Florence Marie "Flo" Voegelin (

née A birth name is the name of a person given upon birth. The term may be applied to the surname, the given name, or the entire name. Where births are required to be officially registered, the entire name entered onto a birth certificate or birth re ...

Harmon, 1927 – January 9, 1989), also known as Florence Marie Robinett and Florence Marie Robinett Voegelin, was an American

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...

and linguist. She was a prominent figure in the documentation of the indigenous languages of

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

, and co-wrote many articles and books with her second husband, Carl Voegelin. She also published under the name F.M. Voegelin and other variants.

Early life and education

Florence Voegelin grew up in Colorado. She received a bachelor's degree from the Colorado Teachers College (currently the University of Northern Colorado). After graduation, she taught English in Puerto Rico. She earned her doctorate from Indiana University in 1954. To support herself while she was in school, Voegelin taught

Lithuanian Lithuanian may refer to: * Lithuanians * Lithuanian language * The country of Lithuania * Grand Duchy of Lithuania * Culture of Lithuania * Lithuanian cuisine * Lithuanian Jews as often called "Lithuanians" (''Lita'im'' or ''Litvaks'') by other Jew ...

with the Air Force Language Training Program. She continued to travel and do descriptive

fieldwork Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting. The approaches and methods used in field research vary across disciplines. For example, biologists who conduct fie ...

languages of the Americas The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. Along with th ...

for the rest of her life. She married and divorced Ralph Robinett by 1952. Her second husband was Carl (Charles) Voegelin, a prominent linguist and anthropologist who was her graduate advisor at Indiana University. They married in 1954, and they remained married until his death in 1986.

Career

She worked at various points as a research associate at the Museum of Northern Arizona and also as a member of the Indiana University Field Station. She was the head of the Languages of the World Archives at the Indiana University Bloomington, and a visiting professor at the

University of Hawai'i at Mānoa A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', which rou ...

. She also was the founder of the journal ''

Anthropological Linguistics Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics and anthropology which deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures. Whil ...

'', for which she was the editor from 1959 to 1987. Later in her life Voegelin was the honorary chairperson of the Seventh Annual Conference on Siouan and Caddoan languages in 1987, as well as the President-Elect and Vice President of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.

Research

Voegelin's research centered on indigenous languages of the American Southwest. Her dissertation work was on Hidatsa, a Siouan language spoken in North Dakota and South Dakota. She also worked on Hopi and comparative Uto-Aztecan. She co-authored numerous publications with Carl Voegelin, including work on Shawnee and a series of fascicles on the languages of the world with an eye toward comparative studies, which was also published as an independent volume in 1977. She also had ongoing friendly relationships with Mrs. Seumptewa, a speaker of

Hopi The Hopi are a Native American ethnic group who primarily live on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona, United States. As of the 2010 census, there are 19,338 Hopi in the country. The Hopi Tribe is a sovereign nation within the Unite ...

, and Margaret Haven, a Hidatsa speaker.

Names

Voegelin was known as Florence Marie Robinett, Florence Marie Robinett Voegelin and also published as F.M. Voegelin and Florence M. Robinett. She was usually called "Flo".

Awards

Voegelin was honored with a dinner at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson and an exhibit entitled D''aughters of the Desert: Women Anthropologists in the Southwest, 1880-1980''.

Later life and legacy

Voegelin died of cancer on January 9, 1989, at the age of 61.

Selected publications

* * Robinett, Florence M. 1954. First report on the Archives of Languages of the World. IJAL 20(3):241-247. * Robinett, Florence M. 1955. Hidatsa I, II, and III. IJAL 21:1-7, 160–177, 210–216. * Voegelin, Carl F., and Florence M. Voegelin. 1957. Hopi domains: A lexical approach to the problem of selection. Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics: Memoir 14. * Voegelin, Carl F., and Florence M. Voegelin. 1959. Guide to transcribing unwritten languages in field work. Anthropological Linguistics 1:1-28. * Voegelin, Carl F., Florence M. Voegelin, and Kenneth Hale. 1962. Typological and Comparative Grammar of Uto-Aztecan; I, Phonology. IJAL Memoir no. 17. * Voegelin, Carl F., and Florence M. Voegelin. 1962. Typological and comparative grammar of Uto-Aztecan. IJAL 28(1):210-213. * Voegelin, Carl F., and Florence M. Voegelin. 1967. Passive transformations form non-transitive bases in Hopi. IJAL 33:276-281. * * Voegelin, Carl F., and Florence M. Voegelin. 1977. Classification and index of the world's languages. (Foundations of Linguistics series). New York: Elsevier.