GOLDENWEISER, ALEXANDER A. (1880–1940), was an American anthropologist and student of primitive religions. Born in Kiev, the son of a distinguished jurist and criminologist, Alexander Alexandrovich Goldenweiser was educated in his native Ukraine, and later, at the graduate level, in the United States. An important early influence was the intellectual companionship and guidance of his father, Alexander Solomonovich Goldenweiser, a social thinker influenced by Hegel and Spencer. Father and son shared a broad intellectual outlook and traveled together in Europe.

Goldenweiser immigrated as a young man to the United States and from 1900 to 1901 pursued graduate study in philosophy at Harvard. He later shifted his studies to Columbia, where he came into contact with Franz Boas and his students, and took his doctoral degree in 1910 under Boas's supervision. Goldenweiser taught as an instructor at Columbia from 1910 to 1919, served as a lecturer in the Rand School of...