AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

OBITUARIES

A studio portrait of John Gumperz. (Photo courtesy of publicdomain)

John Joseph Gumperz (1922–2013)John Joseph Gumperz, one of the founding fathers of so-ciolinguistics and modern linguistic anthropology, died onMarch 29, 2013, in Santa Barbara, California. He was bornHans-Josef Gumperz on January 9, 1922, in Hattingen inthe Ruhr, Germany, where his Jewish family owned a soapfactory. When the Nazi party came to power, he was barredfrom high school, and his family sent him to Italy for school-ing in 1935. After Kristallnacht in 1938, it was clear to thefamily that it was time to leave Europe, and so in 1939they left for Cincinnati. John enrolled for a bachelor’s de-gree in chemistry at the University of Cincinnati, but hisstudies were interrupted in 1943 when he was sent backto Germany as a translator and interrogator for the occu-pying U.S. forces. He finished his degree in 1947, thenmoved to the University of Michigan for graduate studies inchemistry. As it happened, the Linguistic Institutes (sum-mer schools) of the Linguistic Society of America were heldannually in Michigan from 1945 to 1950, mostly under thedirection of Hans Kurath, the dialectologist who initiatedthe Linguistic Atlas of the United States. Seeing the possibil-ity of exploiting his multilingual background and interests,Gumperz soon switched from chemistry to linguistics. His

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 117, No. 1, pp. 212–224, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C© 2015 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12185

dissertation work was on third-generation bilingual speakersof Swabian dialects in Washtenaw County, Michigan, wherehe discovered three distinct dialects that had evolved focusedon distinct Lutheran synods. His doctorate was awarded in1954.

By this time, Gumperz had moved to a post in modernlanguages at Cornell, where he soon joined a Ford Foun-dation project fostering interdisciplinary development stud-ies in India, combining anthropology, linguistics, sociology,political science, and economics. The project had a base atDeccan College, Pune, where in 1954–56 Gumperz cameinto contact with Charles Ferguson and William Bright. Hefocused on the dialects of Hindi in the village of Khalapurin the far north of Uttar Pradesh. As in his PhD work,he found that dialects cannot be explained mechanically interms of barriers to communication; instead, they require aconsideration of social motivations. His two years in Indiaconvinced him of the importance of combining linguisticswith a study of social structure and process. He went onto coedit a volume on linguistic diversity in South Asia(Ferguson and Gumperz 1960), which in retrospect canbe viewed as the first major collection in the new field ofsociolinguistics.1

By 1956, Gumperz had moved to the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, initially as a Hindi instructor. Therehe was soon surrounded by many scholars interested in thesocial foundations of language, including Susan Ervin-Tripp,Erving Goffman, John Searle, Dell Hymes, Dan Slobin, andthe Indianists Murray Emeneau, Gerald Berreman, and FritsStaal. Gumperz was an eclectic scholar who forged the-ory from many ideas, and he benefited greatly from thisrich milieu. In particular, he found his own training andexperiences nicely complemented by Dell Hymes’s back-ground in Amerindian linguistics and folklore and his wideknowledge of ethnographic linguistics. Together they editeda special issue of the American Anthropologist (Gumperz andHymes 1964) on “The Ethnography of Communication,”which essentially crystalized the ethnography of speaking.Influential to this and other early publications was the Soci-olinguistics Committee of the Social Science Research Coun-cil, initiated in 1963, in which Gumperz played a key role,forming small working “Gumperz groups.” The committeeat one time or another included most of the foundationalfigures in anthropological linguistics and sociolinguistics; ofall of these, Gumperz was perhaps the most able to absorbnew developments in many disciplines and explore theirpotential implications for sociolinguistics.

Obituaries 213

When Hymes left Berkeley in 1965, Gumperz inheritedhis position in the Department of Anthropology. But theircollaboration continued with the edited volume Directionsin Sociolinguistics (1972), which served as a textbook forthe new field. That same year Gumperz’s first wife, Ellennee McDonald, took her own life, leaving him with twosmall children. He was fortunate to find a new partner inJenny Cook, a postdoc from Basil Bernstein’s department inLondon, who became a coauthor and coeditor of much of hislater work, contributing her British sociological expertise totheir joint analyses.

Gumperz’s work had taken a more fine-grained in-teractional focus in the late 1960s and early 1970s, start-ing with his investigation with Jan-Petter Blom of thecontrastive uses of standard and local dialects in Norway(Blom and Gumperz 1972). This interactional perspec-tive dovetailed with the evolving Berkeley environment,where an emphasis on inferential processes in languageuse was emerging in the work of Paul Grice, John Searle,George and Robin Lakoff, Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, BrentBerlin, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Dan Slobin, and others. Theestablishment of the Language Behavior Research Lab atBerkeley provided a haven where Gumperz and a talentedcohort of students and collaborators could explore theseissues. These ideas gelled in the books Discourse Strategiesand Language and Social Identity, both appearing in 1982(Gumperz 1982a, 1982b).

A BBC film (Cross-Talk [Twitchin and Thompson 1979])produced with an accompanying booklet (Gumperz et al.1979) illustrated the inadvertent misunderstandings dueto dialect and accent differences and established a com-pelling case for the importance of subtle conversationalinferences, thus promising a new advocacy role for so-ciolinguistics. The idea that possibly well-intentioned butpowerful gatekeepers could make life-changing decisions onthe basis of fleeting misunderstandings has proved one ofGumperz’s most enduring contributions. He went on todevelop these themes in his last works, maintaining thatsociolinguistics led the way toward political engagementin modern anthropological linguistics (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz 2008).

Gumperz retired from Berkeley in 1991 and moved toUC Santa Barbara, where he joined the Language, Interac-tion, and Social Organization unit.

Gumperz is best known for his specific brand of “inter-actional sociolinguistics,” but his work ranged over majorthemes in the relation of language to social structure, andit may be useful to sketch how the different strands fit to-gether. The root of much of his thought can be found in hisearly work in India. In an early article (Gumperz 1958), us-ing his new Indian data, he confronted the idea in traditionaldialectology that dialects directly reflect frequency of com-munication. Quoting Leonard Bloomfield (1933:46), whohad sketched a kind of proto-network analysis and held that“the most important differences of speech within a commu-nity are due to differences in the density of communication,”

Gumperz showed this to be false: his Indian village with31 castes had just four dialects. People of different casteswho spent most of their lives working together might neveracquire each other’s dialects. Gumperz distinguished pureBloomfieldian connectedness from network ties with specificaffective properties: it was only friendship networks thattransmitted dialect forms. Gumperz can be credited withintroducing the promise of network analysis to sociolinguis-tics and with pointing out that friendship ties are the dialectsuperconductors.

The division between work ties, on the one hand, andfriendship–kinship ties, on the other hand, was developedfurther in a celebrated article that did much to spur laterwork on language contact (Gumperz and Wilson 1971). Itexplored the ways in which unrelated languages in dailycontact through work ties converge in their underlyingstructure but retain distinct formal diacritics to mark so-ciolinguistic distance. Work ties also played a crucial rolein Gumperz’s later writing on bureaucracy in complex soci-eties, wherein gatekeepers control access to resources whiledialect differences undermine the rhetorical effectiveness ofplaintiffs.

