Student-Professor Relationships?

The January 2008 SAA Archaeological Record contained a self-report by Lewis Binford on his retirement activities. I found this piece disturbing in its apparent glorification of a romantic student-professor (or advisor) relationship. While I am not inherently opposed to such relationships, as long as they are consensual, I found the tone of the piece to be boastful and inappropriate for a professional newsletter.

On a positive note, I have used this piece in discussing professionalism with senior undergraduates. I do not tell them to avoid romantic relationships with their supervisors. Instead, we talk about why such relationships may not be a good idea.

Interestingly, while I know many female archaeologists who have become romantically involved with their male professors, I don't know any male archaeologists who have become romantically involved with their female professors.

Eleanor Burke Leacock

After returning home from the AAA, I was browsing through Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists by Jerry Moore (Alta Mira Press, 1997). In line with the topic of our roundtable I noted that of the 21 chapters, each covering a prominent theorist, only four feature women. They include not suprisingly Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, as well as Mary Douglas and Eleanor Burke Leacock. The last stands out particularly to me given her theoretical perspective and that she studied Native Americans and the fur trade, and the title of her chapter, “Feminism, Marxism and History,” made me give it a second look.

Burke Leacock’s (1922-1987) experiences remain pertinent today to remind us of just how great the strides of women in anthropology have been. Moore notes,

“She obtained her first tenure track position fifteen years after completing her Ph.D. at Columbia. In contrast, her male contemporaries at Columbia – including fellow radicals Elman Service, Morton Fried, and Stanley Diamond - were quickly hire by universities. In the pages of the International Dictionary of Anthropologists (Winter 1981), there is not even a brief mention of Eleanor Burke Leacock.
“Why did this occur? Simply because, as Stanley Diamond (1993:114) writes, “Being an honest scholar, a radical and a feminist, the going was rough.” But the most difficult barrier Eleanor Burke Leacock faced was simply being a woman in American society,” (p. 202).

Moore goes on to quote Burke Leacock’s own description of her undergraduate career under professor Alfred Tozzer, “who announced to his class of Radcliffe women “bluntly and umsympathetically, that they should not go into anthropology unless they had independent incomes, because they would never get jobs” (Leacock 1993:7),” (p. 202 in Moore).

Among her contributions she demonstrated that the holding private property, that is, hunting territories, by the Innu, as seen in the late eighteenth century was the result of an historical process of involvement with the fur trade. In addition she studied the place of women in non-Western, non-capitalistic societies and found that relegating them to inferior status employed extrapolating from a Western bias.

Amazingly, or perhaps not, Burke Leacock has recently been subject to the discrediting efforts of at least one individual online who claims to look more closely at her evidence than she did and claims to put it into context, which he claims she did not, thereby “debunking” her research into the place of women in egalitarian societies. While I am loath to give attention to such detractors who base their criticizes on such limited “evidence,” I do so to point out that even today a well researched feminist perspective remains the target of those who style themselves as sceptics. However, one does not have to look beyond the opening lines of the detractor’s blog to see that his argument stems as much from his distaste for her Marxist theoretical framework as any supposed research flaw.

Burke Leacock received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1952 where Ruth Benedict taught, but I have not to date seen any publications that indicate Benedict served as a mentor. She made her own way at a time when Marxist theory was at least as unpopular, and dangerous to espouse, as feminist theory, and her example remains inspiring.

By Misty Jackson, Ph.D.
Arbre Croche Cultural Resources


For more on Eleanor Burke Leacock go to http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/theory_pages/Leacock.htm. Kristin Alten who posted the biography also provides a bibliography of much of Burke Leacock’s publications.

References cited in Moore:

Diamond, Stanley
1993 Eleanor Leacock’s Political Vision. In From Labrador to Samoa: The Theory and Practice of Eleanor Burke Leacock. C. Sutton, ed. Pp. 111-114. Arlington, Virginia: Association for Feminist Anthropology/American Anthropological Association.

Leacock, Eleanor Burke
1993 On Being an Anthropologist. In F From Labrador to Samoa: The Theory and Practice of Eleanor Burke Leacock. C. Sutton, ed. Pp. 1-31. Arlington, Virginia: Association for Feminist Anthropology/American Anthropological Association.

Welcome

At a recent roundtable at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, panelists discussed the current status of women in archaeology, identified some of the problems that female scholars are facing, and then proposed some potential solutions.  In particular, we identified the overwhelming need for a community and promotes collaboration and mentoring to support female scholars.  This blog is a platform for continuing important discussions relevant to women in archaeology, providing an online community to support female scholars, and encouraging the of feminizing archaeology.