Victor Barnouw ’37

EMINENT ANTHROPOLOGIST Vic Barnouw, celebrated for his quick wit and his ability to come up with great puns, died on May 9, 1989, of pancreatic cancer. He left his widow, Sachiko; a sister, Elsa; and a brother, Erik ’29. His brother Willem ’27 died in 1988.

Vic prepped at Horace Mann School, where he was active in dramatics and publications. At Princeton, he was on the board of the Tiger but left at the end of sophomore year to study painting at the National Academy of Design. After a wartime stint in the Army Medical Corps, he took his Ph.D. at Columbia in anthropology (1945), working summers to gather data for his dissertation on the Chippewa Indians. He then had various instructorships and professorships at Brooklyn College, the Univ. of Buffalo, the Verde Valley School (Arizona), and the Univ. of Illinois. In 1957, Vic moved to the Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He served as departmental chairman from 1976 to 1979 and retired in 1982.

Vic did field research in India as well as Wisconsin and was the author of "Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales and Their Relation to Chippewa Life" and a novel about an Indian boy, Dream of the Blue Heron. He also wrote studies on the Hindus and Nepalese, and had articles published in the New Yorker and Vogue.

The class sends its condolences to Sachiko, Elsa, and Eric.