Read an Excerpt

Before Boas

The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

History and Theory of Anthropology and Ethnology

Introduction

In the absence of history, men create myths.

— George W. Stocking Jr., in "Matthew Arnold, E. B. Tylor, and the Uses of Invention" (1963)

Debates on the history of anthropology play an important part in anthropological theory. They generally revolve around questions such as: When did anthropology begin? How was its subject matter defined? What were the formative influences on its development: scholarly curiosity or colonialism? Anthropologists enjoy such debates as part of a "professional socialization that consists in good part of constructing unique, individual genealogies for disciplinary practice" (Darnell 2001:xxi). Accordingly, the history of anthropology has been written from a variety of viewpoints, depending on gender, nationality, and theoretical or political perspectives.

The data presented in this book indicate that ethnography and ethnology as important roots of sociocultural anthropology originated in the work of eighteenth-century German or German-speaking scholars associated with the Russian Academy of Sciences, the University of Göttingen, and the Imperial Library in Vienna. The formation of these studies took place in three stages: (1) as Völker-Beschreibung or ethnography in the work of the German historian and Siberia explorer Gerhard Friedrich Müller during the first half of the eighteenth century, (2) as Völkerkunde and ethnologia in the work of the German or German-speaking historians August Ludwig Schlözer, Johann Christoph Gatterer, and Adam František Kollár during the second half of the eighteenth century, and (3) as ethnography or ethnology by scholars in other centers of learning in Europe and the United States during the final decades of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.

While ethnography was conceived as a program for describing peoples and nations in Russian Asia and carried out by German-speaking explorers and historians, ethnology originated with historians in European academic centers dealing with a comprehensive and critical study of peoples — in principle, of all peoples and nations. Whereas the former group of scholars laid the foundations for a descriptive and comprehensive study of peoples and nations, the latter developed ethnology as a theoretical and comparative discipline (Völkerkunde).

Plural Views on Anthropology and Its History

These findings are relevant to debates on the origins of anthropology, its object, and its identity. Most sociocultural anthropologists view anthropology as a "young" discipline, originating during the second half of the nineteenth century with Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), Henry Sumner Maine (1822–88), and John Ferguson McLennan (1827–81) in Great Britain; Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87) and Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) in Switzerland and Germany; and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81) in the United States. In their research, anthropology — at the time usually referred to as ethnology — is regarded to have become "scientific" by adopting evolutionism as a theory and kinship as the primary object of study. Ethnologists and social or cultural anthropologists share this opinion to an almost canonical degree. Subsequently, Franz Boas (1858–1942) founded modern anthropology in the United States during the early twentieth century, while Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) played a similar role in France. In Great Britain Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) are seen as the fathers of social anthropology. Malinowski is often celebrated as the father of long-term fieldwork, developing the emblematic method of "participant observation" with which modern anthropology purportedly began.

In contrast to practicing anthropologists, historians trace anthropology to ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Arabic scholars. Arguing that anthropology is an "old" discipline, they see it as commencing in antiquity with Herodotus and Strabo among the Greeks, Ptolemy and Tacitus among the Romans. Their work on the history and geography of the ancient world included a discussion of the population, or ethnography, which is often seen as having laid the foundation for anthropology. This view is sometimes broadened by assuming that an interest in other people is basic to humanity, leading to the thesis that cultural anthropology began in prehistoric times when the "first Stone Age man" commented on his neighbors' customs.

Many theories have been developed as alternatives to these two basic views. Some argue that anthropology arose during the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery (1450–1700), when Europeans explored the world. Such journeys mainly served to expand trade but seafarers encountered "exotic" human beings beyond Europe and wrote valuable ethnographic reports. Others point to overland travelers like Carpini, Rubruck, and Marco Polo. During the Middle Ages merchants and missionaries, dispatched to establish relations with the Mongol rulers of China, often penned detailed reports. Still others see anthropology as a "romantic" discipline, originating from encounters between European travelers, missionaries, and colonial officers and the peoples outside Europe. This view links a definition of anthropology as the study of the "Other" to Romanticism, a philosophical movement of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries that added a sentimental countercurrent to Western rationalism.

