Gianna Hochstein

Gianna (Smith) Hochstein
( b 1926 in Kansas City)

Daughter of George Day Smith and Bertha Grace (Schmidt) Smith.

Sister of Marium, nicknamed "Swish" (b. 1921, d. 1967, who married "Wally" Longstreth, and who bore two children (first cousins of Miles) Terry Longstreth and Janice (Longstreth) McClintock.)

Wife of Paul Hochstein (b. 1926 in Bronx NY)

Mother of Miles Hochstein (b. 1959, New York, NY) and Evon Hochstein (b. 1962, New York, NY).

Grandmother of three.

When she was young she received a conventional upbringing, conservative and limiting, in Kansas City.

While allowed to attend college at her father's college, Grinnell, in Iowa, I have the impression that she was constrained by her parents George and Bertha, and that their resources of warmth and nurturing were limited.

Following college she set off for Mexico and had various adventures and misadventures about which I have surmised some details, but never been told much.

Above: May 1993, Los Angeles California, at my McCadden Place apartment.

Above: Marrium or Gianna with her mother, Bertha in their garden.

Left: Marrium and Gianna, circa 1930

Above: Marrium and Gianna, circa 1931

Above: Marrium and Gianna, early 1930s

Above: Gianna holding her nephew Terry Longstreth, at around age 17 (circa 1943)

Above, center front: Gianna, with Grinnell College friends, circa 1941-1945

Gianna Smith, college graduate, 1945.

Gianna, post college, year unknown.

Above: Gianna, 1942, in front of Carnegie Hall (Library), Grinnell College. Thanks to Gianna's classmates Bettie (Neville) Noyce, Grinnell '46, and Donald S Noyce, Grinnell, '44 for identifying the building.

She met my father in Washington in the mid-1950s.

She began her doctoral studies in North Carolina at UNC Chapel Hill when I was about 6 or 7, in the mid-1960s. Her doctoral research took her to Trinidad (with my brother and me), and then in 1970-71 to Mexico, for a year of anthropological research.

She did not complete her doctoral degree, but thirty years later has at last published a book based on her research in that period. It is called "Behind God's Back: Reconciling Sex and Sin in an Amuzgo Community"

She has been active for the last several decades in various social action groups and activities in and around the Unitarian Universalist church.

I think she likes living in Cambria, except for the cold and damp.... which is sort of like enjoying hell except for the fire and brimstone.

Above: Paul Hochstein and Gianna (Smith) Hochstein, Cambria California, 1998

The following notice appeared in the Cambria times.

The Cambrian ~ March 4 2004

Gianna Hochstein of Cambria is among three "Women of Distinction" who will be honored by Hadassah of San Luis Obispo at 1:30 p.m. Sunday March 14 at the Jewish Community Center, 875 Laureate Lane, San Luis Obispo. The author, anthropologist and scholar has devoted much of her career to AIDS prevention, including work with the Global Service Corps in Tansania training teachers to teach youths preventionof HIV/AIDS. Also honored will be Debra Linden, San Luis Obispo police chief, and Marie Rosenwaser, San Luis Obispo Community College District superintendent and Cuesta College president. For reservations, $6, call 543-9452 or 772-9004

-- Bert Etling.

Interview with Gianna Hochstein, November 2, 2000

Miles Hochstein: What's your earliest memory?

Gianna Hochstein: My earliest memory is of being on a boat crossing the Mississippi from Hannibal to the town across the way... I've forgotten the name. That was at age 2 or 3 or 4.

What was it like to be 4 or 5 year old in your parent's house?

I remember being under a dining chair and spelling CAT and being rewarded with great praise.

Did your parents give a lot of praise?

No.

That's why you remember it.

Yes. (laughs) When I was about 5 my grandmother visited and she was very nice and she gave me pearls and candy.... which my mother didn't allow.

Which grandmother?

Ida Stobernack Smith....She was a typical grandmother. My mother didn't like the interference, that's the way families are.

What was (your mother) Bertha and (your grandmother) Ida's relationship like?

I don't remember the loving part... because they quarreled over candy... she only visited once that I remember... and my mother also didn't get along with my father's stepmother... she resented any interference in our lives....

I spoke to Terry... he said she may have been a reluctant or ambivalent mother.

She was not warm.... we had a fat next door neighbor and I sat in her lap and I thought "I wish my mother was like this"... and I had a dear cousin who was like an aunt.... her name was Jessie Kibbee... we called her aunt... when she sent me presents they were always adorable... a little purse made out of links....

