This item is the first working draft of the book published in 1959. Arrangement is different from published version, and lacks correspondence with Edward Sapir. More letters, fuller texts, fuller identification of references in this version, however. Includes correspondence of Ruth Benedict with Franz Boas, Reo Fortune, and Margaret Mead.

Barbara Babcock (Department of English) and Nancy Parezo (American Indian Studies and Anthropology) are members of the faculty at the University of Arizona. Their oral history of women anthropologists in the southwestern United States was published in 1988 as Daughters of the Desert : Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest, 1880-1980. This related essay includes brief biographical discussions of over 30 women who worked in the southwestern United States between 1880 and 1945. It was published as "The leading edge: Women anthropologists in the native American Southwest, 1880-1945," El Palacio 92 (1986)

The collection includes material relating to government, history, festivals, customs, games, etc. of the Ojibwe people. Also includes comments on the language; vocabulary, some items with English glosses; lists of bands and locations; and photographs of people, activities, dwellings, canoes, etc.

These items include notes on "primitive economics" (Incan) for A. Irving Hallowell and from seminars with Linton Satterthwaite (on Mayan architecture), E. B. Howard (on problems of the Clovis site in New Mexico), and others at the University of Pennsylvania. There are also notes taken at the 1936 meeting of the American Anthropological Association of papers by various anthropologists in attendance, including Ruth Benedict, Frederica de Laguna, Waiter Dyk, William N. Fenton, Alfred V. Kidder, David G. Mandelbaum, George P. Murdock, Arthur C. Parker, Elsie Clews Parsons, Gladys A. Reichard, William A. Ritchie, Linton Satterthwaite, Gene Weltfish, and others regarding Cree, Flathead, Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), Kaingang (Southern Brazil), Kiowa, Mayan, Natchez, Navajo, Ojibwa, Pawnee, Pueblos, Sahaptin, Saulteaux, Siouan, Tarascan, Tonawanda (Seneca), Zuni, etc.

Material collected by Muriel Rukeyser in the late 1940s and 1950s for a proposed biography of Franz Boas, including original manuscript materials of Boas, correspondence between Boas and Rukeyser, biographical data, early family letters and documents relating to him, school and military records, family reminiscences of Boas, and some professional correspondence. There is also material specifically related to the publication of Rukeyser's biography, including notes, a synopsis of the book, and correspondence with publishers and funding agencies. There are also some of Boas' and others' publications.

William S. Willis Jr. (1921-1983), anthropologist and ethnohistorian, contributed significantly to the understanding of the dynamics of inter-cultural exchange in a multicultural context. After receiving his doctorate from Columbia University, he was hired as the first African American professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. Upon resigning in protest from SMU in 1972, he returned to teach at Columbia University until 1975. His final years were spent studying Boasian anthropology. The collection includes correspondence, lecture notes, manuscripts of Willis' writings, and working notes. Of note, are the memos concerning his leaving Southern Methodist University and his extensive research notes on Franz Boas' views on race relations in America.

Edward Adamson Hoebel (1906-1993) was an anthropologist and educator best known for his studies of the legal systems of pre-literate societies. Graduating from Columbia, where he had studied with Ralph Linton, Franz Boas, and Ruth Benedict, Hoebel early became a scholar on the legal cultures of the Plains Indians, including the Comanches and Cheyennes. After appointments at New York University and the University of Utah, he spent the majority of his academic career at the University of Minnesota, from which he became emeritus professor in 1972. The E. Adamson Hoebel Papers (1925-1993) contain correspondence, subject files, manuscripts of published and unpublished works by Hoebel, papers by colleagues and students, Hoebel's research notes, course materials, and photographs.

Elsie Clews Parsons (1875-1941) was trained as a sociologist at Columbia University, but made her greatest achievements in the fields of anthropology and folklore. Parsons' early works in the field of sociology dealt primarily with gender roles, conventions of society, and the effect of society's pressures on the individual. After a trip to the American Southwest with her husband in 1910, Parsons' interests turned to anthropology. She began making field trips to Arizona and New Mexico and, under the influence of her friend Franz Boas, Parsons recorded in meticulous detail data on social organization, religious practices, and folklore of the Southwest Indians. Concurrently, Parsons conducted research in folklore, concentrating on folk tales of Afro-Americans and Caribbean peoples. She was active in a number of professional associations and was the associate editor of the Journal of American Folklore from 1918 until her death. The Parsons Papers were acquired as two separate accessions and remains organized in two distinct subcollections. Subcollection I (572 P35), acquired in 1949, contains approximately 12 linear feet of materials focused on Parsons' career in anthropology. Subcollection II, acquired in 1985, consists of 26.25 linear feet of materials divided into ten series, covering a larger scope of Parsons' life, including family and personal correspondence.

An archaeological anthropologist and linguist, John Alden Mason spent the majority of his career at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. After receiving his undergraduate degree at Penn in 1907, Mason received a doctorate at Berkeley (1911) for his ethnographic work on the Salinan Indians of California, but his diverse interests in later years ran the gamut from Puerto Rican folklore to Piman languages and cultures (including Pima, Papago, Pima Bajo, Northern and Southern Tepehuan, and Tepecano), Mayan, Aztec, and Incan archaeology, and the languages of South American Indians. Mason was curator of the University Museum at Penn from 1926 until his retirement in 1958. The Mason Papers include both in-coming and outgoing correspondence, linguistic material, notes, and photographs relating to Mason's work in the southwestern U.S., northern Mexico, and South America. Centered on the years after Mason's return to Philadelphia in 1926, the collection covers all aspects of Mason's professional life, from reports on field work to answering casual questions referred to him through the University Museum to data and analyses on Piman and other languages. The collection also contains voluminous files relating to the Mason's editorship of the American Anthropologist (bulk: 1945-1948). Of special note are a series of class notes (1908-1910) kept by Mason for course work in ethnology, archaeology, and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania under Edward Sapir and Frank Speck.