Curious Profession: Alfred Kroeber and Anthropological History

I sincerely thank you for inviting me to speak at this celebration of your department's centennial. At my age, there is comfort in anything older than I am. And among my earliest memories of this campus, around which later I roller-skated and even later studied at, stands the "temporary" (for fifty years) old anthropology building, the "tin shack" few of you knew, dim, mysterious, with its Egyptian mummy case, creaking open-wooden stairs, the clacking of a typewriter somewhere, and the whiff of Prince Albert tobacco from my father's pipe.

I'll never have such justification for public personal reminiscing. My father was a founder of your department and chiefly responsible for its maturation from an infancy, nearly as uncertain as my own, into your profession's mid-life crises at the end of World War II. By being personal, I hope to illuminate the orienting spirit of an academic discipline to which your department has always been an adventurous contributor. My prejudice is that histories of intellectual disciplines should be founded on understanding of the idiosyncrasies of their principal practitioners. Before my brother Clifton can rise from the audience as a professional historian to protest such a naïve restating of the thorniest problem of historical causality, I plead the excuse of recent suffering. I was suckered through Ishi into researching anthropological history, which before had impinged on me mainly through personal encounters with anthropologists, mostly while my hair was still red.

Most of these encounters, of course, were with Alfred Kroeber, but as father, not anthropologist. I recollect an evening around 1950 walking back with my parents to their New York apartment on Claremont Avenue when Alfred and I became intrigued by a long string lying along the sidewalk. This reminded him of how a few years earlier he had gone out with his sister while she walked her little dog. Suddenly they noticed the dog had been chewing at and largely swallowed a ball of string on the sidewalk. "Look," said my father. "I'll hold down what's left here, and you lead Fluffy down the block." Well, it worked—as Fluffy padded along, the string was pulled back out of his mouth. The trouble was, he'd swallowed a lot, and my aunt, not wanting to cross the street unraveling the dog, so to speak, had to turn the corner and lead Fluffy down that block to empty him. So pedestrians coming toward her saw a dog with a string being drawn from its mouth leading back to some mysterious source, while on the avenue other people saw a respectable gentleman with his elegant cane firmly planted on a dirty piece of string mysteriously moving around the corner. "I'm curious," my father said to me, "if this string is as long as that one." So he picked up one end, and I took the other, and as we went down 116th past Broadway, he said, "I'll bet if we stretched this string across Claremont Avenue it would stop some cars." So we did that, between two convenient lampposts—and sure enough it stopped four or five cars. In the apartment house lobby my father chortled every time some law-abiding New Yorker slowed to stop and then laboriously U-turned back.

My father's mischievous sense of humor did sometimes make one think of peasants. Edgar Bergen was his favorite radio comedian in the thirties, and, although Alfred enjoyed Charlie McCarthy, it was Mortimer Snerd who really broke him up. One of the characters in the numerous invented stories he told us children was Little Herominies, who was all metal and had a tendency to fall down with a loud crash. I suspect he invented this character to inspire (as it did) a long-running practical joke in our family. Some child, at Alfred's encouragement, would sneak away from the dinner table, usually a rambunctious scene anyway, and push a collection of metal...