The Anthropologist in a Rural Bureaucracy: Chances for Survival Available to Purchase

The German Blitzkrieg had subsided when I finished secondary school in a London garden suburb. Too young to be called up for army service, I was nevertheless deemed precocious enough to read sociology with Morris Ginsburg and Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. It was as a sociologist, therefore, that I arrived in Haifa in January 1946. I promptly chose the methodology of anthropology, however, and used participant-observation on every topic of research, from the cooperative smallholder village, then characteristic of Jewish settlers, to the underground Haganah resistance movement, characteristic of the Jewish struggle against the British. Like some other female anthropologists working in exotic settings, I eventually identified with the ethnographical context to the extent of marrying (the Jewish equivalent of) a tribal chief.