Berta Ribeiro

Berta Gleizer Ribeiro CONMC (born Bertha Gleizer; Bălți, 2 October 1924 – Rio de Janeiro, 17 November 1997) was a Moldovan-Brazilian anthropologist, ethnologist, and museologist known for her extensive work on the material culture of Indigenous peoples of Brazil. She was married to anthropologist and senator Darcy Ribeiro.

Born in Bălți, then part of Romania, Berta and her older sister Genny were left in Eastern Europe after their mother’s suicide, as their father had already migrated to Brazil seeking work opportunities amid the antisemitic persecution faced by Jews in the region. Only with the aid of an international organization were they able to reunite with him in 1932. Years later, her sister and father were arrested and deported for alleged subversive activities during a period of intense political repression against Jewish immigrants at the outset of the Vargas dictatorship. Orphaned, Berta was cared for by families of Jewish immigrants under the protection of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), later marrying Darcy Ribeiro in 1948.

Berta Ribeiro’s career initially followed the professional and political movements of her husband over the years, but her prominence surged after their separation in the 1970s, when she was already 50 years old. She developed a newfound passion for the knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples, a personal shift that fueled her contributions across various domains: academic, political, cultural, editorial, and artistic, ultimately establishing her as the foremost expert on indigenous material culture in Brazil during her time.

She conducted fieldwork to develop her research, engaging directly with diverse indigenous communities across several Brazilian states. She visited numerous museums worldwide, organized exhibitions on Brazilian indigenous art and culture, and published extensively on indigenous peoples and their customs. She also established key methodological foundations and classification systems for material culture research and ethnographic museum documentation. Her prolific academic, artistic, and cultural output stemmed from her unwavering dedication to her work, as she engaged in multiple roles — researcher, museum collection curator, author of nine books and over forty articles, contributor to various works, and university professor in undergraduate and graduate programs. Until the end of her life, she remained active in the fields of anthropology, museology, ethnology, art, and ecology.

She was a member of the Brazilian Anthropology Association (ABA), the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SBPC), the Regional Museology Council of Rio de Janeiro, and the editorial boards of the journals Ciências em Museus, Ciência Hoje das Crianças, and the Anais do Museu Paulista. She served on the selection committee for postgraduate studies in Visual Arts and taught in the master’s program in History and Art Criticism at the School of Fine Arts (EBA/UFRJ). She acted as an advisor to the National Indigenous People Foundation (FUNAI) and head of museology at the National Museum of Indigenous People (MI), taught in the Anthropology Department of the National Museum, and conducted research for the National Geographic Society.