LUCY WILCOX ADAMS, 98, died in Santa Cruz, CA, on December 6, 1996.
Although not a trained anthropologist, Adams was one of the early pioneers
in the employment of anthropologists, and of anthropological expertise,
in government programs. Her special forte was working in cross-cultural
settings, and she came to appreciate the crucial contribution that anthropology
could make in those circumstances.
Born Lucy Marian Wilcox in San Francisco in 1898, Adams was the daughter
of recent immigrants from Australia. She left Stanford before graduation
to take a position in England as secretary and researcher. There she became
engaged to William F Adams. The couple were married in 1925. His untimely
death a few years later left his widow with two young sons, and very few
resources. Adams secured a position with the Soil Conversation Service
in Albuquerque, beginning her long career in government service. The agency,
Technical Cooperation-Bureau of Indian Affairs, was charged with researching
problems involved in developing soil conservation projects on Indian reservations.
It was from its members--anthropologists John Provinse, W W Hill, Ruth
Underhill and Frederica de Laguna--that Adams acquired her initial interest
in anthropology.
In 1936 Adams was appointed director of the newly consolidated school
systems on the Navajo, Hopi and Southern Ute reservations, where she oversaw
development of the first comprehensive program of day-school education.
It was she who commissioned Gladys Reichard to develop a system of orthography
for writing the Navajo language and ethnologist Richard Van Valkenburgh
to study Navajo place-names.
When World War II brought all Indian Bureau projects to a standstill,
Adams took a position with the War Relocation Authority, the agency responsible
for relocating 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast. As assistant
director of the Manzanar Relocation Camp in eastern California, she was
responsible for education and social programs within the camps. A member
of her staff there was "camp anthropologist" Morris Opler.
At the conclusion of the war, Adams spent three years resettling refugees
and displaced persons in Germany and Hungary for the UN Relief and Rehabilitation
Agency. 1948 saw her back in the Indian Bureau at Window Rock, where she
developed the program of off-reservation employment for Navajos and Hopis.
America's involvement in overseas development programs offered a new
outlet for Adams' talents. She served the remainder of her government career
with the USAID, spending 5 years in Iran as director of projects for Isfahan
Province and later assistant AID director for the whole country. After
another stint in Korea as an assistant director, she served in a planning
role in the agency's Washington headquarters.
Forced to retire at 65, Adams became an adjunct professor at the U
of California, Berkeley, in a special program for training foreign-aid
personnel. Here, she was associated with George Foster. Final retirement
was forced on her at 70.
For all her adventurous life and manifold accomplishments, Adams was
the antithesis of a flamboyant person, driven not by a desire for attention
or success but simply by a love of action and adventure.
Adams is survived by sons Ernest W and retired anthropologist William
Y, and 4 grandsons. (William Y Adams)
SIGURD BERENTZEN, 56, Norwegian anthropologist and noted childhood researcher,
died on November 10, 1996 in a drowning accident near his home in Bergen,
Norway.
Berentzen continually drew attention to the need to study children
and youth from their own perspectives and in natural settings. Although
much of his work has never been published in English, the 1984 translation
of his 1969 magistergrad dissertation, Children Constructing Their Social
World, is widely known as a pioneering and exemplary ethnographic study
of preschool children's negotiation of peer interaction and culture. From
hundreds of hours of observations of 5-to-7-year-old children's interactions
in a Norwegian nursery school, he detailed how girls and boys made use
of materials at hand and utilize them in different ways to create social
structure: hierarchies among boys and alliances among girls.
In 1969, Berentzen was one of the first to be funded by the new Center
for Urban Ethnography at the U of Pennsylvania. While at the center, he
earned both the respect of other ethnographers for his careful research
and profound insight, and the nickname "Cool Sig" for his quiet, reserved,
and observant manner. His research in Philadelphia involved examination
of gang members' storytelling and negotiations in the midst of mundane
talk. Relationships between these boys and girls were also of particular
interest, and he later noted the irony of adolescents' preoccupation with
achieving "going with" relationships with members of the opposite sex after
so much emphasis in preschool and school-age children's peer cultures is
placed on organizing interaction by constructing boundaries between boys
and girls. Although several articles published in Norwegian discuss findings
from the research on gang members, to date none have been published in
English. At least one article on the Philadelphia research ("The Contextualization
of Behavior and Transformational Process: A Study of Gang Formation in
a Black Ghetto") can be requested from the Dept of Cultural Anthropology,
U of Bergen. At the time of his death, Berentzen was working on an ethnographic
study of Norwegian children's transition from preschool to elementary school.
