Edgardo González Niño

Edgardo González Niño (* 1926 in San Cristóbal , † 2002 in Puerto Ayacucho ) was a Venezuelan, anthropological-ethnologically interested adventurer and connoisseur of the Venezuelan Amazon region. He was not an academic ethnographer. He could be described as a free, inquisitive mind who explored the area on his own.

Life

Early years

He came from the Andean province of Táchira in the northwest of the country on the border with Colombia.

Members of his family were supporters of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez (r. 1908–1935) and between 1899 and 1957 made several political leaders of Táchira from the ranks of the military. His parents and grandparents had left their home state of Táchira and moved to Caracas to work actively in the government of General Gómez. When the general died in 1935, which was followed by partial liberalization in the country, most of his family lost their privileges.

Career

He became a civil servant and worked as a veterinarian in the Ministry of Agriculture. When foot and mouth disease broke out in Venezuela in the late 1940s, he was head of the Vaccination and Pest Control Department in the cities of Puerto Cabello , Carabobo state and San Felipe , Carabobo state.

Through his earlier contacts with the communist youth movement of Venezuela and in the course of the conflicts between the supporters of Gómez and the military junta of President Marcos Pérez Jiménez (ruled 1952-1958) he was persecuted by the police.

Eventually he was transferred to a small town in the Llanos , where there was nothing really interesting for him to do. After he resigned from office, he was exiled to Puerto Ayacucho in the Territorio Federal de Amazonas . (The current state of Amazonas only had the status of a territory at the time.)

In 1958, after the fall of Marcos Pérez Jiménez , he returned to Caracas as the representative of the Federal Territory of the Amazon. However, the many journeys between Puerto Ayacucho and Caracas tired him and he gave up his political office and devoted himself again to ethnology.

From 1959 he worked for a time in the Ocamo area for the coordination center for indigenous people. There he devoted himself to combating diseases such as malaria , hepatitis , measles , chickenpox , tuberculosis and river blindness .

Life in the Orinoco

On January 8, 1956, Gonzáles Niño arrived in his "tropical Siberia", where he had to report to the regional police every day.

In the former village of Puerto Ayacucho (founded in 1924) on the Orinoco, on the border with Colombia, very close to the impressive rapids of Atures, there was not a single asphalt road and the river was the only means of transport. The invincibility of the Atures cataracts prevented civilization from advancing further into the Upper Orinoco until the 19th century.

The Indian tribes and the land they inhabited, completely unknown to the majority of urban Venezuelans at the time, aroused a spontaneous interest in him.

One day he embarked on a Colombian freighter for the Rio Negro. He first stopped in San Fernando de Atabapo . From there he continued his journey up the Orinoco with his guide Sixto Sequera , who had lived with his family for a long time with the Yanomami tribe on the Río Ocamo . It took them two weeks for the approx. 300 km from San Fernando de Atabapo to the Río Ocamo.

Late years

In 1998 he finally returned to the town where fate had taken him 43 years ago. He died there in 2002.

His collection

From 1956 González Niño collected objects of the indigenous people in the area of ​​the Upper Orinoco and brought together well over a thousand objects. The unique collection includes masks, cult objects, jewelry, feather work, cooking utensils and weapons and much more.

In 1964 he organized the first "Indigenous Exhibition" in Venezuela to show the life and customs of these peoples. In the absence of financial means, in collaboration with anthropology students, he furnished an exhibition space in the Museo de Ciencias Naturales de Caracas and filled it mainly with exhibits from the Yanomami and Ye'kuana , as well as some of the Híwi . The exhibition was planned for two weeks, but his collection became an integral part of the permanent collection of the natural science museum.

In 1974, at the end of the reign of Rafael Caldera Rodríguez ( COPEI ) (ruled 1969–1974), who had close ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba, the exhibition went to Cuba for two months. This was followed by exhibitions in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Leningrad, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Sofia, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Vienna.

After returning to Venezuela, the collection stayed in the Natural Science Museum in Caracas for a few years.

In 1988 the Fundación Cisneros acquired his collection, which then flowed into the Colección Cisneros .

This collection was then shown in 2000 in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn.

literature

• Marie-Claude Mattéi-Müller : Meeting Edgardo González Niño, a pioneer of Venezuelan ethnography. In: Orinoco – Parima. Indian societies from Venezuela. The Cisneros Collection. Publisher of the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany GmbH, Bonn. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit 1999, ISBN 3-7757-0872-3 , p. 25ff.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marie-Claude Mattéi-Müller: Meeting Edgardo González Niño, a pioneer of Venezuelan ethnography . ( Memento of March 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF) In: Press kit for the exhibition Orinoco – Parima. Indian societies from Venezuela. The Cisneros Collection. August 6, 1999 - February 27, 2000, Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany , Bonn, pp. 6–10; accessed on January 15, 2016.