She remained at Yale between 1930 and 1937, during which time she conducted anthropological fieldwork in an African-American community in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1932-34 (After Freedom: A Cultural Study In the Deep South, 1939).

She then worked documenting the mining industry and the consumption of American media in Northern Rhodesia (Copper Town: Changing Africa, 1962).

Her final book, the memoir Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (1966), was her personal account of her anthropological career, from the beginning as a labor movement leader to her last field work in an African copper mining community.

In 1968, Hortense Powdermaker retired from Queens College, where she had founded the department of anthropology and sociology, and moved to Berkeley, where she remained engaged in ethnographic fieldwork.

This study was the source of her groundbreaking theory focusing on the psychological adaptation undergone by Blacks and whites due to their interracial environment.

The cinema was introduced to Africa by colonial governments in the mid-twentieth century and was perceived to have different influences on the African population depending on the group writing about it.

Powdermaker describes that the concept of acting was not understood for the most part, and as a result whenever an actor “died” in one film and reappeared in another, the lack of continuity was disconcerting.

[9] This cultural values conflict, in turn, threatened the colonial order who used film censorship as a means of keeping Africans from rising against them.