Katherine Dunham - Academic Anthropologist

Academic Anthropologist

Upon completing her studies at Joliet Junior College, Katharine Dunham moved to Chicago to join her brother Albert, who was attending the University of Chicago as a student of philosophy. In a lecture by Robert Redfield, a professor of anthropology, she learned that much of black culture in modern America had begun in Africa. She consequently decided to major in anthropology and to focus on dances of the African diaspora. Besides Redfield, she studied under some of the great anthropologists of the day, including A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edward Sapir, and Bronisław Malinowski. Under their tutelage, she showed great promise in her ethnographic studies of dance.

In 1935, Dunham was awarded travel fellowships from the Julius Rosenwald and Guggenheim foundations to conduct ethnographic study of the dance forms of the Caribbean, especially as manifested in the Vodun of Haiti, a path also followed by fellow anthropology student Zora Neale Hurston. She also received a grant to work with Professor Melville Herskovits of Northwestern University, whose ideas of African retention would serve as a platform for her research in the Caribbean. Herskovits provided her with invaluable information in preparation for her voyage.

Her stay in the Caribbean began in Jamaica, where she went to live several months in the remote Maroon village of Accompong, deep in the mountains of Cockpit Country. (She later wrote a book, Journey to Accompong, describing her experiences there.) Then she traveled on to Martinique and to Trinidad and Tobago for short stays, primarily to do an investigation of Shango, the African god who remained an important presence in West Indian heritage. Early in 1936 she arrived at last in Haiti, where she remained for several months, the first of her many extended stays in that country throughout the rest of her life.

While in Haiti, Dunham investigated Vodun rituals and made extensive notes on her research, particularly on the dance movements of the participants. Years later, after extensive studies and initiations, she became a mambo (priestess) in the Vodun religion. She also became friends with, among others, Dumarsais Estimé, then a high-level politician, who became president of Haiti in 1949. Somewhat later, she assisted him, at considerable risk to her life, when he was persecuted for his progressive policies and sent in exile to Jamaica after a coup d'état.

Dunham returned to Chicago in late spring of 1936 and in August was awarded a bachelor's degree, a Ph.B. (bachelor of philosophy), with her principal area of study named as "social anthropology." In 1938, using materials collected during her research tour of the Caribbean, Dunham submitted a thesis, "The Dances of Haiti: A Study of Their Material Aspect, Organization, Form, and Function," to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master's degree, but she never completed her course work or took examinations to qualify for the degree. Devoted to dance performance as well as to anthropological research, she realized that she had to choose between them. Although she was offered another grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to pursue her academic studies, she chose dance, gave up her graduate studies, and departed for the bright lights of Broadway and Hollywood.