Harald Schultz 1909-1966 (Baldus 1966)
  • Baldus, Herbert. 1966. Harald Schultz 1909-1966. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 68, No. 5, (Oct., 1966), pp. 1233-1235.

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HARALD SCHULTZ

1909-1966


BRAZIL'S two great Indianists, Marshal Rondon and Curt Nimuendajú, had a student in common. The old marshal taught him how to travel through the interior and make friends with the Indians. Later, in 1943, the other famous student of Indian life came to Rio and in the course of an introduction to ethnology fanned the flames of the enthusiasm that Rondon had already kindled. In this way the two teachers, united by their ideal of treating the Indian well and understanding him even better, laid the foundation of a life that was to be entirely dedicated to this noble endeavor: that of Harald Schultz.

It was two years after he had attended Nimuendajú's lectures that Schultz visited my house for the first time. He still bore the clear scars of serious wounds received when he was attacked by an Indian who had been raised among the Whites. His book Vinte e três índios resistem à civilização (Twenty-three Indians Resist Civilization) tells the story of that attack. He was tall, fair, bespectacled, and modest to the verge of shyness. He had an uneven gait, with his head sticking forward as he walked, so that when he ac-

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companied me in the following year to the Kaingang of Ivai, those acute observers nicknamed him "tortoise" (pedn-ni).

Schultz was born on the 22nd of February, 1909, in Porto Alegre. When I first met him, he was 36 years old. At that time he was already a student of Indian life, a subject on which he was later to become an expert. He was already at work — filling his notebooks with detailed descriptions; skillfully making collections of artifacts that satisfied the museums without impoverishing the peoples from whom they were collected; recording on film with consummate artistry those subtleties of exotic cultures that defy description; and at all times remaining the unconditional friend of the Indians, suffering on their behalf, suffering with them, and finding happiness among them.

He was working for the Indian Protection Service and on behalf of the Service had already visited various tribes in Mato Grosso. He had spent considerable time with the Umutina of the upper Paraguay in 1943 and revisited them in the two succeeding years. The result of this intimate contact with the Indians was one of the best motion pictures that has yet been made of a South American tribe, a collection of artifacts that is at present the pride of the Museu Paulista, and an important monograph that was published by the Revista do Museu Paulista.

In 1946 he attended my lectures on Brazilian ethnology at the Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo and collaborated with me as my field assistant. This collaboration continued once he was appointed Assistente de Etnologia at the Museu Paulista on the 4th of January, 1947. He remained a dedicated member of the museum staff until his death in São Paulo on the 8th of January, 1966.

We traveled together to study the Indians served by Indian agencies in the state of São Paulo and to visit the Karajá on the Araguaya River. Then came his first stay with the Kraho, from whom he brought back a substantial collection of myths. This was the first of the great series of expeditions in which Schultz, either alone or accompanied by his wife Wilma Chiara, gathered data; made ethnographic and archeological collections; and with the help of photography, cinematography, and sound recording tried to amass all the information he could that would help to elucidate Indian cultures. He worked in the most diverse parts of Brazil, from Goias and the mouth of the Amazon to the frontiers of Peru and Bolivia.

The Secção de Etnologia of the Museu Paulista owes its most important collections to the efforts of Harald Schultz. He also helped to make the Revista do Museu Paulista an indispensable record for all students of Brazilian Indians. Those who wish to see these Indians in joy and in sadness and to have a sense of their lives should consult Hombu, a book that was internationally acclaimed, in which Schultz, the photographer with the ethnographer's knowledge and the sensibility of an artist, enables us to get closer to these exotic peoples than we can in any scholarly treatise.

In sum, one may say that Harald Schultz's great contribution to ethnology was to increase and to deepen our knowledge of the facts. His empirical ap-

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proach enabled him to become an anthropologist who did more than most in the collection of the raw materials that are the foundation of our discipline.

HERBERT BALDUS
Museu Paulista
Translated by D. Maybury-Lewis, Harvard University


BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HARALD SCHULTZ

Harald Schultz also published book reviews in Revista do Museu Paulista and numerous articles in Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, Göttingen 1964/65, and in journals of zoology.

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