Leslie White
Leslie Alvin White (January 19, 1900, Salida, Colorado – March 31, 1975, Lone Pine, California) was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of the theories on cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.[1] White was president of the American Anthropological Association (1964).[2]
For other people named Leslie White, see Leslie White (disambiguation).Buffalo transition[edit]
Teaching at University of Buffalo marked a turning point in White's thinking. White developed an interest in Marxism in 1929, he visited the Soviet Union and on his return joined the Socialist Labor Party, writing articles under the pseudonym "John Steel" for their newspaper.[3]
White went to Michigan when he was hired to replace Julian Steward, who departed Ann Arbor in 1930. Although the university was home to a museum with a long history of involvement in matters anthropological, White was the only professor in the anthropology department itself. He remained here for the rest of his active career. In 1932, he headed a field school in the southwest which was attended by Fred Eggan, Mischa Titiev, and others.
White brought Titiev, his student and a Russian immigrant, to Michigan as a second professor in 1936. However, during the Second World War, Titiev took part in the war effort by studying Japan. Perhaps this upset the socialist White. In any case by war's end White had broken with Titiev, who would go on to found the East Asian Studies Program, and the two were hardly even on speaking terms. No other faculty members were hired until after the war, when scholars like Richard K. Beardsley joined the department. Most would fall on one side or the other of the split between White and Titiev.
As a professor in Ann Arbor, White trained students such as Robert Carneiro, Beth Dillingham, and Gertrude Dole who carried on White's program in its orthodox form, while other scholars such as Eric Wolf, Arthur Jelinek, Elman Service, and Marshall Sahlins and Napoleon Chagnon drew on their time with White to elaborate their own forms of anthropology.