Anne MacKaye Chapman (January 27, 1922 – June 12, 2010) was a Franco-American ethnologist who focused on the people of Mesoamerica writing several books, co-producing movies, and capturing sound recordings of rare languages from the Northern Triangle of Central America to Cape Horn in South America.
François Lenormant (17 January 1837 – 9 December 1883) was a 19th-century French Hellenist, Assyriologist and archaeologist.
Sonia Elizabeth Guillén is a Peruvian anthropologist and the President of the Centro Mallqui, who is the current Minister of Culture of Peru. She was elected a foreign associate the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2012.
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is a Peruvian anthropologist. She is a full professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and has previously taught throughout the USA and in Chile. Her research primarily focuses on the shamans or machis of the Mapuche community of Chile, and the ways shamanic practices and beliefs are affected by and influence communal experiences of state power, mythical history, ethics, gender, justice, and identity.
Bacigalupo’s research encompasses a number of topics including shamanism, social and historical consciousness, environmental humanities, transformational politics, decolonizing methodologies, social and environmental justice, climate justice, cosmopolitics, the Anthropocene, more-than-humans, power dynamics in colonial politics, death, self and personhood, gender and sexuality, historicity, Indigenous histories, social memory, religion, and medical anthropology. She uses anthropological and social theories including new materialism, critical race theory, queer theory, and embodiment, and phenomenology. She primarily studies the Global South, Indigenous Latin America, the Mapuche people, Chile, and northern Peru.
Her recent research focuses on forms of power and the politics of the Indigenous views of sentient landscapes, spirits, and other ‘more-than-humans’. Using queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and new materialism, Bacigalupo looks at collective ethics, environmental justice, and social justice in the Anthropocene, and how colonial histories have both influenced and been contradicted by Indigenous knowledge. She studies interactions between shamans and more-than-humans, and how these practices can change the structures of power by critiquing colonial perspectives about the organization of nature and the world. One of her arguments is that shamans offer a useful perspective for conceiving of new ideas for the future and critique for the status quo. Many of these shamans are public figures in Indigenous communities, where they are intellectuals who can influence the political landscape.At the State University of New York at Buffalo, Bacigalupo is the chair of the Religion and Spirituality section of the Latin American Studies Association. She also serves as the Program Councilor for the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.
Venetia Newall (1935–2017) was an English-American folklorist who was elected president of the Folklore Society and fellow of the American Folklore Society.
Henry Farmer Dobyns, Jr. (July 3, 1925 – June 21, 2009) was an anthropologist, author and researcher specializing in the ethnohistory and demography of native peoples in the American hemisphere. He is most well known for his groundbreaking demographic research on the size of indigenous American populations before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.
Karl Gustav Vollmöller (or Vollmoeller; 7 May 1878 – 18 October 1948) was a German philologist, archaeologist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and aircraft designer. He is most famous for the elaborate religious spectacle-pantomime The Miracle and the screenplay for the celebrated 1930 film The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel), which made a star of Marlene Dietrich.
Harold Scheub (August 26, 1931 – October 16, 2019) was an American Africanist, Evjue-Bascom Professor of Humanities Emeritus in the Department of African Languages and Literature (now the Department of African Cultural Studies) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Scheub has recorded and compiled oral literature from across southern Africa.
Samuel Preston Bayard (April 10, 1908, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – January 10, 1997, in State College, Pennsylvania) was an American folklorist and musicologist. He received a B.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1934 and later earned an M.A. from Harvard University.
He collected fiddle and fife tunes in southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia from 1928 to 1963. He is known for his interest in the melodies of traditional music at a time when often only the texts were collected. He introduced the concept of "melodic families", which are groups of tunes that appears to be structurally related. He traced the origins of many traditional American fiddle tunes back to the British Isles.
In addition to his work on fiddle tunes, he was the expert on the use of the fife in traditional American music. He is fondly remembered by former students for his large collection of snuffboxes, which he used regularly.
He established the folklore program at Pennsylvania State University, and taught there from 1945 to 1973
He was a fellow of the American Folklore Society, and its president from 1965 to 1966.
He died on January 10, 1997, in State College, Pennsylvania. An award in his name has been established at Penn State for graduate students in comparative literature.
Émile Nourry (December 6, 1870 in Autun, France – April 27, 1935 in Paris) was a French publisher, bookseller, and folklorist known under the pen name Pierre Saintyves (P. Saintyves, sometimes incorrectly given as Paul Saintyves).He was President of the Society of French Folklore (Société de folklore français et de folklore colonial), director of Revue du folklore français and Revue anthropologique, as well as Maître de conférences at the School of Anthropology, Paris.P. Saintyves is credited with the hypothesis that many common folktales originate in pagan rituals, published in his Les Contes de Perrault et les récits parallèles, 1923.