From Herder to Strecker: Birth and Developments of the Anthropological Notion of Culture in Germany

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.