G. William Skinner
| George William Skinner | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 14, 1925 Oakland, California |
| Died | October 26, 2008 Davis, California |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Anthropology of China Anthropology of Southeast Asia (especially Overseas Chinese, Indonesia and Thailand) |
| Institutions |
Cornell University Columbia University Stanford University University of California, Davis |
| Alma mater |
Deep Springs College Cornell University |
| Doctoral advisor | Lauriston Sharp |
| Doctoral students | P. Steven Sangren |
| Known for | Physiographic macroregions of China |
George William Skinner (simplified Chinese: 施坚雅; traditional Chinese: 施堅雅; February 14, 1925 – October 26, 2008) was an American anthropologist and scholar of China. Skinner was a proponent of the spatial approach to Chinese history, as explained in his Presidential Address to the Association for Asian Studies in 1984. He often referred to his approach as "regional analysis," and taught the use of maps as a key class of data in ethnography.
Skinner was born on February 14, 1925, in Oakland, California. His father, John James Skinner was a pharmacologist and his mother, Eunice Engle Skinner, taught music and became the director of music education for the Berkeley school system. Skinner spent two years at Deep Springs College, a small college founded to educate small cohorts of young men into the life of the mind in a self-sufficient, disciplined manner. After Deep Springs, he joined the Navy V-12 Program in 1943, then attended the U.S. Navy Oriental Language School for 18 months at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he studied Chinese. In 1946, Skinner headed for Cornell University to complete his B.A. degree. He graduated in the following year with his B.A. (with distinction) in Far Eastern Studies, and remained there for his Ph.D. in anthropology (1954) under the supervision of Lauriston Sharp.
Skinner’s first job was as instructor in sociology at Cornell in 1949. Late in that year he flew to Chengdu, in China's Sichuan province, to conduct doctoral dissertation research on the structure of markets in the Chengdu Plain. Skinner's research was cut short by the arrival of the People's Liberation Army, which confiscated his notes, but the experience became the basis of his later work on spatial modelling. Skinner proceeded to Bangkok, Thailand, where he researched a substitute doctoral topic, the social structure of the Chinese community in Thailand. This research was published in his first two books, Chinese Society in Thailand (1957) and Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community of Thailand (1958)
...
Wikipedia