Martin GUSINDE (1886–1969)

a priest of the Society of the Divine Word, an ethnologist, a high school and university teacher, born on October 29, 1886, in Breslau (today Wrocław), Silesia, died on October 18, 1969 at St. Gabriel in Mödling near Vienna.

After finishing a high school run by the Divine Word Missionaries at Neisse (today Nysa), Silesia, he joined the order and began his philosophical and theological studies at St. Gabriel in 1905. In 1911, he was ordained a priest and appointed to missionary work in Chile. He reached his destination in 1912 and was assigned to be a teacher in natural sciences at the Lyceo Alemán, a new high school in Santiago, Chile. In 1913, he became an unpaid trainee at the Museo Histórico de Chile and in 1918, a manager of a section of that museum. In 1917, he was invited to teach anthropology at the Catholic University of Chile. At that time, he made his first of several research trips to the Mapuche Indians in Chile. Between 1918 and 1924, he made four research trips to Tierra del Fuego, where he studied the Yamana, the Selk’nam and the Halakwulup.
In 1924, Gusinde returned to Europe and obtained his doctoral degree in ethnology, physical anthropology, and prehistory at the University of Vienna in 1926. At that time, he also worked with W. Schmidt at the Pontifical Missionary Ethnological Section of the Lateran Museum in Rome. In 1928/29, Gusinde spent some time in the United States, where he visited the Sioux, Cheyenne, Pueblo and Zuni Indians. Subsequently in 1934/35, he joined Paul Schebesta for an expedition to the eastern part of the Congo in order to study the short stature ethnic groups living there. He was particularly interested in the biological reasons for their small size.
In 1949, he accepted an invitation to take a teaching position at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. From there, he undertook research expeditions to the people of the Kalahari Desert between 1950 and 1953. In 1954, he did his field research among the small-in-stature Yupa Indians on the border between Venezuela and Columbia, although he did not consider them to be pygmies. In 1955, he was invited to give a series of guest lectures at the Catholic University of Nagoya in Japan, which gave him an opportunity to visit the Ainu in the northern part of Japan and the Aeta in the Philippines. This was followed by a number of visits to the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1956, where he conducted anthropological research among the Ayom pygmies. His teaching contract at the Catholic University of America expired in 1957. Seizing an opportunity to return to the Catholic University of Nagoya, he gave there another series of guest lectures in 1959-1960. In 1961, he returned to St. Gabriel, which remained his home base until his death in October 1969. He had still taught ethnology at Nagoya during the winter semester of 1964/65, but in winter of 1965, he suffered a stroke which severely constrained him.
The volumes which Gusinde wrote about the Indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego are his most important legacy. The first volume, on the Selk’nam (Ona), appeared in 1931. The second one, on the Yamana (Yagan) in 1937. The manuscript of the third volume, on the Halakwulup, was lost in the confusion of the Second World War. However, he was able to reconstruct the manuscript on the basis of his field notes in the last years of his life. The volume was published posthumously in 1974. These three ethnographies, which were translated into English (1961) and into Spanish (1982-1989), were accompanied by about one thousand photographs, which captured glimpses of their life and reconstructed rituals. Gusinde had also edited, together with Ferdinand Hestermann, an over 50-years-old manuscript of Thomas Bridges’ “Yamana-English. A Dictionary of the Speech of Tierra del Fuego” in 1933.
Gusinde could still retrieve fragments of the old beliefs and mythology, of the rituals and customs of the past from the elderly. He had the ability to win over the trust of the Yamana and was accepted as a candidate in a youth initiation ceremony, by which he became a member of the tribe. He took part in two youth ceremonies, one ceremony for adult men, and prepared himself to become a medicine man. He also participated in the kloketen ceremony of the Selk’nam.
Photography was an essential part of Gusinde’s fieldwork but he had to overcome strenuous objections of his hosts, who saw him initially as a mank’acen, the “shadow snatcher.”

(May 2026)