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Biographical Memoirs: Volume 90 (2009)

Chapter: GEORGE McCLELLAND FOSTER JR.

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Suggested Citation:"GEORGE McCLELLAND FOSTER JR.." National Academy of Sciences. 2009. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 90. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12562.
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GEORGE McCLELLAND FOSTER JR. October 9, 1913–May 18, 2006 BY ROBERT V. KEMPER G eorge mcclelland foster jr. was one of the most influ- ential leaders of American anthropology in the 20th century. Going far beyond his graduate training at the Uni- versity of California in the 1930s, he became widely known for his pioneering contributions to medical anthropology and applied anthropology, his brilliant comparative analyses of peasant communities (especially his works on the “Im- age of Limited Good” and the “Dyadic Contract”), and his commitment to long-term research in the community of Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán, Mexico. In reflecting on his life, Foster declared, “I think chance has been the leitmotif of my whole life” (2000, p. 40). He re- peatedly turned “chance” into serendipity, which led in turn to innovative explanations about such widespread features of the human condition as the envy of others; the linkages between individuals, groups, and communities; the impact of technology on society and culture; and the tendency to resist change. The quantity, quality, and long-term value of his scholarly work led to his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976 and the awarding of numer- ous other honors, both before and after his retirement in 1979 as professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. 113

114 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS Foster’s leadership extended beyond his scholarly work. A natural leader, he served as director of the Institute of Social Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution; director of the Anthropology Museum at the University of California; chair of the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley; principal investigator of three consecutive five-year training grants from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences that combined to support more than 100 Berkeley graduate students; and president of the American Anthropological Association during the time of a great professional crisis associated with the Vietnam War. Foster’s legacy is not a single theory or a narrowly con- structed model. Far from it. Well anchored at his research base in Tzintzuntzan, he voyaged throughout the world to fulfill professional consultations and to enjoy travel adventures with his extended family. All of these experiences provided significant data for answering the many questions that inspired his anthropological work for more than 70 years. Foster’s Family and His Early Years Foster was born on October 9, 1913, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where his father ran the newest of the family’s meatpacking plants. In 1878 his grandfather, Thomas Dove Foster (born in Bradford, England, in 1847), had traveled to Ottumwa, Iowa, where he built the first packing house for the Morrell Company. Foster’s father (George McClelland Foster, born in 1887) trained in engineering for two years at the University of Pennsylvania and spent a year working at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, before return- ing to work for the family meatpacking business. Everyone took it for granted that Foster Jr. would follow this same career path.

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 115 In 1922 Foster’s family returned to Ottumwa, strategi- cally located 280 miles west of Chicago along what then was called the Burlington Railway. He was the oldest child, followed by two brothers, Bob (Robert Morrell Foster, born 1916) and Gene (Eugene Moore Foster, born 1921), and sister Janet (Mrs. Thorndike Saville Jr., born 1927). In Ot- tumwa Foster was raised in a “pretty well-to-do” and staunchly conservative Republican household, attended Presbyterian church services (which gave him severe headaches because the sermons were so boring), and grew up assuming that he would attend college. He was sufficiently good at school that he rarely had homework. He joined the Boy Scouts at age 12, and completed the requirements to become an Eagle Scout at age 17. He had his first foreign travel experience in Puerto Rico in 1927, when at age 13, he and his younger brother, Bob, traveled by train from Iowa to New York, where they stayed at the Vanderbilt Hotel. Then, accompanied by a cousin and an adult chaperone, they traveled for four days by the San Lorenzo of the New York and Porto Rico Steamship Company to reach San Juan, where they visited relatives who ran a sugar plantation. His early family travels—to Massachusetts, to Minnesota, to Mackinac Island in Michigan, to Estes Park in Colorado—gave Foster a lifelong desire to travel the world. These trips also inspired his interest in transportation itself—in knowing all about trains, boats, and planes (cf. Foster, 1985).1 Early on, he began to collect train timetables and shipping schedules, and later would walk through airports gathering up sched- ules at every airline ticket counter. He saved these items in shoeboxes as others saved baseball cards. Decades later his train timetables were donated to the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University, his airline schedules to

116 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS Northwestern University, and his collection of materials about ships and boats to the Maritime Museum of San Diego. His love of travel and transportation was typical of his life; what began as a hobby turned into expert knowledge and then into stewardship and philanthropy. The College Years: From Harvard to Herskovits Expected to follow his father’s career in engineering, Foster entered Harvard in 1931. Looking back on that year, he felt that he suffered a serious case of culture shock and depression in trying to make the leap from a small town in Iowa to a major university. After a year he transferred to Northwestern. He was much nearer to home, and even was given a car—his mother’s old Essex—as a birthday present in the fall of his sophomore year so that he could travel home every six weeks or so. While his spirits were buoyed, his grades in engineering courses continued to sink. Aban- doning engineering, Foster sought refuge in history, but did not find it a good fit. Looking back on his failure in engineering, he felt that he couldn’t live up to his father’s example: “I had to get out into a completely different field where I didn’t have anyone I had to equal or come close to” (2000, p. 32). In the spring of his junior year Foster took a friend’s advice and registered for introductory anthropology. Taught by Melville Herskovits, then the only anthropologist on the Northwestern University faculty, that class introduced Foster to cultures and peoples far beyond his familiar world. He loved it. Not only was Herskovits a top-notch teacher, the class was made more attractive by the presence of a sopho- more named Mary LeCron (known as Mickie).2 Foster recalls that he was smitten from that moment, while she didn’t even know that he was there. In this way, anthropology not only

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 117 became his life’s work but also introduced him to the love of his life, Mickie. Foster followed up his initial encounter with anthropology by taking a long trip to China and Japan in the summer of 1933. A highlight of the trip was his ascent and descent of Mount Fujiyama. In the fall of 1933 Herskovits convinced both Foster and Mickie to take honors degrees, including comprehensive written and oral examinations. Lacking graduate students, Herskovits mentored the two with the goal of preparing them for graduate work. When well-known anthropologists (such as Bronislaw Malinowski) came to the Chicago area, he ar- ranged gatherings in his home, to which Foster and Mickie were invited. In this way Foster was brought into contact with professional anthropologists beginning in his undergradu- ate days. Years later the Fosters’ elegant, architect-designed home in the Berkeley hills, with its panoramic view of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Tamalpais, became a focal point for gatherings of anthropology faculty and students alike. Graduate Studies at Berkeley: 1935-1941 In the spring of 1935 Foster wrote to Alfred L. Kroe- ber, one of the leading anthropologists in the country, to inquire about pursuing graduate study in anthropology at the University of California. In his role as acting chair of the Department of Anthropology, Robert H. Lowie wrote back to Foster and urged him not to consider coming out to Berkeley, saying, in effect, that there were no jobs, and it was a just dead-end field (2000, p. 48). Foster persisted, so Lowie grudgingly accepted Foster into the program, along with a handful of other applicants (the best known of whom was Walter Goldschmidt, later professor of anthropology at UCLA).

