John Uzo Ogbu (1939–2003)

Obituaries

Linda S. and Robert J. Braidwood, 1985. (courtesy of the Universityof Chicago News Office)

Robert John Braidwood (1907–2003)

PATTY JO WATSONWashington University, St. Louis

Robert Braidwood’s career was devoted to investigation ofone of the most significant transitions in the human past:from hunting-gathering-foraging of wild plants and ani-mals to agriculture and pastoralism. Beginning with thework he conceived and directed at the prehistoric villagesite of Jarmo in northern Iraq, he spent half a century car-rying out interdisciplinary research on that problem in Iraq,Iran, and Turkey. His 1950s Iraq-Jarmo Project, and the pub-lications based on it, were so well known that for severaldecades during the mid–20th century, anthropology stu-dents were required to display knowledge about Jarmo and“the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent.” That phrase wasBraidwood’s description of the mountain foothill localeswhere he believed the world’s first village farming com-munities were established—places like Jarmo, where wildwheat, barley, and legumes grew and wild goats, sheep,pigs, and cattle roamed. Such sedentary communities, hethought, laid the economic foundations for development ofBronze Age civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain.

American Anthropologist, Vol. 106, Issue 3, pp. 642–649, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C© 2004 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street,Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

Robert John Braidwood was born in 1907 in Detroit,Michigan. His father was a pharmacist; his father’s brotherwas a medical doctor in central Michigan who collectedAmerican Indian artifacts. In a short autobiographical ac-count published in 1981, Braidwood refers to this collec-tion of his uncle’s and to a science course he took in highschool as his earliest awareness of archaeology as a field ofstudy. His own initial ambitions, however, were directedelsewhere, specifically toward architecture, in which he ob-tained certification at the University of Michigan in 1929.But owing to economic effects of the Great Depression, hewas never employed as a professional architect. Instead, hereturned to the University of Michigan to pursue advancedstudy in anthropology. In the spring of 1930 he enrolledin an ancient history class. The instructor, Leroy Water-man, when not on campus, was directing the Michiganexcavations at a large site near Baghdad, Iraq (Selucia-on-the-Tigris, whose modern name is Tell Umar). Braidwoodused his recently acquired skills as an architectural drafts-man to create such a fine product for one of the class as-signments (“draw up a chronological chart for the ancientNear East”) that Waterman invited him to Tell Umar as ex-pedition draftsman for the 1930–31 field season. Braidwoodaccepted. After that initial experience in Iraq, he completedhis B.A. (1932) and M.A. (1933) in anthropology at Michi-gan. In 1933, he was hired by James Henry Breasted, found-ing director of the Oriental Institute at the University ofChicago, the institution with which Braidwood was affili-ated for the rest of his life.

Braidwood’s first assignment as a new Oriental Institutefield archaeologist was to join the Syrian-Hittite expeditionto the ‘Amuq (the Plain of Antioch, then in Syria but trans-ferred to Turkey in 1937). From 1933 to 1937, he supervisedlarge excavations at big mounds in the ‘Amuq. He also ini-tiated a regional study—unheard of in western Asia at thattime, when long-term digs at large individual sites were thenorm. The study was very successful and provided the basisof his first major publication (1937). Meanwhile, on the re-turn voyage from Syria and Europe in 1936, he encountereda young woman whom he had met casually during theirundergraduate years at the University of Michigan, LindaSchreiber. A shipboard romance ensued, with the happy

Obituaries 643

result that Bob and Linda were married in January of 1937.From then on, they were a team in all aspects of their do-mestic and professional lives. Their 66 years of collaborationand partnership began during the fall of 1937 at Tabbat al-Hammam, a site on the Mediterranean shore of Syria (Braid-wood and Braidwood 1940). Among other aspects of theirwork on the Syrian coast, they documented a submergedancient boat landing. Their observations qualified them aspioneer underwater archaeologists in the eastern Mediter-ranean.

During World War II, at the request of the Universityof Chicago, Bob Braidwood directed a meteorological map-ping project for the Army Air Corps. He also completed adoctorate in archaeology at the Oriental Institute (1943) onthe basis of materials from his ‘Amuq excavations (Braid-wood and Braidwood 1960). Linda, who had a MichiganB.A. (1932), earned a Master’s degree at Chicago in 1946,but she was barred both from pursuing a Ph.D. and fromofficial employment at the university by the rules on nepo-tism in force at the time.

