George McClelland Foster Jr. (October 9, 1913 – May 18, 2006) was an American anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, best known for contributions on peasant societies (the " principle of limited good" and the "Dyadic Contract") and as one of the founders of medical anthropology. He served as president of the

American Anthropological Association The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, ...

(elected 1970). And was elected member of the U.S.

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

(elected 1976)and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1980). He received the 1982 Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2005. A festschrift in his honor was published in 1979. He was married to the linguist

Mary LeCron Foster Mary LeCron Foster (February 1, 1914 – December 9, 2001) was an American anthropological linguist, who spent most of her working life at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Foster carried out graduate work i ...

, and in 1997 the U.C. Berkeley anthropology library was renamed the

George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library The George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library is one of the University of California, Berkeley Libraries, subject specialty libraries at University of California, Berkeley, and is one of only three anthropology libraries at American research univ ...

in their honor.

Selected publications

* Foster, George M. (1960) Culture and Conquest: America's Spanish Heritage, Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology No. 27. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. * Foster, George M. (1961) The Dyadic Contract: A model for social structure of a Mexican peasant village. Am. Anthropol. 63:1173–1192. * Foster, George M.(1962) Traditional Cultures and the Impact of Technological Change, New York: Harper & Bros. * Foster, George M.(1967) Tzintzuntzan: Mexican Peasants in a Changing World, Boston: Little, Brown and Co.

References

External links

Robert V. Kemper, "George McClelland Foster Jr.", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (2007)Finding Aid to the George McClelland Foster Papers, 1934–2005

The Bancroft Library The Bancroft Library in the center of the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is the university's primary special-collections library. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retai ...

1913 births 2006 deaths University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 20th-century American anthropologists {{anthropologist-stub