George and Eloi Weber-da Cruz

The Andaman Association's main author, editor, president, founder-member and temperamental engine driver, George H.J. Weber, was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1944. He has always been a tireless collector of facts and figures and his early interest in the Maya civilisation at age 12 had spread into collecting lists of rulers and dynasties which in turn expanded into active grown-up archaeology, mostly in the Far East, the Philippines and Indonesia, into cartography, into the botany of ferns and mosses, history, prehistory, astronomy (if you want to make George really blow his top, just confuse astronomy with astrology - and then dive for cover) and many other field, mostly in or at the fringes of the natural sciences. Among his other interests are meteorology, geology, palaeontology, evolutionary theory, the origins and migrations of the human race, linguistics, the history of writing, genetics and last but not least, good food. All this not neccessarily in this order.

As the president of our multi-cultural and multi-religious Association, George has to tread warily among the many religions present. His stock answer to the question on his own religious beliefs is that "there are so many religions, who am I to decide which are right?" To the tiresomely inevitable follow-up question whether he does "at least believe in God", his stock reply is "that depends on what your definition of God is". You won' t get much more than that out of him. His interest in what he feels are fundamentally unanswerable questions is limited. There are so many more relevant and potentially answerable questions waiting to be investigated - and perhaps even answered.  

George's wife Eloi is his principal co-operator , advisor, wailing wall, lightening rod, nurse, stress counsellor, and peace-maker. Maria Eloi da Cruz-Neta, is a Brazilian child psychologist of partly Amerindian (Yanomami) extraction. The two met in the early 1990s when George was looking for someone with a knowledge of an Amerindian language for - yes! - yet another of those articles. Eloi then worked for the Governor of Minas Gerais at Belo Horizonte (later to become President of Brazil) and was recommended through an unlikely chain of contacts as the right person to approach. Contact was established but soon Eloi discovered to her own surprised pain that she had forgotten most of her childhood knowledge of Yanomami which she had last used at the age of four. She could not be of much help linguistically but by then the correspondence had become so interesting on all sorts of other subjects that it continued regardless. George went to Brazil to meet his lively correspondent face to face for the first time and later Eloi came to Switzerland to visit George. They married in 1993 and now live happily in Switzerland. In 2003 George forgot their 10th wedding anniversary and narrowly escaped with his life. Eloi takes a lively interest in and supports George's Andamanese work (they have been to the Andamans together in 1995) but she also follows her own scientific interests, among which intercultural and geriatric psychology are foremost. 

Eloi and George Weber, Switzerland, July 2004.

 

George has worked in printing and publishing in Europe, Southeast Asia and the Far East and has travelled widely besides, formerly mostly in Southeast Asia and lately also in Brazil. Wherever he finds himself, he always makes a bee-line for the local history and natural history museums. His life-long habit of continuously acquiring ever more bits of useless knowledge and skills has made him, in his own words, "one of those people who know very little about an awful lot". Spotting outlandish connections that the specialists ("people who know an awful lot about very little") often miss, has become something of a specialty for him. In his function of President of the Andaman Association and Hon.Sec of the Nicobar Association, he sees himself not so much as a researcher (still less a campaigner) than a generalist who brings together scientists working in a wide variety of different fields. In both Associations and through this Web-site he has been able to do this to a degree that has come as a surprise to everyone, including himself.

How did George, in the late 1980s, come to re-invent the then virtually extinct field of Andamanology? It is a typical "George story". In the 1980s, encouraged by Judy and Geoffrey Kingscott of Nottingham, George wrote many popular articles on a wide variety of languages and linguistic subjects for the British "Language Monthly" and its successor publications. The most successful of them is reprinted on this website under the title "The Top Languages". Another remarkably successful article (to judge by the number of readers and their reactions) has been "Toba Volcano and Human Evolution" also on this web-site.

It was during his search for the least-known but still living language family (characteristically, George insists that readers should note language family, not individual language!) that he stumbled accross the truly obscure Andamanese language family. That was in the early 1990s. George's interest was really roused when his research immediately ran into a solid brick wall - he charged head first, charged again and got a bad headache, but in the end the wall thought it wiser to crumble. When George discovered how unusual and how grossly under-researched and under-reported subject were the Andamanese and other Asian Negritos, he just could not help make a wider study of the field. As much of this web-site shows, he is still very much at it. 

For an on-line interview with George on 30 April 2008 with Language International see Interview.

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Last changed 27 August 2006