Cultural anthropologist
Eugenia Shanklin, a resident of Princeton since 1971, died Oct. 31 of lung cancer. She was 68.
A cultural anthropologist, she was a professor in the sociology-anthropology department of The College of New Jersey where she taught for 34 years. She also taught at Princeton University and at the Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.
Professor Shanklin’s research and publications involved both Ireland and West Africa. Her most widely read book was “Anthropology and Race” on the erroneous popular ideas of race and also on the failed and discarded biological concept of race in early anthropology, as attempts to understand human differences.
Her most well-known course was on American fantasies of witches, werewolves and vampires and what these images tell us about our culture.
Under a Fulbright Fellowship, she studied the impact on refugees following the 1986 eruption of a volcano under a lake in Cameroon that killed nearly 2,000 people. She assisted in the refugee effort and with colleagues established the Friends of Nyos Foundation to generate continuing funds for assistance.
At her death, she was at work on a volume on the cultural history of the kingdom of Kom in Cameroon together with a group of young Cameroonian scholars, a study of the Cameroonian diaspora in the United States and a project for AIDS clinics in Cameroon.
Born in Kentucky, she attended the University of California at Los Angeles and received a doctorate from Columbia University with a thesis on “Sacred and Profane Livestock in Southwest Donegal, Ireland.”
She was a water-colorist, opera lover, baseball fan and dog lover. She was an active member of the Democratic Party in Princeton, Community Without Walls and of the Princeton Research Forum.
She is survived by her daughter and son-in-law, Cheryl Cramer and John Papierowicz, and granddaughter Lee Papierowicz, of South Brunswick; sister Lynda Webb of Coos Bay, Ore.; and brother Jerry Kapp of Speedwell, Tenn.
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to Doctors Without Borders USA, P.O. Box 5030, Hagerstown, MD 21741-5030.
