[1][4][5][6][7] Ruth Leah Bunzel was born in New York City on April 18, 1898, to Jonas and Hattie Bernheim.
[3] She started her career as the secretary and editorial assistant to Franz Boas in 1922,[1] founder of anthropology at Columbia University, after having taken one of his courses in college.
[8] Bunzel replaced Esther Goldfrank, a friend of one of her sisters, who resigned the position to study anthropology at Columbia.
[3] In the early twentieth century, anthropologist used a method of study called participant observation, which Bunzel utilized when conducting fieldwork among the Zuni people.
Bunzel utilized this fieldwork for her dissertation, The Pueblo Potter: A Study of Creative Imagination in Primitive Art, which was published in 1929.
"[11] In 1925, after returning to New York, Bunzel resigned as Boaz's secretary, and just like Goldfrank, enrolled as a student at Columbia University to study anthropology.
[2] She completed her doctoral dissertation in 1927, but she was not fully awarded her PhD until 1929 when her book, The Pueblo Potter, was published.
Bunzel's book was the first anthropological study of individual creativity in art within overarching artistic boundaries.
[3] Influenced by psychoanalyst Karen Horney, Bunzel focused on the psychological factors contributing to different drinking patterns in Chamula and Chichicastenango.
She argued that her primary consultant's insights were incomplete and could not therefore provide generalized information about the culture, rather viewing his or her contributions as partial and individual to that person or smaller groups of people.
[2] Bunzel viewed knowledge production as culturally situated, limiting her ethnographic interpretations to a specific group of Maya-K'iche' people in the Guatemalan highlands.
Bunzel also advanced the field by studying Chichicastenango, an urban center and hub in the Central American trade system, as opposed to rural settings in Guatemala.
[2] Bunzel also juxtaposed her own interpretations of Guatemalan ritual events with those offered by her informants in her monograph Chichicastenango.
[2] Her monograph Chichicastenango was greatly influenced by Boas' historical particularism and Benedict's culture and personality research focused on child development.
[2] During her professional career, Bunzel faced social gender politics that prevented her from obtaining a tenure position and threatened her fieldwork.
After World War II, she became involved in the RCC, the Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures Project.
[3] In 1951 and 1952, Bunzel developed interview techniques at the Bureau of Applied Social Research project until her appointment as an adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia University in 1953.
[15] The Ruth Leah Bunzel Papers are currently housed at the National Anthropological Archives, including correspondence, manuscripts, notes, research files, teaching materials, artwork, sound recordings, and more.
Bureau of American Ethnology BAE Annual Report 47: 467–554 Above three texts collected and reprinted as Zuni Ceremonialism: Three Studies, ed.
In Primitive Heritage, edited by Margaret Mead and Nicolas Calas: 266–275 1964 "The Self-effacing Zuni of New Mexico."