Dr. Daniel J. Crowley, an anthropologist who loved parties so much that he devoted his life to attending carnivals, festivals and other celebrations in every corner of the globe, died Feb. 24 while in Oruro, Bolivia, for a Mardi Gras carnival.
He was 76 and had been professor of anthropology and art history at the University of California.
For someone who used a wheelchair, Crowley got around. He circled the globe nine times and claimed to have visited every state in the union and every nation except Iraq, generally finding a party at each stop.
The trips earned him recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records as athe most traveled disabled person, but the quest for records was not his motivating force. For Crowley - who was paralyzed after contracting polio in the Navy in World War II, used the GI Bill to get a Master's Degree in art history from Bradley University and a Doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern - there was another reason: he was born in Peoria, IL as the product of what he considered a painfully conventional family in a drab, hidebound community, he defined his entire career as escape from Peoria and cheerfully rubbed it in every December with what his family called his notorious Christmas letter. Sent to hundreds, including those who had derided his dreams of life beyond Peoria, the letter detailed his previous year of exotic travel with frequent references to his exotic wife, Pearl, a Trinidadian of pure Indian extraction.
As a scholar, his specialty was the arts and culture of Africa and African outposts in the New World, with an emphasis on Mardi Gras and other eruptions of excess in the Caribbean and South America. Crowley, who helped develop the field of african studies and won numerous honors for his work had only limited use of his arms. He typed with one finger in turning out more than 350 papers and several books, including a Creativity in Bahamian Folklore. But his real forte was the field trip. Over the years he wangled temporary teaching assignments at a dozen other colleges, including posts in Trinidad, Australia and India, and was forever flying off to join one celebration or another, in the interest of scholarship, of course. Needing someone to push him around, Crowley, who wore out more than a dozen wheelchairs, hit upon an ingenious scheme to attract assistants. For more than 20 years, he ran a program for the University of California at Berkeley under University Research Expedition Projects, or high-spirited trips to blowouts around the world. It was a tribute to his dedication that he once attended carnival in Iceland. The beer helped, but the scholar who spent much of his time surrounded by writhing naked and near-naked bodies in warmer climes had trouble relating to revelers in parkas. Even though Crowley managed to take notes in a laborious scrawl he never had trouble lifting a glass. A man who relished good food and good drink of every cuisine, he was forever inventing exotic new cocktails. Crowley preferred a balcony at festival time, partly because of his experiences at ground level revelry. "When they come at you in Rio de Janeiro after snorting amyl nitrite and drinking quantities of liquor," he once said, "you'd better get out of the way. They have left footprints on my forehead." Crowley predicted his obituary would say, "He died as he lived: crushed by 50,000 Brazilians doing the samba." His family said he had died peacefully of a heart attack in his sleep in a hotel room on Mardi Gras morning. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Peter, of Martinez, Calif.; two daughters Eve, of Rome and Magdalene, of Berkeley; a sister, Patricia Capitelli of Peoria, and two grandchildren.