Approach
Reichel-Dolmatoff had always stressed the importance of holistic research. By adopting the approach of consistent participant observation with the peoples he studied, he was able to better grasp and later clarify the world views of numerous populations and cultures now being diminished today. He very well may have been the very first anthropologist to ever ingest the entheogenic drug, ayahuasca. In so doing, he partook in a sacred ritual central to the organizing principles and cosmological beliefs of many Amazonian peoples. He understood the many lessons to be learned and emulated from indigenous societies throughout the world.
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff’s hard work and extensive studies throughout Colombia as a whole, have paved the way for many more generations of aspiring archaeologists and anthropologist. His many research and publications achievements (Oyuela-Caycedo, 1998) have earned him the title of “Father of Colombian Archaeology” — and rightly so.
Read more about this topic: Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff
Famous quotes containing the word approach:
“A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspend their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.”
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“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)