32 Facts About Stewart Culin

Robert Stewart Culin was an American ethnographer and author interested in games, art and dress.

Stewart Culin's 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.

Stewart Culin believed that similarity in gaming demonstrated similarity and contact among cultures across the world.

Stewart Culin entered his father's mercantile business after graduating from high school.

Stewart Culin's interest began with the Asian-American population of Philadelphia, then composed chiefly of Chinese-American laborers.

Early ethnographic approach could predated to 1884, when Stewart Culin collected advertisements information in Philadelphia.

In 1889 Stewart Culin published a report about Chinese Dominoes and Dice.

Active in several ethnographic organizations during the late 1880s, Stewart Culin became involved with the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago during 1893.

In 1892 Stewart Culin became Director of the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Paleontology.

Stewart Culin became interested in chess and card games and published a paper on the topic in 1886.

Stewart Culin worked with Cushing on an article called Arrow games and their variants in America and the Orient.

When Cushing became ill, Stewart Culin continued the work and eventually published three inter-related papers: American Indian Games, Hawaiian Games and Philippine Games.

Stewart 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 and Chicago.

Stewart Culin was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1897.

Stewart Culin's collecting methodology in many ways exemplified the attitudes and assumptions of the heyday of anthropological collecting known as the "museum age".

Stewart Culin's 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.

Stewart Culin was a meticulous record keeper whose exhaustive documentation practices, unique to museums today, created a level of documentation that set standards in the field.

Stewart Culin endeavored to document both the meanings and the origins of the objects he collected.

Stewart Culin began his career by studying the life and culture of Chinese Americans in Philadelphia.

Stewart Culin immediately set out on a series of field trips through the Southwest, California, and the Northwest Coast.

Stewart Culin was concerned not only with finding and acquiring objects for the museum, but 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.

Stewart Culin amassed an extensive research collection, including correspondence, manuscripts, reports, publications, and clippings.

Stewart 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.

Stewart Culin had a revolutionary interest in the interchange between museum curatorship and contemporary costume and textile designers.

Stewart Culin established a study room in the museum for designers to view the collections and organized traveling exhibitions for department stores around the country.

In 1903, Stewart 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.

Stewart Culin began a series of collection expeditions to study Native Americans in the Southwest and California.

Stewart Culin accumulated a large body of artifacts in the course of his career.

Meticulous in their description, Stewart Culin captured "the maker, use of the object, social position of the seller, the circumstances of purchase, the provenance".

Stewart Culin exchanged letters with Franz Boas and George Amos Dorsey.

In 1907 Stewart 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.

From 1917 to 1928, Stewart Culin collected textiles and dresses from his trips to Eastern and Western Europe.