Geyman Sergey Veniaminovich
05 July 1887 — 1975
Biography, education, career:
Sergey Geyman, a bourgeois from Irkutsk, was interested in ethnography and economics. When he was a student of Bekhterev Psychoneurological Institute in Saint-Petersburg, he travelled to Egypt (1911), India, the island of Java, Japan, and China (1913). He brought ethnographic items to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography from China, Korea, Japan, India, New Guinea, and Buryatia. Geyman gave tours around the MAE. He participated in the Second Russian Expedition to South America, during which he disengaged from the group on 12 August 1914 and travelled around the continent on his own (Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru): he gave lectures in various cities and towns of the continent, wrote newspaper articles, took an interest in the life of European colonies, Slavic settlements in particular. Geyman gathered ethnographic collections of Kadiwéu for the MAE and the Museum of Ethnography of Buenos-Aires University (1915). He worked as an ammunition examiner at a military plant of a Canadian Automobile and Foundry Company in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, USA (1916‑1917). When the plant closed down, Geyman looked for other jobs to sustain himself, then moved to Nizza, France (1932). In the 1960-s he visited the USSR three times and donated his diaries and descriptions of ethnographic collections to the MAE.
Areas of expertise: History and ethnography of the peoples of North and South America; modern ethnopolitical and ethno-confessional processes