The Man Who Wore a Suit in the Amazon

“Schultes wore a suit and tie in the field. Not from vanity, from respect. He treated the people and their knowledge with the same formality he would have brought to any scientific collaboration.”

The image of Richard Evans Schultes in a suit and tie, deep in the Colombian Amazon in the 1940s, is the central image of Wade Davis's portrait of his mentor in One River. It was not affectation. It was methodology.

Schultes spent twelve years in the Amazon at a time when the dominant attitude of Western scientists toward indigenous knowledge was either condescension or romanticism, either the native practices were superstition to be corrected, or they were evidence of a lost paradise to be mourned. Schultes brought a third attitude: rigorous empiricism. He wanted to know what the plants did and how the people used them, and he approached both questions with the same objectivity he brought to his laboratory work.

The suit was part of this. He treated the communities he worked with as professional collaborators, as sources of systematic knowledge accumulated over generations, rather than as subjects of study or objects of rescue. The formality communicated respect. The respect communicated seriousness. Seriousness was what allowed the knowledge transfer that produced his herbarium.

His students, Davis most memorably, but also Mark Plotkin, Tim Plowman, and dozens of others, describe Schultes as a demanding teacher who showed his students the Amazon the way it had to be understood: on foot, by canoe, in rain, in seasons, with the people who knew it from birth. He didn't lecture about plants in classrooms, he took his students to where the plants grew and introduced them to the people who used them.

The Harvard faculty colleague quoted in the Peabody Museum lecture video, 'whatever you do, stay away from Schultes; he's a dinosaur who spent a decade in the Amazon alone', missed the point entirely. The decade alone in the Amazon was not an eccentricity. It was the research.

Sources

• Harvard Magazine, Schultes obituary (2001)
• Davis, Wade. One River (1996)
• Wikipedia, Richard Evans Schultes