Jules Henry

Who was Jules Henry?

Jules Henry was a noted American anthropologist. After studies at the City College of New York, Henry earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1935. His classmates included Irving Goldman, Ruth Landes and Edward Kennard. His instructors at Columbia included Franz Boas and Margaret Mead.

Henry lived with and mastered the language of the Kaingang natives of the highlands of southern Brazil. In writing about the experience, Henry married the then newly popular psychoanalytic notions of Sigmund Freud with the non-invasive, observational discipline of professional anthropology. The resulting monograph, “Jungle People”, was, as Henry himself put it, "the first anthropological monograph written from a psychoanalytic point of view."

In 1936, Henry began an 18-month observational residence with the Pilaga natives of Argentina, which, as with his experience in Brazil, figures in his two books, both of which figured in the orthopsychiatry movement becoming popular at that time.