Alfred Kroeber as Museum Anthropologist

Ira Jacknis

While Alfred Kroeber is not remem-bered today as a museum anthro-pologist, he devoted most of the first

decade of his professional life to museum work,and he returned continually to museums andmaterial culture throughout the rest of his life.This brief overview attempts to fill the gap in ourknowledge about Kroeber.

Early career and institutional contextBorn in 1876, Alfred Kroeber grew up in

Manhattan, where he spent much of his youthcollecting natural history specimens, an orienta-tion that was to mark much of his later anthro-pology. During graduate work at Columbia in thelate 1890s, Kroeber came under the influence ofFranz Boas, who initiated him into anthropologyin its museum incarnation (Jacknis 1985). Duringthe summers of 1899, 1900, and 1901, Kroebermade three collecting trips to the Arapaho andother Plains tribes, sponsored by the AmericanMuseum of Natural History. The young anthro-pologist purchased, catalogued, documented, andhelped install artifacts (T. Kroeber 1970:53).

In August 1900, Kroeber was appointed curatorat the California Academy of Sciences in SanFrancisco. After six weeks spent reviewing thecollections, Kroeber set out on a collecting trip,first to the north and the Yurok, Hupa, and Karokaround the Klamath River and then south to theMojave. As the academy could not afford to payfor collections, which were usually donated, heleft by Christmas.

In late spring of the following year, Kroeberwas offered a position in the new museum andDepartment of Anthropology at the University ofCalifornia, then being formed under the patron-age of Phoebe Apperson Hearst (Kroeber 1946,Thoresen 1975). At its inception, the program'smission was collecting and research; teaching wasto be postponed. This institutional pattern—thejoining of museum research with universityinstruction—was common at the turn of the cen-tury; in fact, it was the norm (for Harvard, cf.Hinsley 1992; for Pennsylvania, cf. Darnell 1970).Between 1903 and 1931 this dual context inCalifornia was marked by a physical separation,

with the museum in San Francisco and the uni-versity in Berkeley.

At the museum, Kroeber began with an un-specified curatorial position under the supervi-sion of Frederic W. Putnam, who continued toserve as director of Harvard's Peabody Museum.Over the next decade Putnam became Kroeber'smentor in practical museum methods (Dexter1989). Kroeber was officially appointed curator in1908, a year before Putnam's retirement, and hebecame the Museum's director in 1925.1

Kroeber's initial academic position was that ofinstructor (1901 to 1906), although he did notstart teaching until spring of 1902.2 Gradually,teaching occupied more and more of his time. In1907, Kroeber was spending two days a week inBerkeley; by 1910, three days; and by 1914, fourof the five teaching days (T. Kroeber 1970:95).

CollectingAlmost all of Kroeber's artifact collecting came

in his first decade in California, when he did thebulk of his ethnographic fieldwork. A review ofthe scope of Kroeber's collections readily indicatestheir wide span in cultures—at least eighteen dif-ferent groups before 1918, when he finished workon his summarizing Handbook of the Indians ofCalifornia (1925).

This broad, but essentially shallow, approachstemmed from Kroeber's fundamental ethnologi-cal goals. Building on the Boasian premise of sal-vaging the remnants of pre-contact cultures,Kroeber confronted the enormous cultural, social,and linguistic diversity of Native California. Hisresponse was survey and mapping (Darnell1969:299-318, Harner and McLendon in Wolf1981:58-60, Buckley 1989). As Kroeber noted toBoas in 1903, 'Virtually all of my field work hasbeen essentially comparative" (AMNH: 5/19/03). Inthat year, this on-going work was formally insti-tutionalized as the Archaeological and Ethnologi-cal Survey of California, with the financialsupport of Phoebe Hearst (Kroeber and Putnam1905).

Of these Californian groups, the two thatKroeber collected from repeatedly were the Yurokand the Mojave. Within a given culture, Kroeber

28 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 17 NUMBER 2

1. California Room, Museum of Anthropology, University of California, 1911. Photograph by S. M. Grow. (neg. no. 15-5397)

tried to collect as representative a sampling as hecould of their material inventory. His Yurok col-lection, for instance, includes tools, some raw ma-terials, and unfinished objects (bow, elk-hornspoon). Specimens also come in multiples andsets, such as net mesh-measures in different ma-terials (wood, horn), used for different kinds offish (sturgeon, salmon, eel, sucker); for differentkinds of nets (drag, set); or for salmon at differenttimes of the year (spring, summer, fall) (Ace. 86,May-July 1902, 469 Yurok, Karok pieces). Amongthe more unusual items are a stick, paddleshaped, inserted in the mouth of a salmon tobreak its head,' and a shell used to cover thethumb in making string" (Ace. 17, 1901).

