Conklin, Harold C., collector.

Harold C. Conklin (born 1926) received his B.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1955. He taught anthropology at Columbia University from 1954 until 1962, at which time he joined the Yale faculty. Conklin served as chair of the Department of Anthropology, curator of Anthropology, and director of Graduate Studies, as well as director of the Division of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. An emeritus professor, he retired from Yale in 1996. He is also the Frank Muzzy Crosby Professor Emeritus of the Human Environment. Conklin is considered a pioneer in the field of ethnoscience, a discipline dealing with the way in which inhabitants of a particular area understand and treat their environment. His research focused primarily on ecology, ethnology, and linguistics in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines. Conklin has authored numerous publications and articles in his field.

From the guide to the Harold C. Conklin papers, 1897-2005, (Manuscripts and Archives)

Biographical History

Harold C. Conklin (professor emeritus, Yale University) is a renowned anthropologist, linguist, ethnobiologist, and preeminent authority on the Ifugao and Hanunóo people of the Philippines. Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1926, Conklin developed an early interest in anthropology and the history and culture of Native Americans that was supported and encouraged by his family. By the end of his high school career, Conklin had formed a number of influential friendships with American Indians, worked as the only non-Indian National Youth Association Indian Counselor, and served as a part-time volunteer at the American Museum of Natural History, where he worked under the supervision of curator and department chairperson, Clark Wissler.

By 1943, Conklin's interests in high school, particularly in American Indian studies and linguistics, had prepared him for undergraduate study at the University of California, Berkeley. In his first year there, he was introduced to Austronesian languages through a hasher (cook's assistant) job at the Gamma Phi Beta sorority house, where he first began speaking, reading, and writing in Malay. In his second semester, Conklin built upon this introduction to Malay by enrolling in an advanced linguistics course where students were assigned the task of transcribing Australian and American broadcasts for Indonesians living throughout the archipelago, then occupied by the Japanese during World War II.

In July of 1944, Conklin was inducted into the U.S. Army and served two years with the 158th Regimental Combat Team in the Philippine Islands, northern Luzon. After arranging to be discharged in the Philippines in 1946, Conklin spent a year and a half conducting serious anthropological research and fieldwork in Manila, Mindoro, and Palawan. During this period, he made his first set of Philippine recordings, and was given locally crafted artifacts, plant leaves, and cuttings in exchange for his freely given store of seed beads, post-war relief clothing, and medicines. The resulting collection of artifacts was later donated to the Philippine National Museum. During his stay in Manila, Conklin was also given a serendipitous crash course, by botanist H.H. Bartlett, on the proper way to prepare, press, and store the botanical specimens he had accumulated during his stay in the Philippines. Upon his return to the United States in 1948, Conklin finished his undergraduate work at Berkeley, but not before cataloging his collection of bamboo manuscripts written by natives from Mindoro and Palawan, publishing two articles on the Mindoro, and typing up a 600-page Hanunóo-English dictionary.

During his first two years as a Yale graduate student (1950-51), Conklin continued to engage in scholarly dialogue with numerous faculty members, visiting scholars, and fellow students who shared his interest in anthropology and linguistics. From 1952 to 1954, he returned to the Philippines to complete fieldwork on the Hanunóo people for his dissertation. At this time, he began making his second set of Philippine recordings with equipment lent to him by Moses Asch of Folkways Records. Although he officially completed his graduate research in 1955, Conklin's analysis of the Hanunóo, based on his four field trips to Mindoro between 1947 and 1958, was not completed until 1961. Almost immediately thereafter, he began studying the Ifugao of northern Luzon in order to provide cultural contrasts to his work with the Hanunóo. From 1961 to 1973, Conklin continued his fieldwork in northern Luzon, making six field trips during this twelve-year span. The audio material he recorded during these visits comprises his third and most comprehensive set of Philippine recordings.

In 1954, Conklin accepted a position at Columbia University, where, for the next eight years, he taught and explored his research interests in cognition, kinship, language use, and folk classification. From 1962 to the present, Conklin has taught at Yale University, where he has continued to pursue research on shifting cultivations, ethnology, and ecologies of tropical forested areas of the Pacific Basin. A prolific writer, Conklin has authored over thirty scholarly essays and seven books. In addition, he has contributed to, co-authored or edited over forty other publications and provided the source material for the Folkways recording, Hanunóo Music From the Philippines (1955). Conklin has also served as the Chair of the Anthropology Department, Director of Graduate Studies, and Curator and Head of the Division of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, Yale University. He holds professional affiliations with the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Anthropological Association, and continues to remain an active scholar and mentor in the anthropology department at Yale. He currently resides in New Haven, Connecticut.

Anthropology at Yale: Emeritus Anthropology Faculty . Yale University. 18 December 2001. http://www.yale.edu/seas/Conklin.htm

Conklin, Harold C. "Language, Culture, and Environment: My Early Years." Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): xiii-xxx.

From the guide to the Harold C. Conklin Philippine Collection, 1955-1995, 1961-1995, (Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center Library of Congress http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/folklife.home)