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Barnes presents an obituary for Gertrude Evelyn Dole. Although she developed many interests, Dole excelled in anthropology and her life's work encompasses four major topics: Kuikuru ethnography, Amahuaca ethnography, kinship theory, and oral history.
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Gertrude Evelyn (Trudie) Dole was born at home in Proctorsville, Vermont, a daughter of modest hill farmers. Thus she inherited a lifestyle that became extinct during the course of the 20th century. In an oral history taken on behalf of the Society of Woman Geographers, Dole depicts an idyllic but strict childhood in what she called "the loveliest spot on earth" (Shepherd 1993-94). All her life Trudie cultivated and cherished the thrift and independence she learned as a girl, repairing furniture veneer with brown electrician's tape and healing cuts with aloe grown on her New York City windowsill.
Dole exhibited a variety of talents. Her creativity found expression in dress, cooking, and, most of all, in her writing, her films, and her photographs. Her intellectual promise became apparent when she graduated in 1932 as valedictorian of Peterborough High School and in 1937 she obtained her A.B. in French and Biology from Middlebury College. Although she developed many interests, anthropology was Dole's metier. Her life's work encompasses four major topics: Kuikuru ethnography, Amahuaca ethnography, kinship theory, and oral history. Miscellaneous lines of inquiry ranged from archaeology to Karaja figurines to alternative medicine.
Dole was a published writer before she obtained her doctorate, and she continued to write prodigiously. In addition to her master's thesis and Ph.D. dissertation, her works include several dozen articles dating from 1939 to 2001; the oft-cited collection, Essays in the Science of Culture, edited as a tribute to Leslie White (Dole and Carneiro 1960); and numerous reviews, comments, letters, and obituaries, as well as some two dozen unpublished interviews. Most are on anthropological subjects.
As a newlywed, in 1941 Dole followed her first husband, Leonard Stevens, to the University of Iowa, where she learned cartography. From there she went to the University of North Carolina to study comparative Indo-European languages. Her 1949 North Carolina master's thesis, The Application of Content Analysis Techniques to Anthropological Field Notes, explored themes in anthropological recording, using part of John Gillin's 1945-57 "Modern Culture of the South Project" as a case study. The essence of her thesis was published as an article in 1950. Trudie then earned her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, with the important cultural evolutionist Leslie White as her mentor.
Dole's marriage to Stevens ended in 1950 with divorce. Her second marriage in 1952, to fellow Michigan graduate student Robert Carneiro, initiated a fruitful intellectual collaboration that lasted after their marriage ended in 1979. Their work together began on their honeymoon in Matanzas Province, Cuba, when they excavated a cave containing evidence of the nonagricultural, pre-Taino culture of western Cuba, often called Siboney or Guanahatabey. It continued in earnest when Trudie and Bob traveled to the Upper Xingu Region of Brazil's Mato Grosso state for ethnographic fieldwork among the until-then unstudied Kuikuru people. They lived with the Kuikuru for seven months (August 1953 to March 1954), far from Western comforts, conveniences, communication, and medicine. They never published a full ethnography of the Kuikuru, but a stream of articles by both Carneiro (e.g., Carneiro 1977, 1983, 1989) and by Dole (1956-57, 1964, 1978a) remain basic to our understanding of these people and their culture, especially their kinship structure, subsistence, and cosmology.
Although Dole intended to write her dissertation on Kuikuru social organization, her committee required her to make it explicitly independent of her husband's research. Undaunted, she developed an evolutionary theory of world kinship (1957). Even though the dissertation remained unpublished, during the 1980s it was one of the most frequently consulted anthropology theses in the Columbia University Library (William L. Balee, personal communication, August 16, 2001). In a series of articles she argued that kinship patterns and nomenclature evolved over time and were associated with particular social structures (1970) or demographic conditions (1969).
