeply personal ways of challenging the strengths and weaknesses of those she liked as people. Devoid of any tendencies towards false self-magnification, she perhaps did not in her lifetime receive the public recognition merited by the variety and quality of her accomplishments as a professional anthropologist.

Born of a German-Jewish middle class family from Baltimore, Powdermaker attended Western High School in that city, and later majored in history at Goucher College. Upon receipt of her B.A. from Goucher in 1921, she worked for some years as labor organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, during a period of great turmoil in the American labor movement. In 1925 she entered the London School of Economics and Political Science, then in its "Golden Age," and studied anthropology under Bronislaw Malinowski who exerted a powerful catalytic influence on the American student. In 1928 she was awarded a Ph.D. in anthropology for a study of leadership in primitive society, and departed, in 1929, for a year's field work in the village of Lesu in New Ireland, the first anthropologist to study that society. Out of this experience came her first book, Life in Lesu (1933). Returning to the U.S., she became a research associate of the Institute of Human Relations at Yale, then under the directorship of Edward Sapir who furthered her interest in the psychological aspects of anthropology, already kindled by Malinowski. In 1932, Powdermaker went to Indianola, Mississippi, a community half White and half Black. Her study of this community may well be the first study of a modern community by an anthropologist in the United States, carried out in a region deeply marked by antagonisms between Whites and Blacks when there existed scant protection for any person who could be accused of disturbing the precarious racial equilibrium. Later on, in the fifties, Sunflower County, in which Indianola was located, was to become the birthplace of the White Citizens Council. Powdermaker's book on her experience, After Freedom (1939), signified a return to the concerns for her own society which had originally prompted her to enter the labor movement; it remains to this day a vivid accounting of the social and psychological costs which attended the adaptive strategies adopted by Whites and Blacks alike. Subsequently, her interest in race relations, strengthened by the Mississippi experience,

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found expression in her well-known paper on the "Channeling of Negro Aggression" (1943), and in a book for high school students entitled Probing Our Prejudices (1944).

In 1937, Powdermaker moved to Queens College in New York where she taught thereafter, rising from lecturer to professor, and where she proved highly successful in informing her teaching -with the excitement of research. She was at her best in small classes in which she could follow the Socratic model of teaching first suggested to her by Malinowski's conduct of his own classes; her course on culture and personality will remain especially memorable to her many students. For her teaching she received, in 1965, the Distinguished Teacher Award of the Alumni Association of Queens College. While teaching at Queens, she also lectured part-time on anthropology at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry (1944-52) and, later, in the Department of Psychiatry of the New York College of Medicine, Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital (1958).

1946 marked a new point of departure. In Indianola she had first become sensitive to the importance of the mass media of communication in providing behavioral and cognitive models for their audiences, and she had explored this area of research in her teaching at Queens. In 1946-47, she went to Hollywood to study the field film making community. Her book on this experience, Hollywood The Dream Factory, displeased many critics for its emphasis on the totalitarian controls exercised by the film makers over the contributing personnel; she herself came to feel that perhaps she had approached the Hollywood scene with too rigid a value system of her own. Nevertheless, the book anticipated many of the insights into the nature of American society which would become the common coin of intellectual discourse in the sixties; also, in dissecting sequentially the stages of production from script writing to final product and the social relations associated with each stage-she provided one powerful model for the study of social processes in complex societies.

Work in Hollywood strengthened and deepened Powdermaker's interest in mass communication. She taught a seminar on the topic at Queens, chaired an interdisciplinary conference on mass communication at Wenner-Gren Foundation and edited the resultant proceedings, and enlarged her sensitivity to the importance of leisure as a separate field of activity in contemporary society. In 1953-54, she once again set out for the field, this time to Luanshya in the Northern Rhodesian Copper Belt of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Her resulting study, Copper Town (1962) is best read in conjunction with the structural study of the same community by A. L. Epstein in his Politics in an Urban African Community (1958). Such concurrent reading emphasizes Powdermaker's special concern with "the extension of the areas of self awareness, of perception, of action, and of the range of identifications" involved in the shift from tribal fife to urban location. 1966 saw the publication of her last book, Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist, in which she evaluated and compared her several field experiences, and drew on there with remarkable candor and honesty-to discuss the anthropologist's characteristic mode of operation in the field, the close identification with the people studied followed by an effort at scientific detachment, embodied in the scientist's role as stranger. In this mode of operation the anthropologist resembles the psychoanalyst: the dialectic of involvement and return to distance is common to both disciplines.

Powdermaker was Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences and Chair, man, Anthropology section, 1944-46, Vice President (1945-46) and President (194647) of the American Ethnological Society. She received, in 1957, an Honorary D. Sc. from Goucher College, her alma mater.

In 1968 she retired from Queens College as professor emeritus. Indefatigable as always, she moved to the West Coast to become a research associate of the Depart-

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ment of Anthropology at Berkeley and to begin a study of youth culture on the
Berkeley campus. Death cut short this last effort. She remained, writes a friend, "lively, witty, utterly human to the end." To commemorate her passing a cocktail party was held in her living room. She would have liked it that way.