118 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS Foster arrived in Berkeley in mid-August 1935 to begin his graduate studies. He found himself literally at the frontier of anthropology, isolated by days of train travel from the major centers of anthropological studies located at universities, museums, and government institutions east of the Missis- sippi. At that time the Department of Anthropology at the University of California consisted of Alfred L. Kroeber (then age 60) and Robert H. Lowie (age 53)—who were jointly responsible for offering graduate seminars—and instructors Ronald Olson and Edward Gifford. In his extended recollections of his graduate studies at Berkeley, Foster observed: As a group we were tremendously supportive of each other. It occurred to no one to conceal ideas or data, and it astonished me when I returned to Berkeley many years later to find that anthropology was regarded by many graduate students as a limited good, so that one had to be cautious in dis- cussing data and ideas with fellow students and faculty lest they be “stolen” (1976, pp. 15-16). During the 1935-1936 academic year Mickie remained at Northwestern to finish her senior year. Meanwhile, Foster dated other women and she other men. He was briefly en- gaged in the spring of 1936 to another woman, but broke it off. With the distance Foster and Mickie were drifting apart, so much so that she went east to Columbia University for graduate study in anthropology. During the five-week Christ- mas break of 1936, he took a solo trip to Mexico. Traveling by train, without any knowledge of Spanish or even a diction- ary in hand, Foster went to Mexico City, Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Tabasco, returning through Guadalajara and up the west coast. Back to Berkeley, he told Kroeber that he was set on specializing in Mexico. Just as significant, after return- ing from Mexico he sent to Mickie some presents acquired during his trip. This initiative proved successful, and they began writing back and forth.

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 119 During the summer of 1937, Foster was given $200 by Kroeber and sent to Round Valley in northern California to study the Yuki culture. Foster recounts that when Kroeber told him that he was to go to the Yuki, I had more than a few doubts as to how to go about it. “Professor Kroe- ber,” I asked, “can’t you give me some advice about fieldwork?” His eyes twinkled, he paused a moment, and then said, “I suggest you get a ste- nographer’s notebook and a pencil.” Then he marched on down the hall (1976, p. 17). Looking back on that initial foray into the field, Foster saw it as a test that he survived. He was discouraged at first, and told Kroeber that he couldn’t do it. Kroeber told him to go back and finish the summer—and Foster did. Soon after, he wrote A Summary of Yuki Culture that eventually ap- peared in the University of California Anthropological Records series (1944). In September 1937 Mickie came to Berkeley, where she had relatives, and renewed her relationship with Foster. Although she arrived too late to register for fall semester courses, she remembers that Foster arranged for her to au- dit some anthropology courses (M. Foster, 2001, p. 116).3 They were married on January 6, 1938, in Washington, D.C., where her Democrat father was employed in the Department of Agriculture. His parents came from Iowa to attend the private marriage ceremony held at her home. The next day, the newlyweds took the Cunard liner Scythia to Liverpool, traveled through London, where they attended one of Malinowski’s seminars at the London School of Eco- nomics, and then onward to Vienna, where they remained until May 24 (and thus were present during the Anschluss). During the summer Mickie’s father sent over a new car by ship so that they could drive around Europe. They traveled through Scandinavia and then attended the International

120 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Copenhagen, where they visited with Herskovits, Malinowski, and other famous anthropologists, before continuing on to Paris. They remained there, studying French (which Mickie already knew well from her high school year abroad in Grenoble), until November 11, when they embarked on the SS Veendam to return to New York. While he was learning French and German in Europe, Foster became intrigued with cultural differences. Reflecting on that experience, he commented that his ideas on envy began when he realized that the word for “tip” in German is Trinkgeld and the word for “tip” in French is pourboire and then a “tip” in English clearly comes from the word “tipple.” I didn’t do anything with those ideas for another thirty years, but they were basic in the work that I did on the anatomy of envy (2000, p. 70). Foster and Mickie returned to Washington, D.C., in No- vember 1938 and then traveled to California, where their son Jeremy was born in March 1939. Mickie tells the story that while she and the baby were still at Peralta Hospital in Oakland, George came to see her. When she asked him if he had gone to see the baby through the nursery window, he replied, “No.” When she asked, “Why not?” he said, Because the other babies are so puny and small and red, and don’t look attractive, and if I ask for my baby—he’s so big and so beautiful, I think they’ll feel badly and be envious, so that I don’t want to put them though that (M. Foster 2001, p. 121). In this intimate family experience one can see elements of what later became Foster’s famous theories about envy and the “Image of Limited Good.” Once again installed in Berkeley, Foster renewed his stud- ies with the aim of preparing for the comprehensive written and oral examinations in the fall of 1939. The “writtens” were especially grueling—30 hours of essays spread over five

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 121 days. After passing that portion of the examination the orals were more or less a formality. Foster’s committee included Kroeber and Lowie from within the department and three outsiders: geographer Carl Sauer, historian Herbert Bolton, and economist Frank Knight. Having passed his exams, Foster still faced the hurdle of mastering Spanish. He determined that while Mickie and baby Jeremy stayed with her parents in Washington, D.C., he would drive to Mexico. He left on the third of January 1940 and arrived in Mexico City on the 13th. There he made contact with friends whom he had met on his earlier trips to China and Mexico, and then connected with their friends in turn. Leaving one-year-old Jeremy with her parents, Mickie came down in March and stayed six weeks before returning to Washington, D.C. Foster found that Mexican anthropologists proved to be invaluable friends and guides through the maze of Mexican government agencies, opening up doors that Foster did not even know existed. He especially came to depend on his con- nections with Irmgard Weitlaner and her engineer father, Roberto, who introduced Foster to the Sierra Popoluca of Veracruz in the spring of 1940. Foster met Isabel Kelly, a Berkeley Ph.D. who had done the first systematic archaeological research in western Mexico but had moved to Mexico City by 1940. He also met Donald and Dorothy Cordry, Miguel Covarrubias, Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, and Frances Toor. This early experience in building social networks with local anthropologists provided Foster with an important lesson that he passed on to his students for decades to come. In April 1940 Foster drove back to Ottumwa in just four days, took a train to Washington, D.C., returned by train to Ottumwa, and then drove out to Berkeley, arriving in mid- June. He spent several months studying Spanish and revising

122 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS his study of Yuki culture for publication. In November he again drove alone to Mexico. In January 1941, having ar- ranged for Jeremy to stay with Foster’s mother in Ottumwa, Mickie joined him in Mexico. Now they were ready to carry out fieldwork among the Sierra Popoluca. With Mickie’s help, Foster spent three months gathering information on economics and linguistics in the town of Soteapan. Return- ing to Berkeley (via Ottumwa, where they picked up little Jeremy), he quickly wrote up a slim dissertation (published in 1942 as A Primitive Mexican Economy in the monograph series of the American Ethnological Society). Following the Berkeley system established by Kroeber and Lowie, the dissertation was not intended to be a magnum opus but simply a progress report on the student’s develop- ment, the last in a long series of exercises. As a result Foster later told his own students to write short dissertations—with 200 pages usually being more than adequate to the need. Having learned the skill of concise writing from Kroeber, Foster passed it along to his own students. In fact, many Berkeley students asked him to serve on their dissertation committees not so much for his ethnographic knowledge or theoretical insights, but because he was willing to spend time working with them on their writing. The experience of Eugene Hammel is typical of what so many students encoun- tered when they handed in a dissertation draft to Foster. He recalls that he gave a copy to Foster on a Friday and got it back, thoroughly marked up, on Monday: He called me in, handed it back, and told me to start over, giving me a list of suggestions. I spent a solid week rewriting and gave the revisions to Foster on a Friday. On Monday he called me in . . , and this process was repeated several times. . . this anecdote [illustrates] Foster’s complete dedication to his task . . . and the promptness of his response (Hammel, 2000, p. v).

