Barbara Myerhoff (February 16, 1935 – January 7, 1985) was an American anthropologist, filmmaker, and founder of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California.
These methods include reflexivity, narrative story telling, and anthropologists' positioning as social activists, commentaries, and critics whose work extends beyond the academy.
Instilling what would later become Myerhoff's anthropological ideology and method, narrative/storytelling, Sofie Mann also helped prepare her for working with the elderly people at the Aliyah Center in Venice California, the subjects of Number Our Days.
Myerhoff emphasized that like her grandmother, their storytelling asserted their love of life, involvement with people, and created an alternative world where they had presence and visibility.
As many anthropologists who practiced in the 1960s and 1970s, Myerhoff was influenced by Victor Turner, Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Mircea Eliade, Max Gluckman, Arnold Van Gennep, Alan Watts, and C.G.
As she explained, "the peyote hunt provides one version of the fulfillment of a panhuman quest—the desire for total unity among all creatures and all people—and accordingly we find in it significance beyond the specificity of Huichol religion and world view."
As in Peyote Hunt, Myerhoff chose one main male informant, Shmuel, who for her possessed worldly intelligence, self-reflection, and insightful community interpretation.
Notably, while Myerhoff celebrated the uneducated female elders' zest for life and survival skills, she chose highly educated male leaders as primary informants.
In the book's introduction, she reflected that she did not recognize Number Our Days as a traditional anthropological text because she wove the elders' voices seamlessly into the study and placed herself alongside them as another character.
As a result of the book's popularity, Myerhoff began to teach workshops on performance, life histories, ritual, and storytelling at NYU and the Hunter/Brookdale Center for the Aging.
The elder's created this title as a pun, taken from the novella Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, for their protest march for safer streets after a reckless biker killed one of the center's members.
In addition to the film, book, and art exhibit, in 1981, Myerhoff helped adapt Number Our Days for the stage, performed at the Mark Taper Forum.
In her essay, "Surviving Stories: Reflections on Number Our Days" she described the ways the elders responded to their new found publicity and their constant negotiations for control over their representation.
Myerhoff told of the inconsolable senior, Manya, who could not forgive her for leaving her out of the film, and of Rebekkah, who initially, would not sign the play's release form unless her and her husband's real names were used.
By explicating the power relations in her collaboration with the seniors, after Number Our Days was published, she further revealed the book's constructions and shed light upon the politics of representation in the anthropologist/subject encounter.
Instead of focusing solely on the variety of Jews, Myerhoff, and collaborator Lynn Littman, turned the camera on her own search for healing with the spiritual guidance of the Fairfax Lubavitch Hasidic community.