Audrey Smedley (1930–2020): A Leading Scholar in the Anthropology and History of Race

Abstract

Audrey Smedley, an African American pioneer in anthropology and African Studies and the leading scholar on the origin and worldview of race, passed away on October 14, 2020, in her home, surrounded by her loving family. She was one of the first eight Black women anthropologists to receive doctorates by the late 1960s. Dr. Smedley earned her BA and MA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and her PhD fromVictoriaUniversity ofManchester (1967), now theUniversity ofManchester (UK). A product of the Detroit public school system, where she was taught by white teachers who begrudgingly gave her well-deserved top grades, Audrey Smedley attended the University of Michigan. In the 1950s, the campus gradually moved away from segregation, permitting Black students to live in dormitories, initially in separate rooms. As Smedley tells us, she became exhausted from the burden of racist experiences with both students and faculty. In her extraordinarily self-revealing essay published in Annual Review of Anthropology (Smedley 2001), she remarks that Black Americans learn to guard their behavior in relationships with the “white ‘others’” (xviii). During her junior-year semester abroad in Paris, she finally felt the meaning of “yearning to breathe free” (xviii). During her time in Paris, she met Africans and African-diasporic people from the Francophone world and found that “race” was of little importance visa-vis their respective cultures, which were much more significant for them and the “wholesome self-confidence” they embodied. For the young Audrey Smedley, this was critical for the next phase of her life. In hindsight, she remarked that “it takes an enormous effort to transcend the identities imposed on us and the stereotypes too many people deal us” (2001, xix). Returning to Ann Arbor, she changed her major to add history to her studies in letters and law. After earning an undergraduate degree, she entered the University of Michigan’s master’s program in anthropology. She continued to take courses in history, whose perspectives deeply influenced her later contributions to anthropology. Under the tutelage of Leslie White, Elman Service, and Marshall Sahlins, Smedley became a student of evolutionary change. The neo-evolutionary perspective saw culture as a phenomenon that should be “studied separately from the biological beings who carry specific cultures” (Smedley 2001, xx). Over time, she observed the contradictions between the science of culture, as White theorized it, and those approaches within the discipline that developed without questioning and being influenced by society’s prevailing racial ideology and its impact on how many Americans interpret human behavior. Smedley would come to conceptualize this phenomenon as a racial worldview (2001; Smedley and Smedley 2018). Following Michigan, Audrey Smedley went to Manchester to further her studies with one of the leaders of the structuralist-functionalist school, Max Gluckman. She found that social anthropologists there were more than just adherents to this way of understanding social systems through structural analysis but were also masters of ethnographic details. It was the significance of social networks, the role of social dramas, the dynamics of social conflict, the recording of economic and social changes, politics, law, ritual, kinship, and marital relationships that made recognizing those