Karl Schwerin, professor emeritus, anthropology, continues to give to UNM. This time it’s his books. The Latin American and Iberian Institute hosted a reception to honor and thank Schwerin recently. After moving the books twice to accommodate office changes, Schwerin decided to donate them. He approached Latin American and Iberian Institute Director Cynthia Radding about the collection.
Photo: Karl Schwerin
“We are grateful to Dr. Schwerin for his generous gift and are pleased he thought to house it here. The collection enhances our existing library and will benefit student and faculty researchers in many fields, including anthropology, history, ethno-history, and Latin American Studies,” Radding said.
Schwerin said that he donated the books because he wanted continued access to them and to make them available to students. “For years I loaned them to my students and others in the department. Now they will be more broadly available,” he said.
María Casellas-Kelly, education specialist at the LAII, said that LAII’s reading room was under-utilized. “Nobody knew about the collection. When we accepted Dr. Schwerin’s collection, we had student employees document what was in it,” she said. They also approached Carolyn Mountain, program manager, University Libraries, about having the collection accessible electronically.
Mountain, who heads up DILARES, or the Division of Iberian and Latin American Resources and Services, has worked closely with the LAII for years. She went through the collection to see what should be added to the library’s holdings. She also asked a student, Deana Banos, to create an Excel file of the collection. The collection will be added to LIBROS, the online catalog, once the library is again able to accept donations.
“LAII offered to keep all the books the library wants until the library is able to accept the collection,” Mountain said. “Dr. Schwerin’s collection represents a rich selection of materials and enhances our anthropology collection. It will be particularly useful for doing Andean micro-studies,” she said.
Schwerin, who taught at UNM for 38 years, donated 1,500 titles valued roughly at $10,000. Schwerin’s areas of research included cultural change and ecological adaptation in Venezuela, Ecuador, Honduras and Mexico. He also studied populations of indigenous people at the time of contact.
“It is a difficult area of research because indigenous is defined differently in each country. For example, Costa Rica officially reports no indigenous people although they have an office for them,” he said.
Prior to donating the collection, Schwerin gave of his time and talent by writing the history of UNM’s anthropology department. He also created the Karl H. Schwerin Graduate Fellowship in Ethnology, which is awarded annually by the Department of Anthropology. It was first awarded in 1998.