This document provides an obituary for David Friend Aberle, a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia who passed away in 2004. It summarizes his educational and professional background, including receiving his PhD from Columbia University where he studied under Ruth Benedict. It describes his various teaching positions and intellectual influences. It highlights his major ethnographic work among the Navajo people, where he studied topics like peyotism, kinship, economy, and the effects of relocation. Aberle made significant contributions to the fields of kinship, social movements, and applied anthropology through his rigorous research methods and deep understanding of Navajo culture.

1. Obituaries
David Aberle at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the
early spring of 2004. (Photo courtesy of Ben Aberle.)
David Friend Aberle (1918–2004)
LELAND DONALD
University of Victoria
David Friend Aberle, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
at the University of British Columbia, died on Septem-
ber 23, 2004, in Vancouver, Canada. With pluck and good
humor, he had struggled against a progressively debilitat-
ing Parkinsonian condition during the last years of his
life. Aberle made significant contributions to a number of
anthropological topics, including kinship and social or-
ganization, economics, religion, and the study of social
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 108, Issue 1, pp. 263–271, ISSN 0002-7294, electronic ISSN 1548-1433. C
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movements, historical and lexical reconstruction, and psy-
chological anthropology. His major ethnographic work was
among the Navajo, where he did conventional ethnog-
raphy, theoretically sophisticated cultural anthropology,
and applied anthropology. He was also an accomplished
comparativist.
Aberle was born on November 23, 1918, in St. Paul,
Minnesota, where he grew up. He attended Harvard Col-
lege and majored in English literature. He had very lit-
tle undergraduate work in anthropology, but at Clyde
Kluckhohn’s urging he attended three summer field schools
at the University of New Mexico—two archaeological and
one ethnological. Aberle’s first summer in the Southwest
led to his lifelong love for that region. He received his BA in
1940, graduating summa cum laude. His honors thesis on
Dickens earned the Sohier Prize for the best honors thesis
in English that year.
That fall Aberle began graduate work in anthropology
at Columbia University. He was initially interested in psy-
choanalysis and its application to anthropological data, and
Kluckhohn recommended that he study Culture and Per-
sonality at Columbia. Like many of his generation, Aberle’s
graduate work was interrupted by a stint in the United States
Army during World War II. He spent three and a half years
in the Army. For much of this time he was chief clerk of
an Army outpatient psychiatric service, doing psychologi-
cal testing and interviewing patients—experience that use-
fully complemented his anthropological interest in culture
and personality.
After his discharge from the army, Aberle returned to
Columbia. He completed his dissertation, entitled “The Rec-
onciliation of Divergent Views of Hopi Culture through
the Analysis of Life-History Material,” in 1947, with Ruth
Benedict as chair of his dissertation committee. Because
Columbia required that the dissertation be published be-
fore the Ph.D. was awarded, his Ph.D. is dated 1950. The
dissertation was published as The Psychosocial Analysis of a
Hopi Life-History (1951).
Aberle held teaching appointments at Harvard, Johns
Hopkins, Michigan, Brandeis, Oregon, and from 1967 until
his retirement in 1983 at the University of British Columbia.
He was also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences (1955–56) and a visiting professor

2. 264 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 1 • March 2006
at Manchester University (1960–61). In 1986 he was elected
a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Over the years Aberle’s intellectual perspective changed
several times as he worked through a variety of intellectual
problems and was influenced by teachers, fellow students,
colleagues, and friends. Kluckhohn, who was influential in a
number of other ways, encouraged his early interest in psy-
choanalysis and anthropology. He offered broad intellectual
horizons and introduced Aberle to living among Navajos.
He also taught respect for ethnographic detail and the need
to attend to variation rather than simply talking about “the”
Navajo pattern or practice.
Aberle’s major faculty influences at Columbia were
Benedict and Ralph Linton, but at Columbia he encoun-
tered students who were trying to relate Marxism and an-
thropology, and he first ran into the idealist–materialist
controversy. Nonanthropologists were also important to
him. For example, Robert E. Harris, a psychologist, exposed
him to a psychologist’s scorn for the lack of rigorous re-
search methods in anthropology. Throughout his career
Aberle had a strong concern with methodological rigor.
His appointment to the Harvard Department of So-
cial Relations (1947–50) renewed Aberle’s contact with
Kluckhohn and also brought him into contact with Talcott
Parsons and some of his students (including longtime friend
Marion Levy). Parsons’s influence resulted in such papers
as “The Functional Prerequisites of a Society” (Aberle et al.
1950).
While Aberle was at Johns Hopkins (1950–52), his
appointment resided in the Walter Hines Page School
of International Relations, the head of which was Owen
Lattimore. During this period there was strong congres-
sional criticism of Lattimore, who eventually left the United
States for a position in Britain. It was Aberle’s first close en-
counter with the mentality and actions prevalent during
the Cold War.
