Schneider, David Murray, 1918-....

While at the University of Chicago, Schneider taught in the Department of Anthropology. He was director of the Kinship Project, which was a study funded by the National Science Foundation that explored the way middle-class families in the United States and the United Kingdom respond to their kinship relations. Perhaps Schneider's most famous publication was American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1968).

David M. Schneider was born on November 11, 1918 in Brooklyn, New York. He was educated at the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University, where he received a B.S. in 1940 and an M.A. in 1941. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard in 1949, based on fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap.

After graduate school, Schneider first taught at the University of California, Berkeley before accepting a position at the University of Chicago in 1960. While at the University of Chicago, he taught in the Department of Anthropology, serving as its chair between 1963 and 1966, and in the Committee on Human Development. He retired from the University of Chicago in 1986, and worked in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz until his death on October 30,1995.

While at Chicago, Schneider was director of the Kinship Project, which was a study funded by the National Science Foundation that explored the way middle-class families in the United States and the United Kingdom respond to their kinship relations. A number of publications grew out of his work with this project which argued that kinship relations needed to be understood as cultural and social phenomena. Perhaps Schneider's most famous publication was American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1968).