Esther Schiff Goldfrank

Esther Schiff Goldfrank (1896 – 23 April 1997) was an anthropologist of the famous German-American Schiff family. She had studied with Franz Boas and specialized in the Pueblo Indians. She worked closely with Elsie Clews Parsons and also with Ruth Benedict on the Blackfoot. She published on Pueblo religion, Cochiti sociology and Isleta drawings. Goldfrank received her bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1918 and graduated from Columbia University in 1937.

Esther Schiff Goldfrank married the historian and sinologist Karl August Wittfogel after the death in 1935 of her first husband, Walter Goldfrank.

Selected works

• Changing Configurations in the Social Organization of a Blackfoot Tribe During the Reserve Period (The Blood of Alberta, Canada), J.J. Augustin Publisher, 1945.
• Isleta Paintings, Smithsonian Institution, 1962.
• The artist of "Isleta paintings" in Pueblo society (Smithsonian contributions to anthropology), Smithsonian Institution, 1967.
• The social and ceremonial organization of Cochiti (Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association), Kraus, 1974.
• Notes on an undirected life: As one anthropologist tells it (Queens College publications in Anthropology, no. 3, 1978.