Adolf Bastian
Adolf Bastian (Bremen, German Confederation 26 June 1826 - Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 2 February 1905) was a 19th century polymath best remembered for his contributions to the development of ethnography and the development of anthropology as a discipline.
Bastian was born into a prosperous bourgeois German family of merchants. His career at university was broad almost to the point of being eccentric. He studied law at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, and biology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and the University of Würzburg. It was at this last university that he attended lectures by Rudolf Virchow and developed an interest in what was then known as 'ethnology'. He finally settled on medicine and earned a degree from Prague in 1850.
Bastian became a ship's doctor and began an eight year voyage which took him around the world. This first of would be a quarter of a century of travels outside the German Confederation. He returned to the Confederation in 1859 and wrote a popular account of his travels along with an ambitious three volume work entitled Man in History, which became one of his most well-known works.
In 1861 he undertook a four-year trip to Southeast Asia and his account of this trip, The People of East Asia ran to six volumes. For the next eight years Bastian remained in the territory of the North German Confederation, where be became involved in the creation of several key ethnological institutions in Berlin. He has always been an avid collector, and his contributions to Berlin's Royal museum was so copious that a second museum, the Museum of Folkart, was founded largely as a result of Bastian's contributions. Its collection of ethnographic artifacts one of the largest in the world for decades to come. He was also worked with Rudolf Virchow to organize the Ethnological Society of Berlin. During this period he was also the head of the Royal Geographical Society of Germany.
In the 1870s Bastian left the German Empire and began travelling extensively in Africa as well as the New World. He died during one these journeys in 1905.
Works and ideas
Bastian is remembered as one of the pioneers of the concept of the 'psychic unity of mankind' — the idea that all humans shared a basic mental framework. This became the basis of notions of cultural relativism and influenced Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. He also argued that the world was divided up into difference 'geographical provinces' and that each of these provinces moved through the same stages of evolutionary development. According to Bastian, innovations and culture traits tended not to diffuse across areas. Rather, each province took its unique form as a result of its environment. This approach was part of a larger nineteenth century interest in the 'comparative method' as practiced by authors such as Edward B. Tylor.
While Bastian considered himself to be extremely scientific, it is worth noting that he emerged out of the naturalist tradition that was inspired by Johann Gottfried Herder and exemplified by figures such as Alexander von Humboldt. For him, empiricism meant a rejection of philosophy in favor of scrupulous observations. As a result, he was extremely hostile to Darwin's theory of evolution because the physical transformation of species had never been empirically observed, despite the fact that he posited a similar evolutionary development for human civilization. Additionally, he was much more concerned with documenting unusual civilizations before they vanished (presumably as a result of contact with Western civilization) than with the rigorous application of scientific observation. As a result, some have criticized his works for being disorganized collections of facts rather than coherently structured or carefully researched empirical studies.
Sources and further reading
- The History of Ethnological Theory. 1937. Robert Lowie. Holt Rhinehart (contains a chapter on Bastian).
- Professor Adolf Bastian. 1905. Edward B. Tylor. Man 5:138-143.
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