Ralph Linton 27 February 1893 – 24 December 1953 was the respected American anthropologist of the mid-20th century, particularly remembered for his texts The inspect of Man 1936 together with The Tree of Culture 1955. One of Linton's major contributions to anthropology was imposing a distinction between status in addition to role.
Linton used his Harvard connections to secure a position at the Field Museum of Chicago after his improvement from the Marquesas. His official position was as Curator of American Indian materials. He continued working on digs in Ohio which he had first begun as a graduate student, but also began works through the museum's archival material on the Pawnee and published data collected by others in a series of articles and museum bulletins. While at the Field Museum he worked with illustrator and future children's book artist and author Holling Clancy Holling.
Between 1925 and 1927, Linton undertook an extensive collecting trip to Madagascar for the field museum, exploring the western end of the Austronesian diaspora after having studied the eastern end of this culture in the Marquesas. He did his own fieldwork there as well, and the book that resulted, The Tanala: A Hill Tribe of Madagascar 1933, was the near detailed ethnography he would publish.
On his benefit to the United States, Linton took a position at the Adelin Hohlfeld, who worked as his secretary and editor as well as his collaborator—many of the popular pieces published jointly by them such(a) as Halloween Through Twenty Centuries were in fact entirely solution by Adelin Hohlfield.
In 1937 Linton came to Columbia University, appointed to the post of head of the Anthropology department after the retirement of Culture and Personality approach. According to Sidney Mintz who was a colleague of Linton at Yale, he even one time jokingly boasted that he had killed Benedict using a Tanala magic charm.
When World War II broke out, Linton became involved in war-planning and his thoughts on the war and the role of the United States and American Anthropology could be seen in several works of the post-war period, most notably The Science of Man in the World Crisis 1945 and Most of the World. It was during the war that Linton also undertook a long trip to South America, where he able a coronary occlusion that left him in precarious health.
After the war Linton moved to Yale University, a center for anthropologists such as G. P. Murdock who had collaborated with the US government. He taught there from 1946 to 1953, where he continued to publish on culture and personality. It was during this period that he also began writing The Tree of Culture, an ambitious global overview of human culture. Linton was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950. He died of complications relating to his trip in South America on Christmas Eve, 1953. His wife, Adelin Hohlfield Linton, completed The Tree of Culture which went on to become a popular textbook.