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For almost half a century as a tenured faculty member and later as Professor Emeritus, Peter Carstens graced the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and played a prominent role in the development of the discipline in Canada. He was born in 1929 in Cape Town, and raised in Kleinzee, a diamond mining community bordering the Atlantic Ocean on the west coast of South Africa in a territory known as Namaqualand. In 1952 he completed a B.A. in social anthropology at Rhodes University, and a year later a B.A. in sociology. In 1961 he received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town.
From 1956 to 1964 he was a lecturer at the School of African Studies at Cape Town. He spent the 1962-3 academic year at the University of British Columbia after Harry Hawthorn, with whom he had been in communication about Indian reserves, arranged for him to be granted a Kroener Foundation Fellowship. During 196465 he was a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his deep understanding of Marx, Weber and Durkheim had an influence on Lenski's monumental theoretical work, Power and Privilege (1966). In 1965 he emigrated to Canada to take up a position at the University of Toronto as an associate professor; four years later he was promoted to professor. He retired and was appointed Professor Emeritus in 1995.
Over the course of his career, Peter completed three original, long-term ethnographic projects. From 1952 to 1962 he focused on the social organization of the reserve system among the Ñama, who inhabited the region of his birthplace. This research became the basis of his Ph.D. dissertation and his first book, The Social Structure of a Cape Coloured Reserve (1966). Years later he commented (personal communication) that he was not certain that he had got the theory side right, but he was confident the data were strong and accurate, and that was what was most important to him.
During his year at the University of British Columbia, he spent four months in a pilot study of nearby reserves. It was not until 1978 that his professional and personal commitments provided an opportunity to return to the project. From 1982 to 1991 he...