We sadly report the passing of former AAA president Walter Goldschmidt, who died Wednesday, September 1, 2010, at the age of 97. The following biography is to appear in the forthcoming publication from the Association of Senior Anthropologists at the University of Alabama Press, edited by Alice Kehoe and Paul L. Doughty, entitled Expanding American Anthropology 1945-1980: A Generation Reflects.  Goldschmidt’s chapter is entitled, “Anthropology and the Business Cycle (or, The Rise from Student Rags to Academic Riches).” AAA thanks Paul Doughty for sharing the biography here.

Walter R. Goldschmidt was born in Texas in 1913 and spent his early years in San Antonio. He earned his BA (1933) and MA (1935) degrees from the University of Texas, and a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in 1942. His dissertation research on farming towns in the San Joaquin Valley, California inaugurated a long anthropological career. After his doctorate, he conducted applied research for the US Department of Agriculture, major study resulting in his famous book, As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness (1947). Subsequently he worked for the USDA Bureau of Agricultural Economics. Since 1946 Goldschmidt has been professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles where he made innovative contributions in teaching, undertook wide-ranging research endeavors from Alaska to Africa. His longtime classroom favorite was the set of recorded 26 half-hour radio dramatizations, from 1951-54, of anthropological concepts and perceptions called, “Ways of Mankind” which he directed for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. His interest in ecology and cultural evolution were expressed in his book Man’s Way (1959).  His diverse interests include cultural ecology, cultural evolution and theory as well as human emotional and behavioral development, agriculture and applied uses of anthropology.  A prolific and stimulating writer, Goldschmidt has written, co-authored and edited some 28 books.  Representative of those are:  Comparative Functionalism (1966); Seibei Law (1967); The Uses of Anthropology (1979); Kambuya's Cattle: The Legacy of an African Herdsman (1969), The Culture and Behavior of the Seibei (1976), The Seibei: A Study in Adaptation (1985); and Haa Aani, Our Land: Tlingit and Haida Land Rights and Use (1946, 1998, with T. H. Haas) and The Human Career (1990). His most recent book The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene (2005) unites biological and cultural anthropology to explain human evolution.  Goldschmidt was Chair  of Anthropology at UCLA (1964-69), helped organize the African Studies Association, the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and the Anthropological Film Research Institute. He was elected President of the American Anthropological Association (1976), American Ethnological Society (1971), Southwestern Anthropological Association (1951), and Executive Board founding member, African Studies Association (1957-60). In 2001 he was awarded the Malinowski Medal of the Society for Applied Anthropology.