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 a physical anthropology course in graduate school. Bob and Yolanda were married in St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, and set out together do fieldwork for a year (1952) among the Mundurucu of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil. 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], as well as a book he co-authored with Yolanda, Women of the Forest (1974)[3], hailed by Margaret Mead [4] as "a salute to women's liberation in a portrait of a fascinating primitive people." In 1974, Murphy experienced a tragic turn of events, as he began to lose motor control to his lower extremities, and was diagnosed as having a benign but slowly growing tumor of the spinal cord, which would unrelentlessly lead to impairment of his central nervous system and greater loss of bodily functions over the next sixteen years of his life; within two years, by 1976, he was paraplegiac and wheelchair-bound. Murphy had the "rage to live," and dramatically transformed his scholarly efforts into an anthropological study of paraplegiacs, a major project funded by the National Science Foundation, which he wrote about in his ethnography of "the damaged self," The Body Silent (which won the Columbia University Lionel Trilling Award)[5] Murphy was a charismatic and extraordinarily popular teacher among the students at Columbia; nearly two decades after majoring in anthropology at Columbia, one of his former students from the 1980s still counts Murphy among his Heros, right up there with Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Cousteau, Pablo Picasso and Bob Dylan [6], luminaries with whom Murphy would likely feel quite comfortable. Murphy won teaching awards and numerous academic awards, and was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1968 [7].