M. G. Smith

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The Honourable Michael Garfield Smith OM (Jamaica) (1921-1993) was a Jamaican poet and sociologist. Smith was the son of a descendant of English army officers and merchants, and his mother a 'coloured' nurse who died in childbirth. Smith served as Franklin M. Crosby Professor Emeritus of the Human Environment at Yale University. He also served as Senior Research Fellow at the Research Institute for the Study of Man, and the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies (Jamaica); Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles ; and as Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology, University College, London where he was one of the first professors of colour in Anthropology.

Born in Jamaica, Professor Smith was educated at Jamaica College, one of the island's leading secondary schools, and at McGill University and University College, London, which awarded him the Ph.D in social anthropology. He carried out extensive field research in Northern Nigeria, Jamaica, Grenada, and Carriacou.

A prolific writer, he authored twenty-four books and numerous articles on theory, on Northern Nigeria, and on the West Indies. Among these are: Government in Zazzau, 1800-1950 (1960), West Indian Family Structure (1962), Kinship and Community in Carriacou (1962), Dark Puritan (1963), The Plural Society in the British West lndies (1965), Stratification in Grenada (1965), Pluralism in Africa, (1969), Corporations and Society: The Social Anthropology of Collective Action, (1974), The Affairs of Daura, (1978), Pluralism, Politics & Ideology in the Creole Caribbean (1991), Government in Kano, 1350-1950 (1997) and The Study of Social Structure, (1998).

He was also known as a poet, his best-known work being the much-anthologised "I saw my land in the morning".

Among his awards are the Wellcome Medal for Anthropological Research, the Curle Bequest Essay Prize, and the Amaury Book Prize from the Royal Anthropological Institute. In 1972, Jamaica bestowed upon Professor Smith its Order of Merit.