Hortense Powdermaker

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 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. Subsequent research yielded Hollywood, the Dream Factory (1950), the first and still the only substantial anthropological study of the film industry. She then worked documenting the mining industry and the consumption of American media in Northern Rhodesia (Copper Town: Changing Africa, 1962).

Her final book, the memoir Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (1966), was her personal account of her anthropological career, from the beginning as a labor movement leader to her last field work in an African copper mining community.

In 1968, Hortense Powdermaker retired from Queens College, where she had founded the department of anthropology and sociology, and moved to Berkeley, where she remained engaged in ethnographic fieldwork. She died two years later of a heart attack.

The building on the Queens College campus that houses the anthropology and sociology departments (along with other social science disciplines) is named in her memory.