R o b e r t   L e o p o l d

He's a dashing young man with extraordinary powers, an under-cover agent for a clandestine branch of the Secret Service called the Organization of Active Anthropologists. If you read comic books in the early '60s, you know him as Brain Boy, the studious superhero who appeared in six full-length color comics published by Dell between 1962 and 1963.

Brain Boy was versatile, battling Latin American dictators and extraterrestrials between the covers of a single issue — and always in a suit and tie.

Of course, nowadays anthropologists and social theorists appear on their own trading cards.

Artist Frank Springer's original drawing for the Brain Boy comic above (No. 3, Page 3, Dec-Feb 1963) was donated to the National Anthropological Archives by Steve Chaput (Acc. No. 1999-19).

Robert Leopold
Director

National Anthropological Archives
Human Studies Film Archives
Smithsonian Institution

Museum Support Center
4210 Silver Hill Road
Suitland, MD 20746

301.238.1311 Tel
301.238.3515 Fax

leopold@si.edu

I work in the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives, teach in the Museum Studies Program at George Washington University, and serve as chair of the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records.

I'm also involved with the AAA's Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing; the SAA's Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct; the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project; the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative; and the journal Cultural Anthropology. In my spare time, I've been developing a Reality TV show based on Plato's Allegory of the Cave and posing as Brain Boy's real-life avatar.

Publications

• Interview: Inside the National Anthropological Archives (with Oona Schmid, Anthropology News).
• Capital Anthropology, a review of Dana Milbank's Homo Politicus: The Strange and Barbaric Tribes of the Beltway (Washington Post Book World).
• The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes (from a presentation at the Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative, Maison de l'Archéologie et de l'Ethnologie, University of Paris X–Nanterre).
• Protocols for Native American Archival Materials were drafted by a group of 19 Native American and non-native archivists, librarians, museum curators, historians and anthropologists to help identify best professional practices for culturally responsive care and use of American Indian archival material held by non-tribal organizations (contributor).
• Guide to Anthropological Fieldnotes and Manuscripts in Archival Repositories provides the location of more than 850 ethnographic collections in non-Smithsonian archives.
• Early African Collections in the Smithsonian Institution — a project to identify the provenance of undocumented material culture through biographical research on their donors and collectors.
• Guide to Smithsonian Institution Archives, Libraries & Special Collections (editor)
• Prescriptive Alliance and Ritual Collaboration in Loma Society (PhD dissertation).
• Sande Society (Wikipedia).

Recent projects

• The Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) web site now features an online edition of Preserving the Anthropological Record and other archival goodies.
• The NAA's Endangered Languages Program is making texts and sound recordings from the Bureau of American Ethnology as well as contemporary linguistic materials more accessible to scholars and native communities. We're partnering with NSF and NEH on Documenting Endangered Languages and collaborating with the Rosetta Project and the Center for American Indian Languages.
• Our archives recently collaborated with the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana on a project to digitize 11,000 pages of Koasati language manuscripts and with the Museum of the Cherokee Indian to digitize 8,200 pages of Cherokee language manuscripts. We've contributed 6,700 photos of archaeological excavations to the Chaco Digital Initiative and 12,000 images of Native American art and culture to ARTstor. All told, we've scanned more than 88,000 photographs and works of art, most of which are available in SIRIS, the Smithsonian's online catalog.

Online exhibits

• Lakota Winter Counts received the UN World Summit Award and a Webby Award. It's been featured in the Christian Science Monitor, the Internet Scout Report, The Native Voice, Science Magazine, USA Today, Yahoo! Picks, and other fine publications. (With Candace S. Greene, Christina Burke and Anh-Thu Cunnion).
• Drawing the Western Frontier: The James E. Taylor Album (with Paula Fleming).
• Camping With the Sioux: Fieldwork Diary of Alice Cunningham Fletcher (with Joy Rohde).
• Some other online exhibits I've worked on.

Music and Video from Liberia

• Sologi (The House Sparrow), a Loma song performed by Kolibah Youlobah and Kolibah Seazea in my home in Kpakamai, Liberia, on Independence Day (July 26, 1985).
• Liberian Stilt dancers filmed during the William M. Mann, Smithsonian-Firestone Expedition to Liberia, 1940 (courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives).

Digital imaging for museums

• I teach Digital Imaging for Museums: Policy and Practice in the Museum Studies Program at George Washington University. I also maintain a Short List of Digital Imaging Resources and a bibliography on the ethics of exhibiting culturally sensitive materials online. Here are the NAA's digital imaging standards.
  

D e p a r t m e n t   o f   A n t h r o p o l o g y

National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution