Leo Frobenius

Leo Frobenius

Leo Viktor Frobenius (June 29, 1873 – August 9, 1938) was a German ethnologist and archaeologist, one of the leading experts on prehistoric art. He was also one of the initiators of the culture-historical approach to ethnology.

Life

Leo Frobenius was born on June 29, 1873, in Berlin, Germany , the son of a Prussian officer. Already as a child he showed enthusiasm toward collecting of African artifacts. By young adulthood he had assembled a significant collection of written and pictorial material of particular ethnological motifs. This collection later became part of his wider assembly of African art, many pieces of which are today in Frobenius Institute in the University of Frankfurt.

Frobenius never completed high school, or received any form of formal education. This is mostly due to the fact that his father, an army officer, had to move around and always took his family with him. Frobenius thus never had a real chance to complete school. He was mostly self-taught, studying works of Heinrich Schurtz (whom Frobenius considered his teacher), Friedrich Ratzel, and Richard Andree. He was particularly fascinated by the work of Heinrich Schliemann.

In the period between 1904 and 1935, Frobenius led 12 expeditions to Africa. His first expedition in 1904 was to the Kasai district in Congo. There he studied the rock paintings and other art of local tribes. The results of his research were published in his Und Afrika sprach, 3 vols. (1912/13; translated in 1913 as The Voice of Africa, 2 vols.).

Until 1918 he traveled to the western and central Sudan, and in northern and northeastern Africa. Between 1921 and 1928 he published 12-volumes series of folk tales and poems under the title Atlantis, which showed to be an excellent source of material for historians of religion. He also visited Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and South Africa. He later traveled to explore centers of prehistoric art in the Alps, Norway and Spain. His last expedition in 1938 was to Australia, where he studied Aboriginal art. His book Kulturgeschichte Afrikas (1933) was the summary of his research.

In 1920, he founded the Institute for Cultural Morphology in Munich, where he exhibited his entire collection. In 1925, the institute was moved to Frankfurt. The University of Frankfurt in 1932 granted Frobenius an honorary lectureship in the department of ethnology and cultural studies. In 1934, he was appointed director of the Municipal Ethnological Museum in Frankfurt. In 1938 he established a periodical Paideuma, devoted to the problem of cultural morphology.

Frobenius died in his residence in Biganzolo, Lago Maggiore, Italy, shortly after his 65th birthday.

Work

Drawing upon the work of Friedrich Ratzel, in his work from 1898 Der Ursprung der afrikanischen Kulturen (The origin of African culture), Frobenius introduced his definition of the term Kulturkreise (“culture circle”). Generally Kulturkreise referred to a larger sphere of cultural influence that develops from a center of origin toward the periphery, and has impact on other cultures in its area of influence. However, unlike other German ethnologists who traced particular elements of a culture and tried to find their origin in a particular Kulturkreise, Frobenius believed that all cultural elements need to be regarded in a more complex context of a particular culture. In another words, he argued that elements of culture should be studied as part of the organic whole of which they are parts. Only then one can understand the complex, historical nature of a particular culture. He also supported the notion of "cultural diffusion," the spread of ideas and material culture through conquest or trade.

Frobenius believed that cultures exhibit "biological" characteristics, similar to living organisms. Every culture passes through “life cycle,” or stages of development. In that manner, he identified three main stages:

1. Ergriffenheit (lit. "emotion") - a culture's youth;
2. Ausdruck (lit. "expression") - a culture's maturity; and
3. Anwendung (lit. "utilization") – a culture’s old age.

Cultures, argued Frobenius, have laws of their own, independently of people who live in them. Those laws, just like biological laws of nature, guide them through their life cycles. He termed that internal law with the Greek word paideuma. His entire book, Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre (Outline of a theory of culture and spirit; 1921) was on this topic. This concept of culture as a living organism was influenced by the theories of Oswald Spengler.

Frobenius was especially inspired by African cultures, and regarded them as genuine as cultures of other continents. This view was rather novel, in the time when others thought of Africa “without history.” He tried to bring African history out of the darkness, putting it into historical relationship with other cultures. Frobenius’s writing with Douglas Fox, African Genesis: Folk Tales and Myths of Africa, was a channel through which some African traditional storytelling and epics entered European literature.

