Raymond J. DeMallie (born October 16, 1946) is an American anthropologist whose work focuses on the cultural history of the peoples of the Northern Plains, particularly the Lakota. His work is informed by interrelated archival, museum-based, and ethnographic research in a manner characteristic of the ethnohistorical method. In 1985 he founded and became the director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University Bloomington.
Raymond DeMallie was born in 1946 and raised in Rochester, New York. In 1964, in his last year of high school, he attended the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester, given by Fred Eggan of the University of Chicago.
This inspired DeMallie's decision to attend the University of Chicago for undergraduate and graduate work; Eggan would eventually serve as the chair of his dissertation committee. Other influential teachers at Chicago included Sol Tax (with whom he worked as a member of the staff of Current Anthropology), , Ray Fogelson, and David Schneider.
DeMallie's dissertation fieldwork on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation focused on kinship and social organization. DeMallie drew from both cultural and linguistic data, and he received his PhD in 1971. (He earned his B.A. with honors in 1968 and his M.A. in 1970, with the Department of Anthropology throughout his education at Chicago.)