Ethnology Research Paper

1. Ethnology As The Formative Period Of Anthropology

Academic circles at the German universities of Goettingen and Halle first used the term ‘ethnology’ in the late eighteenth century. Coined as a derivation of the Greek word ‘ethnos,’ meaning ‘a people,’ the term ‘ethnology’ in its most general meaning indicates a scholarly interest in how aggregations of human beings are distinct from each other in terms of material culture, language, religion, moral ideas, or social institutions. Early developments in ethnology also included speculative theories on assumed interrelations between cultural and biologic group differences. In the nineteenth century, ethnology emerged as an exclusively historical line of inquiry, initially supported and brought to public attention by the founding of learned societies in a number of European capitals. This in turn prepared the ground for the inclusion of ethnology as an academic discipline in the curricula of universities first in England, then in Germany and the United States of America (see Schmidt 1924). Ethnology was first considered to be a subfield of anthropology. In the late nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the umbrella term of anthropology was applied to a much broader domain of scholarly interest than today and included physical anthropology, linguistics, and archeology along with ethnology. Because what has become known as cultural anthropology in the United States of America, and as social anthropology in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, grew out of earlier ethnological concerns, ethnology is also to some extent regarded as the predecessor of Anglo–American anthropology.

1.1 Evolutionism, Diffusionism, And The Historical Method

In 1888, German-born natural scientist Franz Boas, who during the following decades would initiate and establish cultural anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States, lectured on ‘The Aims of Ethnology’ before an audience of a German immigrants’ civic society in New York City. He identified himself as an ethnologist and defined ethnology’s agenda as follows:

‘The task of ethnology is the study of the total range of phenomena of social life. Language, customs, migrations, bodily characteristics are subjects of our studies. Thus its very first and most immediate object is the study of the history of mankind; not that of civilized nations alone, but that of the whole of mankind, from its earliest traces found in the deposits of the ice age, up to modern times.’ (Boas 1940, p. 628)

Coming to ethnology in the late nineteenth century, Boas found himself at the cusp of an important paradigm shift that changed the face of this still young discipline. Up to this point, ethnology had been driven by the impetus to discover the hidden laws of human cultural development. Scholars hoped to do this by aggregating data on as many cultures as possible—both past and present—and by tabulating and classifying them. Findings were supplied either by archeology, itself an emerging discipline, or came from travel accounts, mission reports, and increasingly also from more sophisticated ethnographic surveys of indigenous groups in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Most of the nineteenth-century ethnologists attributed the manifestly observable cultural diversity of mankind to what they considered to be different levels of cultural development: the more ‘primitive’ groups were classified as being still far down on the lowest rungs of the steep ladder of ascent to civilization. At the same time, to the gaze of their more progressed contemporaries these ‘savages’ personified the earliest evolutionary stages of humanity. Therefore, this approach personified among others, by Edward B. Tylor in England (1832–1917), Lewis Henry Morgan (1818– 81) in America, and to some extent by Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) in Germany, was labeled—not by its protagonists, but by later opponents and historiographers—‘evolutionism.’

As increasingly more exact and detailed information on non-European cultures was made available, many evolutionist generalizations became untenable. At the turn of the twentieth century and already anticipated by Boas in the lecture cited above, a new theory took over that shifted the emphasis away from determining the universal rules of cultural development. Instead, evidence of migration and of contact between groups, and the resulting exchanges and transfers of cultural elements were now taken to be the key to the understanding of human history and cultural diversity. The underlying assumption was that human culture emerged from a single or a small number of origins and the ensuing dispersal of cultural elements came about by migration and diffusion—hence the label of ‘diffusionism’ that was attributed to this new school. It had its strongest and methodologically innovative proponents among museum ethnologists in Germany (Graebner 1911) who used similarities in the shape and make of pottery vessels, weaponry, ornaments, or other artifacts as a basis to map geographical areas where cultures were assumed to have a shared origin. This enabled German-speaking ethnologists, among them Leo Frobenius (1873–1939) and Pater Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954), at the beginning of the twentieth century to lay out a worldwide system of so-called ‘Kulturkreise,’ areas of shared cultural traits. With their evolutionist predecessors, representatives of diffusionism shared a tendency for sweeping generalizations and a disregard for the cultural meanings associated with the artifacts under scrutiny. They were not interested in the social integration of groups or in the cultural context of customs they used as the basis for their theoretical speculations, rather they treated them as isolates, much as if they were specimens of material culture in a collection’s glass case. Also, while insisting on their endeavour being historical in nature, they established a frozen chronology of past cultures rather than dating events and gaining insights into historical processes.