I'm sure that she loved my father... and had a time of intimacy but they were restrained people... they were nondemonstrative.

Was it a cultural thing... a family thing....

No my mother's sisters were not like that, especially Aunt Rowena.. and my father as an only child, brought up by an aunt, probably didn't get much attention.....

I thought he was brought up by his stepmother.

No, no she was much later... he was brought up by Aunt Me... which was probably for Marium... we don't have picture of Aunt Me... and her husband.. I don't remember his name.... But there was couple who brought him up....

And (your grandfather) Jacob Smith?

He lived on in Mitchel South Dakota after Emma Day Smith died... but wasn't able to take care of a small boy... so George Day was given to Aunt Me. He was shipped back to Iowa, and raised by Aunt Me and her husband... That's why he went to school in Iowa. I guess his Aunt Me was his mother's sister.. or she could have been my grandfather's sister on the other side, or she could have been a Day.....She was very good to him he always said, but its not the same as your own mother.....

(I asked a question about Dr. Margaret Ruck de Schell Schmidt, her grandmother, and read my mother the nine names of her grandmother's children.)

"I knew Emily and Louise...."

When?

I only met Emily once, but Louise visited us... she thought my mother (her relative) was dull and my father was witty.

These were old ladies by then....

Yes... Louise married a rich man and she was our rich aunt. Emily married an ascetic musician and she was of course a writer.... She wrote books, other than the one with Mark Twain....

What was the book with Twain...?

She wrote one called "Jap Heron" with Mark Twain on the Ouija board...

What was it about?

Some story about life on the Mississippi.... she wrote Indian Summer and Where do We Go From Here.... Now her name is given as Emily Grant Hutchings. She also wrote How to Study Pictures....

This may be the daughter of Ruck De Schell or the next generation. Aunt Louise was the nice one... warm... Aunt Rowena was warm... Aunt Ama was crazy... Uncle Ralph was....

---

What's it like to be a first grader?

Well in the first grade I was promoted because I was so good at the alphabet, so that I went into second grade half a semester early... and that was very fun, because I remember loving the alphabet and sounding it out....

In third grade I had terrible trouble with geography.... I stayed home sick because I couldn't do a map of Africa....

I tended to be the teachers pet.

I tend not to have memory of separate grades....

Well I only remember the trauma and the highlights....And then in fifth grade... boys... There was somebody who gave me a plaque he had made, copper. I remember in 6th and 7th grade we were ranked according to our scores on tests... I was fourth, but I wanted to be first.... Not very progressive

And what did you do after school?

A lot of acrobatics on the playground... I don't know what I did at home... I guess I read... I remember what we did on the street... tap the icebox (everybody hides separately) and War...two groups doing something across the street.... Sardine (where you hide in a group together).

What was the racial environment in Kansas City? Were there any Blacks in your world?.

The school system was segregated and they were in another part of town altogether. I didn't know any blacks, a few Jews, and a few Catholics.. the ones who didn't have enough money to go elsewhere. All of us were anglo Protestant... a bunch of Methodists on the next block... Presbyterian across the street... Some parents were rather haughty about their affiliation, the Presbyterians were.

And there were two people on the block who had jobs... my father and the postman... that was in the early part of the depression.... we didn't have a lot.... but we always knew where the next paycheck was going to come from.... I wanted to go to dancing school but we couldn't afford it... My sister didn't like it so we quit... but I wanted to go.. But my mother wasn't aware of that... so that shows the degree of awareness that she had... years later I told her and she said "oh I didn't know that..."

Then I did a lot of gardening.. and then were able to get a dog... Little Miss Muffet... a Boston terrier.... My sister and I had to persuade our parents to get that... she wanted a monkey but we got the dog.

Gianna has published her doctoral research in the following monograph

Behind God's Back: Reconciling Sex and Sin in an Amuzgo Community
by
Gianna Hochstein

NONFICTION
PUBLISHER: Central Coast Press
DATE: 2000
NOTES: 287 pages
Hardback ISBN: 930401035

ABSTRACT: Abstract from materials provided by the publisher.

The Amuzgo people of the town Xochistlahuaca in southern Mexico live their sexual lives in a vortex of folklore, religion and Mexican and customary law. Hochstein describes Xochistlahuaca's history and the life of its residents in a region so isolated that its inhabitants view themselves as living "behind God's back".

