Adolf Bastian

Adolf Bastian (June 26, 1826 – February 2, 1905) was a German ethnographer, who contributed to the development of ethnography and anthropology as modern disciplines.

Life

Adolf Bastian was born in Bremen, Germany, into a prosperous bourgeois family of merchants. He studied at different universities, his study being so broad that it almost became eccentric. He studied law at the 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 medical degree from Charles University in Prague in 1850.

Bastian became a ship's doctor and began an eight year voyage which took him around the world. This was the first of numerous journeys he later undertook in his life. He traveled to Australia, Peru, the West Indies, Mexico, China, the Malay Archipelago, India, and Africa. During this period, his interest in ethnography grew. He returned to Germany in 1859 and wrote a popular account of his travels, along with an ambitious three volume work entitled Der Mensch in der Geschichte (Man in History), which became one of his most well-known works.

In 1866, he undertook a four-year trip to Southeast Asia and his account of this trip, Die Voelker des Oestlichen Asien (The People of East Asia) ran to six volumes. For the next eight years Bastian remained in Germany. He settled in Berlin, where he was made professor of ethnology at the University of Berlin. At the same time he was working on the establishment of several key ethnological institutions in Berlin. He had always been an avid collector, and his contributions to Berlin's Royal museum were 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 was one of the largest in the world for decades to come.

He also worked with Rudolph Virchow to establish the Berlin Ethnological Society in 1869. During this period he also served as the head of the Royal Geographical Society of Germany. In 1873, he founded the Museum für Völkerkunde (Berlin Ethnological Museum) and helped establish, in 1878, the German Africa Society of Berlin, which did much to encourage German colonization in Africa.

Bastian served as the main editor of the Zeitschrift fur Ethnologic from 1869, in conjunction with Virchow and Robert von Hartmann. In the 1880s, Bastian left Germany to begin his traveling in Africa and the Americas. In 1886, he was honored for his extraordinary accomplishments by being elected as a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society.

He died during one of his journeys, in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1905.

Work

Bastian’s work needs to be observed in the context of its time. Only then one can see the full picture of a genius that Bastian was. Namely, in the time when most philosophers and ethnographers were theorists, rarely conducting any serious field study, Bastian was rather practical, with extensive field experience. He used to learn the language and religious rituals of the people he studied, and regarded them as their partners, rather than subjects. He was influences by the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1774-1803) and Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788). Even though he did not belong to any particular faith, Bastian had a deep regard for people’s spirituality and religious beliefs, and often relied on his own intuition and revelation.

In his work he tried to bridge the gap between science and religion. One of his ideas in that direction was his concept of “psychic unity of mankind”. He regarded ethnology as the tool to bring humanity closer to each other. He wrote:

”Ethnology will give to culture history, which was until now restricted to the areas of European, Western Asian and Northern African civilizations, the tools for comparative equations with which to look over all the five continents.”

Psychic unity

Bastian is remembered as one of the pioneers of the concept of the 'psychic unity of mankind' – the idea that all humans share a basic mental framework. After traveling to different parts of the world, Bastian noticed similarities in different cultures. He noticed that similar themes can be found in different myths and ceremonial customs of peoples separated thousands of miles, living on the different parts of the world. This led him to instate a question of the source of that similarity. His answer was that all humans share basic mental framework of ideas, uniform to all people. He called those basic ideas Elementargedanken (Elementary ideas), which essentially are universal, transcultural, and transhistorical. Due to the effect of the physical environment, however, those elementary ideas undergo certain change, and cultural variations emerge. Völkergedanken (Folk ideas) develop as a result of this process. Nevertheless, it is important to notice, claimed Bastian, that folk ideas are just different expressions of common elementary ideas that are unique to whole humanity. This became the basis of notions of cultural relativism, and has influenced Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious.

Bastian tried to support his idea of psychic unity by collecting artifacts and recording behavior from different cultures, and comparing and drawing parallels between them. Based on the observations he concluded that innovations and culture traits tended not to diffuse across different geographical areas. Rather, each area takes 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.

Cultural evolution

Bastian is sometimes referred as an evolutionist with rather unique beliefs. Rather revolutionary for that time, when majority of scientists supported Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Bastian did not believe in unilinear cultural evolution, the theory originated by scientists like August Comte, Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer. Bastian did not agree with the claim that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilised over time. Rather, he suggested that there were multiple possible outcomes from the same beginning. In another words, cultures develop in their unique environments, through a unique historical context.

Bastian also had a monogenetic view of human origins, when other scientists believed that the races were evolved separately.

"What we see in history is not a transformation, a passing of one race into another, but entirely new and perfect creations, which the ever-youthful productivity of nature sends forth from the invisible realm of Hades." (Bastian, 1868)

Criticism of his work

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 like Alexander von Humboldt. For Bastian, 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. 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.

Legacy

Bastian’s work had influenced numerous scientists, especially in the area of social science. His concept of “psychic unity of mankind” took roots in “collective unconscious” of Carl Gustav Jung and depth-psychologist Karl Kerenyi, and many similar ideas of different anthropologists, such as Paul Radin and Claude Lévi-Strauss. With his ideas of a multilinear cultural development he was a forerunner of such great names as Franz Boas, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and Bronislaw Malinowski.

Bastian found valuable to conduct a long-term study of particular subject, in order to perform an in-depth analysis of it. Through that he established a rigorous (although, in today’s terms, rather simple) scientific method in doing fieldwork.

Bibliography

• Bastian, Adolf. 1860. Der Mensch in der Geschichte (Man in History).

• Bastian, Adolf. 1868. Das Besdändige in den Menschenrassen und die Spielweite ihrer Veränderlichkeit.

• Bastian, Adolf. 1870. Sprachvergleichende Studien mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der indochinesischen Spracher
• Bastian, Adolf. 1878. Die Kulturldnder des alten Amerika.

• Bastian, Adolf. 1881. Der Buddhismus in seiner Psychologie

• Bastian, Adolf. 1885. Der Fetisch an der Kiiste Guineas

• Bastian, Adolf. 1900. Die mikronesischen Kolonien

• Bastian, Adolf. 1902. Die Lehre vom Denken zur Ergänzung der Naturwissenschaftlichen Psychologie, für Überleitung auf die Geistewissenschaften (3 volumes)

• Bastian, Adolf. 2001, (original work from 1866). Die Voelker des Oestlichen Asien: Studien und Reisen: Band II. Reisen in Birma in den Jahren 1861-1862. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 1421217694

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Koepping, Klaus-Peter. 1983. Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind: The Foundations of Anthropology in Nineteenth Century Germany. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. ISBN: 0702218707

• Lowie, Robert. 1937. The History of Ethnological Theory. Holt Rhinehart. ISBN 003009030X

• McGee, J.R. & Warms, Richard. 1996. Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. Mayfield Publishing Company. ISBN 1559342854

• Tylor, Edward B. 1905. Professor Adolf Bastian. Man, 5, 138-143.

External links

• A. Bastian – Bibliography

• Adolf Bastian – Biography

• Adolf Bastien – Biography at Encyclopedia Britannica

• Berlin Ethnological Museum – Website of the Berlin Ethnological Museum which Bastian established

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