Robert F. Murphy (anthropologist)

Robert Francis Murphy (March 3, 1924 – October 8, 1990) was an American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, from the early 1960s to 1990. His field work included studies of the Munduruku (Mundurucu) people of the Amazon and the Tuareg people of the Sahara.

Murphy was a third generation descendant of Irish immigrants and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. His grandmother worked in a textile mill in New Hampshire, and his mother struggled to raise five young children with a mostly absent father in a "lace-curtain Irish" neighborhood of Queens; she suffered from breast cancer until she died when Bob was 14.

He enlisted in the United States Navy during World War II, serving as a private. He used the G.I. Bill to attend Columbia College as an undergraduate. Murphy went on to earn his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University. He met his wife Yolanda in a physical anthropology course in graduate school, and they were married in St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University.

In 1952 the Murphys set out to do fieldwork for a year among the Munduruku of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil, where they studied, among other things, the dynamics of a patrilineal society with matrilocal residence patterns. Bob taught at the University of California, Berkeley for several years before taking a professorship at Columbia. In the early 1960s, Bob and Yolanda, with their two small children Robert and Pamela in tow, trekked to the Sahara to undertake a second fieldwork among the Tuareg of Niger, where Bob, who was fond of paradoxes, was able to study a matrilineal society with patrilocal residence patterns.

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