ERIC R. WOLF
University of Michigan

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HORTENSE POWDERMAKER

Note: Since Dr. Powdermaker did not leave behind a list of her numerous book reviews, this bibliography may be incomplete in this regard.

1928 Leadership Among the Aborigines of Central and Southern Australia.
Economica 23:168-190.

1931a Preliminary Report on Research in New Ireland. Oceania No. 3:1-12.

1931b Vital Statistics of New Ireland as Revealed in Genealogies. Human Biology
3:351-375.

1931c Mortuary Rites in New Ireland Oceania 2:26-43.

1932a Feasts in New Ireland. American Anthropologist 34:236-247.

1932b Review of Sorcerers of Dobu, by R. F. Fortune American Anthropologist 34:724-7 26.

1933 Life in Lesu, The Study of Melanesian Society in New Ireland. New York: W. W. Norton; London: Williams and Norgate

1934a At Home on the Equator. The Atlantic Monthly 153:195-204.

1934b Review of Documents Néo Calédoniens, by Maurice Leenhardt. American Anthropologist 36:471.

1938 (with Joseph Semper) Education and Occupation Among New Haven Negroes. Journal of Negro History 23:200-215.

1939 After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. New York: Viking(Reprinted in hardcover and paperback. New York: Athenaeum Press, 1968.)

1940 Review of Naven, by Gregory Bateson. American Anthropologist 42:162.

1941 Review of Race: Science and Politics, by Ruth Benedict American Anthropologist 43:474.

1943a Commemoration of Professor Malinowski. Quarterly Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in

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America 1:203-207.

1943b The Channeling of Negro Aggression by the Cultural Process. American Journal of Sociology 48:122-130. (Reprinted n 1953, Personality in Nature, Society and Culture. Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray, eds. New York: Knopf, pp. 597-608.)

1943c Review of When People Meet. A. Locke and B. J. Stern, eds. American
Anthropologist 45:475.

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

1944b The Anthropological Approach to the Problem of Modifying Race Attitudes. Journal of Negro Education 13:295-303.

1945a An Anthropologist Looks at the Race Problem. Social Action 11:5-13.

1945b Review of People of Alor, by Cora Du Bois. American Anthropologist 42:162.

1945c Review of The Origin and Function of Culture, by Géza Roheim. American Anthropologist 47:308.

1946 Review of Lay My Burden Down, B.A. Botkin, ed., American Anthropologist 48:631.

1947 An Anthropologist Looks at the Movies. The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 254:80-87.

1948 Review of The American People, by G. Gorer. American Anthropologist
50:666.

1950 Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Studies the Movie Makers. Boston: Little Brown & Co. (English edition 1951, London: Secker and Warburg. Also Italian, Mexican and West German editions. Paperback edition, New
York: University Library. Chapters re printed in 1957, Mass Culture, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds. Glencoe: Free Press; 1960, Readings for Opinion, Earle Davis and William Hummel, eds. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall; 1967, The Mass Media in the United States, Fontenilles and Marty, eds. Paris: Dunod.)

1951a Reply to R. Bierstedt's Review of Hollywood, the Dream Factory. American Sociological Review 16:382-383.

1951b Review of Movies, by Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites. Psychiatry 14:353-355.

1953 ed., Mass Communications Seminar, Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Seminar held under the auspices of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. New York: Wenner

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Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

1955 Communication and Social Change, Based on a Field Study in Northern Rhodesia. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, series 11, 17:430-440.

1956 Social Change Through Imagery and Values of Teen-Age Africans in Northern Rhodesia. American Anthropologist 58:783-813. (Reprinted in 1962, Soziologie der Entwicklungslhänder, Peter Heintz, ed. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witch).

1957a Review of The Image by Kenneth Boulding. American Anthropologist 59:718-719.

1957b Review of Understanding Minority Groups, by Joseph B. Gittler. American Anthropologist 59:760.

1957c Review of Colonial Students, by A. T. Carey. American Anthropologist 59:1139-1140.

1958 Review of Chisungu, by Audrey 1. Richards. American Anthropologist 60:392-393.

1959 Review of Marriage and Family Among the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia, by Elizabeth Colson. American Anthropologist 61:1119-1121.

1960 An Anthropological Approach to the Problem of Obesity. Bulletin, New York Academy of Medicine 36:5-14.

1963 Review of Townsmen or Tribesmen, by Philip Mayer. American Anthropologist 65:472-474.

1964 Review of Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township, by Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeye. American Anthropologist 66:1199-1201.

1965a Copper Town: Changing Africa, The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt. New York: Harper and Row (paperback, 1965, New York: Harper and Row).

1965b Comment on C. Frantz' Review of Copper Town. American Anthropologist 67:1284-1285.

1965c Cultural Factors Affecting American Food Habits, Proceedings: Nutritional Status, A Critical Evaluation. Ithaca: New York State College of Home Economics, Cornell University, pp. 47-54.

1966 Stranger and Friend, The Way of an Anthropologist. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. (English edition 1967, London: Secker & Warburg. Paperback edition 1967, New York: W. W. Norton & Co.).

1967 Review of The Zande Scheme, by Conrad C. Reining. American Anthropologist 69:421-422.

1968 Art. "Field Work" in International Encyclopedia of the Social Science, David L. Sills, ed. New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 5:418-424.