David Murray Schneider (November 11, 1918, Brooklyn, New York – October 30, 1995, Santa Cruz, California) was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology.
He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard in 1949, based on fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap.
In 1960, he accepted a position at the University of Chicago, where he spent most of his career, teaching in Anthropology and the Committee on Human Development.
His findings challenged the common-sense assumption that kinship in Anglo-American cultures is primarily about recognizing biological relatedness.
[2] After retiring from Chicago in 1986, he joined the anthropology department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he remained until his death in 1995.