- Robert F. Murphy (anthropologist)
Robert Francis Murphy (
March 3 ,1924 ,Far Rockaway, New York -October 8 ,1990 ,Leonia, New Jersey ) was a distinguishedanthropologist and professor of anthropology atColumbia University [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/anthropology/about/main/one/index.html] inNew York City , from the early 1960s to 1990. His field work included studies of theMunduruku (Mundurucu) people of the Amazon and theTuareg people of the Sahara.Family, education, career
Murphy was a third generation descendant of Irish immigrants and grew up in
Far Rockaway, New York . His grandmother worked in a textile mill in New Hampshire, and his mother struggled to raise five young children with a mostly absent father in a "lace-curtain Irish" neighborhood ofQueens ; she suffered from breast cancer until she died when Bob was 14.He enlisted and served in the
U.S. Navy as a Private duringWorld War II and used hisGI Bill to attendColumbia College as an undergraduate. Murphy went on to earn his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology at Columbia University, where he met his wife Yolanda in aphysical anthropology course in graduate school. Bob and Yolanda were married in St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University.In 1952 the Murphys set out to do fieldwork for a year among the
Mundurucu of the Amazon rain forest inBrazil , where they studied, among other things, the dynamics of a patrilineal society withmatrilocal post-marital residence patterns. Bob taught at theUniversity of California, Berkeley for several years before taking a professorship at Columbia. In the early 1960s, Bob and Yolanda, with their two small children Robert and Pamela in tow, trekked to theSahara to undertake a second fieldwork among theTuareg ofNiger , where Bob, who was fond of paradoxes, was able to study a matrilineal society withpatrilocal post-marital residence patterns.He died on
October 8 ,1990 at his home inLeonia, New Jersey . [Narvaez, Alfonso A. [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE7DD113CF932A25753C1A966958260 "Robert F. Murphy, 66, Professor Of Anthropology and an Author"] , "The New York Times ",October 11 ,1990 . AccessedMay 27 ,2008 . "Robert Francis Murphy, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, died on Monday at his home in Leonia, N.J."]cholarly contributions to anthropology
A student of
Julian Steward 'scultural ecology approach, Murphy was an eclectic thinker who incorporated ideas from diverse areas of anthropology theory —materialist ,structuralist , and symbolic. Murphy wrote numerous articles and books, including:
*"The Trumai Indians of Central Brazil (Monographs of the American Ethnological Society)" (1955) (based upon field notes byBuell Quain )
*Tappers and Trappers: Parallel Process in Acculturation (1956) "Economic Development and Cultural Change" 4.
*Matrilocality and Patrilineality in Mundurucu Society. "American Anthropologist" (1956) Vol. 58 (3:3): 414-433
*"Mundurucu Religion" (University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology) (1958)
*"The Structure of Parallel Cousin Marriage" (1959)
*"Headhunter's Heritage: Social and Economic Change Among the Mundurucu Indians" (1960)
*"Social Distance and the Veil" (about Tuareg men's veiling practices) (1964)
*"The Dialectics of Social Life: Alarms and Excursions in Anthropological Theory" (1971)
*"Robert H. Lowie (Leaders of Modern Anthropology)" (1972)
*"Evolution and Ecology: Essays on Social Transformation" (1978, co-authored with Julian H. Steward and Jane C. Steward)
*"American Anthropology, 1946-1970: Papers from the American Anthropologist" (2002) [http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bookinfo/4275.html]
*"Women of the Forest" (1974), co-authored with Yolanda (first author), now in a 30th anniversary edition (2004) [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023113/0231132328.HTM]Margaret Mead called "Women of the Forest" "a salute to women's liberation in a portrait of a fascinating primitive people." [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023113/0231132328.HTM] When Mead died in 1978, Murphy extolled her strengths as the most famous anthropologist who ever lived, "a towering personality," on radio station1010 WINS , the major news station in New York City.Fact|date=February 2007Disability
In 1974, Murphy experienced a tragic turn of events, as he began to lose motor control to his lower extremities. He was diagnosed as having a benign but slow-growing
tumor of thespinal cord that would unrelentingly lead to impairment of hiscentral nervous system and greater loss of bodily functions over the next 16 years of his life; within two years, by 1976, he wasparaplegic and wheelchair-bound. Murphy had the "rage to live," and began to edit his popular lectures on cultural anthropology for a new textbook, "Overture to Social Anthropology" (1979), later revised into second (1986) and third (1989) editions before he died. Murphy dramatically transformed his scholarly efforts into an anthropological study ofparaplegia , a major project funded by theNational Science Foundation , which he wrote about in his ethnography of "the damaged self," "The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled" (1987, 1990, 2001), which won the Columbia University Lionel Trilling Award. [http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring01/032042.htm]Teaching style
Murphy was a charismatic and extraordinarily popular teacher among the students at Columbia. His wry sense of humor and appreciation for irony caught the imaginations of thousands of Columbia undergraduates, and he regularly taught large auditorium-sized classes, even when his condition forced him to use a motorized wheelchair and speak through a microphone. Murphy won teaching awards and numerous academic awards, and was a Fellow of the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1968. [http://www.gf.org/68fellow.html]References
Other publications
Murphy, Robert F.
*1970 Basin Ethnography and Ecological Theory. In "Language and Culture of Western North America: Essays in Honor of Sven S. Liljeblad", edited by Earl H. Swanson Jr., pp. 152-171. Pocatello: Idaho State University Press.
*1977 Introduction: The Anthropological Theories of Julian H. Steward. In "Evolution and Ecology: Essays on Social Transformation", edited by Jane Cannon Steward and R.F. Murphy, pp. 1-40. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
*1981 Julian Steward. In "Totems and Teachers", edited by Sydel Silverman, pp. 171-204. New York: Columbia University Press.
*1981 (Book Review) The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing by Michael Harner. Review author [s] : Robert Murphy"American Anthropologist", New Series, Vol. 83, No. 3 (Sep., 1981), pp. 714-717
*1986 Social Structure and Sex Antagonism. "Journal of Anthropological Research" 42 (1986), 407-416.
*1987 American Anthropology. In "Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology", edited by Herbert Applebaum. Albany: State University of New York Press.Murphy, Robert, and Yolanda Murphy
*1960 "Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and Society". University of California Anthropological Records. Berkeley: University of California Press, 16(7):293-338.
*1986 Northern Shoshone and Bannock. In "Handbook of North American Indians: 11. Great Basin", edited by Warren L. d'Azevedo, pp. 284-307. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.Fried, Morton, Marvin Harris, and Robert Murphy, eds.
*1967 "War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression". Garden City, NY: Natural History Press.
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