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

Katherine Dunham
James George Frazer
Leo Frobenius

Zora Neale Hurston
Alfred L. Kroeber

Katherine Dunham Poster

Katherine Dunham
b. 6-22-1909; Joliet, IL
d. 5-21-2006; NYC

Katherine Dunham was a noted dancer and choreographer who brought the dance styles of black people of the Caribbean and the United States to the attention of America at large.

Born in Chicago, she attended the university there and majored in anthropology. She did a year of field work in the west Indies. This helped give her the insight she needed to develop innovative dance forms expressing Caribbean cultural styles.

Dunham choreographed and performed in a number of stage productions and films during the 1930s and '40s. She also founded the first black dance troupe – the Katherine Dunham Dance Company.

She was most proud of the Perfoming Arts Training Center, which she founded in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1967 – and where, in her later years, she continued to teach and offer her guidance. This oasis in the middle of the poverty-stricken city has offered hope and a way out for countless numbers of troubled youth. It is here where her legacy continues, and where many young lives are changed. (based on text from a no longer available poster in the Great Black Innovators poster series)

• women and music posters
• Katherine Dunham books at Amazon.com
• Eartha Kitt began her career in the Katherine Dunham company.

James George Frazer
b. 1-1-1854; Glasgow, Scotland
d. 5-7-1941; Cambridge

James George Frazer, a social anthropologist, was the author of The Golden Bough which documents magical and religious beliefs.

Leo Frobenius
b. 6-29-1873; Berlin, Germany
d. 8-9-1938; Italy

Leo Frobenius, an ethnologist and archaeologist, introduced African storytelling into European literature.

Zora Neale Hurston
b. 1-7-1891; AL (raised in FL)
d. 1-28-1960

Author Zora Neale Hurston studied with Franz Boas.

Poster Text: “Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.” Their Eyes Were Watching God

• more Zora Neale Hurston posters
• more Voices of Diversity Posters

Alfred L. Kroeber
b. 6-11-1876; Hoboken, NJ
d. 10-5-1960; Paris

Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the most influential figures in American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century, was known as the “Dean of American Anthropologists”.

FYI - Kroeber was the father of noted author Ursula K. Le Guin.

• Native Americans posters

Mary Leakey
b. 2-6-1913; London, England
d. 12-9-1996

• Africa posters
• Women Scientists posters

Claude Levi-Strauss
b. 11-28-1908; Brussels, Belgium
d. 10-30-2009; Paris

Claude Levi-Strauss is called the “father of modern anthropology”. Among his notable ideas are “bricolage”, a French term meaning “make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (as in Do It Yourself), and the culinary triangle. Levi-Strauss is also identified as a “structuralist”, one who searched “for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity.”

Claude Levi-Strauss quote ~
• “The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.”

Carl Sofus Lumholtz
b. 1851; Fåberg, Norway
d. 1922; Saranac Lake, New York (sanatorium - tuberculosis)

Ethnographer and explorer Carl Sofus Lumholtz is best remembered for his studies of the indigenous cultures of Australia and Mesoamericans in central Mexico.