Curt Nimuendajú
{{short description|German anthropologist}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=September 2018}}
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| birth_name = Curt Unckel
| birth_date = {{birth date|1883|04|18|df=yes}}
| birth_place = Jena, Germany
| death_date = {{death date and age|1945|12|10|1883|04|18|df=yes}}
| death_place = Brazil
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| discipline = Anthropologist
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| main_interests = Indigenous peoples in Brazil
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Curt Unckel Nimuendajú (born Curt Unckel; 18 April 1883 – 10 December 1945) was a German-Brazilian ethnologist, anthropologist, and writer. His works are fundamental for the understanding of the religion and cosmology of some native Brazilian Indians, especially the Guaraní people. He received the surname "Nimuendajú" from the Apapocuva subgroup of the Guaraní people, meaning "the one who made himself a home",Mércio Pereira Gomes The Indians and Brazil,University Press of Florida, 2000, 3rd edition. p.18 one year after living among them. Upon taking Brazilian citizenship in 1922, he officially added the Nimuendajú as one of his surnames. On his obituary, his Brazilian-German colleague Herbert Baldus called him "perhaps the greatest Indianista of all time".Herbert Baldus, 'Curt Nimuendaju, 1883-1945,' in American Anthropologist, (1946) Vol. 48, pp.238-243
Life and work
File:Curt Unckel Nimuendaju.jpg.]]
Nimuendajú was born in Wagnergasse 31, Jena, Germany in 1883 and he lost either one of or both his parents in his childhood. From an early age, he dreamed of living among a 'primitive people'. Still in school, together with other students they organized an 'Indian gang' to go hunting in the woods outside the city. Lacking the financial means to attend a university, he worked in a camera factory run by Carl Zeiss. Meanwhile, he studied maps and the ethnographic studies of the Indian populations of North and South America in his free time. At the age of 20, he emigrated to Brazil in 1903. His half-sister, who was a school teacher, paid for the travel expenses to South America.
Two years after his arrival in Brazil, he contacted some Guaraní people in the State of São Paulo. Although there were many publications on the Guaraní since the 17th century, their religious behavior such as rituals was poorly described. Nimuendajú familiarized himself thoroughly with the existing literature. He published "Nimongarai" (1910) in the German São Paulo newspaper "Deutsche Zeitung". In 1913, he moved to Belém. In 1914, his groundbreaking publication on the mythology and religion of the Guaraní Apapokúva was accepted by the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie.'Die Sagen von der Erschaffung und Vernichtung der Welt als Grundlagen der Religion der Apapocuva-Guaraní', cited in Lúcia Sá, Rain forest literatures: Amazonian texts and Latin American culture, University of Minnesota Press, 2004 p.114 He became a specialist on various Indigenous peoples, particularly on the Gê, as well as Apapocuva-Guaraní, Ticuna, Kaingang, Apinaye, Xerente, WananoJanet M. Chernela, The Wanano Indians of the Brazilian Amazon: A Sense of Space, University of Texas Press, 1993, pp.39ff. and Canela. His publications laid, in the words of one recent writer:
'the indispensable groundwork from which dozens of doctoral dissertations and books have been elaborated by Brazilian and American anthropologists.'Mércio Pereira Gomes, The Indians and Brazil,p.18
One of the effects of his work was to shift interest from the tribes living along the coast or in large towns, to the tribes hidden in the interior, and to arouse the interests of anthropologists like the young Claude Lévi-Strauss, in communities that, though living in poverty, had managed to develop societies of considerable complexity, and religious cosmologies of great complexity.Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, Plon, Paris,1955 p.290
Over the span of 40 years of fieldwork, much of it self-financed,Virginia Kerns, Scenes from the high desert: Julian Steward's life and theory, p.226. he published about 60 articles, monographs, and vocabulary lists of indigenous languages.
Between 1929 and 1936 he spent 14 months with the Canela Indians, a Gê-speaking people on the northeastern edge of the central plateau of Brazil, and his monograph on them, translated and annotated by Robert Lowie, was published posthumously in 1946. His work on the Apinaye drew attention because it had many features that made it anomalous to the genre structure of the Gê societies to which it belonged in classification. This Apinaye anomaly was one that, while sharing the marked dualism of other related tribal societies, maintained a prescriptive marriage system, with sons incorporated into their father's group and daughters into their mothers' group, that did not fit the Crow-Omaha pattern that he, and Lowie had observed in the Gê tribal system generally.Roberto da Matta, A divided world: Apinayé social structure, Harvard University Press, 1982, pp.1ff.
