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HIJOS DE LA SELVA/SONS OF THE FORESTTe Ethnographic Photography
of Max Schmidt
In the latter part of the 19th century, the Ethnological
Museumof Berlin contained the largest collection of cultural
artefacts inthe world. German ethnographic explorers, notable among
themAlexander von Humboldt, Adolf Bastian and Karl von den
Steinen,created a dynamic and a fertile environment for the
developmentof theories on culture and language origins. It was in
this environ-ment that Max Schmidt developed his passion for
ethnographicresearch, first as a volunteer researcher in the
museum, and lateras a pupil of Karl von den Steinen. Te latter
encouraged Schmidtsinterest in conducting ethnographic fieldwork,
particularly in regardto the Mato Grosso region of central Brazil,
an area little known toEuropeans which Schmidt hoped to explore and
return from with
first-ever accounts of some of its native populations.
Schmidtshands-on yet largely unobtrusive approach to fieldwork and
doc-umentation of indigenous cultures in Brazil and Paraguay
between1900 and 1931 has increasingly been recognised in the field
ofethnography as ground-breaking. Studying these societiesin
situ,as Schmidt did on his pioneering, lightly-manned and
-equippedexpeditions, is now the accepted anthropological
method.
In 1916, Schmidt presented his thesis of ethnology TeArawak, an
important South-American ethno-cultural study thatembraced two
fundamental topics: the cultural diffusion of this lin-guistic
family in the tropical forest area, and the ethnic dispersionof
villages of neolithic culture.
In 1918, Schmidt was appointed Professor of Ethnology at
theUniversity of Berlin, and in 1919 was named Director of the
SouthAmerican Section of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. In
1929, heresigned these positions, along with their associated
pensions, andleft Germany to settle in Cuiab, Brazil. Tis may have
been pri-marily prompted by his expressed longing to return to his
fieldworkand adventures in the forests of South America, although
it mayalso have resulted from a personal distaste for the radical
changesin museum and university policies that resulted from the
rise ofnationalism in German institutional politics in the 1920s.
Tis grow-ing trend of politicising the administration of scientific
research andeducation accelerated when Adolf Hitler came to power,
causingthe study of ethnology to fall into the hands of
administrators who
endeavoured to make the fieldthe hand-maiden of blatant-ly
racist theories designed tounderline the superiority ofAryan
culture in what came to betermed a colonial science.
After two years in Brazil,Schmidt accepted, in 1931, the
invi-tation of the president of the Scientific Society of Paraguay,
Dr.Andrs Barbero, to assume the formation and direction of
theEthnography and History Museum in Asuncin, Paraguay. odaythis
institution is known as the Museo Etnogrfico Andrs Barber
and is where Schmidts remarkable collection of glass plate
pho-tographic negatives, made in the field during various
expeditions,is preserved. It was during his tenure at the museum,
which lasteuntil 1946, that Schmidt started his ethnological and
archaeologiresearch among the indigenous groups of the Gran Chaco
regionand its neighbouring cultural areas.
Te Schmidt photographs and documents reproduced inHIJOS DE LA
SELVA/SONS OF THE FORESTbelong to his legacy in thMuseo Etnogrfico
Andrs Barbero. Te photographs come fromglass-plate negatives
originally prepared and processed by MaxSchmidt. Whenever possible,
the captions for the photographs wgenerated including the
information on the index cards from themuseums photographic
catalogue, originally produced by Schmihimself and later
systematised by Branislava Susnik, who inheriteSchmidts position at
the museum in Asuncin. Te glass plateswere transported to the
United States to be photographed with thhighest possible digital
resolution. Tis task was completed withthe assistance of Hugh
Milstein and the company Digital Fusion inCulver City, California.
Te preliminary selection of the photograpmade in Asuncin was
finalised in Los Angeles following an evalu-ation of the results of
the digital reproduction and restoration. Thope of the authors and
of Perceval Press is that this book haveas much an academic value
as an artistic one, and we trust thatthe pioneering ethnographic
work and exceptional images of MaxSchmidt may help us attain that
goal.
ER CEVAL PR ES S
with texts by Federico Bossert and Diego Villaredited by Viggo
Mortensen for Perceval Press
www.percevalpress.c
ISBN 978-0-9895616-0-0Hardcover, 146 pages, bilingual$39.00