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 123 Finding Work as an Anthropologist In 1941, as Lowie had warned him, jobs were scarce in American anthropology, and Foster had no prospects. Then, in September Kroeber asked him if he were willing to take a one-year job teaching sociology and anthropology at Syracuse University. Foster agreed, and almost immediately took a United DC-3 sleeper plane to Chicago and then an Ameri- can DC-3 on to Syracuse (with stops in Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester). Mickie and their son Jeremy followed later, after she arranged to rent out the small house they had bought on LeRoy Avenue (which they owned until 1946). Although Foster never had taken any courses in sociology, he found himself teaching three sections of introductory sociology: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8:00 a.m., 9:00 a.m., and 11:00 a.m. plus an anthropology course on Tuesday, Thurs- day, and Saturday at 8:00 a.m. During the spring term he received a letter from Ralph Beals (also a Berkeley Ph.D.) asking if Foster were interested in coming to UCLA to replace him for the 1942-1943 aca- demic year, while Beals went to Washington, D.C., to work with Julian Steward on the project for a Handbook of South American Indians. Even though the growing Foster family (daughter Melissa was born while they were in New York) was enjoying the year in upstate New York, he was happy to return to the west coast. At the end of the summer in 1942 the Fosters returned to California, where they stayed in the Beals house in Santa Monica for the following academic year. At UCLA Foster taught a cut-down version of Kroeber’s famous course on culture, plus courses on world ethnology, general anthropology, and social organization. With the war in full gear Foster assumed that he would be drafted into military service when his year at UCLA came to an end. Instead, the Berkeley draft board classified him as

124 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 4-F because of allergies, and soon thereafter he was invited to join the staff of Nelson Rockefeller’s new Institute of In- ter-American Affairs in Washington, D.C. That experience set the course for the rest of his life. In his role as a social science analyst, Foster was taking his first steps along the path of applied anthropology. He realized that this was not a field that anthropologists generally followed: In fact, we were trained to despise applied anthropology. The war had the positive effect of making American anthropologists aware of the possibili- ties. The Society for Applied Anthropology, for example, was established in, I believe, 1942, and it has been a vigorous organization ever since. But I didn’t join until about 1950 (2000, p. 120). Even in those early days of his career, in the dark days of World War II, Foster made the most of the opportunities that came his way. In the 10 years between 1943 and 1952 he went from “despising applied anthropology” to working as an advocate for anthropological research on U.S. techni- cal aid programs in Latin America. He went from being an ethnographer in the tradition of A. L. Kroeber and Robert H. Lowie to becoming an analyst and interpreter of culture, behavior, and bureaucratic premises in contemporary societ- ies. He did not abandon his ethnographic roots but found new ways to blend theory and practice. The Institute of Social Anthropology in Mexico: Training Students and Doing Fieldwork Foster’s transformation did not occur intentionally, but through serendipity. After his short time at the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, he was the first anthropologist hired by Julian Steward (whom Foster knew because both had been at Berkeley in the 1930s) to go to Latin America as a representative of the new Institute of Social Anthropology, created in 1942 within the Smithsonian Institution. Sent to Mexico City to train students at the Escuela Nacional de

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 125 Antropología e Historia (ENAH), Foster also was expected to take a group of students to the field—specifically, to the Tarascan region in the State of Michoacán (the home of the former president of Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas). After a bumpy start in the Tarascan village of Ihuatzio, Foster, his assistant Gabriel Ospina, and several students moved their project over the hill to the mestizo town of Tzintzuntzan (“the place of the hummingbirds”), 400 years earlier the capital of the Tarascan empire. At that time in 1945-1946 Foster had no idea that his long-term ethnographic work would enhance Tzintzuntzan’s fame, or that Tzintzuntzan would provide him with the source of some of his best ideas—especially the “Image of Limited Good” and the “Dyadic Contract.” Reflecting on his now-classic monograph, Empire’s Chil- dren: The People of Tzintzuntzan (1948), Foster recalled that “we were just interested in doing a basic community study. Word pictures of the way of life, the people, all aspects, as many aspects as we could deal with” (2000, p. 135). After leaving Mexico in 1946 he did not return to Tzintzuntzan until 1958, when his long-term study of the community be- gan in earnest. Only in the 1960s and thereafter did Foster develop theoretical models to explain the impact of external forces on the community’s culture. Washington, D.C.: Directing the Institute of Social Anthropology In the summer of 1946 after convincing his colleague Isabel Kelly to replace him as head of the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) program in Mexico, Foster went to Wash- ington, D.C., where he took over the ISA from Steward, who was leaving to become a professor at Columbia University. In this new role as a government administrator and bureaucrat Foster recognized the need to learn more about ISA’s pro- grams in Latin America. On February 1, 1947, he went on his

126 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS first ISA trip to South America. In Ecuador he visited Aníbal Buitrón; in Peru, Alan Holmberg and George McBryde; and in Colombia, John Rowe and Gregorio Hernández de Alba. On a second trip, lasting from February 14 to April 11, 1948, Foster traveled to Colombia, where he again saw Rowe and Hernández de Alba; to Ecuador and Peru, where he saw Holmberg and Jorge Muelle; and to Bolivia and Brazil, where he visited Donald Pierson and Kalervo Oberg. Spain: Studying THE ROOTS OF LATIN AMERICAN Acculturation In 1949-1950 Foster took a leave of absence from the ISA and, with a Guggenheim Fellowship, went to Spain to carry out a detailed study of the Spanish roots of Spanish American culture. He and Mickie (with a Plymouth sedan) went to Spain on March 4 on the Italian Line MV Vulcania and returned on the same vessel, arriving in New York City on May 14. After spending the summer vacationing with family, Foster, Mickie, and their children (with a Pontiac station wagon) sailed to Spain on September 6 on American Export Lines SS Excambion. One year later, on September 19, they arrived back in New York on the MV Saturnia, although they were delayed one day en route by a storm with 100-125 mph winds. While in Spain, Foster benefited substantially from his work and friendship with the anthropologist Julio Caro Baroja. Together they drove 25,000 miles in Spain, from Jeréz de la Frontera in the southwest to Barcelona in the northeast. In addition, he journeyed to the Baleares, where he studied the feixas (irrigation channels) on Ibiza. In his travels Foster emphasized the regions of Extremadura and Andalusia, the places best known for sending conquistadors and emigrants to the New World. Through his ethnographic, ethnohistori- cal, and library research Foster found that the time sequence

