Alfred L. Kroeber

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Alfred Kroeber (left) with Ishi

Alfred Louis Kroeber (born June 11, 1876 in Hoboken , New Jersey , † October 5, 1960 in Paris ) was an American anthropologist and cultural relativist .

family

Alfred Kroeber was the son of the art dealer Florence Kroeber, whose father immigrated to the USA from Germany. In 1906 Alfred Kroeber and Henrietta Rothschild († 1913) married. The literary scholar Karl Kroeber and the writer Ursula Kroeber Le Guin came from his marriage to the writer Theodora Krakow in 1926 .

Life

Alfred Kroeber attended Columbia College from 1892, earned an AB in English in 1896 and an MA in Romantic Drama in 1897 . He received his doctorate in 1901 from Franz Boas at Columbia University with a dissertation on decorative symbols at the Arapaho . Kroeber was the first PhD in anthropology at Columbia University. From 1900 to 1902 and from 1906 to 1907 Kroeber conducted research with the Yurok in California. The results were only published after his death.

In 1901, Kroeber took over a curatorial position in the archaeological collection of Phoebe Hearst in California . In the same year he was able to take over a professorship for anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley , which he held until his retirement in 1946. One of his doctoral students was Theodore D. McCown , who taught palaeoanthropology at Berkeley from 1951 . In 1912 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1928 to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1941 to the American Philosophical Society .

Alfred Kroeber's particular merits are that he tried to document the dying peoples of Australia early on and that he divided the different cultures of the North American Indians into so-called cultural areas (see → North American cultural areas ) .

Very early on he also dealt with psychoanalysis and with Sigmund Freud's work; the ethno-psychoanalyst Georges Devereux did his doctorate with Kroeber.

Kroeber was an opponent of the American eugenics movement and, in particular, of Madison Grant's theses on race theory . In a public statement in March 1914, he declared eugenics to be a "joke".

Alfred Kroeber suffered a heart attack while on vacation with his wife in Paris. They didn't know anyone there except Claude Lévi-Strauss , in whose arms Kroeber is said to have died.

position

Together with his fellow student Robert Lowie , he formed a first generation of Boas students. Kroeber tried to reinforce Boa's cultural relativist element. His best-known article is “the Super organic” from 1917: Kroeber sees culture as something that is beyond the organic. The supra-organic element of culture, the exclusively ideal, is therefore concentrated in so-called “key symbols” - with these, culture can be established. In 1944 he wrote the essay "Configurations of Culture Growth".

According to Boas, every culture is relative; H. can only be experienced and explained from within. A foreign culture cannot be explained and experienced for non-specialists. Cultures are therefore never comparable. From this point of view, a hard and a soft cultural relativism developed.

At the end of his life, Kroeber recognized that his role as the guardian of the Boas theory was weakening and now turned more and more to developments outside of America in anthropology. After the end of the Second World War , Kroeber also had contact with the Viennese Robert von Heine-Geldern .

Publications

author
  • Traditions of the Arapaho . Collected under the auspices of the Field Columbian Museum and of the American Museum of Natural History. With George A. Dorsey. Chicago 1903.
  • Notes on Shoshonean dialects of Southern California . The University Press, Berkeley 1909.
  • The Superorganic , in: American Anthropologist , Vol. 19, 1917.
  • Totem and Taboo: An Ethnologic Psychoanalysis , in: American Anthropologist , Volume 22, No. 1, 1920, pp. 48-55.
  • Anthropology . Harcourt, New York 1923. Digitized
  • Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America. Vol. 38, University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology , Berkeley, 1939.
  • The Nature of Culture , Chicago, 1952.
  • with Clyde Kluckhohn , Culture - A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions , Cambridge 1952
  • with Clyde Kluckhohn , Culture , in: American Anthropologist , Vol. 56, No. 3, 1954, pp. 461-471.
  • A roster of civilizations and culture . Wenner-Gren Foundation, New York 1962.
  • Yurok Myths . University of California Press, New Jersey 1978.
  • Karok Myths . The University Press, Berkeley 1980.
  • The Archeology and Pottery of Nazca . (Expedition in Peru 1926.) AltaMira Press 1999 ISBN 0-7619-8964-1
editor
  • (with TT Waterman ) Source Book in Anthropology. Berkeley 1920 digitized version
  • Handbook of the Indians of California . Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 78.Washington 1925.
  • Anthropology Today . Chicago 1953.

literature

  • Theodora Kroeber: Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration. University of California Press, Berkeley 1970, ISBN 0-520-01598-3 .

Web links

Commons : Alfred L. Kroeber  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul A. Erickson et al. Liam D. Murphy: A History of Anthropological Theory . Toronto 2008, 98.
  2. ↑ Member History: Alfred L. Kroeber. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 3, 2019 .
  3. ^ Douglas Cazaux Sackman: Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America . Oxford University Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-517852-4 , p. 286 .
  4. ↑ John P. Jackson Jr .: Definitional Argument in Evolutionary Psychology and Cultural Anthropology . In: Science in Context . 23, No. 1, March 2010, pp. 121–150 (PDF; 128 kB). doi: 10.1017 / S0269889709990263 .
  5. ↑ Eugenics is a Joke, Declares Professor . In: The Miami News , March 4, 1914.
personal data
SURNAME Kroeber, Alfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kroeber, Alfred Louis (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist and cultural relativist
DATE OF BIRTH June 11, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Hoboken , New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH 5th October 1960
Place of death Paris