Whiting, Alfred F.

Anthropologist and ethnobotanist; b. Alfred Frank Whiting, 1912; d. 1978.

Alfred Frank Whiting, 1912-1978, worked as anthropolgist and ethnobotanist.

Alfred F. Whiting was a botanist, anthropologist, and ethnobotanist.

Alfred Frank Whiting was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1912. After attending public schools, Whiting enrolled at the University of Vermont where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1933. Whiting then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan, and received an M.A. in Taxonomic Botany the next year.

In the summer of 1935, Whiting became the Curator of Biology at the Museum of Northern Arizona. At MNA, he and Dr. Volney H. Jones, who was also from Michigan, surveyed Hopi crop plants for the Michigan Ethnobotanical Laboratory. Whiting also recorded Edmund Nequatewa, a Hopi who was an MNA staff member, who provided information about the names and uses of the cultivated and wild plants Whiting and Jones had collected on the Hopi mesas. Whiting, whose title had changed to Curator of Botany, continued to collect Hopi crops and wild plants of the area until the fall of 1937. At this time, he entered the University of Chicago to work on a Ph.D. in the combined fields of botany and anthropology.

In the summer of 1938, Whiting returned to Flagstaff and completed the Ethnobotany of the Hopi manuscript, which was published the next year in MNA Bulletin 15. Whiting spent the next two school years working on his Ph.D. in Chicago where he met and married Dorothy J. West. They moved to Flagstaff in September 1940 for two years while Whiting concluded fieldwork among the Havasupai in preparation for his dissertation on their ethnobotany. During this time, he also served as Curator at MNA.

In July 1942, Whiting and his family moved back to Chicago where he continued his graduate work until the fall of 1944. He then accepted an assistant professorship at the University of Oregon in the Anthropology department. Due to World War II and other circumstances, Whiting never finished his degree. At Oregon, Whiting taught classes and completed curatorial work at the Oregon State Museum. At Oregon, Whiting published the article “The Origin of Corn, an Evaluation of Fact and Theory” in American Anthropologist.

While in Oregon, Whiting and his wife divorced, and his two sons returned with her to Chicago. In the spring of 1947, Whiting moved to Tucson and Tumacacori and spent several years there. At the University of Arizona and the Arizona State Museum, Whiting researched and wrote “A Kino Triptych” and “The Tumacacori Census of 1796.” Whiting also briefly served as a master at the Santa Cruz Valley School in 1950-1951.

In the summer of 1951, Whiting had the opportunity to be a member of the Cornell University Cultural Seminar, which allowed international students to spend one week with various peoples of the Southwest. A year later, Whiting was awarded a two-year appointment as District Anthropologist for Ponape, Eastern Carolines, U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. While interviewing for the position, he saw Marjorie Grant, whom he had met at the seminar the previous summer. They were soon married and moved to the South Pacific.

Once the appointment ended, Whiting and his wife went to Guam. Marjorie stayed in Guam and Whiting returned to the United States for a short trip. When Whiting learned his first wife was hospitalized, he cancelled the trip back to Guam in order to care for his two young sons. He took his sons East with him and obtained a teaching position at a high school in Rockport, Massachusetts. After Marjorie returned in August, they lived near Boston so she could work on her Ph.D. During the next summer, Whiting worked at the Children’s Museum of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Around this time, Whiting learned he had been appointed Curator of Anthropology at Dartmouth College Museum.

At Dartmouth, he prepared new exhibits, offered guided tours for beginning sociology classes to introduce students to physical and cultural anthropology, and taught several classes including one on museum methods. Soon after he arrived at Dartmouth, Whiting and his wife separated.

In 1961, Whiting was promoted to the rank of Assistant Professor and retained his title of Curator of Anthropology. Five years later he became Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology while continuing as Curator. During his years at Dartmouth, Whiting published numerous book reviews, articles on museology, and articles on Hopi life. In the summer of 1974, Whiting retired and moved to Arizona. He renewed his association with MNA where he commuted once a week from his home in Cornville, Arizona to work on a revision of Ethnobotany of the Hopi.

During his retirement, Whiting intended to prepare his research for publication. This was not to be, however, as Whiting was diagnosed with bone cancer in the fall of 1977 and died a few months later.

In the 1930s, A.F. Whiting did extensive field research on the Hopi language and culture. His Ethnobotany of the Hopi was published in 1939, and is still recognized as the definitive work. In the 1940s Whiting lived with the Havasupai for one year, drafted a rough manuscript biography of a Hopi friend and assistant, and also prepared a multi-volume report on Indian Arts and Crafts for the U.S. Department of the Interior. After World War II he served as a United States anthropologist on Ponape in the Caroline Islands of the South Pacific, and in several other teaching and research positions before finally settling in as the long-time Curator of Anthropology at the Dartmouth College Museum. There he worked at improving the museum holdings, and in enlightening his anthropology students through innovative teaching with the occasional help of a fictitious visiting instructor, "Mr. Ka-Hopi," who served mutton stew to his "guests" while leading them into inductive insights about southwestern American Indian cultures. Whiting typically spent the summers in the Southwest, helping a selected group of students learn the intricacies of field work in other cultures, and pursuing his own wide range of research interests. Whiting's impressive professional correspondence is indicative of his attention to detail and of his generosity in sharing any information he had with other students and professionals who asked him about any topic in the areas of his expertise. He liked to take on new intellectual challenges, do meticulous and exhaustive research--of the literature as well as in the field--and then share and discuss his findings with others who were interested. This he preferred to the tedium of writing up and publishing a final product. Typically, Whiting would enthusiastically enter a project, do extremely careful and competent work resulting in massive and valuable accumulations of original information, and then drop that project in favor of some other equally attractive academic adventure. He did not ever willingly sit down and finish up his notes into a publishable report or book, and he never did complete his formal degree. On the other hand, he amassed for posterity a vast wealth of field work and related information; far more than would ordinarily be expected from any one individual researcher.

Realizing the need for organizing this wealth of ethnographic notes and papers, Whiting after twenty years at Dartmouth "retired" to his beloved Arizona to work on his massive accumulation of data, and to try to update his Ethnobotany of the Hopi . David Seaman of Northern Arizona University was assisting Whiting in several aspects of his work, and Whiting was helping Seaman with his Hopi language research. Tragically, Whiting contracted bone cancer and died at Flagstaff Medical Center on May 1, 1978, at the age of 66. He retained his wry humor to the end. His last report to the Dartmouth Anthropology Department, which he dictated to Seaman from a hospital bed three days before his death, was entitled "Final Report of an Add-Junk Professor."