Author: H. Glenn Penny
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472089260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Book Description
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.
Worldly Provincialism
Author: H. Glenn Penny
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472089260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Book Description
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.
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472089260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Book Description
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.
Objects of Culture
Author: H. Glenn Penny
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, Germans spearheaded a worldwide effort to preserve the material traces of humanity, designing major ethnographic museums and building extensive networks of communication and exchange across the globe. In this groundbreaking study, Glenn Penny explores the appeal of ethnology in Imperial Germany and analyzes the motivations of the scientists who created the ethnographic museums. Penny shows that German ethnologists were not driven by imperialist desires or an interest in legitimating putative biological or racial hierarchies. Overwhelmingly antiracist, they aspired to generate theories about the essential nature of human beings through their museums' collections. They gained support in their efforts from boosters who were enticed by participating in this international science and who used it to promote the cosmopolitan character of their cities and themselves. But these cosmopolitan ideals were eventually overshadowed by the scientists' more modern, professional, and materialist concerns, which dramatically altered the science and its goals. By clarifying German ethnologists' aspirations and focusing on the market and conflicting interest groups, Penny makes important contributions to German history, the history of science, and museum studies.
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, Germans spearheaded a worldwide effort to preserve the material traces of humanity, designing major ethnographic museums and building extensive networks of communication and exchange across the globe. In this groundbreaking study, Glenn Penny explores the appeal of ethnology in Imperial Germany and analyzes the motivations of the scientists who created the ethnographic museums. Penny shows that German ethnologists were not driven by imperialist desires or an interest in legitimating putative biological or racial hierarchies. Overwhelmingly antiracist, they aspired to generate theories about the essential nature of human beings through their museums' collections. They gained support in their efforts from boosters who were enticed by participating in this international science and who used it to promote the cosmopolitan character of their cities and themselves. But these cosmopolitan ideals were eventually overshadowed by the scientists' more modern, professional, and materialist concerns, which dramatically altered the science and its goals. By clarifying German ethnologists' aspirations and focusing on the market and conflicting interest groups, Penny makes important contributions to German history, the history of science, and museum studies.
Before Boas
Author: Han F. Vermeulen
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803277385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 638
Book Description
The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Before Boas delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology's academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnography and ethnology originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the "natural history of man." Han F. Vermeulen explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Great Britain in tracing how "ethnography" originated as field research by German-speaking historians and naturalists in Siberia (Russia) during the 1730s and 1740s, was generalized as "ethnology" by scholars in Göttingen (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) during the 1770s and 1780s, and was subsequently adopted by researchers in other countries. Before Boas argues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on "other" cultures but on all peoples of all eras. Following G. W. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century.
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803277385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 638
Book Description
The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Before Boas delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology's academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnography and ethnology originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the "natural history of man." Han F. Vermeulen explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Great Britain in tracing how "ethnography" originated as field research by German-speaking historians and naturalists in Siberia (Russia) during the 1730s and 1740s, was generalized as "ethnology" by scholars in Göttingen (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) during the 1770s and 1780s, and was subsequently adopted by researchers in other countries. Before Boas argues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on "other" cultures but on all peoples of all eras. Following G. W. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century.
In the Museum of Man
Author: Alice L. Conklin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801469031
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
In the Museum of Man offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high-water mark of French imperialism and European racism. Alice L. Conklin takes us into the formative years of French anthropology and social theory between 1850 and 1900; then deep into the practice of anthropology, under the name of ethnology, both in Paris and in the empire before and especially after World War I; and finally, into the fate of the discipline and its practitioners under the German Occupation and its immediate aftermath. Conklin addresses the influence exerted by academic networks, museum collections, and imperial connections in defining human diversity socioculturally rather than biologically, especially in the wake of resurgent anti-Semitism at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and in the 1930s and 1940s. Students of the progressive social scientist Marcel Mauss were exposed to the ravages of imperialism in the French colonies where they did fieldwork; as a result, they began to challenge both colonialism and the scientific racism that provided its intellectual justification. Indeed, a number of them were killed in the Resistance, fighting for the humanist values they had learned from their teachers and in the field. A riveting story of a close-knit community of scholars who came to see all societies as equally complex, In the Museum of Man serves as a reminder that if scientific expertise once authorized racism, anthropologists also learned to rethink their paradigms and mobilize against racial prejudice—a lesson well worth remembering today.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801469031
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
In the Museum of Man offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high-water mark of French imperialism and European racism. Alice L. Conklin takes us into the formative years of French anthropology and social theory between 1850 and 1900; then deep into the practice of anthropology, under the name of ethnology, both in Paris and in the empire before and especially after World War I; and finally, into the fate of the discipline and its practitioners under the German Occupation and its immediate aftermath. Conklin addresses the influence exerted by academic networks, museum collections, and imperial connections in defining human diversity socioculturally rather than biologically, especially in the wake of resurgent anti-Semitism at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and in the 1930s and 1940s. Students of the progressive social scientist Marcel Mauss were exposed to the ravages of imperialism in the French colonies where they did fieldwork; as a result, they began to challenge both colonialism and the scientific racism that provided its intellectual justification. Indeed, a number of them were killed in the Resistance, fighting for the humanist values they had learned from their teachers and in the field. A riveting story of a close-knit community of scholars who came to see all societies as equally complex, In the Museum of Man serves as a reminder that if scientific expertise once authorized racism, anthropologists also learned to rethink their paradigms and mobilize against racial prejudice—a lesson well worth remembering today.