By the end of World War II, Bob Braidwood had ac-cepted a full-time faculty position at the Oriental Institute,as well as a joint appointment in the Anthropology De-partment at the University of Chicago. With the OrientalInstitute post went the understanding that his PrehistoricProject would engage in fieldwork every third year, so theBraidwoods began scouting for a suitable research locale.Thorkild Jacobsen, who was then Oriental Institute Direc-tor, suggested Iraq. The uplands of northern Iraq, in thefoothills of the Zagros Mountains, appealed to Bob becauseof ideas he was developing about how to test V. GordonChilde’s formulations concerning the Neolithic or Agricul-tural Revolution in the Near East. Childe had written per-suasively about the great significance of the shift from de-pendence on wild species to reliance on the produce of do-mestic plants and animals. Braidwood reasoned that thismajor prehistoric transition should be visible archaeolog-ically. He and Linda designed a project to find empiricalremains of early domesticates at archaeological sites in theZagros foothills of northern Iraq. After a season of recon-naissance and test digs in 1948, the Oriental Institute’s Iraq-Jarmo Project carried out a full nine-month season (1950–51) at Jarmo in Iraqi Kurdistan (Braidwood 1953). Havingfound evidence of the floral and faunal remains he sought,Braidwood was encouraged to apply for a major grant fromthe newly established National Science Foundation. Thefunds he was awarded, the first NSF grant ever made forfieldwork in Old World archaeology, supported a third Iraqiseason in 1954–55.

The Iraq-Jarmo Project (Braidwood 1974) gained last-ing fame as the first interdisciplinary archaeological enter-prise in any part of western or inner Asia since RaphaelPumpelly’s Anau expedition (Pumpelly 1908). Included onits field staff were specialists in various natural sciences: ar-chaeobotany (Hans Helbaek), geology (Herbert Wright), andradiocarbon dating and ceramic technology (Frederick Mat-son). Braidwood’s grant proposal to NSF not only secured

funding for the Project’s 1954–55 field season but also setthe conceptual framework for all subsequent field and labo-ratory research designed and carried out by the Braidwoods.For many years, 8,500-year-old Jarmo was the earliest farm-ing and pastoral community known anywhere in the world,and the Iraq-Jarmo Project itself became the methodologi-cal template for interdisciplinary archaeological research inboth Old and New Worlds. The widespread and continuinginfluence of the work at Jarmo is illustrated by the fact thatin 1995 Braidwood was presented with the Fryxell Medalfor Interdisciplinary Research by the Society for AmericanArchaeology, a professional organization to which he hadnever belonged (although he was a long-time member ofthe American Anthropological Association and had servedon its executive board).

As a result of the nationalist revolution and subsequentpolitical developments in Iraq, the Braidwoods never re-turned to Jarmo after 1955. They spent their next field sea-son (1959–60) across the border in western Iran, and in 1963moved to southeastern Turkey, where they worked withProfessor Halet Cambel of Istanbul University to create theJoint Turkish Prehistoric Project-Istanbul/Chicago, based inErgani, Diyarbakır Vilayet. The remarkable site of Cayonu(Braidwood and Braidwood 1982) was and still is the pri-mary focus of that research. Thus far, Cayonu—which isseveral hundred years older than Jarmo—has yielded theearliest evidence for handworked copper, the oldest clothfragment, and the earliest terrazzo floor yet known, as wellas an amazing array of architectural, artifactual, and ecofac-tual remains.

Bob Braidwood officially retired from the Oriental In-stitute and the University of Chicago in 1978, but he andLinda continued journeying to Cayonu and elsewhere inTurkey to do research and to teach for nearly 20 moreyears. For the past four decades, the Joint Istanbul-ChicagoTurkish Prehistoric Project has been a model for interna-tional, interdisciplinary archaeological collaboration, as theIraq-Jarmo Project was in the 1950s. Research at Cayonuand its environs continues under supervision of ProfessorMehmet Ozdogan of Istanbul University, a former studentof Halet Cambel’s and a young colleague of the Braidwoodsduring the first Cayonu seasons.

