Lawrence Krader (December 9, 1919 – November 15, 1998) was an Americansocialistanthropologist andethnologist.[1]
Krader was born on December 9, 1919, inJamaica, New York. In 1936, at the Philosophy Department of theCity College of New York (CCNY), he studiedAristotle withAbraham Edel,Leibniz with Philipp P. Wiener, andmathematical logic andlinguistics withAlfred Tarski. In 1937–1938, he also studiedlogic withRudolf Carnap andethnology withFranz Boas. In 1941, Krader graduated with aBachelor of Arts degree at CCNY and was granted the Ketcham Award for Philosophy. As the United States enteredWorld War II, Krader joined the merchant navy and traveled to the Russian Arctic port ofArkhangelsk before travelling to Leningrad (nowSaint Petersburg) where he learned the Russian language.
After the war, Krader returned to the US and studied linguistics (1945–1947) atColumbia University withRoman Jakobson andAndré Martinet. During this time, he developed an interpretation ofhuman evolution which resulted in him leaving his focus on philosophy and commencing an intensive study of theEurasian nomads; becoming a fellow of the Far Eastern Institute at theUniversity of Washington in Seattle. His new research interests probably also owed something to his meeting withKarl Wittfogel in 1947, whom he helped with research and Russian translations and also to his contact withKarl Korsch.[2] Krader was Wittfogel's assistant from 1948 to 1951. In 1952, Krader taught linguistics as a Fellow of the Russian Research Center atHarvard and married his wife Dr.Barbara Lattimer in 1953. In 1954 he graduated at Harvard with a PhD on "Kinship Systems of the Altaic-speaking peoples of the Asian Steppes" (supervised byClyde Kluckhohn).
From 1953 to 1956, he was appointed research associate at the Bureau of Social Science Research at theAmerican University of Washington, D.C., in the area of Central Asian Studies. In 1956–1958 he became professor in anthropology and director of the Nomads Program at theSyracuse University and leader of the China Population Program at theUnited States Census Bureau. From 1957 to 1959, Krader became president of the Anthropological Society of Washington. From 1958 to 1963, he taught as ordinary professor at the American University in Washington, D.C., as well as being representative for ethnology and anthropology at the Social Science Council and Human Science Council ofUNESCO, leader of the anthropological section of the sociology and anthropology department at CCNY, and chairman of the sociology and anthropology department at theUniversity of Waterloo in Canada. In 1962, Krader traveled for the first time to outerMongolia. From 1963 to 1968 Krader received finance for his research project on the Evolution of the State and Nomadism, from theNational Science Foundation.
From 1964 to 1978, Krader became secretary-general of theIUAES. For his study of the roots of thetheory of evolution in the 19th century, he received support from theInternational Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) during 1963–1975. From 1970 to 1972, Krader was professor at the University of Waterloo but in 1972 joined the Institute for Ethnology at theFree University of Berlin, where he became director until 1982. From 1989 until his death, Krader produced 156 manuscripts including works on Labour and Value: a Theory of the Russian Revolution, Mathematical Logic, a Critique of Evolution, Linguistics and other topics. It is intended that some of this material will be published via a research project atMcMaster University with the aid of an endowment.[3]
"I'm neither a Hegelian nor a Marxist, I'm a student of both, as Marx was a student of Hegel. But Marx was also a disciple of Hegel, which I am not, nor a disciple of Marx. I am a socialist, and have been one for nearly 60 years, but not a Marxian socialist."
— Lawrence Krader, quoted inSchorkowitz (1995, p. 6)
