Halpern, Joel M. (Joel Martin), 1929-2019

Joel Halpern (1929-2019), cultural anthropologist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Halpern was an adventurer and a keen observer who from an early age set his own path. As a youth, he rejected his father's advice that he study chemistry, and instead earned a BA in history from the University of Michigan and a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University.

His PhD dissertation on the Serbian village of Orašac received the Clarke F. Ansley Award from Columbia University Press and was published in 1956 as A Serbian Village. Throughout his long career, he conducted ethnographic research in regions ranging from Lapland to Laos, and is best known for his studies of the effects of modernization in the Balkans, particularly the work he and his former wife Barbara performed in Orašac, which spanned six decades.

He also engaged in fieldwork in Bulgaria, Canada, Greece, India, Israel, the former Soviet Union, Sweden, Thailand, the United States, and Vietnam. He was on the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles; Brandeis University; and the Russian Research Center at Harvard before arriving at UMass–Amherst in 1967, where he taught until his retirement in 1993.