Herbert Baldus

Herbert Baldus (Wiesbaden, March 14, 1899 - São Paulo, October 24, 1970) was a German-born Brazilian ethnologist. He lectured in Brazilian Ethnology at the Free School of Sociology and Politics in São Paulo from 1939 to 1960, and later headed the Ethnology Section of the Museu Paulista from 1947 to 1968, where he also became director.

Biography Herbert Baldus was the son of Martin Baldus, a mathematician, and Carolina Baldus, daughter of German builders. After turning 18, he joined the German Royal Cadet Corps in Potsdam as an aviator, participated in the World War I and began writing war poems. In 1921, he made an unspecified trip to Argentina and two years later arrived in Brazil.

Arrival in Brazil and early years Herbert Baldus settled in São Paulo and, in the same year, joined a film expedition that visited the Xamakoko, Kaskihá and Sanapaná people of the Paraguayan Chaco, where he became interested in ethnology. Using the research material collected on this trip, he published Os índios Chamacoco in 1927, his first article on indigenous issues. Later, Baldus visited the Guarani on the coast of São Paulo, which led him to write Ligeiras notas sobre os índios Guaranys no litoral paulista in 1929.

In 1944, Baldus excavated sites in Paraná and found pottery shards in the Paranapanema River, which were analyzed and described in the study Tonschenberfunde in Nordparaná. Two years later, he visited the Kaingang people of Ivaí and documented their mythology in his 1947 article Os Kaingang do Ivaí. The psychologist Aniela Ginsberg helped Baldus in an experiment on a group of thirty-two Kaingang men and women, whose results were published in the 1947 article Aplicação do psicodiagnóstico de Rorscharch a índios Kaingang.

Works Selected works include: