Robert F. Murphy (anthropologist)

Murphy died of heart failure on October 8, 1990, at his home in Leonia, New Jersey. He was survived by his wife Yolanda and their two children.

American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 83, No. 3 (Sep. 1981), pp. 714–717

In 1974, Murphy was diagnosed as having a benign but slow-growing tumor of the spinal cord that would unrelentingly lead to impairment of his central nervous system and greater loss of bodily functions over the next 16 years of his life; within two years, by 1976, he was quadriplegic and used a wheelchair full-time. Murphy had the "rage to live", and began to edit his popular lectures on cultural anthropology for a new textbook, Overture to Social Anthropology (1979), later revised into second (1986) and third (1989) editions before he died. Murphy dramatically transformed his scholarly efforts into an anthropological study of paraplegia, a major project funded by the National Science Foundation, which he wrote about in his ethnography of "the damaged self", The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled (1987, 1990, 2001), which won the Columbia University Lionel Trilling Award.

Murphy was a charismatic and extraordinarily popular teacher among the students at Columbia. His wry sense of humor and appreciation for irony caught the imaginations of thousands of Columbia undergraduates, and he regularly taught large auditorium-sized classes, even when his condition forced him to use a motorized wheelchair and speak through a microphone. Murphy won teaching awards and numerous academic awards, and was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1968.

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.

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, graduating in 1949. Murphy went on to earn his Master of Arts and PhD 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.

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.