Beyond making general collections, Kroebercollected for specific research purposes Hewanted to hold back baskets from an exchange ifthey possessed "designs that are unusual or newto me. I have collected very considerable materialon the basket designs of the region and shouldlike to complete it" (AMNH: ALK/Boas: 4/18/02, Ace.1902-61).

In the interest of salvaging pre-contactcultures, Kroeber tried to avoid—not alwayssuccessfully—acculturated objects and objectsmade for sale (cf. Washburn 1984). Outlining hisphilosophy to a trader, Kroeber wrote: "Therequirements of our Museum make it mostdesirable that we should obtain old pieces thathave seen use" (ALK/A.M. Benham, 5/15/07, Ace.279). Nonetheless, he was willing to accept reproductions, which he noted in his inventories as"models."

The quality and quantity of Kroeber's artifactual documentation seems to have improved overt ime, though it was rare ly as specific asMerriam's or Culin's. He usually recorded thetribe and object type, and occasionally notednative names for basket designs. By 1904, as hebecame more familiar with collecting sites, withnative cultures and environments, and perhapswith the collecting process itself, he began to listthe names of vendors (rarely the maker), and theplace and date of collection (Diegueno/LuisenoAce. 124; Yurok, 1907, Ace. 286).

ALFRED KROEBER AS MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGIST 29

The reasons for Kroeber's inattention to docu-mentation are unknown, but students have notedhis phenomena l memory (Harner in Wolf1981:58), and John Rowe (1962:409) observed regarding Kroeber's archaeological documentationin Peru, "He kept no journal in the field, and hisnotes were extremely sketchy.

One reason, perhaps, is that unlike collectorssuch as Stewart Culin, for Kroeber the artifactwas not the goal of ethnography. From the start,Kroeber adopted a basically Boasian approach tofieldwork and the collection of artifacts, that is,they were only one part of a multi-mediaapproach to recording Native cultures, whichincluded texts (primarily in Native languages),ethnographic observations, sound recordings,photographs, as well as artifacts. All were objectsin some way, and all could ultimately be pre-served in the museum.J

Commenting on Kroeber's fieldwork methodol-ogy, Thoresen (1976:xxi) has noted that,

A trip that began with a search for basketsamong the Yurok, for example, might well resultalso in notebooks full of lists of names for Yurokhabitation sites with estimated population,information on house types, statements of bothreported and observed practices, and severalmyths with comments on the informants.

For Kroeber, however, artifacts were secondary tolinguistic notes and texts (folklore), and anexamination of his field work activity reveals thathe spent relatively little time in collecting.

Kroeber's institutional setting in a museum,with Putnam as director and Hearst as patron,impelled him to return with artifactual collections, but he was always pushing to expand thelimits of collecting. Tb their credit, both Putnamand Hearst supported Kroeber s more embracing,Boasian model of ethnography.

Collection management, exhibition, andpublication

Kroeber spent considerable time in what wewould today call "collection management." Asense of his day-to-day work in the museum canbe gleaned from one of Putnam's review letters toMrs. Hearst: "Dr. Kroeber is a most energetic andfaithful worker and is at the building early andlate looking after everything—cataloguing, preparing labels to be type-written, and in arrangingthe specimens. He has identified nearly all thebaskets you sent. He has also added to thelabels many little figures explaining the meaningof the symbolical decorations on the baskets" (PP:FWP PAH, 12 11 04). Once, when complaining ofthe lack of qualified assistance, Kroeber wrote."Practically every specimen that is cataloguedhas to be handled, placed, and named by me" (PP:ALK/FWP, 5 7 05).

It took a decade before the collections werefully opened to the public, and only after 1905were they accessible to students and scholars AsKroeber described the situation, ' As fast as possible, all collections were removed from their pack-ing cases, catalogued, and made accessible in asystem of classified storage The next step was to

2. California Room, Museum ofAnthropology, University of California,ca. 1911. Photographer unknown.

30 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 17 NUMBER 2

glass in on shelves a selection of the more notablespecimens in six of the larger rooms, as well as onstairs and hallways, and to put these on publicexhibition. . . This system of public exhibitionbegan to be installed in 1910, and was formallyopened October 4, 1911, with a reception by Mrs.Hearst" (Kroeber 1946:7). From the survivingphotographic documentation, it is clear thatKroeber's exhibits essentially amounted to openor visible storage. Although large crowds visitedthe museum, especially during the time of Ishi(October, 1911-March, 1916), Kroeber's exhibitsseem to have been di rected pr imar i ly toresearchers and students.4

