Cora Du Bois, an anthropologist who became the first female tenured professor at Harvard University in 1954, had a long and varied career. She studied outlier personalities in Western and American Indian cultures, wrote a book in the 1950s about personality and culture in a remote island of Southeast Asia, headed the Southeast Asian command in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and, following the war, studied the impacts of nation building in India. Yet there were elements of tragedy in the life of Ms. Du Bois, who, as a lesbian, could not be open about her longtime partner and who never managed to write a book about her studies in India.
Susan Seymour, a part-time Inverness Park resident and professor emerita at Pitzer College, who studied with Ms. Du Bois, recently wrote her biography. Ms. Seymour spoke with the Light about culture and personality, Ms. Du Bois’s anthropological research and her intelligence work for the government.
Point Reyes Light: Can you talk about the context in which Cora began studying anthropology, and what the basic tenets or paradigms the field was operating under at the time?
Susan Seymour: Columbia University, when she was an undergraduate student, had two [anthropology] professors basically. One was Franz Boas, whom many consider the founder of American anthropology. He was encouraging students to look at almost everything. He’d come out of physics and he wanted students to do careful ethnographies, especially of native peoples in the New World. He was the one who measured body size and brains and so forth and demonstrated that it made no difference what race you were. He was doing a lot of things. So when you say the paradigm, the paradigm was a wide-open field—we need to do everything, fast!
Cora became really interested in the impact of culture on the individual—not just recording what a people are like and generalizing, but understanding what’s happening and how does an individual fit into their culture, or not fit.
She went into psychiatric hospitals to understand something about what happens to people that in Western society makes us put them into a hospital. She saw that Native Americans didn’t do that; many so-called odd people were considered to have special powers.
The culture and personality school has turned into what we now call psychological anthropology.
PRL: Cora’s research in Alor, an island in the Dutch East Indies, set out to connect culture to personality.
SS: She got pretty positive results. She experimented with Rorschachs, with drawing tests, cross-cultural intelligence tests that had been used with Australian Aborigines and seemed to work for the Alorese. She also did long life histories, so she was one of the first people to use multiple methods in working with a small society and to test whether we could come up with a framework of examining the impact of culture and personality that worked.
PRL: She connected the child rearing practices of Alor to certain traits, like mistrust, exhibited by many of the Alorese.
SS: And religious practices. That’s one of the things there’s a lot of support for—people don’t always like to hear it, but the relationship with early childhood and personal development to what gods and spirits you believe in is strong, cross-culturally. That’s been tested out.
PRL: It was soon after that that the war broke out.
SS: Yes. Then she got invited into the [Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency] based on her time in Southeast Asia.
PRL: But Cora believed her intelligence work was separate from her work as an anthropologist.
SS: She did not view her [intelligence] work as applied anthropology, and she was very opposed to anthropology being used as a cover for intelligence work. She seems to have thought that she was helping the country at a time of potential calamity, and I think she was surprised herself—not because she knew a lot about southeast Asia but because she turned out to be a good researcher and administrator. She kept getting promotions.
[When she went to the State Department after the war], she certainly wanted to try to see the U.S. do what she thought were the right things with emerging nations. She wrote a book about Southeast Asia. She was saying these were emerging nations, not puppets of Russia, which is how the U.S. government viewed them. It must have been very discouraging.
[When Cora returned to academia] she became really interested in post-colonial movements of nation-building. She spent all this time in Asia and in the State Department keeping track of what was happening in Asia. She decided that these movements of people trying to create their own nations were much more important than the work she had previously done [in culture and personality].
She was still interested in the effect on the psyche, so she lined up people to study different aspects of rapid sociocultural change.
PRL: That’s when she started her 11-year project in Bhubaneswar, India, with a number of graduate students undertaking two-year stints there. The overarching question was how did the old temple town and the new capital being built influence each other?
SS: When you come and build a new capital city, what happens to the people already living a very different life there, without schools, water, electricity? She picked it as a microcosm to look at rapid sociocultural change.
The old Bhubaneswar had tiny streets wrapped around temples and everyone organized into caste-based neighborhoods. In the new capital they laid it out in big rectangles. Visually it’s dramatically different.
PRL: Was there a presumption of what would happen?
