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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [First Page] [145], (1) Lines: 0 to 47 ——— 1.5774pt P ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [145], (1) chapter 6 Teachers and Students After Franz Boas’s illness in 1931, he gave up many of his responsibilities, and Ruth Benedict carried on the main work of administration and teaching. She thus was a principal arbiter of a student’s fate, and their opinions of her reflected this. Student accounts of Benedict reflected also her intellectual and personal impact and students’ agreements and disagreements with her. She and Boas together decided on the award of funds for Project #35; indeed, much of the correspondence between them discussed funding, along with their many observations of their own travels and fieldwork, particularly Boas’s reflective thoughts in his frequent letters from his summer home,from the Northwest Coast, and from his trips to Europe. Not only students were funded but also junior faculty and anthropologists from other universities, and frequently field projects were recommended to other funding sources. Grants of fieldwork funds appear to have gone even-handedly to students, although some had personal resources to finance their fieldwork, but funds for writing and publication appear to have been awarded more selectively. Jobs also depended on faculty recommendations; jobs were scarce, and most were part-time and temporary. Benedict frequently mentioned her worry about the difficulty of placing students in jobs. Anti-Semitism was an acknowledged factor in several university hirings, and with a large number of Jewish students at Columbia, Benedict complained severely in much of her correspondence about this prejudice. Several students experienced tragedy in their fieldwork,and Benedict had the main responsibility for dealing with the personal relations and university liability in the aftermath of these incidents.1 Several memoirs of the department and of Benedict have been written, interviews have been conducted with a number of the 1930s students, and reflections about Benedict from the students of the 1940s have been sought in personal communications. She was much admired by some students and had her share of detractors among others, yet their accounts depict with much agreement a personality that was consistent from the early 1930s to the postwar years. An early figure in the department,Esther Goldfrank,has written a memoir 145 Teachers and Students 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [146], (2) Lines: 47 to ——— 0.0pt Pg ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [146], (2) of Columbia anthropology, and she includes acerbic portrayals of Benedict. Goldfrank was a recent graduate of Barnard whom Boas had hired as his secretary when Benedict entered the department. Although not a graduate student, Goldfrank apprenticed with Boas in fieldwork in the eastern pueblos , working there many years and publishing professional articles. She did not seek a degree, although she did take courses with Benedict and Ralph Linton, but because of her extensive field reports on the pueblos, she had a role as a colleague. A key factor in Goldfrank’s relation with Benedict was her disagreement with Benedict’s interpretation of the pueblo cultures as Apollonian, as noted in chapter 1, and Goldfrank wrote in her memoir that Benedict rebuffed her by pointing out that she had never been in the Zuni or Hopi pueblos. Goldfrank’s memoir, written many years after Benedict’s death, portrays Benedict as morose, masked, and aloof, through quotes taken from Margaret Mead’s publication of selections from Benedict’s journals and from Benedict’s personal relations as Goldfrank observed them (Mead 1959; Goldfrank 1978:35–40, 114–24). She wrote that she had seen Benedict “turn off an unwelcome request with a lift of her brow, a curl of her lips or reliance on her long time and well known hearing difficulty” (Goldfrank 1978:142). Goldfrank was antagonized by Benedict’s leftist political leanings, and on this score she also criticized Boas, to whom she was nevertheless devoted. She reports numerous anecdotes to convey the personal style that she disliked , but in these incidents Benedict’s underlying role is actually supportive or kind to Goldfrank. One occasion...

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