Category:The Golden Age 1946-1972

I don't know if anyone else calls this the Golden Age of Anthropological Theory, but most anthropologists would know what I'm talking about. From the end of the second world war, Anthropology goes through a period of intense, focused theoretical originality, and gained a much wider audience than it had had before or would have after. After the holocaust in Germany, the Boasian critique of racial concepts gained wide acceptance, and anthropologists were now the experts of the cultural patterns which replaced older racial thinking.

Although the discipline was wide and dynamic, three schools of thought became particularly influential: Structuralism, from the Durkheimian legacy; Political Economy, associated with Marxism; and Interpretive Anthropology, associated with Max Weber.

Key thinkers in this period include: Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Dumont, Clifford Geertz, David Schneider, Gregory Bateson, Dell Hymes, Victor Turner, Frederik Barth, Mary Douglas, Jack Goody, Edmond Leach, Jack Goody, Julian Steward, Eric Wolf, William Roseberry, Sydney Mintz.