“Not born to the alien culture or committed to it, the anthropologist must stand at a certain psychological and emotional distance from it.” Joe Casagrande was born on February 14, 1915 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the only child of Louis Casagrande and Alma Hauskee. He moved with his parents to Chicago but they were soon divorced and he moved with his mother to Wisconsin. While attending Whitefish Bay High School in Wisconsin, he played football, basketball, and was on the track team. Casagrande entered the field of anthropology by accident, as he was an English major. He was completely "mesmerized" by Ralph Linton in an introductory anthropology class. He quickly changed his major to anthropology.
Casagrande eventually attended graduate school at Columbia, where Linton had transferred to. Some of the other professors Casagrande had the opportunity to learn from at Columbia were Ruth Benedict, Clyde Kluckholm, William Duncan Strong, and George Herzog. His first field experience was during the summer of 1940 when he worked with the Comanches of Oklahoma. This experience eventually led him to his Ph.D. dissertation, Comanche Linguistic Acculturation: A Study in Ethnolinguistics. In 1942, he was drafted for World War II, which disrupted his graduate career. He, later that same year, attended Officer Candidate School and was commissioned. In 1945, he married Mary Devaney and their son was born in 1947, with three daughters following. Also in 1947, Casagrande dropped out of graduate school to support his growing family by selling encyclopedias.
In the summer on 1949, his first teaching experience was at Queens College, New York. Casagrande was a leader and did lead teams into the field, but was not content to remain an administrator while others did the work for him. On many occasions he became actively involved in the fieldwork. Joe was very sensitive to the feelings of other people. “Immersed in the life around him, the anthropologist may experience an exhilarating sense of coming to understand another people and of being accepted by them.” While studying other cultures, he was neither a “full participant” because he distanced himself in neither the life he studied nor was he simply a “passive background observer” of it". Casagrande would eventually take a position as a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He also served as Director of it's Center for International Comparative Studies.
Casagrande’s study of language derived from the fact that he was also a linguist. “His interests ranged broadly in this large domain, encompassing the study of baby language, linguist acculturation, psychological reality of grammatical and lexical categories, problems of translation, and the principals which inhere in the structure of lexical semantic fields.” An important question that was always on his mind is the question of what the study of language can tell us about human beings, their minds, their intellectual traditions, and their ways of relating to the world. Joseph Bartholomew Casagrande died following a stroke in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 2, 1982 .His son, Louis, would become head of the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul in 1983.
References:
Thompson, S. "Obituary: Joseph Bartholomew Casagrande." American Anthropologist. Volume 87, 1985, page 883-888.
Who’s Who in America, 42nd Edition, Volume 1, 1982-1983, page 532, Marquis Who’s Who, Inc, Chicago.
Written by: Kendra K. Engelstad
Edited by: Lillian Dolentz (2009)