Leslie White

Leslie Alvin White (January 19, 1900, Salida, Colorado – March 31, 1975, Lone Pine, California) was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. He was president of the American Anthropological Association (1964).

White's father was a peripatetic civil engineer. White lived first in Kansas and then Louisiana. He volunteered to fight in World War I, but saw only the tail end of it, spending a year in the US Navy before matriculating at Louisiana State University in 1919.

In 1921, he transferred to Columbia University, where he studied psychology, taking a BA in 1923 and an MA in 1924. Although White studied at the same university where Franz Boas had lectured, White's understanding of anthropology was decidedly anti-Boasian. However, his interests even at this stage of his career were diverse, and he took classes in several other disciplines and institutions, including philosophy at UCLA, and clinical psychiatry, before discovering anthropology via Alexander Goldenweiser's courses at the New School for Social Research. In 1925, White began studies for a Ph.D. in sociology/anthropology at the University of Chicago and had the opportunity of spending a few weeks with the Menominee and Winnebago in Wisconsin. After his initial thesis proposal—a library thesis, which foreshadowed his later theoretical work—he conducted fieldwork at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico. Ph.D. in hand, he began teaching at the University at Buffalo in 1927, where he began to rethink the antievolutionary views that his Boasian education had instilled in him. In 1930, he moved to Ann Arbor, where he remained for the rest of his active career.

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