Cora Du Bois was born in 1903. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1932. She worked with Alfred Kroeber from 1932-1935 doing ethnographic research among the Wintu Indians of northern California. 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 (Peabody Museum, 1998). 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." (Du Bois, 1959.pp.9).
Cora Du Bois spent many years teaching about her research in ethnoanthropology at various American colleges, until she began her most famous field research in the island of Alor (Peabody Museum, 1998). 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 (Peabody Museum, 1998). 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 (Peabody Museum, 1998).
Because of her pioneer efforts and extensive knowledge of research, she was chosen for the Zemurray-Stone Chair at Harvard University, which was an honor that only one other woman before her had known (Peabody Museum, 1998). Cora continued to work and teach until the age of 72, when she retired from her job as a professor at Harvard University (Peabody Museum, 1998). 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." (Du Bois, 1959.pp.9).
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