Arensberg, Conrad M. (Conrad Maynadier), 1910-1997

Conrad M. Arensberg was born on September 12, 1910 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Academically inclined from a young age, he excelled at school and graduated first in his class at Shadyside Academy in Pittsburgh. His early success earned him admittance into Harvard College. When he left for Cambridge, he was “singing for joy over each of the seven ridges of the Alleghenies, vowing never ever to return, but to remain forever in the greater world of Boston and beyond” (Comitas 2000). Harvard brought out Arensberg‟s intellectual curiosity. He struggled to decide on a major and was torn between history, anthropology, and English. After taking a variety of classes and traveling through Europe, Arensberg settled on anthropology. He excelled in his studies, and in 1931, at the end of his senior year, the Dean of the College exempted him from his final exams, seeing them as “being completely unnecessary in Conrad‟s case” (Comitas 2000). He graduated summa cum laude. As a graduate student, Arensberg was asked to join a project being conducted in Ireland by Harvard‟s Anthropology Department. Alongside W. Lloyd Warner and Solon T. Kimball, Arensberg spent three years studying rural Irish life in County Clare. This research resulted in his doctoral dissertation, “A Study in Rural Life in Ireland as Determined by the Functions and Morphology of the Family,” which was later published as “The Irish Countryman” in 1937. His work was groundbreaking in the field of anthropology, and his study of County Clare “became a model for other community studies…requiring that researchers study a target culture from the inside, making meticulous notes on everything they saw, heard or experienced.” Arensberg reshaped the way that anthropologists approached fieldwork and opened doors for the study of modern industrial societies. While his Ireland study is the most well known of his research, Arensberg had a diverse array of interests that led him to collaborate with colleagues in a variety of fields. His bibliography includes many co-authored works with friends such as Solon T. Kimball, Eliot D. Chapple, Karl Polanyi, Geoffrey Tootell, and Alan Lomax. These focus on areas such as industrial studies, economics, human relations and behavior. In addition to these endeavors Arensberg traveled as a research consultant. In the early 1950s he spent time in Germany as UNESCO‟s Research Director for the Institute for the Social Sciences. He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California in the late 1950s. In the 1960s he served as the Principal Investigator for the India Community Studies Project. Arensberg‟s varied research interests provided him with a broad range of experience and knowledge to bring to the classroom. He first became a university professor in 1938 at MIT, and remained a professor for the rest of his life, teaching at MIT, Brooklyn College, Barnard College, Columbia University, the University of Florida, and the University of Virginia. At Columbia, Arensberg worked alongside such notable anthropologists as Margaret Mead, Charles Wagley, and Marvin Harris. Despite his consistently heavy workload, Arensberg made time for his students—“He served on countless numbers ofsocial science doctoral defenses, and he was advisor, formal or informal, to almost every social or cultural anthropology graduate student on campus or in the field” (Comitas 2000). His influence can be seen in the work of his students. Always active professionally, Arensberg belonged to numerous “learned societies” as he called them. He was one of the founders of the Society for Applied Anthropology in the early 1940s and served as the organization‟s president several times. He joined the American Anthropological Association in 1933 during his graduate years at Harvard and was elected President in 1980. He often served as Program Chair for various professional meetings and belonged to such diverse organizations as the American Geographical Society, the Industrial Relations Research Association, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and the American Sociological Society. Arensberg officially retired in 1979, but he continued to collaborate with his colleagues, counsel past students, and participate in professional associations until his death. He passed away on February 10, 1997 in a nursing home in Hazlet, New Jersey after suffering from respiratory failure.