H. Glenn Penny, Matti Bunzl, eds. Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 350 pp. $57.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-472-08926-0.
Reviewed by Hartmut Krech (Bremen)
Published on H-German (October, 2003)
Provincialism Spanning the Globe: The Human Sciences in Germany between 1860 and 1930
Translated from the German by Susan R. Boettcher <susan.boettcher@mail.utexas.edu>
Provincialism Spanning the Globe: The Human Sciences in Germany between 1860 and 1930
The history of human culture is the object of several disciplines that are dealt with under the designation of cultural anthropology in English-speaking countries. A greater number of research papers on the history of these disciplines has appeared in recent years. Nevertheless, the history of the human sciences is not represented as a separate subject of study at German universities. In Germany, the history of science continues to be treated primarily as the history of the natural sciences. Eighteen professorial chairs and five independent courses of study are dedicated to pursuing this subject.[1] This situation is thoroughly paradoxical. Several of the disciplines of the human sciences, from anthropology to ethnology to cultural science, were founded in the German culture area. The designations for these subjects and a large portion of their terminology can be traced back to the linguistic creations of German scholars.[2] Furthermore, the influence of German emigre scholars on the formation of American cultural anthropology is well documented. Finally, the abuse of scientific procedures in fascist Germany for ends scornful of human dignity has remained unparalleled in history. Hence, a great deal is to be learned from basic, detailed research on the history of German anthropology.
Despite the wide array of publications that are documented on the twenty-six pages of the bibliography of the book under review[3], however, a comprehensive presentation of German anthropology is lacking in the sense that it has been accomplished for other European countries. Even the collection edited by H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl, Worldly Provincialism, with its temporal limitation to the period between roughly 1860 and 1930, cannot fill this gap. But it succeeds in formulating for the first time numerous areas of inquiry that will be essential for future scholars in this area, even if it cannot deal with them exhaustively.
Given such considerations, the intent of the editors to treat the history of nineteenth century German anthropology not simply as a prelude to the Verbrechen of the twentieth century (p. 30) is appropriate. The peculiarity of developments in Germany, they suggest, followed directly from the predominance of liberal, cosmopolitan-minded theoreticians like Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) and Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902). With their pledge to "culture, plurality, and plasticity" (p. 21), such men opposed themselves to biological determinism and defended the educational endeavor of anthropology. By contrast, Germany's colonial episode, which lasted for thirty-five years (1884-1919), had only a minor influence on the development of theory in the German human sciences.
While colonial interests may explain the course of many developments in the history of anthropology in Europe and America, the basically philosophical search for one's own point of view (which was supposed to lead to a national culture of international proportions) formed the center of attention in German anthropology. For the same reason, that is, in order to contribute to national self-understanding, anthropology in Germany was not subordinated to the political necessities of the capital in Berlin, but instead was pursued quite eagerly in the newly-founded museums and scholarly societies of the regional cities. Even after the beginning of the colonial engagement in 1884, the research of German scholars was not limited to the inhabitants of German colonies. The idealization of the living conditions of peoples from around the world was meant to reflect a greater national identity to the ambitious bourgeoisie. Worldly Provincialism is thus an effective choice for the title of this volume.
The grouping of the different German disciplines such as Voelkerkunde, Ethnologie, Ethnographie, Volkskunde, Anthropologie, Ur- and Fruehgeschichte, etc., under the general designation of anthropology, as is customary in the English-and French-speaking world today, is seen as problematic by the editors. In several places, they remind the reader that in Germany, Anthropologie refers to physical anthropology or is used as a designation for philosophical ideas about the nature of humanity, while cultural anthropology is referred to as Ethnologie even today. This conception, however, is a persistent cliche that does not stand up to closer examination.[4] On the one hand, the opposition of (physical) anthropology and (cultural) ethnology was also widely accepted in England, France and the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. Hence this contrasting terminology does not constitute a German Sonderweg, as the editors suggest it does. On the other hand, it is true that an empirical cultural anthropology has never taken deep root as an integrative discipline in the German world due to the long-lasting influence of the Vienna school of cultural history. After the collapse of the "Third Reich," Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954) assigned to ethnology the task of a synthetic historiography of world cultures. In doing so, he cut off any possibility of development for anthropology, which had been compromised under fascism, that would allow an empirical justification of its claims (which in the final analysis might have been critical of theology).[5] But there is no sound reason not to designate the German human sciences as anthropology.
