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of the Histories of Anthropology

The French civil engineer Jean-Baptiste Vaudry (1875-1938) worked for the Bolivian government between 1902 and 1913 on commissions to delimit the borders with Argentina and Brazil. In the 1920s he worked for several years in the tin mines of the altiplano. Although widely distributed at the time, the more than 500 photographs he took during those years fell into oblivion until their rediscovery in the 2010s. They show indigenous people from the Chaco, the Chiquitania, the altiplano and the valleys, in the most varied situations: workers on the haciendas or in the mines, in remote communities or in the streets of the cities, giving a lively and realistic testimony of a colourful Bolivia.

Keywords: Visual anthropology | Ethnographic photography | Bolivia

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