The Most Influential People in History
Find the most important people in 24 academic disciplines from 4000 BCE to today
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our proprietary AI program, we have ranked everyone in Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef based on the number of citations, publications, and academically relevant web presence.
Students and researchers now have the easiest and fastest way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you ever wanted to find famous medieval biologists, or influential engineers during the industrial revolution, now you can!
We’ve also put together our own custom rankings of people by discipline. And speaking of influential people, don’t forget to check out the interviews we do with the influential people of today!
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List of the most influential people in Anthropology, for the years 2000 – 2022
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.
Go to ProfileWilliam 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...
Go to ProfileDell 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 ...
Go to ProfileMarshall 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.
Go to ProfileClifford 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.
Go to ProfileC. 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.
Go to ProfileDon Kulick
#14950
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (63 years)
Don Kulick is professor of anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden. 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.
Go to ProfileUlf Hannerz
#11312
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (81 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...
Go to ProfileThomas Hylland Eriksen
#14721
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (61 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...
Go to ProfileFiona Graham
#40118
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (62 years)
Fiona Caroline Graham is an Australian anthropologist working as a geisha in Japan. She made her debut as a geisha in 2007 in the Asakusa district of Tokyo under the name Sayuki, and was working in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo.
Go to ProfileTim Ingold
#5990
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (75 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.
Go to ProfileMaurice Bloch
#7631
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (84 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.
Go to ProfileNapoleon Chagnon
#5362
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.
Go to ProfileJonathan M. Marks
#9932
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (68 years)
Jonathan M. Marks is a professor of biological anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a significant figure in anthropology, especially on the topic of race. Marks is skeptical of genetic explanations of human behavior, of "race" as a biological category, and of science as a rationalistic endeavor. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to ProfileJay Ruby
#20879
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (88 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.
Go to ProfileMichael 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.
Go to ProfileArthur Kleinman
#3206
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (82 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Arthur Kleinman is a medical anthropologist and the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University. Kleinman is also the Professor of Medical Anthropology in Global Health and Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He earned his AB and MD from Stanford University and an M.A. in social anthropology from Harvard University. He completed his internship at the Yale University of Medicine, before completing his psychiatric residency in Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
Go to ProfileKathy Reichs
#15844
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (75 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. Early life and education Kathleen Joan Toelle was born in 1950 in Chicago, Illinois.
Go to ProfileBruno Latour
#467
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.
Go to ProfileAnna Tsing
#18314
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (71 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.
Go to ProfileLoïc Wacquant
#2369
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (63 years)
Loïc Wacquant is a professor of sociology and research associate for the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D from the University of Chicago. His primary research focus has been in jails in the United States and Brazil, and ghettos in the suburbs of Paris and South Chicago. It was during his time at the University of Chicago that he began his exploration of inequality and stigmatization in black neighborhoods. He examines the existence of a pipeline to prison that originates all too often in these neighborhoods, regarding the prison as a judicial ghetto and the ghetto as an extrajudicial prison, resulting in a ‘carceral continuum’.
Go to ProfileDidier Fassin
#13561
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (68 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science for the Institute for Advanced Study, the Chair of Public Health at the College de France, and holds Direction of Studies role in Political and Moral Anthropology at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He earned his MD from Pierre and Marie Curie University, an M.A. from the University of Paris, and a Ph.D. from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His career began in the medical field, during which time he served as an infectious disease specialist. He moved on to an anthropological approach, studying health inequities in Africa.
Go to ProfileMarilyn Strathern
#10629
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (82 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.
Go to ProfileNoam 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.
Go to ProfileClyde 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.
Go to ProfileMary-Ann Ochota
#40194
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (42 years)
Mary-Ann Ochota is a British broadcaster and anthropologist specialising in anthropology, archaeology, social history and adventure factual television. Biography Ochota was born and grew up in Wincham, Northwich, Cheshire, to an Indian mother and a Polish father. She studied at the sixth-form college of Sir John Deane's College.
Go to ProfileHenrietta Moore
#14713
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (66 years)
Dame Henrietta Louise Moore, is a British social anthropologist. She is the director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College, London , part of the Bartlett, UCL's Faculty of the Built Environment.
Go to ProfileTanya Luhrmann
#15117
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (64 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.
