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G. William Skinner, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, died on October 26, 2008, in Davis, California. The world's most influential anthropologist of China, Skinner pioneered the method of regional-systems analysis and contributed significantly to a wide range of topics, including studies of marketing systems and urbanization, political structure, the Chinese diaspora, and anthropological demography.
Bill Skinner was born on February 14, 1925, in Oakland, California. His father, John James Skinner, had dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help support his family after his father died; he went to work in a drugstore, then learned pharmacology and opened his own pharmacy. From John Skinner, Bill learned the excessive dedication to work that marked his life. Bill's own sons, James, Mark, and Jeremy, later exhibited the same striving for excellence, all earning Ph.D.s (in chemistry, biology, and psychology, respectively). (A fourth son, Geoffrey, died tragically in 1989.) Bill's mother, Eunice Engle Skinner, taught music and became the director of music education for the Berkeley school system. Early exposure to music profoundly shaped Bill's aesthetic tastes; he was a lifelong amateur musician (piano and voice) who listened avidly and with discernment to many kinds of classical music. Both his sister, Jane, and his daughter, Alison, became choral conductors.
Bill spent two years at Deep Springs College, located on a cattle farm in the California desert and founded to educate small cohorts of young men into the life of the mind in a self-sufficient, disciplined manner. Among his teachers were Kurt and Alice Bergel, refugees from Nazism, whose cosmopolitan depth of learning and wide-ranging curiosity left an indelible mark on Bill, setting him on an intellectual path and also arousing his interest in China. He remained in close contact with the Bergels until their deaths, through correspondence and an annual pilgrimage to the Carmel Bach Festival.
After Deep Springs, Bill 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, he headed for Cornell University to complete his B. A. This was a common trajectory for Deep Springs students, owing to the connections between the two institutions through Lucien L. Nunn,...