Thayer (Ted) Scudder, Caltech's only professor of anthropology for the latter half of the 20th century, passed away October 22 at the age of 96. He was regarded as a leading specialist on dams and their lasting effects on communities and global ecosystems.
"Ted will be remembered as a world expert on the subject of forced population resettlement due to the construction of large dam projects," says economic anthropologist Jean Ensminger, Caltech's Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Social Sciences, Emeritus. "As a result of this work, Ted also developed a passion for the long-term study of a single society, which to him meant 50 years. He appreciated the wisdom that accrued only from a long vantage point. In this sense, Ted was absolutely true to his anthropological roots and training."
In 1964, Scudder joined what was then the Division of Humanities. He was one of the first research-oriented social science faculty hired by Caltech and helped lead the effort to change the original division organized around teaching to a full-fledged research operation. This culminated in the renaming of the division to the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) in 1966 and the creation of the social sciences PhD program in 1974. Scudder continued to teach in HSS until he took on emeritus status in 2000.
As part of his research, Scudder conducted the first multigenerational study of the wide-ranging impacts of communities displaced by dams and river basin development. Initially a strong believer in large-scale water infrastructure, Scudder later aimed to minimize the impact of such projects on the people whose lands were submerged in many parts of the world. This work has helped preserve the lands and livelihoods of millions of people across Africa as well as in India, Nepal, Jordan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and the United States.
"Ted's intellectual integrity and commitment to empirical research exemplify the best work in HSS," says Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (PhD '88), the Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics and director of the Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences. "A beloved professor, he taught with the same joy and passion he brought to his research."
Scudder was born in 1930 and grew up in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, the son of Townsend Scudder, a professor of English at Swarthmore College. He attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire where he was captain of the cross-country team and founder of the Exeter mountaineering club.
By his own account, Scudder was an average student, but his extracurricular activities earned him entrance to Harvard University, where he spent his undergraduate years focusing on his two greatest interests: mountaineering and ornithology. He led an expedition to the Alaska Range for the Harvard Mountaineering Club in 1952; the team made the first ascents of several peaks near what was then called Mount McKinley. Back at Harvard, Scudder studied with James Lee Peters, a leading academic ornithologist, but ended up majoring in general studies—"just sort of playing around with a whole range of things," Scudder recalled in a 2000–01 Caltech Archives oral history interview. In 1950, he married Mary Eliza Drinker.
Determined to embark on a career that involved mountaineering, Scudder took a job working for the Army Quartermaster Corps testing clothing and equipment for use in extreme weather conditions. When his plans for a follow-on job with the Arctic Institute of North America fell through, his family encouraged him to apply to graduate school. Scudder recalls having "a father who was a professor, a father-in-law who was a professor—and of course my grandfather was still alive at that particular time, pressing for me to be something other than a mountain climber." So, Scudder decided to attend Yale Divinity School. He was particularly interested in African religions.
His time at Yale convinced Scudder that he wanted to pursue a PhD in anthropology, and in 1954, he returned to Harvard. Finding that no one in Harvard's anthropology department had done fieldwork in Africa, Scudder enrolled in several anthropology courses at Boston University. There, he first met Elizabeth Colson, an anthropologist who was to become his long-time collaborator.
Initially, Scudder was attracted to Africa's mountainous regions and hoped to do fieldwork with a group known as the Bakonjo, who lived high in the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda. But when he had an opportunity in 1956 to go with Colson to study the Gwembe Tonga, who lived in the Middle Zambezi Valley in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now known as Zambia), he seized upon it. Colson was conducting a benchmark study of the Gwembe Tonga, who soon would be resettled because their native lands would be flooded by the construction of a large dam on the Zambezi River, a project eventually completed in 1959. The resulting reservoir, Lake Kariba, is the world's largest artificial lake by volume; it is more 150 miles long and 20 to 30 miles wide in some places.
