Ethnographer Sonya Salamon, past president of the Rural Sociological Society, died on August 16, 2025, at the age of eighty-four. 

It would prove fortunate that Salamon brought her training as an anthropologist to the discipline of sociology, specifically rural sociology, as her colleague Prof. Kai Arthur Schafft explained, “She approached her research using an anthropological lens at a time when most of the work that was being published by rural sociologists was quantitative and was highly empirical, using statistical methods to verify hypotheses and so forth. But that’s just not what Sonya was doing, which was brave because she was really pushing back methodologically against what were at the time standard practices in the field. She was conducting work in some really interesting ways that helped open the door methodologically for rural sociologists who followed after her, myself included.”

Salamon’s meticulous methods of interpreting copious fieldwork data have continued to resonate with how sociologists and anthropologists look at the areas of research on agricultural communities and poverty.  These subjects were often the focus of her over seventy book chapters, journal articles, and three books: Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming & Community in the Midwest (1992), about the lives and differing legacies of  German and Irish farm families in America’s heartland; Newcomers to Old Towns: Suburbanization of the Heartland (2003), about how rural American communities experience the influx of new populations with differing cultures and needs which inevitably change small towns, whether they are professionals who build and populate upscale subdivisions or are working-class Mexican migrants and immigrants; and Singlewide: Chasing the American Dream in a Rural Trailer Park (2017), co-authored with Katherine MacTavish, which revealed the social and economic complexities of trailer park life in three American communities.

Born November 1, 1939, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Marcus Blank and Ethel Blank Strasser, Dr. Salamon earned a BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1961, where she studied painting and design. Planning to combine her interests in art and anthropology, she completed her master’s in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in1965. However, after discovering an art and anthropology paper she wrote while a student at Berkeley had been plagiarized by one of her professors who published it in a journal, probably thinking that he could get away with this because of the old assumption that, since she was pregnant with her first child, she was not likely to pursue a career. Subsequently she abandoned her plan to focus her work on art and anthropology. Although this was a hard lesson in the politics of academia that would profoundly influence how she mentored future students and credited their contributions to her research, she continued to pursue a career as an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she earned a PhD in Anthropology in 1974. Her PhD dissertation was centered on the lives of post-World War II Japanese middle-class housewives, based on her research conducted over one year when she lived in Tokyo with her husband, physicist Myron Salamon, with a follow-up return trip five years later.  While spending a year in Munich, Germany, through a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) grant, she conducted research with German stay-at-home-middle-class housewives, comparing their lives to the Japanese women she had interviewed. In her publications based on this research, she concluded the Japanese women enjoyed a better situation because they found friends and new skills through women’s groups and were in control of their family’s finances, even to doling out their husbands’ weekly allowances, while the German wives were relegated to caring for their homes and children and did not have the same financial power.   

After accepting an appointment as assistant professor in family studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Agriculture in 1974, Salamon became intrigued with the distinctions between her students with farm roots and those coming from suburban Chicago. So she decided to shift the focus of her research from Japan and Germany to the people living in Illinois farm communities close-by her Champaign-Urbana home.

David L. Brown, International Professor of Development Sociology, Emeritus at Cornell University thinks this was a fortuitous decision. He observed, “I think finding common interests in rural sociology helped to propel her career, because anthropology, at the time, focused almost entirely on the global south. Sonya’s work, focused on the rural US, probably wouldn’t have been that well received in anthropology.  And she really influenced the group quite dramatically, both substantively and methodologically. So many people, I think, in rural sociology who knew Sonya would agree with this claim that she really helped bring qualitative analysis into a strong position in American sociology.”

 Salamon’s devoted two-decades to her study of seven Illinois farming communities and the different ways that families of different ethnicities pass their lands to the next generation. This resulted in Prairie Patrimony, dedicated to the first farmer she met, named John, who proved to be a great guide into the world of farmers. For her second book, Newcomers to Old Towns, awarded the American Sociological Association’s 2004 Robert E. Park Award for outstanding work on community, she focused on six small towns in Illinois, coming up with suggestions as to how these communities can be revitalized by population changes, while sustaining the qualities of life that attract people to move to small towns.

For Salamon, the subjects of her third book, Singlewide, were not “trailer park trash.”  Her co-author, Kate MacTavish, explained how she came to focus on trailer parks: “Sonya had been working in the community where we did the initial research and had heard a lot of negative things about the local mobile homes, so she thought it would be a worthy study to do. Certainly, there were a lot of stereotypes about that neighborhood form, and no one had looked at it.” 

When asked if there was something different about how Salamon did research, MacTavish responded, “I think she honored the method of ethnography, which is so key to anthropology, really taking the time to be with people and to listen and to observe and then to step away and reflect and then to come back again and sort of seek clarity on things that were happening there within the community. So in that way, it allows an incredibly rich perspective. It was interesting when I would go to collaborate with other people who weren’t used to that method. They just couldn’t believe the amount of time that we would invest and spend in the field.”

Prof. Brown said he thinks Sonya Salamon’s work “will hold the test of time because they examined interesting issues. And she was a rigorous ethnographer who asked tough questions and was a good listener and reported what she heard in a detailed and responsible way.” Prof. Schafft said, “I think that in some ways she really helped open up the field, make it a more welcome place.”

Salamon’s work earned her many honors. Only the fifth woman to serve, from 2001-2002,  as president  of the Rural Sociological Society since its founding in 1938, she also served two terms as a member of the National Research Council’s Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources, besides service on the editorial boards of the Rural Sociological Society Series, (Westview Press), Journal of Agriculture and Human Values, Journal Family Relations; Encyclopedia of Community (Sage Reference), Encyclopedia of Rural America, Rural Sociology, and the Rural Studies Series of the Rural Sociological Society.

Sonya Salamon retired as Professor Emerita from the University of Illinois in 2006 and then served six years as a research professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, retiring in 2013. She died August 16, 2025, in a hospice in Santa Fe, New Mexico, following the cumulative effects of a series of illnesses that followed a 2004 diagnosis of non-Hodgkins lymphoma and its return in 2008.  She is survived by her husband, (they met and started dating in tenth grade and married in 1960 at the end of their junior year in college)  and their two sons, David and Aaron (Stacey), her beloved granddaughters, Bryn Salamon and Lina Miyazaki Salamon and her three sisters, Gail Koss (Alan), Carla Blank (Ishmael Reed) and Judith Blank (Steve Alsup, deceased).