26 Facts About Gitel Steed

Gitel Steed supplemented her research with thousands of ethnological photographs of the individuals and groups studied, the quality of which was recognised by Edward Steichen.

Gitel Steed was the youngest of sisters Mary and Helen, who both later emigrated to Israel.

Gitel Steed's father was Jakob Poznanski, a businessman and Polish native who had come to the United States from Belgium.

Gitel Steed's mother was active in the women's suffrage movement and in leftist politics.

Gitel Steed began a BA in banking and finance at New York University, but embraced the Greenwich Village artistic and political life, often singing blues in nightclubs, and dropped out to take a job as a writer with the Works Progress Administration.

Benedict's Patterns of Culture was published in 1934 and had become standard reading for anthropology courses in American universities for years, and Gitel Steed was influenced by Benedict's position in that book that, "A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action", and that each culture chooses from "the great arc of human potentialities" only a few characteristics which become the leading personality traits of the persons living in that culture.

From 1939 to 1941, Gitel Steed undertook research for Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the explorer and writer on Inuit life then planning a two-volume Lives of the Hunters, on diet and subsistence; Gitel Steed worked on the South American Ona, Yahgan, and the Antillean Arawak and Carib, and from this formative experience began a dissertation on hunter-gatherer subsistence.

In 1944, after the Nazi holocaust against the Jews was exposed, Gitel Steed set aside her anthropology and joined the Jewish Black Book Committee, an organization of the World Jewish Congress and other Jewish anti-Fascist groups.

Gitel Steed wrote "The Strategy of Decimation" published in 1946 for the Jewish Black Book Committee.

Gitel Steed taught at Hunter College in New York 1945 and 1947.

Gitel Steed undertook life histories, community self-analysis, and projective tests, then proposed an extended field project in the Toi Shan community to understand the interdependency in social and economic relations between migrants and their kinsmen at home.

Gitel Steed planned "The Effects of Village Institutions on Personality in South China" and had funds granted for its continuation of her Chinese research in China.

Gitel Steed assembled a research team of Dr James Silverberg, Dr Morris Carstairs of Edinburgh University, and her husband Robert Steed, leaving for India in 1949, where there was added a small staff of Indian workers.

Gitel Steed's preparations were aided by her friendship with Gautam Sarabhai, a Gujarati Indian she had met in New York who assisted her in learning Hindustani.

Gitel Steed trained in the use of a professional camera.

Gitel Steed returned to the United States in December 1951 with more than 30,000 pages of handwritten notes and some thousands of ethnological photographs, but infected with malaria, and shortly after her return she developed diabetes which was particularly difficult to control and frequently put her in hospital.

Gitel Steed's reputation rests on her unpublished notes; the thousands of pages of interviews, observations, projective test results, life histories, and villagers' paintings, most of which are now in the special collections of the University of Chicago Libraries.

In 1954 Gitel Steed lectured on "The Child, Family and Community in Rural Gujarat" for the University of Chicago Seminar on Village India.

Gitel Steed presented in India symposia at meetings of the American Anthropological Association, and the Social Science Research Council.

Gitel Steed's one publication of note during this period was a chapter "Notes on an Approach to a Study of Personality Formation in a Hindu Village in Gujarat", illustrating cultural and institutional influences on the personality of a single Rajput landowner, for a volume Village India: studies in the little community edited by Alan Beals and Dr McKim Marriott, published in 1955; Steed's chapter has been held up as a model for the treatment of personality problems and culture in India.

Gitel and husband Robert Steed opened the doors of their house on West 23rd Street to visitors who included Ruth Bunzel, Sula Benet, Vera Rubin, Stanley Diamond, Alexander Lesser, Margaret Mead, and Conrad Arensberg.

In 1970 Gitel Steed revisited Bakrana, its population then doubled since her last visit, to observe the impact of the transforming politics in India.

Gitel Steed's photographs were republished in the New York Times, and featured in the St Louis Post Despatch.

That same year Gitel Steed held the exhibition Child Life in Village India at the New Canaan Art Association Gallery in Connecticut and another, Cradle to Grave in Village India at the Hudson Guild Gallery in New York.

Gitel Steed died in the night of September 6,1977, evidently from a heart attack, at the age of sixty-three.

Gitel Steed was survived by her husband and supporter for thirty years, artist Robert Steed, and by her son, Andrew.