Alice Ginsburg was born in New York (Needs verification Some sources suggest that she was born in Latvia and moved to the United States of America when young) in 1917 and met a future husband and coworker of her named Daniel Thorner while graduating from Columbia University.
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. Thorner may have served as a statistician working for the American government. 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.
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 Doctor of Philosophy 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.
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. 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.