This was a companion study to research that Bill Corsaro is currently completing
in Italy.
Berentzen's devotion to and fascination with children extended far
beyond professional concerns. People who knew him well recall the ease
with which he interacted with their children, and his deep love for and
devotion to his own children, Lin-Christin and Lars. When he died, Berentzen
was in the midst of a weekend spent at his island cabin, his base from
which he went in his boat to put out nets and lobster pots. He drowned
as he attempted to pull his nets from a stormy and inhospitable sea. Although
his death is tragic, it seems somewhat fitting that it came while he was
in a place and engaged in an activity that he clearly loved so much. And
although he will be missed, his work and his deep love of children stand
out loud and clear as a model for all of us who wish to capture the spirit,
vision and promise of children and childhood in our research. (Katherine
Brown Rosier)
ROBERT A MANNERS, 83, died on July 12, 1996 at his home in Newton, MA,
after a prolonged battle with cancer.
Manners was born and reared in New York City. He undertook graduate
studies in anthropology at Columbia U after serving in the Army during
World War II and received his doctorate from that institution in 1950.
He taught for a time at the U of Rochester and in 1952 joined the faculty
at Brandeis U, where he was to remain for the next 44 years, 27 as a faculty
member and 17 as an emeritus. Even after retiring in 1979, he continued
to come to his office on campus almost every day and remained active in
departmental and university affairs.
Manners published, singly or in collaboration, 9 volumes and an extensive
list of essays in both professional and opinion journals. His books range
in content from analyses of his ethnographic field researches to a festschrift
compiled to honor his teacher and intellectual mentor, Julian Steward,
to two collaborative volumes dealing with issues in anthropological theory.
Manners did brief periods of field research among the Walapai and Havasupi
Indians of Arizona, as well as on several of the Carribean Islands. He
also did more extended periods of field research in rural Puerto Rico (1947-49)
and later among the Kipsigis of Kenya (1957-58). The Puerto Rican materials
were incorporated into The People of Puerto Rico (1956), on which he collaborated
(along with Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Elena Padilla and Raymond Scheele)
with Julian Steward. For its time The People of Puerto Rico was a breakthrough
volume in that it was one of the earliest attempts to present a portrait
of a modern, albeit small, complex society, using ethnographic field research.
Likewise, the Kipsigis materials were to become part of Contemporary Change
in Traditional Societies, Vol 1, edited by Julian Steward (1967). A prominent
theme running through all of Manners's ethnographic writings is the notion,
now a commonplace in anthropological analyses, that communities and societies
are not self-contained isolates but ought to be seen in their regional,
national and international context. This point was driven home in an essay
he wrote on the significance of remittances in understanding the viability
of Caribbean economies (1965, "Remittances and the Unit of Analysis in
Anthropological Research," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21:179-195).
Although Manners thought every word he put to paper resonated with
significance, he was especially fond of those pieces in which he critically
dissected viewpoints with which he disagreed. Despite his outwardly irenic
mien, Manners was at bottom a polemicist: he firmly believed that the discipline
advances by the give and take of controversy, and he loved to argue. To
cite an example of his penchant for controversy, in 1962 he wrote "Pluralism
and the American Indian" (American Indigena 22:1), in which he dealt with
attempts to maintain and revive traditional Indian cultures in the modern
world. This essay sparked a lively exchange between himself and John Collier,
who had been head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs under Franklin Roosevelt.
It was just the sort of debate Manners relished: Collier the romantic and
Manners the pragmatic historical materialist, or at least that is how he
viewed their respective positions. This exchange is as relevant today as
when it first took place, perhaps even more so. E B Tylor, in the final
pages of his classic Primitive Culture, refers to anthropology as a "reformer's
science." Manners certainly thought of the field in that way, although
he most likely would have construed this characterization in more political
terms than Tylor had in mind.
