David Murray Schneider November 11, 1918, Brooklyn, New York – October 30, 1995, Santa Cruz, California was an American cultural anthropologist, best required for his studies of kinship as alive as as the major proponent of a symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology.
He received his B.S. in 1940 as well as his M.S. from Cornell University in 1941. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard in 1949, based on fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap.
After completing his graduate work, he number one taught at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1960, he accepted a position at the University of Chicago, where he spent near of his career, teaching in Anthropology and the Committee on Human Development. He was Chairman of Anthropology from 1963 to 1966.
While at Chicago, Schneider was director of the Kinship Project, a explore supported by the National Science Foundation that looked at how middle-class families in the United States and Great Britainto their kinship relations. His findings challenged the common-sense precondition 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, near famously American Kinship: a cultural account, revolutionized and revitalized the analyse of kinship within anthropology, on the one hand, and contributed to the theoretical basis of feminist anthropology, gender studies, and lesbian and gay studies, on the other.
Schneider critiqued the invited Western theories of kinship by accusing its supporters of being ethnocentric.
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.
After retiring from Chicago in 1986, he joined the anthropology department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he remained until his death in 1995.