Robert Stewart Culin (July 13, 1858 – April 8, 1929) was an American ethnographer and author interested in games, art and dress.

[1] Culin played a major role in the development of ethnography, first concentrating his efforts on studying the Asian-Americans workers in Philadelphia.

Active in several ethnographic organizations during the late 1880s, Culin became involved with the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago during 1893.

His major focus was to understand the "language of things", which resulted in innovative exhibitions and collaboration with several colleagues, especially in the worlds of fashion and design.

After resigning from the university in 1903, Culin was appointed Curator of the Brooklyn Museum's newly established Department of Ethnology.

Under the parentage of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (founded 1890), the museum was about to embark on a new era, "building up great ethnological collections, sending out expeditions for the acquiring of antiquities, first over all America, then over the entire world".

Believing that he had collected everything necessary to represent Native Americans, he turned his interests to the cultures of Asia and finally Eastern Europe.

A full visual record complementing the written documentation includes photographs, sketches, watercolors, oil paintings, postcards, and other illustrative study material.

Through his close professional relationship with M. D. C. Crawford of Women's Wear Daily he brought the museum's collections to the attention of the design community.

Culin established a study room in the museum for designers to view the collections and organized traveling exhibitions for department stores around the country.

[7] In 1903, Culin resigned from the University of Pennsylvania and became curator of Ethnology at the Institute of Arts and Sciences of the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.

Meticulous in their description, Culin captured "the maker, use of the object, social position of the seller, the circumstances of purchase, the provenance".

In the midst of a number of collecting expeditions to Africa, China, Japan and Europe, Culin married Alice Mumford Roberts in 1917.

Well known in the worlds of anthropology, ethnography and the fashion industry, Culin died in 1929 in Amityville, Long Island, New York.

In 2019, The Brooklyn Museum concurred that five of the Culin's collections should be returned to the original tribes under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.