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 127 for the introduction of cultural traits to the Americas was more important than their places of origin. This ethnographic and ethnohistorical survey of Spain served as the basis of his well-known book, Culture and Con- quest: America’s Spanish Heritage (initially rejected without explanation by the University of California Press, but finally published by the Wenner-Gren Foundation in 1960 and subsequently translated into Spanish in 1962 and again in 2003). In this masterpiece of cultural history and synthesis Foster presented his important concept of “conquest culture,” which he defined as the totality of donor influences, whatever their origin, that are brought to bear on a recipient culture, the channel whereby the dominant ways, values, and attitudes are transmitted to the weaker. . . The formation of a con- quest culture is characterized by a “stripping down” or “reduction” process in which large numbers of elements of the donor culture are eliminated and the complexity and variety of many configurations become simplified (1960, p. 12). What Foster had learned from Herskovits about accultura- tion at Northwestern in the 1930s was proudly displayed in Culture and Conquest, arguably the last great ethnographic study based on the acculturation framework. Reconfiguring the InstiTute of Social Anthropology: Toward Public Health When Foster returned to Washington from Spain, he real- ized that the days of the ISA were numbered. He made his third (and final) ISA trip to Latin America between March 3 and March 28, 1951. He saw Richard Adams in Guatemala, Charles Erasmus and Luis Duque Gomez in Colombia, and Ozzie Simmons and Muelle in Peru. Upon returning to the U.S., Foster made the strategic decision to attempt to save the jobs of the anthropologists working in the ISA program by shifting their focus from research and training to the evalua-

128 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS tion of U.S. technical aid programs in Latin America. Given his earlier experience with the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, Foster determined that of its three main divisions (agriculture, education, and health), only the area of health held much prospect for success. So Foster went across the Mall to see the acting head of the Institute of Inter-American Affair’s Health Division. After some discussion they agreed that the ISA anthropolo- gists would work on the institute’s health programs and the cultural problems being encountered in several countries. Foster sent instructions to Kelly in Mexico, Adams in Gua- temala, Erasmus in Colombia, Simmons in Peru, and Oberg in Brazil. After a couple of months they sent their notes to Foster, who assembled a 104-page mimeographed report titled A Cross-Cultural Anthropological Analysis of a Technical Aid Program (1951). His work at integrating the disparate in- formation provided by his colleagues demonstrated his rare skill at classification and explanation, hard-won in Kroeber’s seminars at the University of California 15 years earlier. According to Foster, “This paper was, you might say, a bombshell” (2000, p. 159). The promise of the anthropologi- cal approach was so compelling that Henry van Zile Hyde, head of the institute’s Health Division, agreed to hire all of the ISA field staff for the coming year if they would focus their attention on the U.S.-sponsored public health programs in their countries. In June 1952 a one-week conference was held in Wash- ington to discuss the anthropologists’ work. According to Foster, And on one day, I presented our findings. That was one of the great days of my life and a great day, I think, for public health, too. You’ve never seen such enthusiasm. We were able to explain a lot of things that the public health personnel had been knocking their heads about (2000, p. 160).

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 129 In reconfiguring the Institute of Social Anthropology, Foster transformed his own vision of the world. Always the ethnographer, he had learned how bureaucracies had their own cultures and what later he would call their own “implicit premises” (1969,1, pp. 90-113). His experiences in working on public health programs with the Institute of Inter-Ameri- can Affairs in 1951-1952 might have pointed him toward a permanent position in government circles, but he realized that at age 39 he had to make a choice between a govern- ment career and the academic life. Since his wife’s parents had retired from Washington to Berkeley in 1943, Foster, Mickie, and their two children often traveled there on family vacations. Thus, Foster had been able to stay in contact with the Berkeley Department of Anthropology, even though he was a continent away. Berkeley: Leading, Teaching, and Training, 1953-1979 Foster returned to Berkeley in 1953 as a visiting lecturer, hoping to land a permanent job initially designed to be split one-third and two-thirds between public health and anthro- pology, respectively, but the arrangement never came to fruition. Fortunately, it happened that Gifford retired soon after Foster’s arrival, thus creating a need for a new direc- tor of the Museum of Anthropology. Foster was appointed into Gifford’s position. In that role he soon found himself serving as liaison with the architects hired to build a new building, in which the museum would be housed along with the departments of anthropology and of art. After a three- year stint as acting director at the museum, Foster moved into the Department of Anthropology on a full-time tenured appointment in 1955. He served as chair of the department during 1958-1961 and then again from 1973 to 1974. During his years at Berkeley, Foster taught many differ- ent courses, ranging from regional surveys of “Europe and

130 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS the Mediterranean” and “Latin American Culture” to his famous “Anthropology and Modern Life” (later called “Ap- plied Anthropology”). In the fall term of 1968 I served as his teaching assistant for the applied anthropology course. I remember that it had well over 100 students, many of them graduate students in public health, education, social welfare, and architecture. We all had to rise early to be on time for this 8:00 a.m. class, where with missionary zeal Foster blended case studies and theories to teach us about culture and the “implicit premises” of peoples, professions, and bureaucra- cies. With his bow tie in place and his lecture notes typed out on 5×8-inch sheets, he presented a serious and formi- dable figure in the classroom. Yet, he was passionate about enlightening students to an anthropological way of seeing and understanding the world. According to Foster, that was the most successful course that he ever gave: I wrote two books on the basis of my lectures, Traditional Cultures and the Impact of Technological Change (1962) and then, of course, I had to rewrite my lectures. That gave rise to Applied Anthropology, after which I had to rewrite my lectures once more. And that resulted in the revised edition of Traditional Cultures that appeared in 1972, under the mercifully shortened title of Traditional Societies and Technological Change (2000, p. 201). Among his many successful and critically acclaimed mono- graphs and textbooks, his Traditional Cultures book was the best-selling, with well over 100,000 copies sold in English. It also was translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Farsi. Remembering his own struggles in the Berkeley graduate program two decades earlier, Foster set about the enormous task of eliminating what no longer worked and introducing new elements as needed. In this effort he used the skills developed earlier at the ISA. He talked with and listened to the faculty, the staff, and the students, not only about the intellectual rigor of the program but also the sense of com-

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 131 munity that it might create. Eugene Hammel gives Foster credit for being the “architect of the modern Ph.D. program at Berkeley,” for being “instrumental in developing the plans for Kroeber Hall in the 1950s, especially concerning the inclusion of the museum,” and for beginning the “democ- ratization of the department” (2000, p. iv-vi). Aware of the damage done by Kroeber’s “sink or swim” approach to training graduate students for field research, Foster was convinced that the graduate program should include courses on research methods and should encour- age students to get into supervised field situations prior to attempting their dissertation work. He was convinced that predissertation fieldwork was vital to designing the most ef- fective dissertation research projects, a conviction that would result in two major endowments at the end of his life. Foster was the first of the Berkeley faculty to take untested students into the heartland of his own research—Tzintzuntzan and the adjacent towns and villages—where they could learn the basics of fieldwork under his supervision. This was not an annual “field school” in the way that Evon Vogt maintained the Harvard Chiapas Project as a field experience for Harvard graduate and undergraduate students (Vogt, 2002). Foster took students to the field only from time to time, according to who was willing to commit to his three-part process. In 1967, for example, four graduate students went to the Tzintzuntzan area. Stanley Brandes lived in the poor barrio of Yahuaro in Tzintzuntzan, while Ron Maduro went to Santa Fe de la Laguna, a pottery-making village across the lake. Melody Trott studied middle-class teenagers in the regional market town, Pátzcuaro, located about 15 km south of Tzintzunt- zan, and I (and a Mexican anthropology student, Francisco Ríos, from the ENAH) worked on a restudy of Pátzcuaro’s marketplace, which Foster had studied two decades earlier. Except for Ríos we all prepared for our fieldwork in a spring

