G.

William Skinner
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For other people named William Skinner, see William Skinner (disambiguation).

George William Skinner

Born
Died
Citizenship
Nationality
Fields

Institutions
Alma mater

February 14, 1925

Oakland, California
October 26, 2008
Davis, California
United States
United States
Anthropology of China
Anthropology of Southeast Asia
(especially Overseas Chinese,
Indonesia and Thailand)
Cornell University
Columbia University
Stanford University
University of California, Davis
Deep Springs College
Cornell University

Doctoral
Lauriston Sharp
advisor
Doctoral
P. Steven Sangren
students
Known for Physiographic macroregions of China
George William Skinner (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ;
February 14, 1925 October 26, 2008) was an American anthropologist and scholar of
China.[1][2][3] Skinner was a proponent of the spatial approach to Chinese history, as
explained in his Presidential Address to the Association for Asian Studies in 1984.[4] He
often referred to his approach as "regional analysis," and taught the use of maps as a key
class of data in ethnography.

Contents

1 Early life

2 Academic career

3 Research

4 Publications

5 Notes

6 Sources

Early life
Skinner was born on February 14, 1925, in Oakland, California. His father, John James
Skinner was a pharmacologist and his mother, Eunice Engle Skinner, taught music and
became the director of music education for the Berkeley school system. Skinner spent
two years at Deep Springs College, a small college founded to educate small cohorts of
young men into the life of the mind in a self-sufficient, disciplined manner. After Deep
Springs, he 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, Skinner headed for Cornell University to complete his
B.A. degree. He graduated in the following year with his B.A. (with distinction) in Far
Eastern Studies, and remained there for his Ph.D. in anthropology (1954) under the
supervision of Lauriston Sharp.

Academic career
Skinners first job was as instructor in sociology at Cornell in 1949. Late in that year he
flew to Chengdu, in China's Sichuan province, to conduct doctoral dissertation research
on the structure of markets in the Chengdu Plain. Skinner's research was cut short by the
arrival of the People's Liberation Army, which confiscated his notes, but the experience
became the basis of his later work on spatial modelling. Skinner proceeded to Bangkok,
Thailand, where he researched a substitute doctoral topic, the social structure of the
Chinese community in Thailand. This research was published in his first two books,
Chinese Society in Thailand (1957) and Leadership and Power in the Chinese
Community of Thailand (1958) [5]
Between 1951 and 1955, he was field director of the Cornell Southeast Asia Program,
then a research associate at Cornell. He became assistant professor of anthropology at
Columbia University in 1958. Two years later, Skinner was hired back at Cornell as
associate professor and then promoted to full professor in 1962 an unusually fast
track to that status. In 1965, he left for Stanford University, moving again in 1990 to the
University of California, Davis, which had hired his wife, China historian Susan L.
Mann. Skinner retired from teaching in 2005 but maintained an active research program
until his death three years later.[6]

Research
Perhaps his best-known influence on Chinese Studies was his delineation of the
Physiographic macroregions of China.[7][8] In later years he was instrumental in the
establishment of the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project at
Harvard and Fudan Universities.[9] His papers and maps are archived in the library
collections of Harvard, Cornell,[10] the University of Washington,[11] and Fudan
University.