Comparing Primitive Cultures Home and Abroad

Abstract

Chapter 1 highlights the paradigms of nineteenth-century German anthropology. It presents the approach of Adolf Bastian—according to whom all human civilizations shared a set of Elementargedanken (elementary ideas)—and argues that this approach was influenced by universalist notions of early nineteenth-century German scholars such as Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder. This paradigm led several scholars to explore ‘ethnographic parallels’, as they called them, between allegedly primitive cultures in the colonial peripheries and rural populaces of the European hinterland, both of which were considered to be Naturvölker. The somewhat cultural-relativistic aims of this approach were thwarted by the racism of the colonial world order, as European expansion allowed for the often violent acquisition of human bones and cultural artefacts in the colonies in a manner that would not have been possible in Europe.