Anthropologist known for work on inequality in India dies

Eminent social anthropologist Gerald D Berreman, widely recognised for championing socially- responsible anthropology and for his pioneering work on social inequality in India, has died.
He was 83.
Emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, Berreman breathed his last at an elderly care home in El Cerrito in California on December 23, following a long illness, the university announced today.
He had retired from the UCB Department of Anthropology in 2001 after a distinguished career that featured a 41-year-long study of caste, gender, class and environment in and around the Indian village of Sirkanda and the urban area of Dehra Dun.

In later work, Berreman explored how lower-caste individuals in Northern India could escape the stigma of belonging to the so-called "untouchable" class.
With a lifelong interest in South Asia and the Himalayas, he also worked on environmental and development issues in India and Nepal, a media release said.

Berreman was known among anthropologists for his campaign to establish an ethics code that said anthropologists primary responsibility should be to the people they study.
He also was an early proponent of transparency in social science research.
In the 1970s and the 80s, he contributed to efforts that helped debunk a 1970s hoax about a Stone Age tribe in the Philippines.

An outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and the United States' Cold War entanglements, he refused to participate in Peace Corps training for volunteers going to India "because he thought that a nation which was annihilating a people in one country cannot be truly interested in doing good to another," according to Berreman's longtime Indian colleague, the poet and folklorist Ved Prakash Vatuck.
"Gerry considered those years decisive with respect to his development of a broadly comparative theory of social inequality that allowed him... To compare caste relations in India, the American South and, by further extension, to South Africa during apartheid," colleague and friend at Berkeley, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who was Berreman's former graduate student, said.

Berreman earned a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in anthropology from the University of Oregon in 1952 and 1953, respectively. He received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Cornell University in 1959, and got honorary degrees from the University of Stockholm and the Garhwal University in India. He taught in Sweden, India and Nepal.