Biographical Memoirs V.67

The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.

Biographical Memoirs

make decisions with inadequate information and take responsibility for the consequences of those decisions. His collaborative researches into what he came to refer to as “expressive culture” also explored how activities involving music, hobbies, and riddles, similarly provide models of real-life situations through which people not only rehearse social roles but also find ways of managing the emotional conflicts that are associated with these roles. This work has, again, had practical implications for understanding the emotional bases for addiction to various kinds of games as different as football, poker, and bingo.

In his later years Roberts had begun, with Hugo Nutini, to study expressive behavior among Mexican aristocracy; and at the time of his death, he was about to undertake, with Garry Chick, a study of how work, leisure, and technological change were influencing the lives of machine shop workers in western Pennsylvania.³ Funding for the latter had been approved by the National Science Foundation only a few weeks before Roberts's death. These projects, as well as many more that his work has inspired, go on after him.

We who knew him shall not forget the excitement he brought to the behavior science enterprise, his joy in exploring ideas, his generosity in sharing his ideas and letting others run with them, and the intellectual enrichment our discourse with him invariably gave us.

NOTES

1. I am indebted to Marilyn Skutt Roberts, Evan Z. Vogt, D. Fred Wendurff, and Garry Chick for information and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this memoir.

2. R. Bolton. The Content of Culture: Constants and Variants. Studies in Honor of John M. Roberts. New Haven, Connecticut: HRAF Press (1989).

3. G. Chick and H. G. Nutini. John Milton Roberts. Anthropology Newsletter 31(6):4-5.

Free Resources

Related Titles