OUR FACULTY | He’s felt the slither of an anaconda and bathed in the jungle river as a jaguar prowled the shore. The latter, “fortunately, was uninterested,” and the 9-foot skin of the former now adorns his office ceiling.
“I could have retired a few years ago, but they pay me to teach my hobbies,” says Peter Roe.
The 69-year-old anthropology professor has been at UD since 1976 and is internationally regarded for his expertise on the Indians of the Caribbean and South America, having spent years living and learning from the Wai Wai tribe of Guyana and Shipibo indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon.
To the latter, he is simply Quenetsoma, “he who carries designs.”
It is a fitting name for the illustrator who began his fieldwork in archeology and soon became more interested in the living than the dead.
“I study American Indians,” says the artist-turned-anthropologist. “And for American Indians, art is everything.”
Art has the power to embrace religion and science, life and philosophy. To live in this world, they believe, we must pay respects to all of the living beings that own it. “Animism,” Roe explains. “The belief that all the world has a soul.”
To experience this view, one needs only to enter Roe’s office. There, tucked away in Munroe Hall, beyond the steady traffic of Delaware Avenue, is the art of another world, of another people, of lands far removed and cultures long forgotten by Western consciousness.
Roe’s collection ranges around the globe—from Tibet to New Guinea to Africa—but focuses most passionately on the Amazon tribes he so clearly adores. In most cases, he bartered his expedition supplies for the objects.
“Anthropologists like to joke that history is the history of the Western world and anthropology is the history of everyone else,” says Roe. “But there’s truth to it. There’s another way of life, and the job of an anthropologist is to broadcast it.”
On the next two pages, we take a look inside the office of UD anthropologist, Peter Roe.
Article by Artika Rangan Casini, AS05
