An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir

Introduction

5 Introduction PerhaPs one of the most striking images from Hollywood about the adventure of anthropology is the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the biblical Ark of the Covenant, finally discovered, is once again secreted away as it is taken to a cavernous warehouse filled with countless boxes of treasures. We are not suggesting that Ruth M. Underhill’s unpublished and largely unknown archives are exactly equivalent to Moses’s lost tablets. But, for us, maybe they come close. We had both been at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for several years before we learned in detail about the Ruth M. Underhill Collection. Rumor had it that this legendary anthropologist’s papers were donated to the museum, but amid our other duties we never quite found the free hours to explore them. In 2009, however, when we applied for a Save America’s Treasures grant, which sought financial support to garner intellectual and physical control of the museum’s North American ethnography collection, we were sure to include the Underhill collection.* The grant would be our chance to finally explore this neglected historical resource—the mislaid tablets made by one of anthropology’s own progenitors—half-archived but entirely unstudied and unpublished since the materials were donated twenty-five years earlier. When the grant proposal was funded, the museum hired Aly Jabrocki to archive the papers and produce a finding aid.† We were astounded by the result of Aly’s efforts. The rumors of the archive’s historical wealth proved to be true. The Ruth M. Underhill Collection * On the larger collection see: Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, Stephen E. Nash, and Steven R. Holen. 2010. Crossroads of Culture: Anthropology Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. † NEH Grant Number ST-03–06–0024–09. See: Jabrocki, Aly. 2012. Finding Aid to the Ruth Underhill Papers. Ms. on file, DMNS Archives. 6 Introduction runs eighty-five linear-feet and includes such finds as original ethnographic notes from her work with Native Americans, syllabi and class notes from 1930s Columbia University, hand-corrected manuscript drafts, nearly three thousand photographs, and original sound recordings —all created during a life spanning more than ten decades.* As we worked to grasp the breadth of the collection, Aly pointed us to a particularly unique set of papers: about one hundred typed pages Underhill wrote of what she surely intended to be her autobiography. Our DMNS colleague Carla Bradmon carefully retyped Underhill’s memoir into digital format. When we read the product, although it was disordered and at times sketchy, we were immediately taken by Underhill’s candor and thoughtful self-reflection. As importantly, we saw that her life provided historically rich insights into the struggles of a woman to break free from the Victorian age and become one of her generation’s great anthropologists. Quite simply, Ruth Underhill had a remarkable story to tell. However, despite the memoir’s significance, once we went through our first set of edits, we could see that it was incomplete. Key periods in Underhill’s life were missing; key people went unmentioned. The memoir could not hold together by itself. But, luckily, we could draw history from another archival well. Also in the archives were a string of interviews Underhill conducted— mostly with the museum’s staff—between 1979 and 1982. Luckily for us, too, Underhill remained lucid as she neared one hundred years of age, and she answered questions in long paragraphs of sharp, candid, droll, and pensive reflections on her life. Underhill always spoke as if she were writing. With more than a thousand pages of additional material from interviews, we could fill in the voids left in Underhill’s rough draft of a memoir. This book is the result. • Ruth Murray Underhill was born August 22, 1883, some forty miles north of New York City, in a world radically different from the one she departed more than one hundred years later, on August 15, 1984, * Additional though substantially smaller Underhill collections can be found at the Special Collections and Archives of the University of Denver and also the Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries. Figure 1. Ruth M. Underhill, circa 1960. 8 Introduction in Denver, Colorado.* Underhill’s century witnessed the inventions of the steam turbine, zipper, bicycle, Coca-Cola, radio, teddy bear, airplane, automobile, crossword puzzle, telephone, television, polio vaccine...