Kroeber's principal writings on Californianmaterial culture came in the form of three paperson basketry: the first, in 1905, on the basketry ofthe northwestern part of the state,5 the second, in1909, on Porno basketry (based on Barrett's work,cf. Bernstein 1985), and the last in 1922, on thecontainers of the so-called "Mission" Indians fromsouthern California. This basketry research grewdirectly out of his Plains research, embodied, forexample, in his 1901 doctoral dissertation on thedecorative symbolism of the Arapaho. Kroeberwas principally concerned with the evolution andspread of design elements, and the relationship ofform and meaning (Thoresen 1977). This workwas part of a coordinated system of research,

3. Office, Museum of Anthropology,University of California, 1907.Photograph by Alfred Kroeber.(neg. no. 15-4216).

encouraged by Boas, which for California bas-ketry was conducted by Roland Dixon (1902)among the Maidu and Samuel Barrett (1905,1908) among the Porno.

Post-1911 museum workBetween 1908 and 1912, Kroeber's most active

years of museum anthropology began to taper off.In 1908, Mrs. Hearst's funding was substantiallyreduced. As the university took over, the role ofthe museum was diminished relative to the aca-demic department, with less funds for fieldresearch. Putnam, Kroeber's museum mentor re-tired in 1909. In 1911, the museum was opened tothe public, and the following year Edward W.Gifford was appointed assistant curator. Giffordgradually assumed day-ti>-day responsibility forthe running of the museum.

Kroeber, however, did not relinquish museumanthropology. Between September, 1911 andMarch of 1916, he worked with Ishi, the last Yahi,who lived in the museum and spent much of histime creating artifacts. As exemplified in the 1914field trip to Ishi's Mill Creek homeland, much ofthis work was self-consciously re-creative, asKroeber struggled to construct a picture of pre-contact Yahi culture (T. Kroeber 1961).

Kroeber's orientation to material evidenceunderwent a change after 1915, during his sum-

ALFRED KROEBER AS MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGIST 31

4. Work and storage area, Museum ofAnthropology, University of California,1907. Photograph by Alfred Kroeber.(neg. no. 15-4214).

mer field work in Zuni, when his seriation of pot-sherds stimulated his fundamental interest incultural change and process (Rowe 1962, T.Kroeber 1970:143-54, Thoresen 1971:199-211).This initial work was sponsored by the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, where he spent ayear's sabbatical in 1917-18, curating theirPhilippines collections (1919a, 1919b). He alsomade two ethnological collections in Zuni, one forthe American Museum of Natural History in 1915and one for his own museum in 1918. During the1920s, Kroeber became preoccupied with Peru-vian archaeology, which he investigated with hisstudents, but this must be a story for anotheroccasion.

ConclusionTheodora Kroeber (1970:94) has claimed that

her husband was not a "museum man." Shewrites that Kroeber

was meticulous in his care of the collectionsorderly and businesslike in its bookkeeping andadministration; he respected and advanced therole of the museum in the university and thecommunity; and he enjoyed setting up exhibitsthat were aesthetically satisfying and scientifi-cally and historically meaningful.

After all this, she sets limits to his museum an-thropology: "But for him the daily confrontation

must be of people, and as humanist, not as admin-istrator" (1970:94).

The problem with Theodora Kroeber's view isnot that it is untrue (as she is essentially correct),but that—like much of her perspective on herhusband—it is retrospective, written with hind-sight. During his first decade in California,Kroeber took museum work very seriously, devot-ing a great deal of time to all of its aspects. Thispaper has been an attempt to restore Kroeber tohis early context in the world of museum anthropology. •

Abbreviations

AMNH = American Museum of Natural History, Dept. ofAnthropology.PP- Frederic Ward Putnam Papers Correspondence, 1901-1910, Re: University of California, Dept. of Anthropology;Harvard University Archives.

Notes

Kroeber retired from the Museum in 1941, Berving atsdirector emeritus until his death in 1960.Kroebers academic positions were: instructor (1901-06), assistant professor (1906-11), associate professor(1911-19), full profesBor (1919-46), professor emeritus(1946-60).Outlining this strategy in 1903 testimony to a com-mittee investigating the Bureau of American Ethnol-ogy, Boas explained that he instructed his students "tocollect certain things [artifacts] and to collect witheverything they get information in the native lan-guage and to obtain grammatical information that is

32 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 17 NUMBER 2

necessary to explain their texts" (quoted in Hinsley1981:268, cf. Jacknis ms)

4. An alternative approach to exhibition, directed to thegeneral public, was adopted by Stewart Culin at TheBrooklyn Museum (Jacknis 1991).

5. "I have had all the material in hand since last Sep-tember [1902], but until now have not been able todevote any time to it" (PP.ALK/FWP, 4/29/03).

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