Curt Unckel

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Memorial stone for Curt Unckel in the Paradise Park in Jena

Curt Unckel Nimuendajú (born April 17, 1883 in Jena , † December 10, 1945 in Santa Rita do Weil , Brazil ) was a German-Brazilian ethnologist who devoted his life to research and the well-being of Brazilian Indians .

Life

Curt Unckel completed an apprenticeship as a precision mechanic at the Carl Zeiss company in Jena . In 1905 he emigrated to South America and from then on devoted his life to researching the indigenous population of Brazil. As part of his field research , he lived with the Indians who gave him the name "Nimuendajú". Translated, this means "he who has found his place". This shows how comfortable Unckel felt among the local population. As an autodidact , he not only researched the customs and traditions of the Brazilian natives, but also created word lists and examined the grammatical structure of their language. In 40 years Unckel visited more than 40 tribes, mainly in the Amazon region . In doing so, he collected over 350 sagas and made records on 20 indigenous languages . His aim in life was to keep the religion and culture of the peoples of the tropical rainforest alive. The ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss mentions Unckel's investigations into the Tupi-Kawahib tribe in a positive sense in his work Sad Tropics and calls him a "scholar [and] ethnographer".

Commemoration

In his hometown Jena, a memorial stone was erected in his honor, which is located in the Paradise Park. This is taken care of voluntarily by the Jena Association for the Care of Indian Culture eV A small street in Jena southern district was named after him. Furthermore, a plaque at Unckel's birth house at Wagnergasse 31 reminds of the ethnologist.

literature

  • Herbert Baldus : Curt Nimuendaju, 1883-1945. In: American Anthropologist , Volume 48 (1946), pp. 238-243 (Preview) .
  • Georg Menchén: Nimuendajú. Brother of the Indians. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1979. Later 3rd edition 1990, ISBN 3-325-00250-1 .
  • Günther Friedrich Dungs: Curt Unckel Nimuendajú's field research and its theoretical-methodological basis. (= Mundus series ethnology. 43) Holos, Bonn 1991, ISBN 3-926216-42-5 .
  • Frank Lindner: Curt Unckel-Nimuendajú. Jena's great Indian explorer. (= Jenaische Blätter. 5) Quartus, Jena 1996, ISBN 3-931505-08-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Claude Lévi-Strauss: Sad tropics. Frankfurt am Main 1978, p. 330
personal data
SURNAME Unckel, Curt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Unckel Nimuendajú, Curt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Brazilian ethnologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Jena
DATE OF DEATH December 10, 1945
Place of death São Paulo de Olivença , Brazil