In 1957 Trudie and Bob made their home in New York City's Riverdale neighborhood, near Carneiro's family base. Their apartment, which Trudie occupied until 1998, was large and welcoming, full of scholarly books and Amazonian art. It became a meeting place, especially for young scholars working on South American topics. Trudie was active in community affairs, joining the Riverdale Nature Preservancy and contributing to the prize-winning Riverdale Press. Philosophically questing, and a convinced atheist, during the last decade of her life she found a spiritual home in the Riverdale Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture, editing their newsletter, Concern, for several years.
In 1960 and 1961 Dole and Carneiro undertook fieldwork among two communities of Amahuaca Indians living in Peru's Upper Ucayali drainage. One group resided on Chumichinia Island in the Ucayali River and had already been in contact with missionaries and loggers. The other group lived in relative isolation at the headwaters of the Inuya River. Dole's unique ethnography of these people (1998) was preceded by shorter publications by Carneiro (1964, 1970). Among the most important articles derived from Dole's fieldwork was her study of the now-extinct custom of endocannibalism, the practice of eating the cremated remains of the deceased members of a society as a way to appease their spirits and reincorporate their essence back into the community (1962).
Dole taught in adjunct or visiting positions at the New School for Social Research (1958), Columbia University (1958-65), New York University (1961-65), and Vassar College (1965-71), and she was an Associate Professor at SUNY Purchase (1972-74). She also served on several Columbia University dissertation committees. Between 1976 and 1998 her research base was the American Museum of Natural History, where she was a Research Associate in Anthropology. Although she never held a full-time, permanent teaching position, her influence on young scholars exceeded that of many tenured professors. Among her students, research assistants, and proteges who went on to careers in anthropology are William L. Balee, the late S. Brian Burkhalter, Janet Chernela (one of whose works in progress is a volume on gender to be dedicated to Gertrude Dole), and this writer.
An accomplished photographer and pioneering ethnographic filmmaker, Dole's 1957 half-hour color production, The Kuikuru Indians of Central Brazil was distributed by the University of Wisconsin. In 1973 she released a companion film, Amahuaca: A Tropical Forest Society in Southeastern Peru, distributed by the Pennsylvania State University Audio-Visual Services. Her photographs have been published in Sierra Atlantic and have been exhibited in numerous locations.
Long angered by the privileged position that men enjoyed during most of her lifetime, Dole anticipated the Second Wave of feminism. She was a member of the University of Michigan Woman's Research Club during the 1950s. In 1969 she was elected to the Society of Woman Geographers, which in 1999 recognized her work in Amazonian ethnography with its Outstanding Achievement Award. In the 1970s she helped to establish the Ruth Benedict Collective, anthropology's first feminist organization (Chernela 2002). Within these groups she found much intellectual and emotional support. Among her explicitly feminist publications is "The Marriages of Pacho" (1974).
During the 1970s Dole was also a founding member of the New York South Americanists group, a monthly round-table that became the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA). For over two decades she was a member of Columbia University's Seminar on Ecological Systems and Cultural Evolution. She was a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and of the New York Academy of Sciences, Secretary of the American Ethnological Society (1959-60), and a member of Sigma Xi.
By the mid-1970s Dole's interests had begun to shift to oral history. She was a founder of the Society of Woman Geographers Oral History Program, conducting 23 interviews from 1973 to 1988. Among the most notable was her interview of Margaret Mead (Dole and Gurnee 1974). Her interest in women's lives and accomplishments also found expression in Vignettes of Some Early Members of the Society of Woman Geographers in New York (Dole 1978b). Trudie devoted considerable time to interviewing her father, Fletcher Enos Dole, about New England life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unfortunately, this study, "Life and Death of High Hill Farming in Vermont" remains unpublished, but the interview tapes are in the collection of the Vermont Folklife Center, Middlebury, Vermont.
In January of 1998 Gertrude Dole suffered a catastrophic stroke. She never spoke, walked, or wrote again. However, she appreciated the company of friends and family, understood everything she saw and heard, made friends with fellow patients in the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged, and took pleasure in seeing her last work published.