At the University of Michigan, Aberle held a joint ap-
pointment in the Departments of Sociology and Anthro-
pology. The orientations of both departments differed from
that of Social Relations at Harvard. Michigan’s dominant
anthropological figure was Leslie White, and Aberle be-
came involved with the materialism and evolutionism of
Whitean anthropology. Sociology included figures like Guy
Swanson and others, who were interested in forming and
testing hypotheses, unlike the analytic approach of Parsons
and his followers at Harvard. At Michigan Aberle’s interest
in rigorous methods was encouraged. He also moved away
from culture and personality and into the study of kinship
and social movements.
In 1954, Aberle met the anthropologist Kathleen
Gough, and they married in 1955. Although their geo-
graphic specialties were different (India and Southeast Asia
as opposed to the American Southwest), they shared inter-
ests in kinship and social movements. In their son Stephen’s
words, “They remained inescapably, sometimes tumul-
tuously, always lovingly married until Kathleen’s death in
1990” (Toronto Globe and Mail 2004).
In 1962, Aberle and Kathleen took positions at Bran-
deis, he as Chairman of the Anthropology Department. This
was a time of crisis in Cuban–American relations; Kathleen
argued in a speech to students that U.S. policy was wrong,
and she expressed the hope that Cuba would prevail against
any possible U.S. invasion. The university president repri-
manded her, and her right to speak her views was debated
as an issue of academic freedom. This struggle, and the re-
actions of friends and colleagues (both support and failure
to support), was traumatic for them both, and in 1963 they
left Brandeis. Aberle took up an appointment at Oregon,
but they were barely settled there when U.S. military in-
volvement in Vietnam began to be a major issue on U.S.
campuses. In 1965, Aberle organized a successful teach-in
at Oregon. Dave and Kathleen Aberle’s opposition to U.S.
involvement in Vietnam grew. At that time, under the poli-
cies of the Selective Service System, passing or failing male
university students could determine who would be drafted
and who deferred. Their reluctance to thus be made unwill-
ing participants in aspects of the war effort led them to seek
employment outside the United States, and in 1967 they
moved to Canada. Aberle joined the University of British
Columbia’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology as
professor of anthropology. Here, as at Michigan, Brandeis,
and Oregon, he taught graduate students. He was a demand-
ing, conscientious, and stimulating teacher, and he had ma-
jor influence on students as well as colleagues.
Aberle’s name is properly associated with Navajo stud-
ies. The Navajo research for which he is best known be-
gan in the summer of 1949, when the Bureau of Indian
Affairs sponsored his first work on peyotism. They had con-
cerns about the use of peyote on the Navajo Reservation by
members of the Native American Church (NAC), and many
Navajos who were not peyotists were also strongly opposed
to it. Aberle concluded that the peyotists were practicing a
genuine religion and that the use of peyote in ceremonies
deserved protection as a matter of freedom of religion. He
acted as an expert witness on this subject on many occa-
sions, and Navajo members of the NAC credit him with a
significant role in their eventually obtaining the freedom
to practice their beliefs legally. Throughout the early 1950s,
with research support from a variety of sources, Aberle con-
tinued to work on the peyote religion among the Navajo,
with some additional research on Ute and Apache peyotism
and other social movements. The peyote research culmi-
nated in The Peyote Religion among the Navaho (1966), a
major contribution to the analysis of religious movements.
Fruitfully employing a relative-deprivation approach, it re-
veals much about the relations among political context,
economic forces, and the causes of a religious movement.
The sections of the book containing descriptions and anal-
yses of ceremonies and beliefs are also masterful examples
of both the art and science of ethnography.
After the publication of this major work, Aberle shifted
his focus to Navajo kinship and economy and wrote tech-
nical papers on these topics. In the 1970s, however, he was
largely concerned with the issue of the relocation of some

3. Obituaries 265
Navajos and Hopis in the area covered by the Executive Or-
der of 1882. He testified before congressional committees
on behalf of the Navajos and undertook research on the
effects of relocation.
Aberle’s initial interests in social organization and kin-
ship were in the context of the kind of structural–functional
analysis that dominated anthropology in the early 1950s
(e.g., Aberle et al. 1950). His years at Michigan accelerated
his shift away from both the structural-functionalism and
the psychological anthropology of his dissertation. Perhaps
the most tangible result of the Michigan influence is “Ma-
trilineal Descent in Cross-Cultural Perspective” (1961). Here
he used the best large world sample of societies then avail-
able (the World Ethnographic Sample) to test a number of
hypotheses about the covariates of matriliny. The article
pursues the question “Under what circumstances is matri-
lineal reckoning likely to arise, to survive, and to disap-
pear?” It combines a sophisticated (for the time) methodol-
ogy with insightful deviant-case analysis within the context
of ecological and evolutionary theory.
