Ethel M. Albert (28 March 1918 – October 1989) was an American ethnologist. Albert conducted ethnological research related to speech, values, and ethics, employing a cross-cultural approach studying different social classes, ethnic groups, and locations. Albert conducted research with the Navajo (Diné) in the American southwest and the Rundi people in the Republic of Burundi. Albert is most well known among late twentieth-century American semiotics researchers for reviving semiotics in the American university curriculum. Early life and education Ethel Mary Albert was born in New Britain, Connecticut on March 28, 1918 to Zundel and Dorothy (Eisenstadt) Sokolsky. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Brooklyn College in 1942 and a Master of Arts from Columbia University in 1947. Albert received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin in 1949. Albert taught philosophy at Brooklyn College from 1946 to 1947 while pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University. After receiving her PhD in 1949, Albert taught philosophy at Syracuse University from 1949 to 1952. Career Hungarian semiotician Thomas Albert Seboek described Albert as “by profession a cultural anthropologist, by avocation a self-taught semiotician, by employment then a research associate on Kluckhohn’s staff." American anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn was a researcher of the Navajo (Diné) people at Harvard University and the author of Navaho Witchcraft (1944). Albert worked as a research associate at the Laboratory of Social Relations at Harvard University shortly before Kluckhohn's death in 1960. Albert's affiliation with Harvard was confirmed in her 1956 article, "The classification of values: a method and illustration,” published in the American Anthropologist. Albert had moved to the University of California by 1964. Albert developed a variety of research interests, including cross-cultural anthropological studies of values and speech, semiotics, and eventually later in her life, fatalism. Fieldwork with the Navajo (Diné) Albert's research focused on comparative ethnophilosophy and value systems in different Native American groups. In 1953, she became a research associate at the Laboratory of Social Relations at Harvard University, a position she held until 1955 while conducting fieldwork with the Navajo (Diné). Albert created a descriptive-analysis method for classifying values as specific parts of a value system, contributing her own data related to the Navajo Nation to a cross-cultural analysis of value systems among five communities in the American southwest (Navajo, Zuni, Spanish American, Texan, and Mormon). Albert utilized this value scheme to describe the value system of the Ramah Band of the