My friend John Palmer, who has died aged 69, was an anthropologist whose life was forever changed when he met the indigenous Wichí people of South America’s Gran Chaco region.
John was teaching English in Argentina as a gap year student in 1974. Intent on seeing every corner of the country, he travelled to the far north, and found himself in the Wichí’s homeland, an area little known even by most Argentinians. In the Wichí – who are so softly spoken their conversation is more like whispering – he encountered people whose qualities he hugely admired. He returned there in 1978, after university, for two years of doctoral fieldwork, living in the tiny community of Hoktek T’oi (“Stunted Lapacho Tree”). It was to become his spiritual home.
Born in Sheffield, John was the son of Michael, an engineer, and Mary (nee Wilton); the family moved to Devon when he was four. After attending Clifton College, Bristol, and after a gap year, he took a degree in modern languages at the University of Oxford, returning to do an MPhil in Latin American studies and a PhD in anthropology.
John spent the next 10 years in Oxford, working on his doctoral thesis and as a proof reader for Oxford University Press, but in 1990 the Wichí wrote to the indigenous rights organisation Survival International, where I work, requesting that funds be raised to help him return to assist them with a land rights claim. Since he had left, 27 communities had banded together, wanting to claim communal rights to 500,000 hectares of their ancestral land.
He returned and, with a few colleagues, submitted a detailed land claim report in 1991: the Wichí finally secured the land in 2020. Underneath his gentle and courteous demeanour, John had the determination to stand up for the Wichí people against fierce opposition from settlers, soy producers and politicians. Hoktek T’oi’s land was expropriated for the community in 2001 and they were granted the right to use it in 2007, but they still await full legal title.
In 2005, John married Tojweya, and they went on to have six children. He was teaching anthropology at Salta University in northern Argentina when, in 2009, his work was recognised with the awarding of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Lucy Mair medal. In 2012 the Argentinian film-maker Ulises Rosell made a documentary, The Ethnographer, about John and Tojweya’s life together, and John’s efforts to support the Wichí.
He is survived by Tojweya and their children, his brother, Guy, and his sisters, Julia and Sarah, and has been buried in Hoktek T’oi.