132 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS quarter seminar and then analyzed our data and presented our findings in a follow-up seminar in the fall quarter. Rare 40 years ago, Foster’s extended approach to the anthropo- logical fieldwork experience is widespread today. Consulting with THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION and other Agencies Beginning with his participation in 1951-1952 on a joint U.S. Public Heath Service/Institute of Inter-American Affairs evaluation team that assessed “The First Ten Years of Bilateral Health Programs in Latin America,” and concluding with a 1983 trip to participate in a WHO/EURO workshop on the “Scientific Analysis of Health Care,” Foster accepted 36 international consulting assignments during his career (for a complete listing see Kemper [2006, pp. 9-10]). His retire- ment in 1979 hardly slowed the pace of his international travels to work with the World Health Organization and other agencies. Although he served on some administrative commissions and did a few site visits at universities, all of his applied anthropology assignments were international, rang- ing from Latin America to Africa and from Asia to Europe. Although many of his consulting projects were focused on public health issues, they often were labeled more broadly as “community development.” Foster was an excellent consultant who listened carefully and took a positive approach to the people who worked in the sponsoring agencies. The stories of his consultancies have appeared in numerous anthropological and interdisciplinary journals. His international experiences also created for him a global network of contacts in diverse agencies, especially in the World Health Organization and other public health agencies. Early in his career Foster recognized the impor- tance of understanding the cultures of these “innovating organizations” rather than focusing only on the cultures of

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 133 the “target group.” One of his important contributions to applied anthropology was his realization that it was the “in- teraction setting” between change agents and the recipient peoples that determined much of the success (or failure) of development projects. This perspective is cogently presented in his Applied Anthropology (1969,1), generally considered to be the first textbook in the field. Long-Term Fieldwork: The Tzintzuntzan Community Study With a large grant from the National Science Foundation, in 1958 Foster returned to Tzintzuntzan, where he initiated an innovative long-term study of sociocultural change, eco- nomics, personality, and health. This research resulted in many important contributions to understanding peasant life, including his oft-cited (and sometimes controversial) works on pottery making (1965,2), the “Dyadic Contract” (1961, 1963), The “Image of Limited Good” (1965,1), the compa- drazgo (1969,2), and “hot-cold” theories of illness (1994). Foster’s goal was to develop models to explain how villagers’ traditional worldviews (emphasizing balance, harmony, and reciprocity) were being transformed as the national and in- ternational political economic system increasingly influenced local culture (see Rollwagen, 1992). Anyone who observed him in the course of fieldwork could tell that his principal love was the close observation and recording of social and cultural life (2002, 1979). The people of Tzintzuntzan, who collaborated in his studies for over half a century, formed the subject of his major ethno- graphic corpus. He was an inveterate note taker and, relying on a classificatory scheme developed by the Human Relations Area Files, he accumulated what must count as one of the most exhaustive and detailed bodies of ethnographic writ- ing on the widest range of subject matter in the annals of cultural anthropology.4

134 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS Foster’s curiosity was boundless, as were his range of intellectual interests and his data collection strategies. On the one hand, he was a proponent of the vacuum-cleaner ethnographic style, which he had learned through his Kroe- berian graduate school training. He believed that detailed information on every possible topic of social and cultural life should be collected and recorded with assiduous care. A main product of this approach was Empire’s Children: The People of Tzintzuntzan (1948, Spanish translation 2000), which stands as an invaluable source of knowledge about rural life in central Mexico in the mid–20th century.5 On the other hand, Foster was an eminently post-Boasian anthropologist, a problem-oriented researcher who constantly asked questions of his data and knew how to probe a topic until he understood thoroughly the way the local people thought about it. He was interested in assessing the range of opinions and knowledge that might be expressed on any given subject, and in determining the reasons for this varia- tion. Because of his historical bent, his inherent interest in social dynamics, and the decades of research devoted to Tzintzuntzan, Foster made good use of his voluminous and meticulously crafted fieldwork files to determine intracultural variation in local patterns of social and cultural change. The principal product of this approach was Tzintzuntzan: Mexican Peasants in a Changing World (1967, Spanish translation 1972), a monograph that he believed would exert a greater impact and have more lasting value than the original Tzintzuntzan ethnography.6 In his last two decades of fieldwork in Tzintzuntzan Fos- ter concentrated on the domains of health and illness. He gathered extensive ethnographic data on every illness with which the people were familiar. He used a technique of asking multiple informants about certain key issues every time he had a question. For example, he determined the “hot” and

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 135 “cold” qualities of a long list of foods and related products by asking more than a dozen persons on several different visits. Eventually, Foster saw the patterns and the anomalies in the data, and came to the conclusion that rather than being immutable, the categories of hot and cold were adaptable to the empirical medical circumstances of individuals. Reflecting on more than 50 years of research in Tzint- zuntzan, Foster emphasized the importance of serendipity and “trigger mechanisms” (what others might call insight) as critical features of long-term research.7 As in so much of his own life and career he felt that many of his best ideas came not through careful design but from good luck and persistence. In the end he argued, Theories come and go but good data are timeless, grist for the anthropologist’s mill when least expected. And, clearly, one of the advantages of repeated visits to a research site is that, as our data accumulate and we have time to ask questions about their meanings and their anomalies, we can write with confidence on theoretical matters. (2002, p. 266). In reflecting on how our theories and models are subject to unforeseen factors, including the passage of time, Foster reached the conclusion that had he initiated his fieldwork in Tzintzuntzan in, say, 1970, the “Image of Limited Good” model might never have occurred to him. Moreover, he felt that It would be entirely possible for young anthropologists to study Tzintzunt- zan today, search for evidence of Limited Good, and, on the basis of their findings, argue that the Limited Good hypothesis is inappropriate. . . But such an argument, because of its lack of time depth, in no way destroys the model. It merely confirms what we already know: worldviews can and do change (2002, p. 267). Foster’s numerous visits—at least yearly and often more frequent—to Tzintzuntzan were made much more enjoyable and ethnographically fruitful by his good fortune to live

136 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS with the family of Doña Micaela González from 1959 until the new millennium. In the first 10 years he and Mickie oc- cupied a small room on the ground floor. Then, in 1968 he had the idea to build a second floor containing a spacious bedroom, a study, and a patio. Not only did this give him more privacy but he also gained wonderful views of the lake to the north, the church tower to the south, and the yácatas (pyramids) to the east. In recent years these views have been greatly diminished by the construction of second-floor rooms above nearly all of the nearby houses—through economic prosperity linked to emigrant remittances. The Fosters’ relationship with Micaela’s family was based on mutual respect and reciprocity. Foster loved to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries among his “family” in Tzintzunt- zan. In a letter sent to me on May 9, 1991, Foster wrote, Jeremy’s 20-year old daughter, Emily, is planning to go to Tzintzuntzan in August, probably only a short visit. It pleases me that my children and grandchildren feel as much at home there as in other places they visit. I wonder how many other cases there are where grandchildren of the original investigator view the community in that light? Foster brought Micaela (born May 8, 1906; died July 1, 2000),8 her two unmarried daughters (Lola, born May 24, 1929, and Virginia, born April 8, 1934), and their coresident friend (María Flores, born August 6, 1937) to the United States on several occasions. These “ladies” (as they have come to be known after being so called by my son John when he was a small boy) have traveled to Berkeley and through- out California, as well as to Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Washington, D.C. On these trips they saw spectacular tourist venues like the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and Disneyland. More important were two trips to Berkeley. I brought them from Mexico to Berkeley in mid- December 2001, to be with Foster and Mickie (“Mariquita”) at a time when she was losing her battle with cancer. We all

