Eugene Gaspard ('Gassy') Marin

Eugene Gaspard ('Gassy') Marin
Born	1883
Died	1969
Residence	Whiteway, near Stroud, Gloucester [1921, 1949] c/o Banque Belge pour l'Etranger, 4 Bishopsgate, EC2 [1933]
Occupation	molinologist
Society Membership membership ordinary fellow left 1969 deceased elected_AI 1921.11.15

Contents

Notes

Office Notes

House Notes

1921.10.25 proposed by A.M. Hocart, seconded by W.H.R. Rivers
1969.10 death noted

Notes From Elsewhere

molinologist; known as 'Gassy'

Mr. Depaulis wrote: "Eugène Gaspard Marin (1883-1969) was neither a Brit, nor an anthropologist. He was a Belgian anarchist!"
Born into a well-to-do Walloon Belgian family in Boitsfort, Belguim in 1883, he became involved with the Communist-Libertarian colony in Stockel-Bois near Brussels, Belgium, founded in 1905 by Emile Chapelier; the colony was dissolved in 1908. Marin then went to England and settled in Whiteway, the Tolstoyan colony near Gloucester, where he resided until his death in 1969.
In 1928 Marin undertook to travel around the world, partly by bicycle. His trip was to last 10 years through Europe, East Africa, India (where he met Gandhi), Sumatra, and China. He often stopped and mingled with local people in order to learn how they lived. He accumulated a mass of ethnological and sociological information, recorded in many hand-written notebooks that are unfortunately still unpublished. Marin's papers are dispersed between the Imperial College Science Museum Library in London, and the International Institute of Social History (IISH), in Amsterdam. He published two articles on games: "An ancestor of the game of Ludo", Man, Vol. XLII, 1942, no. 64, pp. 114-115 + 116-117, and "Somali games"

Whiteway Colony was a residential community in the Cotswolds in the parish of Miserden near Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK. The community was founded in 1898 by Tolstoyans and today has no spare land available with over sixty homes and one hundred and fifty colonists.[1] At the beginning, private property was rejected and personal property shared; however, today the colonists' homes are privately owned and sold at market value.[2][3] As the colony abandoned Tolstoy's philosophy it has been regarded by many, including Mohandas Gandhi who visited in 1909, as a failed Tolstoyan experiment.[4]

Publications

External Publications

House Publications

Somali games, JRAI 1931
An old Pwo-Karen alphabet, Man 1943
An ancestor of the game of ludo, Man 1942
Batak scarecrows, Man 1954
Tamil pioneers of cultural ecology, Man 1942

Related Material Details

RAI Material

Other Material

papers and notes relating to Marin, sundials and windmills at Science Museum