Kroeber, Alfred Louis

Kroeber, Alfred Louis 1876-1960

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alfred Louis Kroeber earned the second PhD awarded in anthropology in North America, and is regarded as a founder of the modern discipline. He was born in Hoboken, New Jersey to well-to-do German-speaking parents. Although his family is often described as Protestant, Kroeber attended the Ethical Culture School, which though officially nonsectarian was associated with a secular humanist strand of Judaism. He studied English at Columbia College, switching to anthropology after meeting the charismatic and forceful Franz Boas. His twenty-eight-page dissertation “Decorative Symbolism of the Arapaho” (1901) was an analysis of specimens he collected for the American Museum of Natural History. Kroeber spent his academic career in California, where he established the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and directed what became the Museum of Anthropology there. He retired in 1946, but remained active in the field until his death.

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

Alfred Kroeber regarded anthropology as a method for doing history. His academic research and writings addressed two broad concerns: theorizing the nature of culture, and delineating the boundaries of and patterns within specific cultures. In the case of the latter, this can be appreciated in his archaeological investigations in Nazca, Peru, through which he contributed to the archaeological concept of seriation, or relative dating, by observing stylistic changes over time. Cultural boundaries figured into his work on the culture area concept published in Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (1939), whereas patterns within cultures was the subject of his much criticized Configurations of Culture Growth (1944). In both works he developed typologies of cultures based on compilations of traits. For Kroeber, a culture was something analogous to grammar: Both were composed of unconscious mental rules or patterns that could be discerned and described.

Perhaps Kroeber’s most controversial idea concerned his concept of culture generally. In a 1917 article published in American Anthropologist he described culture as “superorganic,” an entity that existed apart from and 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 variation were inconsequential to describing specific cultures. The trouble with this position is that it ignores the context in which people, the culture bearers, live. The problem is illustrated in a story told by the late George Foster, a founder of medical anthropology and one of Kroeber’s students at Berkeley in the 1930s. As a young graduate student Foster was expected to learn how to collect ethnographic data by interviewing an elderly member of a northern California Indian tribe, a man who had been Kroeber’s informant many years earlier. As required, Foster traveled to northern California and conducted a series of interviews about “Native culture” with the old man. Finally, the elder told Foster he would have to stop the interviews as he was becoming exhausted from reading Kroeber’s Handbook of the Indians of California (1925) every evening in order to have something to tell Foster each day.

Kroeber’s understanding of culture as monolithic also informed his relationship with the Native California man known as Ishi (c.1860–1916). Ishi was the sole survivor of a group of northern California Indians hunted, harassed, and dislocated by white ranchers and other settlers. In 1911, alone and starving, Ishi came into the town of Oroville, where he was jailed and then turned over to Kroeber’s Department of Anthropology. Kroeber, like others in that era, believed Ishi to be the “last wild Indian,” and therefore to be in possession of culture uncontaminated by “civilization.” Kroeber arranged for Ishi to live and to be a living exhibit at the University of California museum. Kroeber also arranged for his academic colleagues, T. T. Waterman and Edward Sapir, to “work” with Ishi to record his culture and language. The story of Ishi’s life in San Francisco is well told in a film made for public television, Ishi, The Last Yahi (1992). Ishi died of tuberculosis while Kroeber was in Europe, and despite Kroeber’s supposed directive to the contrary, his body was autopsied “for science.” Kroeber himself sent Ishi’s brain to the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution. The whereabouts of Ishi’s brain and Kroeber’s role during Ishi’s last years of life became a controversy in 1999. Eventually, the brain was removed from the museum and was buried with Ishi’s cremated remains in northern California in 2000.

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

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Kroeber, A. L. 1901. Decorative Symbolism of 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. L. 1939. Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kroeber, A. L. 1944. Configurations of Culture Growth. Berkeley: University of 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