By Daniel Quiroz
Martin Gusinde, a notable anthropologist who worked among the Fuego Patagonian groups at the beginning of the 20th century, produced a significant number of pages, full of data, that showed the economic, social and spiritual life of those who inhabited the southern tip of America.
He was born in Breslau, Silesia (now Wrocław, Poland) in 1886 and in 1900 he joined the Society of the Divine Word, being ordained a priest in 1911. He studied anthropology with Wilhelm Schmidt, another priest of the Society and one of the creators of the so-called school of cultural circles (Kulturkreislehre), a theoretical body which attempted to look at the history of humanity from a perspective somewhat different from the evolutionist view that predominated in the discipline at the time.
His main goal was to move to New Guinea and study the island's societies, supposedly among the most primitive in the world. However, the authorities of his congregation sent him to Chile to work as a Natural Sciences Professor at Liceo Alemán, their school in Santiago.
He arrives on September 21st, 1912, aboard the Rodophis, a passenger and cargo ship of the Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actiengesellschaft (Hapag) and immediately began his collaboration with the newly created Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology of Chile, which at that time was directed by the German archaeologist Max Uhle.
He works on a bibliography on Easter Island, accompanied Aureliano Oyarzún to explore some archaeological sites on the central coast, and studied Mapuche medicine and hygiene. In 1918, he travels to Punta Arenas and begins his comprehensive studies on the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego.
His four expeditions to the extreme south of the country, carried out between 1918 and 1924, are well known. Their reports were published in the Publications of the Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology of Chile between 1920 and 1924. Mario Orellana, National History Prize winner in 1994, compiled and published them in 1980.
Much less is known about his trip to Laguna San Rafael in the summer of 1920, with the geographers Federico Reichert and Hicken, exactly 100 years ago. His magnum opus on “the Indians of Tierra del Fuego” ["Die Feuerland Indianer"] comprises four volumes, dedicated to the Selk'nam, the Yahgan, the Halakwulup, and the physical anthropology of the Fuegian groups respectively, published in German in 1931 [Die Selknam], in 1937 [Die Yamana], in 1939 [Anthropologie der Feuerland-Indianer] and in 1974 [Die Halakwulup].
Gusinde's complete works were translated into Spanish and published in Buenos Aires by the Argentine Center for American Ethnology, in nine volumes, between 1982 and 1991.
His striking photographs became very popular, especially those depicting the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego with their remarkable body paint. Images are used to this day for a variety of purposes, generally related to advertising a brand or object. I won't dwell on these images in particular, but I would refer to the detailed work on this subject by Argentine anthropologist Danae Fiore.
Much less well-known are his audio recordings (he used a phonograph on wax cylinders), obtained from the inhabitants of Insular Western Patagonia. From Gusinde himself, we know that he used the phonograph on his third and fourth voyages.
In the report of the first trip he says that “due to the scarcity of resources [...] I could not obtain a phonograph with the essential accessories to record the language and songs of those Indians”; however, on the third trip, he managed to record “about 25 songs completely unknown until now, and a series of Yahgan words with phonetic sounds that do not exist in our alphabet”; and on the fourth trip he records “on phonograph cylinders more than 20 songs, sung by the Yahgan during these meetings,” and prints “two series of Ona words and some of their monotonous songs; I also compiled a long list of Haus words to save that dialect from oblivion." These are some of his statements regarding the use of the phonograph to record wax cylinders in his fieldwork.
Most part of the cylinders was sent by Gusinde himself to the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv for study, and today those pieces are housed in the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (formerly Museum für Volkerkunde). According to the instition catalogues, they are around 30 wax cylinders containing songs and other verbal accounts from Selk'nam, Yamana, and Halakwulup men and women. There are also 33 other wax cylinders in the Phonogramm-Archiv recorded by Wilhelm Koppers, another anthropologist from the Divine Word Society, who accompanied Gusinde on his third expedition to Tierra del Fuego, which took place between December 1921 and April 1922. These cylinders and the information therein were studied by Erich von Hornbostel, an Austrian musicologist and director, since 1905, of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv.
However, a certain number of cylinders -we ignore how many- was left by Gusinde at the Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology of Chile. That is a window that deserves to be explored, reviewing the records of the National Historical Museum, the institution that housed the former museum.
While coordinating the exhibition Martin Gusinde, Shadow Hunter, held in 1986 to commemorate the centenary of his birth, I had the opportunity to review the related objects in the National Historical Museum. I was able to identify a couple of intact containers of the wax cylinders Gusinde had left, although their contents were destroyed. I learned a story, which I'll share with you: the wax cylinders had been sent to Germany in 1971 to transfer the information they contained onto magnetic tapes. The shipment was made through the Chilean Embassy in Paris. Once the transfer was made in Berlin, the crate -with the wax cylinders carefully packaged- was sent back to Paris, where an officer found that the crate was too big and decided to put the contents in a smaller box, unaware of the precautions the cylinders needed for their protection. To sum it up, the cylinders arrived in Chile completely destroyed (I managed to see a very few little parts in 1986). Fortunately, the content had been recorded on magnetic tapes in Berlin, and a copy had been sent to Chile. I couldn't find it in the museum at the time, but obtained a cassette from the Phonogramm-Archiv with some of the songs that were recorded on the "Chilean cylinders."
I would like to conclude this brief introduction with a remarkable phrase from Martin Gusinde: “in short […], their voice will be perpetuated on phonograph cylinders,” the voices of the Yaghan, the Selk'nam, and the Kawésqar.