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Charles J. Erasmus (1921–2012) - professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), was a pioneer in peasant studies, medical anthropology, development anthropology (especially community development and anthropology’s role in foreign aid), experimental archaeology, and time-allocation. He devoted much of his career to understanding the conditions under which individuals commit to the public welfare, analyzed in his final book, In Search of the Common Good: Utopian Experiments Past and Future (1977, reprinted 1985).

Erasmus majored in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, after taking a class with Ralph Beals. Graduating in 1942, he served as a naval officer in World War II before entering UC Berkeley’s anthropology graduate program in 1946. Erasmus spent most of 1948 doing fieldwork in a Mayo Indian village in Sonora, Mexico, a formative experience. Earning his MA in 1950, he joined the Smithsonian Institution’s Institute of Social Anthropology (ISA) in Colombia, witnessing its transition from an academic training program to an applied unit of American foreign aid. During this time he published Las Dimensiones de la Cultura (1953), a history of American ethnology, one of the first available in Spanish. His applied experience in several Latin American countries served as the basis for scholarly articles on medical anthropology, agrarian change, and technical assistance, and for his second book, Man Takes Control: Cultural Development and American Aid (1961).

He returned to Berkeley in the mid-1950s to complete his dissertation on cooperative labor, drawing on multi-sited research in the Western Andes. Erasmus next joined Julian Steward’s Culture Change Project at the University of Illinois–Champagne, examining agrarian change in northwest Mexico. Some of these findings appeared in Man Takes Control, and other ethnographic materials featured in Volume III of Contemporary Change in Traditional Societies (1967).

Erasmus joined UCSB in 1962 as its first chair in anthropology. Former colleague David Brokensha recalled that Erasmus’ unorthodox but innovative leadership fostered UCSB’s emergence as a strong program.

During the 1960s Erasmus became involved in the Land Tenure Center’s study on agrarian change in Bolivia, which resulted in Land Reform and Social Revolution in Bolivia, co-authored with Dwight Heath and Hans Buechler (1969), and articles analyzing Latin American rural issues. His interest in peasant politics and cultural evolution led him to conduct experimental archaeological research on monument building in Mexico, which he published in 1965. Erasmus also undertook a multi-country investigation of rural cooperation during the late 1960s, including African fieldwork with David Brokensha. These studies shaped In Search of the Common Good and other publications.