Thinkers Timeline

Franz Boas (1858-1942) was a German-American anthropologist, widely regarded as the founder of modern cultural anthropology. He was born in Minden, Westphalia, into a secular Jewish family with strong liberal values. He studied physics and geography at German universities, completing his doctorate in 1881. A field expedition to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic in 1883, where he spent a winter studying the Inuit people, transformed his intellectual orientation: he became convinced that geography and environment could not explain the enormous variety of human cultures and that culture had to be understood on its own terms. He emigrated to the United States in 1887, eventually becoming a professor at Columbia University in New York, where he spent most of his career. He became the most influential figure in American anthropology, training a generation of students who went on to transform the discipline — including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. He was a lifelong anti-racist and used his scientific authority to challenge the racial pseudo-science that was used to justify immigration restriction, colonialism, and eventually Nazism. He died in 1942, reportedly collapsing mid-conversation at a dinner where he had been speaking about racism.

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.

Umm Kulthum was an Egyptian singer. She was probably the most famous Arab cultural figure of the 20th century. She was born around 1898 in a small village called Tamay az-Zahayra, in the Egyptian Nile Delta. Her exact date of birth is uncertain, partly because village births were not always carefully recorded. Her father was a village imam, a Muslim religious leader. He led prayers and sometimes sang religious songs at weddings to earn extra money. He noticed that his young daughter had an extraordinary voice. He taught her to sing religious songs and then took her with him to perform. To make this socially acceptable in conservative villages, she dressed as a boy when she sang in public. She was known as 'the boy with the strong voice'. In the 1920s she moved to Cairo, the capital and cultural centre of Egypt. She took singing lessons, dropped the boy disguise, and quickly became a star. Egyptian radio began broadcasting her concerts in the 1930s. By the 1940s she was the most famous singer in the Arab world. She gave a concert on the first Thursday of every month for decades. Across the Arab world, streets emptied as people gathered around radios to listen. She sang for kings, presidents, and ordinary villagers. She supported Egyptian independence and President Gamal Abdel Nasser. After Egypt lost the 1967 war with Israel, she gave concerts across the Arab world to raise money for the country. She died in 1975. Around four million people attended her funeral in Cairo, one of the largest in human history.

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.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was a Belgian-French anthropologist, one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. He was born in Brussels to a French Jewish family and grew up in Paris. He studied philosophy and law at the Sorbonne before becoming interested in ethnography. In 1935 he joined a French university mission to Brazil, spending several years conducting fieldwork among indigenous peoples of the Brazilian interior. Fleeing Nazi-occupied France, he spent the war years in New York, where contact with the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson transformed his intellectual approach. He returned to France after the war and published a series of major works — The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Tristes Tropiques (1955), Structural Anthropology (1958), and the four-volume Mythologiques (1964-1971) — that established structural anthropology as one of the dominant intellectual movements of mid-twentieth-century France and Europe. He was elected to the prestigious Collège de France and became one of the key figures in the broader structuralist movement that shaped French intellectual life from the 1950s onwards. He died in 2009 at the age of one hundred, the last great figure of the classical period of French intellectual life.

Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane was a Mozambican anthropologist and revolutionary who founded FRELIMO, the movement that led Mozambique's independence struggle against Portugal. He was born in 1920 in N'wajahani, in the Gaza province of southern Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. He was the fourth of sixteen sons of a Tsonga chief. The colonial school system was almost only for Europeans, but Mondlane gained entry through Swiss Presbyterian mission schools. He worked as a shepherd as a boy. Education in his country was almost impossible; he had to leave to get any. His academic journey was extraordinary. He studied in South Africa at Witwatersrand University, but was expelled in 1949 for opposing the new apartheid regime. He went briefly to Lisbon, then to Oberlin College in Ohio in 1951, then to Northwestern University in Illinois, where he earned a PhD in sociology in 1960. He worked at the United Nations from 1957, then taught anthropology at Syracuse University in the early 1960s. He married Janet Johnson, a white American woman from Indiana. In 1962 he left academic life. He went to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to help unite three Mozambican exile groups into a single movement. The result was FRELIMO, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique. He became its first president. Under his leadership FRELIMO began the armed struggle against Portuguese rule in 1964. He wrote his book The Struggle for Mozambique while leading the war. On 3 February 1969, in Dar es Salaam, he opened a parcel addressed to him. It contained a bomb. He was killed instantly. The Portuguese secret police, PIDE, is widely believed to have been responsible. He was 48. Mozambique gained independence six years later, in 1975.

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.

Arturo Escobar is an anthropologist. An anthropologist studies human societies, cultures, and ways of life. He was born in 1951 in Manizales, a city in Colombia, in South America. He holds both Colombian and American citizenship, and he writes in both Spanish and English. Escobar spent much of his career as a professor of anthropology in the United States, mainly at the University of North Carolina. He retired from that post in 2018. He is now linked to universities in Colombia, and he divides his time between the two countries. Escobar is best known as a leading voice in 'post-development' thinking. This is a way of looking critically at the whole idea of 'development': the project of making poorer countries more like richer Western ones. His most famous book is 'Encountering Development', from 1995. In it, he argues that 'development' was not a neutral act of help. It was a way of seeing and controlling the poorer parts of the world. Escobar also works closely with social movements in Colombia, especially Afro-Colombian, environmental, and women's groups. He is both a scholar and an activist. His later work explores ideas like the 'pluriverse', and connects his thinking to the environment. He is seen as one of Latin America's leading critical thinkers.