THE KROEBER ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY, 1949-1969

Clement W. Meighan

University of California, Los Angeles

The Kroeber Society has completed 20 years of active life, and
it has fallen to me as one of the "founding fathers" and first president
of the Society to review the beginnings of the organization. This is
particularly appropriate in a volume dedicated to John Rowe, for the

history of the Kroeber Society is a part of John Rowe's own history at
Berkeley. The founding, organization, and continuance of the Society

have all depended to a great extent on the encouragement, guidance, and
able direction provided by Rowe from the beginning.

I am both pleased and proud, and slightly surprised I must

admit, to realize that the Kroeber Society has survived and flourished
for 20 years. The activities of all those concerned with the founding

of the Society were so dominated by the pressing problems of keeping the
Society alive, particularly in the first years of very inadequate re-
sources, that none of us thought ahead to the possibility that our

Society would continue and eventually have a-history of its own. The
record of accomplishment is a remarkable one.    I know of no other an-
thropological student organization that has maintained, for 20 years
without interruption, its own scholarly publication series supported

entirely by volunteer effort and the resources of the students and mem-
bers of the group. A number of similar organizations have been started

in anthropology departments elsewhere in the U.S. and most of the larger
departments experience intermittent efforts to develop something com-

parable to the Kroeber Society. The life-span of such organizations is
short, however--many never get off the ground at all, and of those tlhat
are born most perish at a tender age. There are very good reasonis for

the high mortality rate, since the business of being a major or n gradu-
ate student in a good department is very demanding and consumes, ais w,

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all know, the full time and energy of the student. To be involved, in
addition, with the writing, editing, and practical production problems

of a journal is a most rewarding experience but also a substantial bur-
den for the student. It is, therefore, a tribute to the energy of the
Berkeley student group through the years that the Kroeber Society and
its ,journal have continued through many student generations.

The beginnings of the Kroeber Society took place in a depart-
mental setting quite different from the present one. The Berkeley

department was much smaller, only about a third of its present size in

both faculty and graduate students. The available student labor for the
Society's activities, particularly for the work of producing the KAS

Papers, was correspondingly limited, and the volunteers credited in the
early Papers included nearly all of the active majors and graduate stu-
dents in the department. Labor resources were a major problem since

there were always some non-participants among the student group and an
even larger number of students who wanted to help but simply could not
because of conflicting responsibilities of seminar reports and similar
pressures. Since the members of the Society did all the necessary

chores, including mimeographing the Papers, collating, proof-reading,
and the like, it was difficult in the beginning to muster enough man-
hours of volunteer time to get all the work done.

There were also some differences in the make-up of the student
group in 1949. Most of the men and some of the women were veterans

whose education had been interrupted (mostly on the undergraduate level)
by military service in World War II. This group tended to be slightly

older than the average students on the same academic level. In addition,
most of the veterans were very conscious of the years they had lost from
their career pursuits and many felt that they had some time to make up.
This in turn led to a high degree of professional motivation and a wish
to complete student requirements and get on to professional work in an-
thropology as soon as possible. It should also be added that most of

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these students were subsidized by the G.I. bill so that they could, and

did, devote full time to their student pursuits without the necessity of
losing time out while working to pay the rent.

The nature of this student group was probably the main factor
leading to the formation of the Kroeber Society. There had existed at

Berkeley for many years an "Anthropology Club" which provided opportunity
for social interaction and occasionally organized lectures by visiting

speakers [I remember one of the best of the lectures being presented by
Carl Sauer who delighted in baiting the anthropologists and did a most
effective job of it]. However, the anthropology club was somewhat in-
termittent in its activity and seemed insufficient to many of the stu-
dents who wanted to replace this largely social organization with a

group of more scholarly purpose. This student group, which wanted to do
anthropology as well as talk about it, conceived the notion of a schol-
arly organization which would publish its own journal in anthropology.

It is impossible to pick a single person as the originator of
the Kroeber Society. There was a general feeling among the students

that something more than the old anthropology club was needed, and the

topic was discussed informally among most of the students. In addition,

there were at least two or three small groups of students who got togeth-
er on the basis of personal friendship to discuss ways and means of

organizing the new society. These groups were spontaneous and met inde-
pendently of one another so that I am unable to identify the persons

involved--in any event, all of the groups coalesced at the organizational
meeting where a more formal structure was developed. My own preliminary
meetings were with F. A. Riddell and Catherine McClellan, and we three

(among others) went to John Rowe for advice and guidance from the faculty.

Discussions were held with other staff members at Berkeley, and
the whole faculty provided support for the Kroeber Society from the be-

ginning. However, the wor'king relationship between students and faculty
hinged on the participation and guidance of John Rowe and it is to him

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that much credit for the birth of the Kroeber Society should be given.

While I appreciated his contribution in 1949, I have a far greater appre-
ciation of it in 1969 since I can now look at the problems from the

faculty point of view as well as the student point of view. In recent
years I have had students come to me in much the same fashion that we
went to Rowe, also with ideas for a student publication series. It is

at these times that I am most aware of the essential contributions made

by John Rowe to the Kroeber Society, and also to the demands and problems
that any such organization must bring to the faculty advisor in terms of
his own duties and responsibilities as a professor.

