Cora Du Bois was born on October 26, 1903 in New York City. She first attended Barnard College where, in 1937, she earned her B. A. degree. She then transferred to Columbia University where one year later she earned her M. A. degree. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1932. Her dissertation was on the menstrual rites among young girls in the new world, which she wrote by doing research in libraries. That kind of "research" was very common among female anthropologists of Du Bois' day, and was the only way women could do research. She also experienced another problem for women anthropologists- no work. She was able to obtain a teaching fellowship and research assistantship from 1932-1935 along side Alfred Kroeber, who was the head of the department at Berkeley at that time. The work, research among the Wintu Indians of northern California, was salvage ethnography.
Du Bois was able to eventually able to do research, which involved trying to understand how professional authorities might be able to psychiatric training. To do that work, she had received a National Research Council Fellowship. She spent six months a the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and then six months of research at the New York Psychoanalytic Society with Abram Kardiner. She spent much of her time studying the relationship between culture and personality, which she researched in California, the Netherlands, the East Indies and India by utilizing photography and team research. Following her research in Asia, she stated her findings as, "Cultural anthropology is concerned with man as a social and psychological phenomenon, and attempts to analyze the forces operative on him in his total environment."
During 1936-1937 Cora Du Bois taught at Hunter College. In 1927 she began her most famous field research on the island of Alor, which at that time belonged to the Netherlands East Indies but is now called Indonesia. She spent two years living in Alor, now part of Indonesia, where she closely studied the culture of the Alorese, focusing mainly on their personality structure . She then used this research to compare the culture and personality behaviors of the Alorese to those in the United States and, although her work was cut short by World War II, she made significant progress in the field of ethnoanthropology. The People of Alor is the monograph she published of her research there. Cora Du Bois concluded her ethnoanthropology research in Asia with the profound statement,
"People without culture are inconceivable. Similarly, culture without man is meaningless. Both are constantly interactive."
When World War Il stopped anthropological work for many of the field researchers, Du Bois became a member of the Strategic Services office. She knowledge of Indonesia secured her a position as Chief of the Indonesia section of the Research and Analysis Branch. She began her service in Washington, D. C. but was soon sent to Ceylon to head up the Southeast Asia Command. In 1945 Du Bois was presented with the Exceptional Civilian Service Award for her work. When Japan occupied countries in Southeast Asia, Du Bois was in charge of the resistance movements in those occupied countries.
In 1946 Du Bois took a position with the State Department and the World Health Organization, which she held until she left in 1954 to accept the Zemurray-Stone Chair at Harvard. She was the second woman to ever receive that honor. Her main project while there was to oversee the Bhubaneswar project. Bhubaneswar was an Indian temple city. Du Bois left Harvard in 1970. She was 67 years old. She spent the next five years working for Cornell University as Professor-At-Large. She then retired. Cora Du Bois died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 7, 1991.
References:
Du Bois, Cora (1959). Social Forces in Southeast Asia. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1964.
http://www.peabody.harvard.edu/maria/bois.html, Feb. 23, 1999. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, "Three Generations of Women Anthropologists at the Peabody Museum." (1998).
Written by: Jessica Newton, 2000
Rewritten by: Lillian Dolentz, 2009