Stewart Culin

Early life

Born Robert Stewart Culin on July 13, 1858, in Philadelphia to Mina Barrett Daniel Culin and John Culin, he was schooled at Nazareth Hall. After graduating from high school, Culin entered his father's mercantile business. He had no formal education in anthropology, but his interest began with the Asian-American population of Philadelphia, then composed chiefly of Chinese-American laborers. His early ethnographic approach could be predated to 1884, when he collected advertisements information in Philadelphia.

His first published works were an 1887 article for a medical journal, 'The Practice of Medicine by the Chinese in America,' and his speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science on 'China in America: A study in the social life of the Chinese in the eastern cities of the United States.' In 1889 Culin published a report about Chinese Dominoes and Dice. In 1890 he wrote an article about Italian marionettes inspired by a visit to a marionette theater in New York City.

World of games

Active in several ethnographic organizations during the late 1880s, Culin became involved with the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago during 1893. As an assistant curator, he organized several game-related exhibitions. In 1891 he published two papers: one on street games of city boys, the other on Chinese gambling games, providing explanations on Fan-Tan and Pak Kop Pin. At the World Exposition, Culin met Frank Hamilton Cushing.

The two became friends and endeavored to create the first cumulative documentation on the world's games. In 1892 Culin became Director of the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Paleontology. He married Helen Bunker on March 18, 1893. His first book, 'Korean Games, with comparisons to those of other Asian cultures,' was published in 1895, inspired by Cushing.

Culin worked with Cushing on an article called 'Arrow games and their variants in America and the Orient.' When Cushing became ill, Culin continued the work and eventually published three inter-related papers: 'American Indian Games' (1898), 'Hawaiian Games' (1899), and 'Philippine Games' (1900). After Cushing's death in 1900, Culin published a revised version of 'American Indian Games' in 1903.

Professional life

Although he had no formal training, Robert Stewart Culin is known today as an expert on games as well as for his museum work. His influence was not limited to the two great institutions where he spent his career—the University of Pennsylvania and the Brooklyn Museum. Culin was a founding member of both the American Anthropological Association and the American Folklore Society, and was an experienced collector and exhibitor who organized exhibitions at world's fairs in Madrid (1892) and Chicago (1893).

He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1897. In the same year, he was elected as a lay member of the Salmagundi Club New York. 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 created a level of documentation that set standards in the field. 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.

He 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.