Although Robert Braidwood is best known for his con-tributions to knowledge about the food-producing revolu-tion in Southwest Asia, he also initiated or encouraged otheradvances now central to his discipline. One of the Univer-sity of Chicago student field assistants at Jarmo in 1950–51was Fredrik Barth, then working toward a Ph.D. in physicalanthropology, who was in charge of all osteological finds,human and nonhuman. Barth had also agreed to undertakesome ethnographic work during the summer of 1951 afterthe Jarmo season ended, with support from the Universityof Oslo’s Ethnographic Museum. Braidwood had high hopesthat Barth would document architectural, artifactual, andeconomic information of relevance to interpreting ancientagricultural/pastoral communities like Jarmo, but Barth’sresearch and his anthropological specialty took a different

644 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 3 • September 2004

trajectory (Barth 1953). The archaeologically orientedethnography that Braidwood wanted was left for subse-quent generations of his students and younger colleagues(David and Kramer 2001).

Prior to the 1950–51 Iraq-Jarmo Project season, LindaBraidwood heard about research then under way at the Uni-versity of Chicago Physics Department concerning use of aradioactive carbon isotope to date ancient organic mate-rial. The Braidwoods followed up on this information andarranged for physicist Willard Libby to be given some testsamples from the Oriental Institute. One of these turnedout to be from a 19th-century fake, but the specimens pro-vided by the Braidwoods played an important role in devel-opment of the radiocarbon-dating technique. During the1950s, Libby dated several samples from various Iraq-JarmoProject sites, thus establishing the first absolute (as distinctfrom relative) chronological framework for the earliest agri-cultural villages in northern Mesopotamia. Libby was even-tually awarded a Nobel Prize for inventing 14C dating.

Besides the Fryxell Medal, Braidwood was the recipientof many other honors, including the Legion of Honor andelection to the National Academy of Sciences, the AmericanPhilosophical Society, the Society of Antiquaries, and theRoyal Society. Although appreciative of these and otherawards recognizing his numerous scholarly contributionsto Near Eastern prehistory and to archaeological methodand theory internationally, Bob was happiest when heand Linda were engaged in the day-to-day challenges andtriumphs of fieldwork in the hilly flanks of the FertileCrescent.

Robert J. Braidwood and his wife, Linda S. Braidwood,formed a vigorous and charismatic archaeological teamfrom the time of their marriage in 1937 to their lastfieldwork seasons in Turkey during the 1990s. They diedwithin hours of each other in Chicago on January 15,2003. The Braidwoods will be long remembered not onlyfor their numerous highly significant publications but alsofor their generous nurturing of students and younger col-leagues and for the joyful enthusiasm they poured into theirwork.

NOTESAcknowledgments. Gretel Braidwood and Ray Tindel kindly pro-vided some of the information included in this obituary.

REFERENCES CITEDBarth, Fredrik

1953 Principles of Social Organization in Southern Kurdistan.Museum Bulletin, no. 7. Oslo: Universitetets Etnografiske.

Braidwood, Linda1953 Digging beyond the Tigris. New York: Henry Schuman.

Braidwood, Linda, and Robert J. Braidwood, eds.1982 Prehistoric Village Archaeology in South-Eastern Turkey.

B.A.R. International Series, 138.Braidwood, Robert J.

1937 Mounds in the Plain of Antioch: An Archaeological Survey.Oriental Institute Publication, 48. Chicago: Oriental Institute.

1974 The Iraq Jarmo Project. In Archaeological Researches inRetrospect. Gordon R. Willey, ed. Pp. 61–83. Cambridge, MA:Winthrop Publishers.

1981 Archaeological Retrospect 2. Antiquity 55(213):19–26.Braidwood, Robert J., and Linda S. Braidwood

1940 Report on Two Sondages on the Coast of Syria South ofTartous. Syria 21:222–226.

1960 Excavations in the Plain of Antioch, 1: The Earlier Assem-blages. A–J. Oriental Institute Publication, 61. Chicago: Orien-tal Institute.

Cambel, Halet, and Robert J. Braidwood1980 Prehistoric Research in Southeastern Anatolia, 1. Publica-

tion 2589. Istanbul: University of Istanbul Faculty of LettersPress.

Clark, Geoffrey A.2003 Obituary for Robert John Braidwood (1907–2003) and

Linda Schreiber Braidwood (1909–2003). Neo-Lithics, theNewsletter of Southwestern Asian Neolithic Research 1/03:3–7.

David, Nicholas, and Carol Kramer2001 Ethnoarchaeology in Action. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press.Pumpelly, Raphael, ed.

1908 Explorations in Turkestan. Expedition of 1904. Civiliza-tions of Anau: Origins, Growth, and Influence of Environment.2 vols. Publication 73. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution.

