Joseph Harold Greenberg (1915-2001)

Abstract

Joseph H. Greenberg was long and widely admired among social and behavioral scientists as an important voice of linguistics, achieving many firsts of recognition as a scholar. Among these, he served magisterially as the very first Distinguished Lecturer of the American Anthropological Association during the tumultuous 69th (San Diego) Annual Meeting of 1970. During a career of more than 60 productive years, he flourished among anthropologists, although he was principally a library linguist-the New York Public Library and, later, Stanford's Green Library were his domains-whose scholarly work both drew on and spoke powerfully to anthropological issues and approaches in a number of disciplinary fields. Succumbing to pancreatic cancer on May 7, 2001, at the time of his death Greenberg was the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor Emeritus of the Social Sciences at Stanford