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 137 were present when she died on the evening of the 14th. In early January 2006 I again took the ladies to Berkeley, where we spent three days with Foster, just a few months before he passed away. His affiliation with the people of Tzintzuntzan was not only anthropological but also philanthropic. Over the years what he referred to as “the Foster Foundation” provided individuals and families with tens of thousands of dollars for medicines and doctors’ bills, for school tuition and books, and for other pressing needs. He also regularly contributed toward the costs of sponsoring the numerous local fiestas. He was proud of receiving diplomas from the municipal council in recognition of his long-term research to make Tzintzuntzan better known in the world. In May 2006 when Dolores and Virginia learned of his death, they placed his photograph on the household altar, next to those of their mother, Doña Micaela, and Mickie Foster. Medical Anthropology: TURNING PRACTICE INTO THEORY Foster’s interest in public health and community de- velopment programs arose in the early 1950s while he was working in Washington, D.C., with the Institute for Social Anthropology and the Institute for Inter-American Affairs. The move from government service back to the academy in 1953 allowed him to expand this emerging area of research. Beginning with Margaret Clark, his first doctoral student, Foster directed numerous dissertations related to health and illness around the world. Upon learning about federal interest in training medically oriented behavioral scientists, he promptly submitted an ambitious grant proposal to the National Institute for General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), up to that time not a standard source for anthropological funding. Over a period of 15 years, from 1965 to 1979, the grant brought in some $3 million (equivalent to more

138 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS than $15 million in 2007 dollars) and supported about 100 students in the Berkeley doctoral program. Surely, this is the largest graduate student training grant in the history of American anthropology. Without that training grant the scholarly corps for doing medical anthropology would have taken much longer to develop. Eager to institutionalize training in medical anthropology, Foster established the joint Berkeley-UCSF Ph.D. program in 1972 and directed it until his retirement. He also coau- thored the first textbook in the field with Barbara Gallatin Anderson, another of his former students, who recently had accepted a position at Southern Methodist University to develop a specialization in medical anthropology. Global in scope, Medical Anthropology (1978) included discussions of the origins and scope of the field; dealt with ethnomedicine, ethnopsychiatry, curers, and non-Western medical systems; examined illness behavior, hospitals, doctors, and nursing in the Western world; and considered roles for medical anthro- pologists, lessons learned from the past, and contemporary trends and dilemmas. The textbook concluded with provoca- tive chapters on nutrition and bioethics, both of which have become important domains for medical anthropological work in recent decades. Retirement: TRAVELS AND FAMILY Foster decided to retire—two years in advance of the statutory requirement—in 1979 when the funding for the third five-year cycle for his NIGMS training grant came to an end. As professor emeritus he continued for several years to keep a small office in the department and to serve on some dissertation committees. Retirement allowed him more time for social interaction with colleagues on and off campus. His routine included an off-campus “Monday Lunch Bunch” (with “the Boys”), a Faculty Club gathering with other retired

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 139 anthropology professors (“the Emeriti”) on Wednesdays, and an interdisciplinary group (“Little Thinkers”) at the Faculty Club on Friday. Retirement also provided the Fosters with more time to spend at Snag, their family’s weekend place in Calaveras County. Snag offered Foster, Mickie, and other family mem- bers and friends time and space to relax, walk along the country lanes, go fishing in the adjacent river, go swimming in their “lake,” go bird watching, pick bushels of apples from their trees, or just read from among the stacks of mostly non- fiction books. An avid angler, Foster was especially proud of a large rainbow trout—mounted on the kitchen wall—that he caught in their stretch of the river. Their retirement years permitted the Fosters to indulge their pleasure in traveling throughout the world, especially as participants on specialized cruises on small vessels and “adventure tourism” to unusual venues. Virtually every spring and fall Foster and Mickie (sometimes accompanied by their extended family members) departed for distant lands and waters. Antarctica, Polynesia, the Indian Ocean, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, Nepal, the Amazon, and the Caribbean were just a few of the more than 100 nations and regions they visited during a lifetime of travel adventures and consult- ing assignments. Even after Mickie died in December 2001 and Foster’s physical mobility became more challenged by Parkinson’s disease, he and his son Jeremy took a train tour through Mexico’s famous Copper Canyon and made a separate trip together to Tzintzuntzan in 2004. Foster also traveled in 2002 through the Panama Canal and later to China, both times accompanied by his son-in-law Wijbrandt van Schuur (of Nijmegen, Netherlands). His final trip—in 2005—took him (with Wijbrandt, Melissa, and their daughter Klaartje) to Alaska on the Celebrity Cruise Lines Infinity.

140 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS FOSTER’S LEGACY IN Anthropology AND Philanthropy On June 16, 1979, Foster was presented with a Festschrift volume entitled From Tzintzuntzan to the “Image of Limited Good”: Essays in Honor of George M. Foster (Clark et al., 1979), which contained congratulatory letters from numerous col- leagues and former students, a dozen articles written by for- mer students, and a comprehensive bibliography of Foster’s publications from 1939 to mid-1979.9 He was passionate about his chosen discipline, one that in many ways defined him. Near the end of his life he de- clared, “I didn’t choose anthropology, anthropology chose me. Anthropology and I, we were made for one another” (personal communication). Anthropology for Foster was a calling, and his enthusiasm for his chosen field never abated. He continued to write long after retirement, even publishing an analysis of his beloved cruise experiences (1985). To the end of his days anthropological journals and monographs remained at his side. Foster’s accomplishments were recognized with many honors and awards. He was elected to the National Acad- emy of Sciences in 1976 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980, served as president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) during the turbulent Vietnam war years of 1969-1970, and was recognized with the AAA’s Distinguished Service Award in 1980. In 1982 he received the Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology (see 1982; Weaver, 2002). On his retirement he received the Berkeley Citation, the campus’s highest honor, and in 1997 the Berkeley Anthropology Library was renamed in honor of the Fosters. In 2005 the Society for Medical Anthropology awarded Foster its Career Achievement Award and in the same year created the George Foster Practicing Medical Anthropology Award.

