author
Weston La Barre
1911–1996
Known for bringing anthropology together with psychology, this American scholar wrote vividly about Native American religion, peyote, dreams, and myth. His work ranged widely, but it stayed focused on how culture and the human mind shape one another.
1 Audiobook
The peyote cult
by Weston La Barre
About the author
Born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1911, Weston La Barre studied at Princeton and earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1937. He later taught at Rutgers University, served in U.S. Navy intelligence during World War II, and spent much of his academic career at Duke University, where he was a professor of anthropology from 1946 to 1977.
La Barre became especially well known for work that linked ethnography with psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He wrote on Native American religion and ethnobotany, with The Peyote Cult among his best-known books, and he also explored dreams, myth, and the cultural roots of human behavior.
He died in 1996. Today he is remembered as a wide-ranging and sometimes provocative anthropologist whose books tried to connect close cultural observation with big questions about belief, personality, and society.