Gumperz was simultaneously exploring the other halfof the distinction—namely, friendship and kinship ties.Through such ties, there is transmission of the full linguisticrepertoire—not only dialect properties but also languagesinvolved in code-switching and distinctive discourse styles.Gumperz was intrigued not so much by situational codeswitching but by what he called metaphorical switching:the rapid mid-sentence switching between fluent bilingualsthat serves to index subtle allusions or trigger complexinferences. Gumperz’s initial foray here (Blom andGumperz 1972) concerned switching between two dialectsor registers of the same language in Norway, a kind oflanguage switching that has been the focus of much laterwork investigating the nature of the metasystem that makesit possible.

The study of friendship networks prepared the way foranother phase of Gumperz’s investigation. He had found itdifficult to nail down exactly the fleeting meanings or infer-ences generated by code switching. Here, drawing on HaroldGarfinkel’s insight that breaches of social norms reveal them(Gumperz 2001), Gumperz focused on where communica-tion breaks down: inevitably, but without awareness, wedeploy the same inferential triggers we use in our friendshipnetworks to generate subtle allusions outside those net-works, where our implied messages may be lost or misin-terpreted. This line of work led to Crosstalk (Gumperz et al.1979; Twitchin and Thompson 1979) and to the discoveryof “contextualization cues.” The underlying concept herehad already been introduced to anthropologists by GregoryBateson’s (1956) notion of the “metamessage,” as when apuppy snarls while simultaneously indicating with his bodythat “this is play.” Gumperz’s specialization of the idea wasthat an utterance could carry with it instructions about thecontext within which it should be understood. His work

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suggested that in English it is prosody in particular that car-ries this metasignal (in other languages, particles or markedconstructions might do the same job). It is a powerful ideawith a number of intriguing consequences (Levinson 1997),but Gumperz was particularly interested in the potential formiscommunication that occurs when these metasignals areused outside the networks in which they are effortlessly de-coded. He focused on gatekeepers in bureaucratic societiesbecause in such job or welfare interviews a brief meetingcan affect individuals’ life chances in fundamental ways—hence the promise of a sociolinguistics that might betterthe world.

Gumperz had now, with this focus on contextual mean-ing in discourse, introduced a new hermeneutic turn insociolinguistics, downplayed in the variationist sociolinguis-tics of William Labov and followers, wherein sociolinguisticvariables are mere associationist markers, not rich inferen-tial triggers for the meta-analysis of communicative content.This hermeneutic turn made it possible to think about arelativity of interpretations, ideas explored in a Wenner-Gren conference, “Rethinking Linguistic Relativity,” and itsresulting published volume (Gumperz and Levinson 1996).Gumperz’s overall approach was unique in that it combineda dialectology compatible with standard variationist soci-olinguistics with a much less familiar meaning-based form ofsociolinguistic analysis, the two strands unified by the studyof interaction in social networks.

Gumperz’s ideas thus describe a whole circle: profes-sional network ties have specific kinds of sociolinguistic con-sequences, linguistic convergence with superficial diacriticsof difference among them. However, friendship and kinshipnetworks foster an exuberance of rich repertoires, with thedevelopment of subtle contextualization cues. When thesecues are introduced into professional networks, they en-gender miscommunications, so generating the many minortragedies of the interview situation, which can neverthelessinfluence individuals’ life chances.

Space precludes adequate treatment of other ofGumperz’s notions that are now part of the standard vocabu-lary of linguistics and sociolinguistics. Suffice it to say that heintroduced or redefined notions like the speech community,repertoire, metaphorical switching, contextualization, lin-guistic convergence, interactional sociolinguistics, and manyothers.

Gumperz’s role in establishing modern sociolinguisticswas recognized by many awards. He was fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences; distinguishedfellow of the American Anthropological Association; lifefellow of the Linguistic Society of America; a Guggenheimfellow; a visiting fellow at the Institute of AdvancedStudies, Princeton; an overseas fellow at Churchill College,Cambridge University; and a fellow at the Center forAdvanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, StanfordUniversity. He also served as the inaugural president ofthe International Pragmatics Association (1986–90), andan award was established in his name by the American

Educational Research Association. He was honored with aspecial session of the American Anthropological Associationin his presence the December before his death and aresulting special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology(Jacquemet 2013).

Gumperz’s legacy also resides in his training of studentsand colleagues, many of whom went on to be major figuresin anthropological linguistics, the ethnography of commu-nication, and sociolinguistics. He never tried to found aschool closely based on a particular method or theory. In-stead, he encouraged students to find their own way, givingthem a tape recorder, encouraging exploratory fieldwork,showing them how to transcribe and analyze, and receiv-ing half-baked ideas with an enthusiasm that transformedthem. This open-ended, generous mode of instruction andcollaboration means that his contribution is diffusely repre-sented across a wide band of researchers both within andoutside of academia (see, e.g., Auer and Roberts 2011).In addition, he was an important conduit of ideas betweenEurope and the United States. His projects with local col-laborators on both sides of the Atlantic led to a flourish-ing of work on language use, especially in the U.K. andGermany. Through the various aspects of his work, JohnGumperz played a key role in establishing the study oflanguage use in its social context over a period of halfa century.

NOTE1. See Paulston and Tucker 1997 for the history of the earlyfoundation of sociolinguistics, wherein Gumperz’s centralrole is evident. Sources on Gumperz’s early career in-clude the following: Dil 1971; Gumperz 1997; Gumperzand Cook-Gumperz 2013; and Murray 1992. I am grate-ful for comments and corrections from Dan Slobin, SueErvin-Tripp, Bill Hanks, and other colleagues andto Sydel Silverman for skillful editing. Further bio-graphical notes will be found on the Berkeley web-site at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ANTH/emeritus/gumperz, along with a complete bibliography of Gumperz’swork.

Stephen C. Levinson Language and Cognition Department,

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The

Netherlands; Stephen.Levinson@mpi.nl

REFERENCES CITEDAuer, Peter, and Celia Roberts, eds.

2011 Special issue, “In Honor of John Gumperz,” Text and Talk31(4).

Bateson, Gregory1956 The Message “This Is Play.” In Group Processes: Transactions

of the Second Conference. Bertram Schaffner, ed. Pp. 145–242. New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.

Obituaries 215

Blom, Jan-Petter, and John J. Gumperz1972 Social Meaning in Linguistic Structures: Code Switching

in Northern Norway. In Directions in Sociolinguistics: TheEthnography of Communication. John J. Gumperz and DellHymes, eds. Pp. 407–434. New York: Holt, Rinehart, andWinston.

Bloomfield, Leonard1933 Language. New York: Henry Holt.

Dil, Anton, ed.1971 Language in Social Groups: Essays by John Gumperz.

Stanford: Stanford University Press.Ferguson, Charles A., and John J. Gumperz, eds.

