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George William (“Bill”) Skinner (February 14, 1925 - October 26, 2008), an American anthropological sinologist, was born in Oakland, California, in 1925. He attended Berkeley High School and then Deep Springs College (California) in 1942- 1943. In 1943 he joined the Navy V-12 Program at Missouri Valley College for two years, followed by 18 months of instruction in Chinese at the U.S. Navy Oriental Language School at the University of Colorado. He then matriculated at Cornell University, earning a bachelor’s degree with distinction in East Asian studies in 1947. From 1948 onward he was a doctoral student in anthropology at Cornell, receiving the Ph.D. in 1954. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980 and awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Hong Kong in 2001.

Skinner’s first teaching post was as instructor in sociology at Cornell in 1949. From 1951 to 1955 he served as field director of the Cornell Southeast Asia Project and from 1956 to 1958 was a research associate in East Asian studies at Cornell. Following two years as assistant professor of sociology at Columbia (1958-1960), he became associate professor and professor of anthropology at Cornell (1960-1965), later serving as professor of anthropology at Stanford (1965-1989) and at the University of California at Davis (1990-2004); he retired in 2005 at the age of 80 but remained active professionally. Between 1977 and 2002 he was visiting professor at five universities, including Keio University in Tokyo and Hong Kong University.

Skinner’s contributions to knowledge span five disciplines: anthropology, demography, geography, history, and sociology— and employed data from five countries: China, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, and France. They fall into four main groups. The first is the study of assimilation and acculturation of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, a broadening of his dissertation. The second is what he came to call the study of “hierarchical regional space,” the main core of his work that began with analysis of rural marketing in Sichuan, China. The third is what he called “family systems theory,” the way kinship and household organization affect behavior, especially economic and demographic behavior; data for this work came from France, China, and Japan. The fourth is a series of essays that overlap the first three and had a profound influence on the historiography of China.

Source: Hammel, E.A. George William Skinner 1925-2008: A Biographical Memoir. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 2009