In 1911, Frobenius claimed that he had found proof of the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis. This was based on some sculptures which he discovered in the area of Ile-Ife in south-western Nigeria. The statues were made in bronze and terra cotta, and were so naturalistic that Frobenius concluded that they could not have been made by Africans, but by some unknown civilization. He believed that a great civilization existed in the heart of Africa, and that it gradually disappeared. He saw evidence for his claims in local vegetation, architecture, and even local myths and fairytales. Later archeologists, however, have attributed the artifacts found by Frobenius as belonging to the Yoruba culture.

Legacy

Due to his studies in African history, Frobenius is a figure of renown in many African countries even today. In particular, he influenced Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of the founders of Négritude and first president of Senegal, who once claimed that Frobenius had "given Africa back its dignity and identity." Aimé Césaire, a Martinican poet, also quoted Frobenius as praising African people as being "civilized to the marrow of their bones," as opposed to the degrading vision encouraged by colonial propaganda.

Frobenius’s concept of Kulturkreise was further extended and developed by Fritz Graebner.

In 1925, the city of Frankfurt acquired his collection of about 4700 prehistorical African stone paintings, currently at the University's institute of ethnology, which was named the Frobenius Institute in his honor in 1946.

Publications

• Frobenius, Leo. 1897/98. Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis. Gotha: Justus Perthes
• Frobenius, Leo. 1898. Der Ursprung der afrikanischen Kulturen. Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger
• Frobenius, Leo. 1903. Weltgeschichte des Krieges. Hannover: Gebrüder Jänecke
• Frobenius, Leo. 1921. Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre . München: Beck
• Frobenius, Leo. 1921-1928. Atlantis; Volksmärchen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas (12 Vols.). Jena: E. Diederichs
• Frobenius, Leo. 1923. Dokumente zur Kulturphysiognomik. Vom Kulturreich des Festlandes. Berlin: Volksverband der bücherfreunde
• Frobenius, Leo. 1931. Erythräa. Länder und Zeiten des heiligen Königsmords. Berlin: Atlantis-Verlag
• Frobenius, Leo. 1933. Kulturgeschichte Afrikas. Erschienen im Phaidon Verlag
• Frobenius, Leo. 1950 (original work published 1936). Das Urbild: Cicerone zur vorgeschichtlichen Reichsbildergalerie. Frankfurt: Forschungsinstitut fur Kulturmorphologie
• Frobenius, Leo. 1980 (original work published in 1913). Voice of Africa. Arno Press. ISBN 0405085370
• Frobenius, Leo. 1972 (original work published in 1937). Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa. Ayer Co Pub. ISBN 0405015615
• Frobenius, Leo & Diederichs, Ulf. 1980. Schwarze Sonne Afrika: Mythen, Marchen und Magie. Düsseldorf: E. Diederichs
• Frobenius, Leo & Fox, Douglas C. 1999 (original work published in 1937). African Genesis: Folk Tales and Myths of Africa. Dover Publications. ISBN 0486409112
• Frobenius, Leo & Haberland, Eike. 2006. Leo Frobenius on African History, Art, and Culture: An Anthology. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Pub. ISBN 1558764267

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• BookRags.com Biography of Leo Frobenius. Retrieved on December 19, 2006
• Encyclopedia Britannica. Leo Frobenius (1873-1938). Retrieved on December 19, 2006
• Heinrichs, Hans-Jurgen. 2000. Léo Frobenius: anthropologue, explorateur, aventurier. L'Harmattan. ISBN 2738479669
• Kriel A. P. 1973. The legacy of Leo Frobenius: An inaugural lecture given in the University of Fort Hare on the 16th March, 1973. Fort Hare University Press. ISBN 0949974145

External links

• Leo Frobenius (1873-1938). – Biography on Literary Encyclopedia website
• Frobenius Institute – Website of the Frobenius Institute, with lot of resources on Frobenius’s expeditions
• Friedrich Ratzel, Clark Wissler, and Carl Sauer: Culture Area Research and Mapping – Short history of the idea of Kulturkreise
• Yoruba mask – Yoruba artwork, for which Frobenius thought being from Atlantis civilization
• Diffusionism as an anthropological paradigm – History of the idea of “cultural diffusion”
• Atlantis – Search for Atlantis

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