29 Facts About Barbara Myerhoff

Barbara Myerhoff was an American anthropologist, filmmaker, and founder of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

Barbara Myerhoff was born on February 16,1935, in Cleveland, Ohio.

When working with the elderly, Barbara Myerhoff attended to the details of their words, movements, and feelings.

Barbara Myerhoff discovered that they like her grandmother, held tightly to stories as their bodies failed them.

Barbara Myerhoff emphasized that like her grandmother, their storytelling asserted their love of life, involvement with people, and created an alternative world where they had presence and visibility.

Not only did Barbara Myerhoff come to appreciate storytelling from Sofie Mann, she came to value reflexive method.

In Number Our Days, and in the introduction to A Crack in the Mirror, Barbara Myerhoff relayed that each day she and her grandmother would sit by a window in her home and tell stories about the people who lived in the adjoining houses.

Barbara Myerhoff described that framing the world outside with her grandmother was the beginning of understanding reflexivity, as reflexivity required attending to the frames of one's habitual perceptions and actions.

When Barbara Myerhoff was a teenager, she moved with her mother and stepfather from Cleveland to Los Angeles, and eventually began her career as a social scientist.

In 1968, Barbara Myerhoff received her PhD in anthropology from UCLA for her dissertation on Huichol ritual form Barbara Myerhoff began her fieldwork with the Huichol Indians of Northern Mexico in 1965 while a graduate student.

Barbara Myerhoff primarily sought to understand "how the deer-maize-peyote symbols and the peyote hunt rituals gave meaning to Huichol life" She explained that choosing to work with Ramon, a religious leader who served as intermediary between Huichol people and Gods or outsiders, precluded her from spending comparable time with other Huichol people.

Barbara Myerhoff noted, therefore, that her account of the peyote hunt and the deer and maize rituals was not an account of Huchiol culture, religious cosmology, or even the definitive word on the peyote ritual, but rather, was her interpretation of Ramon's interpretation By positioning herself as an interpreter of an interpreter, she maintained a subjective voice and ethic.

Barbara Myerhoff began fieldwork in 1972 with elderly Jews at the Israel Levin Center in Venice, California, supported by a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation given to the Andrus Gerontology Center at the USC.

The project included an anthropological component that Barbara Myerhoff took part in.

Barbara Myerhoff explained that the aged created rituals to ensure continuity and assert their voices and visibility.

Barbara Myerhoff explained that because Jacob framed his own death the community had the tools by which to make meaning of his death at his party.

In writing Jacob's story Barbara Myerhoff took part in continuing his life and vision.

In 1976, Barbara Myerhoff became a full professor at USC and chair of the Anthropology Department; she headed the department until 1980.

The film, Barbara Myerhoff explained, would not deal with the complexities of the center's conflicts, but rather showed the elders at their best.

Barbara Myerhoff wanted to give back to the elders what they had generously given her and gain for them some of the positive visibility they sought.

Notably, while Barbara Myerhoff celebrated the uneducated female elders' zest for life and survival skills, she chose highly educated male leaders as primary informants.

In Number Our Days, Barbara Myerhoff uniquely combined social science analysis and narrative story telling.

Barbara Myerhoff continued her work with the elders of the center until 1981.

Barbara Myerhoff told of the inconsolable senior, Manya, who could not forgive her for leaving her out of the film, and of Rebekkah, who initially, would not sign the play's release form unless her and her husband's real names were used.

Barbara Myerhoff gave gifts and companionship so that they would work with her.

Barbara Myerhoff revealed that decisions of subject representation required continual negotiation.

Barbara Myerhoff recruited the noted ethnographic filmmaker Timothy Asch to teach at USC.

In 1984 Barbara Myerhoff was diagnosed with cancer, and as a result, changed the direction of the project.

Barbara Myerhoff explained that because of her illness, she had to use her work to speak directly to her life.