REVIEW: Essays on A. L. Kroeber (1876–1960) and the Unnaming of Kroeber Hall

Editors’ note: The following review by Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, the accomplished historian of anthropology and folklore, reflects on a collection of essays recently published about the 2020 decision by officials of the University of California Berkeley to change the name of Alfred Kroeber Hall. At the time, HAR reported on the controversy, with links to comments by Berkeley professors Rosemary Joyce and Nancy Scheper-Hughes; readers may also wish to read Berkeley linguist Andrew Garrett’s later 38-page evaluation of the issues or Native American scholar David Shane Lowry’s 2021 essay in Anthrodendum. Professor Zumwalt’s essay represents her views and not necessarily those of HAR’s editors.

The 2021 meeting of the American Anthropological Association included a panel of six papers focusing on “Alfred Louis Kroeber: The Man, His Work and His Legacy.” These six papers have now been revised and published in BEROSE. Herbert Lewis explains the panel’s genesis: “On January 27, 2021, the University of California, Berkeley, removed the name of Alfred Kroeber from the building that housed the Department of Anthropology and the Museum of Anthropology—institutions he had built.”

My own interest in the controversy around the unnaming of Kroeber Hall has both professional and personal roots. I spent eight intense years in Kroeber Hall working toward my Master’s in folklore (1978) and my PhD in anthropology (1982). From 1977 to 1980, I was on the editorial board of the Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers (KAS) – established in 1950 and the longest running student publication in the United States – and was an organizer of the Kroeber Anthropological Society Meetings. (It was touching to me to read Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s recollection of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s visit to the department in 1984, and his request “to see the Kroeber Anthropological Society Journal, a graduate student journal that he much admired”.)^[1]The KAS journal that Lévi-Strauss perused was Opportunity, Constraint and Change: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Colson, Nos. 63–64, 1984. I remember one day sitting in the afternoon sun on a wooden bench just off to the side of the front wall with the name that has now been chiseled from the building, “Kroeber Hall,” pondering the treacherous, demanding journey toward a PhD. I visualized myself in a tunnel, too far down to turn back, and not close enough to the end to see the light of possibility; I perceived also that my only practical option was to continue through the tunnel. This struggle and perseverance are connected in my mind always with Alfred Louis Kroeber.

Following the recommendations of the Building Name Review Committee, three other buildings had already been unnamed on the UC Berkeley campus in 2020 when the decision was made to unname Kroeber Hall. In a letter supporting the recommendation, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ wrote to UC President Michael Drake that Kroeber’s perspective and writings “clearly stand in opposition to our university’s values of inclusion and our belief in promoting diversity and excellence.”^[2]“Kroeber Hall, honoring anthropologist who symbolizes exclusion, is unnamed,” Berkeley News, January 26, 2021, accessed March 10, 2022. See also “Building Name Review Committee,” Berkeley Office of the Chancellor, accessed March 14, 2022. The other three buildings that were unnamed in 2020 were LeConte Hall, Barrows Hall, and Boalt Hall. LeConte was unnamed because the LeConte brothers were slaveowners. Barrows Hall was named for president of the University of California (1919–1923) David Prescott Barrows “whose actions and words advanced white supremacy” (“Proposal to Un-Name Barrows Hall,” p. 2, accessed March 15, 2022.) And John Boalt, after whom Boalt Hall was named, supported the Chinese exclusion act. For the LeConte unnaming, see the Building Name Review Commitee’s proposal and outcome here, accessed March 15, 2022. On Boalt, see “Proposed De-Naming of Boalt Hall,” accessed March 15, 2022. Several authors in the Bérose collection disagree. Jack Glazier’s essay laments “the expurgation of the Kroeber name.” For Scheper-Hughes, the event marks “the end of an era of American anthropology”:

The event was quiet, discreet and bureaucratic. Without much ado, the ‘undoing’ of Kroeber took place in front of the locked doors of Kroeber Hall during a pandemic and ghostly, empty campus. The only ceremony to be seen was the sound of a worker chiseling away at the metal letters of Kroeber Hall, clink by clink. With no faculty interest or resistance among the Berkeley anthropology faculty, the name of our founding father and of California anthropology was not only removed but disgraced as well.

