John Peabody Harrington
John Peabody Harrington (born April 29, 1884 in Waltham , Massachusetts , † October 21, 1961 in Santa Barbara , California ) was an American linguist and ethnologist . He researched and documented the Indian languages of California in particular .
Born in Massachusetts , he grew up in California. From 1902 to 1905 he studied anthropology (comparable to ethnology) and classical languages at Stanford University . In Berkeley , where he attended advanced courses, he met the ethnologist Alfred Kroeber . Harrington's special interest in the Indian languages can be traced back to him.
Although Harrington studied in Leipzig and Berlin , he preferred to be a language teacher at a high school . Nevertheless, he spent three years interviewing the Chumash's few native speakers . The resulting work caught the attention of scholars at the Smithsonian Museum , more precisely at the Bureau of American Ethnology . But it wasn't until 1915 that he was hired as a field researcher . Over the next four decades, he collected and compiled vast amounts of raw data to explore the Chumash, Mutsun , Rumsen , Chochenyo , Kiowa , Chimariko , Yokuts , Gabrielino , Salinan , Yuma and Mohave . With it he created not only one of the early collections, but probably one of the largest.
As early as 1915 he met Carobeth (Tucker) Laird, who was eleven years his junior, and a student in one of his language courses. Her later publication, The Chemehuevi , is considered to be one of the best ethnographic studies. Harrington, who is considered eccentric, was married to her from 1916 to 1923. Awona Harrington is their daughter.
Since 2000, his records have been entered into a database by volunteers from the University of California, Davis, making them scientifically available. There are almost a million manuscript pages, which provide enormous amounts of linguistic and mythological material, but also of ritual and musical traditions.
Web links
- bibliography
- Lisa Krieger, Long gone Native languages emerge from the grave, in: Mercury News, December 23, 2007
- Literature by and about John Peabody Harrington in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Harrington, John Peabody |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American ethnologist and linguist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 29, 1884 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Waltham , Massachusetts |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 21, 1961 |
| Place of death | Santa Barbara , California |