Hugo Bernatzik

Hugo Adolf Bernatzik (26 March 1897 – 9 March 1953, born and died in the city of Vienna), was an Austrian anthropologist and photographer. Bernatzik was the founder of the concept of alternative anthropology.

Hugo Adolf Bernatzik was a son of the Professor of Public Law at the University of Vienna and member of the House of Peers, Edmund Bernatzik (1854-1919). After school in 1915, he volunteered to join the Austro-Hungarian Army and was deployed among other places in Albania. In 1920, he abandoned his medical studies for financial reasons and became a businessman. After the early death of his first wife Margarete Ast (1904-1924), he embarked on extensive travels and expeditions taking photographs, which became his profession and passion: Spain and north-west Africa in 1924; Egypt and Somalia in 1925; Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1927; Romania and Albania between 1926 and 1930; Portuguese Guinea in 1930/31 (with Bernhard Struck, Museum of Ethnology, Dresden); British Solomon Islands, British New Guinea, as well as Bali in Indonesia in 1932/33; Swedish Lapland in 1934; Burma, Thailand and French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) in 1936/37; and, French-Morocco in 1949/50.

Bernatzik financed his research and living expenses as a travel writer and freelance scientist, by publishing photo coverages, giving public slide lectures and purchasing collections for ethnological museums in Germany and Switzerland. His journalistic activity and his exceptional photographs of foreign people made him quite prominent. He prepared a worldwide photo archive of remote tribal people considered as threatened. With regard to colonial policies, Bernatzik argued that colonial administrators should take the customs, way of life and the tribal environment into account. In 1927, he married Emmy Winkler (1904-1977), a psychology student in Vienna, who became his assistant and travel companion. From 1930 on, he studied ethnology, anthropology and geography at the University of Vienna and completed a Ph.D doctorate in 1932 with a "monograph of the Kassanga". In June 1935, he applied for his postdoctoral habilitation to the University of Graz to be a professor based on the work he had done on "The development of the child on the Solomon Island of Owa Raha". He received confirmation from the Austrian Federal Ministry in May 1936 in Rangoon. Finally, at the beginning of 1939, he was appointed at the University of Graz to the Institute of Geography. Plans for another expedition to the Chinese province of Yunnan were cut short by Hitler's attack on Poland in September 1939.

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