Alice Thorner

Alice Thorner (1917 – 24 August 2005) was a Latvian-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.

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.

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 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.