Cultural Anthropologist: Ralph Linton

Ralph Linton began his career as an archeologist, but later turn to cultural anthropology. His ethnographic fieldwork took him to Polynesia and Madagascar, as well as on archeological expeditions in Latin America and the United States.

Ralph Linton was a co-founder of the basic personality structure theory. He sought to establish a basic personality for each culture. Linton devoted the majority of his studies to collecting ethnographies of Melanesians and Amerindians.

He developed the concepts of status and role in his classic book The Study of Man (1936). In this book, he has clearly shown the adaptation of culture traits in American culture.

Linton’s most famous book is, Cultural Background of Personality (1945). In this, he has attempted to define cultures and to classify culture on the basis of behavior. He emphasized also as to how personality influences cultural behavior.

Linton was a leading figure in the development of the subfield of psychological anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s, and published widely on the topic of culture and personality.

He also was instrumental in promoting the study of culture change, and published several studies on the acculturation of Native Americans.

Ralph Linton was born in Philadelphia on February 27, 1893 was one of the best known American anthropologists of the time. He was an international renowned anthropologist of America. He belonged to culture and personality of anthropological thought.

Born in Quaker family, he went to a Quaker school and then entered Swarthmore College, where one of his teachers, S. Trotter, took him to visit archeological digs in New Mexico and Colorado, Guatemala and New Jersey.

Linton’s MA in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1916 combined archeology with ethnology under Franck Speck. Graduated from Harvard with PhD in 1927, he then joined Field Museum at Chicago as Curator of American Indian.

In 1946, Linton joined anthropology department, Yale University as Sterling Professor of Anthropology and at the same time as President of the American Anthropological Association. He died due to heart attack in 1953.
Cultural Anthropologist: Ralph Linton