In Search of Us by Lucy Moore

Author:Lucy Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

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* Kroeber and Theodora’s daughter is the novelist Ursula Le Guin.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Maiden

Ruth Benedict in the American Southwest, 1920s

Ruth Benedict, who studied anthropology under Franz Boas in the early 1920s, was not a natural fieldworker. Childhood measles had left her with impaired hearing that made learning and speaking other languages difficult, and she was painfully shy. Fieldwork was a challenge she had to overcome to become an anthropologist and a professor. The puzzle of academic work, intricate and painstaking, was what engrossed her: ‘piecing together bits, filling in lacunae, and discovering correspondences and congruencies in the scattered and uneven accounts of vanished and of almost extinct cultures’. Despite this incompatibility with the field, she was sometimes overwhelmed by her experiences in the red and gold immensity of the American Southwest. In 1925, she wrote to a friend, ‘Yesterday, we went up under the sacred mesa [flat-topped hill] along stunning trails where the great wall towers above you always in new magnificence … When I’m God I’m going to build my city there.’

Once Boas was established at Columbia and began sending students out into the field, trainee anthropologists descended upon the American Southwest. The landscape was beautiful, the sun shone for much of the year, and from the 1910s onwards, Columbia students could board a train at Grand Central Station and find themselves, after a couple of nights in the comfort of a Pullman car, in Chicago or Santa Fe. Many were captivated by the aesthetics of Native American culture as well as the sense that it contained mysterious lessons that might mend the tainted post-war civilisation of the West. These young anthropologists saw primitivism as purity and authenticity. It was also considered an area in which white women travelling alone would be safe.*

White women had been researching the culture of Native American peoples for some decades by the time Ruth Benedict arrived. Matilda Coxe, who married the geologist James Stevenson in 1872, was one of the earliest female ethnographers. For sixteen years she accompanied and assisted her husband on his expeditions to survey Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah while both developed an interest in Native American culture; by 1879, Matilda had been appointed Volunteer Coadjutor in Ethnology by the Bureau of American Ethnology. From Oxford in 1884, that towering figure of nineteenth-century English ethnology, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, thoroughly approved: ‘If his wife sympathises with his work, and is able to do it, really half the work of investigation seems to fall to her, so much is to be learned from the women of the tribe which the men will not readily disclose.’ Matilda Stevenson was one of the founding members of the Women’s Anthropological Society in 1885 and its first president; the society was disbanded in 1899, when women were admitted into the main American Anthropological Association, revived by Boas. When her husband died in 1888, John Wesley Powell made her the first paid female appointment at the BAE and she based herself near the pueblo of San Ildefonso in New Mexico.

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