20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

732 Hartmut WALRAVENSSociety and went on several botanical collection trips to South East Asiaand China. The results were tens of thousands of botanical specimensand almost 2000 bird skins. He never got married, and loved his life inYühu, a village near Lijiang, where his former residence is now maintainedas a museum. When life for a foreigner became difficult there he left (1948)and stayed for a few years in Kalimpong, hoping for an opportunity toreturn. During his stay in Lijiang he became deeply interested in the life,language and religion of the Naxi. He learned the Naxi language, improvedhis command of Chinese and acquired some knowledge of Tibetan, inorder to be able to study the sources. He also assembled a large libraryon the subject (now in the University of Washington Library, Seattle).Last not least, he was smitten by the pictographic script which the Naxidtombas (priests, sorcerers) used for the manuscripts which recordedtheir rituals. So he amassed about 10,000 of these, all of which foundtheir way later into public and private collections in the United States andEurope. It turned out that the manuscripts did not give the full text of therituals, and so Rock could not sit down and just “translate“ them. Heworked with experienced dtombas who chanted the rituals on the basis ofthe manuscripts which served as kind prompt-books, and explained them.When the work of ten years was sunk by a Japanese fighter plane, Rockwas indefatigable – he started again, but this time work progressed faster.Owing to the support of Harvard University, the Anthropos Institute andthe Italian Indologist and explorer Giuseppe Tucci a large amount ofRock’s Naxi materials was published, including his encyclopaedic Naxi-English dictionary.Rock was a great traveller, not only regarding his expeditionsand plant hunting trips. He must have had a fabulous memory because moreoften than not he did not have access to his voluminous library, and in spiteof clerical help from people like René von Nebesky-Wojkowitz 2 ,and his botanical “back office” (Egbert H. Walker [1899-1991] inWashington, D.C., U.S. National Museum) it is truly astounding to see thework of this jet set scholar.Rock was an acknowledged systematic botanist, and he is justlycredited the second father of Hawaiian Botany (the first one was Wilhelm2This promising young Austrian ethnologist passed away prematurely. See J. W.de JONG: René von Nebesky-Wojkowitz, 29.6.1923-9.7.1959. Indo-Iranian Journal3.1959, 306-9; Etta Becker-Donner. René Nebesky-Wojkowitz. Archiv für Völkerkunde14.1959, 1-3.