Cora Du Bois

She published The 1870 Ghost Dance in 1939, a study of a religious movement among Native Americans in the Western U.S.

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

Du Bois was born in New York City on October 26, 1903, to Mattie Schreiber Du Bois and Jean Du Bois, immigrants to the U.S. from Switzerland.

She spent most of her childhood in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where she graduated from Perth Amboy High School.

She spent a year studying library science at the New York Public Library and then attended Barnard College, graduating with a B.A. in history in 1927.

She earned an M.A. in history from Columbia University in 1928.

Encouraged by an anthropology course taught by Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas at Columbia, Du Bois moved 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.

Du Bois's doctoral dissertation, "Girls' Adolescence Observations in North America" covered the topic of puberty and menstrual customs and how they are viewed among Native Americans.

The topic was recommended by a fellow graduate student, but she considered it a very dull and tedious library job.

Du Bois was more interested in the question of the dividing line between cultural behavior and psychologically foundational human behavior, and thought this specific physiological condition (menstruation) would be a good place to study this question.

However, there wasn't sufficient data available to her at that time.

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 to 1935.

In 1932, Du Bois's Tolowa Notes was published in American Anthropologist.

This article explored the culture of the Tolowa people, with data from Agnes Mattez, a full blooded Tolowa woman of forty-five.

Subjects discussed in the text include the puberty and marriage preparation ceremonies for girls.

The puberty ceremony includes the piercing of the girl's nasal septum and fasting, while the marriage ceremony includes bride prices discussed before marriage, and the presentation of gifts to the prospective mother-in-law.

She conducted salvage ethnography on several Native American groups of northern California and the Pacific Northwest, including the Wintu Indians of northern California.

This endeavor was published as A Study of Wintu Myths in The Journal of American Folklore.

Its main focus is on how the Wintu myths changed or remained stable.

In the study, Du Bois and her co-author Dorothy Demetracopoulou divided the data into different groups, including the literary aspects of the mythology, the recorded myth, which includes the determination of the time and language factors of recording, and change and stability in Wintu mythology.

Of the stories discussed in the text, there are three main categories.

First are the bolas, which take up the bulk of storytelling.

Second are the ninas, which are based on love songs.

The third and final type are anecdotes, which is a name used by the researchers themselves, not the Wintu.

Certain beliefs of the Wintu were also discussed, such as the stories having an effect on the weather if not told at the right time.

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 the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, now the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, 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.

Published in 1937, Du Bois's Some Anthropological Perspectives on Psychoanalysis discussed the relationship between Anthropology and Psychoanalysis.

Du Bois stated that The first anthropological theory was a biological outgrowth of a biological analogy.

From 1937 to 1939, Du Bois lived and conducted research among the Abui people on the island of Alor, part of the Dutch 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 in 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.

She was Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor at Radcliffe College from 1954.

She was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955, president of the American Anthropological Association in 1968–1969, and of the Association for Asian Studies in 1969–1970, the first woman to be allowed that honor.

After retirement from Radcliffe, she was Professor-at-large at Cornell University (1971–1976) and for one term at the University of California, San Diego (1976).