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List of the most influential people in Anthropology, for the years 1200 – 2020

Franz Boas

#146

Overall Influence

1858 - 1942 (84 years)

Franz Uri Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss

#141

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.

Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz

#466

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.

Bronisław Malinowski

Bronisław Malinowski

#562

Overall Influence

1884 - 1942 (58 years)

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was a Polish-British anthropologist and ethnologist whose writings on ethnography, social theory, and field research have exerted a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology.

Margaret Mead

#314

Overall Influence

1901 - 1978 (77 years)

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. Mead served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.

Dell Hymes

#1379

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 ...

Edmund Leach

#1498

Overall Influence

1910 - 1989 (79 years)

Sir Edmund Ronald Leach FRAI FBA was a British social anthropologist and academic. He served as provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979. He was also president of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1971 to 1975.

Max Weber

#24

Overall Influence

1864 - 1920 (56 years)

Maximilian Karl Emil Weber was a German sociologist, historian, jurist and political economist, who is regarded as among the most important theorists of the development of modern Western society. His ideas profoundly influence social theory and research. While Weber did not see himself as a sociologist, he is recognized as one of the fathers of sociology along with Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim.

Immanuel Kant

#4

Overall Influence

1724 - 1804 (80 years)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy.

Ruth Benedict

#1275

Overall Influence

1887 - 1948 (61 years)

Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social Research under Elsie Clews Parsons, she entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1921, where she studied under Franz Boas. She received her Ph.D. and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler were among her students and colleagues.

Mary Douglas

#1526

Overall Influence

1921 - 2007 (86 years)

Dame Mary Douglas, was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism, 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.

Émile Durkheim

#89

Overall Influence

1858 - 1917 (59 years)

David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu

#173

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.

David M. Schneider

#1877

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.

Marcel Mauss

#708

Overall Influence

1872 - 1950 (78 years)

Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. His most famous work is The Gift .

Edward Burnett Tylor

Edward Burnett Tylor

#1444

Overall Influence

1832 - 1917 (85 years)

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor was an English anthropologist, and professor of anthropology. Tylor's ideas typify 19th-century cultural evolutionism. In his works Primitive Culture and Anthropology , he defined the context of the scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell. He believed that there was a functional basis for the development of society and religion, which he determined was universal. Tylor maintained that all societies passed through three basic stages of development: from savagery, through barbarism to civilization. Tylor is a founding figu...

Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins

#1699

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.

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer

#64

Overall Influence

1820 - 1903 (83 years)

Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, psychologist, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist famous for his hypothesis of social Darwinism. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.

Max Gluckman

#3315

Overall Influence

1911 - 1975 (64 years)

Herman Max Gluckman was a South African and British social anthropologist. He is best known as the founder of the Manchester School of anthropology. Biography and major works Gluckman was born in Johannesburg in 1911. Like many of the other anthropologists he later worked with, he was Jewish. He was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he obtained a BA in 1930. Although he intended to study law, he became interested in anthropology and studied under Winifred Hoernle. He earned the equivalent of an MA at Witwatersrand in 1934 and then received a Rhodes Scholarship to attend E...

Marvin Harris

#2160

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.

Alfred Kroeber

#2279

Overall Influence

1876 - 1960 (84 years)

Alfred Louis Kroeber was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through 1947. Kroeber provided detailed information about Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people, whom he studied over a period of years. He was the father of the acclaimed novelist, poet, and writer of short stories Ursula K.

Victor Turner

#3091

Overall Influence

1920 - 1983 (63 years)

Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology.

William M. Bass

William M. Bass

#3526

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (95 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...

Meyer Fortes

#4163

Overall Influence

1906 - 1983 (77 years)

Meyer Fortes FBA FRAI was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana. Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship, the family, and ancestor worship setting a standard for studies on African social organization. His celebrated book, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion , fused his two interests and set a standard for comparative ethnology. He also wrote extensively on issues of the first born, kingship, and divination.

Eric Wolf

#2706

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...

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown

#3534

Overall Influence

1881 - 1955 (74 years)

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, FBA was an English social anthropologist who helped further develop the theory of structural functionalism. Biography Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was born Alfred Reginald Brown in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, England, the second son of Alfred Brown , a manufacturer's clerk, and his wife Hannah . He later changed his last name, by deed poll, to Radcliffe-Brown, Radcliffe being his mother's maiden name. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge , graduating with first-class honours in the moral sciences tripos. At Trinity College, he was elected Anthony Wilkin student in 1906 and 1909.

