Assignment 4: Clyde Kluckhohm

Clyde Kluckhohn was born in 1905 and is most known for his work among the Navajo in New Mexico and his work in the field of Navajo ethnography.  Kluckhohn studied at Princeton and University of Wisconsin for his undergraduate education and later studied at the University of Vienna and Oxford. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1936. Between 1936 and 1948 Kluckhohn headed the Rimrock study, which examined how different groups defined “value”. This study looked at the Navajo, Zuni, Mormon, Texan, and Mexican-American residents of Rimrock County. Kluckhohn’s experiment was the result of an illness during his teenage years, during which he was sent to New Mexico. There he fell in love with the Navajo culture, sparking his later experiments in the area.  

Kluckhohn wished to define what constituted “conceptions of the desirable” in each group of people in the Rimrock area and his research focused primarily on the “systematic comparison of values.” The study did conclude that “…the Navajo community places a high value on something called ‘harmony,’ or the Texan, on something it calls ‘success.’” However, Kluckhohn and his fieldworkers had difficulty in creating one set standard with which to evaluate those ideals held by the five different cultures living in Rimrock. Eventually leading most professionals to declare the project a failure.