Gitel (Gertrude) Poznanski Steed (May 3, 1914 – September 6, 1977) was an American cultural anthropologist known for her research in India 1950–52 (and returning in 1970) involving ethnological work in three villages to study the complex detail of their social structure. She supplemented her research with thousands of ethnological photographs of the individuals and groups studied, the quality of which was recognised by Edward Steichen. She experienced chronic illnesses after her return from the field, but nevertheless completed publications and many lectures but did not survive to finish a book The Human Career in Village India which was to integrate and unify her many-sided studies of human character formation in the cultural/historical context of India.
Early life Gertrude Poznanski was born on May 3, 1914, in Cleveland, Ohio, the home of her mother, Sarah Auerbach. She was the youngest of sisters Mary and Helen, who both later emigrated to Israel. Her father was Jakob Poznanski, a businessman and Polish native who had come to the United States from Belgium. When Poznanski was still a baby, the family moved to The Bronx, New York, where she was schooled at Wadleigh High. Though not religious, she adopted the Yiddish name of Gitel. Her mother was active in the women's suffrage movement and in leftist politics. Steed began a BA in banking and finance at New York University, but embraced the Greenwich Village artistic and political life, often singing blues in nightclubs, and dropped out to take a job as a writer with the Works Progress Administration. Rafael Soyer painted portrait of her at eighteen, Girl in a White Blouse, (1932) which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and she is the medusa-haired subject in Soyer's Two Girls 1933 (oil on canvas) at the Smart Museum. In 1933 she met the painter Robert Steed (b.1903), whom she married in 1947.
Introduction to anthropology Philosopher Sidney Hook persuaded Steed to return to NYU and in 1938 she completed her B.A. with honors in sociology and anthropology, then studied as a graduate at Columbia University until 1940 as a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology under Professor Ruth Benedict whom she had met in 1937 and who in 1939 led Gitel Steed's first field experience among the Blackfoot Indians of Montana. Benedict's Patterns of Culture was published in 1934 and had become standard reading for anthropology courses in American universities for years, and Steed was influenced by Benedict's position in that book that, "A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action", and that each culture chooses from "the great arc of human potentialities" only a few characteristics which become the leading personality traits of the persons living in that culture. From 1939 to 1941, Steed undertook research for Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the explorer and writer on Inuit life then planning a two-volume Lives of the Hunters, on diet and subsistence; Steed worked on the South American Ona, Yahgan, and the Antillean Arawak and Carib, and from this formative experience began a dissertation on hunter-gatherer subsistence (not finished until 1969, well after she had established her career). In 1944, after the Nazi holocaust against the Jews was exposed, Gitel Steed set aside her anthropology and joined the Jewish Black Book Committee, an organization of the World Jewish Congress and other Jewish anti-Fascist groups. With a few peers, she participated during 1944 and 1945 in writing The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People, an exhaustive indictment of calculated Nazi anti-Jewish war crimes intended for submission to the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Steed wrote "The Strategy of Decimation" published in 1946 for the Jewish Black Book Committee. Steed taught at Hunter College in New York 1945 and 1947. While teaching at Fisk University in 1946/1947 she researched the Negro in the United States and in Africa and was managing editor of the university's and the American Council on Race Relations' monthly summary of "Race Relations" in America. In 1947–1949 she joined Dr. Ruth Bunzel in establishing the China group of Columbia's Research in Contemporary Cultures to study immigrant Chinese culture, primarily in New York City, from 1947 into 1949, working with migrants from the same community from China's Kwantung Provincial village, Toi Shan. She undertook life histories, community self-analysis, and projective tests, then proposed an extended field project in the Toi Shan community to understand the interdependency in social and economic relations between migrants and their kinsmen at home. Margaret Mead and others joined these Columbia comparative studies of contemporary cultures and they were incorporated into Mead's "The Study of Cultures at a Distance," Steed planned "The Effects of Village Institutions on Personality in South China" and had funds granted for its continuation of her Chinese research in China. However the occurrence of the Chinese Communist Revolution scuttled the project.
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