Jean L. Briggs (May 28, 1929 – July 27, 2016) was an American-born anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and professor emerita at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
[1][3] In 1967, Briggs moved to the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador and joined the Department of Anthropology at Memorial University in St. John's, where she taught for 47 years.
[1] She documents the culture, language and practices of the family and the surrounding community in the book, which remains a landmark publication in the fields of ethnography and anthropology.
[2] Most of her fieldwork and research focused on the Canadian Inuit, but she also visited communities of Alaskan Inupiat and Siberian Yupik people.
[1][2] Briggs won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology,[4] as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Bergen in Norway.