Hortense Powdermaker

Who was Hortense Powdermaker?

Hortense Powdermaker was an 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. After she graduated in 1921 she took an unusual career path for most Goucher graduates, becoming a labor organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. After becoming dissatisfied with the prospects of the U.S. labor movement amid the repression of the Palmer Raids, she took courses at the London School of Economics, then became a graduate student under 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.