As a part of his Navajo studies, Aberle became inter-
ested in Apachean kinship, and eventually the question of
the nature of proto-Athapaskan kinship arose. This prob-
lem tied into his interests in evolutionary questions, such
as whether the proto-Athapaskans were matrilineal. In 1957
Aberle met the linguist Isidore Dyen while Dyen was briefly
teaching at Michigan, and they discovered common inter-
ests. A nearly 20-year collaboration between them led to
Lexical Reconstruction: The Case of the Proto-Athapaskan Kin-
ship System (Dyen and Aberle 1974). Their starting point
was the significant technical advances that Dyen had made
in historical linguistics. Aberle’s specific contribution, aside
from his knowledge of comparative Athapaskan culture and
his expertise in kinship, was to adapt Dyen’s new methods
into a method to analyze kinship-term patterns. He sought
inferences about kinship organization that were more rig-
orous and less subjective than what earlier methods for re-
constructing kinship organization had yielded. The book
also offers a wealth of material and insights for compara-
tive Athapaskanists, and it has significant implications for
the question of the origins of matriliny.
Aberle was a longtime member and supporter of the
AAA. He served on its executive board and gave the 1987
Distinguished Lecture (“What Kind of Science Is Anthropol-
ogy?”). He was strongly supportive of the founding of the
Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists and its affilia-
tion with the association. He actively participated in and
enjoyed the annual meetings until poor health prevented
his attendance late in life. He once described the AAA as
“my club.”
Aberle’s life was marked by a commitment to social jus-
tice. As an anthropologist, he was always very conscious of
his human as well as scholarly obligations toward the peo-
ple among whom he worked. He expressed his concerns in
“One Anthropologist’s Problems,” a Distinguished Lecture
of the Southwestern Anthropological Association (1980).
His many Navajo friends are also an indication of the caring
and honest way in which he conducted his field research.
Encounters with anti-Semitism during his youth, especially
in high school, affected him profoundly and left him with
a determined, lifelong abhorrence of all forms of prejudice
and injustice. He struggled for peace, tolerance, and social
justice throughout his life, in many places and contexts,
including in the efforts of Navajo peyotists to gain reli-
gious freedom and in his and Kathleen’s involvement in
the movements for civil rights and against the Cold War
and the war in Vietnam. After the family’s move to Canada
in 1967, he continued to advocate for peace and justice and
against racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia.
Aberle enjoyed the respect and affection of the Navajo
with whom he worked. In 1963, young and green, I went to
the Piñon area of the Navajo Reservation to do my first field-
work. I was fortunate to make contact with the area’s tribal
councilman, who had very warm memories of Aberle’s stay
in the area in 1950. At a peyote meeting I attended that
summer, the councilman prayed for Aberle—a mark of his
continuing interest in Aberle’s welfare. Over 40 years later,
Clark Etsitty, one of four members of Aberle’s Navajo family
who were able to attend his funeral in Vancouver, spoke at
the service. He emphasized Aberle’s respect for Navajo ways,
his willingness to learn about the peyote religion firsthand,
his lack of ethnocentrism, and his support for religious free-
dom on the Navajo Reservation. The graveside service was
conducted jointly by a rabbi and two representatives of the
NAC.
Aberle’s papers will be deposited at the University of
British Columbia Library.
NOTE
Acknowledgments. My thanks to Stephen Aberle and Joseph G. Jor-
gensen for their comments on an earlier draft. Any remaining errors
of fact or interpretation are my responsibility. For a complete bib-
liography of Aberle’s publications through 1984, see Donald 1987.
That publication also contains a fuller biography and analysis of
Aberle’s anthropological work.
REFERENCES CITED
Aberle, David F.
1951 The Psychosocial Analysis of a Hopi Life-History. Compar-
ative Psychology Monographs 21(1), no. 107. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
1961 Matrilineal Descent in Cross-Cultural Perspective. In Ma-
trilineal Kinship. David M. Schneider and Kathleen Gough,
eds. Pp. 655–727. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1966 The Peyote Religion among the Navaho. Chicago: Aldine
Publishers.
1980 One Anthropologist’s Problems. Southwestern Anthropo-
logical Association Newsletter 19(3):1–5.
1987 Distinguished Lecture: What Kind of Science Is Anthropol-
ogy? American Anthropologist 89(3):551–566.
Aberle, David F., A. K. Cohen, A. K. Davis, M. J. Levy Jr., and F. X.
Sutton
1950 The Functional Prerequisites of a Society. Ethics 60(2):100–
111.
Donald, Leland
1987 Introduction. In Themes in Ethnology and Culture His-
tory: Essays in Honor of David F. Aberle. Leland Donald, ed.
Pp. 9–33. Meerut, India: Folklore Institute.
Dyen, Isidore, and David F. Aberle
1974 Lexical Reconstruction: The Case of the Proto-Athapaskan
Kinship System. London: Cambridge University Press.

4. 266 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 1 • March 2006
Toronto Globe and Mail
2004 Obituary of David Friend Aberle. Toronto Globe
and Mail, October 16, 2004. Electronic document,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com, accessed November 17,
2005.
John Bennett in October 1982. (Photo courtesy of Washington Uni-
versity Photo Services.)
