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An Anthropologist's Arrival An Anthropologist’s Arrival: A Memoir. | Center for Colorado & the West at Auraria Library The Ute people have lived in Colorado longer than anyone else. Home › An Anthropologist’s Arrival: A Memoir. An Anthropologist’s Arrival: A Memoir. EXPLORE BY MEDIA Submitted by CLEAVITT on 2-19-2015 04:17 PM Book Reviews Photographs Author: Ruth M. Underhill; edited by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Video Stephen E. Nash. Biographies Publishing: An Anthropologist’s Arrival: A Memoir. By Ruth Murray New Publications Resource Guides Underhill. Edited by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stephen E. Nash. County Newspaper Histories Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. 240 pages. Black-and-white photographs. 6” x 9”. $21.95 paperback. EXPLORE BY TOPIC Land & Natural Resources Reviewer: Susan Collins Government & Law Reviewer Affiliation: Agriculture Mining Ruth Murray Underhill, eminent educator on Native American cultures, Commerce & Industry Transportation lived past one hundred and left a manuscript recounting “this third class People & Places journey I call my life” (122). The incomplete draft memoir, written in the Communication first person voice, was included in her professional papers that found Healthcare & Medicine Education & Libraries their way to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS) after Cultural Communities her death in 1984. DMNS anthropologists Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stephen E. Nash edited the Recreation & Entertainment memoir, adding material from the archive, particularly information from transcribed interviews by Joyce Tourism Religion Herold and others and selected photographs from the thousands included in the Underhill collection. The editors have written an informative introduction and added numerous interpretive footnotes. The result is a EXPLORE BY CULTURE cohesive work that is intellectually satisfying and emotionally moving. Hispanic Native American The book covers Underhill’s life from her origins in a conservative and wealthy family in New York’s Hudson River Valley to her final years as a retired professor and author in Denver. Her story reflects societal change from the Victorian era through both world wars into the late twentieth century, and it is a thread in the growth of American anthropology as an academic discipline. Each decade required a new persona, and she pursued life with gusto, stating only in her late nineties that she was a bit tired of all the readjustment that was such hard work. The memoir is divided into two sections, “Part One: Becoming Ruth Underhill” and “Part Two: Becoming an Anthropologist.” This makes some sense, since Ruth discovered anthropology in mid-life, starting graduate studies at age forty-six at Columbia University under “Papa Franz” Boas. Nevertheless, despite the many upheavals she undertook, there is continuity. Arguably, her anthropological career began with her undergraduate studies in foreign languages and her post-college European tour when she said goodbye to her chaperone and moved in with an Italian family “to really get to know the people” (90). Conversely, despite her distinguished career, she expressed self-doubt and some resentment toward others who may or may not have had an easier time of it. While the book ends with a paean to tranquility and hope, there is little sense that she had indeed “arrived’ in her own mind. I agree with the editors that the memoir is “deeply personal and at times painful to read” (21). Nevertheless, it is fascinating. http://coloradowest.staging.auraria.edu/book-review/anthropologist’s-arrival-memoir[12/7/2015 3:14:32 PM] An Anthropologist’s Arrival: A Memoir. | Center for Colorado & the West at Auraria Library Here is the journey’s itinerary. Large, brunette, and outspoken, she was raised in a family that preferred her small, blonde, and reticent younger sister, not to mention her privileged younger brother, who ultimately took her mountain climbing, and a still younger sister who eventually became a banker. Since she did not appear to be marriage material, Ruth convinced her father to pay for college, with a firm understanding that she would excel. After graduating from Vassar, she shook off a suitor by explaining that she wanted a life of adventure. Her parents sent her to Europe with a social worker as a chaperone, and Ruth stayed on for two years. On her return, she herself worked as a social worker in Boston and then New York, applying her language skills to gain entrance to the Italian immigrant communities. In addition to helping young women in trouble, she wrote articles for various periodicals and participated in the suffrage movement. During World War I, she worked for the American Red Cross, establishing orphanages in Italy, and afterward she wrote monographs on the provisions for war wounded in Germany and Italy. The Rockefeller Foundation hired her to translate Italian laws into English, and she wrote a report on child labor in Italy. Returning to New York, Underhill continued her creative writing, socialized with a Greenwich Village crowd in the 1920s, found a husband, and moved to her family’s farm. Disillusioned and too poor to buy food or fuel, the couple divorced amicably. In 1930, at age forty-six, Underhill decided she could not return to social work, but needed to learn more “to understand the human race” (131), and she polled academic departments at Columbia University to find a suitable discipline. Ruth Benedict in Anthropology convinced her to enroll in a postgraduate program under the leadership of Franz Boas, who not only led students through formal studies but deployed them to conduct fieldwork recording North American aboriginal cultures. After a year of classroom study, Ruth was sent to record the culture of the Tohono O’odham (then Papago) tribe in southern Arizona. She performed formal ethnography, learning the native language, recording narratives, and becoming immersed in the culture through participant observation. For the next eight years, she alternated between the reservation and university campus, ultimately writing The Autobiography of a Papago Woman, published as a monograph by the American Anthropological Association, and Social Organization of the Papago Indians, which was her PhD dissertation, published by Columbia University Press. Following award of her degree, she went to work for the United States Office of Indian Affairs (later Bureau of Indian Affairs) as associate supervisor of Indian education, then supervisor of Indian education. During the next eleven years, she was a government anthropologist and educator, charged with training young teachers about to be deployed to Indian communities. Typically, she spent her summers on a reservation, doing ethnography, and wrote monographs in the winter. Her reports were published as the Indian Life and Customs Series and served as cultural overviews for various western tribes, including the Tohono O’odham (Papago), Pima, Northern Paiute, Indians of southern California, Navajo, Indians of the Pacific Northwest, and Pueblo peoples. Although she was productive during these years and undoubtedly made a difference to the people she trained, and thus to their students also, she felt unappreciated by the bureaucracy, and accepted an offer to join the faculty at the University of Denver in 1948. After five years as professor of anthropology, she officially retired at age seventy. She continued to write, including a textbook, Red Man’s America: A History of Indians in the United States, even producing an eponymous educational television series. Her travels and consulting occupied her into her eighties. http://coloradowest.staging.auraria.edu/book-review/anthropologist’s-arrival-memoir[12/7/2015 3:14:32 PM] An Anthropologist’s Arrival: A Memoir. | Center for Colorado & the West at Auraria Library What an amazing life! The editors, both male, have done a real service in bringing this material to light and presenting it so sensitively. This book is recommended to anyone with enough emotional stamina to follow a strong woman in her quest for independence, adventure, and meaning through the tumult of the last century. It is also of more than passing interest to those concerned with the history of anthropology, social work, and U.S. Indian policy. Reviewer Info: Susan Collins is a retired anthropologist residing in Boulder, Colorado, and is a PhD alumna of the University of Colorado–Boulder. For twenty-two years, 1988–2010, she served as Colorado’s State Archaeologist and Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer. Other professional experience includes archaeological fieldwork in Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, North Carolina, British Columbia, and Missouri; archaeological program administration for the Pueblo of Zuni, Colorado State University, and Western Carolina University; and teaching at Western Carolina and the University of Colorado Denver and Boulder campuses. She is interested in archaeological site conservation and interpretation. Auraria Library 1100 Lawrence Street In the News 303-556-4587 Denver, Colorado 80204 Partners & Donations About Us Contact Us http://coloradowest.staging.auraria.edu/book-review/anthropologist’s-arrival-memoir[12/7/2015 3:14:32 PM].
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