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J.P. Harrington

John Peabody Harrington
John Peabody Harrington (1884-1961) and Chief Wiishi of Mission Indians, California.jpg
John Peabody Harrington (1884-1961) and Chief Wi'ishi of the Mission Indians, 1935
Born (1884-04-29)April 29, 1884
Waltham, Massachusetts
Died October 21, 1961(1961-10-21) (aged 77)
San Diego, California
Education Stanford University, UC Berkeley, University of Leipzig, University of Berlin,
Occupation Linguist, Field ethnologist
Spouse(s) Carobeth Laird

John Peabody Harrington (April 29, 1884 – October 21, 1961) was an American linguist and ethnologist and a specialist in the native peoples of California. Harrington is noted for the massive volume of his documentary output, most of which has remained unpublished: the shelf space in the National Anthropological Archives dedicated to his work spans nearly seven hundred feet.

Born in Waltham, Massachusetts, Harrington moved to California as a child. From 1902 to 1905, Harrington studied anthropology and classical languages at Stanford University. While attending specialized classes at the University of California, Berkeley, he met anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber. Harrington became intensely interested in Native American languages and ethnography.

Rather than completing his doctorate at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin, Harrington became a high school language teacher. For three years, he devoted his spare time to an intense examination of the few surviving Chumash people. His exhaustive work came to the attention of the Smithsonian Museum's Bureau of American Ethnology. Harrington became a permanent field ethnologist for the bureau in 1915. He was to hold this position for 40 years, collecting and compiling several massive caches of raw data on native peoples, including the Chumash, Mutsun, Rumsen, Chochenyo, Kiowa, Chimariko, Yokuts, Gabrielino, Salinan, Yuma and Mojave, among many others. Harrington also extended his work into traditional culture, particularly mythology and geography. His field collections include information on placenames and thousands of photographs. The massive collections were disorganized in the extreme, and contained not only linguistic manuscripts and recordings, but objects and realia of every stripe; a later archivist described how opening each box of his legacy was "an adventure in itself."


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