Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard FBA FRAI 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.
George Peter ("Pete") Murdock, also known as G. P. Murdock, was an American anthropologist who was professor at Yale University and University of Pittsburgh. He is remembered for his empirical approach to ethnological studies and his study of family and kinship structures across differing cultures. His 1967 Ethnographic Atlas dataset on more than 1,200 pre-industrial societies is influential and frequently used in social science research. He is also known for his work as an FBI informant on his fellow anthropologists during McCarthyism.
Morris Edward Opler, American anthropologist and advocate of Japanese American civil rights, was born in Buffalo, New York. He was the brother of Marvin Opler, an anthropologist and social psychiatrist.
Harry Hoijer was a linguist and anthropologist who worked on primarily Athabaskan languages and culture. He additionally documented the Tonkawa language, which is now extinct. Hoijer's few works make up the bulk of material on this language. Hoijer was a student of Edward Sapir.
Melford Elliot Spiro was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and psychological anthropology. He is known for his critiques of the pillars of contemporary anthropological theory—wholesale cultural determinism, radical cultural relativism, and virtually limitless cultural diversity—and for his emphasis on the theoretical importance of unconscious desires and beliefs in the study of stability and change in social and cultural systems, particularly in respect to the family, politics, and religion. Explicated in numerous theoretical publications, they are empirically exemplified in monographs based on his fieldwork in Ifaluk atoll in Micronesia, an Israeli kibbutz, and a village in Burma.
Frederick Russell Eggan was an American anthropologist best known for his innovative application of the principles of British social anthropology to the study of Native American tribes. He was the favorite student of the British social anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown during Radcliffe-Brown's years at the University of Chicago. His fieldwork was among Pueblo peoples in the southwestern U.S. Eggan later taught at Chicago himself. His students there included Sol Tax.
Sir John Rankine Goody (1919–2015) was an English social anthropologist. He was a prominent lecturer at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 to 1984.
Werner Cohn was a sociologist who wrote on the sociology of Jews and of Romani people, and political sociology. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia.
Tony Naden is a British lexicographer who specializes on Western Oti-Volta subgroup of Gur languages. He has compiled dictionaries in the following languages: Dagbanli, Mampelle, Mõõré, Nabt, Talene, KaMara and Yarsi.
Norma Diamond was an American anthropologist who specialized in the study of Chinese society, especially in Taiwan, and women's studies. She was Professor of Anthropology at University of Michigan from 1963 to 1996, and named Professor Emerita. She was the first woman to be a tenure track professor in Anthropology at that institution.
Karen B. Strier is a primatologist. She is a Vilas Research Professor and Irven DeVore professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and co-editor of Annual Review of Anthropology. The main subject of her research is the Northern Muriqui, a type of spider monkey found in Brazil.
Susan Elaine Emley Keefe is an American anthropologist and author. She is a professor emerita at Appalachian State University. Keefe has published books on Mexican-American culture and Appalachian health issues.
Evelyn Blackwood is an American anthropologist whose research focuses on gender, sexuality, identity, and kinship. She was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize in 1999, 2007 and 2011. Blackwood is an emerita professor of anthropology at Purdue University.
James W. Fernandez is an American anthropologist. He has written extensively and developed several theories, though his primary work is in the rhetorical camp of anthropology and focuses on the role of metaphors and tropes in culture. Fernandez is influenced by postmodernism, which he uses as a lens through which to conduct anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork in Spain and West Africa, most notably among the Fang people regarding the Bwiti cult, as represented by his work Bwiti. Fernandez has taught at several American universities and continues to teach as a professor emeritus of anthropology and social sciences at the University of Chicago. He earned a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in the social sciences in 2003.
Francis L. K. Hsu was a China-born American anthropologist, one of the founders of psychological anthropology. He was president of the American Anthropological Association from 1977 to 1978.
Barbara Helen Tedlock is an American cultural anthropologist and oneirologist. She is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Her work explores cross-cultural understanding and communication of dreams, ethnomedicine, and aesthetics and focuses on the indigenous Zuni of the Southwestern United States and the Kʼicheʼ Maya of Mesoamerica. Through her study and practice of the healing traditions of the Kʼicheʼ Maya of Guatemala, Tedlock became initiated into shamanism. She is the collaborator and wife of the late anthropologist and poet Dennis Tedlock.
Elisabeth Jane Tooker was an American anthropologist and a leading historian on the Iroquois nations in north-eastern United States.
Andrew Jamieson Strathern is a British anthropologist.
Norman E. Whitten, Jr. is an American cultural anthropologist who is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Curator of the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures. He is known for books based on his anthropological field work and his research on the Afro-Latin and Indigenous peoples of the West Coast rainforest and upper Amazon Rain forest, most notably the Black population and Canelos Quichua and Achuar Peoples.
