Linton, Ralph (1893–1953)

Ralph Linton was an American cultural anthropologist known for his academic bravado and popular appeal, as well as for his long-lasting conceptual and theoretical contributions to anthropology and social science in general, whose main interest was the relationship between culture and personality. One of his more established concepts was acculturation, a phenomenon he witnessed throughout his many travels, published on, and in a sense contributed to through his work for Columbia University's School of Military Government and Administration, where he educated military personnel on the characteristics of extrinsic cultures. Along with Abram Kardiner, Cora Du Bois, and Edward Sapir, Linton was a founder of basic and modal personality structure theory, an interactional approach that challenged earlier, culturally deterministic theories of personality. Although he was not a physical anthropologist, Linton considered the differences between humans and apes—indeed, between humans and other animals in general—by and large trivial ones and ultimately pointed to biological influences as an important factor in understanding the origins and nature of human behavior and culture. He was the first to use the terms “status” and “role,” now staple social science concepts. Linton's best known works includeThe Study of Man (1936), The Cultural Background of Personality (1945), Most of the World (1949), and The Tree of Culture (1955).

Linton was born in Philadelphia to a Quaker family on February 27, 1893. His father, Isaiah Waterman Linton, made a living through his ownership of a chain of restaurants. Isaiah and Linton's mother, Mary Elizabeth, took an authoritarian and critical approach to rearing the young Ralph, making for a childhood that was less than ideal. After graduating from Friends High School, Linton pursued a B.A. at Swarthmore College, where one of his teachers encouraged him to study cultures outside his own. Although during his later years Linton would sometimes be criticized for not supporting his theoretical statements with empirical evidence, from the beginning he was anything but an armchair anthropologist. As an undergraduate, Linton interspersed his course work with (prehistoric) archaeological excursions to New Mexico, Colorado,New Jersey, and Guatemala.

Linton earned an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1916. He married his first wife, Josephine Foster, that same year and then went on to study at Columbia. When World War I broke out, and in violation of the pacifist principles by which he was raised, he left Columbia to join the army and saw combat in France. This caused him to be banned [Page 1493]from attending “Friends Meetings” (the Quaker equivalent of “church”). After the war, Linton returned to America and married his second wife, Margaret McIntosh, with whom he had one child. He then spent several years doing fieldwork in Polynesia, eventually leading to the publication of The Material Culture of the Marquesas Islands (1923).

His experiences in Polynesia represented a turning point for Linton. Realizing that he preferred interacting with living people to digging for artifacts, he shifted his focus from archaeology to anthropology. In1922, Linton became assistant curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, a position he held until 1928. He undertook an expedition to Madagascar for the museum in 1925, and for years thereafter he did a great deal of traveling on that island and in East Africa, managing to finish his Ph.D. at Harvard University around the same time (1925).

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