Why the Suit Mattered

“Schultes wore a suit and tie in the field for fifty years. This was not eccentricity. It was a statement about how he understood his relationship with the communities he worked with.”

The image of Richard Evans Schultes in a suit and tie in the Colombian Amazon has become legendary in ethnobotany, partly because it is genuinely remarkable, partly because Wade Davis described it in One River with enough specificity that anyone who read the book will never forget it.

The suit was not about fashion. It was about how Schultes understood the ethics of his fieldwork.

The standard anthropological approach of his era was either colonial (the scientist extracts knowledge and leaves) or romantic (the scientist goes native, adopts local dress and customs). Schultes did neither. He went to communities as a scientist, with notebooks, botanical presses, and the apparatus of professional inquiry, but he also took those communities seriously as holders of systematic knowledge.

The suit communicated: I am here to do professional work. Your knowledge is professional knowledge. I am not a tourist, and I am not going to pretend to be you. I am going to be myself, and I expect you to be yourselves, and we are going to learn from each other as professional equals.

The communities Schultes worked with were not confused about what he was. He was not confused about what they were. The suit was the sartorial expression of that clarity.

Sources

• Davis, One River (1996)
• Harvard Magazine, Schultes obituary (2001)