Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings
Loading
PR![]()
author
Dr. Paul Radin
Paul Radin (April 2, 1883 - February 21, 1959) was an American cultural anthropologist and folklorist of the early twentieth century specializing in Native American languages and cultures. The note...view morePaul Radin (April 2, 1883 - February 21, 1959) was an American cultural anthropologist and folklorist of the early twentieth century specializing in Native American languages and cultures. The noted legal scholar Max Radin was his older brother.
A son of the rabbi Adolph Moses Radin, Paul Radin was born in the cosmopolitan Polish city of Łódź in 1883. In 1884 his family moved to Elmira, New York. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1902. There, he became interested in studying history and came under the influence of James Harvey Robinson.
Between 1905-1907 Radin studied in Munich and then at the University of Berlin. He developed an interest in anthropology and returned to the U.S. in 1907, becoming a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University. He engaged in years of productive fieldwork among the Winnebago (Hocąk) Indians, primarily from 1908-1912. Publications from this research include his doctoral dissertation earned in 1911 and culminated in 1923 with the publication of his magnum opus, The Winnebago Tribe. In 1929, as a result of his fieldwork, he was able to publish a grammar of the nearly extinct language of the Wappo people of the San Francisco Bay area.
In 1952 Radin moved to Lugano, Switzerland, where he worked for the Bollingen Foundation. In 1956 he returned to the U.S. to become chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis. Late in his career he edited several anthologies of folk tales from different continents. His most enduring publication to date is The Trickster (1956), which includes essays by the pioneering scholar of Greek mythology, Karl Kerényi, and the prominent psychoanalyst C. G. Jung.
Radin taught at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of California, Berkeley; Mills College, Fisk University, Black Mountain College, Kenyon College, and the University of Chicago. He died in New York City in 1959, aged 75.view less