#barbara myerhoff

[litandlifequotes]

The self is made, not given.

― Barbara Myerhoff

[snapbookreviews]

Summer 2024 Behind-the-Scenes Reading

This summer was the summer of thesis reading.

There’s a very academic bent to this write-up, because, as I mentioned in last quarter’s write up. This was the summer of thesis reading. The write up you see before you is in no small part an extension of my thesis journaling, which was the half of my summer that wasn’t reading, meaning that even the non academic books here have been read in an academic mindset with an academic…

Summer 2024 Behind-the-Scenes Reading

[nationalbook]

‪For Women’s History Month, we’re bringing you #Women Write the World, daily posts of National Book Award honored women authors whose nonfiction writing on matters here and abroad set new standards for American expository literature.

Scholar, documentary maker, and chair of the University of Southern California's anthropology department, Barbara Myerhoff's work throughout the 1970s and 1980s shaped the study of rituals and life histories. In 1975, Myerhoff became a National Book Award Finalist for her landmark study Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians-- the first non-Huichol to participate in the annual rite.

[shrinkrants]

Barbara Myerhoff, an inspiration to narrative therapists

All of the following is from a lovely tribute to Dr. Myerhoff that was put together by the Jewish Women’s Archive.

[Barbara Myerhoff’s] earliest book, Peyote Hunt, delt with the Huichol Indians of Mexico. Guided by shaman-priest Ramon Medina Silva, Myerhoff was the first non-Huichol ever to participate in the annual pilgrimage to gather peyote. Her work explored the journey’s rich symbols and rituals and the sacredness they conferred on Huichol life.

Full image | Source

Declaring that the study of one’s own culture was just as important as traditional anthropological research on the “exotic”, Myerhoff began fieldwork with the elderly Jews of a Venice, California senior center in 1972. In her influential book,Number Our Days, as well as in essays, an Oscar-winningdocumentary film, an arts festival and even a play, Myerhoff showed how these Eastern European immigrants made every day meaningful, surviving amidst hardship, invisibility and poverty.

Myerhoff’s work throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s shaped the anthropological study of ritual and of life histories. She redefined academic and public perceptions of the elderly and was a pioneer in her scholarship on women and religion.

…

Like those she studied, Myerhoff was a master at finding thesacred in the smallest details of everyday experience. From the intimate connections she made in each field interview to thedecade-spanning friendships that characterized her private life, Myerhoff brought a clear intensity and sense of meaning to everything she did.

…

In the following quote, friend Deena Metzger relates a story Myerhoff often told:

"Many years ago, Barbara Myerhoff was teaching a class at the University of Southern California in urban anthropology. As part of the course, the students were required to interview someone very different from themselves, someone with whom they would not normally converse. One young man in the class, who had lived an unusually protected and insulated middle-class life, was having such great difficulty in finding a subject that he considered dropping the course. However, the day the paper was due, he arrived in the class ecstatic.

Full image | Source

“‘I was at my wit’s end,’ he said, ‘when it occurred to me to interview our Guatemalan housekeeper. Naturally, I was very nervous because I had never really spoken to her, and it was rather late at night. But as I had to do the paper, I went to her room and knocked at her door. When I entered, I explained my need, asking if it would be a terrible nuisance for her to tell me something about her life. She looked at me strangely and my heart sank. After what seemed a very, very long time, she said quietly, ‘Every night before I go to sleep, I rehearse the story of my life, just in case someone should ever ask me. Gracias a Dios’.”

[shrinkrants]

In this paper, I will present two instances of cultural mirroring, one event which I call a “definitional ceremony,” the other an inscribed text, a self-portrait of a collectivity. Both of these are found in a highly self-conscious community which continually interprets, depicts, and performs its self-determined reality; both forms are strikingly symbolic and can be unpacked to elucidate the community’s understanding of itself; and both are reflecting surfaces and reflexive, demonstrating the creators’ consciousness of their own interpretive work. The cases I cite, ceremony and inscribed text, were exceptionally successful in the persuasions about the reality they asserted. Their success may be judged by the fact that they reached beyond convincing and moving their own members about the claims they made. They succeeded in interesting and captivating outsider-witnesses as to the validity of their interpretations. These outsider-witnesses—anthropologist and the media—served as further reflecting surfaces, broadcasting, re-presenting what they had been shown, and thus enlarging the people’s original interpretations and giving them a greater public and factual character than they had in their primary form. By pressing into service others who believed, to restate their versions of themselves, they amplified their claims. The people involved eventually succeeded in bring about actual changes, in reversing to some degree their political impotence and invisibility, by the canny deployment of their symbols, consciously manipulated; by their skillful operation on public sentiments; and by their sheer conviction that although they understood their manipulations fully, they were innocently, utterly correct. Ultimately, they displayed “facts” of their life and their meaning, knowing full well that the facts they portrayed were about life not ast was but as it should have been.

