Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff

Personal life Reichel was born in 1912 in Salzburg, then part of Austria-Hungary, as son of the artist Carl Anton Reichel and Hilde Constance Dolmatoff. Oriented in the classics (Latin and Greek) he did most of his high school at the Benedictine school of Kremsmunster in Austria. He attended classes at the Faculté des Lettres of the Sorbonne and in the École du Louvre from late 1937 to 1938. Reichel emigrated to Colombia in 1939, where he became a Colombian citizen in 1942. Reichel became member and was the Secretary to the Free France Movement (1942-1943) with the help of his colleague and friend the French ethnologist Paul Rivet who was the Delegate of the Resistance of France Libre and living in Colombia. General Charles De Gaulle later awarded Reichel-Dolmatoff with the medal of the Ordre national du Mérite.

In 1963, Reichel and his wife taught courses in anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes, and then in 1964 formally created the first Department of Anthropology in Colombia at the university in Bogotá. Reichel-Dolmatoff worked for 5 years at the Department and left together with his wife and several other professors due to changes in the Department.

Reichel received a short visiting fellowship to Cambridge University in 1970 and became an adjunct professor at the Anthropology Department of the University of California in Los Angeles. During the 1960s and until the mid-1990s Reichel-Dolmatoff advanced research on Amerindian shamanism, indigenous modes of life, ethnoecology, and on cosmologies and worldviews, and he also did research on hallucinogens related to shamanism, entheogens, ethnoastronomy, ethnobotany, ethnozoology, and on the vernacular architecture of temples and of the Amazonian 'maloca' longhouses; additionally he did research on the shamanic symbolism of pre-Columbian goldwork, as well as other Amerindian artifacts and material culture, including basketry.

Reichel-Dolmatoff was a member of the Colombian Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Associate Member of the NAS National Academy of Sciences of the United States and he was also a member of the Academia Real Española de Ciencias. He was awarded the Thomas H. Huxley medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1975. Reichel-Dolmatoff was the single author of 40 books and of over 400 articles, all dedicated to the archeology and anthropology of Colombia and specifically highlighting the relevance of indigenous peoples of the past and present.

In 1983, Reichel-Dolmatoff was one of the founding members of the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), which was created and headed by dr. Abdus Salam (Nobel Prize in Physics) with renowned scientists of the Third World who sought to focus differently on the issues of science and technology for the interests of the developing countries themselves.

International recognition While living in Colombia for over half a century, Reichel-Dolmatoff provided his professional services to the national and departmental governments, and as university professor, researcher and author to public and private universities. In 1945 he founded in Santa Marta the Instituto Ethnologico Nacional del Magdalena and in the early 1950s he became professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Cartagena. He occupied, amongst other positions, those of researcher and lecturer of the Instituto Etnologico Nacional and the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and he was Chair and professor of the Department of Anthropology of the Universidad de los Andes. He was visiting professor of the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan. Reichel-Dolmatoff participated in academic congresses and seminars and wrote conference papers in universities and international or national academic events in South America, North America and Central America as well as in Europe, Japan. In the field of archaeology, Reichel-Dolmatoff helped define the early archeological evidence of the Formative stage in Colombia, based on sites excavated which provided the then most ancient site in all the Americas where pottery had originated over 6,000 years ago, and this research was tied also to new interpretations of the meaning and connections of the cultural evolution of Colombia with other regions of the Americas. Reichel-Dolmatoff researched origins of early chiefdoms and explained the millenarian evolution of Amerindian cultures and their links to contemporary indigenous groups. His excavations focused mainly on living spaces and garbage heaps, where the archaeologist avoided exploring or excavating monumental sculptures, monumental architecture and indigenous burial sites. In the field of anthropology, Reichel-Dolmatoff focused on investigating and celebrating Colombia's ethnic and cultural diversity and especially of indigenous peoples. The scope and extent of his work and dedication to understanding, acknowledging and disseminating the importance and value of Colombia's contemporary indigenous peoples was significant.

At a conference in 1987, Reichel-Dolmatoff spoke the following words: "Today I must acknowledge that since the beginning of the 1940s, it has been for me a real privilege to live with, and also try to understand in depth, diverse indigenous groups. I noted among them particular mental structures and value systems that seemed to be beyond any of the typologies and categories held then by Anthropology. I did not find the ‘noble savage’ nor the so-called ‘primitive’. I did not find the so-called degenerate or brutish Indian nor even less the inferior beings as were generally described by the rulers, missionaries, historians, politicians and writers. What I did find was a world with a philosophy so coherent, with morals so high, with social and political organizations of great complexity, and with sound environmental management based on well-founded knowledge. In effect, I saw that the indigenous cultures offered unsuspected options that offered strategies of cultural development that simply we should not ignore because they contain valid solutions and are applicable to a variety of human problems. All of this more and more made my admiration grow for the dignity, the intelligence and the wisdom of these aborigines, who not least have developed wondrous dynamics and forms of resistance thanks to which so-called ‘civilization’ has not been able to exterminate them.

I have tried to contribute to the recuperation of the dignity of the Indians, that dignity that since the arrival of the Spaniards has been denied to them; in effect, for five hundred years there has been an open tendency to malign and try to ignore the millenary experience of the population of a whole continent. But humankind is one; human intelligence is a gift so precious that it can not be despised in any part of the world, and this country is in arrears in recognizing the great intellectual capacity of the indigenous peoples and their great achievements due to their knowledge systems, which do not lose validity for the mere fact they do not adjust to the logic of Western thinking.

I hope my conceptualizations and works have had a certain influence beyond anthropological circles. Maybe I am too optimistic, but I think that anthropologists of the older and new generations, according to their epochs and the changing roles of the Social Sciences, have contributed to revealing new dimensions of the Colombian people and of nationhood. I also have trust that our anthropological work constitutes an input to the indigenous communities themselves, and to their persistent effort to attain the respect, in the largest sense of the term, that is owed to them within Colombian society. I think that the country must highlight the indigenous legacy and guarantee fully the survival of the contemporary ethnic groups. I think that the county should be proud to be mestizo. I do not think that it is possible to advance towards the future without building upon the knowledge of the proper millenarian history, nor overlook what occurred to the indigenous peoples nor the black populations (Afrodescendants) during the Conquest and the Colonies, and also during the Republic and to this day. These are, in sum, some of the ideas that have guided me through almost half a century. They have given sense to my life."