“Investigating Ruth Landes’s Jewish gendered positionality”

 

Ruth Landes, a white Jewish woman anthropologist (1908-1991), worked on the margins of anthropology for thirty years (1935-1965) because she challenged societal and disciplinary norms.  She did not pay deference to the personages or theories of male anthropologists like Arthur Ramos and Melville Herskowits. In her ethnographic work in houses of Candomblé in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil in 1938-9, she focused on women ritual leaders and her perception of the frequent occurrence of homosexuality among male leaders. She anticipated the emergence of postmodern and feminist ethnography: City of Women (1947) incorporated strategies like reflexivity, dialogue, life history, and personal narrative. In this text she is open about her research and personal relationship with Edison Carneiro, an Afro-Brazilian journalist who was her guide during her year in Brazil (Cole, 2002, p. 5, 12; Price & Price, 2003, pp. 84-85; Yelvington, 2006, p. 73, 75).

Sally Cole, the author of Ruth Landes: A life in Anthropology, asserts that because Landes insisted on absolute equality with men instead of being a “dutiful daughter” to more senior male anthropologists, she sabotaged her efforts to secure a place for herself in the discipline. She became a “bad girl” with a confrontational attitude: Margaret Mead wrote to Ruth Benedict (October 2, 1939) that she wished Landes would act “like a lady.” Interestingly, women in Landes’s ethnographies resemble her: strong-minded, stubborn and individualistic (Cole, p. 11, 13, 55-56).

The purpose of this archival study is to uncover the possible connections between Ruth Landes’s experiences as a white Jewish American heterosexual woman and her research concerns and outcomes with communities of Black African descent in Harlem (1929-1934), Fisk University (1937-1938), Bahia, Brazil (1938-9), Great Britain (1951-2), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1966), and South Africa (1970-4). Her unpublished papers and letters housed at the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian will be used to develop contextual understanding of her experiences growing up in a Jewish immigrant world, witnessing the gendered constraints of marriage: her father was a prominent leader in Jewish socialist labor organizing (1890-1940) while her mother lived unhappily within a traditional domestic role (Cole, 2002, p. 22-23, 26). I am interested in exploring documents that might reveal Landes’s experiences with women labor activists (Cole, pp. 26-27) as well as her mother’s criticisms of Landes’s appearance, comportment and relationship choices, which Landes later learned were common relational patterns between Jewish mothers and daughters (pp. 30-34). My research questions, inspired by Sally Cole’s biography of Landes, are: How might Ruth Landes’s theorizing about (1) the differences between cultural rules and actual practices,  (2) culture as a dynamic process, (3) people who challenge dominant cultural patterns, (4) women’s spiritual autonomy, and (5) women who don’t follow the rules connect with the history of Jewish women activists, researchers, and artists in the United States as well as Landes’s own Jewish trajectories? (Cole, p. 74- 75, 88)

This project is possible through the financial assistance of the Ruth Landes Memorial Fund, a program of The Reed Foundation.