1960 Linguistic Diversity in South Asia: Studies in Regional, Socialand Functional Variation. International Journal of AmericanLinguistics 26(3): part 3, vii–18.

Gumperz, John J.1958 Dialect Differences and Social Stratification in a North Indian

Village. American Anthropologist 60(4):668–681.1982a Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.1997 Some Comments on the Origin and Development of Soci-

olinguistics: Conversation with John Gumperz. In The EarlyDays of Sociolinguistics: Memories and Reflections. ChristinaBratt Paulston and G. Richard Tucker, eds. Pp. 113–120.Dallas: The Summer Institute of Linguistics.

2001 Interactional Sociolinguistics: A Personal Perspective. In TheHandbook of Discourse Analysis. Deborah Schiffrin, DeborahTannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton, eds. Pp. 215–228. Malden,MA: Blackwell.

Gumperz, John J., ed.1982b Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press.Gumperz, John J., and Jenny Cook-Gumperz

2008 Studying Language, Culture, and Society: Sociolinguis-tics or Linguistic Anthropology? Journal of Sociolinguistics12(4):532–545.

2013 Concluding Remarks. Special issue, “In Honor of JohnJ. Gumperz,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 23(3):213–214.

Gumperz, John J., and Dell Hymes, eds.1964 Special issue, “The Ethnography of Communication,” Amer-

ican Anthropologist 66(6[2]).1972 Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography

of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart andWinston.

Gumperz, John J., T. C. Jupp, and Celia Roberts1979 Crosstalk: A Study of Cross-Cultural Communication, Back-

ground Material and Notes to Accompany the BBC Film. Lon-don: BBC.

Gumperz, John J., and Stephen C. Levinson, eds.1996 Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Studies in the Social

and Cultural Foundations of Language series. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Gumperz, John J., and Robert Wilson1971 Convergence and Creolization: A Case from the

Indo-Aryan/Dravidian Border in India. In Pidginization and

Creolization of Languages. Dell Hymes, ed. Pp. 151–167.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jacquemet, Marco, ed.2013 Special issue, “In Honor of John J. Gumperz,” Journal of

Linguistic Anthropology, 23(3).Levinson, Stephen C.

1997 Contextualizing “Contextualization Cues.” In DiscussingCommunication Analysis 1. John J. Gumperz, Susan Eerd-mans, Carlos Prevignano, and Paul J. Thibault, eds. Pp. 24–30.Lausanne: Beta.

Murray, Stephen O.1992 North American Contributions to the History of Linguistics.

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2(2):233–234.Paulston, Christina Bratt, and G. Richard Tucker, eds.

1997 The Early Days of Sociolinguistics: Memories and Reflec-tions. Publications in Sociolinguistics, 2. Dallas: Summer In-stitute of Linguistics.

Twitchin, John, prod., and Fiona Thompson, dir.1979 Crosstalk. 30 min. Series: Multi-Racial Britain. London:

BBC Education.

George J. Armelagos in 2000. (Photo courtesy of Bradd Shore)

George John Armelagos (1936–2014)

George Armelagos, one of the most influential biologicalanthropologists of his generation, died on May 15, 2014,in Atlanta, Georgia. He was arguably the founding fatherof contemporary biocultural anthropology and bioarchaeol-ogy, as well as of modern paleopathology. A prolific writerand researcher with tremendous curiosity and intellectualrange, at the time of his death he was the Goodrich C.White distinguished professor of anthropology at EmoryUniversity.

George (the name he always preferred) was born on May22, 1936, in Lincoln Park, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan,where he grew up. He was the fourth of five sons of John andAshimo Armelagos, both of whom immigrated to Detroit inthe 1920s from Lagadia, a village in Peloponnese Greece.After working in a Ford factory, John Armelagos began afamily-run construction company and a grocery store, abovewhich the family lived. George and his brothers worked fortheir father. George often related how, if he was trying too

216 American Anthropologist • Vol. 117, No. 1 • March 2015

hard to make a beautiful wall, his father would admonishhim: “Honey-boy, we are not building a cathedral.” Georgerelayed this lesson to his students, urging them to finish workat hand with an uplifting “done is good.”

George followed his brother James to the Universityof Michigan; theirs was the first generation in their familyto go to college. He received a BA in anthropology, withhonors, in 1958. In addition to excelling as a student, Georgeplayed four years of football at Michigan—not as a starterbut as a hard-working bulwark of the practice team. Aftergraduation, he entered the University of Michigan Schoolof Medicine, gaining valuable experience in gross anatomyand the analysis of human biological systems at differentlevels. He would later champion the strategy of linkinglevels of analysis from molecular to cellular to organs towhole humans to populations.

Medical school and biomedicine were a poor match forGeorge’s expansive interests, and he switched to anthropol-ogy. He stayed at Michigan for a year and counted amonghis influential teachers Frank Livingstone and Leslie White.While an undergraduate, George had met Jack Kelso, agraduate student and friend of his brother, and they be-came close. When Kelso began to teach at the University ofColorado, Boulder, in 1961, George transferred into thePhD program there. He received his MA in 1963 and hisPhD in 1968.

Even as a young graduate student, George was some-thing of an academic rock star on the Boulder campus, as hewould be at every university where he taught. He was knownas a “mind-blowing” teacher with a magnetic personality anda passion for research, and many of his students changed theircareer paths and went into anthropology because of him.

While George was always fascinated by all of anthrop-ology, as a graduate student he focused on biological–biocultural anthropology. He effectively used hisbiology–medical background to address questions aboutthe ecology and evolution of health and nutrition. Whenthe opportunity arose to excavate cemeteries in Nubia withGordon Hewes, George helped write a grant proposal tostudy burials at Wadi Halfa in 1963–64. At the time of hisdeath, he was finishing a book on the Nubia project withDennis Van Gerven, one of his first graduate students.

The Nubia project solidified two of George’s lifelongpassions: health and nutrition in the past and present anda nonracial approach to human biological variation coupledwith a critique of racist research. His dissertation, whichused his background in medicine and anatomy, was onchanges in health, nutrition, and life expectancy (Armela-gos 1968), and in a major article in Science (Armelagos 1969)he demonstrated the importance of a biocultural and popula-tion perspective in studies of past health. Working with VanGerven and David Carlson, among others, he showed thatdietary change rather than European population replacementbest explained changes in cranial morphology (Van Gervenet al. 1974). His work on Nubia and, soon to follow,on Dickson Mounds, Illinois, helped launch the fields ofpaleopathology and bioarchaeology.

While finishing his degree, George taught at theUniversity of Utah (1965–68). He then spent many yearsat the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1968–1990).Subsequently he was recruited to chair the Department ofAnthropology at the University of Florida (1990–1993). In1993 he moved to Emory, where he played a large role inshaping its programs, serving as chair of the AnthropologyDepartment from 2003 to 2009.

