Helen Codere
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Helen Frances Codere (September 10, 1917 – June 5, 2009) was an American cultural anthropologist who received her BA from the
University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...
in 1939 and her PhD in
anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...
from
Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
where she studied with
Ruth Benedict Ruth Fulton Benedict (June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social Re ...
. She is best known for her work with the Kwakwaka'wakw people of coastal
British Columbia British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...
, Canada, known formerly as the "Kwakiutl." Her academic years spanned over fifty years and included professorships at
Vassar College Vassar College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. Founded in 1861 by Matthew Vassar, it was the second degree-granting institution of higher education for women in the United States, closely foll ...
, the
University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...
,
Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...
,
Bennington College Bennington College is a private liberal arts college in Bennington, Vermont. Founded in 1932 as a women's college, it became co-educational in 1969. It claims to be the first college to include visual and performing arts as an equal partner in ...
, and the
University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
.


Personal life

Helen Codere was born in
Winnipeg Winnipeg () is the capital and largest city of the province of Manitoba in Canada. It is centred on the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, near the longitudinal centre of North America. , Winnipeg had a city population of 749, ...
,
Manitoba , image_map = Manitoba in Canada 2.svg , map_alt = Map showing Manitoba's location in the centre of Southern Canada , Label_map = yes , coordinates = , capital = Winn ...
, but soon after moved to Minnesota. She never married and stated that "single women lack some of the freedom and mobility of single men; they are objects of even greater curiosity and scrutiny in a world in which going two by two is projected",Negri, Gloria. 2009 Helen Codere – A Real Anthropologist. The Boston Globe, July 5:http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2009/07/05/helen_codere_91_anthropologist_studied_rwanda_pacific_northwest/, accessed January 23, 2012. Print although she did have a longtime companion, Marion Tait.Irvine, Judith T., Stephen Pastner. 2009 In Memoriam – Helen Codere, Anthropology News. October 1.http://fadograph.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/helen-codere-in-anthropology-news/, accessed January 23, 2012. Her vacation place in Vermont closely resembles her childhood interest of living like the author Henry David Thoreau had once done – it had no running water, but a system of barrels with gutters along the two cabins. Codere favored khaki-type trousers and casual shirts. She is known for being a "renaissance woman," by her friends. "She was extremely accurate with words, had a great sense of humor, a compelling laugh, and was fiercely independent. She was adamant about reading the paper every day, and always looked ready to go on a hike".


Career

Codere held positions in the
American Ethnological Society The American Ethnological Society (AES) is the oldest professional anthropological association in the United States. History of the American Ethnological Society Albert Gallatin and John Russell Bartlett founded the American Ethnological Societ ...
and various faculty appointments, notably
Brandeis Brandeis is a surname. People *Antonietta Brandeis (1848–1926), Czech-born Italian painter *Brandeis Marshall, American data scientist * Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Austrian artist and Holocaust victim * Irma Brandeis, American Dante scholar * Loui ...
(1964–82), where she also served as dean of the graduate school (1974 – 77). Her academic appointments spanned five decades and included positions at
Vassar College Vassar College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. Founded in 1861 by Matthew Vassar, it was the second degree-granting institution of higher education for women in the United States, closely foll ...
, the
University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...
,
Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...
,
Bennington College Bennington College is a private liberal arts college in Bennington, Vermont. Founded in 1932 as a women's college, it became co-educational in 1969. It claims to be the first college to include visual and performing arts as an equal partner in ...
, and the
University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
. Her many awards and fellowships include the Social Science Research Council and the Guggenheim Foundation. "Codere entered anthropology at a time when the members of the American Anthropology Association would have fitted into one ballroom",. Codere was also one of the first women anthropologists to hold a senior faculty position in a university. Among her achievements, was the 1966 editing of Franz Boas' book ''Kwakiutl Ethnography''; after he died she continued the work of the Kwakiutl peoples. In 1951, and 1954–55, Codere went on trips to study the Kwakiutl people, where she lived with a family.


Later life

After retiring, Codere lived on Concord where she continued to volunteer at the library, and spend time with her companion, Marion Tait. When Tait died, Codere never fully recovered. She died on June 5, 2009. She had donated all of her land to the Vermont Land Trust and most of her books to the library at the
University of Vermont The University of Vermont (UVM), officially the University of Vermont and State Agricultural College, is a public land-grant research university in Burlington, Vermont. It was founded in 1791 and is among the oldest universities in the United ...
’s anthropology department.


