Radin, Paul (1883-1959)
Paul Radin (1883–1959) was an American cultural anthropologist. Son of a rabbi, born in Poland in 1883, he studied anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas. After completing his PhD in 1911, he became a prolific ethnographer who devoted a lifetime study to the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk). He was particularly interested in the things of the mind, myth, ritual drama, religious experience, language, history and the role of the individual in “primitive” societies, a label he utilized with considerable caution (Primitive Man as a Philosopher (1927) and The Method and Theory of Ethnology (1933)). His book The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956) was influential and much discussed. Radin became a fellow of the Bollingen Foundation, in part devoted to the dissemination of Carl Jung’s work. He was also an invited lecturer at the Eranos meetings in Ascona, Switzerland. In 1952 he moved to Lugano and lived there until 1956. During this time, he lectured at Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and at the Carl Jung Institute in Zürich. Then he joined Brandeis University in 1957, where he worked until his death in 1959, in New York City. He never deserted his research on the Winnebago Tribe.
Keywords: Philosophy | Folklore | Culturalism | Salvage ethnography | United States of America | Winnebago | Ho-Chunk | Religion | Language | trickster | Individual | Franz Boas