Роберт С. Кулин: Этнограф и исследователь культурных связей.

American ethnographer and author

Robert Stewart Culin (July 13, 1858 – April 8, 1929) was an American ethnographer and author interested in games, art and dress. Culin played a major role in the development of ethnography, first concentrating his efforts on studying the Asian Americans workers in Philadelphia. His first published works were "The Practice of Medicine by the Chinese in America" and "China in America: A study in the social life of the Chinese in the eastern cities of the United States", both dated 1887. He believed that similarity in gaming demonstrated similarity and contact among cultures across the world.

Born Robert Stewart Culin, a son of Mina Barrett Daniel Culin and John Culin, in Philadelphia, Culin was schooled at Nazareth Hall. Culin's collecting methodology in many ways exemplified the attitudes and assumptions of the heyday of anthropological collecting known as the "museum age" (1875–1925). His major focus was to understand the "language of things", which resulted in innovative exhibitions and collaboration with several colleagues, especially in the worlds of fashion and design. He was a meticulous record keeper whose exhaustive documentation practices, unique to museums today, created a level of documentation that set standards in the field. Culin endeavored to document both the meanings and the origins of the objects he collected. Culin began his career by studying the life and culture of Chinese Americans in Philadelphia. During the 1890s, while employed at the University of Pennsylvania, he turned his attention to Native American culture. After resigning from the university in 1903, Culin was appointed Curator of the Brooklyn Museum's newly established Department of Ethnology. Under the parentage of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (founded 1890), the museum was about to embark on a new era, "building up great ethnological collections, sending out expeditions for the acquiring of antiquities, first over all America, then over the entire world". Culin immediately set out on a series of field trips through the Southwest, California, and the Northwest Coast. By 1911, he had collected more than nine thousand Native American objects and acquired or created an astonishing level of attendant documentation. Believing that he had collected everything necessary to represent Native Americans, he turned his interests to the cultures of Asia and finally Eastern Europe. Culin was concerned not only with finding and acquiring objects for the museum, but also with documenting the maker, the social position of the seller, the circumstances of purchase, the provenance, the use of the object, and the cultural life of the region. Thus, the collection includes information on the cultural and historical context of objects, as seen through Culin's eyes. Like his colleagues, what Culin collected and decided not to collect (both of which are documented here) are important parameters in the history of cultural representation in museums. His opinions and biases are evident throughout the collection. Culin amassed an extensive research collection, including correspondence, manuscripts (his own and those of others), reports, publications, and clippings. A full visual record complementing the written documentation includes photographs, sketches, watercolors, oil paintings, postcards, and other illustrative study material. The depth and range of the information available in the Culin Archival Collection make it a critical resource for the study of cultural anthropology, art and cultural history, costume and textile design, ethnology, folklore, linguistics, museology, and photography on an international scale. The collection contains valuable information on the development of ethnology as a discipline, on the part played by museums in presenting and interpreting objects and cultures, and on the social and economic consequences, within native communities, of large scale systematic collecting. Reflecting Culin's strong interest in Native American cultures, the Archives provides a vivid account of the circumstances under which he collected and of the individuals, native and non native, who assisted him in the field. His intellectual exchanges with several of his colleagues, such as Franz Boas from the American Museum of Natural History, George Amos Dorsey at the Field Museum, and Frank Hamilton Cushing of the Bureau of American Ethnology, are evident in his extensive correspondence files. Textual and visual materials from Cushing form an important component of the Culin Archives. Cushing, who lived with the Zuni between 1879 and 1884, was a major influence on Culin's choice of Zuni as his main collecting focus in the Southwest. Because of their close personal friendship, Culin acquired a large collection of sketches, photographs, and notes from Cushing's estate; the accompanying correspondence between Culin and Cushing provides a detailed picture of their collaboration. Culin was among the first curators to recognize the museum installation as an art form in itself and to display ethnological collections as art objects, not as mere specimens. He had a revolutionary interest in the interchange between museum curatorship and contemporary costume and textile designers. Through his close professional relationship with M. D. C. Crawford of Women's Wear Daily he brought the museum's collections to the attention of the design community. Culin established a study room in the museum for designers to view the collections and organized traveling exhibitions for department stores around the country. The Crawford correspondence and writings are an important reflection of the evolution of a school of American design. Culin's friendship with artists is also evident in the collection, which contains correspondence from Thomas Eakins and the designer Ruth Reeves, among others.

In 1903, Culin resigned from the University of Pennsylvania and became curator of Ethnology at the Institute of Arts and Sciences of the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. He began a series of collection expeditions to study Native Americans in the Southwest and California. Culin accumulated a large body of artifacts in the course of his career. Meticulous in their description, Culin captured "the maker, use of the object, social position of the seller, the circumstances of purchase, the provenance". He also exchanged letters with Franz Boas and George Amos Dorsey. In 1907 Culin unified his 14 years of theories and ideas in the seminal work Games of North American Indians, using the categories games of skill and games of chance to organize the work. After 1907, Culin became interested in decorative art such as costume, fashion, and furniture. Working with Women's Wear Daily, he displayed contemporary fashion, changed museum rooms and created traveling exhibits to exhibit textiles and foster the study of design. As a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, Culin was instrumental in opening exhibits on the major cultures of the world. In the midst of a number of collecting expeditions to Africa, China, Japan and Europe, Culin married Alice Mumford Roberts in 1917. In the 1920s Culin made several collecting expeditions to Europe and published on Asian games, African games and European dress. Well known in the worlds of anthropology, ethnography and the fashion industry, Culin died in 1929 in Amityville, Long Island, New York.

Bronner Simon J. (1985)"Stewart Culin, Museum Magician." Pennsylvania Heritage 11, no. 3 (Summer), 4 11
Bronner Simon J. (1989). Object Lessons: The Work of Ethnological Museums and Collections, in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880 1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner, 217–254. New York: W. W. Norton. Lawrence, Deirdre E. (1989 July). Culin: Collector and Documentor of the World he saw
Poster, Amy G. (2014). "Stewart Culin: Chinese vernacular culture in America and the enchantment of the Museum", in Steuber, Jason, and Lai Guolong, ed., Collectors, Collections & Collecting the Arts of China: Histories & Challenges. Gainesville. University Press of Florida, pp. 99–118.