George held a wide variety of positions in service to an-thropology, among them: chair of the Anthropology Section(section H) of the American Association for the Advance-ment of Science; president of the Northeast AnthropologicalAssociation; president of the American Association of Phys-ical Anthropology (AAPA); chair of the Biology Section ofthe American Anthropological Association (AAA); chair ofthe Council of Nutritional Anthropology section of the AAA;and twice a member of the AAA’s Executive Board. Georgewas a committed and involved scholar who would do all hecould for these professional associations. But he was not a fanof needless prolonged discussions; he had a gift for sensingan approaching synthesis or the dominance of a particularposition, and he is recalled by many as the person most likelyto make a motion to adjourn.

George received most of the highest honors of an-thropology, including the Viking Medal from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Charles Darwin Award for LifetimeAchievement in Biological Anthropology from the AAPA,and the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthro-pology from the AAA. Both the University of Massachusettsand Emory presented him with their highest awards for histeaching and mentoring.

Above all, George was a much beloved teacher tothousands of undergraduates and hundreds of graduate stu-dents and friend to many of them. He recruited studentsinto biocultural research in his laboratory by listening totheir interests and seeing how they dovetailed with ongoingprojects. He said that the secret of turning undergraduatesinto skilled researchers was to treat them like colleagues. Heserved on over 70 dissertation committees, many of them aschair.

George was a prolific writer, editor, and speaker. Hislast CV (dated 2012) is 62 pages long and lists 13 books andover 300 chapters and articles. He had two book manuscriptsin draft and four articles in press when he died.

George was interested in the breadth of anthropology,especially in the intersections of biology and culture acrosstime and space. In bioarchaeology, he championed testablehypotheses that focused on how cultural change had conse-quences for human health, nutrition, and stress. In additionto theory, he was involved in the development of new re-search tools, including nearly every skeletal indicator ofinfirmity. He pioneered the use of skeletal remains to studythe “scars of culture.” Starting from his Nubian work, hebecame fascinated with the biological consequences of theNeolithic revolution, the transition from hunting and gath-ering to horticulture. Along with Mark Cohen, he organizeda Wenner-Gren conference in 1982 to explore this question

Obituaries 217

and edited the subsequent classic Paleopathology at the Originsof Agriculture (Cohen and Armelagos 1984). With his stu-dents, he showed that there could be significant health costsfrom increased population density, dependence on grain-based foods, and centralized control of resources (Goodmanand Armelagos 1985).

George came to view the field of paleopathology asoverly descriptive, focusing on first occurrences of a mal-ady rather than concerns for the distribution of an illnesswithin and among groups. He and his students produceda series of benchmark articles that provided a processualbiocultural approach as well as a stress perspective to thestudy of past health or paleoepidemiology (Huss-Ashmoreet al. 1982). From the 1960s to 1980s, he worked on track-ing changes in porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia assigns of iron deficiency, relating those changes to perios-titis (a sign of infection) and to changes in life expectancy(Mensforth et al. 1978). He also studied general changes innutritional status via linear enamel hypoplasias (Blakey andArmelagos 1985).

True to his appreciation of disease processes at multi-ple levels, as techniques improved (frequently in George’slab), his work expanded from gross observation of lesions onbones and teeth to histological studies to chemical analyses.With graduate student Jerome Rose, George began to studytooth enamel at the histological level (Rose et al. 1978). Thiswas an important breakthrough because it demonstrated thepossibility of studying changes in physiological stresses expe-rienced by different groups over time. Similarly, question-ing the general notion that osteoporosis was a contemporarydisease, he returned to his Nubian bones to study the dy-namics of bone remodeling at the histological level. WithDebra Martin and colleagues (1981), he showed age-relatedchanges in bone dynamics. Observing these bone sectionsunder a fluorescing microscope, George and his studentsmade the serendipitous discovery of tetracycline labeling inNubian bones (Bassett et al. 1980), likely related to beerconsumption.

George took a keen interest in the historical transmis-sion of infectious disease (Swedlund and Armelagos 1990).Reigniting one of his earlier interests in infectious disease(Armelagos and Dewey 1970), George and students chal-lenged the prevailing opinion of a European origin of syphilis(Baker and Armelagos 1998; Harper et al. 2011). His re-emerging interest in infectious disease led to some of hisbest-known theoretical work, including work on the epi-demiological transitions (Barrett et al. 1998) and the “viralsuperhighway” for rapid spread of new infectious diseases(Armelagos 1998).

George was a leader in the development of researchtechniques for using skeletal material to reconstruct ancientdiets. He was one of the first bioarchaeologists to see thepotential for chemical analyses of bones and helped to launchimportant breakthroughs in the use of stable isotopes todetermine past diets (Price et al. 1985).

As with his work on infectious disease, George ex-panded beyond health in the past to current health concerns.He helped to develop a biocultural perspective in thedeveloping fields of medical anthropology and nutritionalanthropology starting in the 1970s (Armelagos et al. 1976).Consuming Passions (Farb and Armelagos 1980) establishedGeorge as a popular writer and biological anthropologistwith a deep interest in the meaning of food and foodways(also see Armelagos 2010).

George had long been influenced by Leslie White’spolitics and perspective on cultural change. After a 1992Wenner-Gren conference on bringing political economyinto biological anthropology (Goodman andLeatherman 1998), George began to look more ex-plicitly at inequalities and poverty. He also renewed hisinterest in race and racism. His early career was framedby the promise of the “new physical anthropology,” whichmoved beyond descriptive studies, typology, and races toevolutionary, ecological, and biocultural processes. Some ofGeorge’s first articles critiqued racial theories of populationreplacement in Sudanese Nubia. He later published a seriesof important papers on a nonracial approach to humanvariation, including critiques of the use of race in forensicanthropology (Smay and Armelagos 2000) and a synthesisof genetic variation within and among races (Brown andArmelagos 2001).

George’s remarkably productive career was the resultnot only of his original ideas but also of his mentoring style,which produced dynamic research collaborations with hisstudents. He frequently showcased his students’ contribu-tions by recognizing them as first author and in many wayswas magnanimous in support of his legions of students.

George was married twice: to Adina Schrager(Kantorowitz) and to Lynn Sibley. He had an adopted sonand two grandchildren.

George’s wit and humor were kind and quick. He tookhis work seriously but not so seriously that it would notbe enjoyable. Indeed, George made anthropology exciting,relevant, and fun. He lived his work. Above all, he touchedmany lives as a family member, friend, colleague, and ad-visor, and those many remember his razor-quick mind, hisoptimistic spirit, and his generosity. His ashes were spreadover St. Catherine’s island—a place he loved and, of course,also wrote about (Armelagos and Woods Jr. 2012)—but hisfriends imagine George waving, with a wry smile, from asunny Greek island.

Alan H. Goodman School of Natural Science, Hampshire College,

Amherst, MA 01002; swedlund@anthro.umass.edu

Alan C. Swedlund Department of Anthropology, University of

Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003; antpjb@emory.edu

Peter J. Brown Department of Anthropology, Emory University,

Atlanta, GA 30322

218 American Anthropologist • Vol. 117, No. 1 • March 2015

REFERENCES CITEDArmelagos, George J.

