Synopses & Reviews
Worldly Provincialism introduces readers to German anthropology during the age of empire and illustrates how the initial motives and interests that gave birth to German anthropology were channeled and shaped by contexts as various as romantic voyages in the South Pacific, the Herero wars in Southwest Africa, open-air presentations of "exotic" peoples in Berlin, and prison camps during World War I. It also shows that Germans' unique intellectual traditions, their emphasis on concepts of culture, and the late arrival of both the German nation-state and the German colonial empire affected their interest in and relationships with non-Europeans.
Worldly Provincialism confirms that there is no justification for presupposing that Europeans shared a common cultural code while abroad or for assuming that they would have behaved similarly during their interactions with non-Europeans. Thus, we must rethink the relationships among anthropology, colonialism, and race. It also forces a rethinking of our understanding of race in the nineteenth century, when race science emerged and eclipsed many alternative racial theories.
H. Glenn Penny is Assistant Professor of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Matti Bunzl is Aaron and Robin Fischer Assistant Professor of Jewish Culture and Society, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 317-342) and index.
Synopsis
Illustrates the impact of imperialism on German scholars in the fields of anthropology and ethnology
Table of Contents
Introduction : Rethinking German anthropology, colonialism, and race / Matti Bunzl and H. Glenn Penny -- Coming of age in the Pacific : German ethnography from Chamisso to Krèamer / Harry Liebersohn -- Vèolderpsychologie and German-Jewish emancipation / Matti Bunzl -- Bastian's museum : on the limits of empiricism and the transformation of German ethnology / H. Glenn Penny -- Spectacles of (human) nature : commercial ethnography between leisure, learning, and Schaulust / Sierra A. Bruckner -- Adventures in the skin trade : German anthropology and colonial corporeality / Andrew Zimmerman -- Turning native? Anthropology, German colonialism, and the paradoxes of the "acclimatization question," 1885-1914 / Pascal Grosse -- Anthropology at war : racial studies of POWs during World War I / Andrew D. Evans -- Colonizing anthropology : Albert Hahl and the ethnographic frontier in German New Guinea / Rainer Buschmann -- Gathering the hunters : bushmen in German (colonial) anthropology / Robert J. Gordon -- Priests among the pygmies : Wilhelm Schmidt and the counter-reformation in Austrian ethnology / Suzanne Marchand.