Хортенс Паудермейкер: Антрополог и Исследователь Американской Культуры

American anthropologist, ethnographer and professor

Hortense Powdermaker (December 24, 1896 – June 16, 1970) was an American anthropologist best known for her ethnographic studies of African Americans in rural America and of Hollywood.

Born to a Jewish family, Powdermaker spent her childhood in Reading, Pennsylvania, and in Baltimore, Maryland. She studied history and the humanities at Goucher College, graduating in 1921. She worked as a labor organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers but became dissatisfied with the prospects of the U. S. labor movement amid the repression of the Palmer Raids. She left the United States to study at the London School of Economics, where she met the eminent anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who convinced her to embark on a course of doctoral studies. While at the LSE, Powdermaker also worked under and was influenced by other well known anthropologists such as A. R. Radcliffe Brown, E. E. Evans Pritchard and Raymond Firth. Powdermaker completed her PhD on "leadership in primitive society" in 1928. Like her contemporaries, Powdermaker sought to identify her anthropological work with a "primitive" people and conducted fieldwork among the Lesu of New Ireland in present day Papua New Guinea (Life in Lesu: The Study of a Melanesian Society in New Ireland. Williams & Norgate, London 1933).

After returning to the United States, Powdermaker was given an appointment at the new Rockefeller Foundation supported Yale Institute of Human Relations. Director Edward Sapir encouraged her to apply ethnographic field methods to the study of communities in her own society. She remained at Yale between 1930 and 1937, during which time she conducted anthropological fieldwork in an African American community in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1932 34 (After Freedom: A Cultural Study In the Deep South, 1939). In 1938 she began working at Queens College, where she founded the departments of Anthropology and Sociology during a career spanning three decades.

Her study of Indianola, Mississippi, published as After Freedom, was one of the first studies of modern American culture by an anthropologist, as well as one of the first academic studies of an interracial community. This study was conducted from 1932 to 1934 and is of particular importance for her having successfully completed participant observation in both white and Black populations, despite the danger involved. This study was the source of her groundbreaking theory focusing on the psychological adaptation undergone by Blacks and whites due to their interracial environment.

Most people outside of the field of anthropology know of Powdermaker from her study of Hollywood. Hollywood, the Dream Factory, published in 1950 remains the only serious anthropological study of Hollywood.

In order to write Copper Town, Powdermaker had to overcome some difficulties. It has been criticized by many social anthropologists who objected to her use of psychological concepts as well as her lack of “linguistic preparation”. Nevertheless, it is an important work regarding the effects of the cinema on African culture presented in an anthropological perspective.

Stranger and Friend, published in 1966, is a comparison of her four ethnographic studies, providing an insight into her own understanding of her works. This book is held in high regard in the anthropological community for its “insight into the anthropological enterprise”.