Anne Chapman
Anne MacKaye Chapman (born 1922) is a Franco-American ethnologist. She has studied the Mesoamerican civilizations and especially the Tolupan (Jicaque) people of Honduras. She has also visited Magallanes and Tierra del Fuego many times, since 1965, to study the Fuegian peoples in depth, especially the Selk’nam and Yahgan.
Concerning the Fuegian, she first became interested in the matter through Annette Laming-Emperaire and Joseph Emperaire. Her research was essential to understand the cultures of these peoples and she met the last members of the Selk’nam people: Lola Kiepja and Angela Loij. She has published many papers in important anthropologic revues, but, without a doubt her most important work concerning the Fuegian is the book Drama and Power in a Hunting Society: The Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego (1981). She has also published La Isla de los Estados en la prehistoria: Primeros datos arqueológicos (1987, Buenos Aires), El Fin de Un Mundo: Los Selk'nam de Tierra del Fuego' (1990, Buenos Aires), and three chapters listed in Cap Horn 1882-1883: Rencontre avec les Indiens Yahgan (1995, Paris), which contains many photographs taken by members of the French expedition to Cape Horn 1882-83 that are among the best of the Yahgans, ten of the Alakaluf in 1881 of the eleven who were kidnapped and taken to Paris and other European cities, and six of the last Yahgans she took in 1964 and 1987. Later, she has also published Hain: Selknam Initiation Ceremony and End of a World: The Selknam of Tierra del Fuego, both books includding a CD of Lola Kiepja’s Hain chants (2003, Santiago de Chile). In 2004 she has published El fenómeno de la canoa yagán (Universidad Marítima de Chile, Viña del Mar) and in 2006 both Darwin in Tierra del Fuego (Buenos Aires) and Lom: amor y venganza, mitos de los yámana (Santiago de Chile). Her present book in press is Cape Horn: Encounters with the Native People Before and After Darwin's Voyage, a narrative of the dramas played out from 1578 to 2000 in the Cape Horn area of Chile by the native people, the navigators, the missionaries and other Europeans.
Chapman has also made the following films about the lives of the last members of the Selk’nam and Yahgan tribes: The Onas: Life and Death in Tierra del Fuego (1977, in collaboration with Ana Montes de González) and Homage to the Yahgans: The Last Indians of Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn (1990), which became International Film and TV Festival of New York Finalist.
Awards
- Doctor Honoris Causa. University of Magallanes, Punta Arenas, Chile (2003).
- Orden José Cecilio del Valle en grado de Caballero. Foreign Relations Ministry, Tegucigalpa, Honduras as well as other honors by the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia and the University of Honduras mainly for her work with the Tolupan of Montaña de la Flor and the Lencas of Intibuca (2005).
- Orden al Mérito Docente y Cultural Gabriela Mistral en el grado de Comendador. Given by the Chilean Ministry of Education (2005).