Du Bois, Cora Alice, 1903-1991

Cora Alice Du Bois, an anthropologist, was one of the first female tenured professors at Harvard. She was a prominent figure in the culture and personality movement within American anthropology, and her fieldwork was among the Wintu in California, the community of Atimelang on the island of Alor in Indonesia, and Bhubaneswar, India.

Du Bois was born October 26, 1903 in Brooklyn, New York. Her family lived in St. Quentin, France and Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Her father died when she was eighteen. Du Bois enrolled at Barnard College in the fall of 1923 and graduated in 1927 with a degree in history. In her senior year at Barnard, Du Bois took an anthropology course taught by Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict. Inheritance from her father allowed her to pursue graduate studies, beginning with a master’s degree in medieval history at Columbia. At Columbia she took a course titled Primitive Religion taught by Ruth Benedict. In 1929 Du Bois began a Ph.D. program in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and studied with Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowrie. Her first fieldwork experience was with the Wintu in northern California. An interest in psychology and anthropology led to a dissertation entitled “Girls’ Adolescence Observations in North America.”

After graduating, Du Bois worked for Kroeber as a research assistant investigating the 1870 Ghost Dance religion among the Paiute and other groups in California, Nevada and Oregon. In 1935 she was awarded a one-year fellowship from the National Research Council to research “Personality Types in Shamanism,” mentored by Edward Sapir. She spent six months at the Harvard Psychological Clinic working with Henry A. Murray as well as observing at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. The following year she moved to New York City to collaborate with Abram Kardiner in a seminar on the relationship of culture to personality at the New York Psychoanalytic Society. From 1937 to 1939 Du Bois conducted fieldwork in the mountainous community of Atimelang, on the island of Alor in Indonesia (then the Netherlands East Indies). After returning to the United States she taught at Sarah Lawrence College and analyzed her data from Alor. In 1944 she published The People of Alor: A Social-Psychological Study of an East Indian Island.

In 1942, Du Bois was hired to work for the Coordinator of Information Office, later renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). She helped analyze intelligence gathered during World War II, specifically as an “area expert” for Southeast Asia and was promoted to chief of the Indonesia section. She requested a transfer to India and was assigned to an office in Kandy in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). She worked with Julia McWilliams, a fellow OSS staff member who later became Julia Child. She also met Jeanne Taylor, who later became her long-term partner. In 1944 Du Bois was made acting chief of Research and Analysis for the Southeast Asia Command. In 1945 she returned to the United States and was employed by the State Department as chief of the South East Asian Branch. In 1946 she was awarded the Exceptional Civilian Award for her service during the war. She was one of many State Department staff members, however, whose loyalty to the country was investigated during the Cold War.

After the State Department, Du Bois returned to academia. She was the first woman to be offered a position in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley in 1951. She declined the offer, however, because she did not want to sign a “loyalty oath,” reminiscent of the cold war suspicions and investigation she had received from the State Department. From 1951 to 1954 she worked for the Institute of International Education. She received several academic offers, including one from Columbia, but accepted the Zemurray professorship of Anthropology at Harvard and Radcliffe. In 1954 Du Bois became the one of the first female tenured professors in the School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. She began to study post-colonial sociocultural change in India and received a National Science Foundation research grant in 1961 to study “Change and Stability in India.” Her project in the town of Bhubaneswar, a small Hindu temple town that had become the new capital of the state of Odisha, continued until 1973. She trained graduate students and hired research assistants from the Department of Anthropology at Utkal University to assist her. Her students published in 1980 and dedicated it to her.

Although Du Bois retired from Harvard in 1969, she continued to direct the Harvard-Bhubaneswar Project until 1973 and continued to teach part-time at Harvard. She served as president of the American Anthropological Association in 1969. Her academic activity, however, diminished as her health began declining in the 1970s, and she died April 7, 1991.