Daniel J. Crowley

Early years

Crowley was born at St. Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois, to Michael Bartholomew Jeremiah Crowley and Elsie Magdalena Cecilia Schnebelin, one of two children. He remained in Peoria into early adulthood. After earning a B.A. from Northwestern University in 1943, he served as a Lieutenant JG with the USS American Legion during World War II. In April 1946, he contracted poliomyelitis and became a partial quadriplegic.

Academic career

Following a 10-month recovery from polio, Crowley earned an M.A. in Art History from Bradley University in 1948 and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University in 1956 under Melville Herskovits, in the Boasian tradition. He joined the University of California, Davis faculty in 1961 as a double Professor of Anthropology and Art, teaching there until after his 1992 retirement. From 1968 to 1971, he received the UC Centennial Citation and became founding director of the UC Education Abroad Program with the University of Ghana-Legon.

He served on the National Commission for UNESCO from 1974 to 1980, sat on many journal editorial boards, and published 4 books, a commercial recording, and about 350 articles and reviews. His field research spanned the Bahama Islands; Trinidad, Tobago, St. Lucia; Western European Ethnographic Museums; Zaire, Angola, Zambia, Tanzania; Southern Africa; Mexico; Ghana, Togo, Dahomey; Senegambia; Brazil; India; Guinea-Bissau; the Canary Islands; Cape Verde; Australia; New Guinea, Melanesia, and Polynesia.

His research interests included African and African-derived societies, graphic and plastic arts, folklore, music, the role of artists in culture, multi-cultural societies, ethnoaesthetics, comparative aesthetic values, and festivals and carnivals. He identified as a Boasian particularist folklorist and considered his folklore contributions among his most successful achievements. His fieldwork in Sub-Saharan Africa aimed at rehabilitating the image of Africa denigrated to justify slavery.

Much of his Caribbean fieldwork was in Nassau, The Bahamas; his work "I Could Talk Old-Story Good: Creativity in Bahamian Folklore" was reprinted in 1987 and used by the performance-oriented school of folkloristics.

Personal life

Crowley’s humor and upbeat outlook on life won widespread acclaim, especially remarkable since he confided to Dr. George Rich that his braces and polio’s aftereffects caused constant pain. On his initial visit to Trinidad, he met Pearl Ramcharan and quickly married her. The couple had three children: Peter, Eve (Eyzaguirre), and Magdalene.

Death

In 1998, Daniel J. Crowley joined a University of California research team in Oruro, Bolivia, to study the city's Carnival. Despite using a wheelchair, he attended all four days of celebration, aided by local friend Oscar Eusebio Apaza, and locals admired his determination.

On the morning of February 24, he died in his sleep from heart failure worsened by the 13,000-foot altitude. His death fell on Martes de Ch'alla, a day honoring the earth goddess Pachamama, after the dancing had ended. He was buried in Oruro, as he had requested.