HAR is pleased to announce a recent release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English ) about German anthropologist Eva Lips.
Kreide–Damani, Ingrid, 2022. “The Grande Dame of Ethnology in Leipzig: A Biography of Eva Lips”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
German anthropologist Eva Lips (1906–1988) was an opponent of the Nazi regime who established herself in the United States in 1934 with her husband, anthropologist Julius Lips (1895–1950). She was a successful anti-fascist exile writer, and she supported her husband in his field research on the economy and law of North American First Nations and African American minorities. In 1948, the couple returned to Leipzig in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. In this fascinating article, Kreide-Damani unveils the biography of Eva Lips, who was born in Leipzig into an upper-middle-class family and grew up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the educated middle class. She married Julius Lips at the age of 18, and they both moved to Cologne in 1925, where he was appointed director of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum of Ethnology in 1928 and associate professor of ethnology and sociology at the University of Cologne in 1930. The couple emigrated to the United States following Julius Lips’ dismissal from his Cologne posts in 1933 as an opponent of National Socialism. When her husband died suddenly in 1950, Eva Lips succeeded him as director of the Julius Lips Institute for Comparative Sociology of Law and Ethnology and advanced to become one of the first female professors at the University of Leipzig. Closely associated with Julius Lips’ scientific approaches, she trained more than half of the graduate ethnologists in the GDR until the beginning of the third university reform in 1968. As a committed but unconventional and individually undogmatic citizen, Eva Lips played a decisive role in shaping the profile of ethnology in the GDR.
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