author
Laura Estelle Watson Benedict
1861–1932
A pioneering early anthropologist, she is best remembered for documenting Bagobo ceremonial life, folklore, and belief in the Philippines. Her work opened a rare written window onto stories and traditions that might otherwise have gone unrecorded.
1 Audiobook
Philippine Folk-Tales
by Clara Kern Bayliss, Laura Estelle Watson Benedict, Fletcher Gardner, Berton L. (Berton Lewis) Maxfield, W. H. Millington
About the author
Born in 1861, Laura Estelle Watson Benedict was an American anthropologist and writer whose name is closely linked with early research on the Bagobo people of Mindanao in the Philippines. Reliable library and museum sources consistently identify her as the author of A Study of Bagobo Ceremonial, Magic and Myth (1916), the work for which she is best known.
Museum sources describe her as the first anthropologist to travel to the Philippines to study the Bagobo, and note that her fieldwork led to a large collection later acquired by the American Museum of Natural History. Her writing focused on ritual life, mythology, and folklore, and her name is also attached to Philippine Folk-Tales.
Although she is not a widely known public figure today, Benedict is still remembered as an important early recorder of Philippine Indigenous traditions. She died in 1932.