Anne Chapman

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Anne Chapman (2009)

Anne MacKaye Chapman (born November 28, 1922 in Los Angeles , United States , † June 12, 2010 in Paris , France ) was a French-American anthropologist and ethnologist .

Career

Study time

Anne MacKaye Chapman studied at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) in Mexico City in the 1940s . During this time she attended the lectures of two professors who had a great influence on her future life. The first professor was Paul Kirchhoff , who fled the National Socialist German Reich to Mexico with his wife Hanna in the 1930s . Chapman and other students often met him in a coffee shop after class to discuss the works of Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels , Karl August Wittfogel , Theodor Cuno, and Lewis Henry Morgan . As part of his teaching activity, Kirchhoff insisted that his students learn the German language . In his view, his students should be able to read at least the works of major authors on the pre-Hispanic and colonial history of Mexico and Central America , which have not been translated into English or Spanish . Among the works were those by Eduard Seler and Walter Lehmann . The basic knowledge of the German language helped her in the late 1970s and early 1980s when she read the work of the ethnologist Father Martin Gusinde (SVD), about the Selk'nam (Ona). The other professor at ENAH was Wigberto Jiménez Moreno . He was a connoisseur of Indian and Spanish sources. During his lectures he always made clear the contradictions and the meaning of the available sources. The amount of written sources and Indian codexes was enormous with allusions to events and dynasties from around 400 years before the Spanish conquest of Mexico by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1521. During her student days, Chapman developed a fascination for using the available sources to create an overall picture To bring harmony, similar to a puzzle. Her master's thesis on the Aztecs from 1951 at ENAH deals with this problem.

In her master's thesis, Chapman described the rise of the Aztecs from a simple hunter-gatherer culture to a vast empire. In this context, it began with the emigration of the Aztecs from Aztlán in northern Mexico. Around the year 1320 the Aztecs settled on an island in Lake Texcoco , a lake in the south of the valley of Mexico that has now almost completely dried up . They later established their capital Tenochtitlan there . Shortly after their arrival, the Aztecs were subjugated by the neighboring Tepanecs and forced to pay them tribute and provide them with military support. A century later, the Aztecs rose and fought successfully against the Tepanecs (1427–1432) to regain their independence. This victory ushered in Aztec rule over much of Mesoamerica in less than a century. Shortly before the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the Aztec empire encompassed a vast area. It stretched from the north (now the Mexican state of Michoacán ) to an enclave in the south along the Pacific coast of Guatemala . At that time the Tarasken lived in the north , and the Aztecs could not subdue them. According to Chapman, the Aztecs were primarily warriors who were convinced that they could subjugate large areas and oblige them to pay tribute. In her master's thesis she dealt with the well-known hypothesis of the Prussian major general , army reformer, military scientist and ethicist Carl von Clausewitz that war was a projection of society itself. Furthermore, she expressed the assumption that the Aztecs could only survive their war of independence with the Tepanecs thanks to the techniques they had learned as hunters and gatherers during their migration to central Mexico. She attributed the victory of the Aztecs to the tactics they had previously learned from the Tapanecs. In her later analyzes of the contrasts between the Selk'nam and Yámana societies in Tierra del Fuego , she again referred to von Clausewitz.

She returned to the United States in the early 1950s and did her PhD at Columbia University in New York City . Chapman had a partial scholarship . During her time at Columbia University, she attended the lectures of archeology professor William Duncan Strong . Among other things, Strong undertook excavations in the Bay of Honduras . On one occasion he told about the Tolupan Indians (Jicaque) who lived in the mountains of central Honduras. This piqued their curiosity. As a result of time she also read a study by Wolfgang von Hagan about a small Tolupan community, which he published in 1943. She realized how little was known about this people and where her future field of activity would be. Through von Hagen she knew that the Tolupan Indians still spoke their mother tongue and lived in a small community called La Montaña de la Flor (German: Mountain of Flowers).

career

From 1953 to 1955 she worked as an assistant for the Hungarian-Austrian economic historian and economic and social scientist Karl Polanyi at Columbia University.

