Alfred louis kroeber biography of donald

Kroeber, Alfred Louis

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alfred Louis Anthropologist earned the second PhD awarded in anthropology in North Usa, and is regarded as neat as a pin founder of the modern training. He was born in Hoboken, New Jersey to well-to-do German-speaking parents. Although his family practical often described as Protestant, Anthropologist attended the Ethical Culture Secondary, which though officially nonsectarian was associated with a secular ism strand of Judaism.

He calculated English at Columbia College, change to anthropology after meeting interpretation charismatic and forceful Franz Boas. His twenty-eight-page dissertation “Decorative Figurativeness of the Arapaho” (1901) was an analysis of specimens noteworthy collected for the American Museum of Natural History.

Kroeber drained his academic career in Calif., where he established the Offshoot of Anthropology at the College of California at Berkeley alight directed what became the Museum of Anthropology there. He lonely in 1946, but remained flourishing in the field until emperor death.

Kroeber married twice. His gain victory wife, Henrietta Rothschild, died put it to somebody 1913 of tuberculosis.

He husbandly Theodora Kracaw Brown in 1926, and adopted her sons, Theodore and Clifton, from an previously marriage. Theodora and Alfred difficult two more children, Ursula come to rest Karl. The Kroebers were brush up academic and literary family. Theodora published many books, including Ishi in Two Worlds (1961), dexterous biography of a California Amerind.

Alfred Kroeber’s relationship to Ishi has recently become a debatable subject addressed in Ishi groove Three Centuries (2003), a solicitation of scholarly articles edited do without sons Karl, a professor mimic literature, and Clifton, a annalist. Kroeber’s daughter is the technique fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K.

LeGuin.

Alfred Kroeber regarded anthropology as a method for know-how history. His academic research standing writings addressed two broad concerns: theorizing the nature of good breeding, and delineating the boundaries come close to and patterns within specific cultures. In the case of goodness latter, this can be rewarding in his archaeological investigations bond Nazca, Peru, through which put your feet up contributed to the archaeological piece together of seriation, or relative dating, by observing stylistic changes change time.

Cultural boundaries figured interruption his work on the courtesy area concept published in Cultural and Natural Areas of Preference North America (1939), whereas structure within cultures was the investigation of his much criticized Configurations of Culture Growth (1944). Underside both works he developed typologies of cultures based on compilations of traits.

Biography thus stories

For Kroeber, a grace was something analogous to grammar: Both were composed of senseless mental rules or patterns prowl could be discerned and described.

Perhaps Kroeber’s most controversial idea active his concept of culture conventionally. In a 1917 article available in American Anthropologist he alleged culture as “superorganic,” an item that existed apart from distinguished independent of individuals.

It was not inherited, only transmitted socially. In other words, culture caused culture.

One corollary of this was that individuals and individual varying were inconsequential to describing precise cultures. The trouble with that position is that it ignores the context in which hand out, the culture bearers, live. Significance problem is illustrated in spick story told by the futile George Foster, a founder be a devotee of medical anthropology and one replicate Kroeber’s students at Berkeley update the 1930s.

As a adolescent graduate student Foster was forfeit to learn how to amass ethnographic data by interviewing draft elderly member of a blue California Indian tribe, a guy who had been Kroeber’s betrayer many years earlier. As agreed, Foster traveled to northern Calif. and conducted a series carry-on interviews about “Native culture” deal the old man.

Finally, prestige elder told Foster he would have to stop the interviews as he was becoming weak from reading Kroeber’s Handbook penalty the Indians of California (1925) every evening in order make a victim of have something to tell Help each day.

Kroeber’s understanding of civility as monolithic also informed sovereignty relationship with the Native Calif.

man known as Ishi (c.1860–1916). Ishi was the sole subsister of a group of union California Indians hunted, harassed, flourishing dislocated by white ranchers stall other settlers. In 1911, circumvent and starving, Ishi came intent the town of Oroville, swivel he was jailed and ergo turned over to Kroeber’s Arm of Anthropology.

Kroeber, like remainder in that era, believed Ishi to be the “last influential Indian,” and therefore to snigger in possession of culture germ-free by “civilization.” Kroeber arranged plump for Ishi to live and convey be a living exhibit putrefy the University of California museum. Kroeber also arranged for reward academic colleagues, T.

T. Boatman and Edward Sapir, to “work” with Ishi to record surmount culture and language. The forgery of Ishi’s life in San Francisco is well told observe a film made for leak out television, Ishi, The Last Yahi (1992). Ishi died of t.b. while Kroeber was in Assemblage, and despite Kroeber’s supposed directing to the contrary, his intent was autopsied “for science.” Anthropologist himself sent Ishi’s brain walkout the National Museum of Hollow History of the Smithsonian Origination.

The whereabouts of Ishi’s brains and Kroeber’s role during Ishi’s last years of life became a controversy in 1999. Sooner, the brain was removed evacuate the museum and was interred with Ishi’s cremated remains admire northern California in 2000.

Kroeber’s deeds and his academic work point up him clearly as a civil servant of his time.

Despite speculative and methodological shortcomings now come into view in his work, Kroeber right deserves recognition for his charity to the discipline of anthropology: He published more than 600 scholarly articles and books; govern with Boas, he is dependable for institutionalizing anthropology as far-out university-based discipline; and most importantly, he established culture as honourableness primary object of North Earth anthropological inquiry, where it relic a productive subject for group theory.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Kroeber, Organized.

L. 1901. Decorative Symbolism outline the Arapaho. American Anthropologist 3: 308-336.

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

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

Kroeber, Precise.

L. 1939. Cultural and Artless Areas of Native North America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kroeber, A. L. 1944. Configurations fail Culture Growth. Berkeley: University support California Press.

SECONDARY WORKS

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

Kroeber, Karl, and Clifton Kroeber, eds.

2003. Ishi in Three Centuries. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Pamela Stern

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences