Although William Lipkind, the anthropologist, may be photographically elusive, Bill Lipkind, the Martha Vineyard's vacationeer, is rather well known in art circles.
William Lipkind (1904-1974), an American anthropologist who did fieldwork among the Karajá, Javaé, Tapirapé, and Kaiapó between 1938 and 1939, passed away on this date (October 1, 1974), 50 years ago. Lipkind was part of the group of Columbia University graduate students who came to Brazil under the auspices of the Museu Nacional (Rio de Janeiro), which included noted Brazilianist Charles Wagley (well known for his work among the Tapirapé, the Tenetehara, and regional populations in Pará, Brazilian Amazon). In 1944 he obtained a Ph.D. with a dissertation on the Winnebago language (Nebraska, USA), under the mentorship of Frans Boaz, based on fieldwork conducted in 1936 (therefore, years before his work in Brazil).
Lipkind had hoped to obtain a job at the Museu Nacional, teaching linguistics to Brazilian students, but those intentions were not welcomed by the Museu's director, Heloísa Torres (cf. Correia & Mello 2008). His anthropological career being cut short, he would go on to cultivate an award-winning career as a writer of children's books. Although his work in Brazil resulted in only a couple of published papers (1940, 1948) on the Karajá (a Macro-Jê group on the Araguaia River, Central Brazil, on whose language I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation), Lipkind was adept at collecting ethnographic artifacts (producing an impressive collection for the Museu Nacional; cf. Lima Filho 2017), in addition to anthropological and linguistic data now housed at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives. As his dissertation demonstrates, Lipkind was likely the most linguistically-oriented among his Columbia colleagues sent to Brazil.
Lipkind preceded Wagley in the Araguaia region and helped establish the grounds for the latter's fieldwork. Both traveled together during Wagley's first introduction to the Tapirapé (cf. Reis 2023:183; see also Wagley 1988), in 1939. That is why, when looking for a picture to illustrate William Lipkind's author page in the Curt Nimuendajú Digital Library, I wasn't surprised to find, among Wagley's materials at the University of Florida's Digital Collections, an image titled (typo and all) "William Lipkin [sic] - graduate student from Columbia University, studying Caraja Indians (Photograph 79)." In the picture, Lipkind sits at a typewritter on a desk made of wooden crates (a picture that, albeit posed, manages to capture some of the ruggedness of the Brazilian backwoods back then):
Photograph 79: The plot thickens
The Charles Wagley collection at the UFDC website is a treasure trove of photographs, sound recordings, field notes and other writings, superbly digitized and fairly well contextualized. The website is very stable, avoiding link rot even when the collections have been restructured. Given the collections' high level of reliability, I was surprised to see a post on the "Highly Accurate Pictures of Anthropologists" blog calling into question the identification of the picture, citing the Curt Nimuendajú Digital Library's Flickr account:
This photo appears to be of Lipkind, via Flickr, where the Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú claims this is from the Wagley papers, but the online Wagley papers do not have the photo so… I’d like to see more on the provenance fo the photo.
Yes, we ‘claimed’ so because that’s exactly the information provided in the collection’s website. It seems the "Highly Accurate" blogger lacked due diligence, as the original links are still online (and not that hard to find). For the sake of further link stability, and ease of access, we’ve also saved them via Wayback Machine.
Photograph 79 is part of a series (numbered 1-186) documenting Wagley’s first trip to Brazil, from his arrival in Rio de Janeiro to his initial work among the Tapirapé. Three other pictures later in the series seem to portray the same individual (albeit not as clearly): photograph 90 in a section titled “Traveling on Rio Tapirape (Photographs 86-97);” and photographs 119 and 121 in a section titled “The anthropologist at work (Photographs 119-121)” (photograph 120 is obviously of Valentim Gomes among the Tapirapé). Compare the individual in these pictures with the one in Photograph 79:
Searching for further corroboration for the identification of the picture as being that of William Lipkind, I came across a possible plot twist. Ribeiro et al. (p. 284-285, in Leitão (org.) 2017) identify the gentleman at the typewriter as renowned Brazilian writer Dalcídio Jurandir, who assisted Wagley during the latter’s work on public health in Gurupá, Pará (for confirmed portraits of Jurandir, click here). However, despite some slight resemblance between both men, the fact that the picture is part of a series documenting Wagley’s early work with the Tapirapé (when his colaboration with Jurandir had not started yet) seems to corroborate its identification as provided by the UFDC website.
Bill Lipkind and Aaron Siskind
Another picture of William Lipkind that has appeared recently in the anthropological literature, published by Lima Filho (2017), shows him decades after his work in Central Brazil, alongside his wife, Maria Cimino, artist Alice Yamin and her husband Leo Yamin, and photographer Aaron Siskind. The picture is part of Alice Yamin's papers at the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art:
This picture helps shed light on a facet of Lipkind's life that seems to be little-known among anthropologists. Along with famed photographer Aaron Siskind, he was part of a close-knit group of friends who would spend their summers at the Yamin's house in Martha's Vineyard. "Bill" (as Lipkind was called among friends--he would author his children's books as "Will") was a recurrent subject of Siskind's photography, dating back to the 1930s, when Siskind had just acquired his first camera. Among Siskind's works at the Eastman Museum there are two pictures from 1935 portraying Lipkind in full frontal nude. Lipkind is also represented in a later, more abstract fase of Siskind's photography, in a 1960 series of photos titled "Physical Portraits of William Lipkind," including works such as Bill Lipkind 5, Bill Lipkind 10, Bill Lipkind 20, Bill Lipkind 22, Bill Lipkind 32, and Bill Lipkind 33.
Thus, although pictures of William Lipkind doing fieldwork as an anthropologist may not be as ubiquitous, Aaron Siskind's personal, fairly intimate portraits of his friend Bill Lipkind are rather prominent, having graced the walls of prestigious art museums.
Besides hopefully connecting two facets of William Lipkind's life that are often appreciated in isolation (by anthropologists, on the one hand, and art lovers, on the other), this brief sojourn served to awaken my curiosity as a linguist. Since he was the first academically-trained linguist to work on the Karajá language, his data at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives may, in addition to their intrinsic historiographic value, provide valuable insights into possible cultural and linguistic change.
Sources
I've created a Tumblr blog to share the sources on William Lipkind's life that I've gathered while researching Photograph 79, including pictures, posts on his children's books, and a radio program episode, a mini-lecture on "Human Nature" he did for New York Public Radio, in which he briefly mentions his experiences among the Karajá. Visit https://williamlipkind.tumblr.com/
