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Judith R. Shapiro (born January 24, 1942) is a former President of Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women at Columbia University. Prior to her role at Barnard, she had a teaching career as a cultural anthropologist at Bryn Mawr College and The University of Chicago. She served as president of the Teagle Foundation from 2013-2018. [1]
A native of New York City, Shapiro was the first Barnard president educated in the New York public schools. Her mother taught Latin and was a librarian in the school system. Judith Shapiro graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Massachusetts with majors in history and French. [2] [3]
Shapiro first entered the graduate program in history at the University of California, Berkeley in 1963 but soon dropped out, disillusioned by the prospect of a career as a professional historian. Having never taken a course in anthropology, she discovered the writing of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and decided to change fields, applying for a scholarship to do graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University. [4]
Soon, as part of her studies, she began doing “salvage ethnography” fieldwork (a movement of the 1960s aimed at documenting and recording what were believed to be dying indigenous cultures) among the Northern Paiute of the Great Basin region of the United States in eastern California, western Nevada, and southeast Oregon. [5] A few years later, Shapiro carried out a series of fieldwork studies among indigenous groups in Brazil, studying missionization among the Tapirapé and the lives of Yanomami women in the Catrimani area (the villages of Wkata?ut'eri and Surucucu). [6]
She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in New York following the defense of her dissertation, Sex Roles and Social Structure Among the Yanomama Indians of Northern Brazil. [7] Judith Shapiro has also published several scholarly articles on gender differentiation, social theory, and missionization based on her field research. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
In particular, the perspectives she gained while living among the Yanomami women provided a critical counterpoint to the cultural descriptions and theoretical perspectives about the Brazilian tribe that had been championed by the dominant (and controversial) anthropologist of that cultural group, Nicholas Chagnon. [14]
Shapiro began her teaching career at the University of Chicago in 1970, the first woman appointed to the Department of Anthropology, and moved to Bryn Mawr in 1975.
On the Bryn Mawr College faculty, she was named as chair of the Department of Anthropology. After serving as Acting Dean of the Undergraduate College in 1985-6, she was appointed as Provost, the chief academic officer, a position she held from 1986 until 1994.
Shapiro became Barnard College's sixth president in 1994. As President of Barnard, she was also an academic dean within the university as well as a professor of anthropology at Barnard. Upon Shapiro's retirement, Debora L. Spar was appointed to replace Shapiro as Barnard's President effective July 1, 2008.
Shapiro was President of the American Ethnological Society, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. In December 2002, she received the National Institute of Social Sciences’ Gold Medal Award for her contributions as a leader in higher education for women. She was elected in 2003 to membership in the prestigious American Philosophical Society, joining 728 distinguished members nationally in the oldest learned society in the United States.
In 2013, she began her five-year role as president of the Teagle Foundation in New York City, which works to support and strengthen liberal arts education and serve as a catalyst for the improvement of teaching and learning. [15] [16]
Barnard College, officially titled as Barnard College, Columbia University, is a private women's liberal arts college in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1889 by a group of women led by young student activist Annie Nathan Meyer, who petitioned Columbia University's trustees to create an affiliated college named after Columbia's then-recently deceased 10th president, Frederick A. P. Barnard. The college is one of the original Seven Sisters—seven liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States that were historically women's colleges.
Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist.
The Seven Sisters are a group of seven private liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States that are historically women's colleges. Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and Wellesley College are still women's colleges. Vassar College became coeducational in 1969 and Radcliffe College was absorbed in 1999 by Harvard College and now offers programs in advanced study.
Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring. His 1967 ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People became a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses.
Partible paternity or shared paternity is a cultural conceptualization of paternity according to which a child is understood to have more than one father; for example, because of an ideology that sees pregnancy as the cumulative result of multiple acts of sexual intercourse. In societies with the concept of partible paternity this often results in the nurture of a child being shared by multiple fathers in a form of polyandric relation to the mother, although this is not always the case.
Yanomaman, also as Yanomam, Yanomáman, Yamomámi, and Yanomamana, is a family of languages spoken by about 20,000 Yanomami people in southern Venezuela and northwestern Brazil.
Tapirapé are an indigenous people of Brazil who survived the European conquest and subsequent colonization, sustaining the majority of their culture and customs. Residing deep in the Amazon rainforest, they had little direct contact with Europeans until around 1910, and that contact was sporadic until the 1950s.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is an American anthropologist at Barnard College and Columbia University.
Yolanda Murphy was a Polish-born American cultural anthropologist who was the co-author of classic anthropology text Women of the Forest with her husband, Robert F. Murphy. This text was based on field work done in 1952 among the Mundurucu Indians of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.
Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians is a biography of Helena Valero, a mixed-race mestizo woman who was captured in the 1930s as a girl by the Kohorochiwetari, a tribe of the Yanomami indigenous people, living in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil. She lived with the Yanomami for about two decades. While living with the Yanoama, Valero married twice and gave birth to four children. She escaped in 1956 to what she refers to as "the white man" in the country of her birth. After rejection by her family and living in poverty at a mission, Valero chose to return to life with the Yanomami.
Florinda Donner is an American writer and anthropologist known as one of Carlos Castaneda's "witches".
The Yanomami, also spelled Yąnomamö or Yanomama, are a group of approximately 35,000 indigenous people who live in some 200–250 villages in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil.
Ruth Murray Underhill was an American anthropologist. She was born in Ossining-on-the-Hudson, New York, and attended Vassar College, graduating in 1905 with a degree in Language and Literature. In 1907, she graduated from the London School of Economics and began travelling throughout Europe. During World War I, she worked for an Italian orphanage run by the Red Cross.
Alice Mossie Brues was a physical anthropologist.
Catharine "Kitty" McClellan was an American cultural anthropologist who is known for her documentation of the oral history and storytelling typical of Athabascan speaking, Tlingit and Tagish peoples of the Yukon Territory. Catharine's work extended past her academic research, as she also became an advocate for their rights on issues such as the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline debate in 1976. Her husband was fellow anthropologist John Hitchcock whom she married in 1974; he died in 2001 from natural health complications.
Frederica ("Freddy") Annis Lopez de Leo de Laguna was an American ethnologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist influential for her work on Paleoindian and Alaska Native art and archaeology in the American northwest and Alaska.
Millicent Carey McIntosh was an educational administrator and American feminist who led the Brearley School from 1930 to 1947, and Barnard College from 1947 to 1962. The first married woman to head one of the Seven Sisters, she was "considered a national role model for generations of young women who wanted to combine career and family," advocating for working mothers and for child care as a dignified profession.
Martha Ann Chowning was an American anthropologist, ethnographer, archaeologist and linguist known for her work on the peoples, languages, cultures and histories of Oceania.
Margaret Cameron Cobb was a petroleum geologist. She was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931.