John Rowe provided three essential things for the Kroeber

Society. These merit individual discussion since it is doubtful that any
student society (certainly any student publication) can survive without-
them. First, of course, is the matter of encouragement. No group of

students, however highly motivated, really knows enough to launch a pub-
lication series of scholarly quality without some advice and encourage-

ment from the trained professional scholars. It is to John Rowe's credit
that he encouraged the students to go ahead with their plans even though
he saw [far better than we did] the size of the task and the implications
of the publication program for his own time and responsibility.

A second essential need for any student enterprise is continu-
ity.  Most of the students involved in the organization of the Kroeber

Society were gone from Berkeley within three or four years, and contin-

uance of the Society required some knowledgeable person who could trans-

mit the experience and guidance of the past to the new student generation.
It is only a faculty member whose long-time career is at Berkeley who can
provide this continuity and communicate the tradition and goals of the
organization to the new student groups. It is also the faculty member
who can take action to maintain the student group when it falters or

moves away from its scholarly purpose. This role was ably carried by
John Rowe through the critical early years of the Kroeber Society.

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A final contribution of equal importance was John Rowe's

expertise as a professional scholar. As a student, much of my learning
of the nuts and bolts of scholarship came from work done for Rowe. Ab-
solutely essential matters such as the proper use of sources, proper

bibliographies, and care and precision in preparing scholarly writing,
were stressed by Rowe in his teaching, and his own high standards of
scholarship were adopted from the beginning of the Kroeber Society.

This is a critical area for any student publication, since students, who
are themselves learning how to do professional scholarship, simply do

not know enough to publish a professional journal without some rigorous
editorial guidance.  It is largely to Rowe's credit that members of the
Kroeber Society do not have to be ashamed of the scholarly quality of

their Papers, not even the beginning Paper No. 1.   It is also a credit

to Rowe and the Society that the articles published by the Kroeber Society
are regularly cited in professional journals and that the scholarly re-
sults are of sufficient quality to merit reprinting of the out-of-print
Papers by the Johnson Reprint Corporation. It is worth memtioning that
the very first article published in the Papers (Chard's article on con-
tacts between North and South America) remains a useful contribution 20
years after its first appearance.

A few brief historical facts concerning the early days of the
Kroeber Society should be added. The current members probably do not
know that their Society came close to being named the Putnam Society,

after the first head of the Berkeley department. This issue was vigor-
ously debated at the organizational meeting of the Society, but the

majority of the students felt themselves too closely identified with
Kroeber to consider any other choice for the name of their Society.

The principal concern of the Society members in the first year
of existence was the launching of the journal. We did not want to begin
the Papers only to see the operation fold after a year or two, and a

major effort was made to get off to a solid beginning with three issues

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of the Papers scheduled for the first year. This was a tremendous task,
both in obtaining material of high quality and in editing and production.
The Society had no printing equipment, very little money, and limited

time available from the volunteer students who did the work. In retro-

spect, I doubt that I would try this again, and I certainly think of that
year when students discuss with me the starting of a student journal.

However, we made it and demonstrated that it can be done with sufficient
time and energy from the student group.

The importance of scholarship and the Papers to the Kroeber
Society has meant from the beginning that the editor of the Papers is
really the most important of the Society's officers and the one whose

commitment of time and responsibility is the greatest. The first editor,

Richard Bachenheimer, spent uncounted hours in getting the Papers launched
and devoted just about all of one year to the Society. As first president,
my own role was somewhat ceremonial and whatever useful work I did was in
helping the editor to get out the labor force, along with my share of the
collating and proof-reading chores. The high spot of my presidency was

the presentation of our first published paper to R. H. Lowie, to whom the
issue was dedicated.

The value of the Kroeber Society to students has been great

during the past 20 years. Many of the student members have gained val-
uable experience in professional scholarship and have gone on to hold

professional positions in anthropology--a review of the list of student
volunteers in the first year of the Society shows a considerable number
of persons who are today professors of anthropology in many Universities
throughout the country. For these people at least, the Kroeber Society
was a valuable activity during their student days and work for the

Society made its contribution to their professional development. It
served, therefore, exactly as it was intended by its founders.

For the future, I foresee two dangers for the Kroeber Society
which are worth mentioning. Predicting the future goes somewhat beyond

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my charge in preparing this historical note, but having gained the

status of an "old timer" who is permitted to write reminiscences, I claim
the accompanying privilege of predicting the future.

First, partly due to the growth in size of anthropology depart-
ments, anthropology seems to be becoming more of a business and less of
an intellectual adventure. It is to be hoped that the Kroeber Society
can maintain its original goals of scholarly endeavor and that it can

continue to put scholarship first and all other activities second in its
future development.

Related also to the problem of department size, there is the
risk that the Kroeber Society will become a clique and will no longer

actively involve all of the students willing to participate, including
the undergraduate majors. After 20 years of development, the Kroeber

Society runs the risk of becoming a student establishment with all the

shortcomings of any establishment with crystallized organization and less
attraction for the beginning students who are most apt to profit from
involvement with the group.

Having avoided these two problems through its organizational

years, largely through the help and wise counsel of John Rowe, I am op-
timistic that the Kroeber Society will continue its success for the next
20 years and I look forward to the record of its further activities and
publications.

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