Helen Codere

Helen Frances Codere (September 10, 1917 – June 5, 2009) 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. She is best known for her work with the Kwakwaka'wakw people of coastal British Columbia, Canada, known formerly as the "Kwakiutl."

Her academic years spanned over fifty years and included professorships at Vassar College, the University of British Columbia, Northwestern University, Bennington College, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Personal life

Helen Codere was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but soon after moved to Minnesota. She 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.

Her vacation place in Vermont closely resembles her childhood interest of living like the author Henry David Thoreau had once done – it had no running water, but a system of barrels with gutters along the two cabins. Codere favored khaki-type trousers and casual shirts. She is known for being a "renaissance woman," by her friends. "She was extremely accurate with words, had a great sense of humor, a compelling laugh, and was fiercely independent. She was adamant about reading the paper every day, and always looked ready to go on a hike". Her academic appointments spanned five decades and included positions at Vassar College, the University of British Columbia, Northwestern University, Bennington College, and the University of Pennsylvania. Her many awards and fellowships include the Social Science Research Council and the Guggenheim Foundation. which was the dominant view of the time, and it was also seen as a wasteful and unproductive to civilized values. In Fighting with Property, she carries out an historical examination of materials on the Kwakiutl people from 1792 to 1930, however, Boas' work formed the basis of her work. She 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. She says that this change can have profound implications not only for an understanding of the Kwakiutl people but also "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". The autobiographies revealed the complexities of the caste system, details of intercaste relationships, and the ways these were shifting during a period of rapid transformation.