Goldenweiser, Alexander (1880-1940)

Alexander Goldenweiser (1880-1940) was born in Kiev (Ukraine, Russian Empire) into a Russian Jewish family. He studied under Franz Boas at Columbia University, where he took a PhD in 1910 and then taught until 1919. He did fieldwork among the Iroquois, but dedicated himself mostly to anthropological theory and had an important role as a progressive public intellectual. He authored a seminal work on totemism and introduced such important notions as “the limited possibility in the development of culture” and “cultural involution”. Along with Edward Sapir and Paul Radin, he insisted on the key role of the individual in culture and promoted a rapprochement between anthropology and psychology. He was a strong advocate of an interdisciplinary approach to the social sciences, combining anthropological, historical and sociological interpretations of culture history. His work includes Early Civilization (1922), one of the first textbooks in anthropology, and History, Psychology, and Culture (1933).

Keywords: Cultural history | Cultural anthropology | Culturalism | Multidisciplinarity | Totemism | Cultural Theory | Russia | Ukraine | Iroquois | Cultural diffusion | Franz Boas | Columbia University