Obituary-Christine Shearer Wilson

Christine S. Wilson, 86, one of the founding mothers of nutritional anthropology died of a stroke on May 31, 2005 in Annapolis, MD. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and her Ph.D. in nutritional sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation: Food Beliefs and Practices of Malay Fishermen: An Ethnographic Study on the East Coast of Malaya (1970) launched a life-long career that forged the new academic discipline of nutritional anthropology combining the science of nutrition and the social science of anthropology. She influenced the field through her teaching of students at the University of California, San Francisco (1971–95), the University of Guelph, University of Delaware, San Francisco State University and elsewhere. At the time of her death she was a research scholar in the Center for Human Nutrition at Johns Hopkins University.

Her research had an international influence on public health nutrition policy and practice particularly in Malaya. Her techniques of child following to gather observational dietary data yielded new insights and were a conceptual and methodological departure from the former approach relying on maternal recall. Her research was published in the Journal of Nutrition Education, Journal of Tropical Pediatrics and Environment, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, Nutrition Today and Journal of Ethnobotany among others. Her book chapters ranged in scope from nutrition and aging to obesity and body image, and from methods in nutritional anthropology to food in medical systems. She produced two widely used annotated bibliographies on food habits (Wilson 1973, 1979) published as supplements of the Journal of Nutritional Education. She made a significant impact on the discipline as an editor for a number of journals, with a more than 25 year association with Ecology of Food and Nutrition as Editorial Board member in the 1970's and 80's, Co-Editor (1991–99) and Editor Emerita in 2000 (Lieberman 2001).

Dr. Wilson was a charter and active member of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (formerly Council on Nutritional Anthropology) a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and a member of many national and international professional organizations including: Association for the Study of Food and Society, American Society for Nutritional Sciences, International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and International Union of Nutritional Sciences. She was a frequent presenter of papers both in the US and abroad through her early 80's.

Among her many honors, she was an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of great Britain and the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition established the “Christine Wilson Award” for the best undergraduate and graduate student papers submitted and presented at the annual American Anthropological Association meeting. Contributions to this Award can be made through the AAA. Dr. Wilson was deeply committed to fostering the careers of young nutritional anthropologists. I know because I was one of them.