Karsten desired to study the Jibaros of the Amazonas area which had preserved their cultural and political independence in
spite of the Catholic missionaries. ... He had to wait till the end of World War I [to go home] which was especially annoying because of his perpetual lack of money....
During his trip [he] gathered material evidence on the Jibaro´s concrete reality for the Gothenburg Ethnographical Museum. ...he was economically compelled to collect material artefacts for the Gothenburg Ethnographical Museum, which provided the capital for his expedition... it proved to be an extremely difficult venture to send these valuable objects safely by ship, ...the collection arrived at Gothenburg much later than had been agreed between Karsten and Erland Nordenskiöld, the Director of the Gothenburg Ethnographical Museum at that time. On the other hand, Karsten had an impatient desire to collect evidence of the material culture of the Jibaro Indians. Owing to his self-evident ethnological conviction that the expedition had to produce material results, he was full of enthusiasm about collecting. But in retrospect, Karsten was also interested in gathering since he had decided to devote one “curiosity-collection” (in Swedish en kuriositetssamling) to his own purposes. This personal “extra-collection” is nowadays stored by Rafael Karsten´s children and grandchildren. (Salomaa 2002)
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