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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

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List of the most influential people in Anthropology,

#1

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss

#16

Overall Influence

1908 - 2009 (101 years)

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world.

#2

Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz

#138

Overall Influence

1926 - 2006 (80 years)

Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

#3

Dell Hymes

#521

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Dell Hathaway Hymes was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline . In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society ...

#4

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu

#34

Overall Influence

1930 - 2002 (72 years)

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields . During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.

#5

Mary Douglas

#619

Overall Influence

1921 - 2007 (86 years)

Dame Mary Douglas, was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture, symbolism and risk, whose area of speciality was social anthropology. Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.

#6

David M. Schneider

#723

Overall Influence

1918 - 1995 (77 years)

David Murray Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology. Biography He received his B.S. in 1940 and his M.S. from Cornell University in 1941. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard in 1949, based on fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap.

#7

Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins

#667

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Areas of Specialization: Economic Anthropology, Historical Anthropology Marshall Sahlins was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Sahlins earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. Note: Since the publication of this ranking list, Professor Sahlins passed away, April 5, 2021. An activist since the Vietnam War, Sahlins coined the phrase, teach-in, an academic exercise inviting open discourse, barring any limitation on where the discussion may lead.

#8

Marvin Harris

#896

Overall Influence

1927 - 2001 (74 years)

Marvin Harris was an American anthropologist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York City. A prolific writer, he was highly influential in the development of cultural materialism and environmental determinism. In his work, he combined Karl Marx's emphasis on the forces of production with Thomas Malthus's insights on the impact of demographic factors on other parts of the sociocultural system.

#9

William M. Bass

William M. Bass

#1728

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Areas of Specialization: Forensic Anthropology William M. Bass is a forensic anthropologist, famous for his work on the study of human decomposition. He earned his B.A. from the University of Virginia, his MS from the University of Kentucky, and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. He founded the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research, also known as “The Body Farm”. The Body Farm is a facility where researchers can study the decomposition of the human body under a variety of conditions. This research helps law enforcement and scientists to better understand...

#10

Eric Wolf

#1164

Overall Influence

1923 - 1999 (76 years)

Eric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology. Early life Life in Vienna Wolf was born in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family. Wolf has described his family as nonreligious, and said that he had little experience of a Jewish community while growing up. His father worked for a corporation and was also a Freemason. Wolf described his mother, who had studied medicine in Russia, as a feminist—"not in terms of declarations, but in terms of her stand on human possibilities." In 1933, his...

#11

Ashley Montagu

#981

Overall Influence

1905 - 1999 (94 years)

Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu was a British-American anthropologist who popularized the study of topics such as race and gender and their relation to politics and development. He was the rapporteur, in 1950, for the UNESCO "statement on race".

#12

Raymond Firth

#1598

Overall Influence

1901 - 2002 (101 years)

Sir Raymond William Firth was an ethnologist from New Zealand. As a result of Firth's ethnographic work, actual behaviour of societies is separated from the idealized rules of behaviour within the particular society . He was a long serving professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, and is considered to have singlehandedly created a form of British economic anthropology.

#13

Bruno Latour

#134

Overall Influence

1947 - 2022 (75 years)

Areas of Specialization: Actor Network Theory, Social Theory Bruno Latour is an anthropologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tours. Soon after graduating, he became interested in anthropology, and set out on a study of race and decolonization in Ivory Coast. He is best known for his work, Nous n’avons jamais ete modernes: Essais d’anthropologie symetrique (translated: We Have Never Been Modern). This theme, of challenging methods and findings of scientific inquiry, is revisited in his later work, Pandora’s Hope. His work in Science, Technology and Modernity has been provocative, to say the least.

#14

Jack Goody

#798

Overall Influence

1919 - 2015 (96 years)

Sir John Rankine Goody 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. Among his main publications were Death, property and the ancestors , Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa , The myth of the Bagre and The domestication of the savage mind .

#15

Sidney Mintz

#3210

Overall Influence

1922 - 2015 (93 years)

Sidney Wilfred Mintz was an American anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for the duration of his career.

#16

Clyde Snow

#2490

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Clyde Snow was an American forensic anthropologist. Some of his skeletal confirmations include John F. Kennedy, victims of John Wayne Gacy, King Tutankhamun, victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

#17

C. Loring Brace

#2274

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Charles Loring Brace IV was an American anthropologist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan's Department of Anthropology and Curator Emeritus at the University's Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. He considered the attempt "to introduce a Darwinian outlook into biological anthropology" to be his greatest contribution to the field of anthropology.

#18

Ulf Hannerz

#5202

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Areas of Specialization: Urban and Media Anthropology Ulf Hannerz is an emeritus professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University, which is where he also earned his Ph.D. As an anthropologist, he has focused his research on urban and media anthropology. His research has taken him to locations in the United States, the Caribbean, and West Africa. His current interests involve post-Cold War future facing scenarios with impacts on a global scale. He examines apocalyptic predictions as a product of culture and spread around the world by way of ubiquitous technology. He has written books s...

