Jean L. Briggs (May 28, 1929 – July 27, 2016) was an American-born anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and professor emerita at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her best known works included the 1970 landmark book Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, based on 18 months of research and field work in Inuit communities on the Arctic coast during the 1960s. ^{[1] [2]}

Biography

Briggs was born in Washington, D.C., on May 28, 1929, the eldest of four children of Margaret ( née Worcester) and Horace W. Briggs, member of the clergy of The New Church, also known as Swedenborgianism. ^[1] She was raised in the state of Maine and Newton, Massachusetts. ^[2] Jean Briggs received her bachelor's degree from Vassar College in 1951. ^[1] She then completed a master's degree from Boston University in 1960 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967. ^{[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] [2]} She was a student of Cora Du Bois, an American cultural and psychiatric anthropologist. ^[2]

In 1970, she published her best-known book, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, based on research conducted while living with an Inuit family along the Chantrey Inlet for 18-months during the 1960s. ^[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. ^{[1] [2]} By her own account, Briggs knew very few Inuit words when she arrived to conduct her research, "When I arrived in Chantrey Inlet in 1963, I knew only six words of Inuktitut: 'yes,' 'no,' ‘I don’t know,’ ‘have some tea,’ 'have some more tea' and 'thank you'." ^[2]

In 1988, Briggs published a second book, Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old. Her book won two awards, the Boyer Prize from the Society for Psychoanalytic Anthropology and the Victor Turner Prize from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. ^{[1] [3]}

Jean Briggs compiled a landmark, bilingual Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut dictionary, which was published in 2015. ^{[1] [2]} Briggs had begun compiling Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut words in 1970, ultimately gathering and preserving 34,000 words in the dictionary. ^[2] Prior to its 2015 publication, no dictionary had ever documented the Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut dialect. ^{[1] [3] [2]} Several researches and colleagues from Memorial University and the University of Toronto joined her to create the dictionary, utilizing five grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). ^[2]

Most of her fieldwork and research focused on the Canadian Inuit, but she also visited communities of Alaskan Inupiat and Siberian Yupik people. ^[2]

Jean Briggs died from congestive heart failure on July 27, 2016, at the age of 87. ^{[1] [2]}

Honors and awards

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. ^[2] She was also a Royal Society of Canada fellow. ^[1]

References