William Shack; Expert on African Peoples

William Alfred Shack, 76, UC Berkeley anthropologist who was an expert on African peoples. A native of Chicago, Shack earned a bachelor’s degree at the Art Institute of Chicago, a master’s at the University of Chicago and a doctorate at the London School of Economics, and served in the South Pacific during World War II. After teaching at the universities of Chicago and Illinois, he joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1970. As dean of the campus’ Graduate Division from 1979 to 1985, Shack established a student exchange program with several universities in France, earning the Chevalier l’Ordre National du Merite in 1987. Earlier, he established a sociology and anthropology department at Haile Selassie University in Ethiopia. Berkeley awarded him its highest honor, the Berkeley Citation, at his retirement in 1991. Intrigued during postdoctoral studies in Ethiopa, Shack became an internationally recognized expert on the never-studied Gurage people of that country. He also was one of the first American anthropologists to focus on ethnographic studies of the urban United States. As an expert on all African groups, Shack often was called upon to testify in court cases involving cultural defenses for immigrants from Africa. In one Oakland case, he succeeded in getting a verdict on a reduced charge against an Eritrean from Ethiopa who claimed that he shot a woman to death in self-defense because she was a witch. Most recently, Shack completed a manuscript on the role of African American soldiers in developing the Paris jazz scene between the two world wars. On Friday in Berkeley of cancer.