Watson, Patty Jo1999 Robert John Braidwood (b. 1909). In Encyclopedia of Ar-

chaeology: The Great Archaeologists, vol. 2. Tim Murray, ed.Pp. 495–505. Oxford: ABC-CLIO.

John Uzo Ogbu. (courtesy of University of California, Berkeley)

John Uzo Ogbu (1939–2003)

MARGARET A. GIBSONUniversity of California, Santa Cruz

John Uzo Ogbu, one of the most influential scholars in thiscountry and abroad in the field of minority education, diedof a heart attack on August 20, 2003, following complicatedback surgery. Ogbu focused his richly comparative researchon the persistent achievement disparities between black andwhite Americans and on minority students’ success and fail-ure in schools.

Ogbu’s fields of specialization included Africa south ofthe Sahara, the anthropology of contemporary U.S. society,culture and cognition, urban anthropology, the anthropol-ogy of education, and minority education. His theoretical

Obituaries 645

framework for explaining variability in minority students’school performance became one of the two or three majororthodoxies in the anthropology of education (Anderson-Levitt 1997), and his work is among the most widely cited inboth anthropology and education. He was also one of thiscountry’s best-known anthropologists outside of academe.

Born on May 9, 1939, in Umuezikwu, a small rural vil-lage in Ebonyi, Nigeria, where his parents were farmers,Ogbu was one of the few foreign-born urban anthropolo-gists whose research was predominantly on contemporaryU.S. society. For his early education, Ogbu attended Pres-byterian mission schools, followed by a year in a teachers’training college. He later taught for two years at the highschool level. In 1961, as part of his plan to become a Presby-terian minister, he accepted a scholarship to study at Prince-ton Theological Seminary. Finding a need to know moreabout his own society, Ogbu transferred after one year tothe University of California, Berkeley, where he ultimatelyearned his B.A. (1965), M.A. (1969), and Ph.D. (1971) inanthropology.

In 1968, after passing his qualifying exams, Ogbu ex-pected to return to Africa to study urbanization in a city inKenya, but the outbreak of the Biafran Civil War in Nigeriacut off his source of funding from home. In need of workand an alternate dissertation project, he accepted a positionas an ethnographer with the Stockton, California, schools,as part of a team of outside consultants hired to help imple-ment bilingual education in this multiethnic school district.It was through this job that Ogbu first became interestedin the variability in minority students’ school achievementand in the black/white achievement gap.

In 1970, Ogbu was appointed as an assistant professorat the University of California, Berkeley. He received tenurein 1976 and was promoted to full professor in 1980. Heremained at Berkeley until his death.

For over three decades Ogbu unrelentingly pursued thequestion of why some groups of minority students are moresuccessful in school than others (1971, 1974, 1978, 1983,1987, 1991, 1995, 2003; Ogbu and Simons 1998). To answerthis question he developed a complex theory of minorityschooling that took into account “the historical, economic,social, cultural, and language or dialect situations of minor-ity groups in the larger society in which they exist” (Ogbu2003:45). As set forth in his cultural–ecological theory, mi-nority students’ engagement and performance in school areinfluenced by two sets of factors that influence the culturalmodels guiding student behavior in school: first, the natureof the history, subordination, and exploitation of the mi-nority group, including the terms by which it was incorpo-rated into the society of which it is now a part; and, second,the adaptive response, both instrumental and expressive,that the group has made to the subsequent discriminatorytreatment that it has experienced.

Based on his analysis, Ogbu identified two major typesof minorities, which he termed “immigrant minorities”: (1)those who have migrated to the new country voluntarily,along with their descendants, and (2) involuntary or “caste-

like” minorities. This latter group includes groups incorpo-rated into the host society involuntarily, most frequently bymeans of conquest, colonization, or slavery, and assigned asubordinate position within it. The major premises of hiswork were that “voluntary and involuntary minorities tendto interpret similar problems differently and forge differ-ent solutions to those problems” and that their differingperceptions and interpretations stem from their differentmodes of incorporation into the society in which they re-side (2003:51–52).