John W. Bennett (1915–2005)
ALVIN W. WOLFE
University of South Florida
THOMAS WEAVER
University of Arizona
John W. Bennett—an innovative and extraordinarily pro-
ductive cultural anthropologist whose long career spanned
fields ranging from archaeology, sociology, East Asian stud-
ies, and government and academic services to ecological
and agrarian development—died on February 1, 2005, in
St. Louis, Missouri.
Bennett was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 18,
1915. He was the only child of a father who was a business-
man in Milwaukee and Chicago and a mother who had been
in the musical theater in her youth. He was educated in the
Milwaukee public schools, and from a very early age was
fascinated by the archaeological and ethnographic displays
in the Milwaukee Public Museum and the Field Museum in
Chicago. Bennett’s undergraduate work was done at Beloit
College, at that time and perhaps still today one of the best
colleges for anthropology in the Midwest. His interest in
archaeology was nourished by work on Beloit’s excavations
in New Mexico. Among his fellow students at Beloit was
Andrew H. Whiteford, another long-lived anthropologist.
He and Bennett were co-editors of the College Annual in
their senior year, and both went on to graduate school at
the University of Chicago. John received a BA with honors
in 1937.
In 1940, Bennett married Kathryn Goldsmith. She was
one of the pioneers in the field of psychiatric social work,
a field that she worked in until her death in 2003. One of
the dynamics of their marriage was a lifelong discussion
about whether we best understand human behavior by fo-
cusing on the individual or on the broader society. Together
they raised two sons: Their firstborn, John M. Bennett, is
an avant-garde poet and word artist, curator of the Avant
Writing Collection at The Ohio State University; their sec-
ond son, James P. Bennett, is an ecologist at the Gaylord
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin.
While a student at Chicago, Bennett was Lichtstern Fel-
low in Anthropology (1939–41), responsible for supervis-
ing the archeological laboratory. He earned an MA from
Chicago in 1941. From 1941 to 1943, he worked as a field
researcher for the Division of Program Surveys in the Bu-
reau of Agricultural Economics, U.S. Department of Agri-
culture. Then, in the midst of World War II, he became
Field Director for the Office of War Information, Domes-
tic Intelligence Branch, Midwest Region (1943–45). He re-
ported on his fieldwork in southern Illinois in two works:
an article in the American Anthropologist on the scope and
implications of research into subsistence patterns (1946a),
and his dissertation on subsistence economy and food-
ways in a rural community (1946b). He received his doc-
torate in anthropology from the University of Chicago
in 1946.
Bennett enjoyed an unusually long career. After earn-
ing his Ph.D. at age 31, he remained active for more than
a half-century, well after his official “retirement.” His first
academic position was in the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at The Ohio State University, where from
1946 to 1959 he was an instructor, an assistant, and an asso-
ciate professor. But Bennett was more than just an academic.
Even early in his career, he was already applying what he
learned as a social scientist to important problems of soci-
eties. At the same time, he was using those work experiences
in the furtherance of his education and the development of
his discipline. Thus, during the time he was at Ohio State,
in addition to his teaching he was also doing important
work in postwar Japan. From 1949 to 1951 he was chief
of the Public Opinion and Sociological Research Division
of the Japanese Occupation Forces. This service on the staff

5. Obituaries 267
of General Douglas MacArthur was a contribution to ap-
plied anthropology. Bennett’s work had the objective of
rehabilitating the Japanese people during what must have
been an extremely rapid social upheaval.
In 1959, Bennett moved to Washington University at
St. Louis as a professor in the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology. His arrival there enhanced a department that
was coming to be recognized as among the best in the na-
tion, with Alvin Gouldner, Joseph Kahl, Robert Hamblin,
Jules Henry, Lee Rainwater, Albert Wessen, and others al-
ready oriented toward an activist social science. The mid-
60s were remarkable years at Washington University and
with Bennett and Jules Henry, the anthropology program
shared much of that recognition. It was during that period
that Bennett led a movement to form a separate anthropol-
ogy department, which resulted in establishment of the De-
partment of Anthropology in 1967 with Bennett appointed
as chair.
This was a time of tumult at Washington University,
as at many other institutions, as the culture wars and
postmodernism were just beginning. This is not the place
for a detailed institutional history, but the joint depart-
ment ultimately split, with considerable turnover of faculty
members. Both disciplines soon recovered, however, with
Bennett heading anthropology and Murray Wax heading
sociology. Interestingly, both new departments were headed
by former presidents of the Society for Applied Anthropol-
ogy (SfAA).
During his tenure at Washington University, from 1959
to 1985, then beyond with emeritus status (when he was
honored with the title of “Distinguished Anthropologist in
Residence”), Bennett also held adjunct appointments in the
East Asian Studies Center, in the Department of Engineering
and Policy, and in the university’s Technology and Human
Affairs Program. He had visiting professorships in numerous
institutions: at the University of Oregon (1956); at the Uni-
versity of Puerto Rico (1961); at Waseda University in Tokyo
(1966–67); at the University of Calgary (1972); in the Land
Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin (1976); at the
Western Rural Development Center, Oregon State Univer-
sity (1976); as the Lansdowne Scholar at the University of
Victoria (1981); and in the Department of Anthropology
and Office of Arid Land Studies at the University of Arizona
(1982).
