[2] Her vacation place in Vermont closely resembles her childhood interest of living like the author Henry David Thoreau had once done – it had no running water, but a system of barrels with gutters along the two cabins.
[1] Codere held positions in the American Ethnological Society and various faculty appointments, notably Brandeis (1964–82), where she also served as dean of the graduate school (1974 – 77).
After retiring, Codere lived on Concord where she continued to volunteer at the library, and spend time with her companion, Marion Tait.
[2] Codere's first major work was Fighting with Property: Study of Kwakiutl Potlatching and Warfare, 1792–1930, which was also her dissertation for Columbia.
In this book, Codere tries to emphasize "the more amiable features [of the potlatch] such as the capacity for sociability and cooperativeness, rather than the aggressive and competitiveness",[4] which was the dominant view of the time, and it was also seen as a wasteful and unproductive to civilized values.
Second, while the majority of anthropologists of the time were doing synchronic studies of societies, Codere's work focused on culture change".
[2] She collected forty-eight autobiographies of Rwandan men and women: Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa of different ages, education levels, economic statuses and occupations, and along with other research that had been done, she studied the social change, focusing more on the problems and social tensions, rather than the functional theory of society.