American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Koeber's Yurok Myths: A Comparative Re-Evaluation Richard Keeling Yurok Myths. By A. L. Kroeber. Foreword by Theodora Kroeber. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. xi + 488 pp. $18.50 cloth., $6.95 paper. In a prefatory essay to this volume entitled "Kroeber and the Yurok, 1900-1908," Timothy H. H. Thoresen describes some of the circumstances surrounding the collection of the narratives in Yurok Myths. In this brief historical sketch, with hardly an ounce of overt criticism, Thoresen quietly dissolves any illusions which a reader may have had concerning the humanistic intentions of turn-of-the-century anthropology. We are told that Kroeber first visited Yurok territory as a museum ethnologist, when he was only twenty-four years old and had just completed graduate study under Franz Boas at Columbia. His task was to collect things: not only material specimens but also linguistic and mythological evidence: Within the ethnological theory of the day, ethnology in practice meant everything and anything that could be collected [Thoresen's emphasis] as illustrative of the life and nature of the Indian-from baskets and mortars to measurements of crania to vocabulary lists to texts of mythological material. (Thoresen, 1976:xx-xxi) Narratives such as the ones which would find their way into Yurok Myths were not only analyzed for linguistic content but also studied as evidence of indigenous lifestyle and belief. They were analyzed for patterns of what Kroeber and his peers understood as "ethnic psychology." Basically, then, Thoresen describes a situation in which cultural and religious materials were wrested from one cultural milieu and interpreted from the viewpoint of a materially dominant civilization. Even considering the important background information which it provides, it is curious that Thoresen's essay should have been included in this volume. It raises sensitive issues in a posthumous and celebratory book that is otherwise presented in the spirit of a monument to Kroeber (1876-1960), considered by many as the dean of American anthropologists and probably the last in that field whose interests and contributions ranged over the whole array of anthropological subjects.