Anthropologist Moore Is Settling In

Sally Falk Moore is one of only 16 women tenured in the Faculty and the only woman professor in the Department of Anthropology. "It's not an issue for combat," she said in a recent interview. "I am a woman and they are men, and that's very apparent. But it's not a political issue."

The experience is not a new one to Moore, who came to Harvard last summer. From 1963 to 1977, she was the only woman in the University of Southern California's Department of Sociology. (Until she established U.S.C.'s Anthropology Department she was also its only anthropologist.) Nor is Moore breaking new ground: Cora DuBois, professor of Anthropology emeritus, taught here from 1954 until her retirement in 1969.

Moore, 57 years old, entered the field of social anthropology through the back door. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1945, she joined a law firm in New York. A few months later, she decided to take a leave of absence to join the-prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials "as the least important lawyer on the staff."

The six months Moore spent in Germany troubled her with "the question of how one decides who is responsible for something that happens in society as a whole" and led her from law to social anthropology.

Currently Moore is working on a book on the Tanzanian Chagga tribe. For the past 13 years she has studied changes in the Chaggan legal system and culture since 1900 and the tribe's success in adapting to the modern world.

"I went the opposite route of most anthropologists," Moore said. "I didn't look for the simplest society." The Chagga are good subjects for research, she said, because in the early 1900s a missionary documented their early history, which provides an insight into the more recent changes in their culture.

About 60 students, most of whom are from the Law School, are enrolled in Moore's course, "Anthropological Approaches to Law." She is slated to teach an introductory course in social anthropology this spring.