Bennett’s service with the American Occupation Forces
in Japan led to a long involvement in Japanese studies. His
concern with modernization came very early in his study of
Japanese scholars overseas (1958) and continued thereafter.
After working primarily on North American agriculture for
many years, he returned to his Japanese interests, publish-
ing on the social structural and kinship basis of Japanese
industry and forestry (1993b). During the latter part of
his career, his research focused on a decades-long study of
economic and social development in the northern Great
Plains.
Bennett authored 17 books and over 200 papers.
Among his best-known books are an ethnography of farm-
ers on the northern Plains (1969), theoretical works on
human ecology (1976, 1993a), and a collection of es-
says on the history of anthropology (1998). In these and
other publications, he made important contributions in
the areas of cultural ecology, adaptive household strategies,
development anthropology, agriculture and pastoralism,
public policy, culture as an adaptive mechanism, and in-
terdisciplinary collaboration. The scope and significance of
his academic and applied output are equaled by few. A brief
obituary cannot do justice to his significance for applied
anthropology. In his nomination for the SfAA’s Malinowski
Award, Thomas Weaver wrote: “John was one of the earli-
est anthropologists to understand the differences and con-
flicts in ethics and activity between academic and applied
anthropologists.”
Out of his many years of researching and consulting on
agricultural systems, particularly in North American con-
texts, Bennett developed the concepts of management style
and strategy to help explain differences in adaptations by
farmers in different times and places. In this work he ex-
amined the cycles of family farming enterprises that vary
with biological cycles and with succession of headship or
ownership. The value of this approach is that it helps an-
thropologists and development experts predict and resolve
problems arising in food production.
Bennett was called on to consult with a number of
agencies, including the following: the National Research
Council (NRC) and the National Academy of Sciences’
(NAS) Committee on Soil as a Resource in Relation to
Surface Mining; the Man and the Biosphere Program of the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Orga-
nization (UNESCO); the U.S. Advisory Committee for Man
and Biosphere; the Conference on Migration in the Pacific
Basin; the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) Committee on Desertification; and the
Social Science Research Council Committee on Japanese
Industrialization.
Bennett had numerous honors bestowed on him. In
1989, the AAA honored him with its Award for Distin-
guished Service for his contributions to both theory and
praxis, and in 2004 the Society for Applied Anthropology
(SfAA) presented him its prestigious Bronislaw Malinowski
Award “in recognition of efforts to understand and serve the
needs of the world’s societies and [active pursuit of] the goal
of solving human problems using the concepts and tools of
social science” (SAA 2005). Also in 2004, he received the
David Plath Media Award from the Society for East Asian
Anthropology for his book of photographs and memories of
the Japanese reconstruction following World War II (2002).
Bennett served on the boards and held offices in sev-
eral professional societies. Among these positions were the
presidency of the Society for Applied Anthropology (1960–
61); the presidency of the American Ethnological Society
(1971–72); and chair of the Anthropological Study Group
for Agrarian Systems (1976–80). He served in various capac-
ities in the AAA, the Society for Economic Anthropology,
the Association for Asian Studies, the Canadian Society for
Sociology and Anthropology, and the Society for the His-
tory of Technology.

6. 268 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 1 • March 2006
Bennett had a profound influence on students. A for-
mer student, Seena Kohl, now a professor at Webster Uni-
versity, wrote of him:
He insisted that students also develop those skills of
integrating material from diverse disciplines. Perhaps
most relevant for the development of the Saskatchewan
Cultural Ecology Research Project were his interests in
natural science. A walk in the woods with John was
an archaeological, ecological, historical, and sometimes
nutritional event. His Saskatchewan Cultural Ecology
Research Project, a longitudinal study that spanned
40 years, epitomized his [four-field] approach to an-
thropology. It connected environmental constraints
with economics of production with demographic
changes with historical political objectives with social
decision-making and family household relationships. It
remains an important and useful model of contemporary
research and I thank John for enabling me to share in
that enterprise. [personal communication, May 5, 2005]
Some have suggested that anthropologists were slow to rec-
ognize Bennett’s significance because his work was not al-
ways in fashion in the discipline. According to Norman E.
Whitten, a colleague at Washington University during the
late 1960s,
As the gap between “scientific” cultural ecology, on the
one side, and “humanistic” nascent postmodernism, on
the other side, widened in the 1970s, the contribu-
tions of a social science–centered adaptive strategy ap-
proach merging these polarities fell rapidly into a void
from which it never really recovered. Much fine scholar-
ship was left out of emerging paradigms and programs.
