R. Tom Zuidema


Reiner Tom Zuidema was professor of Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is well known for his seminal contributions on Inca social and political organization. His early work consisted of a structural analysis of the ceque system. He later extended this approach, based on French and Dutch structuralism, to other aspects of Andean civilization, notably kinship, the Inca calendar and Incaic understanding of astronomy.

Biography

Zuidema was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands. He obtained a PhD in his home country and later moved to the United States. He had started studying Indonesian social sciences but later switched to anthropology of South America. The main reason for this was that Indonesia became independent of the Netherlands, and he could not work in the country anymore. Zuidema studied Spanish in Madrid and moved to Peru in 1957. He published a study on the of Cusco in 1962. In 1964 Zuidema moved his family to Peru and started teaching at San Cristóbal of Huamanga University. After three years he returned to the United States and started working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1993 he retired.
In 1977 Zuidema became a correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in 1993.

Publications (selection)