Alfred Métraux

Alfred Métraux
Alfred Métraux, 1932
Born	5 November 1902 Lausanne, Switzerland
Died	12 April 1963(1963-04-12) (aged 60) Paris, France
Nationality	Switzerland
Fields	ethnography

Alfred Métraux (5 November 1902 – 12 April 1963) was a Swiss anthropologist, ethnologist and human rights leader.

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Metraux spent much of his childhood in Argentina where his father was a well-known surgeon resident in Mendoza. His mother was a Georgian from Tbilisi. He received his secondary and university education in Europe, at the Classical Gymnasium of Lausanne, the Ecole Nationale des Chartes in Paris, the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales (Diplome, 1925). The Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Diplome, 1927) and the Sorbonne (Docteur es Lettres, 1928). He also studied in Sweden, in Gothenburg's University and did research at the well-equipped local anthropological museum.

Among his teachers were Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet, and Erland Nordenskiöld. While he was still a student he entered into correspondence with Father John Cooper who introduced him to the American school of cultural anthropology. It is said that Father Cooper did not realize at first that his scholarly correspondent was only 19 and 20 years old. They actually met much later, when Metraux came to the United States; but Father Cooper seems to have had considerable influence on Alfred Metraux's thought. Metraux combined in his work the best of both the European and the American tradition of historical anthropology.

Métraux's professional career was equally cosmopolitan. He founded and was the first director (1928 – 1934) of the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Tucuman, Argentina. In 1934-35, he led a French expedition to Easter Island, and in 1936 –38, he was a Fellow of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. In 1939, he returned to Argentina and Bolivia for field research on a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1940, upon his return to the United States from South America, he was in residence at Yale University with a renewal of his Guggenheim Fellowship. That next year, he worked with the Cross Cultural Survey (now the Human Relations Area Files) on South American data and was associated with such people as John Dollard, Leonard Bloomfield, and others of the Institute of Human Relations.