David Schneider

David M. Schneider was an influential cultural anthropologist who spent much of his career as a professor at the University of Chicago. He played a vital role in making the university a hub for symbolic anthropology.

His most well-known work is the 1968 book "American Kinship," which applied his symbolic theories to family structures in the United States. In it, he argued that American concepts of kinship are built on cultural symbols rather than biological facts.

He pioneered the symbolic approach to studying kinship, breaking away from the idea that biological reproduction defined family structures. He argued that concepts like "blood" and "sexual intercourse" were primarily cultural symbols used to organize social life.

Schneider criticized Western anthropologists for projecting their own cultural biases—specifically the nuclear family model—onto the societies they studied. He believed that kinship theory needed to be deconstructed to understand the purely cultural symbols of the people being studied.