author
Yolanda Murphy
A cultural anthropologist whose writing helped bring women’s lives and gender roles to the center of ethnographic study. Best known for co-authoring Women of the Forest, she drew on fieldwork in Brazil to write with clarity and close attention to everyday life.
1 Audiobook
Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and Society
by Robert F. (Robert Francis) Murphy, Yolanda Murphy
About the author
Born in Poland on April 10, 1925, and later based in the United States, Yolanda Murphy was a cultural anthropologist known for collaborative, fieldwork-driven writing. She is best remembered as the co-author of Women of the Forest, written with her husband, anthropologist Robert F. Murphy.
That book grew out of fieldwork among the Mundurucú people of the Brazilian Amazon in 1952 and became an important work in anthropology for its focus on women’s experiences and gender. Murphy also taught at Empire State College, and her work is still noted for making social life, kinship, and daily experience feel vivid and accessible.
She died on June 3, 2016. Readers coming to her work today will find careful observation, respect for the people she studied, and a style that helps academic anthropology feel human and readable.