John Peabody Harrington

John Peabody Harrington ( born April 29, 1884 in Waltham, Massachusetts, † 21 October 1961, in Santa Barbara, California ) was an American linguist and ethnologist. He explored and documented especially the Indian languages ​​of California.

Born in Massachusetts, he grew up in California. At Stanford University, he studied from 1902 to 1905 Anthropology (about ethnology comparable) and classical languages. In Berkeley, where he attended advanced courses, he met the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. On him well the particular interest Harringtons on the Indian languages ​​goes back.

Although Harrington studied in Leipzig and Berlin, but he preferred to be a language teacher at a high school. Nevertheless, he brought three years of time, to interview the few native speakers at the Chumash. The resulting work attracted the attention of scientists at the Smithsonian Museum, more precisely at the Bureau of American Ethnology. But until 1915 he was engaged as a field researcher. Over the next four decades he collected and compiled huge amounts of raw data for the study of Chumash, Mutsun, thump, Chochenyo, Kiowa, Chimariko, Yokuts, Gabrielino, Salinan, Yuma and Mohave. He created not only one of the early collections, but probably one of the greatest.

By 1915, he learned the eleven years younger Carobeth ( Tucker ) Laird know, a student in one of his courses. Their subsequent publication, The Chemehuevi, is considered one of the best ethnographic studies. With it, the Harrington regarded as eccentric was married from 1916 to 1923. Awona Harrington is her daughter.

Since 2000, his records of volunteers of the University of California, Davis entered into a database and made ​​available as scientifically. It is almost a million manuscript pages, which provide enormous amounts of linguistic and mythological material, but also on ritual and musical traditions.