Robert A. LeVine

Robert Alan Levine (born March 27, 1932 - death August, 2023) is an American anthropologist best known for his multidisciplinary and cross-cultural work on child development. He spent much of his academic career at Harvard University in the Graduate School of Education, where he has been emeritus professor since 1998. Robert Levine grew up in New York. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1951 and then an M.A. in anthropology there in 1953. He then studied in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, from which he received his PhD in Social Anthropology in 1958, based on fieldwork among the Gusii in East Africa. He taught at University of Chicago from 1960 to 1976. During that time, he also pursued research training in psychoanalysis at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. In 1976, he returned to Harvard where he was faculty in the Graduate School of Education until his formal retirement in 1998, though he continued to be active in research and mentoring for many years after his official retirement. Levine's influence on psychological anthropology and the comparative study of childhood has been wide-ranging. Among other concepts, he is known for advancing a pluralistic view of ethnopsychologies, including critiquing contemporary psychological trait theory as ethnocentric. He has critiqued various prescriptive approaches to childrearing, arguing: "“We see parents as their children’s sponsors in a social world with multiple influences, setting priorities for the training of young children and selecting the environments that will shape their children’s development rather than influencing that development themselves,” Levine has been recognized in many ways for his contributions to social and psychological anthropology and to the understanding of child development. He was named to the U.S. National Academy of Education in 1979 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1989. In 1980, he was elected president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and in 1997 he received the SPA's Lifetime Achievement Award.