1968 Paleopathology of Three Archaeological Populations fromSudanese Nubia. Dissertation Abstracts 29(4):124B.

1969 Disease in Ancient Nubia. Science 163(3864):255–259.1998 The Viral Superhighway. The Sciences 38(1):24–29.2010 Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Evolution of the Brain and the

Determinates of Food Choice. Journal of Anthropological Re-search 66(2):161–186.

Armelagos, George J., and John R. Dewey1970 Evolutionary Response to Human Infectious Disease. Bio-

science 20(5):271–275.Armelagos, George J., Alan Goodman, and Kenneth H. Jacobs

1976 Disease and the Ecological Perspective. The Ecologist6(2):40–45.

Armelagos, George J., and John T. Woods Jr.2012 St. Catherines Island: Untold Story of People and Place.

Colonel’s Island: Colonel Island Press.Baker, Brenda, and George J. Armelagos

1998 Origin and Antiquity of Syphilis: A Dilemma in Paleopatho-logical Diagnosis and Interpretation. Current Anthropology29(5):703–737.

Barrett, Ronald, Christopher W. Kuzawa, Thomas McDade, andGeorge J. Armelagos

1998 Emerging and RE-Emerging Infectious Diseases: The ThirdEpidemiologic Transition. Annual Review of Anthropology27:247–271.

Bassett, Everett J., Margaret S. Keith, George J. Armelagos, DebraL. Martin, and Antonio R. Villanueva

1980 Tetracycline Labeled Human Bone from Prehistoric Su-danese Nubia (A.D. 350). Science 209(4464):1532–1534.

Blakey, Michael L., and George J. Armelagos1985 Deciduous Dentition and Prenatal and Postnatal Stress in

Prehistoric Americans from Dickson Mounds. American Jour-nal of Physical Anthropology 66(4):371–380.

Brown, Ryan A., and George J. Armelagos2001 Apportionment of Racial Diversity: A Review. Evolutionary

Anthropology 10(1):34–40.Cohen, Mark N., and George J. Armelagos, eds.

1984 Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. Orlando: Aca-demic.

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Obituaries 219

Kenneth Kennedy at Attirampakkam, India, in May of 1988.(Photo courtesy of Peg Caldwell-Ott)

Kenneth Adrian Raine Kennedy

(1930–2014)

Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, a biological–physical anthropolo-gist who conducted pioneering work on the paleoanthropol-ogy and prehistory of South Asia, died on April 23, 2014, inIthaca, New York. In addition to his work in paleoanthropol-ogy and prehistory, he also made significant contributionsto skeletal biology and forensic anthropology, paleopathol-ogy, and the history of evolution and biological anthropol-ogy. He spent nearly all of his professional life at CornellUniversity.

Kenneth was born in Oakland on June 26, 1930, but wasraised in San Francisco in the Marina district on land that hadbeen dredged up from the sea for the 1913 World’s Fair. Asan only child, he recalled his youth in San Francisco as a pleas-ant one, with ample opportunities to visit museums, attendconcerts, and participate in school activities. Kenneth camefrom a musical family: although a bank officer by profession,his father, Walter, was also a pipe organist and choir direc-tor, and his mother, Margaret, studied voice as a contralto.He began piano lessons at age six and then studied the violin,which he continued to play well into his later years. Theseearly experiences developed into a lifelong love of music,particularly opera and, later, Indian ragas. In addition tomusic, Kenneth was intensely interested in “primitive man”while in grammar school, and he discovered anthropology

in the context of prehistory and human paleontology by theage of 12. He was largely self-directed in these interests inanthropology.

Following his graduation from Lowell High School,he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in1949 and continued there through the bachelor’s and themaster’s degrees in anthropology, finishing in 1954. Itwas at Berkeley that he met Theodore D. McCown, whobecame his intellectual guide and mentor. Ted McCownhad been trained at Berkeley under Alfred Kroeber, but healso worked on the Mount Carmel fossils from Palestineand with Sir Arthur Keith in England on the fossils duringthe mid-1930s (Kennedy and Brooks 1984). Kenneth alsotook courses from such notables as John Rowe, RobertLowie, Frederica de Laguna, and Robert F. Heiser. Becausehe had postponed being drafted into the military duringgraduate school, he enlisted in the army for three years andvolunteered for the medical service after completing the MAdegree in 1954. A year was spent at the Walter Reed Centerin Washington and then two years at the Landstuhl ArmyMedical Center in Germany. He was discharged in 1957 inGermany and then spent the next eight months touring inEurope. In 1958, armed with funding from the GI Bill, here-enrolled at Berkeley and found that the faculty was quitedifferent from when he had left four years earlier. SherwoodL. Washburn had just arrived from Chicago, and DesmondClark was to arrive at Berkeley in 1961. This led to an en-riched graduate experience; as Kenneth noted, “I was thereduring the golden age of paleoanthropology” (interview,July 30, 2007).

While at Berkeley for PhD studies, Kenneth continuedworking under the direction of McCown, and when it cametime to choose a dissertation project, he was faced with twoattractive possibilities. Louis Leakey invited him to work onthe Kaiso bone beds near Lake Albert in western Uganda,but shortly thereafter Kenneth Oakley at the BritishMuseum invited him to work on fossil skeletal materialsfrom Sri Lanka. He chose to do his dissertation research onthe South Asian materials rather than to work with Leakeyin Africa, principally because he felt that there were moreopportunities for independent investigation in Asia than inAfrica due to so many anthropologists and paleontologistsworking in Africa at that time. Another reason was that hisfirst wife, Mary Marino, a linguist, was interested in Dra-vidian languages. He spent ten months in London workingon the Sri Lanka skeletal material, returned from England in1961, and was awarded the PhD in mid-1962. The next twoyears were spent in India on an NSF postdoc fellowship atDeccan College in Poona. He was then offered a faculty posi-tion at Cornell University by Alan Holmberg, then chair, inthe spring of 1964. In the years that followed, he conductedfield research on prehistoric ecology and evolution in SriLanka at Bellanbandi Palassa and Pomparippu field sites andat the Colombo Museum (1970); at field sites in Poona, India(1971–73); and at field sites in Pakistan and at the Universityof Islamabad (1976–77). He also conducted research and

220 American Anthropologist • Vol. 117, No. 1 • March 2015

visited Deccan College, Poona; the University of Allahabad,Allahabad; and Vikram University, Ujjain in India (1980–81). He was the biological anthropologist on the CaliforniaArchaeological Expedition to Harappa, Pakistan, and con-ducted further field research in India at Upper Paleolithichominin sites in Sri Lanka and Megalithic Iron Age sites inIndia (1987–88). Many of these field research trips to SriLanka, India, and Pakistan were punctuated with brief or ex-tended visits to the British Museum to study their collectionsof South Asian skeletal remains and artifacts. In additionto his field research to South Asia and museum research inEngland during this period, Kenneth had many visiting aca-demic appointments to institutions in the United States andabroad.