SS: There was a presumption—and this is why she became such an opponent of modernization theory. Americans really thought that we could go in and bring in all this technology and education and just change people. It was really naïve of us. Everything would catch on and everyone would want it. That’s not how it works. People are very resistant.
What impressed all of us, and her too, was the way in which people managed to integrate old beliefs and new beliefs. Often in the West we’d say those are contradictory. But people learn—this is me talking—people learn to compartmentalize. They hold on to old ways of viewing the world and practices, while at the same time wanting a foot in the new world.
My project was to look at the impact of the new capital on the old town by studying childrearing practices. One of the biggest things that came out of it for me was the way that, in the old town, children grew up in big extended households with many generations. I came to believe that this teaches children to emotionally attach to a number of people. That enables them to identify with large households, which they are supposed to remain tied to. You have a responsibility for the next generation. In the new capital they didn’t have multi-generational households. That’s one example of difference.
And suddenly there were new opportunities. When I came back in the ’70s and ’80s and discovered that the girls [I had observed] were still in school, I knew they had a problem. You are supposed to arrange a marriage to a man who is more educated. I saw families go through very difficult periods trying to arrange marriages for girls they’d never anticipated sending to school for long periods of time, but they sort of got into it. It was part of the new India.
It took me a good 30 years, basically, to see the outcomes of my early work. I’ve come to realize that Cora had the groundwork for a fabulous study and we got a lot of results. [But] I think the scope had become so big and she did not have enough data to do what she wanted to do. She just couldn’t make herself do it anymore. Also, to attack modernization theory was to attack a bunch of her colleagues at Harvard and M.I.T. She did attack them in public lectures, just not in a book. I think she probably thought she needed a lot more information to do it effectively.
PRL: Did she consider extending her time?
SS: By then she was in her 70s and she went into a health decline. She could have just synthesized everything and used it to say, “Hey, look, things are more complicated than you guys”—and they were all men—“are proposing.” But she couldn’t make herself.
PRL: You delve into some of the difficulties she faced as a woman at Harvard. She even had to use a side door to get to the faculty lounge and couldn’t eat with the male professors. Do you think that affected her research?
SS: No. I think it affected her morale. I think it ended up being a painful time for her and she wanted out. But before she got out, she led two major [anthropological] associations through a tough period—meaning the debates over the Vietnam War. She did that for the American Anthropological Association and the Association of Asian Studies, and that was in retirement. That may have worn her out, too. It was a terrible time. People accused each other of being involved with U.S. counterterrorism work in Cambodia, Thailand, etc. They were breaking into each other’s files. It was nasty stuff. She helped keep an even keel in those societies and stop the demonizing.
And she was not just a woman, but a lesbian, at Harvard. It was a double whammy. She couldn’t have her partner publicly acknowledged. I think she was ready to say, ‘I’ve had enough.’ But one thing we couldn’t agree on was the need for a woman’s movement in order to change things. She couldn’t understand that.
PRL: It seemed there was an element of tragedy both in her private life—not being able to live openly—and in her professional life, not finishing this major project.
SS: Some people said they found the last chapter tragic, but I don’t find it tragic. It’s the way her life happened. She accomplished a lot and then she decided she was done. It’s not like Margaret Mead [a famous anthropologist and contemporary of Ms. du Bois], who kept going until she died. That’s why I make contrasts with Mead, although Mead also never was public about being bisexual and leading the latter part of her life as a lesbian.
Mead’s the one everyone will remember, and that may have been part of my motivation. Mead was willing to spout off on anything. The books were popular, but they can all be torn apart. Du Bois deserved being remembered, in some ways more, because she was more careful in research. But she always had the big picture in mind. In that way, she was a humanist—a humanist in terms of trying to understand the larger context of human evolution. That made her not fit so well in the 1960s, though that changed in the ‘80s.
Today, the field is very divided between people who consider themselves more humanistic and those who consider themselves to be doing science. And then all the people in between.
PRL: Where do you see yourself on that spectrum?
SS: I’m a mixture. I like the hardnosed research, but I like asking the big questions. I find that I’m not happy with people doing a lot of critiquing without doing research. We need multiple methods, and [we need] to look at things in multiple ways.