List of Famous Anthropologists
- Statuesque Yvette Mimieux's film career took off in 1960 with two major parts demonstrating her versatility. In George Pal's version of "The Time Machine," she compelled attention as Weena, a primitive cavewoman in a an apocalyptic future. Later that year, her appearance as a happy-go-lucky teenager on vacation in the smash hit "Where The Boys Are" garnered her praise as much for her portrayal of a young woman struggling with sexual assault as for her bikini scenes. For the rest of her career, Mimieux struggled to find equally compelling parts that would allow her to show off her dramatic talents as much as her body. While her role as an unjustly imprisoned woman in 1976's exploitation movie "Jackson County Jail" briefly helped revive her big screen popularity, from the 1970s up to the time of her retirement Mimieux concentrated on TV movies, two of which included parts she wrote or conceived for herself. As a remorseless assassin in 1974's "Hit Lady" and a deranged stalker in 1984's dark drama "Obsessive Love," Mimieux finally had the chance to demonstrate her range. After her last appearance in the 1992 TV movie "Lady Boss," Mimieux retired from acting, turning her attention to real estate. Yvette Mimieux died on January 18, 2022 at the age of 80.
- Dian Fossey (; January 16, 1932 – c. December 26, 1985) was an American primatologist and conservationist known for undertaking an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups from 1966 until her 1985 murder. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. Gorillas in the Mist, a book published two years before her death, is Fossey's account of her scientific study of the gorillas at Karisoke Research Center and prior career. It was adapted into a 1988 film of the same name.Fossey was one of the foremost primatologists in the world, a member of the so-called "Trimates", a group formed of prominent female scientists originally sent by Leakey to study great apes in their natural environments, along with Jane Goodall who studied chimpanzees, and Birutė Galdikas, who studied orangutans. During her time in Rwanda, she actively supported conservation efforts, strongly opposed poaching and tourism in wildlife habitats, and made more people acknowledge sapient gorillas. Fossey and her gorillas were victims of mobbing; and, she was brutally murdered in her cabin at a remote camp in Rwanda in December 1985. It has been theorized that her murder was linked to her conservation efforts, probably by a poacher.
- Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an influential author of African-American literature, anthropologist, and filmmaker, who portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South, and published research on Haitian Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays. Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. It is now the site of the Zora! Festival, held each year in her honor.In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while a student at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity. She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!! After moving back to Florida, Hurston wrote and published her literary anthropology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935), and her first three novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti. Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. Interest was revived in 1975 after author Alice Walker published an article, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston", in the March issue of Ms. magazine that year. Hurston's manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published posthumously in 2001 after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives. Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), was published posthumously in 2018.
- Carlos Castaneda (December 25, 1925–April 27, 1998) was an American author. Starting with The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968, Castaneda wrote a series of books that describe his training in shamanism, particularly with a group whose lineage descended from the Toltecs. The books, narrated in the first person, relate his experiences under the tutelage of a man that Castaneda claimed was a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge" named don Juan Matus. His 12 books have sold more than 28 million copies in 17 languages. Critics have suggested that they are works of fiction; supporters claim the books are either true or at least valuable works of philosophy. Castaneda withdrew from public view in 1973, living in a large house in Westwood, California from 1973 until his death in 1998, with three colleagues whom he called "Fellow Travellers of Awareness." He founded Cleargreen, an organization that promotes "Tensegrity", which Castaneda described as the modern version of the "magical passes" of the shamans of ancient Mexico.
- Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College in New York City and her MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University. Mead served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within a context of traditional Western religious life.
- Florinda Donner (originally Regine Margarita Thal, later Florinda Donner-Grau) is an American writer and anthropologist known as one of Carlos Castaneda's "witches" (the term for three women who were friends of Castaneda). She studied anthropology at UCLA but did not complete her degree, letting her graduate studies lapse in 1977, after having advanced to doctoral candidacy. While studying she met Castaneda and worked with him on developing his thinking. In addition to working on Castaneda's books, she has written several books about indigenous healing, sorcery and lucid dreaming.
- Tobias Schneebaum (March 25, 1922 – September 20, 2005) was an American artist, anthropologist, and AIDS activist. He is best known for his experiences living and traveling among the Harakmbut people of Peru, and the Asmat people of Papua, Western New Guinea, Indonesia, then known as Irian Jaya.
- Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Al-Bīrūnī (Persian: ابوریحان محمد بن احمد البیرونی Abū Rayḥān Bērōnī; New Persian: Abū Rayḥān Bīrūnī) (973–after 1050), known as Biruni (Persian: بیرونی) or Al-Biruni (Arabic: البيروني) in English language, was an Iranian scholar and polymath. He was from Khwarazm – a region which encompasses modern-day western Uzbekistan, and northern Turkmenistan. Biruni is regarded as one of the greatest scholars of the medieval Islamic era and was well versed in physics, mathematics, astronomy, and natural sciences, and also distinguished himself as a historian, chronologist and linguist. He studied almost all fields of science and was compensated for his research and strenuous work. Royalty and powerful members of society sought out Al-Biruni to conduct research and study to uncover certain findings. He lived during the Islamic Golden Age, in which scholarly thought went hand in hand with the thinking and methodology of the Islamic religion. In addition to this type of influence, Al-Biruni was also influenced by other nations, such as the Greeks, who he took inspiration from when he turned to studies of philosophy. He was conversant in Khwarezmian, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and also knew Greek, Hebrew and Syriac. He spent much of his life in Ghazni, then capital of the Ghaznavid dynasty, in modern-day central-eastern Afghanistan. In 1017 he travelled to South Asia and authored a study of Indian culture (Tahqiq ma li-l-hind...) after exploring the Hinduism practised in India. He was given the title "founder of Indology". He was an impartial writer on customs and creeds of various nations, and was given the title al-Ustadh ("The Master") for his remarkable description of early 11th-century India.
R. H. Barlow
Robert Hayward Barlow (May 18, 1918 – January 1 or 2, 1951) was an American author, avant-garde poet, anthropologist and historian of early Mexico, and expert in the Nahuatl language. He was a correspondent and friend of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and was appointed by Lovecraft the executor of his literary estate.Born at a time when his father, Lieutenant Colonel Everett Darius Barlow, was serving with the American Forces in France, Barlow spent much of his youth at Fort Benning, Georgia, where his father was stationed but also moved from army post to army post in his earliest years. As a result, he never received much formal schooling but he was a brilliant youth and pursued his education on his own. Around 1932 Col. Barlow received a medical discharge, retired on disability from the army and settled his wife (Bernice Barlow) and son in the small town of DeLand, in central Florida where he built a lakeside homestead. Family difficulties later forced Robert H. Barlow to move to Washington, D.C., where, in 1934, as the son of a retired army officer, he received treatment for over-strained eyes at an army facility before returning to DeLand in 1935. In 1936, he received training at the Kansas City Art Institute, where Thomas Hart Benton was one of his teachers, and subsequently at San Francisco Junior College. Barlow settled for a time with the Beck family in Lakeport, California, where he helped publish H. P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book and several other items from Beck's Futile Press. From Lakeport was mailed the second and final issue of his legendary amateur magazine Leaves, which he and Lovecraft had planned together before the latter's death. Following a suggestion from an interested counselor and friend, Barbara Mayer, that Barlow make the study of Mexico's antiquities his goal, he went to Mexico in 1940-41, studied at the Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biologicas, and upon his return to California received the B.A. degree at the University of California in 1942. Returning to Mexico as a permanent resident, he joined the staff of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. In 1944 he received a Rockefeller Foundation and in 1946-48 a Guggenheim Fellowship. He became head of the Department of Anthropology at Mexico City College, which position he held at the time of his passing on January 2, 1951. According to fellow anthropologist Charles E. Dibble, "In the brief span of a decade, Barlow gave Middle American research an impetus and perspective of enduring consequence. His contributions in Mexican archaeology, classical and modern Nahuatl, Mexican colonial history, and what he preferred to call "Bilderhandschriften" are of lasting importance." Dibble compared Barlow's zeal for searching for and deciphering little known or dimly recalled codices and colonial manuscripts to that of Zelia Nuttall. Barlow has been referred to as "the T. E. Lawrence of Mexico.- Henry Field was an American anthropologist and archaeologist. Henry Field was born in Chicago. He was a great nephew of the merchant Marshall Field and a great nephew of Barbour Lathrop. Field grew up at Baggrave Hall, Hungarton, Leicestershire, England and he was educated at Sunningdale, Eton, and Oxford.
