RADIN, PAUL

RADIN, PAUL (1883–1959), U.S. anthropologist. Born in Lodz, Russian Poland, Paul Radin was the youngest son of adolph radin , a rabbi, and brother of Herman, a physician, and of max radin , an eminent legal scholar. He studied first in Europe, then in New York, coming to anthropology via zoology and history. A student of Franz Boas and James Harvey Robinson, he did his first field work with the Winnebago Indians, and during the next five decades explored this group intensively. He advocated the outlook of a natural scientist for the study of human cultures. Like his mentor Boas, he represented the humanistic approach to the understanding of pre-literate societies. A member of the Boas School, he differed from it principally in holding that Boas' quantitative and distributional treatment of culture data leads to inadequate and faulty histories of the societies concerned. With his historicist perspective, Radin interpreted Boas' work in terms of the latter's intellectual antecedents, showed how changes in Boas' intellectual perspective influenced his interpretation of the primitive, and how his positions became the framework and presupposition for subsequent American anthropology. Radin taught at various universities including Cambridge, Chicago, Brandeis, and California. His contributions to linguistics are impressive, comprising texts of Winnebago and various other American Indian languages, and work in historical linguistics (The Genetic Relationship of the North American Indian Languages, 1919). He also endeavored to produce a systematic ethnological theory   in such works as The Method and the Theory of Ethnology (1933, 19662). Radin's life style was that of a liberated cosmopolitan intellectual, and evinced humanistic skepticism toward our culture-bound arrogance vis-à-vis the primitives. His Enlightenment perspective stimulated his immersion in the intellectual world of the primitive and his defense of the primitive mentality as against denigration of it by levy-bruhl as "prelogical." While admitting, in Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927), that primitive mentality differs in degree, he noted that its reaction patterns evince regularity, uniqueness, individuality, and depth, and betray neither linguistic nor conceptual inadequacy. He devoted much study to the phenomena of religion, especially the God concept among primitives, as in Primitive Religion (1937) and The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956). His synthesis of the objective and subjective worlds of the primitive culminated in an apologia for pristine civilizations, and he stressed the virtues found therein – viz., their respect and concern for the individual and their impressive social and political organization. His deeply felt insight that the universal human drama is enacted in primitive societies was set forth in The Road of Life and Death: A Ritual Drama of the American Indians (1945) and in his other studies of the Winnebago Indians. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Diamond (ed.), Culture in History, Essays in Honor of Paul Radin (1960). (Ephraim Fischoff)