Historians of Native Americans claim that comparative ethnology began with the French Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau in 1724. He in turn built on José de Acosta's work, dated 1590 (Pagden 1986). Others argue that relativism in anthropology originated with Michel de Montaigne, Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Bernardino de Sahagún during the sixteenth century, both in Europe and in the Americas (Erdheim 1990).

Social anthropologists in Britain and France developed their own perspectives, seeing anthropology as a product of the Enlightenment. Durkheim (1892) counted Montesquieu among his scholarly forebears; Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, 1963) adopted Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Radcliffe-Brown (1951, 1957) and Edward Evans-Pritchard (1951, 1962, 1981) acknowledged the moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment as their intellectual precursors. Adam Ferguson, John Millar, Lord Kames (Henry Home), Lord Monboddo (James Burnett), William Falconer, and William Robertson utilized ethnographic data to illustrate the presumed development of human society.

Finally, there are those who recognize anthropology only when it was professionalized. Anthropology began when "the first anthropological (then called ethnological) society was formed" in Paris in 1839 (Tax 1955b:316). This narrative falls in with the viewpoint that anthropology was established as a discipline during the nineteenth century in specialized societies, ethnographic museums, and anthropological departments. The first ethnological societies were founded in France, the United States, and Great Britain between 1839 and 1843; the first specialized ethnographic museums were established in St. Petersburg (Russia), Leiden (the Netherlands), and Copenhagen (Denmark) in 1836–41 (see table 12); the first ethnographic chairs were established in Russia and the Netherlands during the 1830s (see epilogue); and the first anthropological departments emerged in the United States during the 1890s. American historians of anthropology consider professional anthropology to have commenced with Franz Boas and his students in the early twentieth century (Stocking 1974).

My view is that ethnology as one of sociocultural anthropology's roots is neither young nor old but a mature discipline emerging during the German Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Russia, northern Asia, and central Germany. This view supplements Regna Darnell's summary that the "role of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers, or the French rationalists of the same period is already well known to the history of social science. These men laid the foundations not only of anthropology as a discipline, but also of other fields of inquiry" (Darnell 1974b:5).

Varieties of Anthropology

Thus the origins of anthropology are highly diverse. Evolutionism, Romanticism, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, and classical antiquity have all been proposed as starting points. These views clearly depend on the theoretical perspectives of the respective authors and their answers to the question: What is anthropology about?

In the world at large, anthropology is especially known in three forms: as philosophical anthropology, as physical or biological anthropology, and as cultural or social anthropology. Philosophical anthropology came into being during the eighteenth century with Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder. John Zammito (2002) argues that Kant and Herder stood at the cradle of anthropology, which "was born out of philosophy" in Herder's reformulation of Kant's precritical work of the 1760s and early 1770s. Michael Forster (2010) emphasizes Herder's pivotal role in the emergence of the philosophy of language, "founding such whole new disciplines concerned with language as anthropology and linguistics."

Biological anthropologists claim that a physical study of the human species developed after 1735 with Carolus Linnaeus, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Petrus Camper, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, John Hunter, Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, Georg Forster, Charles White, Georges Cuvier, James Cowles Prichard, William Lawrence, and others (see chapter 7).

Cultural anthropologists emphasize the predominance of culture and of evolutionism and thus give priority to the nineteenth century. Social anthropologists focus on the study of society, a concept surfacing during the eighteenth century. Students of folklore, usually regarded as a separate discipline, emphasize the study of manners and customs beginning in sixteenth-century Europe.9 Social and cultural anthropology are generally seen as ethnology's successor, but even in this field one finds considerable debate on its origins. Clifford Geertz summarized the dilemma in the Times Literary Supplement by stating that the problem of defining anthropology's subject matter "has been around since the beginning of the field, whenever that was (Rivers? Tylor? Herder? Herodotus?)" (Geertz 1985:623). This lineup ranges from the twentieth to the nineteenth and the eighteenth centuries back to antiquity.

