ANTHROPOLOGY THOUGHT JUNE 2019 Linton, Ralph Ralph Linton (1893–1953), American cultural anthropologist, was one of the major contributors to the reconstruction of anthropology during the second quarter of the twentieth century. Trained in the traditions of the North American “historical school” of anthropology, Lin ton remained loyal throughout his career to the broad interests and general principles established by Franz Boas and other American anthropologists. But with the publication in 1936 of The Study of Man, which was quickly recognized by social scientists all over the world as a pioneering study of human behavior, he embarked on a series of creative and stimulating studies which provided new conceptions of social structure and cultural organization. He related these conceptions in a clear if somewhat simple manner to the biological individual and his personality and utilized them in his analyses of the processes of cultural change. Linton belonged to the “third generation” of American academic anthropologists, succeeding such second-generation students of Putnam and Boas as Wissler, Dixon, Kroeber, Goldenweiser, Lowie, Sapir, and Radin. These academicians, together with a number of outstanding journeymen and masters involved more in field research than in teaching, had created a distinctive variety of anthropology. Like Tylor in England, they had a holistic approach to human studies which is still, thanks in part to Linton, a mark of American anthropology. In the Americas much more than in Europe almost all anthropological study and training had been nurtured by experience in the field and disciplined by the empiricism required by field work on specific problems treating the temporal and spatial dimensions of culture. In dealing with the elements of local aboriginal development or culture history, most American anthropologists insisted that the combined skills of all the arts and sciences, as they may be relevant to the study of man, should be brought to bear on the task at hand. Linton’s own teaching, writing, and research encompassed human biology, archeology, ethnography, ethnology, folklore, and regional and global cultural history. He contributed to all of these classical subfields of his discipline, although less significantly to physical anthropology, archeology, and folklore than to the others. He neglected technical developments in linguistics and approached the field with respectful diffidence, but he urged his students to become familiar with it, since he felt that it was the most scientific of the social disciplines. He did not emphasize SOSINCLASSES.COM 99899 66744 1 ANTHROPOLOGY THOUGHT JUNE 2019 statistical studies, nor did he use specialized mathematical methods in cultural or psychological anthropology, although he recognized these as legitimate activities. It was not any aversion to formalism or structuralism as such that made Linton shy away from these aspects of anthropology, for his approach to culture and to personality studies was essentially formalistic and structural. Like many other American anthropologists who began as archeologists, Linton’s professional career started with a focus on artifacts. As a boy he had systematically collected arrowheads, and his interests in artifacts continued throughout his life as he privately gathered outstanding examples of African textiles and masks, Peruvian ceramics, and Oceanic sculpture. Linton’s eidetic memory and extraordinary capacity for visual imagery enabled him to identify and compare artifacts from all over the world; and he could retrieve data from the masses of material he had read, explaining that often he could simply “turn the pages”; in his mind and reread them. Linton did his undergraduate work at Swarthmore College, a liberal institution to which his Philadelphia Quaker background led him. The college offered no studies in anthropology, but Linton was a good student in the natural sciences and an omnivorous reader in history and literature, and he decided, as he later recalled, that anthropology provided the most promising opportunity for a synthesis of varied fields. In 1912 and 1913 Linton joined field expeditions working in the American southwest and in Guatemala; and in the summer of 1915, after receiving his B.A., he discovered in New Jersey a prehistoric site of controversial importance, which he described in his first professional publications in the two following years. His graduate training at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained an M.A. in 1916, at Columbia University, and finally at Harvard University, where he completed his PH.D. in 1925, was heavily weighted on the side of archeology and physical anthropology. Linton had two more summers of archeological experience in the south-western United States, one in 1916 for the American Museum of Natural History and another in 1919 following his return from army service in France. He embarked in 1920 on his doctoral research on the archeology of the Marquesas Islands. Linton’s two years in Polynesia proved a turning point in his career, for he found work with living Marquesans more rewarding than his study of the meager remains of their ancestors. His concern for archeological problems continued—he was later active in excavations in Ohio and Wisconsin, and his posthumously published reconstruction of global cultural history SOSINCLASSES.COM 99899 66744 2 ANTHROPOLOGY THOUGHT JUNE 2019 demonstrates the mastery he always maintained over the data of world pre-history (see 1955)— but from the early 1920s on, his primary interest was the study of contemporary peoples. On his return from Polynesia in 1922 he joined the staff of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, working on Oceanic and American Indian materials and conducting a one-man ethnographic expedition to Madagascar and adjacent parts of east Africa from 1925 to 1927. The publications he prepared during his years as a curator in Chicago indicate that for him the main task of ethnology was not far removed from that of archeology—the reconstruction of human history through careful descriptive studies of the development and distribution of cultural traits. Thus, when Lin ton began his own teaching career, accepting the first tenure position in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, in 1928, he had moved little beyond the range of interests which had preoccupied the two preceding generations of American anthropologists. His early years in the department of sociology at Wisconsin (soon the department of sociology and anthropology) marked the major turning point in Linton’s intellectual and professional progress. He suddenly acquired wide interests in the many dimensions of human behavior. The competent fieldworker, museum archeologist, and ethnologist became in a few years a leading American social scientist. Linton was an excellent lecturer and teacher. Almost as soon as he arrived at Wisconsin he acquired a following of young scholars who had done their undergraduate work at the university; John Bollard, J. P. Gillin, E. A. Hoebel, Clyde Kluckhohn, Lauriston Sharp, and Sol Tax were among them. Although none of these completed his graduate training under Linton, they were nonetheless widely identified with him. A number of colleagues had a marked influence on Linton’s thinking during his early years at Wisconsin. He said that Kimball Young, the social psychologist, had perhaps helped him most in developing his view of social organization and its relation to individual personality formation; but he also acknowledged his debt to other members of the department, as well as to the psychologists Clark Hull and Harry Harlow, the geneticist Michael F. Guyer, the political scientist John Gauss, and the ethicists F. C. Sharp and Eliseo Vivas. Students in the university’s newly established Experimental College, while dealing with the large problems of order and change in the civilizations of classical Greece and modern America, were reading a wide range of materials bearing on cultural anthropology, and Linton participated in sessions on the nature and organization of culture and civilization that were unlike most anthropology courses of the day. SOSINCLASSES.COM 99899 66744 3 ANTHROPOLOGY THOUGHT JUNE 2019 For a few years during the early 1930s A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, then a leader of the British functionalist school of social anthropology, taught at the University of Chicago, where Linton maintained informal connections. At that time Radcliffe-Brown was claiming in a somewhat doctrinaire manner that history is irrelevant to the real task of social anthropology, which is to study societies synchronically and induce general sociological laws through a comparison of the forms and functions of the social organizations of particular living societies. To Linton, the rejection of history, however fragmentary and insecure our knowledge of it may be, was anathema. However, his own field work had convinced him that the task of determining the functions of segments or complexes of cultural behavior as well as the functional interdependence of parts within the totality of a culture is a legitimate and essential one (1933). Furthermore, Linton himself was seeking regularities and general principles in the varied array of cultural experience in different times and places. Thus, in their intellectual objectives the two scholars were close together, however they differed as to means. Linton’s correspondence of the period indicates that he deplored Radcliffe-Brown’s considerable influence on younger members of the profession