Helen Frances Codere was an American cultural anthropologist who received her BA from the University of Minnesota in 1939 and her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University where she studied with Ruth Benedict.
10 Facts About Helen Codere
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Helen Codere was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but soon after moved to Minnesota.
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Helen Codere never married and stated that "single women lack some of the freedom and mobility of single men; they are objects of even greater curiosity and scrutiny in a world in which going two by two is projected", although she did have a longtime companion, Marion Tait.
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Helen Codere is known for being a "renaissance woman," by her friends.
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Helen Codere was one of the first women anthropologists to hold a senior faculty position in a university.
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Helen Codere had donated all of her land to the Vermont Land Trust and most of her books to the library at the University of Vermont's anthropology department.
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Helen Codere documented that there was a "major shift that took place was the distribution of property and vigor of potlatches for social prestige and the co-existent decrease and final extinction of warfare and physical violence" which the Kwakiutl define as "fighting with property" rather than with weapons.
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Ruth Benedict 8.
Helen Codere says that this change can have profound implications not only for an understanding of the Kwakiutl people but "for knowledge of human potentialities for change away from destructiveness, at a point in the history of the world when such a change is necessary".
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Helen Codere collected forty-eight autobiographies of Rwandan men and women: Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa of different ages, education levels, economic statuses and occupations, and along with other research that had been done, she studied the social change, focusing more on the problems and social tensions, rather than the functional theory of society.
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Helen Codere viewed society has a "complex adaptive system" which was essentially a "bundle of relations".