Go to ProfileKira Hall
#24642
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (61 years)
Kira Hall is professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, as well as director for the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice , at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The majority of Hall's work focuses on language in India and the United States, with special attention to organizations of gender and sexuality. A special focus of her work has been the linguistic and sociocultural practices of Hindi-speaking Hijras in northern India, a transgender group often discussed in the anthropological literature as a "third sex."
Go to ProfileColin Groves
#6824
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.
Go to ProfilePascal Boyer
#2355
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (23 years)
Pascal Robert Boyer is a French-American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at Unive...
Go to ProfileFadwa El Guindi
#16243
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (82 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 .
Go to ProfileMary 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.
Go to ProfileDonald Johanson
#3923
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (80 years)
Donald Carl Johanson is an American paleoanthropologist. He is known for discovering, with Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb, the fossil of a female hominin australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia.
Go to ProfileJane H. Hill
#22623
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Frances Jane Hassler Hill was an American anthropologist and linguist who worked extensively with Native American languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family and anthropological linguistics of North American communities.
Go to ProfileRichard Borshay Lee
#8110
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (86 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.
Go to ProfileTalal Asad
#2196
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (91 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, ...
Go to ProfileGeorge E. Marcus
#8502
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (77 years)
George Emanuel Marcus is an American professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine who focuses on the anthropology of elites. Education and life Marcus received a B.A. from Yale University in 1968 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1976. He spent the 1982–83 academic year at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he came up with the idea for Anthropology as Cultural Critique, which he co-wrote with Michael M. J. Fischer and published in 1986 .
Go to ProfileConrad Phillip Kottak
#23499
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (81 years)
Conrad Phillip Kottak is an American anthropologist. Kottak is currently a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Michigan, where he has been teaching since 1968. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and he did extensive research in Brazil and Madagascar, visiting societies there and writing books about them.
Go to ProfilePhilippe Bourgois
#10336
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (67 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 .
Go to ProfileArjun Appadurai
#6145
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (74 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.
Go to ProfilePierre 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.
Go to ProfilePaul Rabinow
#7620
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Areas of Specialization: Anthropology of Reason Paul Rabinow was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC). He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has also studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, France. He has held Fulbright fellowships at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and the University of Iceland. A recognized scholar on the works of Michel Foucault, and his “anthropology of reason,” Rabinow became a famous ant...
Go to ProfileKarl G. Heider
#16518
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (88 years)
Karl Heider is an Americann visual anthropologist. Life and education Heider was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. Heider is the son of psychologists Fritz and Grace Heider. He had two brothers; John and Stephan.
Go to ProfileJohn Tooby
#1290
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (71 years)
John Tooby is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology. Biography Tooby received his PhD in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University in 1989 and is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Go to ProfileLaura Nader
#13938
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (93 years)
Laura Nader is an American anthropologist. She has been a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley since 1960. She was the first woman to receive a tenure-track position in the department. She is also the older sister of U.S. activist, consumer advocate, and frequent third-party candidate Ralph Nader, and the younger sister of community advocate Shafeek Nader and social scientist Claire Nader.
Go to ProfileRane Willerslev
#47184
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (52 years)
Rane Willerslev is a Danish anthropologist. In his academic career, he has travelled extensively and has a particular interest in primitive tribal cultures, both present and prehistoric. On 1 July 2017, he was appointed director of the National Museum of Denmark by Culture Minister Mette Bock.
Go to ProfileMichael Taussig
#10328
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (83 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Michael Taussig is a professor at Columbia University. He earned a medical degree from the University of Sydney and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the London School of Economics. He has published research in the area of medical anthropology and is known for his work with the idea of commodity fetishism. In his book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, he promotes the study of people living on the fringes of the economy, such as indigenous peoples, as a way of creating contrast with traditionally studied populations. Much of his work is filtered through the lens of the work of Walter Benjamin.
Go to ProfileDavid Harvey
#898
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (88 years)
David W. Harvey is a British-born Marxist economic geographer, podcaster and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.
Go to ProfileGianfranco Ravasi
#11383
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (81 years)
Gianfranco Ravasi is an Italian prelate of the Catholic Church and a biblical scholar. A cardinal since 2010, he was President of the Pontifical Council for Culture from 2007 to 2022. He headed Milan's Ambrosian Library from 1989 to 2007.
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