Robert Lehmann-Nitsche

Robert Lehmann‑Nitsche (November 9, 1872 in Radomierz – April 9, 1938 in Berlin) was a German anthropologist who spent thirty years in Argentina as director of the Anthropological Section of the La Plata Museum and professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He became an authority on indigenous peoples in Argentina and concluded his academic career at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin. After his death, he was accused of racism and having used research methods disrespectful of the rights of native Argentines.

Biography Lehmann‑Nitsche was born in what was then called Radomitz in a well-off family of farmers. He studied at the University of Freiburg and at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, and earned his doctorate in Philosophy in 1894 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). In the same university, he earned a second doctorate, in Medicine, in 1897.

Lehmann-Nitsche did perform the recommended study, but extended it to living individuals from the indigenous people of Argentina. He started in 1898-1900 by examining individuals from the Selkʼnam people who had been abducted in Patagonia and were exhibited by circuses or in events such as Buenos Aires' National Industrial Exposition of 1898.

He found the phonograph cylinders technique particularly useful to document vanishing forms of Argentine music. In 1905, Lehmann-Nitsche recorded extensively music from the Tehuelche people, but he went on in the following years recording several dozens of Argentine folk singers specialized in Tango. In 1906, he signed an agreement with the British industrialists Walter (1858-1944) and William Leach (1851-1932), who owned a sugar factory in La Esperanza, Jujuy. He had noted that workers there came from several different ethnic groups and used to sing while working. Lehmann-Nitsche recorded their songs in 30 phonograph cylinders that, like the better part of his recordings, he sent to the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv.

Selected works by Lehmann-Nitsche (under the pseudonym of Victor Borde) El Plata Folklore. Texte aus den La Plata-Gebieten in volkstümlichem Spanisch und Rotwelsch. Nach dem Wiener handschriftlichen Material zusammengestellt (1923). Leipzig; Ethologischer Verlag Friedrich S. Krauss. Studien zur südamerikanischen Mythologie : die ätiologischen Motive (1939). Hamburg: Friederichsen, de Gruyter & Co.