Michael Garfield Smith OM (18 August 1921 – 5 January 1993) was a Jamaican social anthropologist and poet of international repute. Biography Born in Kingston, Jamaica, M.G. Smith was always a brilliant scholar. When he was a schoolboy at Jamaica College, his schoolmates claimed him as their "intellectual hero." In 1939 at age seventeen, Smith achieved the highest marks of all Higher Schools Certificate candidates in the entire British Empire. More than a student scholar, he later emerged as a published poet of promise. His scholarly feats earned him the Jamaica Scholarship, which did not take him to Bombay as he had wished, but to Canada, where he went to study English literature at McGill University. Joining the Canadian army during the war, he served briefly on the frontline in Europe, in France, Holland and Germany. Demobilized in London in 1945, he turned from literature to law, which he studied for a year before his switch to anthropology. As his wife Mary reported, Smith found the law "an ass" and not, as he had hoped, about justice. He took to anthropology quickly and anthropology to him. Soon he became a prize student in Daryll Forde's department at University College London, completed his undergraduate work in short order, and after field research in Northern Nigeria, was awarded the PhD in 1951. He subsequently carried out extensive field research in Northern Nigeria, Jamaica, Grenada, and Carriacou. Smith served as the senior research fellow, Institute of Social and Economic Research University of the West Indies (Jamaica); professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles; senior research fellow, Research Institute for the Study of Man, New York City; Franklin M. Crosby Professor Emeritus, Human Environment at Yale University; and as professor and head of the Department of Anthropology, University College, London. Personal life Smith was married to Mary F. Smith (née Morrison), author of Baba of Karo (1954), with whom he shared a lifelong collaboration. They had three sons. Anthropology Smith's professional career in anthropology, straddling three continents and the Caribbean, was distinguished. His first appointment, which made possible a return home after eleven years, was to the Institute of Social and Economic Research in Jamaica. When the ISER was merged into what is now the University of the West Indies, Smith was also appointed a senior lecturer in sociology. Over eight years, he embarked on an ambitious program of Caribbean research,