Paul Schebesta

Paul Schebesta (20 March 1887 – 17 September 1967) was a Polish Catholic missionary, ethnographer, linguist and anthropologist. He was a member of the Society of the Divine Word. He is known for his studies on pygmy peoples and was one of the leading authorities on the subject.

Early life Paul Schebesta was born on 20 March 1887 in Pietrowice Wielkie, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now Poland). He was of Moravian ancestry and was fluent in Czech and Polish, but he had to learn German when he went to school. and recommended that Schebesta should travel to British Malaya and study the Semang peoples, which he did in 1924.

Legacy Schebesta was one of the first researchers at the time to classify pygmy people as members of the human species, instead of a variation of mutation, rejecting the idea that they were primitive. Schebesta's most popular works were his travel reports, which were published in multiple languages and primarily described his experiences in the field using anecdotes. He was also one of the first people to describe the pygmies in Southeast Asia and Africa, but never gained broad international attention from the scientific community. According to anthropologist Margit Berner, Schebesta was not as well recognized due to his clerical background and the field methods he used.

Schebesta also wanted to foster the survival of the pygmies and make sure that they would fit into modern civilization, to which the Bambuti people gave him the honorary title of "Baba wa Bambuti". He also worked on recording the and preserving the dialects and languages of the people, including Mamvu, Mangbutu, Batak Karo, Mvuba, and Lese.

Schebesta's plaster casts were later used to create physical models of the pygmy peoples. The casts and some human remains he gathered can be found in the Department of Anthropology collection of the Natural History Museum, Vienna and the collection of the National Museum, Prague among other institutions.