Robert F. Murphy (anthropologist)

Robert Francis Murphy was Professor of anthropology at Columbia University [1] in New York City, from the early 1960s to 1990. He died October 8, 1990 at his home in Leonia, New Jersey.

Family and Education

Born March 3, 1924, Bob Murphy was a third generation descendant of Irish immigrants, and grew up in Far Rockaway, New York. His grandmother worked in a textile mill in New Hampshire, and his mother struggled to raise five young children with a mostly absent father in a "lace-curtin Irish" neighborhood of Queens; she suffered from breast cancer until she died when Bob was fourteen. He enlisted and served in the U.S. Navy as a Private during World War II, and used his GI Bill to attend 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 in 1952 they set out together to do fieldwork for a year among the Mundurucu [2] of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil, where they studied, among other things, the dynamics of a patrilineal society with matrilocal post-marital residence patterns. Bob taught at the University of California, Berkeley for several years before taking a professorship at Columbia. In the early 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, where Bob, who was fond of paradoxes, was able to study a matrilineal society with patrilocal post-marital residence patterns.

Scholarly Contributions to Anthropology

A student of Julian Steward's [3] 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 The Trumaii Indians of Central Brazil (Monographs of the American Ethnological Society) (1955), "Tappers and Trappers: Parallel Process in Acculturation" (1956), Mundurucu Religion (University of Claifornia Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology) (1958), "The Structure of Parallel Cousin Marriage" (1959), Headhunter's Heritage: Social and Economic Change Among the Mundurucu Indians (1960), "Social Distance and the Veil" (about Tuareg men's veiling practices) (1964), The Dialectics of Social Life: Alarms and Excursions in Anthropological Theory (1971), Robert H. Lowie (Leaders of Modern Anthropology) (1972), Evolution and Ecology: Essays on Social Transformation (1978, co-authored with Julian H. Steward and Jane C. Steward), American Anthropology, 1946-1970: Papers from the American Anthropologist (2002)[4], as well as an ethnography on the Mundurucu that he co-authored with Yolanda (first author), Women of the Forest (1974)-- now in a thirtieth anniversary edition (2004)[5], hailed by Margaret Mead [6] as "a salute to women's liberation in a portrait of a fascinating primitive people." When Mead died in 1978, it was Murphy who extolled her strengths as the most famous anthropologist who ever lived, "a towering personality," on radio station WINS 1010 [7], the major news station in New York City.

The Damaged Self, and the Will to Live

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 began to edit his popular lectures on cultural anthropology for a new textbook, Overture to Social Anthropology (1979), later revised into second (1986) and third (1989) editions before he died. Murphy dramatically transformed his scholarly efforts into an anthropological study of paraplegia, a major project funded by the National Science Foundation, which he wrote about in his ethnography of "the damaged self," The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled (1987, 1990, 2001), which won the Columbia University Lionel Trilling Award[8]

Teacher and Hero

Murphy was a charismatic and extraordinarily popular teacher among the students at Columbia. His wry sense of humor and appreciation for irony caught the imaginations of thousands of Columbia undergraduates, and he regularly taught large auditorium-sized classes, even when his condition forced him to use a motorized wheelchair and speak through a microphone. One former student, nearly two decades after majoring in anthropology at Columbia, still counts Robert F. Murphy among his Heros, right up there with Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Cousteau, Pablo Picasso and Bob Dylan [9], 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 [10].

--FoxezandHedgehogs 10:32, 21 December 2006 (UTC)