J. P. Harrington: Linguist and Ethnographer

By Victor Golla (condensed from Golla 1994 "John P. Harrington and His Legacy.") Anthropological Linguistics 33.4.

John Peabody Harrington (b.1884 d.1961) was an extraordinary figure in the history of American Indian studies and his archival legacy is of unique importance to an increasing number of scholars. He was raised in Santa Barbara, California, and from an early age he showed a deep interest in languages and in the local Mission Indians. He graduated from Stanford University, resolving to make his career in American Indian language studies, and in particular to collect extensive and accurate linguistic data from the nearly lost languages of southern California.

Returning to the United States in 1906 from study in Leipzig and Berlin, Harrington launched into this work with the single-mindedness that was to become his dominant characteristic. He took a job as a high school language teacher in Santa Ana, California, but he devoted most of his spare time, to the intensive documentation of such nearby languages as Mohave, Yuma, and Diegueño.

Within a year or two the high quality of his first publications, and his evident qualifications for the task, had caught the attention of other American Indian specialists. He soon acquired several influential supporters, including Matilda Coxe Stevenson of the Bureau of American Ethnology, C. F. Lummis of the Southwest Museum, and especially Edgar Lee Hewett of the Archaeological Institute of America in Santa Fe.

In 1915 he was hired by the Bureau of American Ethnology as a Research Ethnologist, one of the most desirable positions in American linguistic anthropology at the time. From then until his retirement, nearly 40 years later, Harrington had virtually unbounded freedom to wander the North American continent carrying out his mission of linguistic and cultural documentation. Surely no linguistic field worker before or since clocked more months and years of field research.

From 1916 to 1921 he was married to Carobeth Tucker (later Carobeth Laird), and they had a daughter, Awona. They were married on a field trip to work on Obispe–o Chumash, and spent most of their brief married life carrying out research together. Carobeth, late in life, wrote a vivid portrait of the obsessed genius she knew during these years (Laird 1975); this, limited in scope as it is, remains the best biographical treatment of Harrington.

It is one of the ironies of HarringtonÕs career that as he settled into the role of anthropological linguistic field collector par excellence American anthropology and linguistics began moving away from the Boasian emphasis on amassing data and towards more interpretive modes of study. His devotion to field research began to look old-fashioned even as early as the 1920s, and it netted him little academic recognition during his lifetime (an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern California in 1934 was the only significant exception).

After his death, as Smithsonian curators began cataloguing his papers, it was revealed that the larger part of the documentation Harrington had been accumulating had been deliberately kept hidden from his colleagues. Most of them had been stored in warehouses, garages and other caches up and down the West Coast. By the late 1960s, with the bulk of HarringtonÕs materials finally located and consolidated, it became clear that HarringtonÕs extensive, accurate notes were a linguistic treasure of the highest order.

The value of the documentation was especially great for languages like Chimariko, Costanoan, Salinan, and Chumash, considered lost by some scholars as early as the turn of the century, but for which the intrepid Harrington had discovered several aged speakers. His materialÑoften the product of months of field workÑwas more than sufficient to allow a considerable amount of new work to be undertaken on these languages.

Harrington's documentation is by no means restricted to these languages; while focusing his energies on languages nearing extinction, he managed to collect at least some data on over 125 languages in California and the Far West, supplementing his written record with hundreds of sound recordings (wax cylinders in the early days, aluminum discs after about 1930). He also extended his work into traditional culture, particularly mythology and geography. He avidly collected placenames and he took thousands of photographs.