Helmut Petri
Helmut Petri (born November 7, 1907 in Cologne ; † June 21, 1986 there ) was a German ethnologist.
Life
He began his university studies in 1928 (economics, history and philosophy, as well as coursework in prehistory and anthropology). Studies also took him to Rome and Vienna, where he studied with Wilhelm Schmidt , Wilhelm Koppers and Robert von Heine-Geldern . In this early phase Petri was particularly taken with Mesoamerican cultures, which he studied under the direction of Fritz Röck and learned about Nahuatl . He did his doctorate with a thesis on forms of money in the South Seas .
His first professional appointment took place in Vienna, where he was curator at the Ethnological Museum and the Natural History Museum . In 1935 he moved to Frankfurt am Main to take a position at the Research Institute for Cultural Morphology. From 1938 to 1939 he began his first ethnographic field research, which took him to the Kimberley region of Western Australia. There he worked in particular with the Worrorra , Ngarinjin and other tribes of the Dampier Archipelago .
On his return he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and served as a radio operator in France, Greece, North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war he was captured and held in an American prisoner of war camp for several months. After his release, he resumed his previous work at the Frobenius Institute as an ethnologist under the direction of Adolf Ellegard Jensen . After further field work in Australia from 1953 to 1954, he was appointed to a full professorship in 1956 and two years later to the chair of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Cologne . In 1959 he married an ethnologist, Gisela Odermann, who had accompanied him on his field research expedition in 1953/54. He retired in 1971.
Petri died in Cologne after 6 weeks in an intensive care unit after being hospitalized after a car accident in May 1986.
Fonts (selection)
- Dying World in Northwest Australia . Braunschweig 1954, OCLC 185316149 .
- Peoples in the green hell . Lengerich 1962, OCLC 73627041 .
- with Hans Nevermann and Ernest A. Worms: The religions of the South Seas and Australia . Stuttgart 1968, OCLC 611477303 .
- The Australian medic man. The Australian medicine man . Carlisle 2014, ISBN 0-85905-583-3 .
literature
- Kurt Tauchmann as editor: Festschrift for the 65th birthday of Helmut Petri . Cologne 1973, ISBN 3-412-85873-0 .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Petri, Helmut |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German ethnologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 7, 1907 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Cologne |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 21, 1986 |
| Place of death | Cologne |