- Francisco Pascasio Moreno (May 31, 1852 – November 22, 1919) was a prominent explorer and academic in Argentina, where he is usually referred to as Perito Moreno (perito means "specialist, expert"). Perito Moreno has been credited as one of the most influential figures in the Argentine incorporation of large parts of Patagonia and its subsequent development.
Michael Jackson
Michael D. Jackson is a New Zealand poet and anthropologist who has taught in anthropology departments at Massey University, the Australian National University, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of Copenhagen. He is currently distinguished professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School.- Jesse Walter Fewkes was an American anthropologist, archaeologist, writer and naturalist.
- William Foote Whyte was a sociologist chiefly known for his ethnographic study in urban sociology, Street Corner Society. A pioneer in participant observation, he lived for four years in an Italian community in Boston while a Junior Fellow at Harvard researching social relations of street gangs in Boston's North End.
- Jerald T. Milanich is an American anthropologist and archaeologist, specializing in Native American culture in Florida. He is Curator Emeritus of Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville; Adjunct Professor, Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida; and Adjunct Professor, Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. Milanich holds a Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Florida. Milanich has won several awards for his books. Milanich won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida Archaeological Council in 2005 and the Dorothy Dodd Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida Historical Society in 2013. He was inducted as a Fellow into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. Milanich's research interests include Eastern United States archeology, precolumbian Southeastern U.S. native peoples, and colonial period native American-European/Anglo relations in the America. In May 1987 he was cited in a New York Times article: Milanich is married to anthropologist Maxine Margolis.
- Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics.Sapir was born in German Pomerania. His family emigrated to United States of America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph.D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there. He was employed by the Geological Survey of Canada for fifteen years, where he came into his own as one of the most significant linguists in North America, the other being Leonard Bloomfield. He was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, and stayed for several years continuing to work for the professionalization of the discipline of linguistics. By the end of his life he was professor of anthropology at Yale, where he never really fit in. Among his many students were the linguists Mary Haas and Morris Swadesh, and anthropologists such as Fred Eggan and Hortense Powdermaker. With his linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of Boas to develop most completely the relationship between linguistics and anthropology. Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other, and he was interested in the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world views. This part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis. In anthropology Sapir is known as an early proponent of the importance of psychology to anthropology, maintaining that studying the nature of relationships between different individual personalities is important for the ways in which culture and society develop.Among his major contributions to linguistics is his classification of Indigenous languages of the Americas, upon which he elaborated for most of his professional life. He played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology. Before Sapir it was generally considered impossible to apply the methods of historical linguistics to languages of indigenous peoples because they were believed to be more primitive than the Indo-European languages. Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages. In the 1929 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica he published what was then the most authoritative classification of Native American languages, and the first based on evidence from modern comparative linguistics. He was the first to produce evidence for the classification of the Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Na-Dene languages. He proposed some language families that are not considered to have been adequately demonstrated, but which continue to generate investigation such as Hokan and Penutian. He specialized in the study of Athabascan languages, Chinookan languages, and Uto-Aztecan languages, producing important grammatical descriptions of Takelma, Wishram, Southern Paiute. Later in his career he also worked with Yiddish, Hebrew, and Chinese, as well as Germanic languages, and he also was invested in the development of an International Auxiliary Language.
James Owen Dorsey
James Owen Dorsey was an American ethnologist, linguist, and Episcopalian missionary in the Dakota Territory, who contributed to the description of the Ponca, Omaha, and other southern Siouan languages. He worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution from 1880-1895, when he died young of typhoid fever. He became known as the expert on languages and culture of southern Siouan peoples, although he also studied tribes of the Southwest and Northwest. Dorsey also collected much material on beliefs and institutions, although most of his manuscripts have not been published. Some of the many stories he collected from the Ponca and Osage have been published, and are being used in an Omaha-language curriculum project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Robert Francis Murphy
Robert Francis Murphy was an American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, from the early 1960s to 1990. His field work included studies of the Munduruku people of the Amazon and the Tuareg people of the Sahara.- Erna Gunther was an American anthropologist who taught for many years at the University of Washington in Seattle. Gunther's work on ethnobotany is still extensively consulted today.
- Clifford James Geertz ( (listen); August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology, and who was considered "for three decades...the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
- Jane Ellen Buikstra is an American anthropologist and bioarchaeologist. She is credited with coining and defining bioarchaeology in the US as the application of biological anthropological methods to the study of archaeological problems. Emphasis was placed on problem-oriented research. Relevant topics include mortuary studies, paleopathology, paleodemography, biological distance, paleogenetics, among others.
- Livingston Farrand (June 14, 1867 – November 8, 1939) was an American physician, anthropologist, psychologist, public health advocate and academic administrator.
Timothy Pauketat
Dr. Timothy R. Pauketat is an “American Bottom” Mississippian-era archaeologist and professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is best known for his investigations at and involving the World Heritage site of Cahokia Mounds near St. Louis, MO.- Anne Allison is a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University in the United States, specializing in contemporary Japanese society. She wrote the book Nightwork on hostess clubs and Japanese corporate culture after having worked at a hostess club in Tokyo. She received her BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1986.
- Stuart McKee Struever (born 1931) is an American archaeologist and anthropologist best known for his contributions to the archaeology of the Woodland Period in the US midwest and for his leadership of archaeology research & education foundations. He was a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.
- Ted Polhemus is an American anthropologist, writer, and photographer who lives and works on England's south coast. His work focuses on fashion and anti-fashion, identity, and the sociology of style and of the body – his objective, to explore the social and communicative importance of personal expression in style. He has written or edited more than a dozen books, and has taken many of the photographs that appear in them. He was the creator and curator of an exhibition, called "StreetStyle", at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. One of his most popular books is "Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk", which he originally wrote as the book for the exhibition. Ted Polhemus wrote an updated version of Streetstyle, which PYMCA published in 2010.In 2011 he published a revised and expanded version of his early book Fashion & Anti-fashion. Most recently, he has been exploring the social and cultural impact of the baby boom generation and this has culminated in the publication in 2012 of BOOM! - A Baby Boomer Memoir, 1947-22.
- Sven Haakanson, Jr. (born 1967) (Alutiiq) is an American anthropologist who specializes in documenting and preserving the language and culture of the Alutiiq. He served, from 2000-2013, as Executive Director of the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska. He is employed as Associate Professor by the University of Washington, Seattle, and as Curator of North American Anthropology with Burke Museum. In 2007 he was named as a MacArthur Fellow for being a leader in the effort to rekindle Alutiiq language, customs and culture.
