Fernando Ortiz Fernández

Fernando Ortiz Fernández (1881 to 1969) was a Cuban lawyer, essayist, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and scholar of Afro-Cuban culture, a polymath who spent his life recording and explaining indigenous Cuban culture. Born in Havana and raised partly in Menorca, he took his law degree at the University of Barcelona in 1900 and his doctorate in Madrid in 1901, and sat as a Liberal member of the Cuban House of Representatives from 1917 to 1922. He founded or helped found institutions for the study of Cuban culture, among them the Sociedad de Folklore Cubano, the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos and the International Institute for the Study of Afroamericans, and directed the Revista Bimestre Cubana from 1910 to 1959. He coined the term transculturation for the process of cultural convergence and exchange, and is widely seen as a pioneer of postcolonial Latin American thought and a foundational voice in African American anthropology. He has been called the third discoverer of Cuba, after Columbus and Humboldt.