Manners served as editor-in-chief of the American Anthropologist (1973-75).
Many who knew him often remarked that he may have missed his calling. He
had superb editorial talents: enormous patience, an unwavering attention
to detail, a discriminating sense of the organization and intellectual
flow of a discussion as well as a heightened sense of style--always a strong
sense of style. Having come to anthropology from studies in English literature,
he always found the use of language important: almost as critical as what
you said was how you said it. It is no wonder, then, that students and
colleagues often brought their manuscripts to him for his keen critical
appraisal. He was truly the Maxwell Perkins of the Brandeis anthropology
department.
Manners is survived by his wife Jean, 4 children (Karen, John, Steven
and Katherine) and 9 grandchildren. (David Kaplan)
MORRIS EDWARD OPLER, 88, died May 13, 1996, in Norman, OK. One of this
century's premier anthropologists, he is remembered as an ethnologist of
broad reach, theorist, critic and advocate of Japanese American civil rights.
He was president of AAA (1962-63) and first vice president of the American
Folklore Society (1946-47).
Born in Buffalo, NY, May 16, 1907, Opler received his BA in sociology
(1929) and MA in anthropology (1930) from the U of Buffalo, where he was
a student of Leslie White. White encouraged him to go to the U of Chicago
to study with Sapir, and there Opler received his PhD in anthropology (1933).
One of Opler's major influences on anthropology was as the teacher of many
academic anthropologists.
During his early career Opler held a number of positions, including
appointments at the U of Chicago (1933-35), Bureau of Indian Affairs (1936-37),
Reed College (1937-38) and Claremont Colleges (1938-42). His experience
during World War II, when he was a social science analyst first with the
War Relocation Authority, Manzanar, California (one of the Japanese American
internment camps) and then with the War Office, was central to his own
sense of self, and he judged the three legal briefs he wrote during this
time supporting Japanese American civil rights his most important life
work. Two of these were heard before the US Supreme Court. These were grim
days for Japanese Americans. On behalf of the Japanese American Citizens
League and its 20,000 members, National Secretary Mike Masaoka wrote to
Opler, May 13, 1943: "No words of mine can express our gratitude to you,
for without your materials we would have been lost. . . . Our case today
seems dark and hopeless, but as long as men like you will work in our behalf,
the future holds promise of that greater day when all mankind will walk
the earth in dignity and in equality, knowing that race, color and creed
are not the criteria of worth."
In 1945-46, Opler served first as deputy chief and then as chief of
the Foreign Morale Analysis Division, Office of War Information.
Opler taught at Harvard (1946-8), before moving to Cornell (1948),
where he was a professor of anthropology and Asian studies until retirement
in 1969. He was also a professor of anthropology at the U of Oklahoma,
Norman (1969-77). After his second retirement, Opler vigorously continued
his research and writing.
As an ethnologist, Opler focused his field research primarily on the
Mescalero and Chiricahua Apache of the American Southwest and the peoples
of India, although he also wrote about the Third Reich, Japan, China and
American culture. His publications reveal his great care for detail and
his fine sense of language. One of his abiding interests was the depiction
of culture through the vehicles of folklore. Because Opler's work always
gave human agency a significant role in explanations of cultural and social
history, it set him against unilineal evolutionists and the biological
and cultural determinists of his day. In 1945, Opler published the first
of a series of papers that developed his theory of cultural themes. Inspired
by Sapir, the design of this approach was to provide an economic way of
characterizing cultures. Throughout his career, Opler expressed dissatisfaction
with single-causation explanations. His classic ethnography An Apache Life-Way:
The Economic, Social, and Religious Institutions of the Chiricahua Indians
was published in 1941. Opler is survived by his wife, Lucille Ritter Opler,
his partner in research and life. (Mattison Mines)
DAVID RINDOS, 49, died peacefully in his sleep, December 9, 1996, at
home in Perth, Western Australia. Known in many social and academic circles
for his scholarship, wit and charm, he achieved worldwide notoriety for
his tenure battles with the U of Western Australia.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1947, Rindos had earned a BA in sociology
from Cornell U (1969). He then busied himself with the Volunteers in Service
to America, the New York Public Interest Research Group, catering, general
contracting and market gardening, before resuming a more traditional anthropological
role as paleoethnobotanist for the Alambra Project in Cyprus (1976) and
Sula Valley Archaeological Project in Honduras (1977). Returning to Cornell,
he received his master's degree in botany (1980) and his doctorate in anthropology
and evolutionary biology (1981).
