Susan Seymour

Susan C. Seymour is Jean M. Pitzer Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Pitzer College where she served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty as well as Coordinator of Women’s Studies for the Claremont Colleges. Her research has focused on changing family and gender systems in India, specifically a longitudinal study in Bhubaneswar, India. Her books on India include The Transformation of A Sacred Town: Bhubaneswar, India (1980); Women, Education, and Family Structure in India (1994); and Women, Family, and Child Care in India: A World in Transition (1999). Her article, “Multiple Caretaking of Infants and Young Children: An Area in Critical Need of a Feminist Psychological Anthropology” (Ethos) won the 2004 Stirling Prize awarded by the Society for Psychological Anthropology. In recent years she has focused on two principal projects: (1) rethinking the Western concept “attachment” (”’It Takes a Village to Raise a Child’: Attachment Theory and Multiple Child Care in Alor, Indonesia and in North India,“ in the edited volume, Attachment Reconsidered: Cultural Perspectives on a Western Theory) and on researching and writing a biography of her Harvard mentor, Cora Du Bois, Cora Du Bois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent (2015). Du Bois’s distinguished career included groundbreaking research in the Culture and Personality movement of the 1930s, co-chairing a seminar with psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner on the impact of culture on psychological development at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (1935-37), directing research and analysis for the OSS in Southeast Asia during World War II, and becoming Harvard’s first tenured female professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.