Robert Wald Sussman (July 4, 1941 – June 8, 2016) was an American

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...

and professor at

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University is r ...

. His research concerned the evolution of primate and human behavior, and he was interested in race as a social construct. He was a fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

Biography

Sussman was born in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, New York, in 1941.Robert Wald Sussman Memorial, LifeStory – LifePosts
/ref> He earned undergraduate and master's degrees from the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

, and he completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

in 1972 under John Buettner-Janusch. After teaching briefly at

Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...

in New York, he became a member of the faculty at WUSTL. Sussman's interest was in the evolution of behavior in primates, and he was known for his work with

lemur Lemurs ( ) (from Latin ''lemures'' – ghosts or spirits) are Strepsirrhini, wet-nosed primates of the Superfamily (biology), superfamily Lemuroidea (), divided into 8 Family (biology), families and consisting of 15 genera and around 100 exist ...

s from Madagascar. He said that studying the behavior of primates would enhance the understanding of human behavior. In the 1990s, he was editor-in-chief of the journal ''

American Anthropologist ''American Anthropologist'' is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), published quarterly by Wiley. The "New Series" began in 1899 under an editorial board that included Franz Boas, Daniel G. Brinton, and John W ...

''. He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2000, and he later chaired AAAS Section H (Anthropology). In 2014, Sussman wrote '' The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea''. In this book, he described

race Race, RACE or "The Race" may refer to: * Race (biology), an informal taxonomic classification within a species, generally within a sub-species * Race (human categorization), classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, and/or s ...

as a

social construct Social constructionism is a theory in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory which proposes that certain ideas about reality, physical reality arise from collaborative consensus, instead of pure observation of said reality. The ...

rather than an entity based on science. An earlier book, ''Man The Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution'' (co-authored with Donna Hart), made the case that early man evolved as prey rather than as hunters. Sussman died at his home on June 8, 2016, not long after being released from the hospital after a stroke. He was survived by his wife Linda, who was a medical anthropologist and research associate in WUSTL's anthropology department. In 2018, the AAAS established the Robert W. Sussman Award for Scientific Contributions to Anthropology.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sussman, Robert 1941 births 2016 deaths American anthropologists University of California, Los Angeles alumni Duke University alumni Washington University in St. Louis faculty Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Academic journal editors People from Brooklyn Social constructionism American Anthropologist editors