10 Facts About Melvin Ember

Melvin Lawrence Ember was an American cultural anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher with wide-ranging interests who combined an active research career with writing for nonprofessionals.

Melvin Ember then went on to Yale University to study for his Ph.

Melvin Ember was professor at Antioch College and Hunter College.

Melvin Ember chaired the department of anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Melvin Ember served as executive officer of the City University of New York graduate program in anthropology from 1973 to 1975.

Melvin Ember moved to the New Haven area in 1987 to become president of the Human Relations Area Files, an institution at Yale whose mission is to foster the comparative study of culture.

Melvin Ember chose three communities differing in distance from the commercial center to evaluate how commercial involvement affected political change.

Traditional theories had focused on economic factors, such as which gender contributed most to the economy, but finding these explanations lacking in predictive value, Melvin Ember began to explore other possibilities, particularly the effects of warfare in the social environment.

Melvin Ember later worked with cross-cultural psychologists to explore the relationships between aggression and war.

Melvin Ember fervently believed that the work of different anthropologists in far-flung places and across time could be used to test theories about why cultures varied or were similar and he devoted most of his research career to systematically testing explanations, rather than just expounding them.