Despite failing health and warnings from his doctors, he set forth on what was to prove to be his last ethnographic survey in 1945 and was killed on 10 December, among the Tukúna people, by the Solimões river, near São Paulo de Olivença, Amazonas state.Egon Schaden, [http://www.revistas.usp.br/rieb/article/viewFile/45664/49261 Notas sobre a vida e a obra de Curt Nimuendajú] According to the German anthropologist Otto Zerries, he was slain because he had sex with a non-initiated girl,Elena Welper, [https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1678-49442016v22n2p551 FROM THE HEROIC LIFE TO THE EROTIC DIARY: ON THE DEATHS OF CURT NIMUENDAJÚ] which is believed to cause sickness and death.{{Cite book |url=https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/34599 |title=Handbook of South American Indians: Volume 3 The Tropical Forest Tribes}} His ashes are kept in the São Paulo Museum of Art.{{citation needed|date=September 2018}}
The Curt Nimuendajú archives were housed at the National Museum of Brazil. They were completely destroyed in the fire that engulfed the museum in September 2018.Gretchen McCulloch, [https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/177712815507/folks-theres-nothing-left-from-the-linguistics "Folks, there’s nothing left…"], All Things Linguistic, September 2018.
Works
- The Šerente, (ed. Robert H. Lowie), The Southwest Museum, 1942
- The Eastern Timbira, (ed. Robert H. Lowie), University of California Press, 1946
- The Tukuna, (ed. Robert H. Lowie) University of California Press, 1952
- The Apinayé, (tr. and ed. Robert H. Lowie, John M. Cooper), Catholic University of America Press, 1939
;Lexicons
- Nimuendajú, K. (1925). As Tribus do Alto Madeira. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 17:137-172.
- Nimuendajú, K. (1932a). Idiomas Indígenas del Brasil. Revista del Instituto de etnología de la Universidad nacional de Tucumán, 2:543-618.
- Nimuendajú, K. (1932b). Wortlisten aus Amazonien. Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, 24:93-119.
- Nimuendajú, K.; Do Valle Bentes, E. H. (1923). Documents sur quelques langues peu connues de l'Amazone. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 15:215-222.
References
{{Reflist}}
Bibliography
- Herbert Baldus, 'Curt Nimuendaju, 1883-1945'. American Anthropologist, 1946, Vol. 48, pp. 238–243.
- Herbert Baldus review of Nimuendaju The Eastern Timbira. 1960. https://www.jstor.org/stable/663694
- Born, Joachim, "Curt Unckel Nimuendajú - ein Jenenser als Pionier im brasilianischen Nord(ost)en", Wien, 2007.
- Janet M. Chernela, The Wanano Indians of the Brazilian Amazon: A Sense of Space, University of Texas Press, 1993.
- Virginia Kerns, Scenes from the high desert: Julian Steward's life and theory, University of Illinois Press, 2003.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, Plon, Paris, 1955.
- Georg Menchén, Nimuendajú. Bruder der Indianer, Leipzig 1979.
- Günther F. Dungs, Die Feldforschung von Curt Unckel Nimuendajú und ihre theoretisch-methodischen Grundlagen, 1991.
- Mércio Pereira Gomes The Indians and Brazil, University Press of Florida, 2000, 3rd edition.
- Frank Lindner, Curt Unckel-Nimuendajú. Jenas großer Indianerforscher. Jena 1996.
- Lúcia Sá, Rain forest literatures: Amazonian texts and Latin American culture, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
- Welper, Elena M. "Curt Unckel Nimuendaju: um capítulo alemão na tradiçao etnografica Brasileira", 2002, TD PPGAS-MN/UFRJ.
External links
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20070929031745/http://www.bista.de/nachrichten/1993/Ein_Zeissianer_unter_Amazonas-Indianern.html/ Ein Zeissianer unter Amazonas-Indianern]
- [http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=5631 Video: Gedenktafel für Curt Unckel]
- [http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-77012001000200006 Artículo en "Revista de Antropología"] (Portuguese)
- {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091027031836/http://br.geocities.com/terrabrasileira/mitos/mitos1.html |date=October 27, 2009 |title=Mitos Coletados por Nimuendaju }} (Portuguese)
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20080405031105/http://jangadabrasil.com.br/abril32/al320400.htm Página con lista de las obras de Nimuendajú] (Portuguese)
- {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080302060134/http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Jungle/6885/artigos/a-nimuen.htm |date=March 2, 2008 |title=Curt Nimuendajú e os jês }} (Portuguese)
- [http://biblio.etnolinguistica.org Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendaju]
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Category:German anthropologists
Category:Brazilian ethnographers
Category:Brazilian ethnologists
Category:Brazilian anthropologists
Category:20th-century German anthropologists