The intention of the editors to write the history of German anthropology (understood in this way) on the basis of individual studies is doubtless to be welcomed. With a sure hand, they have selected ten essays that contribute to a perceptive and enlightened understanding of their respective subject matter. In most cases the authors have drawn forth an astounding abundance of facts. The case-study approach reveals its deficits, however, where the authors make reference to periods that are not the object of their own accounts (for example, the German-speaking anthropology of the eighteenth century), or where scholarly developments that ran parallel to those treated are factored out, even when they made important contributions to the definition of the cultural sciences (for example, the pedagogical theory of the nineteenth century). In these cases, the editors and authors take refuge in concepts like Kultur, Bildung, Volk, and Rasse. Insofar as they do not translate these terms, they attribute definitions to them that are peculiarly German, without explaining what they mean. An evaluation of historical facts is only possible, however, when clarity about the meaning of the central terms has been established. This procedure becomes dangerous, for example, when the anachronistic term Menschenrasse flows into the presentation of the material as if it belonged to the recognized scientific terminology. If historians do not wish to fall victim to the deceptions of earlier periods, they must first elucidate the historical embeddedness of such terms. Only a single contribution[6] attempts to make out the super-individual essentiality of the relationship between scholar and object behind the words and terms, although the author abandons the chronological order of developments.
Among the essays in this collection, the contribution by co-editor H. Glenn Penny, "Bastian's Museum: On the Limits of Empiricism and the Transformation of German Ethnology," stands out for its exactness of detail and dependable evaluation of the material. Penny's presentation of the competition between the Berlin metropolis and the cities on the periphery, which themselves attempted to define their status as "international players" via newly-founded anthropological museums, provides a good entry into the theme. Penny's study culminates in the recognition that "Bastian's quest to unveil the inner workings of simple societies was part of a conscious effort to help Europeans better understand themselves" (pp. 97 f.).
Sierra A. Bruckner's study of the commercial Voelkerschauen, "Spectacles of (Human) Nature": Commercial Ethnography between Leisure, Learning, and Schaulust" demonstrates that Bastian attempted to separate himself from popular forms of transmission of knowledge with his idea of a pure research museum. Sensitive to the gender differences and currents of the age, the author describes the ethnologists' initial support for this form of showmanship, before a new class consciousness emerged that was to defend the social position of the scholar. The Voelkerschauen became a public danger when the Schaulust of the audience gave way to a feeling of brotherhood with the "cultural performers."
The formation of a middle class was an important motif for the theoretical development of German ethnology in the nineteenth century. In addressing the so-called Akklimatisierungsfrage between 1885 and 1914, biological arguments were amassed to denounce the possibility of a mixture of European settlers with native peoples in the colonies. As Pascal Grosse describes in his essay, "Turning Native? Anthropology, German Colonialism, and the Paradoxes of the "Acclimatization Question, 1885-1914," these contradictory theories prepared the way for the fascist politics of "racial hygiene."
Yet the influence of German colonial politics is only of marginal significance for the emergence of fascist Rassenkunde. The detailed research of Rainer Buschmann on an episode of German colonial rule ("Colonizing Anthropology: Albert Hahl and the Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea") proves that German colonial civil servants took a dismissive stance to the collecting mania of museum ethnologists. Their demand for the distillation of practically applicable knowledge was rarely taken up by official ethnology. Only Richard Thurnwald (1869-1954) accepted the call when he created an analytical framework with his system of ethnosociology that refused service to the scientific parody of fascist anthropology.
The free access of anthropologists to the "human material" in WWI prisoner-of-war camps set the tone for the complicity of German anthropology with National Socialism (and its erroneous equation with "physical" anthropology). As Andrew D. Evans convincingly demonstrates on the basis of the copious sources used in his study, "Anthropology at War: Racial Studies of POWs during World War I," a young generation of scholars achieved professional recognition by expanding racial categories to include members of European nations. Legitimated through allegedly objective techniques of physical observation, a mentality of Lageranthropologie (p. 225) developed in anthropological laboratories that made scholars and their work an extension of politics and at the same time cut the connections of the researchers to their fellow humans.