Religious dogma conflicts both with the pressures of sexual desire and with a sense of justice that is reliant on retributional murder. Modern and primitive Catholics, fundamentalist Protestants, and believers in pre-Christian concepts inhabit the same physical world. The many-facetted folklore described here provides the means for the reconcilement of sin with the ecstasy of drunkenness, the pleasure of fornication and the satisfaction of revenge by murder.

In the 1970's the isolation of this community in the foothills of the Sierra Madre began to erode. A bridge was built so that trucks could cross the protective Arroyo Mujer [the Woman river] and helicopters from the federal government would land in pursuit of the villains. Now many years later, despite greater contact with the rest of Mexico, strife interrupts without God's intervention. Customs such as institutionalized homosexuality and murder in retribution for fornication and/or wife abandonment continue to confirm the idea that this place remains "behind god's back".

Hochstein proposes that belief structures are supported at a meta-level beyond Christian principles of morality. Mythical ideas justify the behaviors of daily life. The discrepancies between an individual's deeds and his beliefs is illustrated in metalogical diagrams which reconcile that dissonance.

The reader can not fail to find parallels between the lives of the people of Xochistlahuaca and our own problems in the United States with sex and violence.

Gianna Hochstein, born (1926) in Kansas City, Missouri, has traveled widely as an anthropologist and as a satellite wife of a prominent biological scientist. Her observations of a variety of western cultures in contact with non-western societies provoked her interest in contrastive sexual drives and mores. The intertwining of sexual behavior and religious doctrine arises out of sensibility derived from a study of history and the ecology of human geography.

She is a lifetime scholar, having studied literature and political history at Grinnell College and linguistics and anthropology at Columbia University. She continued doctoral studies in anthropology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and later at the University of Southern California.

She has lived in Iowa, New York, North Carolina, Sweden, Italy, and in rural areas of Trinidad & Tobago, Mexico, and Guatemala. Hochstein now lives with her skeptical scientist in retirement in Cambria, California. They have two remarkable sons and three consequential grandchildren.

First Cup of Coffee, Gianna Smith Hochstein, Cambria California, August 2004

In April 2005 Gianna was quoted in the following Newsweek International article. Her quote is in bold at the bottom.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7369815/site/newsweek/

Having Fun Doing Good
For some altruistic travelers, vacations mean more than just a day at the beach.
By Eve Conant
Newsweek International

April 11/18 issue - Jen and Ian Close were ready to try something new. The Canadian couple had traveled to Germany and England to visit family, but not much beyond. So last August they went on safari in Kenya, then capped off their African journey with two weeks of volunteering in Arusha, Tanzania, where they taught local teenagers how to prevent AIDS. "Kenya was great," says Jen. "But we didn't really meet people or get a chance to understand them. We couldn't get out of the trap of being treated like tourists."

In Tanzania, on the other hand, the couple received training in how to promote HIV awareness from the San Francisco-based Global Service Corps, which aims to ease the social stigma of AIDS. They lived with a local family and even attended lively church services with them. But the overriding memories are hardly material for a cheery slide show back in Vancouver. "When you see little children sifting through trash, you take that image home with you," says Jen. Once home, she marveled at her privileged life as hot water cascaded from the faucet.

More and more, people like the Closes are using their holidays to help others. Whether it's rebuilding homes in tsunami-hit Sri Lanka, cutting trails in Belize for environmental scientists or teaching English to schoolchildren in Thailand, socially responsible travel is on the rise. Holidaymakers are recognizing that they can have fun doing good; volunteers don scuba gear to record scientific data on dolphins in the Bahamas or lead relief missions on horseback through the Himalayas. It's tourism with a conscience, undertaken by travelers who don't want to experience another culture through the window of a tour bus and who will gladly trade a five-star luxury hotel room for a sleeping bag on the floor of a remote village home. The benefits: you get involved, you make new friends and you come back with a sense of satisfaction and a purpose that no amount of hiking or sunbathing can inspire.

The numbers of socially responsible tourists—and the opportunities available to them—are rising steeply. Rick Lathrop, founder and executive director of Global Service Corps, which took the Closes to Tanzania, says volunteers for programs like trips to Thailand to teach English to monks or to help out in rural health clinics are up 30 percent over last year. He at—tributes the increase, in part, to the current sense of vulnerability many people feel. "It's possible that 9/11 taught us that we're part of a wider family, for better or for worse," he says. "There are a lot of people out there like me, baby boomers with a sense of world peace, who never had a chance to do the Peace Corps." His co-worker, Amy Warren, sees a generational shift back to some of the values of the '60s. "There's a swing from 'Me, me, me, SUV' to 'Hey, that's not so fulfilling. My life is missing some spiritual substance'." The interest transcends borders: conscientious vacations are highly popular among Western Europeans, Australians, Poles and Japanese, as well as North Americans.

