Linton, Ralph (1893–1953)

US cultural anthropologist. He introduced the terms ‘status’ and ‘role’ to social science and influenced the development of the culture-and-personality school of anthropology. His works, such as The Study of Man (1936) and The Tree of Culture (1955), are regarded more as popularizations of anthropology than as original scholarship.

The son of a restaurateur, Linton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was raised a Quaker. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1915, saw combat in France during World War I (which led to his dismissal from his family's Friends Meeting), and received a PhD from Harvard in 1925. Fieldwork took him to Polynesia in the early 1920s. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, where he succeeded Franz Boas, and Harvard University.