Frederick Starr
Frederick Starr, aka Ofuda Hakushi in Japan, was an American academic, anthropologist, and "populist educator" born at Auburn, New York.Scott Atran
Scott Atran (born February 6, 1952) is an American-French cultural anthropologist who is Emeritus Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, Research Professor at the University of Michigan, and cofounder of ARTIS International and of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University. He has studied and written about terrorism, violence and religion, and has done fieldwork with terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists, as well as political leaders.Guillermo Algaze
Guillermo Algaze (born November 24, 1954) is a recipient of a 2003 MacArthur Award, Algaze is a former chair of the anthropology department at University of California, San Diego, and project director of the Titris Hoyuk excavation in southern Turkey.John Reed Swanton
John Reed Swanton was an American anthropologist and linguist who worked with Native American peoples throughout the United States. Swanton achieved recognition in the fields of ethnology and ethnohistory. He is particularly noted for his work with indigenous peoples of the Southeast and Pacific Northwest.- Fiona Caroline Graham (born in Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian anthropologist working as a geisha in Japan. She made her debut as a geisha in 2007 in the Asakusa district of Tokyo under the name Sayuki (紗幸), and as of 2018 was reported working in the Fukagawa district.
Victor Wolfgang Von Hagen
Victor Wolfgang von Hagen was an American explorer, archaeological historian, anthropologist, and travel writer who traveled in South America with his wife. Mainly between 1940 and 1965, he published a large number of widely acclaimed books about the ancient people of the Inca, Maya, and Aztecs. In the early 1950s, he went for a two year exploration of Peru's ancient Inca roads and found the only surviving suspension bridge of this trail. His daughter, Adriana von Hagen, is co-director of a museum in Leymebamba.Ian Tattersall
Ian Tattersall is a British-born American paleoanthropologist and a curator emeritus with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, New York. In addition to human evolution, Tattersall has worked extensively with lemurs. Tattersall is currently working with The Templeton Foundation.Sol Tax
Sol Tax was an American anthropologist. He is best known for creating action anthropology and his studies of the Meskwaki, or Fox, Indians, for "action-anthropological" research titled the Fox Project, and for founding the academic journal Current Anthropology. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1935 and, together with Fred Eggan, was a student of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. Tax grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During his formative years he was involved in a number of social clubs. Among these was the Newsboys Republic with which his first encounter was when he was "arrested" for breaking their rules. Tax began his undergraduate education at the University of Chicago but had to leave for lack of funds. He returned to school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studied with Ralph Linton. He later taught at the University of Chicago. Tax was a mentor to noted anthropologist Joan Ablon at the University of Chicago. He was the main organizer for the 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration held at the University of Chicago.Wallace L Chafe
Wallace Chafe is an American linguist. He is Professor Emeritus and research professor at The University of California, Santa Barbara. Chafe was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from Yale University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1958. From 1975 to 1986 he was the director of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. He later moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and became professor emeritus at UCSB in 1991. Chafe is a cognitivist; he considers semantics to be a basic component of language. He is a critic of Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics. He is an influential scholar in indigenous languages of the Americas, notably Iroquoian and Caddoan languages, in discourse analysis and psycholinguistics, and also prosody of speech. Together with Johanna Nichols, he edited a seminal volume on evidentiality in language in 1986.E. Adamson Hoebel
E. Adamson Hoebel was Regents Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He held a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University, where he also attended the seminars of Karl N. Llewellyn, who taught at the Columbia Law School from 1925-1951. Llewellyn was the most important figure associated with the American Legal Realism of the 1920s and 1930s, which held that the law was indeterminate on the basis of statutes and precedents alone and required study of the how disputes are resolved in practice. The "sociological" wing of legal realism championed by Llewellyn held that in American law dispute resolution was strongly influenced by norms such as those in mercantile practice. Llewellyn and Hoebel went to on to develop a means of determining legal practice from ethnographic description of trouble cases, including mediation and negotiation as well as adjudication. Their "case study method" applied both to social systems with and without formal courts. Hoebel taught anthropology for a number of years at New York University and subsequently at the University of Utah, where he was also dean of the University College.- Edmund "Ted" Snow Carpenter (September 2, 1922 – July 1, 2011) was an American anthropologist best known for his work on tribal art and visual media.
- Maxine L. Margolis is an American anthropologist and an inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and has been with the University since 1970. Margolis holds a Ph. D in Anthropology from Columbia University. She was a student and then a colleague of Marvin Harris, and was one of those responsible for convincing him to leave Columbia University for the University of Florida in 1980. Margolis's work is strongly informed by Harris's anthropological research strategy, known as cultural materialism. In the late 1990s, Margolis sued the University of Florida, charging sex discrimination after twice going through the university’s internal administrative procedures seeking redress. Both times, the university’s salary discrimination committee found that her salary lagged behind those of her male colleagues and that the gap was the result of discrimination. The University of Florida and the Florida Board of Regents settled the suit for an undisclosed amount.
- Josh Bernstein (born February 24, 1971) is an American explorer, author, survival expert, anthropologist, and TV host best known as the host of Digging for the Truth. He later appeared for one season as the host of the Discovery Channel's Into the Unknown with Josh Bernstein.
- LeRoy Robert Ripley (December 25, 1890 – May 27, 1949) was an American cartoonist, entrepreneur, and amateur anthropologist who is known for creating the Ripley's Believe It or Not! newspaper panel series, radio show, and television show which feature odd facts from around the world. Subjects covered in Ripley's cartoons and text ranged from sports feats to little-known facts about unusual and exotic sites. But what ensured the concept's popularity may have been that he also included items submitted by readers, who supplied photographs of a wide variety of small-town American trivia ranging from unusually shaped vegetables to oddly marked domestic animals, all documented by photographs and then depicted by his drawings.
Brian J. McVeigh
Brian J. McVeigh is a scholar of Asia who specializes in Japanese pop art, education, politics, and history. He is also a theorist of cultural psychology and historical changes in human mentality. He received his doctorate in 1991 from Princeton University’s Department of Anthropology. While a graduate student, he studied under Julian Jaynes whose influence is apparent in his research. He taught at the University of Arizona until 2013.Russell L Ciochon
Russell Ciochon is an American paleoanthropologist. He was born in Altadena, California and received three degrees in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa. He is known primarily for his research into Gigantopithecus.Howard Reid
Howard Reid is a British documentary film maker and anthropologist. He has a PhD from Cambridge University and has made films for the BBC and Channel 4 relating to ancient civilizations and ancient religions.- Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA (née Nicol, 6 February 1913 – 9 December 1996) was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, eastern Africa. For much of her career she worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge, where they uncovered fossils of ancient hominines and the earliest hominins, as well as the stone tools produced by the latter group. Mary Leakey developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetoli footprints, and at the Laetoli site she discovered hominin fossils that were more than 3.75 million years old. During her career, Leakey discovered fifteen new species of animal. She also brought about the naming of a new genus. In 1972, after the death of her husband, Leakey became director of excavations at Olduvai. She maintained the Leakey family tradition of palaeoanthropology by training her son, Richard, in the field.