Over the next few years Rindos held teaching and research positions
at Cornell, the U of Illinois and the U of Missouri. While an assistant
professor in the Department of Natural Science at Michigan State U in 1988,
he took a fellowship at the Australian National U. It was there that he
was aggressively recruited for the newly formed archaeology department
at the U of Western Australia. Hired as a senior lecturer and serving as
acting chair, he brought his energetic teaching style and excellent scholarship
to their program. Regrettably, he exposed improprieties that began a chain
of events that brought the demise of that department, but also denial of
his tenure. Regrettably, his last few years were dominated with battles
through successive levels of university, court and finally government channels,
bringing him notoriety but little peace.
Rindos's Origins of Agriculture (1984) achieved an award from Cornell
and universal acclaim. He was likely the first to successfully apply neo-Darwinian
theory to problems of cultural change, including the great mystery of agriculture.
His theoretical work on the origins of cultural capacity were a new means
to understand human evolution, while his term cultural selectionism has
been widely adopted to describe a new and rapidly growing analytic school.
While active, Rindos presented and published many papers on these topics,
including a chapter in Archaeological Method and Theory and several articles
in Current Anthropology. He helped to found the World Archaeological Congress
and was nominated to Sigma Xi. A requested speaker at national and international
meetings in countries as diverse as the US, England, the Netherlands, Australia,
Russia and India, he also gained attention outside of academia, including
citations in Encyclopedia Britannica, lengthy discussion in the Illustrated
History of Humankind and coverage by major newspapers, radio and television
programs. In his last years, he was modeling the initial colonization of
Australia and gathering support for an archaeological research institute
for Western Australia.
While Rindos's scholarly interests included biological, ecological
and evolutionary anthropology, mathematical modeling, quantitative analysis
and the history and philosophy of science, he was equally renowned for
his teaching, gardening and culinary skills, as well as extensive activity
on the Internet.
Rindos is survived by his covivant, David Goddard, his mother and brother,
and his former wife and two children. (Hugh Jarvis)
ELMAN ROGERS SERVICE, 81, died in Santa Barbara, CA, on November 14,
1996, after a brief illness.
Service was born in Tecumseh, MI, in 1915. His undergraduate career
at the U of Michigan, begun after he earned enough money working in a southern
California aircraft plant, was interrupted when he joined the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade to fight fascism in Spain. This experience not only helped lead
him to anthropology but later dogged his steps during the McCarthyite craze.
After serving in the US Army in World War II, Service entered Columbia's
graduate program where he was the senior member of a group of graduate
students styled the Mundial Upheaval Society (MUS). Other members included
Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz and the late Morton Fried. The MUS students, taking
Julian Steward as their faculty leader, opposed Columbia's prevailing antiscientific
ethos expressed in Ruth Benedict's cultural relativism.
Service received his PhD in 1950. (He had also done graduate work at
Chicago.) He taught at Columbia from 1949 to 1953, when he moved to Michigan.
There he chaired the department during a period of active growth. In 1968
he joined the faculty at the U of California at Santa Barbara and, though
he retired in 1985, remained active in the department's affairs, teaching,
guest-lecturing and advising graduate students.
Service did fieldwork among the Havasupai of the Grand Canyon and in
Paraguay and Mexico, his principal ethnographic contribution being Tobati:
Paraguayan Town (1954), written with his wife Helen. His principal theoretical
interests were in kinship, cultural evolution, theories of culture and
the evolution of political institutions, and are typified in such works
as Evolution and Culture (1960; edited with Marshall Sahlins), Primitive
Social Organization (1962), The Hunters (1966), Cultural Evolutionism:
Theory in Practice (1971), Origins of the State and Civilization (1975)
and A Century of Controversy, Ethnological Issues from 1860 to 1960 (1985).
