Anne Chapman

Anne Chapman

Anne MacKaye Chapman (c. 1922 – June 12, 2010) was a Franco-American ethnologist. She studied the Mesoamerican civilizations and especially the Tolupan (Jicaque) people of Honduras. She had 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 Joseph and Annette 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 Ángela Loij.

Chapman wrote on many important anthropologic issues; possibly her most important work concerning the Fuegian was Drama and Power in a Hunting Society: The Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego (1981). She also wrote 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 wrote 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 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 last book is entitled European Encounters with the Yamana People of Cape Horn, Before and After Darwin (2010, New York, Cambridge University Press), 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.

She also made films about the lives of the last members of the Selk’nam and Yahgan tribes, including 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 was a finalist in the International Film and TV Festival of New York.