At the same time as Kenneth was immersed in SouthAsian paleoanthropology and prehistory, he was actively en-gaged in forensic anthropology in the United States, analyz-ing local and regional cases in the northeast and serving as anexpert witness in numerous criminal cases. He was one of theearliest elected members and certified holders of the Diplo-mate in Forensic Anthropology (1978) from the AmericanBoard of Forensic Anthropologists of the American Academyof Forensic Sciences (AAFS). In 1987 he was presented withthe T. Dale Stewart Award for Forensic Anthropology by theAAFS, and in 1994 and 1995 he served as chair of the phys-ical anthropology section of the academy. After receivingthe diplomate accreditation, he became the primary consul-tant on forensic cases for the Tompkins County, New York,medical examiner. He also participated in forensic casesand worked with law enforcement officials in other parts ofNew York State, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut,Massachusetts, and Kentucky. As his field research in SouthAsia wound down in the early 1990s, Kenneth devoted moreeffort to forensic cases and writing and struck a balance be-tween continued analysis and synthesis of his South Asiandata and his forensic methods and forensic cases publications(Kennedy 1994, 1995, 1996). There were connections alsobetween his South Asian work overseas and his forensic workin the United States: for example, his interests in the effectsof occupational stress on the skeleton.

Throughout Kenneth’s 50-year-long career, most ofwhich was spent at Cornell University, his publication rateand overall productivity were remarkable. He publishednearly 200 articles and book chapters, 21 books and mono-graphs, and 76 book reviews: at the time of his death, afterten years of retirement, still he had four works in press. Hisfirst and last books dealt with the history of evolution andbiological anthropology, another area of interest in which hetaught and published. He edited Climbing Man’s Family Tree(McCown and Kennedy 1972) with his former mentor, whodied several years before publication. This book traced, asnoted in the subtitle, major writings in human evolution from1699 to 1971; today the book is still a valuable referencework. His last book, Histories of American Physical Anthropol-ogy in the Twentieth Century (Little and Kennedy 2010), cele-brated a symposium that he and I organized to mark the 75th

anniversary of the American Association of Physical Anthro-pologists. The book of which Kenneth was most proud is hissynthesis of his own and others studies of paleoanthropologyin South Asia: God-Apes and Fossil Men (Kennedy 2000). Thebook, which covered the prehistory of South Asia from Pale-olithic to Megalithic and early historic periods, was awardedthe W. W. Howells Medal from the biological anthropol-ogy section of the American Anthropological Association.As one reviewer noted, “Along with the most recent andcomprehensive summary in print on the South Asian fos-sil hominids, Kennedy supplies information from his ownextensive work in the region and research by South Asianscholars not readily available outside of the subcontinent”(Hawkey 2002:361). Not only does the volume synthesizean enormous amount of research, but Kenneth’s generosityand sensitivity in recognizing and praising the work of hisSouth Asian colleagues is commendable.

Kenneth was a warm and generous mentor, and hewas committed to teaching, education, and maintaining highstandards for students’ work—standards that he set by hisown example. Generosity and warmth toward his studentswere prime attributes that were recognized during his re-tirement celebration in September of 2005, when studentsfrom all over the United States came to Ithaca to pay tributeto their former advisor and mentor. Former students alsoorganized a festschrift symposium at the annual meeting ofthe American Anthropological Association in November of2008. At these occasions, he was identified as a “gentlemanof integrity,” “a great teacher,” and “an individual who gener-ously shared his knowledge.” Over his full career, Kennethtrained a dozen or more PhD students at Cornell and men-tored many more. These students and former students wereoften coauthors on his articles, books, and monographs; inaddition, many of his articles were coauthored also with hisSouth Asian colleagues.

Despite the time that he devoted to teaching, mentor-ing, field research, and scholarship, Kenneth was also a “goodprofessional citizen,” contributing generously to his home in-stitution and to the broader fields of anthropology and Asianstudies. He was a member of nearly 20 professional societiesand held offices in a number of them: the biological anthro-pology section of the AAA (chairman, 1986–88); the physicalanthropology section of the American Academy of ForensicSciences (chairman, 1994–95); the American Associationof Physical Anthropologists (vice president, 1994–96); andseveral other offices held over the years. He was also electedas a fellow of the American Association for the Advancementof Science in 1992. Kenneth moved from the CornellAnthropology Department to the Department of Ecologyand Systematics (now the Department of Ecology andEvolutionary Biology) in 1981. The circumstances of themove were painful to Kenneth because of his close identityas an anthropologist. However, his new departmentwas welcoming, and he fully enjoyed the more than 25years that he spent there. When he retired in 2005, hehad senior faculty appointments in the Departments of

Obituaries 221

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology, andAsian Studies—these three academic units reflected wellhis professional and intellectual interests.

The two most important people in Kenneth’s life wereTheordore D. McCown, his late Berkeley mentor and friendto whose memory he dedicated his South Asian synthesisbook, and his second wife of 44 years, Margaret CarrickFairlie Kennedy. Margaret and Kenneth had no children; in-stead, they traveled together widely and led lives of adven-ture and scholarly productivity. Margaret’s contributionsto Kenneth’s research were acknowledged in many of hispublications, and Margaret also enjoyed the successes of hermodern music compositions. The two were totally devotedto one another, and it is not surprising that Kenneth’s deathfollowed Margaret’s by only four months. Among my ownrecollections of Kenneth are a congenial collaboration on abook, his visits and guest lectures in forensic anthropologyfor Dawnie Steadman at Binghamton, and my quarterly visitsto Cornell to have lunch with Kenneth at the Statler Hotel.Of those many visits, he only allowed me to pick up thecheck once.

Kenneth Kennedy was distinguished and highly re-spected for his remarkably long, creative, productive, andinfluential career as a teacher, researcher, and writer inmany fields, including general physical anthropology, prehis-toric archaeology, paleoanthropology of South Asia, skeletalbiology, forensic anthropology, and the history of physicalanthropology. He will be remembered fondly by his friends,colleagues, and former students. His death is a loss to an-thropology and to research in South Asia.

Michael A. Little Department of Anthropology, Binghamton

University, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY 13902

NOTEAcknowledgments. I wish to thank Leslie Sponsel, NancyLovell, Peg Caldwell-Ott, Jere Haas, Diane Hawkey, and BrookeThomas, who commented on this obituary. Their suggestions areappreciated.

REFERENCES CITEDHawkey, Diane E.

2002 Review of God-Apes and Fossil Men: Paleoanthropology inSouth Asia by Kenneth A. R. Kennedy. American Anthropol-ogist 104(1):360–361.

Kennedy, Kenneth A. R.1994 Identification of Sacrificial and Massacre Victims in Archae-

ological Sites: The Skeletal Evidence. Man and Environment19(1–2):247–251.

1995 But Professor, Why Teach Race Identification if Races Don’tExist? Journal of Forensic Sciences 40(5):796–800.

1996 The Wrong Urn: Commingling of Cremains in Mor-tuary Practices. Journal of Forensic Sciences 41(4):689–692.

2000 God-Apes and Fossil Men: Paleoanthropology in South Asia.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kennedy, Kenneth A. R., and Sheilagh T. Brooks1984 Theodore D. McCown: A Perspective on a Physical Anthro-

pologist. Current Anthropology 25(1):99–103.Little, Michael A., and Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, eds.

