Photo credit: Paul Moore

The Human Relations Area Files at Yale University announces the retirement of Research Anthropologist Ian Skoggard, a longtime member of our staff. Ian has worked at HRAF for 28 years and has contributed greatly to our organization. He will be greatly missed by all.

Ian Skoggard was born on Long Island, New York. In 1968, his family moved to Canada, where he later attended the University of Toronto majoring in anthropology. After college he lived for a year in the Yukon Territories working at a nature retreat on the confluence of the Yukon and Pelly Rivers. The following year he moved to New York City to pursue a career in filmmaking, eventually going back to graduate school to study anthropology. He received a master’s degree in anthropology from Hunter College and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the City University of New York (CUNY) where Burton Pasternak was his advisor. While at CUNY, he was also influenced by Eric Wolf, Gerald Sider, Vincent Crapanzano, and Jane Schneider.

During his time in New York he met and married Hilary Cain, a medical student at Columbia Presbyterian (now, New York Presbyterian). He did his fieldwork in Taiwan under the auspices of the Bureau of Ethnology, Academia Sinica and studied the history and organization of Taiwan’s shoe industry, the country’s third largest export industry at the time. His dissertation showed how rural, formerly agricultural families and villages were able to adapt labor intensive manufacturing processes and how new religions helped to accommodate this process. The dissertation was later published under the title, The Indigenous Dynamic in Taiwan’s Postwar Development: Religious and Historical Roots of Entrepreneurship (Routledge. 1996/2016).

After moving to New Haven, Connecticut in 1993, Ian taught at Southern Connecticut State University. In 1996, he began working at HRAF as an analyst and editor. In New Haven he became an active community volunteer for Elm City Congregations Organized, a faith-based organization, and later became a key leader in New Haven Rising, the community organizing arm of the Yale Unions. During this time, he felt a call to ministry, or at least wished to understand his faith better, and studied at the Yale Divinity School, obtaining a M.Div. in 2008. He returned to working at HRAF with new interests in religion, affect, and the evolution of cooperation.

Officially retired at the end of August 2024, Ian will continue to work at HRAF part-time to finish up his work on various research projects, including his grant work on hazards and culture change. He intends to travel and continue writing on topics close to his interests in academia and community, as well as science and religion. Ian and Hilary have two grown children, James and Sophie, with whom they also intend to spend much quality time.

We hope that you will join us in congratulating Ian Skoggard on his retirement and thanking him for his service to HRAF and anthropology. We wish him all the best for the future and a well-deserved, happy, and healthy retirement.