Лесли Уайт: Американский антрополог и теоретик культурной эволюции.

American anthropologist (1900–1975)

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. White was president of the American Anthropological Association (1964).

White lived first in Kansas and then Louisiana. He volunteered to fight in World War I, serving in the US Navy before enrolling at Louisiana State University in 1919. In 1921, he transferred to Columbia University, where he studied psychology, receiving a B. A. in 1923 and a M. A. in 1924. His PhD in Anthropology and Sociology came from the University of Chicago(1925). White studied at Columbia, where Franz Boas had lectured, however he supported cultural evolution as defined by writers such as Lewis. H Morgan and Edward Tylor. White's interests were diverse, and he took classes in several other disciplines, including philosophy at UCLA, and clinical psychiatry, before discovering anthropology via Alexander Goldenweiser courses at the New School for Social Research. White also spent a few weeks with the Menominee and Winnebago in Wisconsin during his PhD His thesis proposal was a library thesis, which foreshadowed his later theoretical work. He conducted fieldwork at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico. In 1927 White began teaching at the University at Buffalo.

Teaching at University of Buffalo marked a turning point in White's thinking. It was here that he developed a worldview—anthropological, political, ethical—that he would hold to and advocate until his death. 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. 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.

Ethnological Essays: Selected Essays of Leslie A. White. University of New Mexico Press. 1987. The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. 1959. The Science of Culture: A study of man and civilization. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949. The Pueblo of Santa Ana, New Mexico. American Anthropological Association Memoir 60, 1949. The Pueblo of San Felipe. American Anthropological Association Memoir No. 38, 1938. The Pueblo of Santo Domingo. American Anthropological Association Memoir 60, 1935. The Acoma Indians. Bureau of American Ethnology, 47th annual report, pp. 1–192. Smithsonian Institution, 1932.