Early in her career, she was interested in the Mesoamerican civilizations. In this context, she began her first field research in 1955 in Honduras with the Tolupan Indians. Funding came first from the Fulbright Program and later from the Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM) in New York City. During her first visit in 1955, she was there for seven months. After that she spent the summer months there every year until 1960 (from January to March or April). Back then it took three days to get from Tegucigalpa - the capital of Honduras - to La Montaña de la Flor. First you spent a day driving a car or bus to a small sawmill called San Diego. There, every year she borrowed three horses from the owner of the sawmill the following day, one of which was for an employee who was supposed to accompany her. The extra horse was always for the equipment they had brought with them. At the end of the second day they reached the city of Orica . From there it went to La Montaña de la Flor the following day. During her stay there, she always stayed in a small hut nearby, which a hospitable Mestizo family made available to her . In the 1960s, the horse runway was extended via Orica to facilitate traffic. This made it possible to get from Tegucigalpa to La Montaña de la Flor in about five hours during the dry summer season.

At the time of their fieldwork, the Tolupan settlement consisted of a scattered pile of huts, corn fields, and coffee plantations divided into two by the Guarabuqui River . The entrance to the part of the settlement west of the river was enclosed by a fence ( palenque ), formed by posts about two meters high and a wooden door with a lock. The other entrance to the part of the settlement east of the river had an ordinary fence without a door. Each of the two chiefs ( caciques ) lived near the respective entrance to their part of the settlement. Before the two parts of the settlement were founded, the Tolupan lived as patrilocal , exogamous , egalitarian tribes . The two parts of the settlement consisted of a pile of about 60 huts that were scattered in the surrounding hills. The area is common land ( ejido ), which was officially granted to the Tolupan in 1929. By making family trees, Chapman found that the population of the settlement descended from three adult couples, their children, and a bachelor in the 1860s. A hundred years later, most of the Tolupan had forgotten their rituals and the youth were not interested in the oral traditions. Divination with the help of cords was still practiced by some older men. Some families still tied the bones of the killed animals to a post in their huts as a gesture of respect or gratitude for the masters of their prey. The settlement had no public buildings, temples, schools, or shops. Around 1972 the population consisted of about 400 Indians including some mestizo families.

Your Ph.D. made it in 1958 at Columbia University.

During one of her stays in Mexico, Chapman advised her former professor Kirchhoff to study the Lenca people in Honduras, which she later did.

In 1961 she became a member of the Center national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and remained so until her resignation in 1987.

Chapman began her field research in 1964 in the province of Tierra del Fuego ( Argentina ) with the last remaining Selk'nam (Ona) and in 1985 in the region of Magallanes ( Chile ) with the remaining Yámana. In this context, the French archaeologist couple Annette and Joseph Emperaire aroused their interest in the peoples of Tierra del Fuego. Chapman's research is instrumental in understanding the cultures of these peoples. There she met the last members of the Selk'nam: Lola Kiepja and Ángela Loij .

She began her first field research with the Lenca people in 1965 in the Intibucá department in Honduras. She stayed there for seven months until 1966. During her stay, she traveled most of the area on horseback and in buses to learn about the Lenca rituals. Chapman was on site again briefly in 1975, 1976 and for five months between 1981 and 1986. In the course of her field research, she was able to gain deep insights into their culture: several hundred myths, legends, stories and prayers. She wrote two volumes on Lenca: Los Hijos del Copal y la Candela. The first volume deals with the rituals from the pre-Hispanic times and the second with the rituals from the Spanish colonial times.

In 1967 she worked at the University of Paris , Sorbonne . Chapman became a Fellow at the Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM) in 1968 and an Associate at the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (INAH) in Tegucigalpa in 1979 . In 1981 she worked at the University of Paris, René-Déscartes . In 1986 she became an associate at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Buenos Aires .

In her later life she did historical research. In this context she made trips to Honduras and Tierra del Fuego.

Chapman wrote both articles and books on many important anthropological issues. She also made films about life and the last members of the Selk'nam and Yámana.

After her death in Paris at the age of 88, she was buried there in the Père Lachaise cemetery.

