George Gmelch


George Gmelch is an American anthropologist known for his research on Irish Travellers, return migration and the culture of sport. He is emeritus professor of anthropology at Union College and the University of San Francisco. Gmelch is married to fellow cultural anthropologist, and frequent collaborator, Sharon Bohn Gmelch.

Career

After his sophomore year in college Gmelch signed a professional baseball contract with the Detroit Tigers. Over the next few seasons he played on four minor league teams. Political scientists Peter Dreier and Rob Elias note in their book Baseball Rebels, “...in the Carolina League towns Gmelch played in, he was shocked by the segregation and racism he observed...... passing the general manager’s office before a game, he witnessed members of the Rocky Mount’s Chamber of Commerce reminding the ballclub’s General Manager that the town would not support the team if there were ‘too many colored boys in the starting lineup... Gmelch soon learned that the ball field itself was used by the local Ku Klux Klan for gatherings, and that the town’s police chief was a member of the Klan and his brother a Grand Dragon.
Gmelch who had been writing monthly articles about life in the minor leagues for a home town California newspaper, then wrote a piece “Life in Rocky Mount with the Klan,” describing what he had witnessed including the police chief’s involvement in the Klan. A week later Gmelch was given his unconditional release.  
Gmelch would later write many pieces and several books about the culture of baseball.  While still a student, he wrote a paper on the rituals and superstitions of ballplayers. “Baseball Magic,” a test of a well -known theory of magic, became the feature article in Transaction  magazine.
With In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People Gmelch and his student J.J. Weiner wrote about the varied occupations and work of professional baseball. Subsequently, Gmelch described the culture of ballplayers in Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball and then examined baseball cross-culturally in Baseball without Borders: An International Pastime. Finally, he revisited his own baseball experiences in a memoir Playing with Tigers: A Minor League Chronicle of the Sixties. The latter was a finalist for the Casey Award for the best baseball book of 2016.

Irish Travellers

In 1971-72, he and his anthropologist wife Sharon spent a year living in a horse-drawn wagon in a camp on the outskirts of Dublin for their PhD research. His work on this nomadic group’s adaptation to urban life was published as The Irish Tinkers: The Urbanization of an Itinerant People and in a collaboration with Sharon Gmelch in Tinkers and Travellers, which won Ireland’s Book of the Year award in 1976.
The Gmelchs’ return to Ireland in 2011 to look at how Irish Traveller culture had changed was the subject of an acclaimed two-part Irish TV documentary called “Unsettled – from Tinker to Traveller”, and their book Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life, was published in 2014.

Documentary films

With filmmaker Dennis Lanson, Gmelch has produced two films related to the remote Newfoundland fishing community of Bay de Verde where he conducted research between 2018 and 2020. The first film, “A Year in the Field,” looks at the research of a young Estonian anthropologist studying climate change in Newfoundland and is now distributed by Documentary Educational Resources.  The second film, “The Village at the End of the Road,” examines the aftermath of the collapse of Newfoundland’s cod fishery and its impact on the community.

Selected books

Gmelch is the author and co-author of sixteen books, including In the Field: The Work and Life of Anthropology with Sharon Gmelch, Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life with S Gmelch, Double Passage: The Lives of Caribbean Migrants Abroad and Back Home, and Tasting the Good Life: Wine Tourism in the Napa Valley with S. Gmelch, winner of the 2012 Gourmand International Award for the best book on wine tourism.