STAY IN THE HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS FOR HEALTH, PEACE, AND YOGA
John Montgomery Cooper (October 28, 1881 – May 22, 1949) was an American priest, anthropologist, and sociologist. He was a sociology professor at the Catholic University of America and from 1934 to 1949 served as chairman of the first Department of Anthropology in a Catholic university. In his anthropological fieldwork, he specialized in studying the Indians of South America and Native Americans of North America. Cooper founded the academic journal Primitive Man, which was renamed Anthropological Quarterly in 1953.
In a hearing before the United States Senate in 1945, To
Permit all people from India residing in the United States to be Naturalized,
Cooper recorded that: "The people of India are predominantly Caucasoid. Their
features, hair texture, hairiness, the shape of the nose, mouth, and so on, are
all distinctly Caucasoid". Caucasoid was a word for a person from Europe, West
Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, North Africa, or the Horn of Africa.
Cooper established the Department of Religious Education at the Catholic
University of America in 1920. He became an associate professor of sociology in
1923 and gained a professorship in sociology in 1928. John Montgomery Cooper
served as chairman of the first Department of Anthropology in a Catholic
university.
As an anthropologist, his original fieldwork was in the Tête
de Boule of Ottawa. John Montgomery Cooper took research trips to study Native
American tribes who spoke Algonquian languages, making several visits to the
Great Plains and northeastern Canada. From his studies there, Cooper wrote many
articles about Algonquian culture, customs, and religion. Cooper developed the
theory that both the South American and North American Indians were "marginal
peoples" who were cultural relics from prehistoric times and had been displaced
by subsequent migrations into less desirable living areas. He first publicized
this theory in his 1941 book Temporal Sequence and the Marginal Cultures.