As a black African immigrant, he brought fresh in-sights to the field of minority education in the UnitedStates. His initial interest in studying minority-student un-derachievement derived in part from his reaction to thethen-prevailing explanations for African American chil-dren’s poor academic performance, which focused on ge-netic and cultural deficits. It also grew out of his rejectionof the cultural-differences explanation, which had and con-tinues to have wide currency among anthropologists of ed-ucation. In his seminal ethnography of a multiethnic ur-ban neighborhood in Stockton, California, Ogbu noted that“subordinate and immigrant minorities appear to differ inthe way they perceive American society and in how they re-spond to the education system” (1974:2). In his next path-breaking study (1978), he drew on cross-cultural researchin six countries to show that wide gaps in school achieve-ment exist in societies where there are no racial differences.He undertook this work in part to counter Arthur Jensen’s(1969) arguments that the black/white achievement gapwas because of genetic differences and to document howbarriers in the postschool opportunity structure shape mi-nority children’s perceptions of schooling and, in turn, theireffort in school. In addition to the Stockton study, Ogbucarried out field research in Oakland and Union City, Cali-fornia, and in Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent suburb ofCleveland.

Ogbu’s work, particularly in the early years, played amajor role in influencing scholars to reframe their questionsabout the school performance of minority children, to askwhy differences between home and school cultures posemore serious obstacles to academic success for some groupsthan for others. At a time in the 1970s and 1980s whenthe anthropology of education was not well known beyondthe membership of the Council on Anthropology and Ed-ucation, Ogbu brought national attention to the impor-tance of the questions anthropologists were asking aboutthe achievement gap and to the value of ethnographic re-search.

Ogbu received numerous honors and awards, includ-ing: the Society for Applied Anthropology’s first MargaretMead Award (1979); election as a Fellow of the AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of Science (1980); theAmerican Educational Research Association’s DistinguishedScholar Award (1985), as well as its Distinguished Contri-butions to Educational Research Award (1998); and elec-tion to the National Academy of Education (1990). TheUniversity of California, Berkeley, named him Alumni

646 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 3 • September 2004

Distinguished Professor in 1989 and Chancellor’s Professorin 1997. In 2003, the Council on Anthropology and Ed-ucation organized a special session around his work andnominated him to receive its highest honor, the Georgeand Louise Spindler Award; the award was made to himposthumously.

Ogbu was a productive and creative writer, rising earlyevery morning to begin writing. With four highly citedbooks (Ogbu 1974, 1978, 2003; Gibson and Ogbu 1991),some 40 journal articles, 60 book chapters, and over 300 in-vited presentations, his influence has been enormous. Hiswork has been translated into many foreign languages, in-cluding French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish,and stimulated numerous sessions at professional confer-ences. Beyond his scholarly publications, he was a prolificletter writer and correspondent. He had a great love of po-etry and was himself a poet.

Ogbu’s work was not without controversy. His rejec-tion of the cultural-differences explanation for minoritystudents’ academic difficulties became an early point ofdisagreement with some of his colleagues. A 1986 arti-cle coauthored with Signithia Fordham sparked furthercontroversy for its conclusion that black and Latino stu-dents’ resistance to “acting white” contributes to anti-school oppositional behaviors and, ultimately, results inlowered school performance. In addition, European schol-ars have sharply challenged Ogbu’s belief that his volun-tary/involuntary minority typology has heuristic value intheir countries. The dichotomous nature of his typologyhas also drawn fire from scholars in this country, whofind his framework too simplistic and unable to accountfor intragroup variability, including the academic successof many African American youth. Others have chargedthat his theory is overly deterministic and that his persis-tent focus on community forces can be misread as “blam-ing the victim” and seriously underplays the impact ofschool factors on minority underachievement. His inat-tention to gender differences has been another point ofcontention.

Ogbu last book, Black American Students in an AffluentSuburb (2003), stirred further controversy and propelled himinto the national limelight as a result of media attention tohis explanations for why middle-class blacks were “disen-gaged” from their academic work and performed less well inschool than middle-class white classmates. As in all his ear-lier work, Ogbu concluded that black students’ own culturalattitudes hinder their achievement, and that while changein schools is necessary it will prove insufficient withoutchange also in the black community. With his wonderfulsense of humor, he quipped that if the media attention gottoo tough he would charter a plane and return to his nativevillage.

Many disagreed with Ogbu’s assumptions and frame-works but at the same time found themselves in need ofexplaining their differences, stimulating them to identifyboth the strengths and the shortcomings of his theory. Al-though his work provoked heated debate, its influence on

the fields of educational anthropology and minority educa-tion will last far into the future.

In spite of his busy schedule, Ogbu gave generouslyof his time to promote the work of others, particularlyyounger scholars of color and women, often serving cross-country on dissertation committees. He always made timeto talk with junior colleagues and students about the is-sues they were confronting in the field and about theirfindings. Although he fought fiercely for his ideas, hewas a gentle and caring man, known for his warmth andhumanity.