To be sure, many of these holidays are considerably more trying than a week at the spa. Volunteer outfits usually require travel, health and emergency-evacuation insurance. Trekforce Expeditions, a U.K.-based charity that sends 18- to 38-year-olds into the jungles of Belize or Borneo to help with conservation, starts each trip with jungle training. Experts teach volunteers about "all the venomous, nonvenomous snakes, all the bugs and the beasties, the biting bits and bobs," says managing director Rob Murray. Once the volunteers know which insects to avoid, they begin the real work: building visitor centers, clearing trails or planting hardwood trees that help regenerate forests after heavy logging.

Such hardships don't come cheap. A four-week Trekforce trip costs about £1,800 and a five-month tour up to £3,900—not including airfare. But depending on their country of origin, most volunteers can deduct a hefty portion of the trip on their taxes. And since Trekforce is a charity, volunteers can also raise money from friends and colleagues to fund their trips. "It sounds arrogant, but we want people to change for the better, to put aside their materialist ways," says Murray. "You've got someone in a pin-striped suit who goes to Belize, and comes home a far more socially responsible person." There's even a hidden bonus: raising thousands of dollars for charity, trekking through the jungle and improving people's lives while on vacation is great for the resume.

The trips seem to have a domino effect. Volunteers have been known to sponsor trips for their local host families to visit the United States or Europe; others get hooked and visit their volunteer vacation spots repeatedly. A few months ago, Singapore-based Brit John Clarke volunteered to assist with tsunami cleanup through Hands On Thailand; he brought his three children, ages 11, 9 and 8, who donned gloves and helped clear debris. "At the end of the day you know you've made a difference, even if it's small," he says. "We tend to focus on ourselves too much."

The experience made such an impression on him that Clarke recently returned with dozens of his co-workers from American Express. Wiping slime off his hands, he grabbed a telephone to speak to NEWSWEEK from Bang Tao Beach, one of the worst hit parts of the Phuket Island. "You have top businessmen here, but all you know is so-and-so is the sledgehammer person, another is the shovel," he says. "When we're not building walls, we're spending all the money we can so that Thailand can get back into the tourism business." More and more companies are sending employees on such expeditions to help with group building, says Trekforce's Murray—a sort of Outward Bound with tangible results. "You've got to get on with the person who sits across from you at work," he says. "You have to be a team player."

Usually such holidays benefit the volunteers at least as much as the locals. Kimberly Haley-Coleman created the Dallas-based Globe Aware four years ago in large part to help compensate for the U.S. bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia in the 1970s; her volunteers now assemble wheelchairs from recycled materials for bombing victims there. "Laos is the most bombed country in world history, and we did it," she says. Globe Aware, which has seen its membership quadruple over the past year, encourages volunteers to get more involved in the local community by giving them fun assignments, like going into a village and asking, "Are Buddhist monks vegetarian?" "They're not; they accept alms, and eat whatever they're given," says Haley-Coleman. "But you'd never know it unless you went up to one and —asked them. They like to talk. We just want people to get beyond what a tourist would see or do."

Trips like these aren't just for the young and vigorous. Gianna Hochstein, a 78-year-old anthropologist from California, went to Tanzania in 2003 to lead HIV/AIDS awareness classes. "Many anthropologists believe you shouldn't get involved," she says. "I'm an adventurer, but I'm a do-gooder, too." Still, Hochstein admits her age was an obstacle; during her home stay, she learned that Tanzanians are obsessive about locking their doors, which proved hard on her arthritis. But the insights she gained far outweighed the difficulties. For one thing, she learned not to judge Tanzanian abodes by their appearance. "Their home was so attractive inside, but from the outside it looked quite miserable," she says. When the 13-year-old girl in her family got in trouble at school for showing her knees beneath her skirt, "it was just because she had grown so quickly," says Hochstein. "I learned that Tanzanians can be very modest." She'd like to go back and do more AIDS-awareness work—not that the trips are strictly "work," says Hochstein. Being helpful while enjoying oneself is a lot more rewarding than simply having a good time.

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