Anthropology and the place of knowledge in imperial Berlin.

摘要

Anthropology was a discipline that straddled many borders in the traditional order of knowledge in nineteenth-century Berlin, including those between natural-scientific and humanistic disciplines, between academic and popular cultures, between elitist narratives of civilization and illicit fascination with barbarism, and, finally, between colonizing Europeans and colonized Africans, Pacific Islanders, and others. Drawing on written and visual sources from government and museum archives, unpublished personal papers, as well as published sources, my dissertation presents anthropology as it developed in Berlin between 1870 and 1914. Archival material allowed me to reconstruct anthropology not only as a system of ideas but also as a culturally embedded phenomenon involving anthropologists and the people they studied, their audiences, and their political and financial patrons. My dissertation reconsiders the German concept of culture in the period of the Kulturkampf, as it developed after romanticism and before the anti-modernism of the early twentieth century. Furthermore, as a study of the foundation of an extra-academic discipline in Germany, my thesis begins to fill a gap in the historiography of German science, which has emphasized the university. Finally, as an account of the development of a form of knowledge from a specialized discipline to the subject of a popular museum, it is a study of the relation of the production and the communication of knowledge and participates in recent discussions on museums and popular culture.