Daniel P. Biebuyck 1925–2019

Daniel P. Biebuyck died on December 31, 2019, aged 94. First trained in philology and law at the University of Ghent, Dr. Biebuyck took advanced degrees in cultural anthropology at the London School of Economics. Working for the Belgian Institute for Scientific Research in Central Africa from 1949 to 1961, he undertook detailed ethnographic studies in east-central Belgian Congo among Lega, Nyanga, Bembe, and related peoples. He wrote monographs and scholarly articles from these experiences, and through shorter IRSAC projects, he visited more than fifty other Congolese ethnic groups, contributing to wide-ranging overviews such as Congo Tribes and Parties (1961) that he coauthored with Mary Douglas.

Through a position at the University of Delaware in 1961, Dr. Biebuyck helped found the Department of Anthropology. After teaching anthropology at UCLA from 1964 to 1966 and curating the university’s first African collections, he returned to Delaware for the rest of his long career. He enjoyed guest professorships at Yale and several other universities, and retired from Delaware as H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Anthropology and the Humanities in 1989. Dr. Biebuyck’s last years of teaching were at the University of Southern Florida as Golding Distinguished Professor of African Art.

1.

Daniel Biebuyck filming Baremba hunter-gatherers of east-central Belgian Congo, 1957.

Photo by Henri Brandt during the shooting of Les Seigneurs de la Forêt (dist. Twentieth Century Fox, 1958), for which Dr. Biebuyck was a consultant.

Photo: reproduced with permission from Brunhilde Biebuyck

Dr. Biebuyck’s greatest intellectual passions were African visual and narrative arts. Among his many publications, Lega Culture: Art, Initiation, and Moral Philosophy among a Central African People (1973) remains one of our most significant studies of African humanities to date. Lega people produced an astonishing panoply of sculptures in ivory, bone, and wood, and as Dr. Biebuyck evocatively demonstrated, single objects and complex displays were mnemonic and didactic, recalling aphorisms, relationships, and ethical purposes of Bwami as a Lega association through which initiates achieved increasing levels of esoteric knowledge throughout their lives. Rich costuming and choreographies permitted Lega to dramatize fundamental truths of human society. A sustained value of Lega Culture was Dr. Biebuyck’s ability to situate works of art in complex performance contexts rather than admiring them for their formal properties to the exclusion of Lega thinking and making. Statuary from the Pre-Bembe Hunters: Issues in the Interpretation of Ancestral Figurines Ascribed to the Basikasingo-Bembe-Boyo (1981) may be less well known than Lega Culture, yet like the latter, over and above the strength of Dr. Biebuyck’s art-oriented ethnography, his contributions are of additional importance because civil strife in east-central Democratic Republic of the Congo has been so acute for so long that very little if any other scholarly research has been undertaken there.

3.

‘Alunga masked performance among Bembe people of east-central Belgian Congo, 1950.

Photograph by Daniel Biebuyck from research about which he wrote in African Arts (1973).

Photo: reproduced with permission from Brunhilde Biebuyck

As an editor and contributing author, Dr. Biebuyck produced the still stand-out Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art (1969) that features compelling chapters by William Bascom, Edmund Carpenter, William Fagg, Robert Goldwater, Roy Sieber, and Robert Farris Thompson, among others. In 1986 and 1987, Dr. Biebuyck published two compendia on The Arts of Zaïre (DRC) among eastern and southwestern peoples. Also in 1987, he produced a valuable annotated bibliography of central African arts.

Daniel Biebuyck published a dozen essays and reviews in African Arts, with particular pieces on Nyanga circumcision masks (1973) and musical instruments (1974), Lega stools (1978) and dress (1982). He also contributed a paper on “textual and contextual analysis of African art studies” (1976) and a triad on sculpture from forest peoples of eastern Zaïre (1976–77). His books were reviewed in African Arts by notable scholars (Aniakor, Berns, Bravmann, Crowley, Lauer, MacGaffey, Merriam), and he returned the favor. Dr. Biebuyck also published in other journals, with an especially valuable example his “Buhabo Statues from...