Meinhard Schuster

Meinhard Schuster (* 1930 in Offenbach am Main ) is a German-Swiss ethnologist and student of Adolf E. Jensen .

Life

Schuster comes from a family of teachers. His childhood in Offenbach was shaped by the war and the post-war period. At school he shows an interest in South American woodland Indians and learned Spanish and Portuguese. In June 1948 he passed the Abitur and in the winter semester of 1948/49 began studying ethnology as a major, art history and classical archeology as minor subjects at Frankfurt University. In the winter semester of 1949/50 he switched from classical archeology to prehistory because this subject “more suited to his more general technical and technical inclinations”.

Schuster's first field research took place from February 1954 to August 1955, in which he participated as a student assistant to Otto Zerries and aimed at the Waika , a subgroup of the Yanomami , and the neighboring Makiritare ( Ye'kuana ) in southern Venezuela. After his return from Venezuela, he completed his dissertation based on literature research on Indonesian headhunting and received his doctorate in the summer of 1956. He devoted the next two years to evaluating the results of the expedition.

When Helmut Petri was appointed professor of ethnology in Cologne in 1958 , Schuster took over his vacant position as an assistant at the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt. From 1961 Schuster turned to the South Seas and undertook a first expedition to the Sepik area in Papua New Guinea together with Eike Haberland on behalf of the Frankfurt City Museum for Ethnology . Objects from this expedition have been in the Frankfurt Museum since then. In the summer semester of 1962, Schuster becomes a revoked civil servant at the Frankfurt Seminar for Ethnology.

In 1965, Schuster took on the position of assistant in the large Oceania department at the "Museum of Ethnology and Swiss Museum of Folklore", now the Museum of Cultures in Basel. From the end of 1965 to the beginning of 1967 he researched together with his wife Gisela Schuster and the Basel student Christian Kaufmann in various areas on the Middle and Upper Sepik and its tributaries. In 1967 he became curator of the Oceania department of the Basel Museum of Ethnology and from 1968 to 1969 he headed the museum as deputy to the museum director Gerhard Baer. In 1968 he completed his habilitation in Basel with a thesis on Makiritare. In 1970 he became Alfred Bühler's successor and thus also professor of ethnology at the University of Basel. Schuster retired in October 2000 and lives with his wife in Basel.

Works

Most of Schuster's works are devoted to the description of the residents, their way of life, customs and everyday activities in the Sepik area. He also dealt with the categories “ethnic foreignness”, “ethnic identity” and “ethnicity”. Another important topic for him are the descriptions of the Waika and Makiritare.

Publications

• Locals and foreigners in the Sepik countryside. 1961.
• Color, motif, function: for painting primitive peoples. 1968.
• The painting by May River. 1969.
• The pottery deity of Aibom. 1969.
• On the village history of Scatmeli. 1973.
• Dekuana: Contributions to the ethnology of the Makiritare. 1976.
• Publications on scientific films. 1979.
• Ethnic foreignness, ethnic identity. 1996.

literature

• M. Schuster: Student and assistant years at the Frobenius Institute 1948–1965. In: Paideuma: Communications on cultural studies. B. 49, 2003, pp. 7-29.

Web links

• Interview with Meinhard Schuster from 2009 (PDF; 240 kB)