Bennett’s work—in spite of its critical, insightful, and pio-
neering nature—may have become underappreciated be-
cause of this void. [personal communication, August 22,
2005]
Art Gallaher wrote of him:
I feel that, like Homer Barnett, John Bennett was under-
appreciated in our discipline. He was no disciplinary
imperialist, and he did find stimulation, certainly was
never uncomfortable, on the periphery. He kept one foot
planted firmly in sociology. With Mel Tumin, he co-
authored a book many of our colleagues in anthropol-
ogy never read—Social Life: Structure and Function, An In-
troductory General Sociology (1949)—which rivals, in my
opinion, Linton’s Study of Man, and for the same reasons.
It offers an incredible kit of conceptual and theoretical
tools. John was a most formidable, tenacious, and honest
intellectual adversary, who shot straight from the shoul-
der, who was educable, who didn’t nit-pick, and who was
not averse to upset with those who did. Like Jack Roberts,
he could spin enough ideas in a casual few minutes to
leave one with hours of thought. Eclectic to the end, John
never stopped reaching for the ceiling. [personal commu-
nication, April 25, 2005]
Bennett’s professional papers and his extensive photo-
graphic works are housed in the Rare Books and Manuscripts
Library of The Ohio State University.
REFERENCES CITED
Bennett, John W.
1946a An Interpretation of the Scope and Implications of Social
Scientific Research in Human Subsistence. American Anthro-
pologist 48(24):553–571.
1946b Subsistence Economy and Foodways in a Rural Com-
munity: A Study of Socio-economic and Cultural Change.
Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of
Chicago.
1969 Northern Plainsmen: Adaptive Strategy and Agrarian Life.
Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.
1976 The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthropology and Hu-
man Adaptation. New York: Pergamon Books.
1993a Human Ecology as Human Behavior: Essays in Environ-
mental and Developmental Anthropology. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers.
1993b The Social Ecology of Japanese Forestry Management
in the World War II Period. In Human Ecology as Hu-
man Behavior: Essays in Environmental and Developmental
Anthropology. Pp. 99–127. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers.
1998 Classic Anthropology: Critical Essays 1994–1996. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
2002 Doing Photography and Social Research in the Allied Oc-
cupation of Japan 1948–1951: A Personal and Professional
Memoir. Columbus: The Ohio State University.
Bennett, John W., with Melvin Tumin
1949 Social Life: Structure and Function. New York: Knopf.
Bennett, John W., with Herbert Passin and Robert K. McKnight
1958 In Search of Identity: The Japanese Overseas Scholar in
America and Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Society for Applied Anthropology
2005 Bronislaw Malinowski Awards. Electronic document,
http://www.sfaa.net/malinowski/malinowski.html, accessed
on October 4, 2005.
Alan Dundes (1934–2005)
LAURA NADER
University of California, Berkeley
STANLEY BRANDES
University of California, Berkeley
Alan Dundes, Professor of Anthropology and Folklore at the
University of California, Berkeley, died suddenly on March

7. Obituaries 269
30, 2005. The most prolific and influential folklorist of his
generation, he died at the height of his intellectual pow-
ers doing what he loved most, writing and teaching about
folklore and anthropology.
Dundes was born in New York City on September 8,
1934, and, for all of his happy childhood, lived in a spa-
cious 200-year-old home in rural Patterson, New York. His
mother was a pianist who had studied in Europe. His fa-
ther commuted by train to New York City where he had a
general law practice, returning home every evening to tell
the family jokes he had heard on the train, a preview of
things to come for Dundes. He and his younger sister, who
later became a librarian, were bused to public schools. Af-
ter high school, he attended Yale College. When he was a
17-year-old sophomore, his father died. Yale offered Dun-
des financial aid, and he worked in the library to make ends
meet. He received his BA in English in 1955 and a masters
in Teaching (MAT) in English from Yale in 1958. In between
he did a tour of duty in the Navy. It was at Yale that he met
and married Carolyn Browne, then a graduate student in
the Yale School of Drama.
Dundes was a serious musician whose love of the clar-
inet and piano almost moved him to specialize in music,
until he discovered folklore. He went to Indiana Univer-
sity for doctoral study in folklore, completing his Ph.D. in
1962. He then taught briefly in the English Department at
the University of Kansas and in 1963 joined the Depart-
ment of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, where he spent the
remainder of his professional career as the only full-time
folklorist on campus.
For much of Dundes’s early career, he was known prin-
cipally as a structuralist, a follower of the Russian folk-
lorist Vladimir Propp. In this vein, he offered completely
new definitions of several key folklore genres, including
the proverb and the riddle, using structural criteria. He be-
came a Freudian folklorist because, as he put it, folklore
is fantasy, not reality; it has to be interpreted to be un-
derstood, and he wanted to make the unconscious con-
scious. But his key contribution to folklore was to com-
pletely redefine the basic concept of “folk,” which had been
equated with peasants or with the illiterate in a literate so-
ciety. Dundes expanded and modernized the definition to
include “any group of people whatsoever who share at least
one common linking factor” (1978). This meant that eth-
nic groups were folk, as were occupational groups and in-
dividual families. In his terms there can even be e-mail and
photocopying folklore. He coauthored five books on the
subject with Carl Pagter (Dundes and Pagter 1978, 1987,
1991, 1996, 2000), and his inclusive definition has been
widely accepted in the United States and to some extent
worldwide.
