Notable Anthropologists Posters, “M...-Z...-”
teaching resources for the classroom and home schoolers.

Bronislaw Malinowski
Margaret Mead

Pearl Primus
Evelyn Reed

Bronislaw Malinowski
b. 4-7-1884; Kraków, Austria-Hungary
d. 5-16-1942; New Haven, CT

Bronislaw Malinowski, “stranded” in the Trobriand Islands during World War I, 1914-18, became involved in the daily lives of the islanders, which inspired his theories of “participation observations”.

Malinowski studied ethnology at the University of Leipzig after he read James Frazer's The Golden Bough.

• Argonauts of the Western Pacific

Margaret Mead
b. 12-16-1901; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
d. 11-15-1978; NYC

Anthropologist Margaret Mead taught at Columbia University and Fordham University, as well as mentoring numerous students.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

• Margaret Mead 1977 Earth Day Speech

Pearl Primus
b. 11-29-1919; Trinidad and Tobago
d. 10-29-1994

Pearl Primus, who was trained in classical dance, received her Ph.D. degree in anthropolgy from New York University. Her studies, and travels to the interior villages of Africa, the Caribbean, and throughout the southern United States, gave Primus unique training and insight into the African dance heritage.

in July 1991 she was awarded the national Medal of Arts by President Bush, the highest honor given by the National Endowment for the Arts.

• more Black History posters
• Dancing in the Light: Six Dance Compositions By African American Choreographers / Asadata Dafora, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Talley Beatty, Donald McKayle, Bill T. Jones, DVD

Evelyn Reed, née Horwit
b. 10-31-1905; Haledon, NJ
d. 3-22-1979; NYC

Evelyn Reed was the pen name of Evelyn Horwit Andreas Novack, an artist, philosopher, anthropologist and socialist who “sought to educate and inspire women with the facts about the creative and productive role females have played in history.”

Evelyn Reed's book Woman's Evolution, establishes through research that women/mothers were the creators of the social skills necessary to evolve primates to hominids, and that women, as the first artists, linguists, architects, writers and farmers, were the sex to tame fire.

Herbert Spencer
b. 4-27-1820; Derby, England
d. 12-8-1903; Brighton

Philosopher and anthropologist Herbert Spencer was a ‘polymath’, making contributions to a wide range of fields. His best known theory was Social Darwinism, or “the survival of the fittest”; he was also the inventor of the paper clip.

Spencer was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature before his death.

Herbert Spencer quotes ~
• “What is Science? To see the absurdity of the prejudice against it, we need only remark that Science is simply a higher development of common knowledge; and that if Science is repudiated, all knowledge must be repudiated along with it.”
• “Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.”
• “Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation.”
• “Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.”
• “No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.”
• “Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.”
• “Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.”
• “... But this survival of the fittest, implies multiplication of the fittest.”
• “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.”
• “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.”
• “Religion under all its forms is distinguished from everything else in this, that its subject matter passes the sphere of the intellect.”