2010 Histories of American Physical Anthropology in the Twen-tieth Century. Lanham: Lexington.

McCown, Theodore D., and Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, eds.1972 Climbing Man’s Family Tree: A Collection of Major Writ-

ings on Human Phylogeny, 1699 to 1971. Englewood Cliffs:Prentice-Hall.

Clyde Snow in the field during the late 1980s, conducting humanrights investigations. (Photo courtesy of Angela Berg, from the

personal collection of Clyde Collins Snow)

Clyde Collins Snow (1928–2014)

Clyde Collins Snow, a renowned pioneer in forensic anthro-pology who used his science to advocate for human rights,died on May 16, 2014, in Norman, Oklahoma. He assistedwith high-profile cases including the identification of Naziwar criminal Josef Mengele, analyzed radiographs of JohnF. Kennedy following his assassination, provided testimonyregarding evidence of genocide against Saddam Hussein, andidentified victims of human rights violations across the globe,often with the families of the victims by his side. He consultedon over 3,000 skeletal cases in the United States and abroadand helped found and train multiple forensic anthropologyteams to carry out human rights investigations throughoutLatin America. He unfailingly spoke the truth in the pursuitof justice, for the living and dead.

Clyde Snow was born on January 7, 1928, in FortWorth, Texas, and grew up in the Texas panhandle, sur-rounded by nature and exposed to science from an earlyage. His father, Wister Clyde Snow, a medical doctor,met Clyde’s mother, Mary Collins, while providing medicaltreatment to orphaned children. Shortly after Clyde’s birth,the family moved west. They lived briefly in Muleshoe,Texas, a town that Mary was not fond of because of itsname, and they later settled in Ralls, Texas. It was not un-common for Clyde’s father to run EKGs on catfish in theirbathtub or to bring home wounded wildlife and nurse them

222 American Anthropologist • Vol. 117, No. 1 • March 2015

to health. Clyde had a pet roadrunner that imprinted on himand a lamb named Eleanor Roosevelt. He also developedan affection for snakes, which would later lead to an MAin herpetology. Clyde was expelled from Ralls High Schoolfor setting off cherry bombs in school lockers. (Despite hisexpulsion, in 1991 he was presented with the outstandingalumnus award for the class of 1945, an award of whichhe was most proud.) He completed high school in 1945 atthe New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, staying onthere for two years of junior college.

Clyde continued college at Eastern New Mexico Uni-versity, receiving a BS degree in 1951. After graduating heattended Baylor Medical School, where he reportedly walkedout the door one day to take a break and never returned. Hethen moved to Texas Tech University and obtained a MA inherpetology in 1954 with a thesis on “The Spermatogenesisof Bufo boreas.” This was followed by three years as a lieu-tenant in the United States Air Force Medical Service Corpsat Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

Clyde’s formal initiation into anthropology began atArizona State University, where he first declared an inten-tion to study archaeology but gravitated toward physicalanthropology under the direction of Fred Hulse. Despitethis specialization, his doctoral education was four field, asevidenced by his fieldwork and publications on the culture,human biology, and genetic variation of the Tarahumara inNorthern Mexico (e.g., Balke and Snow 1965; Paredeset al. 1970). His dissertation research, which was carriedout in Puerto Rico, focused on primates (“The PhysicalGrowth and Development of the Open-Landed Baboon,Papio doguera”; 1961). While at Arizona State, he gained afundamental understanding of method, theory, and advancesin physical anthropology (Brues and Snow 1965), but he alsoincorporated archaeology into his academic training and ul-timately into his forensic investigations (Scott 2001). Hewas always attuned to technological innovations, and laterhe readily adopted computer technology.

Before finishing his dissertation research, in 1961 Clydewas contacted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)Civil Aerospace Medical Institute and offered a job. He beganas a research physical anthropologist, and shortly after earn-ing his PhD in 1967, he was promoted to chief of the Phys-ical Anthropology Laboratory. His knowledge of growthand development and human variation, combined with histechnological savvy and skills in quantitative methods, ledto significant improvements in airline safety for pilots, flightattendants, and passengers and provided him with hands-onexperience in forensic anthropology. Clyde’s investigativeresearch on survivorship in multiple airline crashes, coupledwith his anthropometric studies of pilots, flight attendants,and the U.S. population at large, led him and his colleaguesto the conclusions that there were too few exits in economyclass, aisle widths were too narrow for emergency evacua-tion, and exit signs were inadequate (Hasbrook et al. 1962;Snow and Snyder 1965; Snow et al. 1970a). Their recom-mendations were acknowledged by the FAA.

Clyde’s research at the FAA was applied but alwaysincorporated theory and method in the study of human vari-ation. In 1982, he and his colleagues used an early model dig-itizer to collect landmark-based data from human pelvises,which were used to make 3D scale models for the pur-pose of creating realistic crash-test dummies (Reynoldset al. 1982). This technology was new at the time, andit was almost certainly the first use of geometric morpho-metric research within a forensic anthropological frame-work. These data were presented in a way that alsoprovided information about the sexual dimorphism andvariation of the U.S. population. While working on massdisasters such as airline crashes, Clyde was able to test ex-isting methods for utility in estimating the biological profile(Snow et al. 1979).

Called in to assist on the 1979 crash of AmericanAirlines Flight 191 in Chicago (which has been described asthe nation’s deadliest aviation accident resulting from me-chanical failure), Clyde set up a computerized database sys-tem that could run queries to help sort commingled remainsand also to compare antemortem and postmortem informa-tion (see Joyce and Stover 1991). Working with a team ofradiologists, pathologists, and dentists, Clyde helped identify89 percent of the victims. Although now ubiquitous, the useof databases was uncommon at the time. Clyde continued toinnovate with his knowledge of the human form and with theartistic talents of Betty Pat Gatliff. The two pioneered theuse of forensic facial approximation for unidentified humanremains. At the time, there were no databases of missingand unidentified persons or DNA identification technology,and facial approximation was the best chance for cold caseidentification. Gatliff would undertake the facial approxima-tions in consultation with Clyde, and the two began rigorousstudies testing its utility under the auspice of the FAA (Gatliffand Snow 1979; Snow et al. 1970b).

While at the FAA, Clyde would consult on homicides,identifications, and trauma interpretations for the OklahomaCity Medical Examiner’s Office (see Foote 2014), includ-ing the 1967 child disappearances in Oklahoma City (Snowand Luke 1970). Before long, other medicolegal agenciesaround the country took note of Clyde’s talents. In 1979,Clyde retired from the FAA to become an independentconsultant in forensic anthropology. In 1983 he acceptedan appointment as adjunct research professor in the Depart-ment of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, whichprovided him the opportunity for student mentorship. Hisstudents remember every interaction with him as a learningexperience. His retirement years proved busy and fruitful, ashe provided consults for 36 states and 15 foreign countries.When the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in OklahomaCity was attacked in 1995, claiming the lives of 167 individ-uals, he worked tirelessly to identify victims. Clyde viewedevery forensic case he worked on as human rights case, withone goal in mind—to tell the truth (Angela Berg, personalcommunication with author, September 9, 2014). Whetherfor the prosecution or the defense, his testimony was always

Obituaries 223

the truth. Clyde’s factual testimony for a defendant facingdeath row in California resulted in the accused being set free.

