Name Augustin Kraemer Died 1941, Stuttgart, Germany | Books The Samoa Islands | |
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Augustin Friedrich Kraemer or Krämer (27 August 1865 – 11 November 1941) was a German naturalist and ethnographer. Augustin Kraemer was a Navy surgeon who worked in the Polynesia in 1893–95 and 1897–99.
He wrote the Palau sections of Georg Thilenius five-volume ethnographic documentation of the Hamburg Südsee Expedition, which sailed through Micronesia to record the island peoples and their way of life during the early 1900s (Palau, Ergebnissse der Südsee-Expedition, herausgegeben von Dr G. Thilenius 1926, Hamburg). His second voyage is described in Hawaii, Ostmikronesien und Samoa. Meine zweite Südseereise (1897–1899) zum Studium der Atolle und ihrer Bewohner published in Stuttgart by Strecker & Schröder, 1906.
His extensive study of Samoan culture contained in Die Samoa Inseln is revered by the modern Samoans because of the detailed genealogies, village honorifics (fa'alupega), and details of chiefly rhetoric he included. However, linguistic analysis of his diaries indicates that he had extensive assistance of a Samoan chief that today would have likely merited coauthorship with his indigenous informant.