( "The book is absolutely excellent . . . a unique fascin...)
"The book is absolutely excellent . . . a unique fascinating account of the work of one of our leading anthropologists." ―Colin M. Turnbull "Her book is all about people. . . . The publishers say of it that 'field work in its personal and objective dimension is placed under a kind of microscope. The book is a must for all field workers in the social sciences.' That claim does not seem to me excessive." ―Edmund Leach, New York Review of Books "There are few books which are as informative of what it means to be a field-worker in social science as Hortense Powdermaker's Stranger and Friend. This book should be must reading both for scholars and students." ―Seymour M. Lipset, Harvard University "Stranger and Friend is a passionate plea for anthropology as a human discipline as well as a science, as an all-engrossing life experience as well as a profession, and increasingly as a subject in the curriculum of graduate and undergraduate studies." ―Margaret Mead, American Museum of Natural History "This is just the kind of book needed in anthropology today. It tells objectively, but in warm and human terms, how important research was done. It contributes to methodology and to the history of the science of anthropology." ―Charles Wagley, Columbia University "This is an essential book for anyone interested in the problems of an anthropologist at work." ―Cornelius Osgood, Peabody Museum of Natural History
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He was born on December 24, 1896 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the daughter of Louis Powdermaker, a middle-class businessman, and Minnie Jacoby. Her father's success fluctuated, making her family aware of fine social distinctions. This experience contributed to her sensitivity to social facts. Her family settled in Baltimore.
Powdermaker started school in Baltimore. She attended Western High School and graduated from Goucher College in 1919, having majored in history.
Powdermaker reentered intellectual life in 1925, enrolling at the London School of Economics to study geography and anthropology. After a class with Bronislaw Malinowski, she knew anthropology would be her lifework. She completed her Ph. D. in 1928.
Upon graduation, she accepted a position with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and spent time in Cleveland as a union organizer. Although Powdermaker looked back on this work with nostalgia, she never felt fully accepted in the union hierarchy.
Powdermaker settled in the New Ireland (Bismarck Archipelago) village of Lesu in 1928. She spent ten months in Lesu, becoming a pioneer among women anthropologists who did fieldwork alone in exotic places.
After returning to the United States, she secured funding at the Institute of Human Relations at Yale University to write Life in Lesu (1933), which found an important place in anthropological literature, and to continue research. At Yale, Powdermaker met Edward Sapir, whose interest in personality and culture further shaped her thinking. With his aid, she received a grant from the Social Science Research Council that allowed her to spend twelve months early in the Great Depression in Indianola. Fieldwork conditions were more difficult there than in Lesu. Powdermaker had to exert much tact to gain rapport with both blacks and whites. Introduced as a "visiting teacher, " she found that her contacts were limited largely to women.
Powdermaker's After Freedom (1939) was widely read by social scientists and read again after the White Citizens Council originated in Indianola. She concluded this phase of research with an influential article, "The Channeling of Negro Aggression by the Cultural Process" (1943), which reflects her interest in a combination of psychology and anthropology.
Powdermaker's career as teacher began in 1938, when she became an instructor at Queens College in New York City, remaining until her retirement. She published Probing Our Prejudices (1944), which served as a high school text.
After World War II she taught at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. During her Mississippi fieldwork Powdermaker attended movies to escape the stress of a biracial community, but even in this diversion she found data. Blacks and whites significantly differed in their interpretation of films. This interest led to a meeting with the director of the Viking Fund, Paul Fejos, a film director turned anthropologist. With his encouragement and aid in securing funding, Powdermaker went to Hollywood in 1946-1947. This fieldwork was even more untraditional than that done at Indianola. Her the Dream Factory (1950) was popular. This work brought her recognition far beyond the field of anthropology.
Although discouraged by her Hollywood experience, Powdermaker maintained her interest in the relationship between society and mass communication. On sabbatical in 1953-1954, she went to Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) to study culture change and the media. The results she published in Copper Town and Changing Africa: The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt (1962).
When she retired from teaching in 1968, she became a research associate at the University of California at Berkeley, where she died.
The data, which were received by Hortense Powdermaker, helped update and further the ethnography of Melanesia. She also extended the evidence for functional theory. Besides, she established the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Queens College, which she sometimes chaired, and was notably successful as a professor in many other universities. Her best-known book Stranger and Friend is held in high regard in the anthropological community for its insight into the anthropological enterprise. The building on the Queens College campus that houses the anthropology and sociology departments is named in her honor.
( "The book is absolutely excellent . . . a unique fascin...)
Powdermaker believed that functionalism was of less use in studying change than was theory derived from culture and personality.
She enjoyed hosting parties for students as well as colleagues and developed a reputation as a charming, witty, and warm person who lent a helping hand in time of need.
She had one foster son, Won Mo Kim.
