Alfred L. Kroeber

Alfred L. Kroeber was an American anthropologist, one of Franz Boas's first doctoral students, who became the founding figure of academic anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted extensive research on the indigenous peoples and languages of California, and developed the concept of culture as a superorganic phenomenon, arguing that cultural patterns follow their own trajectories of development that cannot be reduced to the psychology or biology of individuals. Kroeber is also widely known, and remains a subject of ongoing ethical debate within the discipline, for his relationship with Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people, whom Kroeber studied and housed at a university museum in the years before Ishi's death in 1916.