Edward Winslow Gifford (August 14, 1887 – May 16, 1959) devoted his life to studying California Indian

ethnography Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...

as a professor of

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...

and director of the

Museum of Anthropology This is a list of museums with major collections in ethnography and anthropology. It is sorted by descending number of objects listed. # Canadian Museum of History, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada #: 3.75 million artifacts # Musée du quai Branly, P ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. Born in

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

, he became an assistant curator of ornithology at the

California Academy of Sciences The California Academy of Sciences is a research institute and natural history museum in San Francisco, California, that is among the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over 46 million specimens. The Academy began in 1853 ...

after graduating from high school; he never attended college. He joined the University of California's Museum of Anthropology in 1912 as an assistant curator. In the 1920s he was sent to

Tonga Tonga (, ; ), officially the Kingdom of Tonga ( to, Puleʻanga Fakatuʻi ʻo Tonga), is a Polynesian country and archipelago. The country has 171 islands – of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about , scattered over in ...

with William C. McKern who was also from the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...

. These two and the botanist was Arthur J. Eames from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

made up one of the four teams of the Bayard Dominick Expedition.An Introduction to Polynesian Anthropology
Te Rangi Hiroa, The Bayard Dominick Expeditions, p45-, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1945, Honolulu Gifford became a curator in 1925 and a professor in 1945. Working in close association with the preeminent leader in California anthropology,

Alfred L. Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first ...

, Gifford produced more than 100 publications. His numerous contributions to

salvage ethnography Salvage ethnography is the recording of the practices and folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a result of modernization. It is generally associated with the American anthropologist Franz Boas; he and his students aimed t ...

have left an invaluable record of the state's native cultures. He developed the museum into a major U.S. institution with its major field research and collections. Although Gifford was less widely known than his colleague and supervisor Kroeber, he maintained a positive relationship with many Berkeley graduate students - often writing them with advice and ideas while they were engaged in fieldwork.

References

Calisphere - University of California - ''Edward Winslow Gifford, Anthropology: Berkeley''
*Foster, George M. 1960. "Edward Winslow Gifford". ''American Anthropologist'' 62:327-329. *Kroeber, A. L., and E. W. Gifford. ''Karok Myths''. University of California Press, Berkeley. *Hurtado, Albert L. 1990. "Introduction to the Bison Book Edition". In ''California Indian Nights'', compiled by Edward W. Gifford and Gwendoline Harris Block, pp. 1–7. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. *Redman, Samuel J. 2015. "Museum tours and the origins of museum studies: Edward W. Gifford, William R. Bascom, and the remaking of an anthropology museum." Museum Mangagement and Curatorship. Vol. 30, No. 5.

External links

(University of California)
Edward Winslow Gifford. 1917.
"Miwok Myths". ''University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology'' 12:283-338.]
Gifford, Edward W., and Robert H. Lowie. 1928.
"Notes on the Akwa'ala Indians of Lower California". ''University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology'' 23:338-352. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Gifford, Edward Winslow 1887 births 1959 deaths American ethnologists American ethnographers University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Linguists of Uto-Aztecan languages 20th-century American anthropologists