Barbara Myerhoff

Barbara Myerhoff (February 16, 1935 – January 7, 1985) was an American anthropologist, filmmaker, and founder of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

Throughout her career as an anthropologist, Barbara Myerhoff contributed to major methodological trends which have since become standards of social cultural anthropology. These methods include reflexivity, narrative story telling, and anthropologists' positioning as social activists, commentaries, and critics whose work extends beyond the academy. Barbara Myerhoff was born on February 16, 1935, in Cleveland, Ohio. Her maternal "storytelling grandmother" Sofie Mann, a transformational childhood and adolescent figure for Myerhoff, helped to raise her. Myerhoff attributed Sofie Mann's influence to her early appreciation of people's life stories because Mann taught her that if one looked closely, every person had an interesting story. Instilling what would later become Myerhoff's anthropological ideology and method, narrative/storytelling, Sofie Mann also helped prepare her for working with the elderly people at the Aliyah Center in Venice California, the subjects of Number Our Days. When working with the elderly, Myerhoff attended to the details of their words, movements, and feelings. She also discovered that they like her grandmother, held tightly to stories as their bodies failed them. Myerhoff emphasized that like her grandmother, their storytelling asserted their love of life, involvement with people, and created an alternative world where they had presence and visibility.

Not only did Myerhoff come to appreciate storytelling from Sofie Mann, she also came to value reflexive method. In Number Our Days, and in the introduction to A Crack in the Mirror, Myerhoff relayed that each day she and her grandmother would sit by a window in her home and tell stories about the people who lived in the adjoining houses. As she explained, "we imaginatively entered in turn, making their stories into a commentary on our own lives." One particularly memorable day of watching out the widow began when frost on the window blocked their view. Assuaging Myerhoff's distress, her grandmother made a viewing hole by warming a penny in her palm and pressing it against the window. Seeing the world through a framed narrow perspective deeply moved Myerhoff to begin to think about the significance of isolating, attending to, and framing a piece of life. She described that framing the world outside with her grandmother was the beginning of understanding reflexivity, as reflexivity required attending to the frames of one's habitual perceptions and actions.

When Myerhoff was a teenager, she moved with her mother and stepfather from Cleveland to Los Angeles, and eventually began her career as a social scientist. In 1958, she received a BA in sociology from the University of California and an MA in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 1963. She then entered UCLA's Anthropology PhD program. At UCLA, Hilda Kuper, a student of Malinowski, became a beloved teacher of Myerhoff. Myerhoff and Kuper would remain friends and correspondents throughout her life. As many anthropologists who practiced in the 1960s and 1970s, Myerhoff was influenced by Victor Turner, Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Mircea Eliade, Max Gluckman, Arnold Van Gennep, Alan Watts, and C.G. Jung, all of whom wrote on symbolic systems of ritual, myth, and religious cosmology.

In 1968, Myerhoff received her PhD in anthropology from UCLA for her dissertation on Huichol ritual form Myerhoff began her fieldwork with the Huichol Indians of Northern Mexico in 1965 while a graduate student. She and her colleague Peter Furst became the first non-Huichol people to embark on the peyote hunt, an annual ritual pilgrimage to the sacred land of Wirikuta in search of peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus plant. Myerhoff interpreted this rite to be a recovery of the Huichol peoples' original condition of oneness; she viewed this quest as universal and understood the Peyote Hunt to be one example among many "returns to paradise." As she explained, "the peyote hunt provides one version of the fulfillment of a panhuman quest—the desire for total unity among all creatures and all people—and accordingly we find in it significance beyond the specificity of Huichol religion and world view."

Although Myerhoff argued for universal application of the peyote hunt's symbolic meaning, the study itself was deliberately narrow. Myerhoff primarily sought to understand "how the deer-maize-peyote symbols and the peyote hunt rituals gave meaning to Huichol life" She explained that choosing to work with Ramon, a religious leader who served as intermediary between Huichol people and Gods or outsiders, precluded her from spending comparable time with other Huichol people. She noted, therefore, that her account of the peyote hunt and the deer and maize rituals was not an account of Huchiol culture, religious cosmology, or even the definitive word on the peyote ritual, but rather, was her interpretation of Ramon's interpretation By positioning herself as an interpreter of an interpreter, she maintained a subjective voice and ethic. Simultaneously, she asserted that her main purpose was to document the "native model" and to salvage the rituals of an endangered people. Through engaged participant observation, constant verification, and correction she tried to stay as close to Ramon's meaning as she could. Nevertheless, through narrative style she maintained the dialogue between herself, Ramon, and his wife Lupe throughout the book so that she, alongside them, was an observable character. The final book, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians, published in 1974, was nominated for a National Book Award.