William Jones
William Jones was a Native American anthropologist of the Fox nation. Born in Oklahoma on March 28, 1871, after studying at Hampton Institute he graduated from Phillips Academy and went on to receive his B.A. from Harvard. When in 1904 he received his PhD from Columbia University as a student of Franz Boas, he became the fourth person to receive a PhD in linguistic anthropology, twelfth person to receive a PhD in anthropology, and first Native American PhD in anthropology. Jones was biologically only part Fox but was raised by his Fox maternal grandmother between the ages of one, when his mother died, and nine, when his grandmother died. He is known as a specialist in Algonquian languages, particularly known for his extensive collection of Algonquian texts. In 1908 while employed as an assistant curator at the Field Museum he went to the Philippines to do fieldwork. He was killed on March 28, 1909 at Dumobato on the east side of Luzon in an altercation with some of the Ilongot among whom he was engaged in fieldwork.Lawrence Rosen
Lawrence Rosen (born 1941) is an American anthropologist and scholar of law. He is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia University.Rosen earned his B.A. at Brandeis University in 1963, his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1968, and his J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1974. In 1981 he became one of the first generation of MacArthur Fellows.Ann Laura Stoler
Ann Stoler is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School.William W. Howells
Dr. William White Howells was a professor of anthropology at Harvard University. His most notable research concluded that modern humans are of one species. Howells, grandson of the novelist William Dean Howells, was born in New York City, the son of John Mead Howells, the architect of the Chicago Tribune Tower, and Abby MacDougall White. He graduated with an S.B. in 1930 and obtained a doctorate from Harvard in 1934 and worked for the American Museum of Natural History. He lectured at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1954, serving as a lieutenant in the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II. He taught at Harvard from 1954 until his retirement in 1974. He was president of the American Anthropological Association in 1951. In 1998, with his wife Muriel Seabury, Howells endowed the directorship of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. "Professor Howells had a moderating effect" over the origins of modern humans as he "tended toward the Noah's Ark theory."Gilbert H. Herdt
Gilbert H. Herdt is Professor of Human Sexuality Studies and Anthropology and a Founder of the Department of Sexuality Studies and National Sexuality Resource Center at San Francisco State University.- Don Jeffrey "Jeff" Meldrum (born May 24, 1958) is a Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology and a Professor of the Department of Anthropology at Idaho State University. Meldrum is also Adjunct Professor of Occupational and Physical Therapy. Meldrum is an expert on foot morphology and locomotion in primates.
Tom D Dillehay
Tom Dillehay is an American anthropologist who is the Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Culture and Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. In addition to Vanderbilt, Dillehay has taught at the Universidad Austral de Chile and the University of Kentucky. Since 1977, Dillehay has been involved in the excavations at Monte Verde in Chile, where an early human settlement was found in 1975. Dillehay claims that the remains are about 14,500 years old, challenging the Clovis theory of the first human arrival in the Americas. In addition to his archaeological work, Dillehay has conducted ethnographic work among the Mapuche of southern Chile and the Jivaro of northern Peru.- Ruth Fulton Benedict (June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social Research under Elsie Clews Parsons, she entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1921, where she studied under Franz Boas. She received her PhD and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler, were among her students and colleagues. Benedict held the post of President of the American Anthropological Association and was also a prominent member of the American Folklore Society. She became the first woman to be recognized as a prominent leader of a learned profession. She can be viewed as a transitional figure in her field, redirecting both anthropology and folklore away from the limited confines of culture-trait diffusion studies and towards theories of performance as integral to the interpretation of culture. She studied the relationships between personality, art, language and culture, insisting that no trait existed in isolation or self-sufficiency, a theory which she championed in her 1934 Patterns of Culture.
- Alfred Russel Wallace (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish his own ideas in On the Origin of Species. Like Darwin, Wallace did extensive fieldwork; first in the Amazon River basin, and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. He was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography". Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century and made many other contributions to the development of evolutionary theory besides being co-discoverer of natural selection. These included the concept of warning colouration in animals, and the Wallace effect, a hypothesis on how natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridisation. Wallace's 1904 book Man's Place in the Universe was the first serious attempt by a biologist to evaluate the likelihood of life on other planets. He was also one of the first scientists to write a serious exploration of the subject of whether there was life on Mars.Wallace was strongly attracted to unconventional ideas (such as evolution). His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with some members of the scientific establishment. Aside from scientific work, he was a social activist who was critical of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system (capitalism) in 19th-century Britain. His interest in natural history resulted in his being one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activity. He was also a prolific author who wrote on both scientific and social issues; his account of his adventures and observations during his explorations in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, The Malay Archipelago, was both popular and highly regarded. Since its publication in 1869 it has never been out of print. Wallace had financial difficulties throughout much of his life. His Amazon and Far Eastern trips were supported by the sale of specimens he collected and, after he lost most of the considerable money he made from those sales in unsuccessful investments, he had to support himself mostly from the publications he produced. Unlike some of his contemporaries in the British scientific community, such as Darwin and Charles Lyell, he had no family wealth to fall back on, and he was unsuccessful in finding a long-term salaried position, receiving no regular income until he was awarded a small government pension, through Darwin's efforts, in 1881.
Munro S. Edmonson
Munro Sterling Edmonson was an American linguist and anthropologist, renowned for his contributions to the study of Mesoamerican languages and Mesoamerican cultural heritage. At the time of his death in 2002, Edmonson was Professor in Anthropology at Tulane University, New Orleans. Edmonson authored a 1971 edition of the Popol Vuh entitled The Book of Counsel: The Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya of Guatemala published by the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans. His edition was the first to espouse the theory of multiple Popol Vuh manuscripts. In February 2002 Edmonson died in New Orleans, at the age of 77 from an incurable blood disease.- Arjun Appadurai (born 1949) is an Indian-American anthropologist recognized as a major theorist in globalization studies. In his anthropological work, he discusses the importance of the modernity of nation states and globalization.Arjun Appadurai was born in 1949 and raised in Bombay, India, and went to the United States where he obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He was the former University of Chicago professor of anthropology and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Humanities Dean of the University of Chicago, director of the city center and globalization at Yale University, he was a senior tutor at New College of the Global Initiative, and the Education and Human Development Studies professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture. Arjun Appadurai has presided over Chicago globalization plan, as many public and private organizations (such as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, UNESCO, the World Bank, etc.) consultant and long-term concern issues of globalization, modernity and ethnic conflicts. "Some of his most important works include Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule (1981), Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy (1990), of which an expanded version is found in Modernity at Large (1996), and Fear of Small Numbers (2006). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997."Appadurai held many scholarships and grants, and has received numerous academic honors, including the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (California) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as well as individual research fellowship from the Open Society Institute (New York). He was elected Arts and Sciences in 1997, the American Academy of Sciences. In 2013, he was awarded an honorary doctorate Erasmus University in the Netherlands. He also served as a consultant or adviser, extensive public and private organizations, including many large foundations (Ford, MacArthur and Rockefeller); the UNESCO; UNDP; World Bank; the US National Endowment for the Humanities; National Science Foundation; and Infosys Foundation. He currently serves as the Asian Art Program Advisory Committee members in the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and the forum D 'Avignon Paris Scientific Advisory Board.
Grenville Goodwin
Grenville Goodwin, born Greenville Goodwin, is best known for his participant-observer ethnology work among the Western Apache in the 1930s in the American Southwest. Largely self-taught as an anthropologist, he lived among the Apache for nearly a decade, and learned their stories and rituals. His monograph The Social Organization of the Western Apache was considered a major contribution to American ethnology. It was published in 1941 after his death at age 32, when his promising career was cut short. Based on his studies, Goodwin classified the Western Apache into five groups, but some of these divisions have been disputed by other anthropologists and linguists. Researchers have generally agreed on three major groups: the White Mountain, San Carlos and Tonto Apache peoples, with sub-groupings of bands below this classification.- Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through 1947. Kroeber provided detailed information about Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people, whom he studied over a period of years. He was the father of the acclaimed novelist, poet, and writer of short stories Ursula K. Le Guin.
