Background
Clyde Kluckhohn was born in Le Mars, Iowa, on January 11, 1905.
Clyde Kluckhohn was born in Le Mars, Iowa, on January 11, 1905.
He received his undergraduate education at Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin. He was awarded a Rhodes scholarship for study at Oxford, where he received his master's degree in 1932. He also studied at the University of Vienna in 1931-1932, where he encountered the diffusionist Kulturkreis school led by Father Wilhelm Schmidt. Returning to the United States, he received his doctorate in anthropology at Harvard University in 1936. There, in 1935, he was appointed as instructor, rising eventually to the rank of professor.
Later, his scholarly reputation was greatest for his contributions to the ethnography of the Navaho Indians of this region. However, he also took a research interest in other southwestern cultures, European as well as Indian. During World War II he worked for the Federal government in connection with Japan. Following the war, he organized the Russian Research Center at Harvard and was its first director, from 1947 to 1954. Perhaps Kluckhohn's greatest contribution to learning was his teaching. He challenged accepted views and encouraged and generously supported students and junior colleagues who had new ideas which seemed worthy of development. He took an active interest in all major branches of anthropology, but outside his primary field of cultural anthropology, Kluckhohn's greatest interest was in linguistics, where he acknowledged the influence of Edward Sapir. Kluckhohn also took a great interest in interdisciplinary collaboration: along with the sociologist Talcott Parsons, the social psychologist Gordon Allport, and the psychoanalyst Henry Murray, he helped found the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard after World War II. Kluckhohn's grand goal was to render the study of human behavior more scientific while retaining the richness of understanding and the focus on important issues characteristic of the humanities. As he advanced professionally and accumulated more administrative responsibilities, his scholarly interests centered increasingly on the theory of culture and especially on the nature of values. He died on July 29, 1960, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
(Witchcraft is defined by Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-60) as "th...)
( What are the Navaho today? How do they live together a...)
(A chronicle of a 1925 travel by horseback through the Fou...)
( While the world has undoubtedly been shrinking, at the ...)
Quotations:
"Every human is like all other humans, some other humans, and no other human. "
"Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together. "
"Without the discovery of uniformities there can be no concepts, no classifications, no formulations, no principles, no laws; and without these no science can exist. "
"The practice of democracy means that I, one person, one humble person, nevertheless feel some responsibility if the officials for whose election I was responsible go too far out of line. "
Kluckhohn was extremely fond of the American Southwest ever since his youth, when he had gone to a ranch near Ramah, New Mexico, to build up his health after an attack of rheumatic fever. Kluckhohn was aware that his health was precarious. At the same time he felt the need for a crowded life with many social contacts and late hours. Moreover, all those unrecorded conversations and arguments made their contributions to his own intellectual development and continued to stimulate and reverberate in the minds of his former colleagues and students.
Clyde Kluckhohn was married Florence Rockwood Kluckhohn.
