JULY 13

Paul Bohannan

Born March 5, 1920 in Lincoln, Nebraska
Died July 13, 2007 Visalia, California

Anthropologist
Paul Bohannan

Paul Bohannan was born on March 5,1920 in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1951, he earned his Ph.D. at University of Oxford. He was a Don at Oxford and then taught at Princeton University. From 1959 to 1975, he taught at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. He was drawn to Northwestern when their anthropology department began focusing on African ethnography. While there, he helped reinforce the study of Economic Anthropology within the department. From there, he went to the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. He has also been the President of the African Studies Association. In 1960, Bohannan won the August Volmer Research Award of the American Society for Criminology for his study African Homicide and Suicide. He has researched and written books about the Tiv and African people. Bohannan retired from the University of Southern California in 1987.

He published studies of African legal and economic anthropology, Africa and Africans (with Philip Curtin, 1964, revised 1971), Tiv Economy (1968, with L Bohannan), and Western middle-class concepts of marriage, family, and divorce Divorce and After (1970).

Bohannan known as the world's leading expert on the Tiv of Nigeria, died on July 13, 2007 at his home in Visalia, California of Alzheimer's disease which he had for several years.