The papers of anthropologist Ward Goodenough cover his whole career, most of it spent in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. After service in army during WW II, Goodenough received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1949. He conducted field research from 1947 to 1965, working at Chuuk (Truk), the Gilberts, Papua New Guinea, and New Britain. The collection is particularly important in showing how linguistic theory can help further anthropological theory.

The Reina Papers contain the professional papers of cultural anthropologist Ruben E. Reina (1924-2016). Reina is an emeritus professor of anthropology and curator of ethnology who taught at the University of Pennsylvania and worked at that institution's University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology from 1957-1990. Broadly interested in modern and historical cultures of Central America, South America, and Spain, he is most widely known for his contributions to the study of the culture and peoples of Guatemala. The collection contains Reina's correspondence, administrative records, teaching materials, research notes, subject files, and written works from his career. Of particular interest are the notes from his fieldwork in Guatemala, Argentina, Spain, and Puerto Rico. A further significant component of the papers is the records of the Hispanic-Latin American Research Project. Reina served as director of the long-term project (1967-1988), during which a team of scholars compiled thousands of pages of Spanish colonial materials from the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville, Spain and Archivos General de Centro America (AGCA) in Guatemala. The Reina Papers serve as a vital storehouse of this important historical material.

Dell Hymes' doctoral research on Kathlamet Chinook (Indiana University, 1955) grew into a lifelong interest in the relationship between ethnography and linguistics. Following academic appointments at Harvard University (1955-1960) and the University of California, Berkley (1960-1965), Hymes joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. During twenty-two years tenure at Penn he was a professor of folklore, linguistics, sociology and education. In 1975, he was promoted to Dean of the Graduate School of Education (1975-1987). A principal proponent of the emergent field of sociolinguistics, his most influential works include Reinventing Anthropology and Language in Culture and Society. The Hymes papers cover all aspects of Dell Hymes' professional life. Subcollection I is concentrated on his years at the University of Pennsylvania, his presidencies of the American Association of Anthropology and the Linguistic Society of America, and his editorship of the journal Language in Society. Subcollection II is broader, focusing much more on published and unpublished linguistic work on dozens of languages, mostly of North America. Of particular interest is his rich correspondence with colleagues and students on linguistic issues. The papers reflect Hymes' interests in the history of linguistics and anthropology, Native American languages (especially oral literatures), and his comparative ethnographies of communication.