author
Stewart Culin
1858–1929
An early American ethnographer and museum curator, he turned everyday objects and games into windows on culture. His work helped make the study of play a serious subject and shaped how museums presented world traditions to the public.
2 Audiobooks
About the author
Born in 1858, Stewart Culin was an American ethnographer, author, and curator whose interests ranged across games, clothing, art, and material culture. He is especially remembered for treating games not as trivial pastimes but as meaningful cultural evidence, and for studying how play connected communities across regions and traditions.
He began his research work in Philadelphia, where he focused in part on Chinese American communities, and later became closely associated with the University of Pennsylvania museum world. Culin went on to play an important role at the Brooklyn Museum, where he developed ethnological collections and helped present them to a broad public through exhibitions and installations.
His best-known work includes major studies of games, especially Games of the North American Indians, which remains an important reference in the history of comparative game studies. Today he is remembered as a curious, wide-ranging scholar whose museum and research work helped broaden American interest in the everyday arts and traditions of many cultures.