Charles (“Chas”) Freemont McKhann IV was born 1957 in Boston, Massachusetts to parents, Margaret Leisy McKhann and Charles McKhann III. He lived in the Boston area until age twelve, when the family moved to Minneapolis.

Chas graduated Whitman College in 1979 with bachelor's degrees in anthropology and geology. He spent the summers of 1981 and 1982 in Chinese language training programs at Yale University and Middlebury College respectively, before beginning graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he hoped to study the cultural anthropology of China.

Whitman College, through the work of David Deal, created the Whitman in China program in 1982. Chas was awarded a teaching fellowship for the program’s inaugural run from 1982 to 1983. The program was a partnership with Yunnan University in southwestern China, where he was a Visiting Lecturer of Foreign Languages and Literatures for the same period. It was at Yunnan University where Chas discovered a passion for studying ethnic minority groups in the region. Before he left China that year, he had already made arrangements to come back for his dissertation fieldwork.

Chas returned to southwestern China for various research projects for the next two decades. His master's thesis, “The Responsibility System in Chinese Agriculture: Some Implications for the Future,” was informed by fieldwork Chas did in Kunming from 1982 to 1983. In 1992, he published his doctoral dissertation, “Fleshing out the Bones: Kinship and Cosmology in Naqxi Religion,” following two periods of field research in Lijiang in 1986 to 1987, and in 1991 to 1992. Chas also returned to China for various research projects in 1996, 1999, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2012, and 2017.

After graduating from the University of Chicago with his P.h.D. in anthropology, Chas began working at Whitman as an Assistant Professor of anthropology in 1992. He had previously worked at the college as a lecturer from 1990 to 1992. He became an Associate Professor in 1996, and a full Professor in 2006. He chaired the Department of Anthropology from 1998 to 2006 and again from 2014 to his retirement in 2022. He acted as the Director of Asian Studies off and on, from 1994 to 2014.

In the early 1990s, Chas began research on David Crockett Graham, a fellow Whitman alum and traveler to China who worked from the early to mid-twentieth century. Following a decade of research, he contributed, “David Crockett Graham: American Missionary and Scientist in Sichuan, 1911-1948,” to the larger publication, Explorers and Scientists in China’s Borderlands, 1880-1950 (University of Washington Press, 2011).