A number of books were issued in translation (Spanish, Portugese, Japanese
and Hungarian). His ethnographic text Profiles in Ethnology (1958) went
through a number of editions. Service's intellectual influence in anthropology
is still to be assessed.
Many hundreds of students for whom Service was a kind, gentle, refined
and very personable professor would have difficulty visualizing his earlier
manifestations as football quarterback, prize fighter and revolutionary
soldier. Nevertheless, Service was a determined fighter throughout his
professional life, a fighter for clear thinking and expression--and thus
against scholarly jargon and pretentiousness--for a scientific perspective
in anthropology and for the just and humane conduct that he thought anthropological
knowledge could promote. His most formidable weapons were elegant prose,
an incisive wit and an undogmatic style of argument that invited both participation
and challenge.
Elman is survived by his wife of more than 50 years, Helen S Service.
(Tom Harding)
LAURENS VAN DER POST, 90, author, explorer, anthropologist, linguist
and philosopher, died December 15, 1996 at his home in London, UK. Descended
from 17th century Dutch settlers, Sir Laurens was born December 13, 1906
on a farm in Philippolis, on the Orange River in what was then the Union
of South Africa. He earned a worldwide reputation as an explorer and writer
about Africa in the 1950s. The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958), a book
about the lost way of life of the desert Bushmen, became a bestseller upon
publication. Praised for their poetic prose, both it and its sequel The
Heart of the Hunter (1961), are credited with saving the Bushmen from extinction.
Sir Laurens began his career as the first Afrikaner journalist on the
Natal Advertiser in Durban. His first book, In a Province (1934), was the
first written by a South African against racial prejudice. He maintained
that whites who oppressed and feared darker peoples were reflecting the
expression of something inside themselves: the instinctive, emotional,
dark unconscious. Through such turning experiences as brutal captivity
at the hands of the Japanese in Java during World War II, he came to believe
in the correctness of the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,
yet forgave his captors to the extent that he refused to collaborate with
war crimes trials in the Far East. Inspired by Jungian psychology, he wrote
that the only sure way to rid life of villains is "to rid ourselves first
of the villain within."
In his later years, Sir Laurens became a mentor to the Prince of Wales
and to former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who knighted him in 1981.
Godfather to Prince Charles's son, Prince William, he was influential in
the development of the prince's interest in non-Christian religions, nontraditional
life styles and multiculturalism.
Sir Laurens wrote 26 books, including Venture to the Interior (1951),
a biographical and mystical account of an exploration of remote mountainous
areas in Malawi; the biography Jung and the Story of Our Time (1976); First
Catch Your Eland (1978), a memoir using food to understand the diverse
cultures of Africa; and A View of All the Russias (1964), an account of
his travels in the former Soviet Union. The Seed and the Sower (1971),
about a test of wills between a Japanese prison-camp commandant and an
English officer, was filmed in 1982 as Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. Sir
Laurens's latest book, The Admiral's Baby (1997), recounts the 22 months
he spent in Java after his release from 3 years of captivity.
Laurens van der Post is survived by second wife Ingaret Giffard, daughter
Lucia Crichton-Miller from his first marriage, and 6 grandchildren. (Excerpted
from the December 17, 1996 New York Times obituary by Lawrence van Gelder)
ALSO NOTED: VANCE PACKARD, 82, popular sociologist and bestselling author,
died December 12, 1996, after suffering a heart attack in Martha's Vineyard,
MA. Packard analyzed and criticized 20th-century American advertising,
business practices, psychology and social mobility. His best known books
include: The Hidden Persuaders (1957) a description of how advertisers
fuel consumerism with subliminal images and symbols; The Status Seekers
(1959), about the susceptibility of people to notions of power, position
and class structure; How to Pick a Mate (with C R Adams, 1946); Animal
IQ (1950), an account of psychological tests performed on animals; The
Waste Makers (1960), an exploration of purposeful waste and technological
obsolescence; The Naked Society (1964) a study of the proliferation of
surveillance techniques used by government agencies, businesses and institutions
of higher learning to tap into private lives of ordinary people; The Sexual
Wilderness (1968), about changing sex roles; and Our Endangered Children
(1983) about how US children face a perilous path to adulthood and inhospitable
birthing system. His most recent work, The Ultra Rich (1989) was a protest
against the increasing concentration of vast wealth among a relatively
few people. Packard is survived by wife Mamie Virginia and three children.