In addition to his scholarly work, Ogbu’s passions werehis family and his native country. He is survived by his wifeof 28 years, Marcellina Ada Ogbu, four daughters, and oneson, as well as several siblings and a large extended fam-ily in Nigeria. Throughout his life, Ogbu was active in theNigerian community in the United States and in Africa. Heretained close ties to his homeland, where he built him-self a house and sponsored numerous community projects,including the establishment of a library for Nigerian re-searchers and scholars. John Ogbu was buried in his nativevillage.

REFERENCES CITEDAnderson-Levitt, Kathryn M.

1997 Editor’s Preface. Ethnicity and School Performance:Complicating the Immigrant/Involuntary Minority Typol-ogy. Theme issue, Anthropology and Education Quarterly28(3):315–317.

Fordham, Signithia, and John U. Ogbu1986 Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the Burden of

Acting White. Urban Review 18(3):1–31.Gibson, Margaret A., and John U. Ogbu, eds.

1991 Minority Status and Schooling: A Comparative Study ofImmigrant and Involuntary Minorities. New York: Garland.

Jensen, Arthur R.1969 How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?

Harvard Educational Review, Reprint Series 2:1–123.Ogbu, John U.

1971 The Next Generation: An Ethnography of Education in anUrban Neighborhood. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univer-sity of California, Berkeley.

1974 The Next Generation: An Ethnography of Education in anUrban Neighborhood. New York: Academic Press.

1978 Minority Education and Caste: The American System inCross-Cultural Perspective. New York: Academic Press.

1983 Minority Status and Schooling in Plural Societies. Compar-ative Education Review 27(2):168–190.

1987 Variability in Minority School Performance: A Problem inSearch of an Explanation. Anthropology and Education Quar-terly 18(4):312–334.

1991 Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities in ComparativePerspective. In Minority Status and Schooling: A Compara-tive Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities. Mar-garet A. Gibson and John U. Ogbu, eds. Pp. 3–33. New York:Garland.

1995 Cultural Problems in Minority Education: Their Interpre-tations and Consequences, Part 1: Theoretical Background.Urban Review 27:189–205.

2003 Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study ofAcademic Disengagement. Mahwah, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Ogbu, John U., and Herbert D. Simons1998 Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-

Ecological Theory of School Performance with Some Implica-tions for Education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly19:155–188.

Obituaries 647

Photo taken by Jessica Kuper at a luncheon to celebrate 60 yearsof friendship between Isaac Schapera and Raymond Firth (October1996).

Isaac Schapera (1905–2003)

JEAN LA FONTAINELondon School of Economics

When Professor Isaac Schapera died on June 26, 2003, inLondon, a generation died with him. After the death of Ray-mond Firth the year before, he had been the last memberof the famous Malinowski seminar at the London School ofEconomics (LSE). However, Schapera had previously beentaught by Radcliffe-Brown, and that seems to have been amuch greater influence on him. Still, Schapera resembledMalinoswki in leaving a body of ethnography, the richnessof whose detail is of lasting value, regardless of the prevail-ing wind of theoretical fashion, whether in African Studiesor in anthropology. He is read wherever there is an inter-est in the Tswana people, including Botswana itself, wherehe is venerated as the meticulous recorder of tradition. Hiscremation was attended by a member of the High Commis-sion of Botswana, who did not know him personally butwas there to represent the Tswana people.

The more familiar one becomes with Schapera’s life, themore one can appreciate the achievements of his career. Hewas born on June 23, 1905, in Garies, a small village in theremote countryside of South Africa’s Cape Province, wherehis father was an unsuccessful shopkeeper. When young,he had a Hottentot nanny, and he claimed that his interestin the Khoisan-speaking peoples was stimulated by what helearned from her. The family was poor, but the adolescentIsaac was invited by the local doctor, an amateur ethnol-ogist, to use his library; Schapera attributed his initial in-terest in anthropology to this opportunity. He went to sec-ondary school in Cape Town, and then on to Cape TownUniversity to read law. He was seduced from that initial

choice by a series of lectures on anthropology given there byRadcliffe-Brown, although he retained a lifelong interest inlaw. When his brilliant academic performance earned hima doctoral scholarship to Britain in 1925, Schapera wentto the London School of Economics (LSE) to do a Ph.D.in anthropology. His supervisor was C. G. Seligman, butlike all fledgling anthropologists at the LSE, he attendedMalinowski’s weekly seminar, and on two occasions he wasemployed by Malinowski as a research assistant. He did notlike Malinowski very much but paid him the tribute of say-ing he made one think, unlike Radcliffe-Brown, whose the-ories were so polished one could only accept them as theywere (Comaroff and Comaroff 1988).

