The American anthropologist Leslie A. White (1900-1975) was known for his fieldwork among the Keresan-speaking Indians, his "culturological" theory of human behavior, and his energy theory of cultural evolution.

Leslie White was born at Salida, Colorado, on January 19, 1900. He took his B.A. and M.A. degrees in psychology at Columbia University in 1923 and 1924. At the same time he took some courses at the New School for Social Research which he later said were the most important intellectual influences on him; his teachers there were Alexander Goldenweiser, William I. Thomas, Thorstein Veblen, and John B. Watson. In 1924 White decided that sociology would be his field, and he moved to the University of Chicago to take his Ph.D. degree in what was then a combined anthropology-sociology department. At that time he began the summer field expeditions to the Keresan pueblos in New Mexico which he continued for many...