Theodora Kroeber

Theodora Kroeber Quinn (born March 24, 1897 as Theodora Kracaw in Denver , † July 4, 1979 in Berkeley ) was an American ethnologist . She is best known for her books on Ishi , the last survivor of the Yahi culture.

Life

Theodora Kroeber grew up as the youngest of three children in the mining town of Telluride, Colorado ; her parents owned a general store. In 1915 the family moved to Orland, California and Kroeber studied at the University of California, Berkeley , where she graduated with a Masters in Clinical Psychology in 1920 . Also in 1920 she married Clifton Spencer Brown and moved with him to Santa Fe, New Mexico . She had two children with him before Brown, who had suffered from pneumonia since World War I, died in 1923.

Kroeber returned to Berkeley and, inspired by his time in New Mexico, began studying anthropology with Alfred Kroeber . The two married in 1926; in the same year they went on an eight-month research expedition to Peru. The two had two children, the literary scholar Karl Kroeber and the writer Ursula Kroeber Le Guin .

The family moved into an old farmhouse in Napa Valley and Theodora Kroeber largely took care of the upbringing of the four children, but continued to accompany her husband in his field research, for example with the Yurok on the Klamath River . In their property, too, the couple had frequent contact with other ethnologists as well as with local Papago and Yurok. Robert Spott, a young Yurok, told Kroeber only orally handed down legends, which she later processed in her first book The Inland Whale .

After her children grew up and her husband retired, Kroeber began to take a serious look at her writing. 1955 to 1956 the couple spent at the "Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences" at Stanford University . It was there that Kroeber wrote his first unpublished novel. In 1959, her first book, The Inland Whale , was published, in which she reproduced the stories of the Californian Indians . She did not choose the most famous stories, but those in which female protagonists appeared.

For the next two years, Kroeber studied the literature on Ishi , the last survivor of the Yahi Indians, who was found in 1911 and died of tuberculosis in 1916. In 1961 she published Ishi in Two Worlds (published in German as The man who came from the Stone Age ). The book became a bestseller in the United States and is now one of the most widely read works on the indigenous culture of North America . In 1964 a book for young people on the same subject came out ( Ishi. The Last of His Tribe ). This formed the basis for two films, Ishi: The Last of His Tribe (1978) and The last of his tribe ( The Last of His Tribe ) (1992).

In 1960 Alfred Kroeber died. Theodora wrote his biography, Alfred Kroeber. A personal configuration . She also worked with the anthropologist Robert F. Heizer on two publications. The first, Almost Ancestors , contained more than a hundred photos of California Indians; the second, Drawn from Life , contained drawings and sketches by Indians from before 1880. In both cases, Kroeber wrote the accompanying text.

In 1969, Kroeber married the artist and psychotherapist John Harrison Quinn, who was over 40 years his junior. In 1977 she was appointed to the Board of Directors of the University of California for one year ; In this capacity she spoke out against the university's participation in nuclear weapons research. Theodora Kroeber Quinn died on July 4, 1979 at the age of 82 in Berkeley.

Publications (selection)

• The Inland Whale . Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1959, ISBN 0-520-24693-4 .
• Ishi in Two Worlds. A biography of the last wild Indian in North America . Ishi Press, New York; Tokyo 2011, ISBN 978-0-923891-01-5 (first edition: University of California Press, Berkeley 1961). Also in German as The Man who Came from the Stone Age. The biography of the last wild Indian in North America . Bechtle, Munich; Esslingen 1967.
• Ishi. The Last of His Tribe . Bantam Books, New York 1973, ISBN 0-553-24898-7 (first edition: Parnassus Press, Berkeley 1964).
• Alfred Kroeber. A personal configuration . University of California Press, Berkeley 1970, ISBN 0-520-01598-3 .
• with Robert F. Heizer: Almost Ancestors. The first Californians . Sierra Club, San Francisco 1968, OCLC 187047 .
• with Robert F. Heizer and Albert B. Elsasser: Drawn from Life. California Indians in pen and brush . Ballena Press, Socorro, New Mexico 1977, ISBN 0-87919-068-X .

literature

• David G. Mandelbaum: Memorial to Theodora Kroeber Quinn (1897–1979) . In: Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology . tape 1 , no. 2 , 1979, p. 237-239 ( escholarship.org , University of California. [Accessed February 27, 2017]).
• Grace Wilson Buzaljko: Theodora Kracaw Kroeber . In: Uta Gacs, Aisha Khan, Jerry McIntyre and Ruth Weinberg (Eds.): Women Anthropologists. Selected Biographies . University of Illinois Press, Urbana; Chicago 1989, ISBN 0-252-06084-9 , pp. 187-193 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ishi: The Last of His Tribe in the Internet Movie Database (English)
2. ↑ The last of his tribe in the Internet Movie Database (English)