#19

Tim Ingold

#2969

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Tim Ingold is Chair of Social Anthropology at University of Aberdeen. He earned his B.A. and Ph.D from Churchill College at University of Cambridge. His research interests are diverse and include creativity, environmental perception, human-animal relations, technology, and many others. His earliest research was an examination of the hunting peoples living in the arctic, dependent on caribou or reindeer. As a result of that experience, he became more curious about interactions between reindeer and humans and ecological anthropology. He has also explored the evolution of language and technology and cultural transmission.

#20

M. N. Srinivas

#2379

Overall Influence

1916 - 1999 (83 years)

Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas was an Indian sociologist and social anthropologist. He is mostly known for his work on caste and caste systems, social stratification, Sanskritisation and Westernisation in southern India and the concept of 'dominant caste'. He is considered to be one of the pioneering personalities in the field of sociology and social anthropology in India as his work in Rampura remains one of the early examples of ethnography in India. That was in contrast to most of his contemporaries of the Bombay School, who focused primarily on a historical methodology to conduct research, mainly in Indology.

#21

Richard Borshay Lee

#4445

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Richard Borshay Lee is a Canadian anthropologist. Lee has studied at the University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. He holds a position at the University of Toronto as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. Lee researches issues concerning the indigenous people of Botswana and Namibia, particularly their ecology and history.

#22

John J. Gumperz

#3974

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

John Joseph Gumperz was an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research on the languages of India, on code-switching in Norway, and on conversational interaction, has benefitted the study of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and urban anthropology.

#23

Don Kulick

#6936

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Don Kulick is a Swedish anthropologist and linguist who is the professor of anthropology at Uppsala University. Kulick works within the frameworks of both cultural and linguistic anthropology, and has carried out field work in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Italy and Sweden. Kulick is also known for his extensive fieldwork on the Tayap people and their language in Gapun village of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea.

#24

Talal Asad

#781

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Talal Asad is emeritus distinguished professor of anthropology for the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He earned his B.Litt from the University of Edinburgh, and a Bachelor of Letters and Ph.D from the University of Oxford. He is noted for his contributions to theoretical secularism. His work in secularism challenges the actual impacts of separation of church and state, or the secular and the religious, suggesting that in so doing, the government becomes too distant from the cultural norms and expectations of conduct held by their citizenry. He felt Europe, in particular, ...

#25

Chie Nakane

#4813

Overall Influence

1926 - 2021 (95 years)

was a Japanese anthropologist and Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at the University of Tokyo. Education and career Nakane was born in Tokyo and spent her teenage years in Beijing. She graduated from Tsuda College in 1947 and then completed her graduate work specializing in China and Tibet at the University of Tokyo in 1952. In 1953–1957, she did fieldwork in India and studied in the London School of Economics. Nakane served as Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago at the invitation of Sol Tax from 1959 to 1960 and as Visiting Lecturer in the...

#26

Napoleon Chagnon

#2782

Overall Influence

1938 - 2019 (81 years)

Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring.

#27

Henrietta Moore

Henrietta Moore

#6618

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Dame Henrietta Louise Moore, is a British social anthropologist. She is the director of the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity at University College, London, part of the Bartlett, UCL's Faculty of the Built Environment.

#28

Maurice Bloch

#3376

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Maurice Bloch is Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics. He was born in France in 1939. After his father, serving in the French army, was killed by the Nazis, he moved with his mother and her new husband to England. He completed his undergraduate education at the London School of Economics and earned his Ph.D in anthropology at Fitzwilliam College of Cambridge University. Bloch has researched themes of kinship, politics, economics, and religion in two regions of Madagascar. His work has built a bridge between linguistics, psychology, and social anthropology. A writer of numerous books and articles about Madagascar, his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

#29

Maurice Godelier

Maurice Godelier

#2082

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Maurice Godelier is a French anthropologist who works as a Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He is one of the most influential French anthropologists and is best known as one of the earliest advocates of Marxism's incorporation into anthropology. He is also known for his field work among the Baruya in Papua New Guinea from the 1960s to the 1980s.

#30

Arjun Appadurai

Arjun Appadurai

#2838

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Arjun Appadurai is an Indian-American anthropologist recognized as a major theorist in globalization studies. In his anthropological work, he discusses the importance of the modernity of nation states and globalization. He is the former University of Chicago professor of anthropology and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Humanities Dean of the University of Chicago, director of the city center and globalization at Yale University, and the Education and Human Development Studies professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture.

#31

Jeffrey Meldrum

#4289

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Don Jeffrey "Jeff" Meldrum is a Full Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology in the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University. Meldrum is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Physical and Occupational Therapy and the Department of Anthropology. Meldrum is an expert on foot morphology and locomotion in primates.

#32

Jared Diamond

#155

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books. Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond is commonly referred to as a polymath, stemming from his knowledge in many fields including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA.

