David Murray Schneider (November 11, 1918,Brooklyn, New York – October 30, 1995,Santa Cruz, California) was anAmericancultural anthropologist, best known for his studies ofkinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology.

He received his B.S. in 1940 and his M.S. fromCornell University in 1941. He received his PhD inSocial Anthropology from Harvard in 1949, based on fieldwork on theMicronesian island ofYap.

After completing his graduate work, he first taught at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. In 1960, he accepted a position at theUniversity of Chicago, where he spent most of his career, teaching in Anthropology and the Committee on Human Development. He was Chairman of Anthropology from 1963 to 1966.^[1]

While at Chicago, Schneider was director of the Kinship Project, a study supported by the National Science Foundation that looked at how middle-class families in the United States and Great Britain respond to their kinship relations. His findings challenged the common-sense assumption that kinship in Anglo-American cultures is primarily about recognizing biological relatedness. While a rhetoric of "blood" ties is an important conceptual structuring device in US and British kinship systems, cultural and social considerations are more important. The discoveries he demonstrated through a series of books, most famouslyAmerican Kinship: a Cultural Account, revolutionized and revitalized the study of kinship within anthropology, on the one hand, and contributed to the theoretical basis offeminist anthropology, gender studies, and lesbian and gay studies, on the other.

Schneider critiqued the so-called Western theories of kinship by accusing its supporters of beingethnocentric.

As a teacher, Schneider was also known for taking on and encouraging students studying nontraditional topics, and as a mentor to women and lesbian or gay graduate students, who often otherwise had difficulty finding mentors.^[2]

After retiring from Chicago in 1986, he joined the anthropology department at theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz, where he remained until his death in 1995.

This sectionneeds expansion. You can help byadding missing information.(October 2015)

• Raymond J. DeMallie
• Esther Newton, cultural anthropologist, gay and lesbian communities in U.S.
• Bradd Shore, psychological anthropologist
• Roy Wagner
• Gary Witherspoon

• A Critique of the Study of Kinship
• American Kinship : A Cultural Account
• Matrilineal Kinship
• Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture
• Dialectics and Gender: Anthropological Approaches
• History of Public Welfare in New York State: 1867–1940
• The Micronesians of Yap and Their Depopulation (1949)
• 1995.Schneider on Schneider: The Conversion of the Jews and Other Anthropological Stories by David Schneider, as told to Richard Handler. Ed. Richard Handler. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
• 1997. "The Power of Culture: Notes on Some Aspects of Gay and Lesbian Kinship in America Today." Cultural Anthropology 12 (2): 270-74.

• Bashkow, Ira. 1991. The Dynamics of Rapport in a Colonial Situation: David Schneider's Fieldwork on the Islands of Yap. InColonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge. George Stocking, ed. pp. 170–242. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Feinberg, Richard and Martin Ottenheimer, eds. The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David M. Schneider. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2001.

• Guide to the David M. Schneider Papers 1918-1994 at theUniversity of Chicago Special Collections Research Center

• 1918 births
• 1995 deaths
• Symbolic anthropologists
• American anthropology writers
• Anthropology educators
• Cornell University alumni
• Harvard University alumni
• University of Chicago faculty
• University of California, Berkeley faculty
• University of California, Santa Cruz faculty
• Yap
• 20th-century American non-fiction writers
• 20th-century American male writers
• American male non-fiction writers
• 20th-century American anthropologists
• 20th-century American science writers

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles to be expanded from October 2015
• All articles to be expanded