Jean Briggs facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jean Briggs
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| Born | May 28, 1929 Washington, D.C., United States
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| Died | July 27, 2016 (aged 87) |
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Jean L. Briggs (born May 28, 1929 – died July 27, 2016) was an important American researcher. She studied people and cultures as an anthropologist. She also studied languages as a linguist. Briggs was a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada.
Her most famous book was Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. This book came out in 1970. It was based on 18 months of her research. She lived with Inuit families on the Arctic coast in the 1960s.
Contents
About Jean Briggs
Jean Briggs was born in Washington, D.C., USA. This happened on May 28, 1929. She was the oldest of four children. Her father was a church leader.
She grew up in Maine and Newton, Massachusetts. Jean Briggs went to Vassar College and earned her first degree in 1951. Later, she got her master's degree from Boston University in 1960. She then earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967.
Life in Canada
In 1967, Briggs moved to Canada. She went to the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. She joined the Anthropology Department at Memorial University. This university is in St. John's. She taught there for 47 years.
She learned from Cora Du Bois, another famous anthropologist.
Studying the Inuit People
In 1970, Jean Briggs published her most well-known book. It was called Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. She wrote it after living with an Inuit family. She stayed with them for 18 months in the 1960s. This was along the Chantrey Inlet.
In her book, she wrote about the Inuit culture. She also described their language and daily life. This book is still very important for studying cultures and people. When she first arrived, Briggs knew very few Inuit words. She said she only knew six words of Inuktitut.
More Books and Research
In 1988, Briggs published another book. It was called Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old. This book won two awards. One was the Boyer Prize. The other was the Victor Turner Prize.
Jean Briggs also created a very important dictionary. It was a bilingual dictionary for the Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut language. This dictionary was published in 2015. Briggs started collecting these words in 1970. She gathered and saved 34,000 words in the dictionary. Before 2015, no dictionary had ever recorded this specific Inuit language.
Several researchers from Memorial University and the University of Toronto helped her. They worked together to create this dictionary.
Most of her research focused on the Canadian Inuit. But she also visited other groups. These included the Alaskan Inupiat and Siberian Yupik people.
Jean Briggs passed away on July 27, 2016. She was 87 years old.
Awards and Recognition
Briggs received the Lifetime Achievement Award. This was from the Society for Psychological Anthropology. She also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bergen in Norway. She was also a Royal Society of Canada fellow.
