Gender, race, and life writing in In her book City of Women and journal articles she recorded her observations on matrifocality and gender variance and portrayed Afro-Brazilian culture as dynamic and innovative. We must understand the individual as living in his culture; and the culture as lived by individuals. Franz Boas , p. Such information, as it were, tests out a culture by showing its workings in the life history of a carrier of that culture.
Ruth Benedict [], p. During graduate training, she conducted research in indigenous North American communities, where, like other Boasian anthropologists, her approach to fieldwork was to immerse herself in everyday life and to work with key informants to record individual life histories and communally shared stories that were repositories of local knowledge. City of Women is a personal account of her daily life in Salvador. The book offers vivid descriptions of individuals and accounts of conversations.
In City of Women , Landes celebrates the cultural dynamism and innovativeness of Afro-Brazilian shantytown dwellers. Herskovits and Ramos vehemently criticized Landes and her work, helping to ensure her a marginal place in the discipline. She secured a permanent academic appointment at a Canadian university in when she was 57 years old.
A second edition of City of Women was published in after her death. My intent in this paper, however, is not to review the literature, but instead to recall the era of anthropology in Brazil in the s and the contested terrain that Landes entered when she chose to write about the then-little-addressed topics of women, gender, race, and social inequality.
Her parents, Joseph Schlossberg and Anna Grossman, were Russian Jewish immigrants active in the trade union and labor Zionist movements. Joseph Schlossberg was co-founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and devoted his life to organizing for labor rights.