Dundes also internationalized the field through publi-
cations intended to upgrade the teaching of folklore around
the world, which was often unscholarly. His edited book The
Study of Folklore (1965) became the standard textbook in the
field until it was replaced with his International Folkloristics
(1999b). He also published a series of casebooks on the fol-
lowing: Cinderella (1982), Little Red Riding Hood (1989),
the blood libel (1991), the cockfight (1994), the vampire
(1998), and more. He brought the fruits of European schol-
arship to U.S. students who did not know foreign languages,
making it difficult for them to remain locked in parochial
mindsets.
Guided by psychoanalytic insight, Dundes interpreted
deities, in their full range of action and emotions, as psy-
chological projections of parents. In the world of folklore,
he was “a leader without followers,” as he was fond of
repeating.
He compared the biblical story of Noah with other flood
myths and found in all of them a regular pattern consisting
of sexual transgression, followed by punishment by a di-
vine father. The flood myth, he suggested, is a male fantasy
through which men symbolically usurp procreative abili-
ties from women. Whereas in religious (and other) thought,
males invariably attempt to prove that it is women who
envy men, Dundes’s work demonstrated that it is in fact
men who envy women, particularly women’s reproductive
capacity (1987). His prime example was the couvade—an ac-
tual, lived syndrome in which men identify with wives and
suffer the symptoms brought on by pregnancy and birth,
and after birth enjoy a period of rest and recuperation. This
pattern is reflected ideologically in the Judeo-Christian cre-
ation story: God worked for six hard days to give birth to
the world and then rested on the seventh.
In his many works Dundes demonstrated the impor-
tant but often disputed point that folklore is not necessarily
transmitted and expressed orally. For him, folklore adapts
to contemporary circumstances, as for example the pres-
ence of fax machines, photocopiers, and computers illus-
trated in Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing (Dundes and Pagter
1991). He believed that the field of folklore must be defined
not by some abstract formula but, rather, according to a
list of genres, proverbs, riddles, legends, jokes, memorates,
and the like. His research into the folklore of the electronic
age was ultimately part of his lifelong mission to update
the field of folklore, to expand its repertoire of subjects,
and to change the way it perceived itself. Relevant genres
should include certain literary and artistic products dissem-
inated through modern electronic devices. In this and other
ways, he challenged assumptions of his sometimes stodgy,
tradition-bound discipline, developing ideas about the evo-
lution of folklore theory from folklore items drawn from
around the world.
Dundes’s work, which was marked by thoroughness,
originality, and intellectual provocativeness, gave us an en-
tirely fresh look at familiar topics. One of his most ambi-
tious articles (1993) was a cross-cultural consideration of
the cockfight in the light of Clifford Geertz’s work, which
he critiqued by comparing variants of the cockfight through
large parts of Asia and elsewhere, using bodies of linguis-
tic, visual, and ethnographic data. In Two Tales of Crow and
a Sparrow (1997), Dundes offered a new interpretation of
caste and untouchability in India, differing completely from
standard discussions of the topics. Three books followed
that dealt with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His study
of the Bible, Holy Writ as Oral Lit (1999a), demonstrated

8. 270 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 1 • March 2006
that both the Old and New Testaments were originally
orally transmitted, as manifested in the presence of dif-
ferent versions of the same proverb and legends of the
flood myth—a bold new step in biblical studies. In a sim-
ilar vein, he documented the oral traces in the Qur’an
(2003), showing not only the existence of oral formulas
throughout the Qur’an but also the indisputable presence of
traditional tale types. Another of his studies of contempo-
rary religions, The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Sub-
terfuges (2002), provides an ethnographic analysis of Ortho-
dox strategies and rituals designed to circumvent the rules
set forth in what many Orthodox Jews refer to as the “Oral
Torah.”
Although Dundes was no practitioner of religious or-
thodoxy, sacred canon of all sorts provided him an endless
source of information. His research was driven by a need to
explain the enigmatic, but telling, detail—which inevitably
provided the key to much wider cultural configurations. He
loved the library, the data he found there, and its contribu-
tion to his theoretical, historical, and psychoanalytic inter-
pretations. He wrote about his own religious feelings: “I did
not have much exposure to formal Jewish religious prac-
tices. As a result, although I was always proud of my [Jew-
ish] heritage, I felt quite ignorant of the religious elements
in Judaism” (2002:xii).