Clyde’s knowledge of and work in forensic anthropologypreceded the academic development of the field. In 1982, hewrote a review article entitled “Forensic Anthropology” justas the field was transitioning into a formal subdiscipline. Thearticle aimed to provide the nonspecialist with informationabout the discipline and its past, present, and future. Thirty-years later, this article is still relevant, and its commonsenseapproach remains useful for students interested in a future inforensic anthropology. While promoting the discipline andencouraging students, Clyde cautioned that the four-fieldapproach to anthropology must always come first.

In June of 1984, following Argentina’s Dirty War, theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science sentClyde to Argentina to investigate the Disappeared, individ-uals who were abducted, tortured, and murdered by deathsquads when the country was under military dictatorship.He testified against nine generals and admirals who ruledArgentina during the repression. His testimony was the firstuse of forensic evidence in a human rights trial, and it re-sulted in six convictions. Fourteen years later, he providedthe first forensic expert witness testimony before a UnitedNations War Crimes Tribunal, concerning a mass grave thatwas forensically documented as evidence of ethnic cleansingin the Former Yugoslavia. He assisted in similar missionsin Brazil, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, El Salvador, Ethiopia,Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, the Philip-pines, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Iraqi Kurdistan, the DemocraticRepublic of Congo, and Zimbabwe.

At the request of the National Commission on the Dis-appearance of Persons, Clyde returned to Argentina to traina local team of six students to excavate burials and analyzehuman remains to identify the Disappeared and to docu-ment evidence on the cause and manner of death. The ini-tial team members trained by Clyde eventually became theEquipo Argentino de Antropologıa Forense, which appliesforensic anthropology and archaeology to the investigationof human rights in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eu-rope (http://www.eaaf.org). In 1991, Clyde recruited fiveGuatemalan students to form a team now known as theFundacion de Antropologıa Forense de Guatemala, whichfacilitates exhumations, documentation of evidence, andidentification of victims of Guatemala’s Civil War (Snow etal. 2008). He also helped to set up forensic anthropologyteams in Chile and Peru. Clyde’s role in building a LatinAmerican forensic anthropology has had far-reaching effects;the teams that he helped found have aided in human rightsinvestigations in over 34 countries.

Clyde was married three times: to Donna Herrig,Loudell Fromme, and his wife of 44 years, Jerry WhistlerSnow. He had four daughters and a son, eight grandchildren,and eight great-grandchildren.

Clyde Snow’s groundbreaking work in forensic anthro-pology, using a multidisciplinary approach, helped shape adiscipline, one that is both academic and applied and that

has a significant social impact. His work on behalf of inter-national human rights and justice will live on through thestudents he mentored and the teams he founded. His effortshave been honored through the creation of the Clyde SnowJustice Award at the University of Oklahoma. The ClydeC. Snow Forensic Anthropology Collection is currently cu-rated in the Department of Anthropology at the Universityof Oklahoma.

Kate Spradley Department of Anthropology, Texas State

University, San Marcos, TX 78666

NOTEAcknowledgments. The author is grateful for an interview withJerry Whistler Snow and thoughtful reflections from Angela Berg andMercedes Doretti.

REFERENCES CITEDBalke, Bruno, and Clyde Snow

1965 Anthropological and Physiological Observations on Tarahu-mara Endurance Runners. American Journal of Physical An-thropology 23(3):293–301.

Brues, Alice M., and Clyde C. Snow1965 Physical Anthropology. Biennial Review of Anthropology

4:1–39.Foote, Jody Bales

2014 Profiles in Science for Science Librarians: Clyde Snow:Forensic Anthropologist, Social Justice Advocate, and Su-per Sleuth. Science and Technology Libraries 33(3):213–227.

Gatliff, Betty P., and Clyde C. Snow1979 From Skull to Visage. The Journal of Biocommunication

6(2):27–30.Hasbrook, A. Howard, J. D. Garner, and Clyde C. Snow

1962 Evacuation Pattern Analysis of a Survivable CommercialAircraft Crash. Office of Aviation Medicine Report. OklahomaCity: Federal Aviation Agency Civil Aeromedical ResearchInstitute.

Joyce, Christopher, and Eric Stover1991 Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell. Boston:

Little, Brown.Paredes, Alfonso, Louis Jolyon West, and Clyde Collins Snow

1970 Biosocial Adaptation and Correlates of Acculturation in theTarahumara Ecosystem. International Journal of Social Psychi-atry 16(3):163–174.

Reynolds, Herbert M., Clyde C. Snow, and Joseph W. Young1982 Spatial Geometry of the Human Pelvis. Washington, DC:

Federal Aviation Administration.Scott, Douglas

2001 Firearms Identification in Support of Identifying a MassExecution at El Mozote, El Salvador. Historical Archaeology35(1):79–86.

Snow, Clyde Collins1954 The Spermatogenesis of Bufo boreas. Thesis. Texas Technical

College.

224 American Anthropologist • Vol. 117, No. 1 • March 2015

1961 The Physical Growth and Development of the Open-LandedBaboon, Papio doguera. PhD dissertation, Department of An-thropology, Arizona State University.

1982 Forensic Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology11:97–131.

Snow, Clyde C., and J. L. Luke1970 The Oklahoma City Child Disappearances of 1967: Forensic

Anthropology in the Identification of Skeletal Remains. Journalof Forensic Sciences 15(2):125–153.

Snow, Clyde C., and Richard G. Snyder1965 Anthropometry of Air Traffic Control Trainees. Office of

Aviation Medicine Report. Oklahoma City: Federal AvaiationAgency.

Snow, Clyde C., John J. Carroll, and Mackie A. Allgood1970a Survivial in Emergency Escape from Passenger Aircraft.

Office of Aviation Medicine Report. Oklahoma City: FederalAviation Administration Office of Aviation Medicine.

Snow, Clyde C., Betty P. Gatliff, and Kenneth R. McWilliams1970b Reconstruction of Facial Features from the Skull: An Eval-

uation of Its Usefulness in Forensic Anthropology. AmericanJournal of Physical Anthropology 33(2):221–227.

Snow, Clyde C., Steve Hartman, Eugene Giles, and Fontaine A.Young

1979 Sex and Race Determination of Crania by Calipers and Com-puter: A Test of the Giles and Elliot Discriminant Functionsin 52 Forensic Cases. Office of Aviation Medicine Report.Washington, DC: Federal Aviation Administration Office ofAviation Medicine.

Snow, Clyde Collins, Fredy Armando Peccerelli, Jose Samuel Su-sanavar, Alan G. Robinson, and Jose Maria Najera Ochoa

2008 Hidden in Plain Sight: X.X. Burials and the Desaparecidosin the Department of Guatemala, 1977–1986. In StatisticalMethods for Human Rights. Jana Asher, David Banks, andFritz J. Scheuren, eds. Pp. 89–116. New York: Springer.