Empires, Nations, and Natives
Author: Benoît de L'Estoile
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387107
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the “other” has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of “national character” studies in the United States during World War II, the modernizing efforts of the French colonial administration in Africa, and postcolonial architecture. The contributors—social and cultural anthropologists from the Americas and Europe—report on both historical and contemporary processes. Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavor is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of a changing world. Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoît de L’Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, João Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleón, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387107
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the “other” has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of “national character” studies in the United States during World War II, the modernizing efforts of the French colonial administration in Africa, and postcolonial architecture. The contributors—social and cultural anthropologists from the Americas and Europe—report on both historical and contemporary processes. Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavor is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of a changing world. Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoît de L’Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, João Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleón, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber
An Empire of Others
Author: Roland Cvetkovski
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155225761
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415
Book Description
Ethnographers helped to perceive, to understand and also to shape imperial as well as Soviet Russia?s cultural diversity. This volume focuses on the contexts in which ethnographic knowledge was created. Usually, ethnographic findings were superseded by imperial discourse: Defining regions, connecting them with ethnic origins and conceiving national entities necessarily implied the mapping of political and historical hierarchies. But beyond these spatial conceptualizations the essays particularly address the specific conditions in which ethnographic knowledge appeared and changed. On the one hand, they turn to the several fields into which ethnographic knowledge poured and materialized, i.e., history, historiography, anthropology or ideology. On the other, they equally consider the impact of the specific formats, i.e., pictures, maps, atlases, lectures, songs, museums, and exhibitions, on academic as well as non-academic manifestations.
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155225761
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415
Book Description
Ethnographers helped to perceive, to understand and also to shape imperial as well as Soviet Russia?s cultural diversity. This volume focuses on the contexts in which ethnographic knowledge was created. Usually, ethnographic findings were superseded by imperial discourse: Defining regions, connecting them with ethnic origins and conceiving national entities necessarily implied the mapping of political and historical hierarchies. But beyond these spatial conceptualizations the essays particularly address the specific conditions in which ethnographic knowledge appeared and changed. On the one hand, they turn to the several fields into which ethnographic knowledge poured and materialized, i.e., history, historiography, anthropology or ideology. On the other, they equally consider the impact of the specific formats, i.e., pictures, maps, atlases, lectures, songs, museums, and exhibitions, on academic as well as non-academic manifestations.
Tides of Empire
Author: Courtney Work
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789207738
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Book Description
At the forested edge of Cambodia’s development frontier, the infrastructures of global development engulf the land and existing social practices like an incoming tide. Cambodia’s distinctive history of imperial surge and rupture makes it easier to see the remains of earlier tides, which are embedded in the physical landscape, and also floating about in the solidifying boundaries of religious, economic, and political classifications. Using stories from the hybrid population of settler-farmers, loggers, and soldiers, all cutting new social realities from the water and the land, this book illuminates the contradictions and continuities in what the author suggests is the final tide of empire.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789207738
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Book Description
At the forested edge of Cambodia’s development frontier, the infrastructures of global development engulf the land and existing social practices like an incoming tide. Cambodia’s distinctive history of imperial surge and rupture makes it easier to see the remains of earlier tides, which are embedded in the physical landscape, and also floating about in the solidifying boundaries of religious, economic, and political classifications. Using stories from the hybrid population of settler-farmers, loggers, and soldiers, all cutting new social realities from the water and the land, this book illuminates the contradictions and continuities in what the author suggests is the final tide of empire.
Religion, Science, and Empire
Author: Peter Gottschalk
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195393015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442
Book Description
Peter Gottschalk offers a compelling study of how, through the British implementation of scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities. England's ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined with the Christian impulse to differentiate people according to religion, led to a designation of Indians as either Hindu or Muslim according to rigidly defined criteria that paralleled classification in botanical and zoological taxonomies. Through an historical and ethnographic study of the north Indian village of Chainpur, Gottschalk shows that the Britons' presumed categories did not necessarily reflect the Indians' concepts of their own identities, though many Indians came to embrace this scientism and gradually accepted the categories the British instituted through projects like the Census of India, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the India Museum. Today's propogators of Hindu-Muslim violence often cite scientistic formulations of difference that descend directly from the categories introduced by imperial Britain. Religion, Science, and Empire will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in the colonial and postcolonial history of religion in India.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195393015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442
Book Description
Peter Gottschalk offers a compelling study of how, through the British implementation of scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities. England's ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined with the Christian impulse to differentiate people according to religion, led to a designation of Indians as either Hindu or Muslim according to rigidly defined criteria that paralleled classification in botanical and zoological taxonomies. Through an historical and ethnographic study of the north Indian village of Chainpur, Gottschalk shows that the Britons' presumed categories did not necessarily reflect the Indians' concepts of their own identities, though many Indians came to embrace this scientism and gradually accepted the categories the British instituted through projects like the Census of India, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the India Museum. Today's propogators of Hindu-Muslim violence often cite scientistic formulations of difference that descend directly from the categories introduced by imperial Britain. Religion, Science, and Empire will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in the colonial and postcolonial history of religion in India.
Affinities and Extremes
Author: James A. Boon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226064638
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
Examining representations of Balinese culture in complex contexts of Indonesia's colonial history, Hindu ritual practice as opposed to Islam, and comparative Indo-European hierarchies, Boon offers a powerful critique of doctrinal approaches to culture, religion, literature, politics, and the history of ideas and disciplines.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226064638
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
Examining representations of Balinese culture in complex contexts of Indonesia's colonial history, Hindu ritual practice as opposed to Islam, and comparative Indo-European hierarchies, Boon offers a powerful critique of doctrinal approaches to culture, religion, literature, politics, and the history of ideas and disciplines.
Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance
Author: Joan-Pau Rubiés
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521526135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476
Book Description
A detailed study of the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans during the early modern period, first published in 2000.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521526135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476
Book Description
A detailed study of the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans during the early modern period, first published in 2000.