LISA GILAD, 39, social anthropologist and member of the Immigration
and Refugee Board of Canada, Convention Refugee Determination Division,
died in a car accident in Ottawa on May 28, 1996.
Born in the US on August 15, 1957, Lisa Gilad earned an honors BA degree
in social anthropology at York U (Downsview, Ontario), where she was awarded
two year-long scholarships for outstanding academic achievement. She continued
her studies in social anthropology at U Cambridge (England), under the
supervision of Meyer Fortes, Esther Goody and Susan Benson (PhD, 1983).
Gilad's career, though cut short prematurely, was nonetheless extraordinarily
fruitful. Her work on Yemeni Jewish women and girls in Israel was published
in various academic journals as well as in the ethnography Ginger and Salt
(1989). Her work in Israel was followed by another study of refugees, this
time in Newfoundland. The book resulting from this research, The Northern
Route (1990), has become a classic in refugee scholarship. The clarity
and simplicity of her writing made her work accessible to a wide readership
and gave it an impact well beyond the frontiers of anthropology.
Much of Gilad's work as an anthropologist was done in interdisciplinary
and nonacademic contexts. Her commitment to the refugees she studied in
Newfoundland led her to work as an advocate for refugee rights in Canada.
Her eloquent presentation to the Canadian House of Commons led to her being
named a founding member of Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board, an independent
body charged with judging requests for asylum. In these contexts, Gilad
had many occasions to combine her thinking as a social anthropologist with
the insights of other disciplines, notably law.
Gilad brought the integrity, intellectual rigor and capacity to integrate
conflicting points of view that marked her research and work as a refugee
rights advocate to her work as a decision maker at the Refugee Board. Her
considerable legal acumen allowed her to challenge legal paradigms all
the more effectively, while bringing to debates on policy and case decisions
her anthropological expertise on involuntary migration.
While highly respected by her colleagues at the board, Gilad continued
to play an active role in the anthropological profession. Besides her work
as a referee for various academic journals, she served on the editorial
board of Anthropologica (1989-94), gave many papers at academic symposia
and congresses, helped train students of law to deal with refugee issues
and gave informal help to junior researchers in anthropology. In 1995 she
was recommended to serve on the AAA Commission on Human Rights.
Lisa Gilad is survived by her husband, Robert Paine, and their daughter
Jessica. (Dierdre Meintel; photo courtesy of Robert Paine)
CLYDE PATRICK MORRIS, 57, professor of liberal studies at U Washington
Bothell, passed away September 25, 1996, at his home in Kirkland, WA.
Morris was born December 5, 1938, grew up in Phoenix, AZ, and joined
the Navy as a radio operator on a destroyer. Following his honorable discharge,
he began to study anthropology. He earned BA, MA and PhD degrees from Arizona
State U and taught at U Iowa and Montana State U.
Morris served on many university and regional committees and cofounded
the Human Rights Task Force and Network of the AAA. In 1992 the AAA appointed
Morris to the Commission on Human Rights.
For many years, Morris worked tirelessly to improve the lives of indigenous
peoples. He helped the Maori negotiate a treaty settlement with the government
of New Zealand, created student exchange programs between Indian tribes
and France, Norway and Italy, provided advice and research to the Sami
people, designed the Native American Studies curriculum at Salish Kootenai
College and coordinated the Little Shell Band of Chippewa's tribal campaign
for federal recognition. He also worked as a consultant to Indian tribes
in North, Central and South America.