Schapera’s thesis was based on library research, as wasusual then. Published as The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa(1930), it became a classic in the field. In 1929 he returnedto South Africa, first to Witswatersrand University and thento Cape Town University, and began his fieldwork amongthe Tswana-speaking peoples. At first he planned to workin South Africa, but the opportunity to witness the instal-lation of a new chief drew him across the border into whatwas then Bechuanaland, where he found the retiring regentsympathetic to his project. As a result, most of his 20 yearsof research was undertaken there. At the early age of 30,he was appointed to the Chair of Social Anthropology atCape Town where he remained for 15 years. During thistime in South Africa he spent every spare moment amongthe Tswana, accumulating with scrupulous care informa-tion on every aspect of life among the Ba-Kgatla and re-lated Tswana-speaking groups. But far from being satisfiedwith this achievement, he remained perpetually aware ofthe questions he had not asked, the topics he had not con-sidered, and the notes he had not written up.

Schapera returned to the LSE as Professor in 1950, andhe remained in London after his retirement in 1969 until hisdeath. During the more than 50 years of his life in London,he published regularly and prolifically. A bibliography com-piled by Suzette Heald for the special issue of the Universityof Botswana’s African Studies journal Pula celebrating 75years of Schapera’s work contained 180 published items. Abook of his accomplished photographs with commentarystill awaits publication.

Schapera’s methods were those of his time. He did notimmerse himself in the lives of those he studied, as subse-quent generations of anthropologists have thought essen-tial. Most of his information he got by asking questionsof key informants, and those who were literate were alsoasked to record texts for him on specified topics. He paidhis informants and regarded their work for him as a form ofemployment, a common view at the time. He used Englishor Afrikaans with those Tswana who were fluent in either ofthese languages, particularly at the beginning of his field-work, because it aided communication. Nevertheless, hewas always aware of the individuality of his informants,which he did not submerge in generalization. As Heald re-marks, “It is refreshing to read that he asked three peopleand two said this and the other said that” (2003:19). He

648 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 3 • September 2004

used the ancient epics, praise poems, and oral histories thatwere written for him to learn the language. He later pub-lished this corpus, thus constituting a literature that is stilltaught in Tswana schools and preserving oral traditions forfuture generations. His grasp of Tswana culture and societyhas never been challenged either by the Tswana themselvesor by the many scholars who succeeded him in the area.

To dismiss Schapera as an old-fashioned functionalistwould be a mistaken and simplistic judgment. He describedhimself as an ethnographer, one who recorded life in a par-ticular period of time, rather than claiming membership inany particular school or taking a defined theoretical posi-tion. Indeed, he told Adam Kuper in an interview in 1998that he had no theories (Kuper 2001–02:18). Nevertheless,he had opinions about the theories of others; his comments,often somewhat acerbic, made that quite clear. For example,he complained that anthropologists, from Malinowski on,claimed to be describing what they saw but in fact omitted—as Malinowski himself did—the evidence of change: thechurches, shops, and administrative offices. In a revealingremark, he told Kuper: “Look. You start off by studying athing as you find it. Then you ask why is it like this, andthat’s where the social change comes in” (Kuper 2001–02:4).Kuper commented, rightly, that this was revolutionary at atime when social change was relegated to a short chapterat the end of a monograph devoted to a presumably un-touched “traditional society.”

Much of Schapera’s work was about history and socialchange. His earliest publications introduced the topic; hewrote on the disruptions caused by the alienation of landand by migrant labor and edited Western Civilisation andthe Natives of South Africa: Studies in Culture Contact (1934).He was a living contradiction to the facile generalizationso often made later—that anthropologists of that time wereuninterested in social change.

