Marian Smith
{{Short description|American anthropologist}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Marian Smith
| image = Marian Smith portrait crop.jpg
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| caption = Smith in 1951, taken by Dolph Zubick
| birth_name = Marian Wesley Smith
| birth_date = May 10, 1907
| birth_place = New York City
| death_date = May 2, 1961 (aged 53)
| death_place = New York City
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| occupation = anthropologist
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| spouse = {{marriage|H. Farrant Akehurst|1952}}
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| nationality = American
}}
Marian Wesley Akehurst ({{nee|Smith}}; May 10, 1907 – May 2, 1961) was an American anthropologist who was a leader in the American and British organisations.
Life
Smith was born in New York City in 1907. When she was three years old, she contracted polio which left her with a paralysed leg. She attended Columbia University, graduating in 1934.{{Cite journal |date=December 9, 1961 |title=Dr Marian W Smith - Obituary |url=https://www.nature.com/articles/192917b0.pdf |journal=Nature |issue=4806 |page=917}}
She gained her doctorate and was the last student of Frank Boas.{{Cite journal |last=Laguna |first=Frederica de |date=April 1962 |title=Marian Wesley Smith 1907–1961 |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0002731600024045/type/journal_article |journal=American Antiquity |language=en |volume=27 |issue=4 |pages=567–570 |doi=10.1017/S0002731600024045 |s2cid=245677793 |issn=0002-7316|doi-access=free }} In 1940 she published The Puyallup-Nisqually. The Nisqually and Puyallup peoples are Native Americans based in Washington State.{{Cite book |last=Smith |first=Marian W. |url=https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/smit94070/html?lang=en |title=The Puyallup-Nisqually |date=1940-03-02 |publisher=Columbia University Press |isbn=978-0-231-89684-9 |language=en |doi=10.7312/smit94070}}
She rose to take leading positions in the American Folklore Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Before she was forty, she became the President of the American Ethnological Society.
In 1950, she published her research of the archaeology of the Columbia-Fraser Region.{{Cite book |last=Smith |first=Marian Wesley |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=63YPxwEACAAJ |title=Archaeology of the Columbia-Fraser Region |date=1950 |publisher=Society for American Archaeology |language=en}} In 1952, she moved to the UK and married H. Farrant Akehurst.{{Cite web |title=AIM25 collection description |url=https://aim25.com/cgi-bin/vcdf/detail?inst_id=109&coll_id=9919 |access-date=2023-04-10 |website=aim25.com}}
In 1956, she began teaching part-time in the Anthropology Department of the London School of Economics. In the same year, William Buller Fagg was replaced as the Royal Anthropological Institute's General Secretary by Smith.{{Cite ODNB |title=Smith [married name Akehurst], Marian Wesley (1907–1961), anthropologist |url=https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-75495 |access-date=2023-04-09 |year=2004 |language=en |doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/75495}}
In 1958, she worked with the Rivers Memorial Medal winner Brenda Seligman to create the Royal Anthropological Institute's endowment fund. The fund was able to bankroll various symposia including ones on the artist in tribal society, the domestication of cattle, and race relations.{{Cite ODNB |title=Marian Smith in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography |date=2004-09-23 |url=http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/75495 |pages=ref:odnb/75495 |editor-last=Matthew |editor-first=H. C. G. |access-date=2023-04-10 |place=Oxford |doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/75495 |editor2-last=Harrison |editor2-first=B.}}
Smith first had symptoms of her illness in 1949 and died in New York in 1961.
References
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Category:20th-century American anthropologists
Category:American women anthropologists
Category:Columbia University alumni
Category:Academics of the London School of Economics