Patrick Morris was a lion for the dispossessed people of the earth
and a caring husband, father, friend and teacher. We will miss him. Memorial
services were held at Salish Kootenai College and the U Washington Bothell
campus. Morris is survived by a son, Michael, daughter, Khera, and two
brothers, Mike and Lance. (Alan Wood)
RUTH H MUNROE, 66, research professor of psychology at Pitzer College,
Claremont, CA, died on October 22, 1996, in Pomona, CA, following a long
illness. Born in Youngstown, OH, August 15, 1930, and reared in nearby
Poland, OH, Munroe graduated from Antioch College (1953). She received
her EdM in measurement and statistics (1959) and EdD in human development
(1964) from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, where John and
Beatrice Whiting were significant mentors. She lived her life in an exemplary
manner parallel to what she gave her students--she gave them roots and
wings.
Munroe launched her professional career at Pitzer when its doors opened
in 1964 and where she taught until 1990, inspiring, supporting, training
and educating numerous students and colleagues not only at Pitzer but also
in other institutions in the US and worldwide. She frequently drew them
into her intellectual fold as collaborators and stimulated many of her
undergraduate students to go on to careers in the social and behavioral
sciences. As an educator and role model, Munroe's exacting standards were
well matched by her warmth and humor. During 4 major periods of fieldwork
(1962-79), Ruth Munroe, and husband Robert Lee Munroe studied peoples in
Belize (Garifuna), Kenya (Logoli, Kipsigis, Gusii, Kikuyu), American Samoa
and Nepal (Newars). In 1980 she went back to Nepal on her own for follow-up
work. She also went abroad repeatedly to amplify her own and others' understanding
of human nature around the world at the meetings of the International Association
for Cross-Cultural Psychology.
Munroe is best known for her 36-year collaborative work with Lee Munroe
in cross-cultural human development. Consistently, she brought to bear
the rigor of the instruments of psychological testing--adapted with sensitivity
to cultural context--on the study of human behavior and cognition. As a
team, the Munroes contributed to our understanding of fathering, birth
order, sex roles and sexuality, infant care, children's work, dreams and
language. Of the more than 90 journal articles, book chapters and books
she authored and coauthored, the most notable for anthropologists are Cross-Cultural
Human Development (1975, 1994), coauthored with Lee, Handbook of Cross-Cultural
Human Development (1981), coedited with Lee Munroe and Beatrice Whiting,
and Newar Time Allocation, a new book to be published by HRAF Press. In
1996 Munroe was made an Honorary Fellow of the International Association
for Cross-Cultural Psychology, in recognition of her contributions to the
growth and strength of that organization in which she played numerous key
roles over many years.
Munroe led a life of dedication to science and scholarship. Her home
was an important intellectual center of activity--frequently around the
clock--for herself, her students, colleagues and family, an impeccable
place where "data" and "findings" were major foci of discussion and excitement
and where earnest deliberations were punctuated by the merriment engendered
by great observational tales. Munroe is survived by her husband Lee and
three children, Jonathan, Julia and Anthony.
It is altogether fitting that Pitzer College is naming a research laboratory
for the study of cross-cultural human development in honor of this exceptional
scientist of human behavior. (Sally Nerlove)
MARJORIE SHOSTAK, 51, died October 6, 1996, in Atlanta, GA, after a
10-year battle with cancer. Although not professionally trained as an anthropologist,
Shostak authored the anthropological classic Nisa: The Life and Words of
a !Kung Woman (1981). She coauthored another bestseller, The Palaeolithic
Prescription (with Boyd Eaton and Mel Konner) and wrote over 20 scholarly
papers on Kalahari ethnography, art and the life history method. The great
strength of Nisa is its ability to speak to people across cultural boundaries,
a credit both to "Nisa" herself--a storyteller of great depth and candor--and
to Shostak, who framed Nisa's words with insight into their shared womanhood
and the human condition.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, Shostak took her BA in English literature. It
was at Brooklyn College that she met Melvin Konner; she moved with him
to Cambridge, MA, where she later became an associate at the Peabody Museum.
Traveling to Africa in 1969 for Konner's doctoral research, Shostak began
looking for something "to do." An excellent photographer and musician,
she spent her time photographing, audiotaping and studying women's artistic
productions. Well into her fieldwork, she began recording life stories
of women in the Dobe camp. She had taped several with variable results
when she was introduced to a feisty, outspoken woman in her early fifties
to whom Marjorie gave the pseudonym "Nisa." The two worked together for
many months. Shostak returned to the Dobe area (1975-76) for more work
with Nisa. The book quickly became an anthropological classic, assigned
reading in countless anthropology courses, and was translated into over
5 languages.
