Wanda Hanke

Wanda Theresia Leokadia Hanke (born December 9, 1893 in Troppau , Austrian Silesia , † August 31, 1958 in Benjamin Constant , Amazonas , Brazil) was a doctor and ethnologist .

Life

Wanda Hanke passed the matriculation examination at the grammar school in Donaueschingen in 1913 . She studied briefly in Freiburg (winter semester 1913/14 and summer semester 1914) and Bonn (winter semester 1914/15), but mainly (from summer semester 1915) in Munich and Heidelberg , at a time when women were less likely to study than they are today. The versatility of her scientific zeal was so great that she earned three doctoral degrees:

• Dr. phil. majoring in psychology in 1918 with Erich Becher in Munich
• Dr. med. 1920 ibid
• Dr. jur. 1926 in Marburg

Wanda Hanke subsequently worked as a doctor in Vienna. However, her interest was in the world of the indigenous peoples of South America . She wanted to become a mediator between the peoples. In 1934 she was able to travel to South America with savings from her practice and began her research in the Chaco region in Paraguay , which she later extended to the Bolivian Chaco and western Brazil , always in close partnership with the indigenous groups . For Hanke, whose first field of study was psychology, the languages ​​and religions of the peoples became the main interest.

The researcher returned to Europe for the first time in October 1936. But already in July 1937 she traveled to South America again and only in autumn 1955 did she come back to Germany and Austria with the intention of a temporary stay. Hanke traveled back to South America at the end of 1956. In January 1957 she wrote from Rio de Janeiro about a planned fieldwork with the Tukuna , which was also carried out. After interposing a trip to Jatapu, she lived with the Tukuna again by helping the chief of her location with the expansion of his cassava plantation - in the absence of all requested help.

Her health suffered from the strains of life in the jungle and bush and from malaria. She had to be carried on a stretcher for long distances on her travels because of her arthritis. The border area at the border triangle between Brazil, Peru and Colombia was her last work area. Your last excursion was to Leticia in Colombia. Without the support of scientific bodies, she finally lived on the cassava roots that she had grown herself; her last letters urging help came too late for any action taken to have any effect. On August 31, 1958, she died after an increasing decline in strength in Benjamin Constant in the Brazilian state of Amazonas . She was buried there too.

Fonts (selection)

• The psychological and characterological meaning of the dream. Noske, Dorna 1918 (dissertation, University of Munich, 1918).
• About aphasic and opto-spatial disturbances. In: Archives for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases . Vol. 63 (1921), H. 1, pp. 167-209.
• Legal interests in moral crimes. 1926 (dissertation, University of Marburg, 1926)
• Legal capacity, personality, capacity to act: an analytical-dogmatic study. Heymann, Berlin 1928.
• Ethnological research in South America. Extinct prehistoric times in the interior of Brazil (= cultural-historical research . Vol. 11). Limbach, Braunschweig 1964. Digitized
• Dos años entre los cainguá. CAEA, Buenos Aires 1995, ISBN 950-9252-14-X (reports in Spanish on the life and customs of the Caingua Indians).

literature

• Bettina Beer : Women in German-speaking Ethnology. Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-11206-6 , pp. 85-87.
• Gabriele Habinger: Hanke, Wanda. In: Ilse Korotin (ed.): BiografıA. Lexicon of Austrian Women. Volume 1: A-H. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2016, ISBN 978-3-205-79590-2 , pp. 1181–1185 ( online ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Wanda Hanke in the catalog of the German National Library