Ralph Kepler Lewis papers
name: label: Creator
content: Lewis, Ralph Kepler
place: label: Place
content: Lebanon
label: Place
content: Middle East
acqinfo: label: Provenance
content: Received from Ralph Kepler Lewis in 1994.
creator: label: Creator
content: Lewis, Ralph Kepler
setName: label: See more items in
content: Ralph Kepler Lewis papers
bioghist: label: Biographical Note
content: Ralph Kepler "Kep" Lewis was an anthropologist whose dissertation fieldwork took place in 1949-1950 in Lebanon, where he studied the social and economic causes of sustained emigration on a peasant community. The mountain village of Hadchite was the locus of his fieldwork.

Lewis was born in Missouri in 1912, and served in the Army in North Africa and France during World War II. After the war, he conducted several years of fieldwork among the Turkana people in Africa.  He received his undergraduate degree from Southwest Missouri State College, and  his MA in anthropology from the University of Southern California. He then attended Columbia University for his PhD, completing his doctoral work in 1967 with his dissertation,  Hadchite: A Study of Emigration in a Lebanese Village based on his earlier fieldwork. He joined the faculty of George Washington University in 1964, after having served in the State Department as a specialist on the Middle East. He retired in 1982 but continued to teach for several years. Lewis died in 1997.
physdesc: label: Extent
content: 2.5 Linear feet (4 boxes)
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1949-1967
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Anthropological Archives
identifier: label: Identifier
content: NAA.1995-02
objectType: label: Type
content: Collection descriptions
label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: The Ralph Kepler Lewis papers contain manuscript drafts, photographs, and original drawings for Lewis's dissertation Hadchite: a study of emigration from a Lebanese Village. No final version is present.