Linton, Ralph

Related Category: Anthropology: Biographies

1893–1953, American anthropologist, b. Philadelphia, B.A. Swarthmore College, 1915, Ph.D. Harvard, 1925. He was (1922–28) assistant curator at the Field Museum, Chicago, then taught at the Univ. of Wisconsin (1928–37), at Columbia (1937–46), and at Yale (1946–53). His wide studies in the Americas, Africa, Madagascar, and the South Pacific produced insights into the process of acculturation and the complex of cultural-psychological relationships. Among his more general works are The Study of Man (1936), The Science of Man in the World Crisis (1945), Most of the World (1949), and The Tree of Culture (1955).

See biography by A. S. Linton and C. Wagley (1971).