Julian Steward

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Steward later established an anthropology department at the University of Michigan, where he taught until 1930, when he was replaced by Leslie White, with whose model of "universal" cultural evolution he disagreed, although it became popular and gained the department fame and notoriety. In 1930 Steward relocated to the University of Utah, which appealed to him for its proximity to the Sierra Nevada, and nearby archaeological fieldwork opportunities in California, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon.

Steward's research interests mainly concerned "subsistence"—- the dynamic interaction of man, environment, technology, social structure, and the organization of work—- which Kroeber regarded as "eccentric", original, and innovative. (EthnoAdmin 2003) In 1931, Steward, needing money, began fieldwork on the Great Basin Shoshone for Kroeber's Culture Element Distribution (CED) survey; in 1935 he received an appointment to the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnography (BAE), which published some of his most influential works. Among them: Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (1938), which "fully explicated" the paradigm of cultural ecology, and helped decrease the diffusionist emphasis of American anthropology.

For eleven years Steward was an administrator of considerable influence, editing the Handbook of South American Indians. He also had a job with the Smithsonian Institution, where he initiateded the Institute for Social Anthropology in 1943. He also served on a committee to reorganize the American Anthropological Association and played a role in the creation of the National Science Foundation. He was also active in archaeological pursuits, successfully lobbying Congress to create the Committee for the Recovery of Archaeological Remains (the beginning of what is known presently as 'salvage archaeology') and worked with Gordon Willey to establish the Viru Valley project, an ambitious research program involved with Peru.

Steward searched for cross-cultural regularities in an effort to discern principles of culture and culture change. His work explained variation in the complexity of social organization as being limited to within a range possibilities by the environment. In evolutionary terms, he described cultural ecology as "multi-linear", in contrast to the unilinear typological models popular during the 19th century, and Leslie White's "universal" model. Steward's most important theoretical contributions happened during his teaching years at Columbia (1946–53).

Steward's most productive years theoretically were from 1946–1953, while teaching at Columbia University. During this time, Columbia had an influx of World War II veterans who were attending school due to the GI Bill. Steward quickly developed a coterie of students who would later have enormous influence in the history of anthropology, including Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, Roy Rappaport, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, Morton Fried, Robert F. Murphy, and influenced other scholars such as Marvin Harris. Many of these students participated with the Puerto Rico Project, yet another large-scale group research study that concerned modernization in Puerto Rico.

Steward quit Columbia for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he directed the Anthropology Department and continued to teach until his retirement in 1968. There he began yet another large-scale study, a comparative analysis of modernization in eleven third world societies. The results of this research were published in three volumes entitled Contemporary Change in Traditional Societies. Steward died in 1972.

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