Walter Goldschmidt | Anthropologist, 97

Walter Goldschmidt, 97, an anthropologist and longtime University of California, Los Angeles professor whose studies ranged from California farmers to East African cultures, died Sept. 1 in Pasadena, Calif., after a short illness, said his son, Mark.

He went to UCLA in 1946 and over the years was a prolific author who "was really looking for the motivation for human behavior," his son said.

Dr. Goldschmidt earned bachelor's and master's degrees in anthropology from the University of Texas and received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1942.

In 1937, he married Beatrice Gale, a psychiatric social worker who assisted in his research and took photographs for some of his books. They honeymooned among the Hupa, an American Indian tribe in Northern California that he was studying. She died in 1991.

His studies of California farming communities compared life on small family farms to areas controlled by agribusiness, showing that the family-farm communities had more social institutions and a better quality of life. Those findings were included in his 1947 book, As You Sow.

East Africa was another focus of Dr. Goldschmidt's work, particularly the Sebei tribal group in Uganda.

In the 1960s, Dr. Goldschmidt directed a study of four East African tribes. The study examined the tribes' cultural institutions, such as marriage and land tenure, to show how they adapted when lifestyles within the tribes changed.

Dr. Goldschmidt spent two years in the 1950s helping produce a program called Ways of Mankind for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. The program dealt with such topics as music, religion, and ethics.

He was president of the American Anthropological Association and editor of the journal American Anthropologist. He became an emeritus professor of anthropology and psychiatry in the early 1980s. - Los Angeles Times