John Whiting

John Robert Whiting (15 November 1917 – 16 June 1963) was an English actor, dramatist and critic.

Born in Salisbury, he was educated at Taunton School, "the particular hellish life which is the English public school" as he described it. Trained at RADA, he then worked as an actor in repertory, and while in the company at Bideford in Devon, met the actress Asthore Lloyd Mawson (Jackie). At the start of the Second World War, as a lifelong pacifist, he registered as a conscientious objector, but soon after changed his mind and joined the anti-aircraft section of the Royal Artillery: his wartime experiences as a soldier, which are vividly described in dark detail in diaries written at the time ( now held in the V&A theatre museum collection) were to mark a profound change in his life and work. In 1940, he married Jackie; in 1944 he was discharged from the army for undisclosed health reasons.

From 1946 till 1952, while writing, he again worked as an actor, as a member of John Gielgud's company, and also, in 1951, winning first prize in the Festival of Britain play competition for Saint's Day. As a working actor, he, Jackie and their two young boys led a peripatetic life moving to different lodgings around the country until settling into rooms in Jackie's aunt's house in Barnes, where he was able to find a place in the London theatre world and where his first daughter was born. In 1956, he bought and moved his family to a house in the tiny hamlet of Duddleswell, on Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, and in 1957, his second daughter was born in Crowborough. In Duddleswell he worked on many plays, film scripts and reviews on a wide mahogany table that had belonged to a hero of his, Lord Byron, writing by hand in a tiny black script adopted from the handwriting of Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), or typing out the pages on a stately German typewriter, often to the accompaniment of a Beethoven piece on a rather modern stereo system.

John Whiting (anthropologist)

John Wesley Mayhew Whiting (June 12, 1908 Chilmark, Massachusetts – May 13, 1999, Chilmark, Massachusetts) was an American sociologist and anthropologist, specializing in child development.

Whiting grew up on Martha's Vineyard, on the Massachusetts coast. He received his B.A. in 1931 and his Ph.D. in sociology & anthropology in 1938, both from Yale University. He remained at Yale until 1947 on the staff of Yale Institute of Human Relations. After two years at the State University of Iowa, he was offered a position at Harvard in the Graduate School of Education. In 1963 he transferred to the Department of Social Relations, where he taught and conducted research in anthropology and comparative child development.

Together with his wife Beatrice, John Whiting organized the Six Cultures Study of Socialization, the largest and most comprehensive comparative study of child rearing and child development. The study assigned teams of anthropologists with interdisciplinary training in psychology and child development to six sites around the world: The six cultures studied are Nyansongo: a Gusii community in Kenya (Robert A. LeVine and Barbara B. LeVine); the Rajputs of Khalapur, India (Leigh Minturn and John T. Hitchcock); Taira: an Okinawan village (Thomas W. Maretzki and Hatsumi Maretzki) ; the Mixtecans of Juxtlahuaca, Mexico (Kimball Romney and Romaine Romney); Tarong: an Ilocos barrio in the Philippines (William F. Nydegger and Corinne Nydegger); and the New Englanders of Orchard Town, USA. (John L. Fischer and Ann Fischer). The Whitings continued work on comparative child development, both with their own fieldwork and through many students and collaborators, throughout their careers.

John Whiting (disambiguation)

John Whiting was an English actor, dramatist and critic.

John Whiting may also refer to:

See also