Works


Kwakiutl

Codere's first major work was ''Fighting with Property: Study of Kwakiutl Potlatching and Warfare, 1792–1930'', which was also her dissertation for Columbia. In this book, Codere tries to emphasize "the more amiable features f the potlatchsuch as the capacity for sociability and cooperativeness, rather than the aggressive and competitiveness",Rosman, Abraham and Paula Rubel. 2010 Helen Francis Codere. American Anthropologist 112(2):342-–350. which was the dominant view of the time, and it was also seen as a wasteful and unproductive to civilized values. In ''Fighting with Property'', she carries out an historical examination of materials on the Kwakiutl people from 1792–1930, however, Boas' work formed the basis of her work. She documented that there was a "major shift that took place was the distribution of property and vigor of potlatches for social prestige and the co-existent decrease and final extinction of warfare and physical violence"Helen Codere. 1950 Fighting with Property: A Study of Kwakiutl Potlatching and Warfare. New York: J.J. Augustin which the Kwakiutl define as "fighting with property" rather than with weapons. She says that this change can have profound implications not only for an understanding of the Kwakiutl people but also "for knowledge of human potentialities for change away from destructiveness, at a point in the history of the world when such a change is necessary". Her work on the Kwakiutl was not only important for understanding that culture but also because "first, it was one of the pioneering efforts of what later came to be known as
historical anthropology Historical anthropology is a historiographical movement which applies methodologies and objectives from social and cultural anthropology to the study of historical societies. Like most such movements, it is understood in different ways by differe ...
. Second, while the majority of anthropologists of the time were doing synchronic studies of societies, Codere's work focused on culture change".


Rwanda

After her work with the Kwakiutl, she expanded her work to the Tutsi and Hutu of Rwanda in 1959, during a time of revolution. "The general purpose of the Rwanda field research," she wrote, "was to study change." While in Rwanda, she was challenged to communicate in two languages – Kinyarwanda and French. She collected forty-eight autobiographies of Rwandan men and women:
Tutsi The Tutsi (), or Abatutsi (), are an ethnic group of the African Great Lakes region. They are a Bantu-speaking ethnic group and the second largest of three main ethnic groups in Rwanda and Burundi (the other two being the largest Bantu ethnic ...
,
Hutu The Hutu (), also known as the Abahutu, are a Bantu ethnic or social group which is native to the African Great Lakes region. They mainly live in Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they form one of the p ...
, and Twa of different ages, education levels, economic statuses and occupations, and along with other research that had been done, she studied the social change, focusing more on the problems and social tensions, rather than the functional theory of society. She viewed society has a "complex adaptive system" which was essentially a "bundle of relations".Helen Codere. 1975 African Autobiography, the Biography of an African Society: Rwanda. The Journal of African History 16:473–474 The autobiographies that she took showed the complexities of the caste system and also showed details of intercaste relationships, and the ways these were changing. Her studies about Rwandan
social structure In the social sciences, social structure is the aggregate of patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions of individuals. Likewise, society is believed to be grouped into structurally rel ...
were carried out when that very social structure entered a period of rapid transformation.


References


Bibliography

* Boas, Franz (1966) ''Kwakiutl Ethnography.'' Ed. by Helen Codere. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. * Codere, Helen (1950) ''Fighting with Property: A Study of Kwakiutl Potlatching and Warfare, 1792–1930.'' New York: J. J. Augustin. * Codere, Helen (1956) "The Amiable Side of Kwakiutl Life: The Potlatch and the Play Potlatch." ''American Anthropologist,'' vol. 28, pp. 334–351. * McFeat, Tom (ed.) (1966) ''Indians of the North Pacific Coast: Studies in Selected Topics.'' Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. * Anthropology News (October 2009) ''IN MEMORIAM'' of Helen Frances Codere, p. 44. {{DEFAULTSORT:Codere, Helen 1917 births 2009 deaths American women anthropologists American anthropology writers Anthropology educators Vassar College faculty University of Minnesota alumni Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Northwestern University faculty University of Pennsylvania faculty People from Winnipeg 20th-century American women scientists 20th-century American scientists Brandeis University faculty 20th-century American anthropologists