Merriam, Alan P(arkhurst)

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Merriam, Alan P(arkhurst)

Merriam, Alan P(arkhurst), American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist; b. Missoula, Mont., Nov. 1, 1923; d. in an airplane crash near Warsaw, March 14, 1980. He studied at the Univ. of Mont. (B.A., 1947) and took courses in anthropology from Melville Her-skovits and Richard Waterman at Northwestern Univ. (M.M., 1948; Ph.D., 1951). He taught anthropology there (1953–54; 1956–62) and at the Univ. of Wise. (1954–56); in 1962 he became a prof. of anthropology at Ind. Univ. in Bloomington; was chairman of the dept. there from 1966 to 1969. In 1976 he was engaged as a senior scholar in anthropology at the Univ. of Sydney. He was involved in field research among the Flathead Indians and the tribes in Zaire.

Writings

The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, III., 1964); with F. Gillis, Ethnomusicology and Folk Music: An International Bibliography of Dissertations and Theses (Middletown, Conn., 1966); Ethnomusicology of the Flathead Indians (Chicago, 1967); African Music on LP: An Annotated Discography (Evanston, 1970); The Arts and Humanities in African Studies (Bloomington, Ind., 1972).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire