Alma mater Columbia University Role Anthropologist Doctoral advisor Franz Boas | Name Paul Radin Education Columbia University | |
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Fields anthropology linguistics Died February 21, 1959, New York City, New York, United States Books The trickster, Primitive man as philosopher, The Winnebago Tribe, Primitive religion: its nature an, The method and theor Similar People Franz Boas, Karoly Kerenyi, Carl Jung, Louis Ginzberg | ||
Stories - Trickster eats a bulb
Paul Radin (April 2, 1883 – February 21, 1959) was a widely read American cultural anthropologist and folklorist of the early twentieth century.
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Biography
The son of a rabbi, Paul Radin was born in the cosmopolitan Polish city of Lodz in 1883. In 1884 his family moved to Elmira, New York. He entered the public school system and graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1902. There, he became interested in studying history and came under the influence of James Harvey Robinson.
Between 1905 and 1907 Radin studied in Europe, first in Munich and then the University of Berlin. As a result, he became interested in anthropology. In 1907 he returned to the United States and became a student of Franz Boas at Columbia, where he counted Edward Sapir and Robert Lowie among his classmates. He engaged in years of productive fieldwork among the Winnebago (Hocak) Indians, primarily from 1908-1912. Publications from this research include his doctoral dissertation, earned in 1911 and culminated in 1923 with the publication of his magnum opus, The Winnebago Tribe. In 1929, as a result of his fieldwork, he was able to publish a grammar of the nearly extinct language of the Wappo people of the San Francisco Bay area. Beginning in the 1940s, Radin was monitored by the FBI, who believed him to be a communist. This monitoring continued until his death. In 1952 Radin moved to Lugano, Switzerland, where he worked for the Bollingen Foundation. In 1956 he returned to the US to take a position at Brandeis, where he was chairman of the Department of Anthropology. Late in his career he edited several anthologies of folk tales from different continents. His most enduring publication to date is The Trickster (1956), which includes essays by the pioneering scholar of Greek mythology, Karl Kerenyi, and the prominent psychoanalyst C. G. Jung.
Radin taught at a number of colleges and universities, never staying at any one more than a few years. At various times he held appointments at University of California, Berkeley; Mills College, Fisk University, Black Mountain College, Kenyon College, and the University of Chicago. He concluded his career as chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis.