DRAFT OBITUARY OF WARD HUNT GOODENOUGH Ward H. Goodenough, 94, died on June 9th in Haverford, Pennsylvania. A long-time Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he shaped the discipline of Anthropology in the second half of the 20th century, was active as a composer and poet, and was loved as a friend, a mentor, and a patriarch of his family. Born May 30, 1919, in Cambridge Massachusetts, he attended high school at the Groton School in Groton Massachusetts and earned a B.A. in 1940 from Cornell University, where he met his soon-to-be wife, Ruth Gallagher. In World War II he served in the United States Army and did research under Gen. George Marshall that helped enable two of Marshall's signature achievements: showing that integration of the armed forces was both feasible and desirable and that the GI Bill would meet the needs of returning soldiers and thereby prevent destabilization of civilian society. Goodenough earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale in 1949. He was greatly influenced by George Peter Murdock, who supervised his dissertation. He did fieldwork on Chuuk (Truk) in Micronesia with Murdock for seven months in 1947. His resulting PhD thesis was published as Property, Kin and Community on Truk (1951). He had a life-long attachment to Chuuk and its people and was the author and compiler of the Trukese English Dictionary (1980). Goodenough's later fieldwork was also in Oceania. An expert on kinship, his best known early work was the development of a method for applying componential analysis to the study of kinship terminology. In his later work, Goodenough published widely and made foundational contributions to linguistic anthropology, economic development studies and culture theory. An active writer into his 80s, Goodenough's last book, Under Heaven's Brow: Pre-Christian Religious Tradition in Chuuk, appeared in 2002. His scholarship also had application in public policy decisions, including work on the Ocean Studies Board of the National Research Council appraising fishing quota shares and on a panel of consultants that advised the Department of Energy on how to mark its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant so as to "prevent inadvertent intrusion for the next 10,000 years." A teacher as well as a scholar, Goodenough came to the University of Pennsylvania in 1949, where he remained until his retirement in 1989, serving as the department chair from 1976 to 1982 and as a University Professor from 1980-1989. He was appointed to many leadership positions and received many honors in his career. He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1958), President of the Society for Applied Anthropology (1963), Editor of the American Anthropologist (1966- 70), a Guggenheim Fellow (1979-80), and president of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (1987). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1971), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975) and the American Philosophical Society (1973), where he served in several capacities. He received the American Anthropological Association's Distinguished Service Award in 1986 and the Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1997. He was named as the Groton School Distinguished Grotonian for 2012. His marriage to Ruth Goodenough lasted until her death in 2001. She often served as his editor, and the success of his writing owed a debt to her lively intellect and lightness of touch. They raised four children, Hester Gelber (now living in Palo Alto, California), Deborah Gordon (Millington, New Jersey), Oliver Goodenough (Woodstock, Vermont) and Garrick Gallagher (Phoenix, Arizona), and he leaves ten grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He is also survived by Joan May, his beloved partner of recent years. His poetry includes work in English and in Trukese. A formalist at heart, he was particularly devoted to the sonnet in his poetry, and in music he specialized in keyboard fugues and other contrapuntal forms. A Memorial Service will be held at the Quadrangle, 3300 Darby Road, Haverford, Pennsylvania on June 27 at 2:00. Memorial contributions may be made to the American Philosophical Society, 104 South Fifth Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106-3387
Arr. by: Bringhurst Funeral Home at West Laurel Hill Cemetery. www.forever-care.com