Earnest Albert Hooton

Earnest Albert Hooton PhD
Born	1887
Died	1954
Residence	Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., USA 13 Buckingham Street, Cambridge, Mass. [1935]
Occupation	anthropologist
Society Membership membership ordinary fellow from 1913 Hon. Fellow from 1950 left 1950.10.03 resigned elected_AI 1913.03.04 1950.12.05 1951.01.09

Notes

House Notes

1913.02.10 proposed by R.R. Marett, seconded by Arthur Thomson
1938.12.13 The following were nominated as Hon. Fellows: Prof. E.A. Hooton, Mons. Le Rouzic, Prof. C. van Riet Lowe, Dr Broome, Mrs Hoernle, Dr Ralph Linton, Prof. S.E. Morley.
1950.10.03 it was resolved that Dr Hooton be approached with a request inviting him to reconsider his resignation
1950.11.07 The President communicated to the Council a letter received from Sir Arthur Keith deploring this resignation, and urging that he be elected to Honorary Fellowship in recognition of his services to anthropology. It was resolved to accept Sir Arthur Keith’s nomination of Dr Hooton as Hon. Fellow

Notes From Elsewhere

Earnest Albert Hooton (November 20, 1887 – May 3, 1954) was a U.S. physical anthropologist known for his work on racial classification and his popular writings such as the book Up From The Ape. Hooton sat on the Committee on the Negro, a group that "focused on the anatomy of blacks and reflected the racism of the time."[2]
Earnest Albert Hooton was born in Clemansville, Wisconsin. He was educated at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. After earning his BA there in 1907, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, which he deferred in order to continue his studies in the United States. He pursued graduate studies in Classics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he received an MA in 1908 and a Ph.D. in 1911 on "The Pre-Hellenistic Stage of the Evolution of the Literary Art at Rome" and then continued on to England. He found the classical scholarship at Oxford uninteresting, but quickly became interested in anthropology, which he studied with R.R. Marett, receiving a diploma in 1912. At the conclusion of his time in England, he was hired by Harvard University, where he taught until his death in 1954. During this time he was also Curator of Somatology at the nearby Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Hooton was known for combining a rigorous attention to scholarly detail combined with a candid and witty personal style. Henry Shapiro remembers that his lectures "were compounded of a strange, unpredictable mixture of strict attention to his duty to present the necessary facts... and of a delightful impatience with the restrictions of this role to which he seemed to react by launching into informal, speculative, and thoroughly entertaining and absorbing discussions of the subject at hand." As a result, Hooton established Harvard as a center for physical anthropology in the United States and at the time of his death most physical anthropologists in the United States were former students or instructed by one.[3][4]
Many of Hooton's research projects were indebted to his training in physical anthropology at a time when this field consisted most of anatomy and focused on physiological variation between individuals. One project that came to be known as 'Harvard Fanny Study', for instance, involved measuring buttock spread and buttock-knee lengths in order to design more comfortable chairs for the Pennsylvania railroad.[5] A similar study of applied physical anthropology examined the restrictive shape of ball-turrets in military aircraft.[6]
Hooton was an advanced primatologist for his time. If the great Latin playwright Terence said "Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto" ("I am a man; nothing about men is alien to me"), Hooton, following and correcting him, used to say: "Primas sum: primatum nihil a me alienum puto" ("I am a primate; nothing about primates is alien to me").[7]
Hooton was also a public figure well known for popular volumes with titles like Up From the Ape, Young Man, You are Normal, and Apes, Men, and Morons. He was also a gifted cartoonist and wit, and like his contemporaries Ogden Nash and James Thurber he published occasional poems and drawings that were eventually collected and published.
Hooton died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Publications

External Publications

The American criminal, 1939

The ancient inhabitants of the Canary Islands, 1925

Up from the ape, 1931, etc.

Related Material Details

Other Material

Peabody: Among the prints of people and events at the museum are portraits of the founder, George Peabody, and former directors, trustees, anthropology faculty members, and benefactors including Ernest Hooton, Roland P. Dixon, Augustus Hemenway, Asa Gray, Samuel K. Lothrop, and Donald C. Scott.