Martin Gusinde

Martín Gusinde (29 October 1886, in Breslau – 10 October 1969, in Mödling, Austria) was a German priest and ethnologist famous for his work in anthropology, particularly on the native groups of Tierra del Fuego. He was one of the most notable anthropologists in Chile in the first half of the 20th century, together with Max Uhle and Aureliano Oyarzún Navarro.

In 1900, Martin Gusinde joined the missionary order Divine Word Missionaries. He began higher studies in 1905 in St. Gabriel in Mödling, near Vienna. After ordination in 1911, Gusinde went to Chile. He worked as a teacher from 1912 to the end of 1913 and subsequently at the Ethnographic Museum in Santiago de Chile with Max Uhle until 1922, becoming a head of department in 1918.

Gusinde undertook four research journeys to Tierra del Fuego between the end of 1918 and 1924. The objective was to explore the different groups of Tierra del Fuegan Indians, the Yamana and Stekhman (also known as Selk'nam), who had been displaced by immigrants and severely depleted by imported diseases for which they lacked natural resistance. He stayed in Tierra del Fuego for 22 months in total. He was allowed to participate in the initiation rites of the groups he studied. On behalf of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, he recorded the songs and chants of the indigenous peoples; these are the sole surviving audio recordings of the Tierra del Fuegan Indians.

In 1926 Gusinde, gained a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Vienna. Together with Frederick Hestermann, he edited and helped arrange for publication in 1933 of a Yamana-English dictionary, based on an 1879 manuscript by Rev. Thomas Bridges, an Anglican missionary at Ushuaia. This was later reprinted in Buenos Aires in 1987, and in a paperback edition in 2011.

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