Lewis, Oscar, 1914-1970

Oscar Lewis was born in New York City and grew up on a farm in upper New York State.  He took his BSS degree from the City College in 1936, and went on to graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University, taking his doctorate in 1940 with a thesis on cultural change among the Blackfoot Indians.  At Columbia he studied under Ruth Benedict, and although in many ways the focus of his work differed from hers, Benedict's influence as a teacher and a person remained with him.  Throughout his life, he retained great interest in psychological anthropology and the ethnography of changing, modernizing cultures.  Thus, throughout most of his work he insisted upon building up a meticulously gathered corpus of materials on families and individuals, and rejecting as premature generalizations not founded on such studies. His work was also suffused with a great moral concern for the social problems of poverty, a concern going well beyond the limits of his concerns as an academician.  But his intent was always just as much to make clear in the context of academic anthropology and social science the methodological and theoretical importance of looking at the fine patterning of individual and family life, in order to understand how cultural and social life is organized.

Lewis was a member of the faculty of the University of Illinois from 1948 to his death, having earlier taught at Brooklyn College and at Washington University in St. Louis.  He helped bring anthropology to the University of Illinois as one of the first two anthropologists on this campus when it was still a part of the department of Sociology.  He was particularly instrumental in getting a well-rounded and distinguished program in the subject going here, and in getting such distinguished colleagues as Julian Steward to join the faculty, and finally in having a separate department of anthropology created here in 1959.  He took students into the field on several occasions, demanding of them a great deal in dedication and rigor, and giving them a thorough training in field method.

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