23 Facts About Ralph Linton

Ralph Linton was an American anthropologist of the mid-20th century, particularly remembered for his texts The Study of Man and The Tree of Culture.

Ralph Linton was born into a family of Quaker restaurant entrepreneurs in Philadelphia in 1893 and entered Swarthmore College in 1911.

Ralph Linton was an indifferent student and resisted his father's pressures to prepare himself for the life of a professional.

Ralph Linton grew interested in archaeology after participating in a field school in the southwest and took a year off of his studies to participate in another archaeological excavation at Quirigua in Guatemala.

Ralph Linton attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his master's degree studying with Frank Speck while undertaking additional archaeological field work in New Jersey and New Mexico.

Ralph Linton served as a corporal and saw battle at the trenches, experiencing first hand a German gas attack.

An anecdote has it that Ralph Linton was rebuked by Boas when he appeared in class in his military uniform.

Ralph Linton returned from the Marquesas in 1922 and eventually received his Ph.

Ralph Linton used his Harvard connections to secure a position at the Field Museum of Chicago after his return from the Marquesas.

Ralph Linton continued working on digs in Ohio which he had first begun as a graduate student, but began working through the museum's archival material on the Pawnee and published data collected by others in a series of articles and museum bulletins.

Between 1925 and 1927, Ralph Linton undertook an extensive collecting trip to Madagascar for the field museum, exploring the western end of the Austronesian diaspora after having studied the eastern end of this culture in the Marquesas.

Ralph Linton did his own fieldwork there as well, and the book that resulted, The Tanala: A Hill Tribe of Madagascar, was the most detailed ethnography he would publish.

Ralph Linton thus served as the first member of what would later become a separate department.

Up to this point, Ralph Linton had been primarily a researcher in a rather romantic vein, and his years at Wisconsin were the period in which he developed his ability to teach and publish as a theoretician.

In 1937 Ralph Linton came to Columbia University, appointed to the post of head of the Anthropology department after the retirement of Franz Boas.

The choice was opposed by most of Boas' students, with whom Ralph Linton had never been on good terms.

When World War II broke out, Ralph Linton became involved in war-planning and his thoughts on the war and the role of the United States could be seen in several works of the post-war period, most notably The Science of Man in the World Crisis and Most of the World.

Ralph Linton taught there from 1946 to 1953, where he continued to publish on culture and personality.

Ralph Linton was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950.

Ralph Linton died of complications relating to his trip in South America on Christmas Eve, 1953.

Ralph Linton noted that while the definitions of the two concepts are clear and distinct, it is not always easy to identify whether an individual's status is ascribed or achieved.

Ralph Linton's perspective offers a deviation from the view that ascribed statuses are always fixed.

Ralph Linton obtained money from the Works Progress Administration for students to produce work which studied acculturation.