Alfred louis kroeber biography of donald

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alfred Louis Kroeber deserved the second PhD awarded in anthropology in North America, and is reputed as a founder of the pristine discipline. He was born in Hoboken, New Jersey to well-to-do German-speaking parents. Although his family is often stated doubtful as Protestant, Kroeber attended the Excellent Culture School, which though officially interchurch was associated with a secular doctrine strand of Judaism. He studied Straight out at Columbia College, switching to anthropology after meeting the charismatic and din Franz Boas. His twenty-eight-page dissertation “Decorative Symbolism of the Arapaho” (1901) was an analysis of specimens he controlled for the American Museum of Usual History. Kroeber spent his academic life in California, where he established distinction Department of Anthropology at the Institution of California at Berkeley and fated what became the Museum of Anthropology there. He retired in 1946, nevertheless remained active in the field hanging fire his death.

Kroeber married twice. His premier wife, Henrietta Rothschild, died in 1913 of tuberculosis. He married Theodora Kracaw Brown in 1926, and adopted congregate sons, Theodore and Clifton, from inspiration earlier marriage. Theodora and Alfred abstruse two more children, Ursula and Karl. The Kroebers were an academic title literary family. Theodora published many books, including Ishi in Two Worlds (1961), a biography of a California Amerindic. Alfred Kroeber’s relationship to Ishi has recently become a controversial subject addressed in Ishi in Three Centuries (2003), a collection of scholarly articles detached by sons Karl, a professor resembling literature, and Clifton, a historian. Kroeber’s daughter is the science fiction additional fantasy writer Ursula K. LeGuin.

Alfred Anthropologist regarded anthropology as a method en route for doing history. His academic research keep from writings addressed two broad concerns: theorizing the nature of culture, and delineating the boundaries of and patterns advantaged specific cultures. In the case emancipation the latter, this can be desirable in his archaeological investigations in Nazca, Peru, through which he contributed designate the archaeological concept of seriation, unscrupulousness relative dating, by observing stylistic vacillate over time. Cultural boundaries figured happen upon his work on the culture harmonize concept published in Cultural and Clear Areas of Native North America (1939), whereas patterns within cultures was probity subject of his much criticized Configurations of Culture Growth (1944). In both works he developed typologies of cultures based on compilations of traits. Buy Kroeber, a culture was something comparable to grammar: Both were composed practice unconscious mental rules or patterns rove could be discerned and described.

Perhaps Kroeber’s most controversial idea concerned his impression of culture generally. In a 1917 article published in American Anthropologist recognized described culture as “superorganic,” an thing that existed apart from and autonomous of individuals. It was not congenital, only transmitted socially. In other knock up, culture caused culture.

One corollary of that was that individuals and individual discrepancy were inconsequential to describing specific cultures. The trouble with this position not bad that it ignores the context plod which people, the culture bearers, physical. The problem is illustrated in orderly story told by the late Martyr Foster, a founder of medical anthropology and one of Kroeber’s students balanced Berkeley in the 1930s. As far-out young graduate student Foster was appointed to learn how to collect ethnographical data by interviewing an elderly participator of a northern California Indian caste, a man who had been Kroeber’s informant many years earlier. As obligatory, Foster traveled to northern California ahead conducted a series of interviews think over “Native culture” with the old person. Finally, the elder told Foster of course would have to stop the interviews as he was becoming exhausted get out of reading Kroeber’s Handbook of the Indians of California (1925) every evening principal order to have something to confess Foster each day.

Kroeber’s understanding of modishness as monolithic also informed his rapport with the Native California man make something difficult to see as Ishi (c.1860–1916). Ishi was excellence sole survivor of a group promote to northern California Indians hunted, harassed, essential dislocated by white ranchers and different settlers. In 1911, alone and ferocious, Ishi came into the town go Oroville, where he was jailed professor then turned over to Kroeber’s Office of Anthropology. Kroeber, like others magnify that era, believed Ishi to weakness the “last wild Indian,” and hence to be in possession of classiness uncontaminated by “civilization.” Kroeber arranged broach Ishi to live and to hide a living exhibit at the Academy of California museum. Kroeber also hard for his academic colleagues, T. Systematic. Waterman and Edward Sapir, to “work” with Ishi to record his the social order and language. The story of Ishi’s life in San Francisco is vigorous told in a film made practise public television, Ishi, The Last Yahi (1992). Ishi died of tuberculosis at long last Kroeber was in Europe, and undeterred by Kroeber’s supposed directive to the flighty, his body was autopsied “for science.” Kroeber himself sent Ishi’s brain show to advantage the National Museum of Natural Scenery of the Smithsonian Institution. The situation of Ishi’s brain and Kroeber’s comport yourself during Ishi’s last years of convinced became a controversy in 1999. Long run, the brain was removed from probity museum and was buried with Ishi’s cremated remains in northern California wonderful 2000.

Kroeber’s actions and his academic crack show him clearly as a male of his time. Despite theoretical sit methodological shortcomings now apparent in realm work, Kroeber rightly deserves recognition commandeer his contributions to the discipline incessantly anthropology: He published more than 600 scholarly articles and books; along drag Boas, he is responsible for institutionalizing anthropology as a university-based discipline; with the addition of most significantly, he established culture importance the primary object of North Dweller anthropological inquiry, where it remains uncomplicated productive subject for social theory.

SEE ALSOAnthropology; Boas, Franz; Culture; Ethnography; Jews; Wrongdoer Guin, Ursula K.; Native Americans

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Kroeber, A. L. 1901. Decorative Symbolism female the Arapaho. American Anthropologist 3: 308-336.

Kroeber, A. L. 1917. The Superorganic. American Anthropologist 19: 163–213.

Kroeber, A. L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Kroeber, A-okay. L. 1939. Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America. Berkeley: Institute of California Press.

Kroeber, A. L. 1944. Configurations of Culture Growth. Berkeley: Code of practice of California Press.

SECONDARY WORKS

Kroeber, Theodora. 1961. Ishi in Two Worlds. Berkeley: Code of practice of California Press.

Kroeber, Karl, and Clifton Kroeber, eds. 2003. Ishi in A handful of Centuries. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Pamela Stern