Steed, Gitel Poznanski

Gitel P. Steed was born Gertrude Poznanski in 1914, in Columbus, Ohio, to Sara Auerbach and Jakob Poznanski. Her mother was a native of Columbus and her father, a businessman, immigrated from Poland. Shortly after her birth, Steed family moved to the Bronx, New York. She eventually attended Waleigh High School, and as a teenager adopted the Yiddish name Gitel.

In 1932 Gitel entered New York University (NYU), majoring in banking and finance, but dropped out after her first year. She later returned to NYU and in 1938 received her B.A. degree with honors in sociology and anthropology. While attending NYU Gitel lived in Greenwich Village where she developed friendships with many including the painter Rafael Soyer. She is the subject of at least two paintings by Soyer, "Girl in a White Blouse," 1932, which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and "Two Girls," 1933, which is in the collections of the Smart Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of Chicago. It was at this same time that Gitel met her future husband, the artist Robert Steed.

In 1938, with financial support arranged by Ruth Benedict, she entered graduate school in anthropology at Columbia University, where she studied under Benedict for three years. During this time Gitel undertook the first two of four ethnological projects that marked her career in anthropology. The first of these projects, under the direction of Ruth Benedict, she conducted among the Blackfoot Indians in Montana. Then, from 1939 to 1941 she worked with Vilhjalmur Stefannsson on Inuit in Greenland, studying hunter-gatherer diet and subsistence patterns. This was to be the basis of her dissertation, but she never completed the Greenland project and only much later (1969) completed her dissertation, basing it on her India research. In 1941 she left Columbia and worked until 1943 as the senior editor of information at Yale University's Institute of Human Relations.

In 1944 she was invited to join the Jewish Black Book Committee. A group of writers and researchers supported by the World Jewish Congress and other anti-fascist Jewish organizations, this committee documented in detail the Nazi death campaign against Jews in Europe during World War II. The committee compiled papers subsequently published as The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People (1946). Gitel contributed a 130-page section called "Strategies of Decimation" in which she documented Nazi Germany's policies and techniques of extermination.

In 1945 and again in 1947 she taught at Hunter College in New York. In 1946 she taught at Fisk University and there edited the journal Race Relations. In 1947 she married Robert Steed, and in 1953 gave birth to their only child, Andrew Hart Steed.

She began her third ethnological project in 1947 when she was invited to join the Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures Project. In this project, co-directed by Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, Steed's assignment was to work among Chinese immigrants in New York City. Some of the results of Steed's work were published in Mead and Metraux, The Study of Culture at a Distance (1953).

After a similar China project had to be canceled, Steed formulated her fourth ethnographic project, a field study in India. Funding was received through a grant from the Department of the Navy and Steed was appointed Director of the Columbia University Research in Contemporary India Project. Upon her return to the U.S. from India in 1951, Steed presented her findings in several seminars. The most in-depth of these seminars was a lecture series, run by Abram Kardiner, that she gave at Columbia University in 1953-1954. Due to a disagreement between Steed and Kardiner, the funding for the India project was discontinued.

Steed joined the faculty of Hofstra College in New York in 1962. While teaching at Hofstra, she completed her dissertation at Columbia University, "Caste and Kinship in Gujarat: The Social Use of Space" (1969). In 1970 she returned to Kasandra for four months, with her husband, at which time she interviewed many of her old informants about social change in the village. Steed remained on the faculty of Hofstra University until she died in 1977, at the age of 63.

INDIA FIELD PROJECT

The India field project was a team effort carried out between 1949 and 1951 in three different villages in northwestern and north central India. The primary research team included Steed, as Project Director; an anthropology graduate student, James Silverberg; a British psychiatrist, G. Morris Carstairs; and Steed's husband, Robert Steed. Silverberg's wife Donna also joined the team for some time, as did an assistant researcher, Cecil B. Massey. They were joined in India by a team of Indian interpreters and researchers. These included Bhagvati Masher and Kantilal Mehta, who worked as interpreters; Nandlal Dosajh, a psychologist; N. Prabhudas, an economist who conducted the land utilization survey; and Jerome D'Souza as cook. In the second year of research, the team also included an Indian assistant, Tahera, as well as Americans Grace Langley and John Koos. The three villages were "Kasandra" in Gujarat state, "Nawabpur" in Uttar Pradesh, and "Deoli" in Rajasthan. The villages were referred to by these pseudonyms throughout the project. Steed worked primarily in Kasandra for one year (1950). She started work in Nawabpur as well but had to cut her stay there short because of illness. James Silverberg worked in both Kasandra (1950) and in Nawabpur (1951), staying in each place for one year. Carstairs worked almost exclusively in Deoli. He worked there for approximately six months, alone but for one brief visit by Steed in the summer of 1950.

Steed and her team of researchers made use of a variety of fieldwork methods, gathering data both on individual psychology and on social institutions. Most of their data on individual psychology they derived from detailed life histories collected from a sample of informants. These life histories comprised long sets of free-ranging interviews that were designated "personal narration," a battery

of psychodiagnostic tests (whose validity they subsequently questioned and dismissed), as well as watercolors and drawings by both adults and children. Data on social institutions were collected through survey methods as well as participant observation. They completed thorough surveys on land tenure and economic relations, and collected data on economic, political, religious, kinship, and caste organization.

Steed formulated the project within the broader agenda of culture and personality studies in anthropology. The theoretical and methodological agenda of culture and personality studies was to study the relation between individual personality and the socio-cultural context of their enculturation. Steed was interested in studying the extent to which Indian social institutions determined individual behavior and personality. Conversely, she also asked if innate psychological or personal aspects influenced institutions. She analyzed both the cultural and the psychological aspects of character formation and was interested in where these two aspects met.

In order to judge the relation of social institutions to personality formation, the researchers required a basis for comparison, and thus they chose three villages with different institutional frameworks. Kasandra and Deoli were predominantly Hindu villages, while Nawabpur was predominantly Muslim. Each of the three villages had a different land tenure system and political history as well as being linguistically distinct.

From the guide to the Steed, Gitel P. Papers, 1907-1980, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)