Cousin of Alexander B. Goldenweiser. After receiving his doctorate taught Goldenweiser to 1919 at Columbia University. After that, he worked at, which was founded in 1919, New School for Social Research as a lecturer. Among his colleagues were John Dewey, James Harvey Robinson, and Thorstein Veblen. 1926 ended the lectureship, and Alexander A. Goldenweiser was co-editor of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. From 1915 to 1929 taught Goldenweiser also at the edge School for Social Science. This school had the Socialist Party of America in 1906. In 1923 he accepted a professorship at the University of Washington, and from 1930 to 1938 he taught at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Goldenweiser has held visiting professorships 1937 to 1938 at the University of Wisconsin and in the time from 1933 to 1939 at Reed College. In his questions Alexander Goldenweiser included on the anthropology, theinsights of psychology and psychoanalysis in addition, so special in the works for cultural diffusion. Theoretical aspects he could from his field studies gain among the Iroquois. In total, he spent ten months in the years 1911-1913 in the Grand River Reserve in Ontario. Here he was concerned with symbolic and mystical relationship with the totemism. Goldenweiser realized that the structures of primitive peoples (nonliterate people) not fundamen- tally different from the life-world of modern humans.