John Fee Embree (August 26, 1908 – December 22, 1950) was anAmericananthropologist and academic who specialized in the study ofJapan. He was a professor atYale University when he was struck and killed by a motorist.[1]
Born inNew Haven, Connecticut, Embree received hisBachelor of Arts from theUniversity of Hawaiʻi in 1931, hisMaster of Arts from theUniversity of Toronto in 1934 and hisPh.D. from theUniversity of Chicago in 1937. In 1935–36, as part of his doctoral thesis, he conducted field research in a rural area ofKumamoto on the southernmost Japanese island ofKyūshū. The study culminated in the seminal bookSuye Mura: A Japanese Village,[2] published in 1939 by theUniversity of Chicago Press. His wife, Ella Lury Embree (later, Wiswell) conducted the research in Suye Mura alongside him, and subsequently published her ownethnographical work on the subject,The Women of Suye Mura.[1]
John Embree served as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii in 1937–41 and duringWorld War II in 1943–45. He was also associate professor of Anthropology and head of the Japanese area studies of the Civil Affairs Training School for the Far East which theWar Department set up at the University of Chicago for the training of military government officers for Japan and the Occupied Areas. He was associate professor of Sociology and Research Associate of Anthropology at Yale from 1948 to 1950 and, later in the year, was appointed the university's Director of Southeast Asia Studies.[1]
John Embree was 42 when, at year's end 1950, he and his only daughter, Clare, were struck and killed by a car inHamden, Connecticut.[1]
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