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 141 In a tribute at the time of his retirement Foster’s Berke- ley colleagues Eugene Hammel and Laura Nader wrote of him: George Foster stands as a challenge to those anthropologists who believe that specialization is incompatible with breadth of view, that scientific and applied work cannot productively be part of one career, that historical and long time association with the same community and region tends to narrow comparative insight (Hammel and Nader, 1979, p. 159). Foster’s commitment to anthropology went far beyond research, teaching, publications, and service. Inheriting con- siderable family wealth, he quietly provided gifts and endow- ments totaling well over $1 million to sustain the anthropo- logical institutions with which he was most closely identified: his beloved Anthropology Department at Berkeley, his alma mater Northwestern University, and Southern Methodist Uni- versity, where two of his former students shaped the growth of its new anthropology department and continued to work with him on writing projects related to medical anthropology and Tzintzuntzan’s community transformation. But it was not just in major gifts and endowments that Foster’s commitment was manifested. At the 1969 AAA an- nual meeting in New Orleans, a group of anthropologists interested in Mexico and Latin America gathered to discuss the formation of a professional organization (which eventually became the Society for Latin American Anthropology). The leaders of the group had arranged with the hotel to provide drinks and food to those who came to the reception follow- ing the meeting. Unfortunately, there was some confusion about whether the organizers or the AAA would pay the bill of several hundred dollars. Foster heard about the situation and anonymously took care of the bill. Throughout his life, Foster attributed his success to chance, luck, and serendipity. In the end, American anthro- pology was lucky to have Foster.

142 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS CHRONOLOGY 1913 Born on October 9 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota 1935 B.S. degree in anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 1935 Enrolled in doctoral program in anthropology at University of California, Berkeley 1936 First trip to Mexico 1937 Summer fieldwork among the Yuki of Round Valley, California 1938 January 6, married Mary LeCron (known as Mickie) 1940-1941 Fieldwork among the Sierra Popoluca in Soteapan, Veracruz, Mexico 1941 Ph.D. in anthropology, University of California, Berkeley 1941-1942 Instructor in sociology, Syracuse University 1942-1943 Lecturer in anthropology, UCLA 1943 Social science analyst, Institute of Inter-American Affairs, Washington, D.C. 1943-1952 Ethnologist, Institute of Social Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution; 1944-1946, Mexico City; 1946-1952, Institute director in Washington, D.C. 1945-1946 Initial fieldwork in Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán, Mexico 1949-1950 Fieldwork in Spain on Spanish background of con- temporary Latin America 1951-1952 Consultant with Institute of Inter-American Affairs on applied anthropology in Latin America 1953-1979 University of California, Berkeley, director, Museum of Anthropology, 1953-1955; lecturer in public health, 1954-1965; professor of anthropology, 1955-1979; department chair, 1958-1961, 1972-1973; director, joint (with UCSF) Ph.D. program in medical anthropology, 1972-1979; professor emeritus, 1979-2006 1957-1959 Member, Executive Board, American Anthropological Association 1958-2004 Continuing longitudinal field research in Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán, Mexico

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 143 1982 Bronislaw Malinowski Award, Society for Applied Anthropology 1990 Honorary doctor of humane letters degree, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas 1996 Berkeley Anthropology Emeriti Lecture (by Evon Z. Vogt) in honor of Foster 1997 Anthropology Library at Berkeley renamed in honor of George and Mary Foster 2000 First annual George and Mary Foster Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology, Southern Meth- odist University, Dallas, Texas 2004 The Deering Family Award, Northwestern University 2005 Career Achievement Award, Society for Medical Anthro- pology PROFESSIONAL RECORD 1935 B.S. degree in anthropology, Northwestern University 1941 Ph.D. in anthropology, University of California, Berkeley 1941-1942 Instructor in sociology, Syracuse University 1942-1943 Lecturer in anthropology, UCLA 1943 Social science analyst, Institute of Inter-American Affairs, Washington, D.C. 1943-1952 Ethnologist, Institute of Social Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution; 1944-1946, Mexico City; 1946-1952, institute director in Washington, D.C. 1953-1979 University of California, Berkeley, director, Museum of Anthropology, 1953-1955; lecturer in public health, 1954-1965; professor of anthropology, 1955-1979; department chair, 1958-1961, 1972-1973; director, joint (with UCSF) Ph.D. program in medical anthropology, 1972-1979; professor emeritus, 1979-2006

144 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS MEMBERSHIPS American Anthropological Association (fellow) Cosmos Club, Washington, D.C. Society for Applied Anthropology (fellow) Society for Latin American Anthropology Society for Medical Anthropology Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología NOTES 1. Foster’s line-a-day diary listed details of his travels. His entries typically included the name of the vessel, train, or type of aircraft, times of departure and arrivals, cities and countries along the way, hotels and restaurants, and persons visited. The information provided here, derived from his 56-page single-spaced typed summary of the Fosters’ trips and cruises from 1938 to 2000, is intended to capture some of his enthusiasm for travel. 2. To avoid confusion, I refer throughout to Prof. George Mc- Clelland Foster Jr. as “Foster” and to Prof. Mary LeCron Foster as “Mickie.” This use of his patronymic and her nickname reflects the way many perceived them. Even in Tzintzuntzan he always was called “el Doctor” while she was called “Mariquita.” 3. Mickie provided Foster with invaluable assistance—reading and suggesting corrections and improvements on all of his papers—for the next 22 years, until she returned to graduate studies in linguistics at Berkeley. She took advantage of his return to Tzintzuntzan to do field research for a dissertation on Tarascan grammar. Subsequently, she published important work on symbolism, language origins, and peace and conflict (cf. Brandes, 2003, M. Foster, 2001). 4. The Tzintzuntzan corpus of field notes, photographs, censuses, genealogies, etc. eventually will join the rest of Foster’s professional materials in the archives of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. At the time of this writing, the Tzintzuntzan files are being digitized and organized for scholarly use at the Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University. Interested scholars should contact the author, who serves as literary co-executor (with Stanley Brandes of the University of California, Berkeley) of Foster’s professional materials.

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 145 5. In 2000 a decade of efforts came to fruition when a Spanish translation of Empire’s Children was published by El Colegio de Mi- choacán as Los Hijos del Imperio: La Gente de Tzintzuntzan. More than 800 copies of this handsome volume have been provided at no cost to households in the community and to numerous Tzintzuntzeño emigrant households in Mexico and in the United States. 6. The Tzintzuntzan monograph, translated into Spanish as Tzint- zuntzan: Los campesinos mexicanos en un mundo en cambio was published by the prestigious Fondo de Cultura Económica and went through three reprintings. The American edition is still in print, having gone from the imprint of Little, Brown (1967) to Elsevier in 1979 and finally to Waveland Press in 1988. 7. Foster’s account of the theoretical, methodological, logistical, and personal dimensions of his over 50 years of research in Tzint- zuntzan is presented in the volume Chronicling Cultures (Kemper and Royce, 2002), and represents an extension from his account of 30 years of research published in the earlier volume on Long-Term Field Research in Social Anthropology (1979). 8. The dates for Micaela and members of her household come from the master file (“fichero” in Spanish) created by Foster in the 1960s after he became committed to a long-term study of Tzintzunt- zan. Since then, data derived from a series of decennial household censuses, the parish and civil archives, and genealogical data on the major families have been combined on individual 5×8-inch sheets for each of more than 5,000 individuals. The master file is maintained and updated by the author, with assistance from a research team of knowledgeable community members. 9. Without a doubt the most important piece in the Festschrift is that of Eugene Hammel and Laura Nader, titled “Will the Real George Foster Please Stand Up? A Brief Intellectual History” (1979, pp. 159-166). This article is available at the Anthropology Emeritus Lecture Series website, specifically the Fifth Emeritus Lecture deliv- ered by Evon Z. Vogt on October 21, 1996: http://sunsite.berkeley. edu/Anthro/foster/bio/fobib.html. This website also includes a link to the exhibit “Tzintzuntzan, Mexico: photographs by George Foster” (http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/exhibitions/tzin/01. html). Other assessments of Foster’s career include M. Foster (2001); Kemper (1991, 2006); Kemper and Brandes (2007); Weaver (2002); and Zamora (1983).