The "business" of traditional ethnology remained the concept of a great Voelkerpanorama in which the middle class could recognize itself. Thus, for a long time, the German population of contemporary Namibia drew a significant portion of its self-conception from "scholarly" research on the local aboriginal people, as Robert J. Gordon explains in his essay, "Gathering the Hunters: Bushmen in German (Colonial) Anthropology." Suzanne Marchand identifies this transfigured image of the world, which toyed with the self-mirroring of the bourgeoisie, in the theoretical constructions of the Vienna school of cultural history of Father Wilhelm Schmidt ("Priests among the Pygmies: Wilhelm Schmidt and the Counter-Reformation in Austrian Ethnology"). Because of its despotic claim to explain the world and because of its rejection of practically usable knowledge, the Kulturkreislehre was apt to fill the vacuum left by fascist race research at the end of WWII. With this development, the culture-empirical and reflective endeavors of anthropology in German-speaking areas were given up. Only two decades later could cultural anthropology finally recover from this relapse into neo-romantic cultural theory. It is difficult to comprehend why the editors treat this strong ideological influence on empirical scholarship with so much tolerance (pp. 21f.).
Many of the contributions of this volume are characterized by a predilection for the history of ideologies and their situational contexts. Some readers may thus resign themselves to believe that anthropology (in contrast to other disciplines) is not concerned with the production of verifiable knowledge. This methodological shortcoming is most obvious in the essay by co-editor Matti Bunzl ("Voelkerpsychologie and German-Jewish Emancipation"). His argument, according to which "Voelkerpsychologie" was predicated on German-Jewish cultural constellations" (p. 49), is not unfounded[7], but must remain unproven as long as no citations are provided in support of this thesis. Bunzl's reference to "the universalist desire of German-Jewish Bildung" (p. 84) is at best over-generalized. Clearly it cannot be refuted that the founders of Voelkerpsychologie identified themselves with German Enlightenment philosophy, writing: "We are Germans, nothing but Germans" (p. 76).
The significance of German anthropology over the entire period of its development, from its beginnings in Renaissance humanism to its decline under German fascism, cannot be overestimated. Without the theoretical contributions of German anthropologists, the modern cultural sciences would have to do without a great portion of their analytical vocabulary. This collective volume takes a first step toward a comprehensive history of the discipline--it should be followed by further steps.
Notes:
[1]. "'Wissenschaftsgeschichte' bezeichnet an deutschen Hochschulen die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Mathematik." Christoph Meinel: Allgemeine Informationen zum Fach Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Regensburg 1995 (http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/philFakI/Philosophie/Wissenschaf tsgeschichte/Einfuehrung/Einfuehrung.html).
[2]. Hartmut Krech, Ein Bild der Welt. Die Voraussetzungen der anthropologischen Photographie (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 1989).
[3]. To name a few omissions: Ruediger Vom Bruch's edited collection Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1989), Justin Stagl's methodologically important introduction Kulturanthropologie und Gesellschaft (Munich: List, 1974) and Wolfgang Emmerich, Kritik der Volkstumsideologie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1971).
[4]. The approaches to a systematic cultural anthropology in the work of Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) and Erich Rothacker (1888-1965) are passed over in favor of the Vienna School of Father Wilhelm Schmidt with its retrograde post-war effects.
[5]. The specific method of the Vienna school is dealt with only in one footnote, on p. 309, a remarkable deficit in a work on the history of science.
[6]. Andrew Zimmerman, Adventures in the Skin Trade: German Anthropology and Colonial Corporeality (pp. 156-178).
[7]. As early as 1974, Justin Stagl referred to the marginal background of many cultural anthropologists (see Note [3]). Only in the rarest cases, however, do social background and self-identification of the scholar agree.
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Citation:
Hartmut Krech. Review of Penny, H. Glenn; Bunzl, Matti, eds., Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8278
Copyright © 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.