Scudder's fieldwork in the Zambezi Valley set him on the course that would consume the next 60 years of his life: the resettlement of peoples whose lands were affected by the development of large dams. This work led him from Africa to India, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Laos, and more, and eventually from his academic position at Caltech (he joined the Institute in 1964) to consultancies with the World Bank and groups investing in large dam projects. He also continued to follow the Gwembe Tonga for decades.
After a year in Africa, Scudder returned to Harvard to complete his doctoral degree in 1960. That same year, Scudder took a one-year postdoctoral position at the London School of Economics after which he accepted an assistant professorship at the American University in Cairo. He taught there for six months and then did fieldwork with the Nubian people, who were soon to be displaced by new construction on the Aswan High Dam. This was followed by more research with Gwembe Tonga; a research postdoc position at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, where he wrote up the fieldwork he had done in Egypt; and a position with the World Bank, where he studied smallholder agriculture across the continent of Africa.
After his arrival at Caltech, Scudder conducted numerous studies worldwide, each spanning multiple generations. Through this research, he formulated a theory to help predict the environmental, economic, and sociocultural effects of relocating populations for river basin development. He returned again and again to Zambia and realized by the mid-1970s that the dam had increased poverty and caused other long-lasting problems for the Gwembe Tonga. "If you study [large dams] over an extended period of time … you find out how destructive they are," he told The Exeter Bulletin in 2020.
In 1976, Scudder, along with colleagues from UC Santa Barbara and SUNY Binghamton, founded the Institute for Development Anthropology, a nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to understanding how development projects, such as those sponsored by the United Nations and the United States Agency for International Development, affected native peoples. Under the auspices of the Institute of Developmental Anthropology, Scudder continued his research into the impact of dams on the people who were displaced by them, publishing several monographs on population resettlement in various locales.
In the 1990s, his research was instrumental in convincing the government of Botswana to halt a dam project in the Okavango Delta, an "exceptional example of the interaction between climatic, hydrological and biological processes," according to UNESCO, which designated the delta as a World Heritage Site in 2014.
"Ted's role in saving the Okavanga Delta in Botswana from a mega dam project should not be forgotten," says Thomas Palfrey (PhD '81), Caltech's Flintridge Foundation Professor of Economics and Political Science, Emeritus. "His efforts were an illustration of his revised opinions about weighing the relative costs and benefits of mega dams."
From 1998 to 2000, Scudder served on the World Commission on Dams, a global, independent committee that reviewed the development effectiveness of large dams and set international standards for their planning and operation.
Scudder's scholarly activity continued through his retirement years as a visiting lecturer and as an author of summary works on the impact of dams including The Future of Large Dams: Dealing with Social, Environmental, Institutional and Political Costs and Large Dams: Long Term Impacts on Riverine Communities and Free Flowing Rivers.
Scudder was a fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science and won virtually every significant award in anthropology, including the Solon T. Kimball and Edward J. Lehman awards from the American Anthropological Association, the Lucy Mair Medal & Marsh Prize for Applied Anthropology from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology.
Until his retirement in 2000, Scudder enthralled hundreds of students with his research findings, teaching introductory courses in anthropology as well as courses in social anthropology, the lives of the world's low-income majority, and the fate of Indigenous peoples under globalization. He was the first three-time recipient of Caltech's ASCIT teaching award, which is given to instructors who demonstrate exceptional ability to inspire and motivate. In 2021, Scudder and his wife established the Eliza and Thayer Scudder Professorship in the Social Sciences through a planned gift to Caltech.
"Ted was a character who reveled in his eccentricities, and he adored the research and teaching environment at Caltech," Ensminger says. "He would often comment, 'Look at this place. I get to be a monk. No interruptions! I can be creative with the students and just hunker down on my research with complete freedom.'"
Scudder was predeceased by his wife and his daughter Eliza "Lydee" Scudder. He is survived by daughter Alice Thayer Scudder and Lydee's three children: Kacie King, Andrew King, and Patrick King.
Ted Scudder, right, chats with a man during his field studies in Africa.
