Ward Hunt Goodenough II (May 30, 1919 – June 9, 2013) was an American anthropologist, who has made contributions to kinship studies, linguistic anthropology, cross-cultural studies, and cognitive anthropology. Biography and major works Goodenough was born May 30, 1919, in Cambridge Massachusetts, the son of Helen Miriam (Lewis) and Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, a scholar in the history of religion, who was then a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. He was a brother to noted solid-state physicist John B. Goodenough. As a child his family moved between Europe and Germany as his father conducted research on a Ph.D. As a result Goodenough developed an early interest in German and languages in general. He began attending Groton School in 1932. In 1937 he began studying at Cornell University. He majored in Scandinavian languages and literature, but was also influenced by the psychologist Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. and the anthropologist Lauriston Sharp. He earned a B.A. in 1940, and decided to pursue graduate study in anthropology. He enrolled in graduate school at Yale University, but his studies were interrupted by World War II. During the war, Goodenough worked under Samuel Stouffer in the Research unit of the Information and Education Division of the War Department, among other positions. During this period he developed expertise in quantitative research methods as well as clinical social psychology. After the war, Goodenough returned to Yale. There, he was a student of George Peter Murdock, who supervised his dissertation. He also took classes with Bronislaw Malinowski and Ralph Linton. In 1947, Goodenough became part of the team of researchers involved in the Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology, a large-scale project led by Murdock and funded by the Office of Naval Research. Murdock's assignment was the study of social behavior and religion. He did fieldwork on Chuuk Lagoon with Murdock for seven months in 1947. This research was designed to provide the American government basic information about Micronesia, which it had acquired from the Japanese at the end of the war. It also became a central moment in the history of Micronesian studies and became the start of modern ethnography in that area. Goodenough completed his Ph.D., entitled "A Grammar of Social Interaction" in 1949. It was later reworked and published as Property, Kin, and Community on Truk. Marshall and Caughey describe it as "the premier publication resulting from CIMA, one of the enduring classics of Pacific ethnography".