We’ve all been told that anthropologists have no right to intervene in the lives of their subjects — does it make a difference if their subjects are small, green, and promise not to tattle?
Frank Goldsmith Speck, near the end of his career at Penn, befriended John Witthoft, a young colleague of his. The two had much in common — both were interested in Native American people, and neither were terribly interested in the fashions and pretenses of their peers in academia.
Speck came to the University of Pennsylvania in 1907 as a Harrison Fellow in anthropology, and received his Ph.D. in 1908. Considered one of the founders of anthropology at Penn, Speck organized the department of anthropology in 1913, and for forty years he was the senior member. John Witthoft studied with Speck; he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and retired in 1986 as associate professor emeritus, specializing in the archaeology and ethnology of Native Americans.
One day, near the end of Speck’s career and the beginning of Witthoft’s, the two decided that the turtles under the care of the Philadelphia Zoo were longing for the outside world. The two snuck into the zoo one night, loaded them into a truck, sprung them, and transported them to what they thought would be a more congenial environment — a pond in Swarthmore, Pa.
Unfortunately, the always-intrepid Philadelphia police were able to trace the truck to the two turtlenappers, who were then asked to either reimburse the zoo for the two turtles — to the tune of $600 — or return them to the zoo.
This is where I would like to take a minute to imagine these two important names in the history of anthropology wading in a pond in the middle of who-knows-where, trying desperately to remember which were the turtles they stole and which were run-of-the-mill pond turtles.
Upon their return, the zoo director produced a receipt for their return and promised to upgrade the turtles’ environment.
