Sydel Silverman, an anthropologist who championed her profession as a scholar, teacher, historian and preservationist, died on March 25 in Manhattan. She was 85.
The cause was cancer, her son-in-law Kevin Yorn said.
Dr. Silverman taught at Queens College in New York from 1962 to 1975 — she was chairwoman of the anthropology department from 1970 to 1973 — and served as executive officer of the doctoral program in anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center from 1975 to 1986.
In 1976, during the city’s fiscal crisis, when City University officials threatened to eliminate what they deemed as nonessential majors like anthropology at some of the senior colleges, Dr. Silverman mounted an emphatic defense.
She pointed out that while only about 600 City University students were majoring in anthropology, as many as 30,000 others enrolled in anthropology courses.
“We are concerned with the consolidation and the way it’s being formulated,” she said at the time, charging that the city’s Board of Higher Education was considering the cutbacks without consulting the faculty. “But we also feel the need to clarify the role of anthropology as a separate discipline.”
She enlisted, among others, Margaret Mead, then the country’s pre-eminent cultural anthropologist, in a successful campaign to spare the department. The outcry prompted the board to postpone and finally abandon the proposed retrenchment.
Dr. Silverman’s early work as an ethnographer focused on the allocation of farmland in rural Italy. Her research evolved into “Three Bells of Civilization: The Life of an Italian Hill Town” (1975), the first of a dozen books she wrote or edited.
“Totems and Teachers: Key Figures in the History of Anthropology” (1981), which she edited, traced the emergence of the field from its beginnings at the American Museum of Natural History in the late 19th century.
In that book, drawn from lectures at the Graduate Center, anthropologists traced the discipline’s historical development through profiles of Franz Boas, Mead and other prominent figures in the field.
Throughout her own four-decade career, Dr. Silverman defined her vocation to encompass archaeology, linguistics, and both biological and cultural anthropology.
Sydel Finfer was born on May 20, 1933, in Chicago, the youngest of seven children of Joseph Finfer, a rabbi, and Elizabeth (Bassman) Finfer. The couple met after immigrating from Lithuania.
In 1945, when she was barely 12, she appeared as a contestant on “Quiz Kids,” a radio program originating in Chicago on which questions were posed to a panel of young people.
After graduating from high school, she enrolled as a premedical student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, then transferred to the University of Chicago’s Committee on Human Development (now the Department of Comparative Human Development), where she earned her master’s degree in 1957 with a thesis titled “The Female Climacterium.”
In 1963, she received a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University with a dissertation on “Landlord and Peasant in an Umbrian Community.”
She had traveled to Montecastello di Vibio in Umbria, Italy, with her husband, Mel Silverman, an artist she had met in high school. They married in 1953; he died in 1966.
In 1972 she married the anthropologist Eric R. Wolf, who taught at Lehman College and the Graduate Center. He died in 1999. Her survivors include their daughters, Eve Silverman and Julie Yorn; a stepson, Daniel J. Wolf; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; two sisters, Goldie Bulgatz and Ida Kaufman; and a brother, Mark Finfer.
From 1987 to 1999 she was president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, which supports global field work and symposiums. She helped galvanize organizations of anthropologists in Africa and Europe and oversaw the awarding of fellowships and grants. She also convened more than two dozen conferences, which became the subject of her book “The Beast on the Table: Conferencing With Anthropologists” (2002).
Dr. Silverman was one of many anthropologists who defended Margaret Mead against criticism by the anthropologist Derek Freeman that undermined “Coming of Age in Samoa” (1928), her classic study of how Samoan culture, rather than biology alone, shaped the adolescent experience in that country.
Mead’s “message to her own society about cultural variability and the human potential is as timely as ever,” Dr. Silverman wrote in The New York Times Book Review in a review of “Quest for the Real Samoa: The Mead/Freeman Controversy & Beyond” (1986), by Lowell D. Holmes.
In the review, Dr. Silverman defined her field as “that combination of science and art in which the details of daily life are systematically observed, analyzed and constructed into a cultural account.
“Every account is shaped not only by the common anthropological enterprise,” she continued, “but also by the ethnographer’s personal attributes, training and interests, and by the time, place and circumstances of the field work.”
