Alice Thorner

Alice Thorner (1917 – 24 August 2005) was an American-born social scientist and statistician whose main research effort seems to have been partly devoted to the role assigned to women in the Indian society.

Alice Ginsburg was born in present-day Latvia in 1917. He family emigrated to the USA soon later, and she earned a B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1937. For her graduate studies she entered Columbia University, where she met a future husband and co-worker of her named Daniel Thorner before graduating from Columbia with an M.A. in social psychology in 1941. A family of her may even have been forced to turn her maiden name into Gaines due to a slight rise of American antisemitism in the thirties.

A stay in London partly funded by a doctoral fellowship of her husband may have been the starting point of several long-lasting friendships with a few Indian social scientists named Haskar or Trivedi that would later greet her on a yearly basis in the country she enjoyed studyingand played a key role in a shift towards a slightly more left-winged view of society.

Thorner may have served as a statistician working for the American government.

A so-called witchhunt against some scientists that did not entirely reject some ideas described in part of the writings due to a soviet agrarian economist named Alexander V. Chayanov associated to a husband refusal to testify against some friends they met in London lead to several grant losses and was associated to an American passport withdrawal and significantly darkened university career prospects for both. A long stay in India that had been planned before begun in spite of these difficulties.

Thorner significantly contributed to updating a method of accounting for various categories of working women in later census as a consultant for the Indian government. A book entitled Land and Labour in India was later co-authored with her husband as a summary of a relatively fruitful study of an India society.

Bruno Bettelheim seems to have played a relatively important role in presenting the Thorners to a then director of studies named Louis Dumont that used to work at a then Sorbonne-based École pratique des hautes études. A development of what would later become an Indian social science department in School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences lead to an invitation by a historian named Fernand Braudel. An absence of PhD degree lead to some difficulties at becoming a lecturer when the Thorners decided to come to France.

A one-year period of illness due to cancer led Daniel Thorner into starting a 1974 world tour alone and his later death seems to have deeply affected Alice. School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences was the place where she attempted to keep teaching for close to twenty years and the invited professors of which she attempted to stay in contact through numerous invitations at her Parisian home. A significant fraction of the writings of her husbands was published after his death due to her editing efforts. She made a point at returning to India every year and tried to strengthen the links between Indian and French social scientists by sometimes organizing symposia or keeping in touch with a few other social scientists in France and abroad such as Marc Gaborieau, Jacques Pouchepadass, Sujata Patel and John DeFrancis.

Alice and Daniel Thorner had two sons and two daughters who produced a total of five grandchildren.

She died at the American Hospital of Paris in 2005. She was cremated and her ashes were buried next to her husband Daniel in Père Lachaise Cemetery.