Irven DeVore (October 7, 1934 – September 23, 2014) was an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, and Curator of Primatology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He headed Harvard's Department of Anthropology from 1987 to 1992. He taught generations of students at Harvard both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He mentored many young scientists who went on to prominence in anthropology and behavioral biology, including Richard Lee, Robert Trivers, Sarah Hrdy, Peter Ellison, Barbara Smuts, Henry Harpending, Marjorie Shostak, Robert Bailey, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Wrangham and Terrence Deacon.
Early life and career
DeVore grew up in Joy, Texas, and attended the University of Texas for his undergraduate studies. He later pursued his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago upon receiving the Danford Scholarship, which paid the full costs for his and his wife's, Nancy DeVore, graduate education. DeVore went on to do field research on the behavior and ecology of baboons in 1959, at the same time Jane Goodall was doing her research on chimpanzees and Robert Ardrey was writing African Genesis (1961), a book that DeVore used to use as an example of how not to explain human evolution scientifically. DeVore's own mentor was Sherwood Washburn, a distinguished physical anthropologist and primatologist whom DeVore followed from the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1962, to the University of California at Berkeley, where he held a prestigious Miller Fellowship. Under Washburn's wing, he carried out pioneering studies of baboon behavior and ecology, and in 1965 published a collection of research chapters on various primates, a volume under DeVore's editorship that helped define the field of behavioral primatology. His many field trips to the baboons were a natural focus for a young man who, growing up in and around Joy, Texas, had steeped himself in nature. Throughout life he was known for delightedly adopting odd pets, and his trips to Africa put him back in touch with the natural world he had loved since childhood.
Ethnographic work
However, by the mid-'60s he had turned his attention to humans, through his collaboration with Richard B. Lee. Together they organized (despite their youth) an influential international conference called Man the Hunter, which included Claude Lévi-Strauss in cultural anthropology, Lewis Binford in archeology, and other experts in disciplines relevant to hunter-gatherer studies, a sub-field Lee and DeVore helped create. The conference led to a landmark book in 1968; although the title seemed anachronistic within a few years, the book posited that women were the main breadwinners in that type of society.
Meanwhile, Lee and DeVore had also made their first, exploratory visit to northwestern Botswana, where they contacted San (or "Bushman") people who were still hunting and gathering for a living. Together they mounted a years-long, multidisciplinary project to study the way of life of the group known as the !Kung or Ju/'hoansi, involving a number of graduate students and visiting scientists. The study became a model for multidisciplinary anthropological field work, which DeVore often contrasted with the classic approach of "one ethnographer with his people against the sky." He did not shrink from making barbed statements and he cast a narrow critical shadow, but for those whose work he liked, his support was legendary. DeVore's kind of field research was more expensive, but he was vigorous and successful in raising grant funds for research that he believed in, by himself and others.
In the late 1970s he began another major multidisciplinary study, together with Robert Bailey and Nadine Peacock, among the small-stature hunter-gatherers of the Ituri rain forest. This too produced a stream of monographs and scientific papers that contributed to our understand of this way of life, which DeVore believed shed light on the human past. This claim became widely accepted. DeVore was sometimes accused of treating the San and Ituri people as relics of that past, but he always explained that they were people like us who happened to still be subsisting in this very old way.