Hortense Powdermaker

Cultural anthropologist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. The daughter of a businessman, she graduated from Goucher College (1919), worked as a union organizer, and studied at the London School of Economics. A pioneer among women archaeologists for working alone in exotic places, her Life in Lesu, based on research in a Pacific island village, appeared in 1933. She taught at Queens College, New York City (1938–68) and undertook anthropological studies of life in a Mississippi town and in Hollywood, CA, the latter resulting in Hollywood, The Dream Factory (1950). In 1966 she published her memoirs, Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist.

Hortense Powdermaker (1896-1970) was an anthropologist best known for her ethnographic studies of African Americans in rural America and of Hollywood.

Born in Philadelphia to a Jewish family, Powdermaker spent her childhood in Reading, Pennsylvania and in Baltimore. After Powdermaker became dissatisfied with the prospects of the U.S. labor movment, she took courses at the London School of Economics. Powdermaker became a graduate student under anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who convinced her to embark on a course of doctoral studies.

Powdermaker completed her PhD on leadership in "primitive" society in 1928. Like her contemporaries, Powdermaker sought to identify her anthropological work with a "primitive" people and spent ten months conducting fieldwork among the Lesu in Melanesia. After returning to the United States, Powdermaker was given an appointment at the new, Rockefeller Foundation supported Yale Institute of Human Relations. She conducted what was probably the first such anthropological study in an African American community in Indianola, Mississippi from 1932-1934.

In 1950, Powdermaker published Hollywood, the Dream Factory, the first, and to date, the only substantial anthropological study of the American film industry.

In 1968, Hortense Powdermaker retired from Queens College, where she had founded the department of anthropology and sociology, and moved to Berkeley, where she remained engaged in ethnographic fieldwork.