Oswald J. Werner was born February 26, 1928, in Rimavská Sobota, Czechoslovakia in what is now south-central Slovak Republic.
His father, Professor Julius M. Werner, was Slovak, while his mother, Bella L. (née Toth), was Hungarian.
The history of the area with its malleable borders following World War I required an academic family to know all three languages, Slovak, Hungarian, and German.
[1] Matriculating at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany, he studied applied physics, graduating in 1950 with a bachelor's degree equivalent.
A summer of archaeological field work and photography at Mesa Verde National Park brought him into daily contact with Navajo laborers.
[9][10] Werner was a student of Navajo folk knowledge for over 30 years and moved easily between linguistics and cultural anthropology.
Noting lapses in how others approached ethnography led him to develop methodologies for cultural anthropology and ethnoscience.
In particular, ethnoscience was used to analyze Navajo culture by delving into their world view, specifically botany and folk-science.
[17][18] Werner also intensively explored the pragmatic aspects of employing the ethnoscience approach to data collection through mentoring his students in the Northwestern University Summer Ethnographic Field School.
[21] Another work was “The Navaho ethnomedical domain: prolegomena to a componential semantic analysis" (1964) which defines Navajo terms for diseases.
[25] Starting in 1974 he founded and directed the Northwestern University Ethnographic Field School in Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology outside Gallina, New Mexico, not far from the Navajo Nation.
[27] In fact, research done there has already felt its influence in additional studies regarding the Navajo by his students with Werner's guidance.
[29] To advance, it is necessary to establish minimum standards for ethnography[30] since historically, anthropological monographs have not been science, but a "work of art" [31] which reflect the ethnographer more than their subjects.
1970 (with D. T. Campbell) Translating, Working Through Interpreters, and the Problem of Decentering, in R. Naroll and R. Cohen, eds., Handbook of Anthropology, Natural History Press, pp. 398–420.
(Paper presented at the Wenner-Gren Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognition, March 1969, Chicago), pp. 15–75.
Anthropology and Linguistics: Essays in Honor of Carl F. Voegelin, Peter DeRidder Press, 700 pages.
1975 (with Gladys Levis, Bonnie Litowitz, and Martha Evens) An Ethnoscience View of Schizophrenic Speech, in B. Blount and Mary Sanches, eds., Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use, Academic Press, pp. 349–80.
Proceedings, Georgetown University Roundtable on Language and Linguistics 1976, in Clea Rameh, ed., Semantics: Theory and Application, pp. 131–70.
1978 The Synthetic Informant Model: On the Simulation of Large Lexical/Semantic Fields, in M. D. Loflin and J. Silverberg, Discourse and Inference in Cognitive Anthropology: An Approach to Psychic Unity and Enculturation, Mouton, pp. 45–82.
1983 (with A. Manning and K. Y. Begishe) A Taxonomic View of the Traditional Navajo Universe, in A. Ortiz, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 10, Smithsonian Institution, pp. 579–91.
1987 (with G. Mark Schoepfle, et al.) Systematic Fieldwork, Volume 1: Foundation of Ethnography and Interviewing (416 pages), Volume 2: Ethnographic Analysis and Data Management (355 pages), Sage Publishing Co. 1989 How to Teach a Network, in M. Evens (ed.
(Lecture presented on the occasion of being awarded the Sarton Medal, Universiteit Gent, Belgium).