(Re)approaching to and withdrawing from Germany: Curt Nimuendajú as part of transnational networks of anthropologists

Abstract

In the history of anthropology, there has been produced an extensive bibliography about some personages. This is also true for the Brazilian ethnologist of German origin Curt Nimuendajú (1883-1945). Revisiting the various, Brazilian and foreign, narratives about his biography can be justified above all when new empirical information becomes available. That Nimuendajú cultivated numerous contacts with Brazilian and foreign researchers is a well-known fact, but it is worth while taking another look at the transnational networks of anthropologists he took an active part in and seeing how they structured his activities as a researcher and collector. In this article, three of these networks are analyzed in chronological order (with Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Emilie Snethlage, Fritz Krause and Otto Reche, and Robert Lowie and Julian Steward, respectively, as his principal interlocutors). It becomes evident that their formation, discontinuation, and transformation reflect, in a kind of microcosm, the changes in the scenario of Brazilian anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century, with its gradual turning away from German ethnology, opening for dialogues with North American cultural anthropology.

Keywords:
Curt Nimuendajú; German ethnology; Brazilian anthropology; scientific transnationalism