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Alfred Louis Kroeber ( ; June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through 1947. Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology – History Kroeber provided detailed information about Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people, whom he studied over a period of years. He was the father of the acclaimed novelist, poet, and writer of short stories Ursula K. Le Guin.
Alfred's family moved into New York City when Alfred was quite young, and he was tutored and attended private schools there. He had three younger siblings and all had scholarly interests. The family was bilingual, speaking German at home, and Kroeber also began to study Latin and Greek language in school, beginning a lifelong interest in languages. He attended Columbia College at the age of 16, joining the Philolexian Society and earning an BA in English in 1896 and an MA in Romantic drama in 1897. Changing fields to the new one of anthropology, he received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, basing his 28-page dissertation on decorative symbolism on his field work among the Arapaho. It was the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia.
Kroeber spent most of his career in California, primarily at the University of California, Berkeley. He was both a professor of Anthropology and the Director of what was then the University of California Museum of Anthropology (now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology). The anthropology department's headquarters building at the University of California was named Kroeber Hall in his honor, before being unnamed January 26, 2021, in order to "help Berkeley recognize a challenging part of our history, while better supporting the diversity of today's academic community." He was associated with Berkeley until his retirement in 1946. He died in Paris on October 5, 1960.
In 1926 he married again, to Theodora Kroeber, a widow who had been a student in one of his graduate seminars. They had two children: Karl Kroeber, a literary critic, and the science fiction writer Ursula Kroeber Le Guin. In addition, Alfred adopted Theodora's sons by her first marriage, Ted and Clifton Kroeber, who both took his surname.
In 2003, Clifton and Karl Kroeber published a book of essays on Ishi's story, which they co-edited, called, Ishi in Three Centuries.Clifton and Karl Kroeber (2002) Ishi in Three Centuries, Univ. of Nebraska Press This is the first scholarly book on Ishi to contain essays by Native American writers and academics.
After her husband's death, Theodora Kroeber wrote a biography of him, titled . It was published by the University of California Press in 1970. David G. Mandelbaum, a cultural anthropologist and former colleague of Alfred, stated that this biography was just as important a work from an anthropologist's perspective as Ishi in Two Worlds.
Kroeber and his students did important work collecting cultural data on western tribes of Native Americans. The work done in preserving information about Californian tribes appeared in Handbook of the Indians of California (1925). In that book, Kroeber first described a pattern in Californian groups where a social unit was smaller and less hierarchically organized than a tribe, which was elaborated upon in The Patwin and their Neighbors in which Kroeber first coined the term " tribelet" to describe this level of organization. Kroeber is credited with developing the concepts of culture area, cultural configuration ( Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, 1939), and cultural fatigue ( Anthropology, 1963).
Kroeber influenced many of his contemporaries in his views as a cultural historian. During his lifetime, he was known as the "Dean of American Anthropologists". Kroeber and Roland B. Dixon were very influential in the genetic classification of Native American languages in North America, being responsible for theoretical groupings such as Penutian and Hokan languages, based on common languages.
He is noted for working with Ishi, who was claimed to be the last California Yahi Indian. (Ishi may have been of mixed ethnic heritage, with a father from the Wintu, Maidu or Nomlaki tribes.) His second wife, Theodora Kroeber, wrote a well-known biography of Ishi, Ishi in Two Worlds. Kroeber's relationship with Ishi was the subject of a film, The Last of His Tribe (1992), starring Jon Voight as Kroeber and Graham Greene as Ishi.
Kroeber's textbook, Anthropology (1923, 1948), was widely used for many years. In the late 1940s, it was one of ten books required as reading for all students during their first year at Columbia University. His book, Configurations of Cultural Growth (1944), had a lasting impact on social scientific research on genius and greatness; Kroeber believed that genius arose out of culture at particular times, rather than holding to "the great man" theory.Simonton, D.K. 1994. Greatness: Who Makes History and Why. New York: The Guilford Press. p. 375–382
Kroeber's childhood friend Carl Alsberg described him as a "good listener" and able "to be objective, to see the other point of view, to penetrate behind another person's behavior to his underlying thought ... These traits indicate a sincerity and simplicity of character that primitive peoples sense at once and to which they respond by giving their confidence."
From 1920 to 1923 Kroeber conducted an active practice as a lay psychoanalyst, with an office in San Francisco.
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