On a few occasion Schapera participated directly in thetheoretical debates of the time, as in his article “Should An-thropologists Be Historians?” (1962), but usually the theo-retical import of what he wrote was not spelled out, andhis ethnographic accounts were not used as grist to themill of academic theory making. He contributed a chap-ter to African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard1940), a comparative exercise in the style of Radcliffe-Brown. Later, in Government and Politics in Tribal Societies(1956), he demonstrated a more complex view of politicalstructure, one that included the distribution and exercise ofpower and leadership, which had been lacking in the earlierwork’s focus on order and administration. His aim was alsoto demonstrate regional comparisons, which he felt weremore revealing than comparisons between distant and dis-similar societies. In both respects he was making seriouscriticisms of the Fortes and Evans-Pritchard approach, buthe concentrated on building a regional classification ratherthan engaging in theoretical polemics.

Schapera’s generalizations were never taken to an ab-stract level. Thus, in Tribal Innovators: Tswana Chiefs and So-cial Change 1795–1940 (1970), a much revised version of anearlier work on legislation among the Tswana (1943a), he set

out to show that some changes among the Tswana-speakingpeoples came about because of the conscious actions of in-dividuals, in this instance their chiefs, who also mediatedthe changes that could be seen as coming from outside.His conclusions from that study concerned the Tswana-speaking peoples, although he mentioned that chiefs inother African societies might also be influential in initiatingchange. He did not use the Tswana to construct a theoryof social change or a critique of existing theories but wascontent to demonstrate the variability among individuals,the differences in social and political circumstances, and,hence, the complexity of explaining “why it is like it is”in the society he knew. Still, he was disappointed that thebook had little impact.

Schapera undertook several commissions in what to-day would be called “applied anthropology,” as a means offunding his research. Some of his contemporaries did thesame but less assiduously so. His first such project, whichwas funded by the colonial government, resulted in A Hand-book of Tswana Law and Custom (1938). The chiefs had askedfor such a book for use in the courts by white administra-tors and younger chiefs, inexperienced in customary law.It is still in use, although Heald (2003) remarks that, ironi-cally, it now sometimes has the effect of holding back socialchange, since it is the yardstick against which everything ismeasured. Schapera’s studies of land tenure (1943b) and ofmigrant labor (1947) provided eloquent testimonies to theeffects of colonization, as did his Married Life in an AfricanTribe, which caused a mild sensation when it was publishedin 1940. The reason for the sensation, he explained with rel-ish, was that he described sexual relations among Africansas essentially the same as among whites. More generally, heshared the view that traditional cultures could not be pre-served as separate entities; South Africa was already a singlesociety. He would not admit that the Nationalists’ accessionto power in 1948 caused him to leave South Africa, but hedid not return there when he retired.

In Britain, too, Schapera’s career was a successful one.He was president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, afounding member and secretary of the Association of SocialAnthropologists, and a fellow of the British Academy. Hewas recognized by his peers for his meticulous attention toaccurate detail, for his command of ethnography, and forhis dedication to scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge.He was not a gifted lecturer; it was his writing and the in-formal help and encouragement he gave to any youngerscholar who showed an interest in Botswana that estab-lished his influence. A long list could be made of those,not only anthropologists, who benefited from his unusu-ally generous sharing of his field material and his contacts.He included the Tswana in his concern for the future. Hisfield notes, photographs, and unpublished reports are to befound in the National Archives of Botswana, as well as inthe British Library of Political and Economic Science at theLSE and at Cape Town University.

Botswana reveres Isaac Schapera as their chronicler,naming a street in the capital after him and presenting himwith an honorary doctorate soon after independence. In

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Mochudi, the town most associated with his work, thereis a museum set up by the Bakgatla chief that displays hisphotographs and serves as a memorial to him. Some pho-tographs have been made into postcards, which are soldto benefit the museum. The University of Botswana Soci-ology Department has set up the Schapera Project “to ex-plore issues in his work and develop it for the future” (Heald2003:19). (Dr. G. Moolokedi is the contact for the Project.)It would be fitting if the people of Botswana were to leadthe West to follow them in building on the splendid foun-dations that Schapera laid.

NOTESAcknowledgments. I am grateful to Adam Kuper for reading a draftof this obituary and correcting its errors; he is not responsible forthose that remain or for the views expressed. I also thank JessicaKuper for the photograph of Schapera, which she took in October1996 at a celebration of 60 years of friendship between Schaperaand Firth.

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1988 On the Founding Fathers, Fieldwork and Functionalism:A Conversation with Isaac Schapera. American Ethnologist15(3):554–565.

Fortes, Meyer, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, eds.1940 African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press

for the International African Institute.Heald, Suzette

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Kuper, Adam2001–02 Isaac Schapera: A Conversation. Anthropology Today

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