Edmund Snow Carpenter

He was a descendant of William Carpenter (1605 England - 1658/1659 Rehoboth, Massachusetts) the founder of the Rehoboth Carpenter family who came to America in the mid-1630s.

Born in Rochester, New York to the artist and educator Fletcher Hawthorne Carpenter (1879–1954) and Agnes "Barbara" Wight (1883–1981), he was one of four children.

He was a fraternal twin with Collins W. "Connie" Carpenter, later of Canandaigua, New York.

Edmund "Ted" Snow Carpenter (September 2, 1922 – July 1, 2011 ) was an American anthropologist best known for his work on tribal art and visual media.

Edmund Carpenter began his anthropology studies under Frank G. Speck at the University of Pennsylvania in 1940.

After completing his semester in early 1942, he volunteered to serve his country during World War II.

He joined the United States Marine Corps in early 1942, fighting in the Pacific Theater of Operations for the duration of the war especially in New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Marianas, and Iwo Jima.

After the war ended, he was assigned to oversee hundreds of Japanese prisoners, putting them to work on an archaeological dig in Tumon, Guam.

Discharged as a captain in 1946, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania using his G.I. Bill, was awarded a bachelor's degree, and earned his doctorate four years later in 1950.

His doctoral dissertation was on the pre-history of the Northeast, entitled Intermediate Period Influences in the Northeast.

On June 14, 1946, Edmund Carpenter married a fellow student at the University of Pennsylvania, Florence Ofelia Camara, and had two children with her, sons Stephen and Rhys.

Their marriage united two of the earliest English and Spanish families to settle in the New World: the Camaras were a Spanish Conquistador family who settled in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.

They served under Francisco de Montejo, the Adelantado and Capitan General of Yucatán, and after that under his son, Francisco de Montejo (el Mozo), conqueror of the Yucatán.

Carpenter began teaching anthropology at the University of Toronto in 1948, taking side jobs such as radio programming for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

In 1950, he started fieldwork among the Aivilingmiut, returning to these Inuit in Nunavut in the famine winter of 1951–52, and again in 1955.

They divorced in the mid-1950s.

When public television took off in Canada with the launching of CBC-TV in 1952, Carpenter began producing and hosting a series of shows.

Moving back and forth between Toronto's broadcasting studios and Arctic hunting camps, Carpenter collaborated on the theoretical ideas in development by Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.

He and McLuhan co-taught a course, and together hatched core ideas about the agency of modern media in the process of culture change.

In 1953, after a well-received proposal written by Carpenter, he and McLuhan received a Ford Foundation grant for an interdisciplinary media research project, which funded both the Seminar on Culture and Communication (1953–1959) and their co-edited periodical Explorations throughout the 1950s.

Meanwhile, Carpenter continued his programs on CBC-TV, including a weekly show also titled "Explorations" (which started as a radio program).

Together with Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, and Northrop Frye, McLuhan and Carpenter have been characterized as the Toronto School of communication theory.

In his famous article "The New Languages" (1956), Carpenter offers a succinct analysis of modern media based on years of participant observation in different cultures, academic and popular print publishing, and radio and television broadcasting.

In 1959, Carpenter joined anthropologist Raoul Naroll at San Fernando Valley State College (California State University-Northridge) and was appointed an assistant professor and founder of an experimental interdisciplinary program of Anthropology and Art, where students were trained in visual media, including filming.

As the only faculty member in the new department, Carpenter went on to hire more faculty.

In 1960, he was promoted to the rank of associate professor.

In 1961, he was made chairman of the anthropology department.

With award-winning filmmaker Robert Cannon, he made an innovative documentary about "surrealist" Kuskokwim Eskimo masks.

Carpenter also co-authored Georgia Sea Island Singers (1964), a film documenting six traditional African-American songs and dances by Gullahs of St. Simon Island, based on fieldwork by Alan Lomax.

During this period, Carpenter worked with McLuhan on the latter's book Understanding Media (1964).

And with Bess Lomax Hawes, he collaborated on Buck Dancer (1965), a short film featuring Ed Young, an African-American musician-dancer from Mississippi.

In 1967, however, just when visual anthropology began to take institutional form as an academic enterprise, the program was closed.

In 1967 McLuhan was awarded the Schweitzer Chair at Fordham University, and he brought Carpenter (on a sabbatical from Northridge), Harley Parker, and Eric McLuhan to be on his research team.

On leave from his faculty position at Northridge, Carpenter subsequently held the Carnegie Chair in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1968–69), and then took a research professorship at the University of Papua New Guinea, officially having resigned his position at Northridge.

Joined by photographer Adelaide de Menil (who later became his wife), he journeyed to remote mountain areas where indigenous Papua had "no acquaintance" yet with writing, radios, or cameras.

They took numerous Polaroid and 35mm photographs, made sound recordings, and shot some 400,000 feet of 16mm film in black and white, as well as color and infrared film.

During the next dozen years, Carpenter taught at various universities, including Adelphi University (c. 1970–1980), Harvard, New School University, and New York University (c. 1980–1981).

In addition to numerous other publications, he also completed art historian Carl Schuster's massive cross-cultural study on traditional art motifs, Materials for the Study of Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art: A Record of Tradition and Continuity, published privately in three volumes, with a much-abbreviated one-volume version published in 1996 by Abrams under the title Patterns That Connect.

In 2008, Carpenter guest-curated an important Eskimo traditional and prehistoric art exhibit Upside Down: Les Arctiques at the Musée du quai Branly, the ethnographic art museum in Paris, France.

This exhibit was re-installed in 2011 as Upside Down: Arctic Realities at The Menil Collection, an art museum in Houston, Texas, which, since 1999, also houses his permanent exhibit Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision.