Kluckhohn, Clyde

(1905-60)

An American anthropologist who taught at Harvard University and whose writings combined elements of anthropology and psychology. His main publication was Navajo Witchcraft (1944), in which he argued that witchcraft served to channel tensions caused by pressures exerted from the wider society in the United States. For a number of years he worked alongside Talcott Parsons , in the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard, and is generally recognized to have encouraged Parsons to take seriously the Freudian-influenced American cultural anthropology of the 1940s. See also Culture and Personality School ; magic, witchcraft, and sorcery.