Thinkers Timeline

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an African American anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist, one of the most significant figures in both the Harlem Renaissance and the history of American anthropology. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, but grew up in Eatonville, Florida — one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the United States — an experience that would shape everything she wrote and thought. She studied anthropology under Franz Boas at Barnard College and Columbia University, becoming one of the very few Black women to enter the discipline in that era. Boas recognised her exceptional gifts, particularly her ability to collect folklore from communities that would not have opened to a white researcher. She conducted fieldwork across the American South, the Caribbean, and Central America, collecting African American folklore, Hoodoo practices, and Caribbean religious traditions. She wrote four novels, most famously Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), two books of folklore, an autobiography, and numerous essays. She died in poverty and obscurity in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. She was recovered for a wide readership by Alice Walker, who found and marked her grave in 1973 and wrote about her in a celebrated essay.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who became the most publicly prominent and widely read anthropologist of the twentieth century. She was born in Philadelphia and studied at Barnard College before completing her doctorate under Franz Boas at Columbia University. In 1925, at the age of twenty-three, she travelled to American Samoa to conduct fieldwork on adolescence — a period of turmoil in Western culture that many assumed was biologically inevitable. She wanted to test whether this turmoil was universal or culturally specific. Her book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) argued that adolescence in Samoa was a calm and untroubled transition, suggesting that the storm and stress of Western adolescence was a product of culture, not biology. The book became an international sensation. She went on to conduct fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Bali, and elsewhere, writing influential books on gender, temperament, and culture. She was also a tireless public intellectual, writing a column for Redbook magazine for many years and testifying before Congress on issues from nuclear weapons to environmental policy. She was married three times, all to fellow anthropologists, and her personal life was characterised by the same willingness to challenge convention that marked her intellectual work. She died in 1978.

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was an American cultural anthropologist and one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. He was born in San Francisco and served in the US Navy during the Second World War before studying at Antioch College and Harvard, where he received his PhD in 1956. He conducted fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco — societies that became the material for his most important work. He spent most of his career at the University of Chicago and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked from 1970 until his death. His most important works include The Religion of Java (1960), Agricultural Involution (1963), The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980), and Local Knowledge (1983). He was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000 for Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. He died in 2006.

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was a Chicana cultural theorist, poet, and writer. She was born in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas into a family of farmworkers, descendants of both the indigenous peoples of the region and the Spanish colonisers, who had been living on the Texas-Mexico border since before Texas became part of the United States. She grew up between English and Spanish, between Mexican and American cultures, between indigenous and Catholic traditions, and between the rural world of agricultural labour and the academic world she eventually entered. She studied at the University of Texas at Pan American, then at the University of Texas at Austin, and later at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her doctoral work. She is best known for Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a groundbreaking work that mixes prose and poetry, Spanish and English, theory and autobiography to develop her philosophy of borderlands consciousness. She also co-edited This Bridge Called My Back (1981), a landmark anthology of writings by women of colour that helped define the field of women of colour feminism. She died in 2004 from complications of diabetes.