Glazier relates that in “sanctioning Kroeber’s defamation, the chair of the Berkeley anthropology department observed that ‘The name binds the discipline to a past it no longer needs.’” Herbert Lewis attributes the unnaming to amnesia or ignorance, and insists that the discipline does in fact need to recall Kroeber and its past: “It is a grim commentary on our discipline that recent generations of anthropology students have grown up knowing little or nothing about the man or why his name was on that building.” Hence the panel: Lewis writes, “It is therefore incumbent upon those of us who know about the career, works, and influence of A. L. Kroeber to discuss at least a few of his many achievements.”

What do these six papers contribute to knowledge about Kroeber? Lewis’s introductory essay enumerates accomplishments of “the dean of American anthropology”: in 1901, Kroeber established “the first department of anthropology in the US west of Chicago and the most important,” providing a publication outlet in University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology which ran from 1903 to 1964. Kroeber’s work in academic organizations, his research and publications, and his ethnographic work was enormous. Of his ethnographic work, Lewis states: “Kroeber’s extensive research program was also intended to challenge the ethnocentrism, prejudice, and racism rampant in California, through an understanding of the history, lifeways, and arts of the native people of the state.” While his work might be labeled “salvage anthropology,” Kroeber viewed it as “a sacred task—as well as an intellectual one—to record whatever he could before it was too late.” He and his colleagues produced “over “2500 recordings of songs and spoken texts from many of the peoples of California and the West,” now in the UC Hearst Museum. Lewis quotes Ralph Beals’s entry on Kroeber in the International Encyclopedia of Social Science (1968): “When he first visited California in 1900, the California Indians were little known and of little interest to anthropologists. At the time of his death probably no comparable area of the world had such a large anthropological literature, a substantial portion written by Kroeber himself.”

In his essay, Stanley Brandes stresses that Kroeber’s research “spanned the full range of human phenomena, from detailed ethnography… to global transformations in human artistic, philosophical and other endeavors taking place over the course of millennia.” Kroeber’s anthropology reached from the study of “small-scale, non-Western, non-literate societies” to the study of “civilizational history”; with an historical perspective, Kroeber began the study of culture change, considering “three hundred years of women’s fashion” in his research on women’s dress styles. In Configurations of Culture Growth (1944), Kroeber examined “significant advances in philosophy, science, sculpture, painting, literature, and other examples” in “China, India, Greece, Islam, and Western Europe.” At his death in 1960, Kroeber “had long been one of the most eminent and productive anthropologists in the world, and had certainly become the foremost spokesperson of American anthropology.” Brandes asserts that Kroeber’s work, with over five hundred and thirty separate items, “must be approached with humility.”

In his reassessment of Kroeber’s contributions to Linguistic Anthropology, James Stanlaw recalls Kroeber’s statement: “I came from humanistic literature, entered anthropology by the gate of linguistics.” When he “turned part of his insatiable curiosity to the linguistic garden in his own backyard,” his work in California revealed the area’s abundant linguistic diversity. Working with Ishi, Kroeber made 148 wax cylinder recordings, “selected to be part of the Library of Congress’s National Registry in 2010.” While there was a hiatus in Kroeber’s publications on linguistics “from the turn of the century until 1919,” according to Stanlaw, “Kroeber remained a linguistic anthropologist….His last four publications—in the year before his death and just after—were in linguistics.”

Jack Glazier uses a discussion of three films of Ishi, “the last survivor of the decimated Yahis”—Ishi in Two Worlds (1967), The Last Yahi (1993), and The Last of His Tribe (1994)— “as retrospective counterpoints to the ‘unnaming’ of Kroeber Hall.” Challenging “the preposterous claim, even among anthropologists, that anthropology has been responsible for the erasure of native peoples,” Glazier asks, “What would be the nearly blank picture of aboriginal California in the absence of Kroeber’s cooperative research with American Indian elders that culminated in the Handbook”? According to Glazier, in unnaming Kroeber Hall, the chancellor of UC Berkeley and the president of the UC system followed “college and university administrations across the country” in a “weak-kneed” response to “dreaded allegations of racism.” The result, Glazier opines, was the perversion of “history by inventing…complicity in shameful events.”