Yet the majority of sociocultural anthropologists trace the origins of their discipline to the 1860s, when their "ancestors" embraced evolutionism as a theory and kinship as a method. For them Bachofen's Mutterrecht (1861), Maine's Ancient Law (1861), McLennan's Primitive Marriage (1865), Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), and Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) are the founding texts of sociocultural anthropology as a specialized discourse on human diversity.

Most practicing anthropologists do not see it as a problem that none of these founding fathers presented their work as a contribution to anthropology. In the era of these ancestors, anthropology was predominantly seen as a biological study of humans conducted by medical doctors and naturalists. True, in the late eighteenth century, Kant applied the term "anthropology" to a philosophical discussion of humankind, not in terms of culture, nor of peoples, but "from a pragmatic point of view" (Kant 1798). By 1860, however, "anthropology" was primarily reserved for the biological study of human diversity. This trend had been set by the German anatomist Blumenbach, who in 1790–95 reserved the name "anthropology" for a study previously referred to as the "natural history of man" (see chapter 7).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, physical anthropology rose to dominance with the founding of anthropological societies in Europe and the United States. Adopting Blumenbach's terminology, the French physician Paul Broca created the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris in 1859. He was followed by the British physician James Hunt, who founded the Anthropological Society of London (ASL) in 1863. These societies appeared alongside the ethnological societies that had been established in Paris, New York, and London two decades earlier. As the result of discussions about the origins and definition of the terms "anthropology" and "ethnology," a holistic model was invented during the 1860s and 1870s in which "anthropology" was seen as the general term for a field of sciences including ethnology.

Anthropology and Ethnology

The founding of anthropological societies sparked a debate in England, France, and the United States about the unity of the human species and the name of the societies dealing with this subject. Following French initiatives, the Ethnological Society of London (ESL) had been founded in 1843. The ASL split off from this organization in 1863. One year later, John Lubbock, president of the ESL and future author of Pre-Historic Times (1865) and The Origin of Civilisation (1870), argued that ethnology was "an older word and a prettier word than anthropology" (Stocking 1971:381). Therefore, it was to be preferred in the title of Section E of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which covered "Geography and Ethnology." With this argument Lubbock prevented an attempt by ASL members to incorporate anthropology in this section. Lubbock did not favor anthropology because the ASL's founder was a polygenesist who emphasized a biological rather than a cultural history of humankind. Following the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and the debate on evolution during the BAAS meeting at Oxford in 1860, this became an important issue.

The battle between the "anthropologicals" and the "ethnologicals" ignited a heated discussion about the name under which a common institute should operate. Lubbock's remark inspired members of the ASL, especially Thomas Bendyshe (1865a, 1865b, 1865c) and James Hunt, "to trace the origin and different meanings attached to the words anthropology, ethnography and ethnology" (Hunt 1865:xcii). Both favored the term "anthropology," which they found to be much older, having been introduced by Magnus Hundt in Leipzig as early as 1501 (see chapter 7). An agreement was reached in 1871, when the ESL and ASL merged into the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (Cunningham 1908; Stocking 1971).

These events formed the background to the debate about the differences between anthropology and ethnology in England. Reflections on the conceptual history of anthropology and ethnology induced participants to change the name of a research institute. These debates also took place in France and the United States, mutually influencing each other.

In France the Société d'Ethnographie was founded in 1859, five days before the founding of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris. The ethnographic society held its position alongside the anthropological society only with great difficulty (Lacombe 1980; Stocking 1984b). Broca was interested in "the scientific study of the human races." Despite defining "general anthropology" as "the biology of the human species," Broca's anthropological program was holistic. Apart from three periodicals Broca set up a museum, the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie in 1867, and an anthropological school (École d'Anthropologie de Paris) in 1876. The laboratory and the school provided lectures in six or more fields: anatomical (or general) anthropology, biological anthropology, archaeology, demography, ethnology (defined as a "study of ... races"), and linguistic anthropology (Blanckaert 2009; Conklin 2013). Nevertheless, Broca subsumed the cultural study of man within the physical study of man (to paraphrase Stocking 1968:21).

---

Excerpted from Before Boas by Han F. Vermeulen. Copyright © 2015 Han F. Vermeulen. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---