#33

Marilyn Strathern

Marilyn Strathern

#5135

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Areas of Specialization: Social Anthropology Marilyn Strathern was born in 1941 in North Wales. She attended Crofton Lane Primary School and Bromley High School before moving on to study Archaeology and Anthropology at Girton College. She earned her Ph.D. from Girton College in 1968. Strathern has spent her career working with the people of Papua New Guinea. Her approach to feminist anthropology has yielded important scholarship, including Self-Interest and the Social Good: Some Implications of Hagen Gender Imagery and Dealing with Inequality: Analysing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond.

#34

Derek Freeman

#3402

Overall Influence

1916 - 2001 (85 years)

John Derek Freeman was a New Zealand anthropologist known for his criticism of Margaret Mead's work on Samoan society, as described in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa. His attack "ignited controversy of a scale, visibility, and ferocity never before seen in anthropology."

#35

Rodney Needham

#4151

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Rodney Needham was an English social anthropologist. Born Rodney Phillip Needham Green, he changed his name in 1947; the following year he married Maud Claudia Brysz. The couple would collaborate on several works, including an English translation of Robert Hertz's Death and the Right Hand.

#36

Fredrik Barth

#3699

Overall Influence

1928 - 2016 (88 years)

Thomas Fredrik Weybye Barth was a Norwegian social anthropologist who published several ethnographic books with a clear formalist view. He was a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University, and previously held professorships at the University of Oslo, the University of Bergen , Emory University and Harvard University. He was appointed a government scholar in 1985.

#37

Jane Goodall

#149

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Dame Jane Morris Goodall , formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzeess, after 60 years studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960.

#38

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

#7236

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Areas of Specialization: Social Anthropology Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is a scholar of identity politics, cultural dynamics, the global response to accelerating change and crisis, and the Creole world. He has published numerous works, including Common Denominators: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Compromise in Mauritius, Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography, and Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. He has also published many research artic...

#39

Jay Ruby

#10185

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Jay Ruby was an American scholar who was a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Temple University until his retirement in 2003. He received his B.A. in History and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

#40

Colin Groves

#3255

Overall Influence

1942 - 2017 (75 years)

Colin Peter Groves was a British-Australian biologist and anthropologist. Groves was Professor of Biological Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Education Born in England, Groves completed a Bachelor of Science at University College London in 1963, and a Doctor of Philosophy at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in 1966. From 1966 to 1973, he was a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Queen Elizabeth College and the University of Cambridge.

#41

Kathy Reichs

#7314

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Kathleen Joan Reichs is an American crime writer, forensic anthropologist and academic. She is an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is well known for inspiring the television series Bones.

#42

Richard Shweder

#5064

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Richard Allan Shweder is an American cultural anthropologist and a figure in cultural psychology. He is currently Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.

#43

Philippe Bourgois

#4860

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Philippe Bourgois is professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the founding chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and was the Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania .

#44

Fadwa El Guindi

#7770

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Fadwa El Guindi is an Egyptian-American anthropologist and former professor of anthropology at Qatar University. She is the author of several ethnographies, including The Myth of Ritual: A Native's Ethnography of Zapotec Life-Crisis Rituals and By Noon Prayer: The Rhythm of Islam .

#45

Marc Augé

#4239

Overall Influence

1935 - 2023 (88 years)

Marc Augé was a French anthropologist. In an essay and book of the same title, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity , Augé coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to spaces where concerns of relations, history, and identity are erased. Examples of a non-place would be a motorway, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket.

#46

Tanya Luhrmann

#6586

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is an American psychological anthropologist known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and studies of how culture shapes psychotic, dissociative, and related experiences. She has also studied culture and morality, and the training of psychiatrists. She is Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. Luhrmann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

#47

Robert I. Levy

#10388

Overall Influence

1924 - 2003 (79 years)

Robert I. Levy was an American psychiatrist and anthropologist known for his fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal and on the cross-cultural study of emotions. Though he did not receive a formal degree in anthropology, he spent most of his adult life conducting anthropological fieldwork or teaching in departments of anthropology. In developing his approach to anthropology, he credited his cousin, the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, and Gregory Bateson .

#48

Anna Tsing

#7054

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an American anthropologist. She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

#49

John Tooby

#557

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

John Tooby was an American anthropologist, who helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology with his psychologist wife Leda Cosmides. Biography Tooby received his PhD in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University in 1989 and was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara .

#50

Paul Bohannan

#7574

Overall Influence

1920 - 2007 (87 years)

Paul James Bohannan was an American anthropologist known for his research on the Tiv people of Nigeria, spheres of exchange and divorce in the United States. Early life and education Bohannan was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, to Hillory Bohannan and Hazel Truex Bohannan. During the Dust Bowl his family moved to Benson, Arizona. World War II interrupted his college education, and he served in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps from 1941 to 1945 reaching the rank of captain. In 1947 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with his bachelor's degree in German from the University of Arizona. He attended Queen...

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