Julian Steward

#3107

Overall Influence

1902 - 1972 (70 years)

Julian Steward Julian Steward was born on January 31, 1902. During his life, he developed the idea of cultural ecology. Steward developed his love of nature at Deep Springs Preparatory School, which he began attending at age 16. Steward graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Zoology. Throughout his career, Steward worked at the University of Michigan (where he established the anthropology department), the University of Utah, the Smithsonian, and the National Science Foundation. Steward wrote many essays and articles regarding his theory of cultural ecology including: Cultural ecology studies how environment can affect cultural similarities and differences.

Paul Broca

#848

Overall Influence

1824 - 1880 (56 years)

Pierre Paul Broca was a French physician, anatomist and anthropologist. He is best known for his research on Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe that is named after him. Broca's area is involved with language. His work revealed that the brains of patients with aphasia contained lesions in a particular part of the cortex, in the left frontal region. This was the first anatomical proof of localization of brain function. Broca's work also contributed to the development of physical anthropology, advancing the science of anthropometry.

James George Frazer

James George Frazer

#1611

Overall Influence

1854 - 1941 (87 years)

Sir James George Frazer was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. His reputation was improved after his new wife in 1896, Lilly Frazer, decided that he was undervalued and that she would improve his impact.

Michael Silverstein

#2779

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Michael Silverstein was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture.

Raymond Firth

#3718

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 London School of Economics, and is considered to have singlehandedly created a form of British economic anthropology.

Ashley Montagu

#2513

Overall Influence

1905 - 1999 (94 years)

Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu — born Israel Ehrenberg — 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 "The Race Question".

Carleton S. Coon

Carleton S. Coon

#3725

Overall Influence

1904 - 1981 (77 years)

Carleton Stevens Coon was an American anthropologist. A professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, lecturer and professor at Harvard University, he was president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Coon's theories on race were widely disputed in his lifetime and are considered pseudoscientific in modern anthropology.

Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson

#359

Overall Influence

1904 - 1980 (76 years)

Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature .

Edward Sapir

#1382

Overall Influence

1884 - 1939 (55 years)

Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, in what is now northern Poland. His family emigrated to the United States of America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas, who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph.D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there.

Eugen Fischer

#2224

Overall Influence

1874 - 1967 (93 years)

Eugen Fischer was a German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics, and a member of the Nazi Party. He served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and also served as rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin.

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

#136

Overall Influence

1926 - 1984 (58 years)

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

Earnest Hooton

#6659

Overall Influence

1887 - 1954 (67 years)

Earnest Albert Hooton was an American physical anthropologist known for his work on racial classification and his popular writings such as the book Up From The Ape. Hooton sat on the Committee on the Negro, a group that "focused on the anatomy of blacks and reflected the racism of the time."

Sidney Mintz

#7058

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.

Robert Lowie

#6207

Overall Influence

1883 - 1957 (74 years)

Robert Harry Lowie was an Austrian-born American anthropologist. An expert on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology and has been described as "one of the key figures in the history of anthropology".

Clyde Snow

#5480

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.

Leslie White

#4217

Overall Influence

1900 - 1975 (75 years)

Leslie Alvin White was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of the theories on cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. White was president of the American Anthropological Association .

C. Loring Brace

#4971

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.

Ralph Linton

#8263

Overall Influence

1893 - 1953 (60 years)

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 . One of Linton's major contributions to anthropology was defining a distinction between status and role.

Jack Goody

#2229

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 .

Hans F. K. Günther

Hans F. K. Günther

#1161

Overall Influence

1891 - 1968 (77 years)

Hans Friedrich Karl Günther was a German writer, an advocate of scientific racism and a eugenicist in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He was also known as "Rassengünther" or "Rassenpapst" . He is considered to have been a major influence on Nazi racialist thought.

Aleš Hrdlička

#10526

Overall Influence

1869 - 1943 (74 years)

Alois Ferdinand Hrdlička, after 1918 changed to Aleš Hrdlička , was a Czech anthropologist who lived in the United States after his family had moved there in 1881. He was born in Humpolec, Bohemia .

Theodor Waitz

#7100

Overall Influence

1821 - 1864 (43 years)

Theodor Waitz was a German psychologist and anthropologist. His research in psychology brought him into touch with anthropology, and he will be best remembered by his monumental work in six volumes, Die Anthropologie der Naturvölker .

M. N. Srinivas

#4755

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...

Noam Chomsky

#46

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (95 years)

Noam Chomsky currently holds joint appointments at MIT as Institute Professor Emeritus, and the University of Arizona as Laureate Professor. Chomsky completed his university studies between the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. The influence of Chomksy in both linguistics and political discourse cannot be overstated; regardless of what aspect of his work you are discussing, his name always perks a few ears. Depending on who is describing him, Chomsky is either one of the most important linguists in modern times, one of the most important political thinkers, or (most often) both. Chomsky began his career squarely in academia as a professor of linguistics at MIT.

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