Abstract
Austrian and German anthropological traditions are considered in view of the influence they had on global anthropology. The chapter is built around the centrality of the anthropological notion of culture and cultural dynamics. The particularistic and relativist notion of culture is in fact believed to have emerged from Germany from the eighteenth century, where intellectuals have juxtaposed the term Kultur to Zivilisation. Within German anthropology, universalistic perspectives on culture have continued through the nineteenth century, as in the evolutionary approach of Gustav Klemm and Johann Jakob Bachofen. A different form of cultural universalism was introduced by Adolf Bastian with his theory of the psychic unity of mankind. Towards the end of the nineteenth century a third declination of Kultur emerged within the well-known cultural-historical school. Ratzel and Leo Frobenius’s methodological contributions opened the possibility to compare the cultural tracts of different peoples for the reconstruction of processes of cultural diffusion. At theoretical level this led to the definition of the Kulturkreise (‘culture circles’ or ‘culture complexes’). The greabnerian version of this model was adopted by the Vienna school. The particularistic and relativistic notion of Kultur as well as the methods and concept of the cultural-historical school have informed the early phases of American anthropology through the mediation of Franz Boas and his school.
The Nazi phase forced several influential anthropologists to leave the country. However, the presence of important museums and research institutes allowed the recovery of some continuity with the classic approaches after the war. The Frobenius Institute is a case in point, with its capacity to keep focus on the cultural morphological approach through the work of Frobenius, Jensen and Haberland, three scholars linked by direct teacher-pupil relationships.
Germanophone anthropology is today highly diversified, open to new topics and contaminated by the most diverse tendencies, but it is still possible to identify elements of continuity with the classic themes and approaches. The rhetoric culture project, promoted by Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler, is a case in point. With this initiative, American anthropology, with its post-modern developments of the discipline, seems to be paying back its early time debt to German anthropology.
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Notes
- 1.
The relevant arguments are presented in scattered writing, mainly Über den Fleiss in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen (On Diligence in Several Learned Languages) (1764), Über die neuere deutsche Literatur: Fragmente (Fragments on Recent German Literature) (1767–1768), Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin of Language) (1772).
- 2.
“Wherever men have lived together as a group over a period of time there is a culture. To be sure, there are differences, but these are differences of degree, not of kind” (Herder cit. in Barnard, 1969, p. 382).
- 3.
See, for instance, Ratzel’s contribution (Ratzel, 1882)
- 4.
- 5.
The first edition of the first volume, inspired by Andrew Lang, had already been published in 1912 (Bernardi, 1995, p. 167).
- 6.
Bernardi notices how in the sixth volume Schmidt manifests the fact that he really believed in a divine revelation of correct religious ideas to humankind (Bernardi, 1995, p. 168).
- 7.
Among the discoveries that are still very topical today, is the acknowledgement of institutional components reserved for women, relevant at the contemporary political level with regard to the issue of customary institutions and human rights, and the practice of mummifying some leaders, relevant, even today, in a diffusionist fashion, for the debate of the connection of Oromo culture with ancient Egypt or the Nubian State.
- 8.
- 9.
This department closed in 2020.
- 10.
The institute is probably the European centre that gathers the largest number of anthropologists, a primacy disputed with the Anthropology Department of the University of Durham.
- 11.
The online Oxford Bibliographies carries a rich, annotated bibliography of the project (Meyer et al., 2016).
- 12.
I thank Ivo Strecker for sharing the draft.
- 13.
On a phone call made early in January 2022, Strecker confirmed that he has direct knowledge of classic writings of Herder and Humboldt.
- 14.
For example, there was a strong influence on Vinigi Grottanelli and on the formative period of Bernardo Bernardi, the two teachers who followed one another at the first Ethnology Chair at the University La Sapienza of Rome (Grottanelli et al., 1977, p. 565; Bernardi, 1990, p. 7; Pavanello, 2020, pp. 17–18, 21; Bassi, 2020, pp. 292–5).
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Bassi, M. (2023). From Herder to Strecker: Birth and Developments of the Anthropological Notion of Culture in Germany. In: D'Agostino, G., Matera, V. (eds) Histories of Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21258-1_4
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