Works (selection)

  • 1982: Drama and Power in a Hunting Society: The Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego
  • 1985: Los Hijos del Copal y la Candela (Volume 1)
  • 1986: Los Hijos del Copal y la Candela: Tradición católica de los lencas Honduras / Ritos agrarios y tradición oral de los lencas de Honduras (Volume 2)
  • 1986: Feminist Resources for Schools and Colleges: A Guide to Curricular Materials
  • 1987: La Isla de los Estados en la prehistoria: Primeros Datos Arqueológicos
  • 1989: El Fin de Un Mundo: Los Selk'nam de Tierra del Fuego
  • 1995: three chapters in Cap Horn 1882–1883: Rencontre avec les Indiens Yahgan
  • 1998: Primary Source Readings: World History
  • 2002: End of a World: The Selknam of Tierra del Fuego
  • 2004: El fenómeno de la canoa yagán
  • 2006: Darwin in Tierra del Fuego
  • 2006: Lom: amor y venganza, mitos de los yámana
  • 2008: Grove: Selknam Initiation Ceremony
  • 2010: European Encounters with the Yamana People of Cape Horn, Before and After Darwin

Films (selection)

  • 1977: The Onas: Life and Death in Tierra del Fuego
  • 1990: Homage to the Yahgans: The Last Indians of Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn

Awards

Trivia

Chapman and other ENAH students published the journal Anthropos in Mexico City in 1947 .

Among her fellow students at Columbia University was the Argentine archaeologist Alberto Rex González . Chapman later met him in Buenos Aires. With his wife Ana Montes she made a film about the surviving Selk'nam in the province of Tierra del Fuego.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Chapman, Anne: Drama and Power in a Hunting Society: The Selk'nam of Tierra Del Fuego , CUP Archive, 1982, ISBN 978-0-521-23884-7
  2. ^ Chapman, Anne: Los Hijos del Copal y la Candela , UNAM, 1992, ISBN 978-968-6029-22-2
  3. ^ Chapman, Anne: Los Hijos del Copal y la Candela: Tradición católica de los lencas Honduras , UNAM, 1985, ISBN 978-968-83796-9-1
  4. ^ Chapman, Anne: Feminist Resources for Schools and Colleges: A Guide to Curricular Materials , Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1986, ISBN 978-0-935312-35-5
  5. ^ Chapman, Anne: La Isla de Los Estados en la Prehistoria: Primeros Datos Arqueológicos , Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1987, ISBN 978-950-23-0354-3
  6. ^ Chapman, Anne: El Fin de Un Mundo: Los Selk'nam de Tierra del Fuego , Vázquez Mazzini Editores, 1989, ISBN 978-950-99063-2-7
  7. ^ Anne Chapman, Christine Barthe, Philippe Revol: Cap Horn 1882-1883: Rencontre avec les Indiens Yahgan , Ed. de la Martinière, 1995, ISBN 978-2-7324-2173-5
  8. ^ Anne Chapman and Jackson J. Spielvogel: Primary Source Readings: World History , Glencoe / McGraw-Hill, 1998, ISBN 978-0-314-14095-1
  9. ^ Chapman, Anne: End of a World: The Selknam of Tierra del Fuego , Zagier & Urruty Publicaciones, 2002, ISBN 978-987-1468-04-1
  10. ^ Chapman, Anne: El fenómeno de la canoa yagán , Universidad Marítima de Chile, 2003
  11. ^ Chapman, Anne: Darwin in Tierra del Fuego , Imago Mundi, 2006, ISBN 978-950-793-049-2
  12. ^ Anne MacKaye Chapman, Cristina Calderón, Martin Gusinde: Lom, amor y venganza: mitos de los yámana de Tierra del Fuego , LOM, 2006
  13. ↑ Chapman, Anne: Hain: Selknam Initiation Ceremony , Museo Marítimo de Ushuaia, 2008, ISBN 978-987-1468-06-5
  14. ^ Chapman, Anne: European Encounters with the Yamana People of Cape Horn, Before and After Darwin , Cambridge University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-51379-1
  15. ↑ Montes de Gonzales, Ana; Chapman, Anne: Los Onas: vida y muerte en Terra del Fuego (in Spanish), El Comite Argentino del film Antropologico, 1977
  16. ↑ Homage to the Yahgans: The Last Indians of Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn , thereedfoundation.org, 1990

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Chapman, Anne
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chapman, Anne MacKaye (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French-American anthropologist and ethnologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 28, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Los Angeles , United States
DATE OF DEATH June 12, 2010
Place of death Paris , France