Murray Leaf
American social and cultural anthropologist
Murray John Leaf (born June 1, 1939) is an American social and cultural anthropologist.
Education
He was born in New York City in 1939, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. After active duty for training in the United States Army Reserves in 1957, he attended the University of Arizona and Reed College, receiving a B.A. in philosophy from Reed in 1961. He received a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1966. He has taught at Pomona College, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Dallas.
Career
In practical development work, Leaf has served as Senior Social Scientist on the Irrigation and Water Management and Training Project, in India (1987–89), Senior Socio-Economist for the Bangladesh Flood Response Study (1990–93), and as a consultant to the United Nations Centre for Regional Development, Nagoya, Japan (1991–95).
He has served on the editorial board of Regional Development Dialogue, the journal of the United Nations Centre for Regional Development, and the online anthropological journal Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory. He has held elected positions in the Culture and Agriculture section of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Anthropological Sciences.
Contributions
Leaf's central concern is the social nature of thought and its relation to organization. Methodologically, his argument is for radical empiricism in opposition to positivism, Marxism, interpretivism, and postmodernism.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Murray Leaf” as american social and cultural anthropologist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6939348. VIAF identifies the subject as 7560814. The Library of Congress control number is n79003271. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1957, 1961 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Murray Leaf” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.