A trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology,
Gladys Reichard (1893-1955) is one of America's least appreciated
anthropologists. Her accomplishments were obscured in her lifetime
by differences in intellectual approach and envy, as well as
academic politics and the gender realities of her age. This
biography offers the first full account of Reichard's life, her
milieu, and, most importantly, her work-establishing, once and for
all, her lasting significance in the history of anthropology. In
her thirty-two years as the founder and head of Barnard College's
groundbreaking anthropology department, Reichard taught that Native
languages, written or unwritten, sacred or profane, offered
Euro-Americans the least distorted views onto the inner life of
North America's first peoples. This unique approach put her at odds
with anthropologists such as Edward Sapir, leader of the
structuralist movement in American linguistics. Similarly,
Reichard's focus on Native psychology as revealed to her by Native
artists and storytellers produced a dramatically different style of
ethnography from that of Margaret Mead, who relied on western
psychological archetypes to "crack" alien cultural codes, often at
a distance. Despite intense pressure from her peers to conform to
their theories, Reichard held firm to her humanitarian principles
and methods; the result, as Nancy Mattina makes clear, was
pathbreaking work in the ethnography of ritual and mythology;
Wiyot, Coeur d'Alene, and Navajo linguistics; folk art, gender, and
language-amplified by an exceptional career of teaching, editing,
publishing, and mentoring. Drawing on Reichard's own writings and
correspondence, this book provides an intimate picture of her
small-town upbringing, the professional challenges she faced in
male-centered institutions, and her quietly revolutionary
contributions to anthropology. Gladys Reichard emerges as she lived
and worked-a far-sighted, self-reliant humanist sustained in
turbulent times by the generous, egalitarian spirit that called her
yearly to the far corners of the American West.
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