I share the news of John Bock’s passing with great sadness. He served the discipline of anthropology with distinction. He earned his Masters and Doctoral degrees in the lauded Evolutionary Anthropology program at the University of New Mexico. After a post-doc, he took a position at California State University Fullerton in 2000 where he rapidly rose to the rank of Professor on the basis of his original work on children in Botswana. He took advantage of the unique demography where, within a fairly small region, there are foraging, fishing, pastoralist and farming communities. He looked at how these distinct ecologies affected the lives of children. One question among many that he pursued was the relationship between children’s play and subsequent work assignments. Although widely taken as gospel, Bock (partnered with his spouse, anthropologist Sara Johnson) was the first to show an explicit connection between play activity and skill development such as playing at pounding in a mortar with pestle and doing it in earnest to husk the grain. Their findings from Botswana would fill many highly-cited articles.
I met John in 1999 in Santa Fe at the annual The Anthropological Study of Play meeting where he gave a paper entitled “Children’s work and play among the Okvango Delta peoples of Botswana.” After the session I buttonholed John to seek his collaboration and guidance. He did much to reduce my woeful ignorance of the role of evolution in shaping life history, especially childhood. and continued to field evolution questions from me with great care and consideration. Our principal joint work was co-editing (with Suzanne Gaskins) a comprehensive survey of learning in culture— The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood— published by AltaMira in 2010.
Much as he would have liked to return to Africa, John already at our initial meeting confessed to suffering from serious illness. Over a course of almost 25 years, John ‘s life was repeatedly threatened then saved by miracle treatments just out of the pharma lab. Despite these continual setbacks and the daily challenges, he remained devoted to his family Sara, Nea and Alex and to the university community.
Placebound, he reinvented himself as an institution builder and created substantial new programs in Evolutionary Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and the Center for Sustainability for which he was the director. For each of the programs, he developed numerous new courses and was known as an outstanding teacher and mentor. These many accomplishments led the University to name John their Outstanding Professor in 2012.
John Bock’s passing leaves a void for me, individually and professionally, but his remarkable life should be an inspiration to us all.
David Lancy
July 17th, 2024