Michael Garfield Smith OM (18 August 1921 – 5 January 1993) was a Jamaican social anthropologist and poet of international repute.
In 1939 at age seventeen, Smith achieved the highest marks of all Higher Schools Certificate candidates in the entire British Empire.
[2] His scholarly feats earned him the Jamaica Scholarship, which did not take him to Bombay as he had wished, but to Canada, where he went to study English literature at McGill University.
Soon he became a prize student in Daryll Forde's department at University College London, completed his undergraduate work in short order, and after field research in Northern Nigeria, was awarded the PhD in 1951.
When in 1972 while at UCL, his old schoolmate and Prime Minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley, requested his services as special adviser, he accepted this added appointment as well.
Smith returned to the United States in 1978 as the Franklin M. Crosby Professor of the Human Environment at Yale University, a post he held until his retirement in 1986.
Nettleford); West Indian Family Structure; Kinship and Community in Carriacou; Dark Puritan; The Plural Society in the British West Indies; Stratification in Grenada; Culture, Race and Class in the Commonwealth Caribbean; Poverty in Jamaica and Pluralism, Politics and Ideology in the Creole Caribbean.
Throughout his career, he was steadfast in the belief that the study of social structure, despite a period of scholarly disinterest, was central to the anthropological enterprise, and he was even more resolute that the subject itself be critically reexamined.
In both regards, he called for the development of new conceptual frameworks "free of unverifiable postulates" to facilitate the study of social structural phenomena.
He wrote that traditional Western ideas of societies as normatively and functionally integrated systems of action had to be supplemented, "perhaps" even replaced, by concepts that suspend such assumptions so as to permit the investigation of social units and relations "directly as concrete empirical structures."
[9] A prolific writer, Smith authored or co-authored numerous books and articles on theory, on Northern Nigeria, and on the West Indies.