Stanley Diamond

Who was Stanley Diamond?

Stanley Diamond was an American poet and anthropologist. As a young man, he identified as a poet, and his disdain for the fascism of the 1930s greatly influenced his thinking.

He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then New York University, graduating from the latter with a B.A. degree in English and philosophy.

At the outbreak of World War II, Diamond joined the British Army Field Service and served in North Africa. Like many veterans of his generation, he went to graduate school on the G.I. Bill. And, in 1951, received a Ph.D. degree in anthropology from Columbia University, where he was greatly influenced by the anti-racism writing of Franz Boas. Supporting Diamond's Ph.D.-degree was his unpublished dissertation "Dahomey: A Proto-State in West Africa".

After graduation, his first teaching position was at the University of California at Los Angeles, but, as a result of denouncing the McCarthyist politics of that era and on a politically divided campus, he was dismissed and found that no other university was willing to hire him for the next three years. It was during this period that he conducted his first ethnographic fieldwork, which took him in the 1950s to an Israeli kibbutz and a nearby Arab mountain village. On his return to the United States, he taught at Brandeis University, where anthropologist Paul Radin, a former student of Boas, was forced to retire, and in response to which Diamond resigned.