Thayer Scudder (born 1930, New Haven, Connecticut), an American social anthropologist, is an Anthropology Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology.

[citation needed] In addition to expertise and special interest in regional development, irrigated and rainfed agriculture, pioneer settlement, community-based natural resource management, and impacts of large-scale river basin development projects on low income populations, Scudder has focused on systematic long-term studies of low income human communities.

The most classic of his long-term studies has been carried out with anthropologist Elizabeth Colson among the Gwembe Tonga of Zambia.

[3] Author Jacques Leslie devotes a third of his narrative nonfiction book Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005) to a portrait of Scudder.

The section includes a visit to the Zambian resettlement village where many Gwembe Tonga now live and follows Scudder as he inspects dam projects in Lesotho and Botswana.