Franz Boas (1858–1942) who had been trained by Bastian in Germany and was appointed a professor at Columbia University in New York City in 1899 rejected not only evolutionism—which had an American stronghold in the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington DC— but German diffusionism as well. He founded a new approach, ‘the historical method,’ that could perhaps best be described as a moderate type of diffusionist ethnology. He and his students, however, shied away from projective theory and, indeed, from generalizations on a grand scale. They built up an enormous database from fieldwork among contemporary North American indigenous populations; their concept of culture areas paid careful attention to proven historical relationships between native American tribal groups and also integrated environmental factors. With this emphasis on ‘critical empiricism’ (Kuper 1988, p. 143), the Boasians, as his students came to be called who later would become university professors in their own right at the most prestigious American universities, ended the era of speculative ethnology. In Great Britain, evolutionism proved to be more tenuous and was not superseded by diffusionist ideas until the 1920s (see Kuper 1983). However, both in the United States and in England, the term ‘ethnology’ was gradually eclipsed by the newer designations of cultural anthropology—in America—and its British counterpart of social anthropology, with a focus on culture and on social structure respectively.

2. Ethnology As Cross-Cultural Comparison

Cross-cultural comparison had already been an indispensable tool for the historical reconstruction of cultural evolution as well as of cultural diffusion, but it was not until the advent of the functionalist school that cross-cultural comparison emerged as the principal methodology of social anthropology. ‘By comparing a sufficient number of diverse types we discover uniformities that are more general, and thus may reach to the discovery of principles or laws that are universal in human society,’ British social anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown put it succinctly in 1921 (Radcliffe-Brown 1951). Relinquishing the generalizing thrust of earlier social anthropology, later approaches used comparison to inquire into the interplay of variable and invariable factors shaping social relations in a given culture by contrasting it with others like it, often in a controlled sample of regionally equivalent cultural groupings. Meanwhile, in the United States of America, the statistical analysis of nonmaterial cultural data had been elevated to an advanced ‘scientific’ level by the development of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University, a project that since 1937 had abstracted and systematized information on cultures around the world from ethnographic reports, and successively created a huge cross-cultural survey (see Moore 1961).

2.1 Ethnography, Ethnology, Anthropology

By the end of World War II, the meaning of ‘ethnology’ had contracted to define but one of the three scholarly practices that form the anthropological enterprise. Ethnography was understood as datagathering in a single society, usually in a spatially and temporally bounded situation, such as when the fieldworker spends 1 year as a participant observer in a local community and later writes up the findings in a stand-alone, case study-type monograph (also called ethnography). Ethnology, by contrast, utilizes the information collected in a number of ethnographies in order to engage in systematic cross-cultural comparisons between two or more societies. In a report on the status of anthropology in higher education submitted to UNESCO in 1954, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss defined ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology as three consecutive stages in the production of anthropological knowledge, each building up on the results of the other. While ethnology, to his mind, achieves synthesis by the systematic comparison of ethnographic data across cultures, only anthropology as the third and final stage aspires to theory building with a generalizing impetus, attempting to come to universal statements on the nature of humanity (see Levi-Strauss 1975).

2.2 The Crisis Of Comparativism In Anthropology

In cultural anthropology in 1960s America, new developments predicated a significant shift away from comparative work in anthropology. Most notably, Clifford Geertz’s championing of ‘thick description’ suggested ‘not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them’ (Geertz 1973, p. 26) by indepth immersion in one culture and ethnographic representation of one individual case-study. Criticism of cross-cultural comparativism became increasingly vocal. Comparative methodologies were attacked for their tendency to cut up cultural systems into transculturally comparable bits and pieces, with contextual meanings and culturally specific relations getting lost in this process. By treating the cultures under comparison as discrete and separate, cross-cultural comparison in the past tended to deny or downplay influences and linkages between cultures. Also, cross-cultural comparison has been criticized for fixing cultures in time and thus robbing them of their historicity (see Fabian 1983). Another important critique concerns the anthropologist conducting the comparison of at least two, usually multiple non Western cultures and assumes the position of objective observer who is purportedly above or beyond culture. Critics argue that cross-cultural comparison as an operation tends to make invisible power and privilege shaping the hierarchical relations between observer and observed, or between comparer and compared.

