Robert Francis Murphy (March 3, 1924 – October 8, 1990) was an American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Columbia University[1] in New York City, from the early 1960s to 1990.
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.
[4] A student of Julian Steward's cultural ecology approach in his early years, Murphy was an eclectic thinker who engaged Marx, Freud, Hegel, Simmel, and Schutz, and who incorporated ideas from diverse areas of anthropology theory — materialist, structuralist, and symbolic.
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),[2] which won the Columbia University Lionel Trilling Award.
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.