Martha Warren Beckwith (January 19, 1871 – January 28, 1959) was an American folklorist and ethnographer who was the first chair in folklore at any university or college in the U.S.
Early life and education
Beckwith was born in Wellesley Heights, Massachusetts to George Ely and Harriet Winslow (née Goodale) Beckwith, both schoolteachers, before the family moved to Maui, Hawaii, where they had relatives descended from early missionaries. There, Beckwith made friends with many locals including members of the wealthy Alexander family who later sponsored her folklore work, and she developed an early interest in Hawaiian folk dancing.
Beckwith graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1893 and taught English at her alma mater, as well as at Elmira College, Vassar College, and Smith College.
Her formal education in anthropology did not begin till the 1900s. In 1906, she obtained a Master of Arts degree in anthropology after studying under Franz Boas at Columbia University, and she received her Doctor of Philosophy from the same institution in 1918.
Career
In 1920, Beckwith was appointed to the chair in Folklore at Vassar College, making her the first person to hold a chair in the field at any college or university in the United States. The chair was part of The Folklore Foundation, established at Vassar by an anonymous donation by the naturalist, Annie Alexander, who Beckwith knew from her childhood in Maui.
Beckwith became a full professor in 1929 and retired in 1938.
Research
Beckwith conducted research in a variety of European and Middle Eastern countries but her most extensive research focused on Hawaii, Jamaica, and the Sioux and Mandan-Hidatsa Native American Reservations in North Dakota and South Dakota where she was inducted into the Prairie Chicken Clan of the Mandan-Hidatsa.
Beckwith carried out fieldwork in Jamaica between 1919 and 1922. Her publications on Jamaican folklore often included details on music recorded by Helen H. Roberts, who accompanied Beckwith to Jamaica in 1920 and 1921. Beckwith's research in culminated in Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folklife (1929), which was the subject of an extended review in the Journal of American Folklore by Melville J. Herskovits, and to which Beckwith responded. Although not an uncritical review, Herskovits - an anthropologist who specialised on Africa - praised Beckwith for her detailed descriptions of customs, so much so that "he felt able to identify some as not merely African in origin but specifically, say, as Yoruba or Ashanti".
In 1926 Beckwith gathered folktales at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. From 1926 to 1927, during a sabbatical year from Vassar, her fieldwork took her to Goa, where she worked among Portuguese settlers as part of travels that also took place in Italy, Greece, Palestine and Syria. Between 1932 and 1933 Beckwith served as president of the American Folklore Society.
Beckwith's most recognised work was her studies of Hawaiian culture, including creation chants and myths and translations of 19th century Hawaiian writers such as Kepelino and Kamakau, on the later period of the Hawaiian monarchy. Her Hawaiian Mythology (1940) has been described as "representing more than thirty years of exhaustive research".
Later life
Beckwith retired from Vassar in 1938 but continued to research and publish. Her last years focused on work pertaining to Hawaiian herbal remedies. She died on 28 January 1959 and is buried on Maui in Makawao Cemetery, which is also the final resting place of her parents, brother, sister, and childhood friend Annie Alexander.
