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Curious Profession: Alfred Kroeber and Anthropological History

Curious Profession: Alfred Kroeber and Anthropological History boundary 2 30:3, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Karl Kroeber. 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 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture Duke University Press

Curious Profession: Alfred Kroeber and Anthropological History

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References (1)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0190-3659
eISSN
1527-2141
DOI
10.1215/01903659-30-3-141
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

boundary 2 30:3, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Karl Kroeber. 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

Journal

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and cultureDuke University Press

Published: Sep 1, 2003

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