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Mario Christian Meyer
Summary
Mario Christian Meyer is a Swiss-Brazilian doctor and advocate for the sustainable development of the Amazonia and preservation of its indigenous cultural heritage.
Meyer was born in Salta, Argentina. His father, Hermann Meyer, a Swiss polytechnics engineer specializing in agronomy, became a fazendeiro (large plantation farmer), first in Argentina, in the early 1930s, then in Brazil in 1954. His mother, Anne Camille Blanc de Corbières Meyer, was a Swiss structural engineer. The young Meyer spent his first months in Salta, where his father had established a Hacienda and an olive oil production plant. Because of Peronism, with its nationalism and isolationism, his family lost everything and, in 1954, consequently moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
In the book Embracing Amazonia, published in Brazil, 2008, Eliana Spengler (Giant of Ecology Award coordinator) talks about Meyer's childhood and youth:
In his early years, he elected his father's library as his shelter; there he nourished his young mind and imagination reading books by classical Brazilian writers about Amazonian rainforest and Índios. Later, through encyclopaedias, he developed personal approaches to his numerous questions about the meaning of life.
The stories of Brazilian authors Jose de Alencar, Castro Alves and Machado de Assis fueled Meyer's love of the Amazon, while reading Montaigne's" Bon sauvage", Rousseau's "État de Nature" and Locke's concepts of empiricism and "tabula rasa" directed his thoughts on the nature of human development.
Later in life, Meyer experienced an Índios initiation rite, an experience that sealed his commitment to the Amazonian cause.
Meyer studied medicine, specializing in Developmental Neuropsychology and Child Psychiatry. He went on to teach at the Sorbonne in Paris. His thesis Apprentissage de la langue maternelle écrite: étude sur des populations autochtones dites socio-culturellement défavorisées dans une approche interdisciplinaire,
prefaced by Prof. Dr.
Official source
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