Ernestine Friedl

Ernestine Friedl (born 1920) is an American anthropologist, author, and professor. She has served as the president of both the American Ethnological Society (1967) and the American Anthropological Association (1974-1975). Friedl was also the first female Dean of Arts and Sciences and Trinity College at Duke University, and is a James B. Duke Professor Emerita. A building on Duke's campus, housing the departments of African and African American Studies, Cultural Anthropology, the Latino/Latina Studies program, and Literature was named in her honor in 2008. Her major interests include gender roles, rural life in modern Greece, and the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin.

Early life

Born in Hungary in 1920, Ernestine Friedl emigrated to the United States with her mother at the age of two years old. They joined Ernestine's father and settled in the West Bronx neighborhood of New York City. Her father had studied law in Europe, worked with the Hungarian Consular service, and was also a businessman, while her mother was of a small business-owning family, establishing the family as firmly of the petit bourgeoisie class. Ernestine had three siblings, two sisters and one brother.

Education

At the age of nine, Ernestine entered the Ethical Culture School, which had a student population that was largely ethnically Irish, German, and Jewish. While at the school, she had early exposure to leftist and pacifist ideology. At the age of fourteen, Ernestine began attending the prestigious public Walton High School for girls located in the Bronx. Upon graduation, Friedl then entered Hunter College, a public women's college in the Upper East Side of New York, from which she graduated in 1941 with a Bachelor of Arts in pre-social work.

Friedl attended Columbia University from 1941 to 1950, earning a Ph.D. in anthropology.

Influences

While in attendance at Hunter College, Friedl met three influential figures in her life: Dorothy L. Keur and Elsie Steedman, both professors of anthropology who taught and inspired Friedl to pursue the same field, as well as her future husband Harry Levy, who studied classics. It was Levy who encouraged Friedl to continue on with post-graduate studies in order to become an anthropologist. Other influences include Columbia professors Ralph Linton and Ruth Benedict.

Fieldwork

In 1942 and 1943, under the tutelage of Columbia professor Ralph Linton, Friedl studied the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin. She published a dissertation concerning the Chippewa political organization and leadership. After receiving her Ph.D. at Columbia, she and her husband Harry Levy traveled to Greece in 1954 where they engaged in anthropological fieldwork. She had been awarded a Fulbright grant to study life in a Greek village Vasilika, a small agricultural town with a population of 216 people. She returned to the area from 1964 to 1965 to do fieldwork with migrants. In 1971 and 1972, Friedl and Levy spent time in Athens working on her book Women and Men, which is when Friedl's interest in gender roles began.

Career

Friedl began teaching in at Brooklyn College in the fall of 1942. Other than a brief intermittent stint at Wellesley College she continued teaching at Brooklyn College until 1973 when she became a professor of anthropology at Duke University. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. While at Duke, she was the chair of the Department of Anthropology from 1973 to 1978, and the Dean of Arts and Sciences and Trinity College from 1980 to 1985.

She served as the secretary and later the president of the American Ethnological Society in 1967. In 1970, Friedl participated in the Committee on the Status of Women in Anthropology as part of the American Anthropological Association, later serving as its president from 1974 to 1975.

Notable published works

• 1956 "Persistence in Chippewa Culture and Personality." American Anthropologist 58: 814-215.
• 1959 "The Role of Kinship in the Transmission of National Culture to Rural Villages in Mainland Greece." American Anthropologist 61: 30-38.
• 1962 Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• 1963 "Studies in Peasant Life." Biennial Review of Anthropology. B Siegl, ed. Stanford, CA: Sanford University Press. 276-306.
• 1967 "The Position of Women: Appearance and Reality." Anthropological Quarterly. 40: 97-108.
• 1970 "Fieldwork in a Greek Village." Women in the Field. P. Golde, ed. Chicago: Aldine Press. 193-217.
• 1975 Women and Men: An Anthropologist's View. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• 1978 "Society and Sex Roles." Human Nature. 1:8-75. Reprinted in "Culture and Conflict" in 1979. J. Spradley and D. McCurdy, eds.