Sapir and Goldenweiser, White and Redfield

Posted on by Rex

Investigating the biographies of Leslie White, Robert Redfield, Edward Sapir, and Alexander Goldenweiser. White studied with Goldenweiser in New York. Goldenweiser and Sapir were exact contemporaries in New York. White, Redfield, and Sapir were all at Chicago.

Also attaching image of the overlapping lives of Sapir and Goldenweiser. Born 4 years apart, they got their Ph.D.s within a year of each other, and died within a year of each other as well. Boas hoped they would both faculty at Columbia when he retired.

in 1925 Goldenweiser was teaching a course at the New School on ‘new evolutionism’. When you move past pat stereotypes of ‘particularist Boasian’ anthropology in the 1920s looks a lot different!

Published by Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is a political anthropologist who studies kinship, customary land tenure, and the mining and petroleum industry in Papua New Guinea. He also studies the video game World of Warcraft, and is an advocate for open access scholarly communications. His book "Leviathans at the Gold Mine" was published by Duke University Press.