In 1983 Shostak and Konner moved to Atlanta, where she became a research
associate at the Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory. She also had a faculty
appointment in the anthropology department, where she occasionally taught
courses in life history methods and Kalahari ethnography. When her illness
began to tax her strength, she resolved to return to the Kalahari to see
Nisa once again and did so in 1989 after a 13-year absence. She recorded
another series of interviews that form the basis of "Nisa Revisited," a
manuscript Shostak had almost completed before her death.
Shostak's long and complex relationship with Nisa became the subject
of the play My Heart Is Still Shaking, written by Brenda Bynum. Performed
at Theatre Emory and at the 1994 AAA Annual Meeting in Atlanta, the play
featured Bynum playing the part of Shostak and Carol Mitchell-Leon in the
role of Nisa. The play also directly addressed the issue of Shostak's illness.
The power and honesty of the play made it a dramatic tour de force with
audiences. Shostak's wide circle knew her as an outspoken, funny and loyal
friend and colleague. Fiercely devoted to her close-knit family, she fought
her illness with courage. She is survived by her husband Melvin Konner,
and children Susanna, Adam and Sarah, as well as a far-flung network of
Kalahari ethnographers, residents and friends. A memorial service is planned
for Atlanta in May 1997. (Richard B Lee and Peter Brown)
ELSA ZIEHM, 82, linguist, ethnomusicologist and editor of the three-volume
edition of Nahua-Texte aus San Pedro Jicora in Durango (1968-76), died
October 15, 1993, in Berlin. Born Elsa Harmening on March 23, 1911, to
non-Jewish parents, she was adopted by a family of Jewish background and
given the family's surname, Wertheim. In 1934, during her third year at
U Berlin, encountering aggressive antisemitism in the linguistic department,
Ziehm switched her major and went on to take her doctorate in ethnomusicology.
Accordingly, in 1939 she began her professional career as an assistant
curator in the Lautarchiv at the old University. But with the outbreak
of the war in September of that year, her work came to a halt. Recently
married to Hans-Jurgen Ziehm, she embarked on a 20-year respite from ethnological
pursuits to rear three children.
The opportunity to resume her chosen career came after the providential
postwar rediscovery of her former teacher Konrad Theodor Preub's Nahua
manuscripts, recognized as the largest compilation of Nahuatl myth, song
and prayer since the 16th century work of Bernardino de Sahagún.
As the last in the line of the first generation of Berlin Nahuatl scholars,
Ziehm was acutely aware of her position as a woman in a man's environment.
Even at the end of her life, she would hasten to respond to a query from
a female colleague, noting, "I must help her if for no other reason than
that she is a woman." In 1985 Ziehm assumed her duties as a lecturer, teaching
Nahuatl in the Alt-Amerikanistik curriculum of the Latin America Institute
of the (new) Free University of Berlin. The course was popular with students
but was discontinued after one year, owing to Ziehm's reluctance to further
accept the stress of teaching in the difficult situation of an institute
disrupted by political strife.
Work on Ziehm's announced "Grammatik und Vokabular der Nahua-Sprache
von San Pedro Jicora in Durango" was never quite finished. Manuscripts
are in the hands of her colleague John Bierhorst and daughter Irmela Stroh,
respectively. A Spanish-language edition of Nahua-Texte, volume 1, was
published in Mexico as Mitos y cuentos nahuas de la Sierra Madre Occidental
(1982). An earlier work on Romanian folkmusic was published as Rumanische
Volksmusik, dargestellt an den Schallaufnahmen des Instituts fur Lautforschung
an der Universitat Berlin (1939).
Elsa Ziehm is survived by her husband Hans-Jurgen Ziehm, son Jurn,
daughters Inga Wickel and Irmela Stroh and 7 grandchildren. Colleagues
around the world treasured her sense of humor, sharp wit and, above all,
her loyal and generous friendship. |
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