Margaret Lantis facts for kids

Margaret Lantis (born September 1, 1906 – died September 8, 2006) was an American anthropologist, a person who studies human societies and cultures. She was also an expert on the Inuit people (sometimes called "Eskimos") and a writer.

Early Life and Learning

Margaret Lantis loved to learn. She got her first degree from the University of Minnesota in 1930. She studied both Spanish and anthropology. After that, she went to the University of California, Berkeley to continue her anthropology studies. She earned her Ph.D., which is a very high degree, in 1939.

At that time, it was sometimes hard for women to find many jobs in anthropology. Margaret Lantis taught at different universities for many years. She was known for being very good at ethnographic research. This means she was skilled at studying and describing different cultures by living with them and observing their ways of life. In 1964, she was chosen to be the president of the American Ethnological Society.

Exploring Arctic Cultures

Margaret Lantis spent a lot of time studying cultures in the Arctic region. Her detailed research helped other anthropologists learn about these groups, especially the Inuit people, who had not been studied much before.

She wrote many articles and notes from her fieldwork. One of her most famous books is Eskimo Childhood and Interpersonal Relationships (1960). This book shares the life stories of 18 people from Nunivak Island. This island is located in the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska. The book showed the challenges faced by the small community of about 200 Inuit people living there.

Lantis visited Nunivak Island three times to gather information for her book. Her first trip was in 1939-1940. She went back in 1946 and again in 1956 to update her research. She gathered personal stories and even used special tests to understand the personalities of 12 men and 6 women on the island. Her goal was to give an inside look at Nunivak culture and how people there thought and felt. Because she was one of the first anthropologists to work with these Alaskan cultures, she became known as a top expert on the Inuit people of Alaska.

Understanding Everyday Culture

Margaret Lantis also wrote about "vernacular culture." This idea focuses on how people behave in everyday situations and specific places. For example, she looked at how people act when they go to a bus station or attend an event after a football game. She argued that there are certain ways of behaving that people expect in these different situations.

She listed several parts of vernacular culture, like shared values, common knowledge, and how people communicate. She believed that understanding these everyday behaviors helps us study complex cultures better. Her ideas about "vernacular culture" became important in many fields, including architecture.

Career Highlights

After getting her Ph.D., Margaret Lantis worked for several government groups. She spent almost ten years with the United States Public Health Service. In these jobs, she studied how people in rural communities lived, their health, and their local economies.

Teaching and Writing

In 1965, Lantis became a professor of anthropology at the University of Kentucky. By 1967, she earned tenure, which means she had a permanent teaching position. She taught there until she retired in 1974.

During her time at the University of Kentucky, she wrote many important books and articles. These included works about the social life and religious customs of the Nunivak Island culture. In 1970, the University of Kentucky Press published a collection of papers she edited. This collection was about a newer field in anthropology called ethnohistory, which combines history and anthropology. Lantis wrote a chapter in this book about the Aleut people.

Focus on Alaska

Towards the end of her career, she kept writing about the people of Nunivak Island and the larger Alaskan area, as well as the Southern Yukon. She wrote about how communities change, like in her work Factionalism and Leadership: a case study of Nunivak Island. This book looked at how leaders helped the Nunivak people move from a hunting and fishing way of life to a mix of traditional and modern economies in just one generation.

She also studied how cultural changes can affect people's health. For example, her paper Changes in the Alaskan Eskimo Relation of Man to Dog and Their Effect on two Human Diseases discussed how changes in culture influenced certain health issues among the Alaskan Inuit and Yuit people.

Committees and Awards

While teaching, Lantis was also very active in different committees and societies. She was president of the American Ethnological Society from 1964 to 1965. She also served on the Polar Research Committee of the National Academy of Sciences. From 1973 to 1974, she was elected president of the Society for Applied Anthropology.

She was the only woman on any of the seven panels of the Committee on the Alaska Earthquake. This committee started its work after the big Good Friday Earthquake in 1964. Her report on the earthquake, called Impact of the Earthquake on Health and Mortality, was very important. It was one of the first studies in anthropology to look at how disasters affect people. Her work helped the University of Kentucky become known for its focus on applied anthropology, which means using anthropology to solve real-world problems. She later wrote another book about the earthquake, When the Earthquake Hits Home, which explored how families in Anchorage dealt with the disaster.

Later Life and Legacy

Margaret Lantis was known as a "specialist in Arctic and Subarctic anthropology." Her life's work greatly added to what we know about the personalities and cultures of Alaska Natives.

She retired from teaching at the University of Kentucky in 1974. However, she stayed involved in the anthropology community for many years. She helped younger scholars who were studying the Arctic by giving advice and sharing her research notes. For example, she encouraged the publication of Nunivak Island Eskimo (Yuit) Technology and Material Culture (1989) by James Vanstone. This book used a lot of Lantis's notes and observations from her time on the island in 1939-1940.

Lantis also gave many of the artifacts she collected during her research in the Arctic to the University of Kentucky Museum of Anthropology. These included a collection of Nunivak children's toys.

She received many honors for her work. She was made an honorary life member of the Alaska Anthropology Association and received a lifetime achievement award in 1993. In 1987, she received the Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology. This award recognized her many years of using anthropology to help people through her public service work.

Margaret Lantis never learned to drive a car, but she was very good at using a dog sled! She never married, choosing instead to dedicate her life to her work as an anthropologist. She continued to be interested in current events related to Alaska Natives and inspired new generations of scholars well into her nineties. She passed away at the age of 100.