Conrad Arensberg was born Sept. 12, 1910 in Pittsburgh PA and died of respiratory failure Feb. 10, 1997 in Hazlet NJ. He earned his BA in 1931 and his PhD in 1934 from Harvard. While at Harvard, he participated in W Lloyd Warner's Yankee City project.
He gained prominence in the field of Anthropology through his work in Ireland in the 1930's, where he studied a modern Irish society for his doctoral thesis. Previously, only primitive societies had been studied and considered a viable topic for anthropologists. These studies resulted in the 1937 publication of The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study.
In 1934 he began teaching as Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During WWII he was with the US Army Military Intelligence. He also worked at Columbia University. First, in 1946 as the chair of the Barnard College Department of Sociology, and then in 1952, he moved to the Department of Anthropology. He remained at Columbia University until his retirement in 1979. He was also the research director of UNESCO's Institute for Social Sciences and a consultant to the U. S. Department of The Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was the editor of "Human Organization" and "Journal of Applied Anthropology."
Arensberg did pioneering work on Europe and Old World Civilizations. He believed that anthropology is a natural science. Natural sciences each have a focus of observation, and the focus of observation of anthropology is humans. Other interests and areas of research include interaction theory and ethnographic study of social behavior, morale and productivity in industrial settings. He also studied bureaucracies and international development, social change, community study method and cultural stabilities in a modernizing India.
Books by Conrad Arensberg:
Rooney, Terrie M, Contemporary Authors, Vol 156,Gale Research, 1997
Former link, http://www.aaanet.org/an/ob9705.htm , (2006)