Robert F. Murphy (anthropologist)

Robert F. Murphy was Professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, from the 1960s to October 8, 1990 when he died at home in Leonia, New Jersey [Social Security Death Index]. Born March 3, 1924 [Social Security Death Index], he was a third generation descendant of Irish immigrants, and grew up in Far Rockaway, New York. He enlisted and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and attended Columbia 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 graduate school. They were married in St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, and set out together do fieldwork for a year among the Mundurucu of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil in the late 1950s. Bob taught at the University of California, Berkeley for several years before taking a professorship at Columbia in the mid-1960s. In the late 60s, Bob and Yolanda, with their two small children (Robert and Pamela) in tow, trekked to the Sahara to undertake a second fieldwork among the Tuareg of Niger. A student of Julian Steward's [1] cultural 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 Headhunter's Heritage: Social and Economic Change Among the Mundurucu Indians, The Dialectics of Social Life, American Anthropology, 1946-1970 (2002)[2], and The Body Silent (which won the Columbia University Lionel Trilling Award)[3], as well as a book he co-authored with Yolanda, Women of the Forest. Murphy was a charismatic and extraordinarily popular teacher among the students at Columbia, and won several major teaching awards. He won numerous academic awards, and was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1968 [4] .