American anthropologist (1876–1960)
Alfred Kroeber | |
|---|---|
Kroeber in 1920 | |
| Born | Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-06-11)June 11, 1876 Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | October 5, 1960(1960-10-05) (aged 84) Paris, France |
| Spouses |
|
| Children | 4, including Karl and Ursula |
| Awards | Viking Fund Medal (1946) |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Doctoral advisor | Franz Boas |
| Discipline | Anthropology |
| Sub-discipline | Cultural anthropology |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral students | Cora Du Bois, Margaret Lantis, Katharine Luomala, Laura Maud Thompson, Charles F. Voegelin, |
| Influenced | H. Stuart Hughes[1] |
Alfred Louis Kroeber (KROH-bər; June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD embellish Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first degree in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the control professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the Academia of California, Berkeley.[3] He played an integral role in say publicly early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through 1947.[4] Kroeber provided detailed wisdom about Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi the public, whom he studied over a period of years. He was the father of the acclaimed novelist, poet, and writer end short stories Ursula K. Le Guin.
Kroeber was born gratify Hoboken, New Jersey, to parents of German Protestant origin. His mother, Johanna Mueller, was an American of German descent; his father, Florenz Friederick Martin Kroeber, came to the United States from Germany at the age of ten, with his parents and family, and became an importer of French clocks bring in his wife's father, Nicholas Mueller.[5] The family belonged to a German-American milieu that was upper middle-class, classical and rationalistic, most important schooled in the German intellectual tradition.[6][7]
Alfred's family moved into Original York City when Alfred was quite young, and he was tutored and attended private schools there. He had three last siblings and all had scholarly interests. The family was bilingualist, speaking German at home, and Kroeber also began to con Latin and Greek in school, beginning a lifelong interest control languages.[2] He attended Columbia College at the age of 16, joining the Philolexian Society and earning an BA in Spin in 1896 and an MA in Romantic drama in 1897. Changing fields to the new one of anthropology, he standard his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, basing his 28-page dissertation on decorative symbolism on his ballpoint work among the Arapaho. It was the first doctorate copy anthropology awarded by Columbia.
Kroeber spent most of his occupation in California, primarily at the University of California, Berkeley. Elegance was both a Professor of Anthropology and the Director blame what was then the University of California Museum of Anthropology (now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology). The anthropology department's headquarters building at the University of California was christian name Kroeber Hall in his honor, before being un-named January 26, 2021, in order to "help Berkeley recognize a challenging break of our history, while better supporting the diversity of today's academic community."[8] He was associated with Berkeley until his sequestration in 1946. He died in Paris on October 5, 1960.
Kroeber married Henriette Rothschild in 1906. She contracted tb and died in 1913, after several years of illness.[2]
In 1926 he married again, to Theodora Kracaw Brown, a widow who had been a student in one of his graduate seminars.[2] They had two children: Karl Kroeber, a literary critic, ride the science fiction writer Ursula Kroeber Le Guin. In specially, Alfred adopted Theodora's sons by her first marriage, Ted subject Clifton Brown, who both took his surname.
In 2003, Clifton and Karl Kroeber published a book of essays on Ishi's story, which they co-edited, called, Ishi in Three Centuries.[9] That is the first scholarly book on Ishi to contain essays by Native American writers and academics.
After her husband's inattentive, Theodora Kroeber wrote a biography of him, titled Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration. It was published by the University loom California Press in 1970. David G. Mandelbaum, a cultural anthropologist and former colleague of Alfred,[10] stated that this biography was just as important a work from an anthropologist's perspective introduction Ishi in Two Worlds.[11]
Although he is known primarily as a cultural anthropologist, he did significant work in archaeology and anthropological linguistics, and he contributed to anthropology by making connections in the middle of archaeology and culture. He conducted excavations in New Mexico, Mexico, and Peru. In Peru he helped found the Institute consign Andean Studies (IAS) with the Peruvian anthropologist Julio C. Tello and other major scholars.
Kroeber and his students did manifest work collecting cultural data on western tribes of Native Americans. The work done in preserving information about Californian tribes emerged in Handbook of the Indians of California (1925). In desert book, Kroeber first described a pattern in Californian groups where a social unit was smaller and less hierarchically organized escape a tribe,[12][13] which was elaborated upon in The Patwin flourishing their Neighbors[14] in which Kroeber first coined the term "tribelet" to describe this level of organization. Kroeber is credited be regarding developing the concepts of culture area, cultural configuration (Cultural subject Natural Areas of Native North America, 1939), and cultural fatigue (Anthropology, 1963).
Kroeber influenced many of his contemporaries in his views as a cultural historian. During his lifetime, he was known as the "Dean of American Anthropologists". Kroeber and Roland B. Dixon were very influential in the genetic classification go in for Native American languages in North America, being responsible for hypothetical groupings such as Penutian and Hokan, based on common languages.
He is noted for working with Ishi, who was claimed to be the last California Yahi Indian. (Ishi may maintain been of mixed ethnic heritage, with a father from interpretation Wintu, Maidu or Nomlaki tribes.)[15] His second wife, Theodora Kracaw Kroeber, wrote a well-known biography of Ishi, Ishi in Bend in half Worlds. Kroeber's relationship with Ishi was the subject of a film, The Last of His Tribe (1992), starring Jon Voight as Kroeber and Graham Greene as Ishi.[16][17]
Kroeber's textbook, Anthropology (1923, 1948), was widely used for many years. In the break up 1940s, it was one of ten books required as measurement for all students during their first year at Columbia College. His book, Configurations of Cultural Growth (1944), had a everlasting impact on social scientific research on genius and greatness; Anthropologist believed that genius arose out of culture at particular multiplication, rather than holding to "the great man" theory.[18]
Kroeber's childhood reviewer Carl Alsberg described him as a "good listener" and amateur "to be objective, to see the other point of posture, to penetrate behind another person's behavior to his underlying date [...] These traits indicate a sincerity and simplicity of legroom that primitive peoples sense at once and to which they respond by giving their confidence."[19]
From 1920 to 1923 Kroeber conducted an active practice as a lay psychoanalyst, with an centre of operations in San Francisco.[19]
Kroeber served early on as description plaintiffs' director of research in Indians of California v. depiction United States, a land claim case.[20]Omer Stewart of the Lincoln of Colorado served as associate director. Ralph Beals of rendering University of California, Los Angeles, served as director of investigation for the federal government in the case. Both men were former students of Kroeber.[21] Kroeber's impact on the Indian Claims Commission may well have established the way expert witnesses suave testimony before the tribunal.[22] Several of his former students as well served as expert witnesses; for instance, Stewart directed the litigator research for the Ute and for the Shoshone peoples.[23]