Deceased November 16, 1992
View alumni profile (log in required)
In Memory
Friends of George Sherman were shocked and saddened to learn of his death in a car accident on Nov. 16, 1992, in Erving, Mass. George was on his way to teach a course in cultural anthropology at Keene State College when a car driven by an 18-year-old boy tried to cross his path, resulting in a head-on collision. The crash cut short the energetic and creative life of a man remembered by many of his classmates as one of the more dynamic and uncompromising forces in a turbulent time.
George was born on Feb. 22, 1947, in New York, N.Y. He attended public school and the Horace Mann School. In 1969 he was awarded his B.A. in English from Amherst. He studied anthropology at Cornell University where he earned his M.A. in 1974. After completing three years of field research in North Sumatra, Indonesia, where he studied the social organization of Batak rice-farming people, he was awarded his Ph.D. in anthropology by Cornell in 1982.
He later expanded his work on the Batak and in 1990 completed his first book, Rice, Rupees, and Ritual: Economy and Society among the Samosir Batak of Sumatra, published by Stanford University Press. During the following years, George continued his research into the societies of farming cultures and contributed numerous articles on the subject to many journals including The American Anthropologist, Studies in Third World Societies and Indonesia.
George also maintained a longtime interest in the study of the phenomenon of Nazism and delivered several papers on that subject at meetings of the American Anthropological Association. Between 1973 and 1977, he won two Fulbright-Hayes fellowships, and in 1982, he won the Lauriston Sharp Prize of the Cornell Southeast Asia program.
He was also an avid organic farmer, tireless father and supporter of the community. In 1969 he helped found a small communal farm in Wendell, which remained his home until his untimely death. He traveled the United States pursuing his academic goals and teaching but always returned to Wendell where he farmed and raised his daughter. Since 1984 he held teaching positions at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Dartmouth College and the University of California, Irvine. At the time of his death, he was teaching at Keene State College in New Hampshire and completing a book on Nazism.
George was a co-founder of the Crashing Tower Pickle Company, which produced organic dill pickles to celebrate an early act of ecotage to stop the nuclear power plant planned for Montague. He was active in the publication of the Wendell Post and worked for peace and justice as an individual and with the Traprock Peace Center.
Even the solid granite foundations of Amherst College shook during the tumult of the 1960s, and the class of 1969, with George’s help, added a good deal of energy to that process. This period was the beginning of the end of the old fraternity system, and many of us remember well the first non-fraternity, Phi Psi, leading the way, and George, from his tree-top level, third floor suite, directing the progress. It was in this large airy studio hung with silks that George organized his intellectual life, held forth on Bach and Bob Dylan to the many who were interested enough to wander by, day or night, and bent over the books and journals that were so much of this world.
Politics and the fight for rights for the oppressed were always primary in George’s mind, and when he thought he had done as much as he could do to shake up Amherst, he transferred to Columbia for a year to help the famous “strike” there.
George was the son of the late Isaac Sherman and the late Tamara Manela (Sherman). He leaves his daughter, Ruth Sherman; a sister, Reena Moss; and a brother, Alexander Sherman, along with many cousins, nieces and nephews.
Daniel Keller ’69