Carleton S. Coon

Carleton Stevens Coon (June 23, 1904 – June 3, 1981) was an American anthropologist.

A professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, lecturer and professor at Harvard University, he was president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Coon's theories on race were widely disputed in his lifetime and are considered pseudoscientific in modern anthropology.

Carleton Stevens Coon was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts on June 23, 1904.

His parents were John Lewis Coon, a cotton factor, and Bessie Carleton.

His family had Cornish American roots and two of his ancestors fought in the American Civil War.

As a child, he listened to his grandfather's stories of the war and of traveling in the Middle East, and accompanied his father on business trips to Egypt, inspiring an early interest in Egyptology.

He initially attended Wakefield High School, but was expelled after breaking a water pipe and flooding the school's basement, after which he went to Phillips Academy.

Coon was a precocious student, learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphs at an early age and excelling at Ancient Greek.

Wakefield was an affluent and almost exclusively White Town.

Coon's biographer, William W. Howells, noted that his "only apparent awareness of ethnicity" was in childhood fights with his Irish American neighbours.

Coon himself claimed that "both anti-Semitism and racism were unknown to me before I left home at the age of fifteen, and zero to fifteen are formative years."

Intending to study Egyptology, Coon enrolled at Harvard University and was able to obtain a place on a graduate course with George Andrew Reisner based on his knowledge of hieroglyphic.

He also studied Arabic and English composition under Charles Townsend Copeland.

However he changed his focus to anthropology after taking a course with Earnest Hooton, inspired by his lectures on the Berbers of the Moroccan Rif.

Coon obtained his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1925 and immediately embarked on graduate studies in anthropology.

He conducted his dissertation fieldwork in the Rif in 1925, which was politically unsettled after a rebellion of the local populace against the Spanish, and was awarded his PhD in 1928.

Coon was motivated to study the Rif by the puzzle of the "light-skinned" Riffians' presence in Africa.

Throughout much of his fieldwork, he relied on his local informant Mohammed Limnibhy, and even arranged for Limnibhy to live with him in Cambridge from 1928 to 1929.

After obtaining his PhD, Coon returned to Harvard as a lecturer and later a professor.

In 1931 he published his dissertation as the "definitive monograph" of the Rif Berber; studied Albanians from 1920 to 1930; traveled to Ethiopia in 1933; and in worked in Arabia, North Africa and the Balkans from 1925 to 1939.

In The Races of Europe (1939), for example, an update of William Z. Ripley's 1899 book of the same title, he distinguished between at least four racial types and sub-types of Jewish people, but also maintained that there existed a single, primordial Jewish race, characterised by a Jewish nose and other physical features that together form "a quality of looking Jewish".

He was also named a Membre D'Honneur of the Association de la Libération française du 8 novembre 1942.

Coon left Harvard to take up a position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1948.

From 1948 to the early 1960s, he was the Curator of Ethnology at the University Museum of Philadelphia.

Coon wrote widely for a general audience like his mentor Earnest Hooton.

Coon published The Riffians, Flesh of the Wild Ox, Measuring Ethiopia, and A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent.

A North Africa Story was an account of his work in North Africa during World War II, which involved espionage and the smuggling of arms to French resistance groups in German-occupied Morocco under the guise of anthropological fieldwork.

During that time, Coon was affiliated with the United States Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Coon served as a mentor to another Harvard-educated OSS agent and anthropologist who embraced anthropometry (measuring features of the human body, such as crania and nose sizes) as a means asserting racial types and categories.

He was a scientific consultant to the CIA from 1948 to 1950, and in 1945 wrote an influential paper that argued that the United States should continue the use of wartime intelligence agencies to maintain an "Invisible Empire" in the postwar period.

Throughout the 1950s he produced academic papers, as well as many popular books for the general reader, the most notable being The Story of Man (1954).

During his years at Penn in the 1950s, he sometimes appeared on the television program called What in the World?, a game-show produced by the Penn Museum, and hosted by its director, Froelich Rainey, in which a panel of experts tried to identify an object in the museum's collection.

He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his wartime services and the Viking Medal in Physical Anthropology in 1952.

In 1956–57, he worked for the Air Force as a photographer.

Before World War II, Coon's work on race "fit comfortably into the old physical anthropology", describing the racial types supposedly present in human populations based on visible physical characteristics.

He explicitly rejected any specific definition of race and used the concept to describe both highly specific groupings of people and continent-spanning racial types.

This was Lloyd Cabot Briggs, author of Living Races of the Sahara Desert (1958) and later of No More for Ever: A Saharan Jewish Town (1962) about the Jews of the Mzab region of the Algerian Sahara, which he wrote with Norina Lami Guède (née Maria Esterina Giovanni).

The historian Sarah Abreyava Stein (who argued that Guede had done most of the research) noted that Briggs and Coon corresponded during the writing of No More for Ever, joking, for example, about the genital depilation customs of Jewish women in Ghardaïa.

After the war, Coon returned to Harvard, but retained ties to the OSS and its successor the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).