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PORTFOLIO 142 Sons of the Forest The Photography of Max Schmidt The fi eld of anthropology underwent certain developments during the fi rst thirty years of the twentieth century that both shifted the paradigm of the discipline and affected how photography has been used by ethnographers from that time since. In the nineteenth century, physical anthropology was focused on collecting quantitative data intended to identify the different races of the world’s population. At the beginning of the twentieth century, researchers began to take interest in material culture, languages, kinship systems, and the collective representations of societies deemed “primitive” at the time. The transformation that took place was not entirely comprehensive and new challenges appeared. How could all this information be collected without corrupting it in the process of gathering it? Though invested with scientifi c authority, how could the researcher put aside his personal prejudices and make observations on the daily lives of indigenous peoples in the same way that a physical scientist observes microscopic phenomena? Max Schmidt was among the anthropologists who represented this change of mentality. Infl uenced by the German school of anthropology and in particular by Adolf Bastian and Karl von den Steinen, he rejected “offi ce anthropology,” in which the anthropologist remained in his place of work analyzing data collected by travelers, explorers, traders, etc., and emphasized the necessity of in situ ethnographic research. Founded on the principle of the psychological unity of the human species, two elements characterize Schmidt’s epistemology. The fi rst of these is the importance he placed on language as an essential tool for the understanding of a culture, and the second is the interest he took in the relationships between a culture and the environment in which it exists.1 (1900–1935) By Hasan G. López Sanz In 1869, Bastian, who was one of the founders of German ethnology, participated in the creation of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology, and Pre-History), of which Schmidt became an active member, and in 1873 in the creation of Berlin’s Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde, a German center for ethnological research. Von den Steinen encouraged Schmidt, who was at least partly motivated by a thirst for adventure, to pursue research in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil in 1900. His work there culminated in the publication in 1917 of his doctoral thesis, titled Die Aruaken, an ethnocultural study on the diffusion of the Arawak linguistic family in this tropical forest region. It also addressed the ethnic dispersion of villages in the area with Neolithic cultures, that is, those that had abandoned hunting and gathering in favor of agriculture and animal husbandry. Other Germans had visited the area before Schmidt. Paul Ehrenreich had traveled in the Rio Xingu region in 1884 and 1885, and he also accompanied von den Steinen on his second trip to the area in 1887. Hermann Meyer and Theodor Koch-Grünberg also went there a bit later. According to Schmidt himself, “The results of the four German expeditions to the Rio Xingu, which took place in close succession, made me understand that the headwaters of the river would be the most appropriate area to encounter the children of the forests.”2 In 1918, Schmidt was appointed professor of ethnology at the University of Berlin, and in 1919 he became the head of the South American department of the city’s Museum für Völkerkunde. Ten years later, he would leave these positions to move to the Brazilian town of Cuiabá, located at the gateway to Amazonian jungle. In 1931, at the request of Dr. Andrés Barbero, he moved to Paraguay to take up the FIG. 1 (left): Max Schmidt (seated) in Germany. Date unknown. FIG. 2 (below): Page from one of Max Schmidt’s fi eld notebooks. FIG. 3 (right): Old Niclavé man wearing a hat, necklaces, bracelets, a leather pouch, and a chiripa. Esteros, Paraguay, 1935.


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