For 50 years Dole remained a staunch cultural evolutionist, never moving into more current theoretical paradigms, nor did she conduct South American fieldwork after 1961. Perhaps for those reasons, the work she published in the last decade of her life seems old-fashioned, although her bibliographies always covered the latest research. Nevertheless, while theory evolves constantly and is rapidly outmoded, data and data-based interpretations live forever. Anyone in the future with a serious interest in the development of Amazonian cultures will need to turn to the works of Gertrude Dole.
REFERENCES CITED
Carneiro, Robert L.
1964 Shifting Cultivation among the Amahuaca of Eastern
Peru. Beitrage zur Volkerkunde Sudamerikas. Festgabe fur Herbert Baldus zum 65. Geburstag. Hans Becher, ed. Volkerkundliche Abhandlungen 1:9-18. Des Niedersachsischen Landesmuseums, Abteilung fur Volkerkunde, Kommissions-verlag Munstermann-Druck GMBH, Hannover.
1970 Hunting and Hunting Magic among the Amahuaca of the Peruvian Montana. Ethnology 9(4):331-341.
1977 Recent Observations on Shamanism and Witchcraft among the Kuikuru Indians of Central Brazil. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 293:215-228.
1983 The Cultivation of Manioc among the Kuikuru of the Upper Xingu. In Adaptive Responses of Native Amazonians. Raymond B. Hames and William T. Vickers, eds. Pp. 65-111. New York: Academic Press.
1989 To the Village of the Jaguars: The Master Myth of the Upper Xingu. Antropologica (Caracas) 72:3-39.
Chernela, Janet
2002 Obituary of Gertrude Dole. Rites of Passage: Death Notices, Anthropology News, May: 33.
Dole, Gertrude E.
1950 A Technique for Analyzing Field Notes. Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 36:205-213.
1957 The Development of Patterns of Kinship Nomenclature Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan.
1956-57 La Cultura de los Indios Kuikuru del Brasil Central: II La Organization Social. RUNA: Archivo para Las Ciencias del Hombre 8(2):185-202.
1962 Endocannibalism among the Amahuaca Indians. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series 2, 24(5):567-573.
1964 Shamanism and Political Control among the Kuikuru. Volkerkundliche Abhandlugen 1:53-62.
1969 Generation Kinship Nomenclature as an Adaptation to Endogamy. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 25(2):105-123.
1970 The Development of Japanese and Anglo-American Kinship. Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences 1968. Ethnology 2:105-123.
1974 The Marriages of Pacho. In Many Sisters: Women in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Carolyn Matthiasson, ed. Pp. 3-35. New York: Free Press.
1978a The Use of Manioc among the Kuikuru: Some Interpretations. In The Nature and Status of Ethnobotany. Richard I. Ford, ed. Pp. 217-247. Ann Arbor: Anthropological Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 67.
1978b Vignettes of Some Early Members of the Society of Woman Geographers in New York. Washington, DC: Society of Woman Geographers.
1998 Amahuaca. Guia Etnografica de la Alta Amazonia, vol. 3. Frederica Barclay and Fernando Santos, eds. Pp. 125-273. Quito: Abya Yala.
Dole, Gertrude E., and Carneiro, Robert L., eds.
1960 Essays in the Science of Culture: In Honor of Leslie A. White. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
Dole, Gertrude E., and Jeanne Gurnee
1974 Interview with Margaret Mead. April 15, 1974. For the Society of Woman Geographers Oral History Program. Manuscript on file, Archives of the Society of Woman Geographers, Washington, DC.
Gillin, John
1945-57 References. Electronic document, http://www.lib. unc.edu/mss/inv/f/Field_Studiesjn_the_Modern_Culture_ of_the_South, accessed March 2003.
Shepherd, Helen B.
1993-94 Interviews with Gertrude E. Dole. October 24, 1993, November 6, 1993, November 7, 1993, November 21, 1993, September 15, 1994. For the Society of Woman Geographers Oral History Program. Manuscript on file, Archives of the Society of Woman Geographers, Washington, DC.
MONICA BARNES
Andean Past
Copyright American Anthropological Association Jun 2003