Cora DuBois
| Cora Alice DuBois | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 26, 1903 NJ |
| Died | April 7, 1991 (aged 87) Brookline, MA |
| Occupation | Anthropologist |
| Known for | Culture and personality studies and psychological anthropology |
Cora Alice Du Bois (October 26, 1903 – April 7, 1991) was an American cultural anthropologist and a key figure in culture and personality studies and in psychological anthropology more generally.
Du Bois was born in New York City on October 26, 1903 to Mattie Schreiber Du Bois and Jean Du Bois, immigrants to the U.S. from Switzerland. She spent most of her childhood in New Jersey, where she graduated from high school in Perth Amboy. She spent a year studying library science at the New York Public Library and then attended Barnard College, graduating with a B.A. in history in 1927. She earned an M.A. in history from Columbia University in 1928.
Encouraged by an anthropology course taught by Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas at Columbia, DuBois moved to California to study anthropology with Native American specialists Alfred L. Kroeber and Robert Lowie. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1932.
In part due to prejudices against women academics, she was initially unable to find a university position. She remained at Berkeley as a teaching fellow and research assistant from 1932 to 1935. She conducted salvage ethnography on several Native American groups of northern California and the Pacific Northwest, including the Wintu Indians of northern California. She published The 1870 Ghost Dance in 1939, a study of a religious movement among Native Americans in the Western U.S.
In 1935, Du Bois received a National Research Council Fellowship to undertake clinical training and explore possible collaborations between anthropology and psychiatry. She spent six months at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, now the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and six months at the New York Psychoanalytic Society. In New York she worked with psychiatrist Abram Kardiner, who became her mentor and collaborator for several projects in cross-cultural diagnosis and the psychoanalytic study of culture. Du Bois also taught at Hunter College in 1936-1937 while developing a fieldwork project to test their new ideas.
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