Harold C. Fleming
| Harold Fleming | |
|---|---|
| Born | Harold Crane Fleming December 23, 1926 |
| Died | April 29, 2015 (aged 88) |
| Occupation | linguist, anthropologist, writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works |
The age-grading culture of East Africa: an historical inquiry (1965) A new taxonomic hypothesis: Borean or Boralean (1991) |
Harold Crane Fleming (December 23, 1926 – April 29, 2015) was an American anthropologist and historical linguist, specializing in the cultures and languages of the Horn of Africa. As an adherent of the Four Field School of American anthropology, he stresses the integration of physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and cultural anthropology in solving anthropological problems.
Since 1965, Fleming had been affiliated with Boston University, continuing to the present as Research Fellow in the African Studies Center and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology. He conducted extensive field work in Northeast Africa, mostly in Ethiopia.
Early in his career, Fleming published a paper (Fleming 1969) that outlined an important taxonomic proposal, claiming that what had up to then been known as the "Western Cushitic" language family was not a part of Cushitic at all, but instead makes up a sixth primary branch of Afroasiatic, for which he coined the name Omotic. The proposal has since been widely but not universally accepted. He continued in the vein of solving taxonomic problems involving the languages spoken in Africa and worldwide (Fleming 1976, 1987, 1988, 1991, 2002, 2006, etc.).
Fleming was a vocal advocate of, and practitioner in, the effort to extend the application of historical linguistic methods as far as possible into the past. He recommended integrating its results with those of physical anthropology, genetics, and archaeology, in order to produce a unified view of human prehistory. Fleming was also a strong supporter of the sometimes controversial proposals of Joseph Greenberg, emphasizing the success of Greenberg's classification of "1500 [African] languages into four large taxa where almost all have stayed ever since" (Fleming 2000-2001).
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