- Lesley Gill is an author and a professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. Her research focusses on political violence, gender, free market reforms and human rights in Latin America, especially Bolivia. She also writes about the military training that takes place at the School of the Americas and has campaigned for its closure. She has campaigned with Witness for Peace.
Jeffrey Anderson
Jeffrey D. Anderson is an American anthropologist who specializes in Arapaho culture and Arapaho language and culture. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Raymond D. Fogelson. He is currently Professor of Anthropology at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, FBA (born Alfred Reginald Brown; 17 January 1881 – 24 October 1955) was an English social anthropologist who developed the theory of structural functionalism and coadaptation.- Judith R. Shapiro (born January 24, 1942) is a former President of Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women affiliated with Columbia University; as President of Barnard, she was also an academic dean within the university. She was also a professor of anthropology at Barnard. Shapiro became Barnard's 6th president in 1994 after a teaching career at Bryn Mawr College where she was Chair of the Department of Anthropology. After serving as Acting Dean of the Undergraduate College in 1985-6, she was Provost, the chief academic officer, from 1986 until 1994. Debora L. Spar was appointed to replace Shapiro, effective July 1, 2008.
- Ralph Linton (27 February 1893 – 24 December 1953) was a respected American anthropologist of the mid-20th century, particularly remembered for his texts The Study of Man (1936) and The Tree of Culture (1955). One of Linton's major contributions to anthropology was defining a distinction between status and role.
- Franz Uri Boas (1858–1942) was a German-born American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movement of anthropological historicism.Studying in Germany, Boas was awarded a doctorate in 1881 in physics while also studying geography. He then participated in a geographical expedition to northern Canada, where he became fascinated with the culture and language of the Baffin Island Inuit. He went on to do field work with the indigenous cultures and languages of the Pacific Northwest. In 1887 he emigrated to the United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian, and in 1899 became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programmes inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology. Among his most significant students were A. L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics. In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy he showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait. Boas also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas introduced culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology.Among Boas's main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas and that consequently there was no process towards continuously "higher" cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the "stage"-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question. Boas also introduced the ideology of cultural relativism, which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct, but that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms. For Boas, the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways and to do this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural practices of the people studied. By uniting the disciplines of archaeology, the study of material culture and history, and physical anthropology, the study of variation in human anatomy, with ethnology, the study of cultural variation of customs, and descriptive linguistics, the study of unwritten indigenous languages, Boas created the four-field subdivision of anthropology which became prominent in American anthropology in the 20th century.
- Johnnetta Betsch Cole (born 1936) is an American anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. Cole was the first female African-American president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. During 2009–2017 she was Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art.
Rubie S. Watson
Brackette Williams
Brackette F. Williams is an American anthropologist, and Senior Justice Advocate, Open Society Institute. She is currently an associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Arizona.Williams graduated from Cornell University with a BS, from the University of Arizona with a master's in Education, and from the Johns Hopkins University with a PhD in Cultural Anthropology. She has taught at Duke University, Queens College, the New School for Social Research, the University of California, Berkeley, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Arizona.Her work has centered on the Caribbean region, and in particular, examined how racial and ethnic categories are reproduced in Guyana nationalism. Categories and classification systems - how they are developed, what basis they have in cultural contexts, and how they are put to use, by whom and for whom - have been a general theme in her work as well. Williams's ethnographic work on the categories informing capital punishment in the United States demonstrates has also been an interest. She was editor of the journal Transforming Anthropology.- Lewis Roberts Binford (November 21, 1931 – April 11, 2011) was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period. He is widely considered among the most influential archaeologists of the later 20th century, and is credited with fundamentally changing the field with the introduction of processual archaeology (or the "New Archaeology") in the 1960s. Binford's influence was controversial, however, and most theoretical work in archaeology in the late 1980s and 1990s was explicitly construed as either a reaction to or in support of the processual paradigm. Recent appraisals have judged that his approach owed more to prior work in the 1940s and 50s than suggested by Binford's strong criticism of his predecessors.
- Clyde Kluckhohn (; January 11, 1905, Le Mars, Iowa – July 28, 1960, near Santa Fe, New Mexico), was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the development of theory of culture within American anthropology.
Stanley Diamond
Stanley Diamond (January 4, 1922 in New York City, NY – March 31, 1991 in New York City, NY) was an American poet and anthropologist. As a young man, he identified as a poet, and his disdain for the fascism of the 1930s greatly influenced his thinking. Diamond was a professor at several universities, spending most of his career at The New School. He wrote several books and founded Dialectical Anthropology, a Marxist anthropology journal, in 1975.Mark Zborowski
Mark Zborowski (January 27, 1908 – April 30, 1990) (AKA "Marc" Zborowski or Etienne) was an anthropologist and an NKVD agent (Venona codenames TULIP and KANT). He was the NKVD's most valuable mole inside the Trotskyist organization in Paris during the 1930s and in New York during the 1940s.- Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu (1905 – 1999) — born Israel Ehrenberg — was a British-American anthropologist who popularized the study of topics such as race and gender and their relation to politics and development. He was the rapporteur, in 1950, for the UNESCO statement "The Race Question". As a young man he changed his name from Ehrenberg to "Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu". After relocating to the United States he used the name "Ashley Montagu". Montagu, who became a naturalized American citizen in 1940, taught and lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and New York University. Forced out of his Rutgers position after the McCarthy hearings, he repositioned himself as a public intellectual in the 1950s and '60s, appearing regularly on television shows and writing for magazines and newspapers. He authored over 60 books throughout this lifetime. In 1995, the American Humanist Association named him the Humanist of the Year.
- Florentino Ameghino (September 19, 1853 – August 6, 1911) was an Argentine naturalist, paleontologist, anthropologist and zoologist, whose fossil discoveries on the Argentine Pampas, especially on Patagonia, rank with those made in the western United States during the late 19th century. Along with his two brothers –Carlos and Juan– Florentino Ameghino was one of the most important founding figures in South American paleontology. From 1887 until his death, Ameghino was passionately devoted to the study of fossil mammals from Patagonia, with the valuable support of his brother Carlos Ameghino (1865–1936) who, between 1887 and 1902, made 14 trips to that region, where he discovered and collected numerous fossil faunas and made important stratigraphic observations which helped to support his journal Ameghiniana.
- William Boyd Allison Davis (October 14, 1902 – November 21, 1983) was an American educator, anthropologist, writer, researcher, and scholar. He was considered one of the most promising black scholars of his generation. He was the first African American to hold a full faculty position at a major white university when he joined the staff of the University of Chicago in 1942, and he served there for the balance of his academic life. Among his students during his tenure at the University of Chicago were anthropologist St. Clair Drake and sociologist Nathan Hare. Davis, who has been honored with a commemorative postage stamp by the United States Postal Service, is best remembered for his pioneering anthropology research on southern race and class during the 1930s, his research on intelligence quotient tests in the 1940s and 1950s, and his support of "compensatory education." This work contributed to the intellectual genesis of the federal Head Start Program.
- Stanley Ann Dunham (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995) was an American anthropologist who specialized in the economic anthropology and rural development of Indonesia. She was the mother of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. Dunham was known as Stanley Ann Dunham through high school, then as Ann Dunham, Ann Obama, Ann Soetoro, Ann Sutoro and finally after her second divorce as Ann Dunham.Born in Wichita, Kansas, Dunham studied at the East–West Center and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, where she attained a bachelor of arts degree in anthropology (1967), and later received master of arts (1974) and PhD (1992) degrees, also in anthropology. She also attended University of Washington at Seattle in 1961–1962. Interested in craftsmanship, weaving, and the role of women in cottage industries, Dunham's research focused on women's work on the island of Java and blacksmithing in Indonesia. To address the problem of poverty in rural villages, she created microcredit programs while working as a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development. Dunham was also employed by the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and she consulted with the Asian Development Bank in Gujranwala, Pakistan. Towards the latter part of her life, she worked with Bank Rakyat Indonesia, where she helped apply her research to the largest microfinance program in the world.After her son was elected President, interest renewed in Dunham's work: the University of Hawaii held a symposium about her research; an exhibition of Dunham's Indonesian batik textile collection toured the United States; and in December 2009, Duke University Press published Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, a book based on Dunham's original 1992 dissertation. Janny Scott, an author and former New York Times reporter, published a biography about Ann Dunham's life titled A Singular Woman in 2011. Posthumous interest has also led to the creation of The Ann Dunham Soetoro Endowment in the Anthropology Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, as well as the Ann Dunham Soetoro Graduate Fellowships, intended to fund students associated with the East–West Center (EWC) in Honolulu, Hawaii.In an interview, Barack Obama referred to his mother as "the dominant figure in my formative years ... The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics."
- William Graham Sumner (October 30, 1840 – April 12, 1910) was a classical liberal American social scientist. He taught social sciences at Yale, where he held the nation's first professorship in sociology. He was one of the most influential teachers at Yale or any other major school. Sumner wrote widely within the social sciences, with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology. He supported laissez-faire economics, free markets, and the gold standard. He adopted the term "ethnocentrism" to identify the roots of imperialism, which he strongly opposed, and as a spokesman against it he was in favor of the "forgotten man" of the middle class, a term he coined. He had a long-term influence on conservatism in the United States.
- Anatoly Mikhailovich Khazanov (Russian: Анато́лий Миха́йлович Хазáнов, born December 13, 1937) is an anthropologist and historian. Born in Moscow, Khazanov attended Moscow State University, where he received an M.A. in 1960. He earned a Ph.D. degree in 1966 and Dr.Sc. in 1976 from the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1990, he became Professor of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and at the moment he is the Ernest Gellner Professor of Anthropology (Emeritus). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Corresponding Member of the UNESCO International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations, and Honorary Member of the Central Asian Studies Society; as well as the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships. Anatoly M. Khazanov started his professional career as an archaeologist specializing in the nomadic cultures of the Early Iron Age. In the second half of the 1960s he shifted to socio-cultural anthropology. From 1966-1985, his main fields of research were pastoral nomads and the origins of complex societies. His main argument that the nomads were never autarkic and therefore in economic, cultural, and political respects were dependent on their relations with the sedentary world, is shared now by the majority of experts in the field. On the other hand, Khazanov was trying as much as was possible under Soviet censorship, to demonstrate the fallacy of the Soviet Marxist concept of historical process. After his emigration in 1985 from the Soviet Union, Khazanov continued to study mobile pastoralists, paying particular attention to the role of nomads in world history and to the deficiences and shortcomings of their modernization process. He argued that various modernization projects have failed because they did not provide room for the sustained self-development of the pastoralists and denied their participation in decision-making. Since the beginning of the 1990s, Khazanov has also become known for his contribution to the study of ethnicity and nationalism, and transitions from communist rule. He was one of the first to argue that in many countries this transition does not guarantee an emergence of liberal democratic order. He also argued that, contrary to widespread opinion, globalization per se is unable to reduce nationalism and ethnic strife, which will remain a salient phenomenon in the foreseeable future. In the 2000s, Khazanov has also turned to the study of collective memory, collective representation, and other related issues; being particularly interested in their role in defining and redefining national and ethnic identities. Khazanov has written 6 monographs and around 200 articles. These include Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge University Press, 1984; 2nd Edition University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), which has been translated into several languages; Soviet Nationality Policy During Perestroika (Delphic, 1991), and After the U.S.S.R.: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). He has also edited or co-edited 10 volumes of papers, including Pastoralism in the Levant: Archaeological Materials in the Anthropological Perspective (Prehistory Press, 1992) with Ofer Bar-Yosef, Changing Nomads in a Changing World (Sussex Academic Press, 1998) with Joseph Ginat, Nomads in the Sedentary World (Curzon Press, 2001) with André Wink, Perpetrators, Accomplices, and Victims in Twentieth Century Politics: Reckoning with the Past (Routledge, 2009) with Stanley Payne, and Who Owns the Stock? Collective and Property Rights in Animals (Berghahn, 2012) with Günther Schlee.
- Akbar Salahuddin Ahmed, (born. January 15, 1943) also known as Akbar Ahmed, is an American-Pakistani academic, author, poet, playwright, filmmaker and former diplomat. He currently holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and is Professor of International Relations at the American University in Washington, D.C. A former Pakistani High Commissioner to the UK and Ireland, Ahmed was a member of the Civil Service of Pakistan and served as Political Agent in South Waziristan Agency and Commissioner in Baluchistan. He also served as the Iqbal Fellow (Chair of Pakistan Studies) at the University of Cambridge as well as holding teaching positions at Harvard, Princeton, and the U.S. Naval Academy. An anthropologist and scholar of Islam, he received his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He has been called "the world's leading authority on contemporary Islam" by the BBC.Ahmed received the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz (Medal of Excellence) and Sitara-i-Imtiaz (Star of Excellence) from the Pakistani government for academic distinction and the Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs in London. He was also awarded the inaugural Purpose Prize in 2006 alongside Judea Pearl and is frequently named in the annual book, The Muslim 500: The World's 500 Most Influential Muslims, and was named a 2015 Global Thought Leader by The World Post and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.
- Paul Edward Farmer (born October 26, 1959) is an American medical anthropologist and physician. Farmer holds an MD and PhD from Harvard University, where he is the Kolokotrones University Professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is co-founder and chief strategist of Partners in Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He is professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Additionally, Farmer serves as the United Nations Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti. Farmer is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Bronislaw Malinowski Award and the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and, with his Partners In Health colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, from which he was awarded the 2018 Public Welfare Medal. Farmer and his colleagues in the U.S. and abroad have pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings in the U.S. and other countries. Their work is documented in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Clinical Infectious Diseases, British Medical Journal, and Social Science and Medicine. Farmer has written extensively on health and human rights, the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases, and global health. He is known as "the man who would cure the world," as described in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. The story of Partners In Health is also told in the 2017 documentary Bending the Arc.
- Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille (; French: [ʒɔʁʒ batɑj]; 10 September 1897 – 9 July 1962) was a French intellectual and literary figure working in literature, philosophy, anthropology, consumerism, sociology and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as erotism, mysticism, surrealism, petroleum, and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including poststructuralism.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, FBA (21 September 1902 – 11 September 1973), known as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, was an English anthropologist who was instrumental in the development of social anthropology. He was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1970.- Marc Lamont Hill (born December 17, 1978) is an American academic, author, activist, and television personality. He is a Professor of Media Studies and Urban Education at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.He was the host of the syndicated television show Our World with Black Enterprise and hosts the online Internet-based HuffPost Live. He is also a BET News correspondent, and a former political commentator for CNN and Fox News. Hill also hosts VH1 Live! and reunion shows for Basketball Wives. Hill was fired from his position as a commentator for CNN after remarks before the U.N. on the Arab–Israeli conflict that were perceived as antisemitic.
- Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (26 January 1935 – 25 May 2009) was a Guyanese-born associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States.He was best known for his Olmec alternative origin speculations, a brand of pre-Columbian contact theory, which he proposed in his book They Came Before Columbus (1976). While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, or else dismissed as Afrocentric pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures".
- Wade Davis may refer to: Wade Davis (anthropologist) (born 1953), Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis (American football) (born 1977), former American football player Wade Davis (baseball) (born 1985), baseball player Wade–Davis Bill, American legislation, vetoed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864
- Robert John Braidwood (29 July 1907 – 15 January 2003) was an American archaeologist and anthropologist, one of the founders of scientific archaeology, and a leader in the field of Near Eastern Prehistory.
- André Singer is a documentary producer and anthropologist. He is currently CEO of Spring Films Ltd of London and is President of The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. Having studied at Oxford University under Professor Sir E.E. Evans-Pritchard specializing in Iran and Afghanistan for his doctorate, he moved to television in the early 1970s as a researcher, then producer and director for the Disappearing World series at Granada Television. As a director he made several award –winning films including the Strangers Abroad series, Khyber and Witchcraft and Magic Among the Azande. His television career has moved between working for several broadcasters including Commissioning editor for Discovery Channel, Europe; Senior Vice-President for Alliance Atlantis; and the BBC where he headed the Independent Documentary Unit. At the BBC, he founded and commissioned for the Fine Cut series working with such international filmmakers as Jean Rouch, Werner Herzog, DB Pennebaker, Bob Drew, Fred Wiseman and Vikram Jayanti.
Melville J. Herskovits
Melville Jean Herskovits (September 10, 1895 – February 25, 1963) was an American anthropologist who helped establish African and African-American studies in American academia. He is known for exploring the cultural continuity from African cultures as expressed in African-American communities. He worked with his wife Frances (Shapiro) Herskovits, also an anthropologist, in the field in South America, the Caribbean and Africa. They jointly wrote several books and monographs together.- George Peter ("Pete") Murdock (May 11, 1897 – March 29, 1985), also known as G. P. Murdock, was an American anthropologist. He is remembered for his empirical approach to ethnological studies and his study of family and kinship structures across differing cultures.
- Mary Rosamond Haas (January 23, 1910 – May 17, 1996) was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics.
- Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (March 28, 1793 – December 10, 1864) was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native American cultures, as well as for his 1832 expedition to the source of the Mississippi River. He is also noted for his major six-volume study of Native Americans published in the 1850s. He served as United States Indian agent in Michigan for a period beginning in 1822. There he married Jane Johnston, mixed-race daughter of a prominent Scotch-Irish fur trader and Ojibwa mother, herself a daughter of Ojibwa war chief Waubojeeg. Jane taught Schoolcraft the Ojibwe language and much about her maternal culture. They had several children, two of whom survived past childhood. She is now recognized as the first Native American literary writer in the United States. In 1846 the widower Schoolcraft was commissioned by Congress for a major study, known as Indian Tribes of the United States, which was published in six volumes from 1851 to 1857. He married again in 1847, to Mary Howard, from a slaveholding family in South Carolina. In 1860 she published the bestselling The Black Gauntlet, an anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novel.
- William Henry Holmes (December 1, 1846 – April 20, 1933) — known as W.H. Holmes — was an American explorer, anthropologist, archaeologist, artist, scientific illustrator, cartographer, mountain climber, geologist and museum curator and director.
Arthur Demarest
Arthur Andrew Demarest is an American anthropologist and archaeologist, known for his studies of the Maya civilization.- Edgar Lee Hewett (November 23, 1865 – December 31, 1946) was an American archaeologist and anthropologist whose focus was the Native American communities of New Mexico and the southwestern United States. He is best known for his role in gaining passage of the Antiquities Act, a pioneering piece of legislation for the conservation movement; as the founder and first director of the Museum of New Mexico; and as the first president of the New Mexico Normal School, now New Mexico Highlands University. Hewett's dealings with Maria Martinez, the great potter of San Ildefonso Pueblo, were instrumental in establishing San Ildefonso as a center for Native American pottery. He helped stimulate the rebirth of pottery as a significant folk art form in the region. Hewett also had a significant role in the formation of Bandelier National Monument and Chaco Culture National Historical Park, established to preserve extensive prehistoric ruins of the Pueblo people whom he studied. The Antiquities Act, which he had worked on, authorized the establishment by the executive branch of such national monuments.
- Raymond Arthur Dart (4 February 1893 – 22 November 1988) was a South African anatomist and anthropologist, best known for his involvement in the 1924 discovery of the first fossil ever found of Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominin closely related to humans, at Taung in the North of South Africa in the province Northwest.
- Morris Swadesh (; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics. Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents. He completed bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Chicago, studying under Edward Sapir, and then followed Sapir to Yale University where he completed a Ph.D. in 1933. Swadesh taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1939, and then during World War II worked on projects with the United States Army and Office of Strategic Services. He became a professor at the City College of New York after the war's end, but was fired in 1949 due to his membership of the Communist Party. He spent most of the rest of his life teaching in Mexico and Canada. Swadesh had a particular interest in the indigenous languages of the Americas, and conducted extensive fieldwork throughout North America. He was one of the pioneers of glottochronology and lexicostatistics, and is arguably best known for his creation of the Swadesh list, a compilation of basic concepts believed to present across cultures and thus suitable for cross-linguistic comparison. Swadesh believed that his techniques could discover deep relationships between apparently unrelated languages, thus allowing for the identification of macrofamilies and possibly even a "Proto-Human" language. His theories were often controversial, and some have been deprecated by later linguists.
- Kenneth Lee Pike (June 9, 1912 – December 31, 2000) was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was the originator of the theory of tagmemics, the coiner of the terms "emic" and "etic" and the developer of the constructed language Kalaba-X for use in teaching the theory and practice of translation. In addition, he was the First President of the Bible-translating organization Summer Institute in Linguistics (SIL), with which he was associated from 1942 until his death.
- Ronald L. Olson (born July 9, 1941) is an American attorney and a partner in the Los Angeles office of Munger Tolles & Olson LLP. He was the lead attorney representing the board of directors of Yahoo! in connection with Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo!, and was contemporaneously involved in Yahoo!'s Google outsourcing contract.
- Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall (6 September 1857, San Francisco – 12 April 1933, Coyoacán, Mexico) was an American archaeologist and anthropologist specialised in pre-Aztec Mexican cultures and pre-Columbian manuscripts. She discovered two forgotten manuscripts of this type in private collections, one of them being the Codex Zouche-Nuttall. She was one of the first to identify and recognise artefacts dating back to the pre-Aztec period.
- Craig Stanford is Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. He is also a Research Associate in the herpetology section of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. He is known for his field studies of the behavior, ecology and conservation biology of chimpanzees, mountain gorillas and other tropical animals, and has published more than 140 scientific papers and 17 books on animal behavior, human evolution and wildlife conservation. He is best known for his detailed field study of the predator–prey ecology of chimpanzees and the animals they hunt in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, and for his long term study of the behavior and ecology of chimpanzees and mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda. He is also on the board of the Turtle Conservancy and is involved in efforts to save critically endangered tortoises and turtles from extinction.