In contrast to such a strident defense of Kroeber’s legacy, Nick Barron’s essay makes clear the complexity of historical judgement and the difficulty of attributing praise and blame. His essay on “Alfred Kroeber’s Handbook and Land Claims”  evaluates a key argument put forth by the Building Name Review Committee: that Kroeber’s statement that the Ohlone people were extinct contributed to the delisting by the federal government of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe. After carefully reviewing the loss of status of both the Muwekma Ohlone and the Ahman Mutsun Tribal Band, Barron concludes that the narrative articulated during the Kroeber Hall discussion, “while not without relevance, ultimately simplified the relationship between anthropology, the state, and Indigenous peoples, thereby absolving government functionaries and institutions of their own culpability.”  

Much like Glazier’s essay, the evocative piece by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Goodbye Kroeber, Kroeber Hall, and the Man We Know as Ishi,” is piercingly critical of chancellor Christ, UC president Drake, and the anonymous faculty members who condemned Kroeber “as a white supremacist, among other absurd untruths.”^[3]For an even more impassioned piece on the unnaming of Kroeber Hall, see Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s published letter to Paul Fine of the Building Name Review Committee, “Reflections on the Renaming of Kroeber Hall: Alfred Kroeber and his Relations with California Indians,” accessed March 18, 2022. She seeks to counter the four main accusations: 1) That Kroeber engaged in objectionable research practices; 2) “That Kroeber and his colleagues engaged in collection of the remains of Native American ancestors”; 3) “That Kroeber mistreated a Native American survivor of genocide”; and 4) “That Kroeber pronounced the Ohlone to be culturally extinct.” With regard to California Indians, Scheper-Hughes argues that Kroeber was “an ally not an enemy.” She notes that he “went to federal court as an expert witness on behalf of a California Indian land rights lawsuit, ‘Indians of California, Docket No. 37 on June 23, 1952.” She also notes how Kroeber reluctantly agreed “to be Ishi’s ‘guardian’ and said that the man would have an ‘independent life’ while living in and working as a custodian in the San Francisco Anthropology Museum. Kroeber had his office and a suite of rooms that he shared with Ishi.”. She portrays Kroeber’s time with Ishi as a refutation of criticism of Kroeber as someone “who mistreated a Native American survivor of genocide whom he placed in a living exhibit in the university’s museum.” She also suggests that her colleagues in anthropology voted for the renaming “with the belief that this ‘gesture’ would bring administrative financial support to the department.” 

When I reflect on the spate of criticisms of Kroeber which led to the unnaming, I think of what Robert Lowie wrote to Verne Ray in 1955: “I want justice [for] the older men, whom it is very easy to criticize for not knowing in 1900 what we know now,” over half a century later.^[4]Lowie to Ray, May 26, 1955, Lowie Papers, Bancroft Library. In this collection of papers, Kroeber is recalled as a man of deep intellect with sensitivity and commitment to the study of California Indian peoples, their languages and cultures. The address for Berkeley’s faculty is now given as “Anthropology and Art Practice Building (Formerly Known as Kroeber Hall).” Thus, in a sense, the building is still known as Kroeber Hall— but only as a shadow of what it was.^[5]Ira Jacknis—consummate historian of anthropology (and author of “The First Boasian” about Kroeber) and Research Anthropologist at the Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley—and I exchanged emails about the Kroeber Hall controversy. He told me he was opposed to the unnaming, that Kroeber had accomplished a great deal, and that we were honored to have the building named after him. He said that he was trying to finish his diorama manuscript and that I needed to focus solely on finishing my second biography on Franz Boas. Ira and I did complete our manuscripts. Tragically, Ira died not long after our conversation about Kroeber Hall. We lost so very much in 2021.