Carl Gunnar Feilberg


Carl Gunnar Feilberg was a Danish geographer, ethnographer and explorer of Asia.

Life

Feilberg was born in Copenhagen, Denmark on October 22, 1894. His father was Henning Frederik Feilberg and his mother Anny Caroline Louise Olsen He graduated from the Østersøgades gymnasium, Copenhagen in 1912. He attended the University of Copenhagen and in 1919 he was awarded a Master of Theology with excellence for the university's historical prize essay http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/accessit He married Martha Siegumfeldt and they had a son Anders F S Feilberg. He died in Hellerup in Denmark on January 6, 1972.

Work

Feilberg was appointed to the Chair of Human Geography at University of Copenhagen in 1949.
By the help of the Danish company,, Feilberg travelled in 1935 to Iran, where he carried out ethnographical fieldwork in Bala Geriveh among the Papi tribe in Southern Luristan in Iran from the end of March to the end of July. Feilberg, who carried out fieldwork among the Lur pastoralists, dealt with the history of nomadism through an intricate analysis of the structure and distribution of the black tent. During his stay in the district of Luristan in Iran he gathered the huge number of material cultures of the nomads of Luristan and gave them to the National Museum of Denmark. Feilberg, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, stayed with KAMPSAX engineers who had been contracted during the mid-1930s to build the Trans-Iranian railway. He made collections of ethnographic materials and took many pictures of people, working and relaxing; of tents and winter dwellings; of tools, rugs, carpets, and other domestic equipment; of animals; and of weddings and musical instruments. The photographs and collections are curated at the Danish National Museum and at the Prehistoric Museum.

Publications