Cora DuBois

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Cora Alice Du Bois, (October 26, 1903, in New York, NY-April 7, 1991, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American cultural anthropologist and a key figure in culture and personality studies and in psychological anthropology more generally.

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[edit] Biography

Cora Du Bois's parents, Mattie Schreiber Du Bois and Jean Du Bois, had immigrated to the U.S. from Switzerland. Cora was born in New York City and spent most of her childhood in New Jersey, where she graduated from high school in Perth Amboy. After a year studying library science at the New York Public Library, she matriculated at Barnard College, where she received her BA in history in 1927. She went on to earn an MA in history from Columbia University in 1928.

Encouraged by an anthropology course at Columbia taught by Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas, DuBois moved out to California to study anthropology with Native American specialists Alfred L. Kroeber and Robert Lowie. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1932. In part due to prejudices against women academics, she was initially unable to find a university position. She remained at Berkeley as a teaching fellow and research assistant from 1932-1935. During this period, she conducted salvage ethnography on several Native American groups of northern California and the Pacific Northwest, including the Wintu Indians of northern California. published on the Ghost Dance of 1870 (Dubois 1939).

In 1935, Du Bois received a National Research Council Fellowship to undertake clinical training and explore possible collaborations between anthropology and psychiatry. She spent six months at what was then the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, now the Murray Psychological Clinic, and six months at the New York Psychoanalytic Society. In New York she worked with psychiatrist Abram Kardiner, who became her mentor and collaborator for several projects in cross-cultural diagnosis and the psychoanalytic study of culture. Du Bois also taught at Hunter College in 1936-1937 while developing a fieldwork project to test their new ideas.

From 1937-1939, Du Bois lived and conducted research on the island of Alor, part of the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia. She collected detailed case studies, life-history interviews, and administered various personality tests (including Rorschach tests), which she interpreted in collaboration with Kardiner and published as The people of Alor; a social-psychological study of an East Indian island (1944). One of her major theoretical advances in this work was the concept of modal personality structure. With this notion she modified earlier ideas in the Culture and Personality school of anthropology on "basic personality structure" by demonstrating that, while there is always individual variation within a culture, each culture favors the development of a particular type or types, which will be the most common within that culture.[1] Her work strongly influenced other psychiatric anthropologists such as Robert I. Levy, with his person-centered ethnography, and Melford Spiro.

Like many other American social scientists during World War II, Du Bois served as a member of the Office of Strategic Services working in the Research and Analysis Branch as Chief of the Indonesia section. In 1944 she moved to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to head the Southeast Asia Command.

After the end of WW II, Du Bois worked for the World Health Organization until 1954, when she was offered a position at Harvard University as the second holder of the Zemurray-Stone Chair at Radcliffe College. She was the first woman tenured in the Harvard's Anthropology Department and the second woman ever be tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. She began a long-term study of the temple city of Bhubaneswar in the Indian state of Orissa, where a number of graduate students in Anthropology and Social Relations conducted fieldwork.

In 1970 she retired from Harvard but continued teaching, as Professor-at-large at Cornell University (1971-1976) and for one term at University of California, San Diego (1976)[2]. She died in 1991. Most of her research materials and personal papers are held in Tozzer Library at Harvard University; some are in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

[edit] Interlocutors

[edit] Notable Students

  • Jean Briggs, cultural and psychological anthropologist, Canadian Inuit[3]
  • Richard Taub, sociologist
  • Richard A. Shweder, cultural anthropologist and cultural psychologist, Orissa

[edit] References

  1. ^ Toren, Christina (1996) "Culture and Personality" Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. London: Routledge.
  2. ^ Du Bois, Cora Alice, 1903-. Papers: Guide
  3. ^ Briggs, Jean (1970) Never in Anger: portrait of an Eskimo family. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. P. ix.

[edit] Select Publications

  • Du Bois, Cora A. (1938) The Feather Cult of the Middle Columbia. Menasha, WI: George Banta Publishing Company.
  • Du Bois, Cora A. (1939) The 1870 Ghost Dance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  • Du Bois, C. A. (1944) The people of Alor; a social-psychological study of an East Indian island. With analyses by Abram Kardiner and Emil Oberholzer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Du Bois, Cora (1959) Social Forces in Southeast Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[edit] External links