May Mandelbaum Edel

The materials Jacobs had collected, along with what Boas had collected earlier in 1890 and Edel's field notes from her 1931 research, served as Edel's grammar research, which is the only published account of the Tillamook language.

Edel's PhD thesis focused on the Tillamook language.

May Mandelbaum Edel (1 December 1909 – 23 May 1964) was an American anthropologist known for her fieldwork among the Okanagan in Washington, the Tillamook in Oregon, and the Kiga in Uganda.

Edel's linguistic research of the Tillamook serves as the only published account of the language which provided data for future linguistic publications.

Edel was the first American woman anthropologist to live in an African village, and her research in Africa documented the diversity of African cultures.

May Mandelbaum Edel was born in New York on December 1, 1909, to a Brooklyn physician.

Edel had two brothers, Melvin and Joseph Mandelbaum.

She began her studies at Barnard College in 1925, where she took graduate anthropology courses taught by anthropologists Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University.

Edel obtained a Bachelor of Art degree from Barnard College in 1929.

She entered anthropological research at a time when there were very limited jobs and fieldwork research funding available to women.

Edel went on to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University and worked closely with Franz Boas.

From 1930 to 1931, Edel served as a research assistant to Franz Boas while conducting fieldwork among the Okanagan in Washington and the Tillamook in Oregon.

During this period, Edel also gave lectures to teachers at the American Museum of Natural History, which brought to her attention the potential impact of anthropology on education.

Edel conducted fieldwork among the Okanagan in Washington, the Tillamook in Oregon, and the Kiga in Uganda.

She began conducting fieldwork among the Okanagan in Washington in 1930 prior to pursuing her doctoral dissertation research among the Tillamook.

In the summer of 1931, Edel went to conduct fieldwork among the Tillamook in Oregon sponsored by the Council of Learned Societies.

The Tillamook language is part of the Salish family, spoken by groups living along the river mouths in the northern Oregon coast, ranging from the Nehalem River to the Siletz River.

Edel employed Clara Pearson, who was fluent in the Nehalem language as well as Jane and Lizzie Adams and Jane's daughter, Mrs. Nota Goff.

Franz Boas later requested Melville Jacobs to collect information about dialects in the Garibaldi area in Oregon to provide more grammatical material for Edel's doctoral dissertation.

Edel continued her graduate studies at Columbia University in 1932 and was awarded a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1940 after her dissertation was published.

Edel also conducted fieldwork among the Kiga people, in Uganda, identified in her publications as the Bachiga, Chiga, and the Ciga, in 1932.

These are all outdated spellings of Kiga.

Edel was awarded a fellowship by the National Research Council for research in Uganda from October 1932 to January 1934, and she postponed her marriage to Abraham Edel for one year until after she returned from Africa.

Edel supplemented this fellowship with a grant from the Anthropology Department at Columbia University [3].

Edel spent a full year among the Kiga people on the Bafuka peninsula on Lake Bunyonyi in the Kigezi District.

She was the first American woman anthropologist to live in an African village, in the village of Bafuka, Uganda, which was noted in the American Anthropologist.

Edel's linguistic training allowed her to work in vernacular speech, which was a necessity given that there were not interpreters available to aid her research.

The Kiga live in the Kigezi county of Uganda and speak a Bantu dialect related to Nyoro.

The language and cultural practices of the Kiga people are similar to those of communities in Ankole, Mpororo and Ruanda.

Edel studied tribal horticultural systems; the basis of Kiga livelihood was horticulture andams, eleusine, and millet are staple foods.

Edel utilized her studies of horticulture to study patterns of property-holding among the Kiga people related to agriculture and animal use.

Edel's research demonstrated the variability in African social systems, a phenomenon under-acknowledged by Western scholars at the time.

Jacobs conducted fieldwork from November to December 1933, supported by a grant from the ACLS Joint Committee on Native American Languages.

Jacobs recorded text from Clara Pearson, although, she could no longer work as a linguistic informant, so Jacobs worked with Mrs. Ellen Center, the only known informant at the time of Jacob's fieldwork.

Center provided vocabulary and short phrases for grammatical research but was not able to provide texts.

Edel became interested in Ugandan communities after Boas secured a small grant for her to work with Ernest Kabila to translate and edit a book on the Baganda by Sir Apolo Kagwa, titled Customs of the Baganda (1934).

Edel was a graduate student at the time, and it sparked her interested in African studies.

After her doctoral dissertation, Edel went on to pursue field research in Uganda.

Her findings from research among the Okanagan Indians was published in 1938.

Her thesis served as a monograph for the International Journal of American Linguistics and was published in 1939.