146 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS References Brandes, S. 2003. Mary LeCron Foster (1914-2001). Am. Anthropol. 105(1):218-221. Clark, M., R. V. Kemper, and C. Nelson, eds. 1979. From Tzintzunt- zan to the “Image of Limited Good”: Essays in Honor of George M. Foster. Kroeber Anthropol. Soc. Pap. 55-56. Foster, M. L. 2001. Finding the Themes: Family, Anthropology, Language Origins, Peace and Conflict, an oral history conducted in 2000 by S. Riess, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library. Berkeley: University of California. (http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docI d=kt4s2003sn&brand=calisphere. Accessed May 24, 2007.) Hammel, E. A. 2000. Introduction. In George M. Foster, An Anthropol- ogist’s Life in the Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice at UC Berkeley, the Smithsonian, in Mexico, and with the World Health Organization, pp. iv-viii. An oral history conducted in 1998 and 1999 by S. B. Riess. Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library. Berkeley: University of California. (http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=kt7s2005 ng&brand=calisphere. Accessed May 24, 2007.) Hammel, E., and L. Nader. 1979. Will the Real George Foster Please Stand Up? A Brief Intellectual History. In From Tzintzuntzan to “The Image of Limited Good: Essays in Honor of George M. Foster, eds. M. Clark, R. V. Kemper, and C. Nelson. Kroeber Anthropol. Soc. Pap. 55-56:159-164. Kemper, R. V. 1991. Foster, George M. In International Directory of An- thropologists (compiled by Library-Anthropology Resource Group, C. Winters, gen. ed.), pp. 212-13. New York: Garland Publishing. Kemper, R. V. 2006. George M. Foster (1913-2006). SfAA Newsl. 17(4):3-15. (http://www.sfaa.net/newsletter/nov06nl.pdf. Accessed May 24, 2007.) Kemper, R. V., and S. Brandes. 2007. George McClelland Foster, Jr. (1913-2006). Am. Anthropol. 109(2):427-433. Kemper, R. V., and A. Peterson Royce, eds. 2002. Chronicling Cul- tures: Long-term Field Research in Anthropology. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press. Rollwagen, J. (producer). 1992. Tzintzuntzan in the 1990s: A Lakeside Village in Highland Mexico (Module 1: Introduction, 22 minutes; Module 2: Change in Tzintzuntzan, 33 minutes; Module 3: part 1, Religious Calendar, 14 minutes). Brockport, N.Y.: The Institute Inc.

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 147 Vogt, E. Z. 2002. The Harvard Chiapas Project: 1957-2000. In Chroni- cling Cultures: Long-term Field Research in Anthropology, eds., R. V. Kemper and A. Peterson Royce, pp. 135-159. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press. Weaver, T. 2002. George M. Foster: Medical anthropology in the post-World War II years. In The Dynamics of Applied Anthropology in the Twentieth Century: The Malinowski Award Papers, ed. T. Weaver, pp. 170-186. Oklahoma City: Society for Applied Anthropology. Zamora, M. D., ed. 1983. Social change in India, Pakistan, and Ban- gladesh: Essays in honour of George M. Foster. S. Asian Anthropol. 4(2):63-125.

148 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS S elected B I B L I O G R A P H Y 1942 A Primitive Mexican Economy. Monographs of the American Ethnologi- cal Society V. New York: J. J. Agustin. 1944 A Summary of Yuki Culture. University of California Anthropological Records 5(3):155-244. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1948 With G. Ospina. Empire’s Children: The People of Tzintzuntzan. Washing- ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology Publication No. 6. México, D.F.: Imprenta Nuevo Mundo. 1952 Relationships between theoretical and applied anthropology: A public health program analysis. Hum. Organ. 11(3):5-16. 1958 Problems in Intercultural Health Programs. Social Science Research Council Pamphlet No. 12. New York: Social Science Research Council. 1960 Culture and Conquest: America’s Spanish Heritage. Viking Fund Publica- tions in Anthropology No. 27. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. 1961 The Dyadic Contract: A model for social structure of a Mexican peasant village. Am. Anthropol. 63:1173-1192. 1962 Traditional Cultures and the Impact of Technological Change. New York: Harper & Bros. 1963 The Dyadic Contract. II: Patron-client relationship. Am. Anthropol. 65:1280-1294.

L A N D F O S T E R J R GEORGE McCLEL 149 1965 [1] Peasant society and the Image of Limited Good. Am. Anthropol. 67:293-315. [2] The sociology of pottery: Questions and hypotheses arising from contemporary Mexican work. In Ceramics and Man, ed. F. R. Matson, pp. 42-61. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology No. 41. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. 1967 Tzintzuntzan: Mexican Peasants in a Changing World. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1969 [1] Applied Anthropology. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. [2] Godparents and social networks in Tzintzuntzan. Southwest. J. Anthropol. 25:261-278. 1972 The anatomy of envy: A study in symbolic behavior, and reply [to commentators]. Curr. Anthropol. 13:165-186, 198-202. 1974 With R. V. Kemper, eds. Anthropologists in Cities. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1976 Graduate study at Berkeley: 1935-1941. In “Paths to the Symbolic Self: Essays in Honor of Walter Goldschmidt,” eds. J. P. Loucky and J. R. Jones. Anthropol. UCLA 8(1-2):9-18. 1978 With B. Gallatin Anderson. Medical Anthropology. New York: Wiley & Sons. 1979 With T. Scudder, E. Colson, and R. V. Kemper, eds. Long-Term Field Research in Social Anthropology. New York: Academic Press.

150 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 1982 Applied anthropology and international health: Retrospect and prospect. Hum. Organ. 41:189-197. 1985 South Seas cruise: A case study of a short-lived society. Ann. Tourism Res. 13:215-238. 1994 Hippocrates’ Latin American Legacy: Humoral Medicine in the New World. Langhorne, Pa.: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. 2000 An Anthropologist’s Life in the Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice at UC Berkeley, the Smithsonian, in Mexico, and with the World Health Organi- zation. An oral history conducted in 1998 and 1999 by S. B. Riess. Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library. Berkeley: University of California. (http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=kt7s2005 ng&brand=calisphere. Accessed May 24, 2007.) 2002 A half century of field research in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico: A personal view. In Chronicling Cultures: Long-term Field Research in Anthropology, eds. R. V. Kemper and A. Peterson Royce, pp. 252-283. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press.

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Biographic Memoirs Volume 90 contains the biographies of deceased members of the National Academy of Sciences and bibliographies of their published works. Each biographical essay was written by a member of the Academy familiar with the professional career of the deceased. For historical and bibliographical purposes, these volumes are worth returning to time and again.

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