Ralph Linton

Ralph Linton (1893 to 1953) was an American anthropologist of the mid twentieth century, remembered above all for The Study of Man (1936) and The Tree of Culture (1955) and for defining the distinction between status and role. Born in Philadelphia, he graduated from Swarthmore College, studied at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Harvard, where he took his Ph.D. in 1925, after archaeological fieldwork in the Southwest and an expedition to the Marquesas. He worked at the Field Museum of Chicago, collected in Madagascar, which produced The Tanala: A Hill Tribe of Madagascar (1933), taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, became head of the anthropology department at Columbia University in 1937 and from 1946 taught at Yale University. In The Study of Man he held that ascribed status is assigned without reference to innate differences or abilities, while achieved status is determined by performance or effort, and he worked on acculturation and on culture and personality. His relations with Franz Boas and the Boasian school were hostile.