Cultural Anthropology
The development of cultural anthropology, which is the study of human culture and its variations, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries played a…
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Modernism in Canada and The United States
In Canada and the United States modernism emerges from transnational engagements with global intellectual movements while also grappling with local intellectual, cultural, and political developments…
Intellectual Currents
This section focusses on the historical, sociological, philosophical, economic, political, and scientific context of modernism. Entries cover individuals, coteries, movements, and events. The primary criterion…
Modernism in Europe
We are living in a very singular moment of history. It is a moment of crisis, in the literal sense of that word. In every…
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism was a movement initiated by a group of loosely affiliated artists that came together during the early 1940s, primarily in New York City.…
Photography
Dunham, Katherine Mary (1909–2006)
As a choreographer, anthropologist, educator, and activist, Katherine Dunham transformed the field of dance in the twentieth century. In the mid-1930s she conducted anthropological research…
Boas, Franz (1858–1942)
Franz Boas was a founder of the fields of modern anthropology and ethnography. He created the anthropology department at Boston’s Clark University and oversaw the…
Benedict, Ruth (1887–1948)
Known as America’s first woman anthropologist, Ruth Fulton Benedict was a cultural relativist and folklorist. She studied anthropology under Franz Boas (1858–1942) at Columbia University,…
Hurston, Zora Neale (1891–1960)
Zora Neale Hurston was a writer and anthropologist. Since the Black Arts and Feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, she has been commonly acclaimed…
Malinowski, Bronisław Kasper (1884–1942)
Born Bronisław Kasper Malinowski to a family in the Polish nobility (the szlachta), Malinowski made contributions to anthropology through his text Argonauts of the Western…
Sapir, Edward (1884–1939)
Linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir is one of those thinkers whose fame has been increased but his full achievement somewhat underrated through association with just…
Orientalism
Orientalism is the sociological, historical, cultural, and anthropological study of the Orient, with “the Orient” constituting countries East of “the Occident” (Western Europe), and including…
Frazer, Sir James George (1854–1941)
James George Frazer was a Scottish classicist, social theorist, anthropologist, and historian of religion. He was a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University. In addition…
Bateson, Gregory (1904–1980)
Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, communications theorist, and cyberneticist. His most famous work, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), is a…
Cambridge Ritualists, The
The Cambridge Ritualists, also known as the Cambridge Group of Classical Anthropologists, were a closely knit group of four classicists—Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), Francis M.…
Celtic Revival
The Celtic Revival was a late-nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in Celtic history, languages and myths that crossed through many disciplines, most notably cultural anthropology, art…
Rivers, W. H. R. (1864–1922)
A pre-eminent British neurologist, psychologist, ethnologist and anthropologist, William Halse Rivers Rivers worked as a psychiatrist in British military hospitals, most famously Craiglockhart War Hospital…
Primus, Pearl (1919–1994)
Dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus made significant strides toward securing a vital role for dance artists of color in American modern dance. Sparked by the…
Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)
Sigmund (Sigismund Schlomo) Freud was an Austrian psychiatrist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who systematized theories of the unconscious and psychosexual development. Freud published case…
Dance and Writing
The centrality of dance to aesthetic modernism led to dance becoming a major preoccupation of modernist literature and a model for the generation of the…
Lévy-Brühl, Lucien (1857–1939)
Lucien Lévy-Brühl was a French philosopher who taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1899 to 1927. Investigating the psychology of ‘primitive’ societies, his book Les…
Asturias, Miguel Ángel (1899–1974)
Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974), the recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the most decorated Guatemalan writers in history. He was…
Jensen, Johannes V. (1873–1950)
Winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize in literature, the novelist and poet Johannes V. Jensen was Denmark’s major 20th-century literary figure. Much celebrated for his…
Structuralism
Structuralism, generally described, is a twentieth-century intellectual movement associated with linguistic studies in Europe, despite its vast applicability and many adherents. An initial aim of…