Dr Robert E. MacLaury 1944-2004
An obituary by Terri MacKeigan (University of Edinburgh) and Chris Sinha
(University of Portsmouth)
Dr Robert E. MacLaury died on February 18, 2004.
Rob was a scientist and scholar of huge stature, enormous originality
and breathtaking
productivity. He began his academic life as an anthropologist, doing
fieldwork in Oaxaca State, Mexico, where he carried out an exhaustive
study of the phonology, grammar and semantics of Zapotec languages.
Amongst the many publications resulting from this work was his seminal
1989 paper on the semantics of Zapotec body part locative terms.
He gained his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in
1986. Rob became involved in the World Color Survey, based in Berkeley,
and was himself responsible for the Meso-American Color Survey, culminating
in his book Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categories
as Vantages, published in 1997. Rob’s involvement in research
in colour perception and language was not confined to Central America,
but also encompassed work in Africa, Canada, New Zealand and the
American North and Southwest. It was his colour research that provided
the spur for the theoretical work that occupied the last few years
of his life. Rob MacLaury’s name will always be associated
with Vantage Theory, an approach to categorization that significantly
extended prototype theory by incorporating, as its name suggests,
speaker vantage point, entrenched in the semantics of particular
languages, into the process of human categorical perception.
It is for his kindness and humanity that we shall most remember Rob.
We, and many others, benefited from the unstinting generosity with
which he shared his time and his encyclopaedic knowledge with colleagues
and students. Rob was not one of those who viewed scientific knowledge
as primarily a vehicle for professional advancement, and we often felt
that he did not receive the kind of recognition that his work deserved.
During the last years of his life, Rob was immensely productive. Perhaps
he sensed that he had only a little time in which to complete his life’s
work. Now Rob is no longer with us, but it is our profound hope that
others, beside ourselves, will read his publications, be inspired,
and develop the rich inheritance he has left behind him.
Rob lives on, like all great intellectuals, in his work; but we also
celebrate him through our memories of a very special and dear person.
One of the privileges of knowing Rob was to have the opportunity to
meet his wife, Maria. To see Rob and Maria together was to see two people
who rejoiced in each other’s presence, and their happiness was
infectious. We extend our profound condolences to Maria and to the other
members of Rob’s family. Rob was a native Californian, and it
is fitting that he died in Los Angeles. We shall miss him very much.