Barbara Myerhoff. “Life Not Death in Venice”: its second life. In The Anthropology of Experience edited by Victor Turner and Edward Bruner, University of Illinois Press, 1986.

[jasonkaesmith]

I am keenly interested in how one is "made" as a person and how one "makes a world" by the acts of preservation and witnessing. Finally, there is the issue of "bearing witness," of surviving, of becoming visible and thereby achieving existence in the eyes of others; this is, coming to be.

So something which is very familiar and which seems so simple--storytelling--raises quite profound questions about self-knowledge and self-preservation. By self-preservation I mean, specifically, remaining in being, existence itself. Consciousness, continuity, finally morality--all of these are involved.

Barbara Myerhoff, Stories as Equipment for Living

[shrinkrants]

Barbara Myerhoff, an inspiration to narrative therapists

All of the following is from a lovely tribute to Dr. Myerhoff that was put together by the Jewish Women's Archive.

[Barbara Myerhoff's] earliest book, Peyote Hunt, delt with the Huichol Indians of Mexico. Guided by shaman-priest Ramon Medina Silva, Myerhoff was the first non-Huichol ever to participate in the annual pilgrimage to gather peyote. Her work explored the journey's rich symbols and rituals and the sacredness they conferred on Huichol life.

Full image | Source

Declaring that the study of one's own culture was just as important as traditional anthropological research on the "exotic", Myerhoff began fieldwork with the elderly Jews of a Venice, California senior center in 1972. In her influential book, Number Our Days, as well as in essays, an Oscar-winning documentary film, an arts festival and even a play, Myerhoff showed how these Eastern European immigrants made every day meaningful, surviving amidst hardship, invisibility and poverty.

Myerhoff's work throughout the 1970's and 1980's shaped the anthropological study of ritual and of life histories. She redefined academic and public perceptions of the elderly and was a pioneer in her scholarship on women and religion.

. . .

Like those she studied, Myerhoff was a master at finding the sacred in the smallest details of everyday experience. From the intimate connections she made in each field interview to the decade-spanning friendships that characterized her private life, Myerhoff brought a clear intensity and sense of meaning to everything she did.

. . .

In the following quote, friend Deena Metzger relates a story Myerhoff often told:

"Many years ago, Barbara Myerhoff was teaching a class at the University of Southern California in urban anthropology. As part of the course, the students were required to interview someone very different from themselves, someone with whom they would not normally converse. One young man in the class, who had lived an unusually protected and insulated middle-class life, was having such great difficulty in finding a subject that he considered dropping the course. However, the day the paper was due, he arrived in the class ecstatic.

Full image | Source

"'I was at my wit's end,' he said, 'when it occurred to me to interview our Guatemalan housekeeper. Naturally, I was very nervous because I had never really spoken to her, and it was rather late at night. But as I had to do the paper, I went to her room and knocked at her door. When I entered, I explained my need, asking if it would be a terrible nuisance for her to tell me something about her life. She looked at me strangely and my heart sank. After what seemed a very, very long time, she said quietly, 'Every night before I go to sleep, I rehearse the story of my life, just in case someone should ever ask me. Gracias a Dios'."

[carrieblondestein]

Number Our Days, By Barbara Myerhoff

This book is a must read and the Oscar winning documentary short film that goes along with it is a must see if you are interested in Cultural Anthropology or Advocacy Anthropology. Myerhoff rights familiarly about her field work at a Jewish senior citizens center. They reminded me of my grandparents! You will have so much admiration for them at the end! I read this book for my Intro to Cultural Anthropology class, I never thought I would like it this much!