[Tlc] TLC-scholar's passing

[justinm at ucr.edu]

Forwarded from Dr. Charles Keyes.
Thanks,
justin

G. William (Bill) Skinner, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of
California, Davis, died Saturday night after a long battle with cancer.

Bill was a devoted and loyal mentor to me and to many other students from
Cornell, Stanford, and UC Davis, and an inspiration to generations of
scholars in anthropology, geography, sociology, China studies and Southeast
Asian studies.

In 2006 at the AAS meeting in San Francisco, a number of us gathered to
honor Bill. At the event I spoke as one of Bill’s first PhD students.  I
would like to repeat here some of what I said.

>From my perspective it was fortunate that the end of the Chinese Revolution
took place while Bill was engaged in fieldwork in Sichuan. Because he was
compelled to abort this fieldwork and because all of his field notes were
taken from him, he had, on return to Cornell where he was studying, to
choose a new dissertation project. That project turned out to be a study of
the Chinese in Thailand. His dissertation became two books that would shape
subsequent scholarship not only about Chinese migrants and their descendants
in Thailand and, more generally, Southeast Asia, but also lay the foundation
for studies of the relationship between class, ethnicity and politics in
Thailand. My own career-long preoccupation with the study of the
relationship between ethnicity and the nation-state unquestionably can be
traced to Bill’s influence on my scholarly development.

Bill also inspired me to draw on methods from sociology as well as
anthropology. In a paper I presented in 1963 in Bangkok to a seminar
sponsored by a joint project between Cornell and the University of London, I
wrote: “One of my deepest regrets that I have developed during the course of
my research is that I am not more versed in the techniques of sociological
research.” I was then engaged in fieldwork in a village in northeastern
Thailand and realized that I needed quantitative data to complement the
qualitative data I was gathering using the usual anthropological method of
participant observation. Bill must have taken my statement very much to
heart because after he returned from this seminar to Cornell he sent me
(very much by snail mail in those days) a number of guides to constructing
demographic surveys. I would go on to carry out three household and
socioeconomic censuses in this village, including ones during restudies of
the village in the early 1980s and in 2005.

At Cornell in the early and mid-1960s Bill was working on his magisterial
study of marketing in China that would result in his articles on “Marketing
and Social Structure in Rural China” that were published in the Journal of
Asian Studies. I recall being asked by Bill in a letter to me when I was in
the field about periodic markets in northeastern Thailand. He was quite
unbelieving when I reported that there were none. I am sure he would be
happy to know that in recent decades a periodic marketing system has been
created, as villagers have found peddlers do not bring a sufficient variety
of goods to their communities.

Bill had drawn some of his thinking for interpreting the spatial data
related to marketing in China from ‘central place theory’, originally
proposed by Walter Cristaller and made known to English-speaking scholars by
Edward Ullman. I think the fact that Ullman was a professor of geography at
the University of Washington was one of the reasons why Bill encouraged me
to accept an offer from UW.
Bill became one of the major shapers of comparative historical sociology. By
the time I first came to know him, Bill had already carried out fieldwork in
China, Thailand and Indonesia. He went on to add Japan and France to his
research interests. There can be few social scientists who contributed so
much to so many diverse fields

Bill is survived by his wife Susan Mann, Professor of History at Davis, by
three sons, James, Mark, and Jeremy, all professors themselves, and by his
and Susan's daughter Alison, a choral music conductor.  His eldest son
Jeffrey died in a tragic accident several years ago.
I know I speak for others in expressing profound gratitude for his
inspiration. On behalf of the many who have been his students in one way or
another I would like to offer deepest condolences to Susan and Bill's
family.

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
3046 INTN
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu