Paul James Bohannan (March 5, 1920 – July 13, 2007) was an American anthropologist known for his research on the Tiv people of Nigeria, spheres of exchange and divorce in the United States.
World War II interrupted his college education, and he served in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps from 1941 to 1945 reaching the rank of captain.
He attended Queen's College, Oxford, thereafter as a Rhodes scholar,[4] receiving a Bachelor of Science in 1949 and his doctor of philosophy degree in 1951, both in anthropology.
In 1959, Bohannan left Princeton for a full professorship at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Bohannan married Laura Marie Smith, an anthropologist with whom he collaborated on Tiv Economy, on 15 May 1943.