Marlene Dobkin de Rios
American anthropologist and psychotherapist
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Early life and education
Dobkin de Rios was born in 1939 in The Bronx into a Ukrainian Jewish family. She was the daughter of Bernard Dobkin, a salesman from Kyiv, and Anne (née Schwartz), a bookkeeper whose parents emigrated from Galicia. Her family were Russian Jews.
Dobkin de Rios completed a bachelor's degree in clinical psychology at Queens College, City University of New York in 1959. In 1963, Dobkin de Rios earned a M.A. in anthropology from New York University. She researched gender issues including the social aspects of purdah in Turkey and the French colonial empire's policies impacting women in French West Africa.
She conducted doctoral research on the Preclassic Maya's use of psychoactive plants. In 1972, she earned a Ph.D. at University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation was titled The Use of Hallucinogenic Substances in Peruvian Amazonian Folk Healing.
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Career
In 1972, Dobkin de Rios became a tenured professor cultural anthropology at California State University, Fullerton. She taught at Fullerton from 1969 until her retirement in 2000. Dobkin de Rios led fieldwork in the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon for almost thirty years. Her research included the use of entheogenic plants by the indigenous peoples of Peru.
From 1999 to 2000, Dobkin de Rios directed the qualitative dimension of research of ayahuasca use among adolescents within the União do Vegetal in Brazil.
Dobkin de Rios was a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. She served as president of the Ethnopharmacology Society (1979-1981) and the Southwestern Anthropological Association (1979-1980).
Personal life
On November 7, 1969, Dobkin married artist Yando Rios, son of Peruvian healer Don Hilde. They had two children. Dobkin de Rios died on November 10, 2012, in Placentia, California of cancer.