Academic Career
Harris received both his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, the former in 1949 and the latter in 1953. He performed fieldwork in Brazil and Portuguese-speaking Africa before joining the faculty at Columbia. He eventually became chairman of the anthropology department at Columbia. During the Columbia student campus occupation of 1968, Harris was among the few faculty leaders who sided with the students when they were threatened and beaten by the police. During the 1960s and 1970s, he was a resident of Leonia, New Jersey.
Harris next joined the University of Florida anthropology department in 1981 and retired in 2000, becoming the Anthropology Graduate Research Professor Emeritus. Harris also served as the Chair of the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association.
Harris became the author of seventeen books. Two of his college textbooks, Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology, were published in seven editions. His research spanned the topics of race, evolution, and culture. He often focused on Latin America and Brazil, including the Islas de la Bahia, Ecuador, Mozambique, India, and East Harlem.
Read more about this topic: Marvin Harris
Famous quotes containing the words academic and/or career:
“The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)