Gerald Duane Berreman was born in 1930 in America. As a young ambitious teenager, Gerald knew he wanted to learn more after high school so he attended the University of Oregon where he developed an interest in comparative social inequality, which consequently led him to his dissertation on the contemporary study of Nikolsky: an Aleutian Village. He graduated shortly after that in 1953 with a Bachelors Degree in Anthropology. In 1959, he got a job at University of California, Berkeley where he got his professorial start teaching and has taught on and off for the last 40 plus years. Over the years, he's broadened his interests to include small-scale societies, research methods and ethics, interaction theory, urban society, India, the Himalayas, and the Arctic.
Berreman’s theoretical approach to anthropology is “social interactionalist, which articulates with symbolic interactionism, ethno methodology, cognitive sociology and practice theory.” These topics study human perception and understanding skills, power, behavior, and beliefs. His ethics, when it came to his research, were held in so high of regard by his peers that he co-drafted and supported the American Anthropological Association's “Principles of Professional Responsibility.” He has taught the topics of social inequality and human rights all over the world including Sweden, Nepal, and India, where he was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Garhwal (India) and the University of Stockholm (Sweden).
Now, for the most part, his recent research finds him in Nepal and India fighting over environmental issues concerning development. For this he has teamed up with a famous grassroots environment movement, Chipko. A feature published by the United Nations Environment Programme reported, 'In effect, the Chipko people are working a socio-economic revolution by winning control of their forest resources from the hands of a distant bureaucracy which is concerned with selling the forest for making urban-oriented products.'
Gerald Berreman is a man of the people, trying to better social inequalities among humans which can be proven time and again through his published works. Berreman can be found arguing and theorizing throughout the country on topics such as research ethics and the pragmatic and theoretical implications of the “The Great Hunter-Gatherer Debate”. You can also find him today teaching Anthro 154: Social Inequality at Berkeley.
References
Gerald Berreman, http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/berreman.html, (Nov, 2000)
Former link, http://newfirstsearch.oclc.org, (Nov. 2000)
Beatrice Bain Research, http://socrates.berkeley.edu:7013/, (Nov. 2000)
Kottak, Conrad P., Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity, 8th Ed, Pg. 411-412, McGraw Hill Companies
Written By: Greg Lessard
Edited By: David Gardner 2007