David M. Schneider

David M. Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918, who chaired the anthropology department at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1966 after an earlier position at the University of California, Berkeley, and later taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He became a leading figure in symbolic anthropology through his critique of the study of kinship, arguing in American Kinship: A Cultural Account and A Critique of the Study of Kinship that anthropologists had wrongly assumed kinship everywhere rests on a universal biological or genealogical foundation, when in many cultures, including his own case study of American kinship, it is better understood as a locally specific cultural and symbolic system rather than a direct expression of biology. He died in Santa Cruz, California, in 1995.