In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

131 Columbia, Part 1 i tramPed uP dingy stairs and along dingy halls. Columbia University’s were far from the neatness of Vassar’s, and the people tramping with me, mostly males, looked flustered and untidy. England’s University of Cambridge, when I visited it later on, looked just as bad. But I drank in the dinginess like a whiff of beer. It was a stimulant. It was something I had a right to. Here, at last, I would not have to be a sweet girl or a gay sex partner. I am no longer quite sure which departments I visited before anthropology. I think they were sociology, philosophy, and economics . What I said to them in substance was: “I find that social work is not doing what I thought it did. I wonder if what you teach would really help me to understand these people. I want to understand the human race. How did it get into the state it is in?” Perhaps I put my question in more academic terms. At least the people who answered me were completely academic. They spoke sentences out of a prospectus. They told me about studies I could make as to why some little group of people moved an inch this way or that way. Must I give up trying to learn something and go back to living in the country? I was planning that when I met Ruth Benedict.* People who * Like Underhill, Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948) attended Vassar (BA 1909) and spent two years traveling in Europe before entering the anthropology department at Columbia University comparatively late in life, in her case at the age of thirty. Like Underhill, Benedict predominately studied Native Americans in the Southwest. Benedict’s 1931 book Patterns of Culture was wildly successful and influential. Her 1946 book The Chrysthanthemum and the Sword provided an early application of anthropological concepts to modern societies, in this case Japan’s. It, too, was hugely popular. These publications and others made her a key figure in the culture and personality school that dominated Americanist anthropology in the early to middle twentieth century. See Lee, Dorothy. 1949. Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948). The Journal of American Folklore 62(246):345–347; Caffrey, Margaret M. 1989. Ruth Benedict : Stranger in This Land. Austin: University of Texas Press; Mead, Margaret. 1975. Ruth Benedict: A Humanist in Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press. Becoming an anthroPologist 132 have written about her so often do not mention that she was beautiful.* I have always liked beautiful people. White hair, with a few shades of gray swept back from her forehead. Brilliant eyes that looked at you, not at your eyes, but at your mouth, since Ruth was somewhat deaf. “You want to know about the human race?” She accepted my question naturally, with a nod. “Well, come here. That is what we teach.” Revelation! That little dark-walled office looking out on a stony courtyard glowed like the heart of a jewel. Here was a person who, as used to be said of the Greek chorus, you could speak to and who would answer you again. That was how I found Benedict and Franz Boas.† They just opened a door out of which light streamed on me. I was not sure that I had ever spoken simply to a person about what I really thought and been answered straight. My decision was immediate. There was no money, but of that I scarcely thought. I would get a job somehow, even if it meant washing dishes in a hotel, working in a factory. Actually, Ruth lent me some money, but really Father came to the rescue. How glad he must have been to think of my doing something respectable. My brother was to attend Columbia law school that year and must live in town. Father arranged—I don’t know what inspired him to do this for us—that Rob and I should share a flat. So we had a walk-up with two bedrooms, a sitting room, and a kitchen on 121st Street. I don’t remember anything about that flat except how wonderful it was to walk over to Columbia every morning. With what joy I sniffed the dust of those dingy halls! How wonderful it was to be greeted at my entrance of Schermerhorn Hall * See, e.g.: Mead, Margaret. 1949. Ruth Benedict, 1887–1948. American Anthropologist 51(3):457–468. † Franz Boas (1858–1942) was a pioneering German-American scientist...

Share