HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article in Portuguese on photographer and anthropologist Pierre Fatumbi Verger.
Luhning, Angela, 2022. “Um fotógrafo antropólogo: trajetórias transatlânticas de Pierre Fatumbi Verger”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
A messenger between worlds, that’s how Pierre Fatumbi Verger (1902, Paris–1996, Salvador/Brazil) was called by many, due to his constant travels between oceans for more than five decades. His work as a photographer, ethnographer, anthropologist, and historian was focused on people in their respective cultural and historical contexts. Because of his travels, he arrived in Brazil in 1946, a country that became the starting point for much of his research in Nigeria and Benin, having studied the diasporic relations of Yoruba culture between the Gulf of Benin, Cuba and Brazil, with emphasis on Salvador, Bahia. He approached this theme from various perspectives: as a precursor of visual anthropology through his vast photographic work and as a researcher seeking to understand the modus operandi of the transatlantic slave trade, based on extensive documentary research. Published in a dossier containing various resources on Verger, this lavishly illustrated article unveils Verger’s trajectories. His visual and textual legacy was diverse and distributed, from the outset, among several different languages, countries and even continents, which makes an analysis and understanding of his contributions all the more complex, Luhning sustains. Delving into his personal archive, one perceives extensive networking, involving Nigerian, French and Brazilian intellectuals, as well as non-academic individuals on both sides of the Atlantic, already evidencing in his time a concern with traditional knowledge as a counterpoint to Eurocentric views of knowledge.
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