Working alone and in collaboration, Dundes explored
the expression of peoples as diverse as the Choctaw,
Cheyenne, and Seminole; Africans, Jews, and Moslems; and
Germans, Italians, Lithuanians, Turks, and North Ameri-
cans. At the end of his life, he was deeply engaged in a folk-
loristic study of Japanese national character. Dundes was in
awe of the innovativeness of the folk. They were pictures
painted by the people themselves, different from pictures
painted by social scientists and, perhaps, more accurate in
gauging a people’s anxiety and concerns. He lectured all
over the world, including in Bangladesh and south India
(as part of a Ford Foundation sponsored workshop), East-
ern Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and, of course,
North America. He loved introducing folklore to audiences
who knew nothing about the field. He was unfailingly
interesting and—as anyone who knew him can attest—
funny.
Dundes was an inspired and dedicated teacher, at both
the graduate and undergraduate levels. His fertile mind, en-
cyclopedic knowledge of folklore forms and theory, linguis-
tic mastery, and relentless drive to improve and promote his
often misunderstood and belittled field combined to make
him by far one of the University of California’s preeminent
and productive faculty members. In 1994, he won the UC
Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award. He drew hundreds
of students to his introductory folklore course every year
and effortlessly made any large lecture hall feel like an inti-
mate seminar. He was a supportive, responsible, generous,
and hardworking colleague, who contributed selflessly to
the advancement of his department. He was not easily in-
fluenced or flummoxed, and he did not like it when students
or colleagues were mistreated. He was a good ombudsman,
although not always popular for his decisions, but as he
would say, “Life is not a popularity contest.” He was irrever-
ent; anything but politically correct. He liked an argument,
did not mind disagreement, and never took it personally.
His presidential talk to the American Folklore Society on
German national character was censored and not published.
His psychoanalytic interpretation of football even stimu-
lated death threats.
In more than 250 scholarly articles and book chapters
and nearly 40 authored and edited books, Dundes explored
an impressive array of folklore genres. He expanded the field
of folklore by forcefully demonstrating that folklore does
not fade with time but, rather, constantly changes form and
function and is ever present; that it exists not only among
poor, exotic peoples but also within every segment of soci-
ety, including elites; and that it is not only transmitted and
expressed orally but also manifest through writing. He also
insisted that folklore be theoretical, and his studies made
major contributions to structural, historical, and psycho-
analytic interpretations.
Dundes was a member of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, the first folklorist to be elected. He
was the first U.S. scholar to receive the top international
folklore prize—the Pitrè prize for lifetime achievement.
Three festschrifts have been published in his honor, two in
English (Boyer et al. 1993; Zumwalt and Bendix 1995) and
one in German (Mutschelknaus 1994). His death constitutes
an incomparable loss to his family and colleagues, as well
as to the academic discipline to which he devoted himself
so passionately.
REFERENCES CITED
Boyer, L. Bryce, Ruth M. Boyer, and Stephen M. Sonnenberg
1993 Essays in Honor of Alan Dundes. Psychoanalytic Study of
Society 18:xv–xxxiii. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Dundes, Alan
1965 The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
1978 Meerut: Essays in Folkloristic. New Delhi: Meerut Folklore
Institute.
1982 Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook. New York: Garland.
1987 Couvade in Genesis. In Parsing through Customs: Essays
by a Freudian Folklorist. Pp. 145–166. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
1989 Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press.
1991 The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semetic Folk-
lore. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
1993 Gallus as Phallus: A Psychoanalystic Cross-Cultural Con-
sideration of the Cockfight as Fowl Play. Psychoanalytic Study
of Society 18:23–65.
1994 Cockfight: A Casebook. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
1997 Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic
Essay on Caste and Untouchability. Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield.
1998 The Vampire: A Casebook. Madison: University of Wiscon-
sin Press.
1999a Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield.
1999b International Folkloristics: Classical Contributions by
the Founders of Folklore. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield.

9. Obituaries 271
2002 Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges: Circum-
venting Custom and Jewish Character. Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield.
2003 Fables of the Ancients: Folklore in the Qur’an. Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Dundes, Alan, and Carl R. Pagter
1978 Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded: Urban Folklore
from the Paperwork Empire. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press.
1987 When You’re Up to Your Ass in Alligators: More Urban
Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Detroit: Wayne State Uni-
versity Press.
1991 Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing: Still More Urban Folklore
from the Paperwork Empire. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press.
1996 Sometimes the Dragon Wins: Yet More Urban Folklore
from the Paperwork Empire. Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press.
2000 Why Don’t Sheep Shrink When It Rains? A Further Col-
lection of Photocopies Folklore. Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press.
Mutschelknaus, Katja
1994 Der psychoanalytische Forschungsansatz von Alan
Dundes: eine exemplarische Bestandsaufnahme und kritische
Wurdigung der Voraussetzungen, Moglichkeiten und Grenzen
einer psychoanalytischen Volkskunde. M.A. thesis, Universitat
Munchen.
Zumwalt, Rosemary, and Regina Bendix, ed.
1995 Folklore Interpreted: Essays in Honor of Alan Dundes.
New York: Garland.