Conklin was born in
Easton, Pennsylvania in 1926 but moved before the age of one to his father's hometown of
Patchogue, New York. Interested in
Native American culture from an early age, he was adopted by the
St. Regis Mohawk tribe of the
Akwesasne (Mohawk) Nation in 1939, when he was in eighth grade. While in high school, he pursued his interest in anthropology by serving as a volunteer at the
American Museum of Natural History under anthropology curator
Clark Wissler. Conklin entered the
University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate in 1943, studying with anthropologists
Robert Lowie,
Alfred L. Kroeber, and
Edward W. Gifford, as well as geographer
Carl O. Sauer. He attended Berkeley for one year before being inducted into the
United States Army in July 1944. After serving briefly in
New Guinea and
Leyte, he served with the
158th Infantry Regiment on the island of
Luzon in the
Philippines. When
World War II came to an end, Conklin continued serving with the Army in the Philippines until his discharge in August 1946. With the support of the Berkeley anthropology department he remained in the Philippines to conduct fieldwork for a year and a half. In 1947, he traveled to
Mindoro and
Palawan for a linguistic and cultural survey, spending time with the
Hanunóo, an upland tribe in Mindoro. In
Manila, he met with the tropical botanist
Harley Harris Bartlett, who instructed him in botanical research and provided him with funds to create an ethnobotanical collection from Palawan. Conklin returned to Berkeley in 1948 and finished his undergraduate work in 1950. He then started graduate school in anthropology at
Yale University. At Yale he studied with
Floyd Lounsbury (who became his dissertation advisor),
Bernard Bloch, and
Isidore Dyen, among others. His fellow graduate students included
William C. Sturtevant and
Charles Frake, who shared his interest in language, culture, and cognition. He conducted fieldwork among the Hanunóo in Mindoro from 1952 to 1954, completing his dissertation in 1955. == Career ==