- Leslie Alvin White (January 19, 1900, Salida, Colorado – March 31, 1975, Lone Pine, California) was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. He was president of the American Anthropological Association (1964).
- David Rolfe Graeber (; born 12 February 1961) is an American anthropologist, anarchist activist and author known for his 2011 Debt: The First 5000 Years and 2018's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. He is a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics.
- Alfred Irving "Pete" Hallowell (; 1892–1974) was an American anthropologist, archaeologist and businessman. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania receiving his B.S. degree in 1914, his A.M. in 1920, and his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1924. He was a student of the anthropologist Frank Speck. From 1927 through 1963 he was a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania excepting 1944 through 1947 when he taught the subject at Northwestern University. Hallowell's main field of study was Native Americans. He also held the presidency of the American Anthropological Association for a period. His students included the anthropologists Melford Spiro, Anthony F. C. Wallace, Raymond D. Fogelson, George W. Stocking, Jr., Regna Darnell, James W. VanStone and Marie-Françoise Guédon. After his retirement, his position was filled by the linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes.
- Grover Sanders Krantz (November 5, 1931 – February 14, 2002) was an American anthropologist and cryptozoologist; he was one of few scientists not only to research Bigfoot, but also to express his belief in the being's existence. Throughout his professional career, Krantz authored more than 60 academic articles and 10 books on human evolution, and conducted field research in Europe, China, and Java.Outside of Krantz's formal studies in evolutionary anthropology and primatology, his cryptozoological research on Bigfoot drew heavy criticism and accusations of "fringe science" from his colleagues, costing him research grants and promotions, and delaying his tenure at the university. Further, his articles on the subject were rejected by peer-reviewed scholarly journals. However, Krantz was tenacious in his work and was often drawn to controversial subjects, such as the Kennewick Man remains, arguing for their preservation and study. He has been described as having been the "only scientist" and "lone professional" to seriously consider Bigfoot in his time, in a field largely dominated by amateur naturalists.
- Darrell Addison Posey (March 14, 1947 – March 6, 2001) was an American anthropologist and biologist who vitalized the study of traditional knowledge of indigenous and folk populations in Brazil and other countries. He called his approach ethnobiology and combined research with respect for other cultures, especially indigenous intellectual property rights. An obituary described him as an "anthropologist who gave up scholarly detachment to fight for the rights of native peoples." He never married and was survived by his parents and brother. He died of a brain tumor, at 53 years of age, in Oxford, England, where he made his home after 1992.
- Robert Ardrey (October 16, 1908 – January 14, 1980) was an American playwright, screenwriter and science writer perhaps best known for The Territorial Imperative (1966). After a Broadway and Hollywood career, he returned to his academic training in anthropology and the behavioral sciences in the 1950s.As a playwright and screenwriter Ardrey received many accolades. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1937, won the inaugural Sidney Howard Memorial Award in 1940, and in 1966 received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay for his script for Khartoum. His most famous play, Thunder Rock, is widely considered an international classic.Ardrey's scientific work played a major role in overturning long-standing assumptions in the social sciences. In particular, both African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966), two of his most widely read works, were instrumental in changing scientific doctrine and increasing public awareness of evolutionary science. His work was so popular that many prominent scientists cite it as inspiring them to enter their fields.
- Ruth Landes (October 8, 1908 in New York City – February 11, 1991 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) was an American cultural anthropologist best known for studies on Brazilian candomblé cults and her published study on the topic, City of Women (1947). Landes is recognized by some as a pioneer in the study of race and gender relations.
- Cora Alice Du Bois (October 26, 1903 – April 7, 1991) was an American cultural anthropologist and a key figure in culture and personality studies and in psychological anthropology more generally.
- Dell Hathaway Hymes (June 7, 1927 in Portland, Oregon – November 13, 2009 in Charlottesville, Virginia) was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline (linguistics). In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society and served as its editor for 22 years. He was accused of sexual harassment in the later years of his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania.
- John Francis Marchment Middleton (22 May 1921 – 27 February 2009) was a British professor of anthropology in the United States, specializing in Africa. He was director of the International African Institute in 1973-74 and in 1980-81. His work on the Lugbara religion is considered a classic of African anthropology.
- Hortense Powdermaker (December 24, 1900 – June 16, 1970) was an American anthropologist best known for her ethnographic studies of African Americans in rural America and of Hollywood.
- Raphael Patai (Hebrew רפאל פטאי; November 22, 1910 − July 20, 1996), born Ervin György Patai, was a Hungarian-Jewish ethnographer, historian, Orientalist and anthropologist.
Henri Breuil
Henri Édouard Prosper Breuil (28 February 1877 – 14 August 1961), often referred to as Abbé Breuil, was a French Catholic priest and member of the Society of Jesus, archaeologist, anthropologist, ethnologist and geologist. He is noted for his studies of cave art in the Somme and Dordogne valleys as well as in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, China with Teilhard de Chardin, Ethiopia, British Somaliland, and especially Southern Africa.- Mark J. Plotkin (born May 21, 1955) is an ethnobotanist and a plant explorer in the Neotropics, where he is an expert on rainforest ecosystems. Plotkin is an advocate for tropical rainforest conservation.
- Carleton Stevens Coon (June 23, 1904 – June 3, 1981) was an American physical anthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, lecturer and professor at Harvard University, and president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Coon's theories on race are widely rejected by modern anthropologists for unsubstantiated claims of European superiority to all other races.
- Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, FRS HFRSE FRCP (15 August 1871 – 1 January 1937) was an Australian-British anatomist, Egyptologist and a proponent of the hyperdiffusionist view of prehistory. He believed in the idea that cultural innovations occur only once and that they spread geographically. Based on this, he traced the origins of many cultural and traditional practices across the world, including the New World, to ideas that he believed came from Egypt and in some instances from Asia. An expert on brain anatomy, he was the first to study Egyptian mummies using radiological techniques. He took an interest in extinct humanoids and was embroiled in controversy over the authenticity of the Piltdown Man.
- Stephen Douglas Houston ( HOW-stən; born November 11, 1958) is an American anthropologist, archaeologist, epigrapher and Mayanist scholar, who is particularly renowned for his research into the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. He is the author of a number of papers and books concerning topics such as the Maya script, the history, kingships and dynastic politics of the pre-Columbian Maya, and archaeological reports on several Maya archaeological sites, particularly Dos Pilas and El Zotz. Houston is an endowed chair as Dupee Family Professor of Social Science at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and is also a professor in Brown's Department of Anthropology.Houston has collaborated with many of his students and colleagues on projects and publications. He has led investigations at Piedras Negras, Kaminaljuyu and El Zotz, Guatemala. These projects have resulted in new information on the ancient cultures of Mesoamerica.
- Christopher Horner is an American anthropologist and scenic designer.
- David Murray Schneider (November 11, 1918, Brooklyn, New York – October 30, 1995, Santa Cruz, California) was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology.
- Georgina Emma Mary Born, is a British academic, anthropologist and musician. As a musician she is known as Georgie Born and is known for her work in Henry Cow and with Lindsay Cooper.
Erik Trinkaus
Erik Trinkaus (born December 24, 1948) is a paleoanthropologist specialised on Neandertal biology and human evolution. Trinkaus researches the evolution of the species Homo sapiens and recent human diversity, focusing on the paleoanthropology and emergence of late archaic and early modern humans, and the subsequent evolution of anatomically modern humanity. Trinkaus is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a contributor to publications including Natural History and Scientific American, and is frequently quoted in the popular media. Trinkaus is the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Physical Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.