In recent decades, many anthropologists have avoided the pitfalls of comparativism by doing away with explicitly cross-cultural perspectives alltogether. At the same time, ethnography stopped being conceived of as merely providing ‘raw materials’ for comparison and theory building, but as a mode of producing anthropological knowledge became unexpectedly central for the disciplinary identity and epistemology of anthropology. However, anthropologists never completely abandoned comparativism. In recent years, there is a definite move to reassess comparative methodologies in anthropology. New approaches are introduced to strengthen what is considered the inherently critical potential of comparison (see Marcus and Fischer 1986).

3. European Ethnology

The disciplinary landscape of European countries is far from uniform. Especially in the social sciences and the humanities, the names of academic disciplines, their boundaries, and their designated domains of scholarly inquiry differ from one country to the next, sometimes even between individual universities and research institutions. Historical developments account for this high degree of variation. A closer look, however, reveals some remarkably consistent patterns. A European phenomenon that in the past has been most strongly articulated in the German-speaking countries is the so-called ‘Volkskunde Volkerkunde split’ in anthropology (Gerholm and Hannerz 1982, p. 22) that emerged in the nineteenth century, resulting in two separate anthropological disciplines coexisting in academic teaching and research. Traditionally, those disciplines grouped under the Volkskunde heading were concerned with the historical investigation and the cultural construction of a national heritage. Conversely, those disciplines belonging to the Volkerkunde category focused on non-European ‘primitive’ peoples. While the latter scholarly line of inquiry became dominant in those societies marked by colonial expansionism, the former interest led to the establishment of folklore and folklife studies dedicated to the philology and history of national and regional cultures in most of Eastern, Central and Northern Europe.

Since the late 1960s, and intensifying with the transformations in Eastern Europe starting in 1989, both sections of the anthropological enterprise have undergone a marked modernization, in some countries leading to a rapprochement of the disciplines. In Nordic countries, ethnology, formerly a museum science concerned with the material culture of nonEuropean small-scale societies, was transformed into an internationally acclaimed social anthropology, while the label ethnology was appropriated by a historically informed and sociologically acute ‘anthropology at home’ that has little in common with the folk life studies it emerged from. In the German- speaking countries of Europe, conversely, the term ethnology was initially adopted by Volkerkunde, while many university departments and programs previously called Volkskunde acquired new names— cultural studies, European ethnology, cultural anthropology, among others. Their name change signified a shift towards the problem-oriented study of contemporary German, Swiss, or Austrian society informed by new developments in social theory as well as in international anthropology (Greverus 1978). In France, the ‘ethnologie contemporaine de la France’ represents a new orientation of anthropological inquiry into French society with a strong ethnographic flavor (see Cuisenier and Segalen 1986). In the postsocialist and postcommunist countries of Eastern Europe, new orientations being established could build on the fact that prior to 1989, the discipline of ethnography had integrated scholars working within and outside of Europe. Abandoning the name ethnography that dates back to the 1929 rejection of purportedly ‘bourgeois’ ethnology by Moscow and Leningrad anthropologists, in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, at Polish and at Hungarian universities, to cite a few examples, ethnology, cultural anthropology, or combinations of both have been chosen as new designations for anthropological inquiries at home and abroad. Also, in Southern Europe, regional anthropologies are developing that combine research interests in their home countries and regions with the most advanced theoretical developments in international anthropology (for a European survey see Giordano et al. 1990, Giordano and Greverus 1992). These new directions on the European continent have been entering into a dialog with a Europeanist specialization developing in American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology since the 1970s.

As early as 1955, a Europe-wide conference of ethnologists and folklorists in Arnhem, Netherlands, recommended to use the name ‘European ethnology’ internationally for all disciplines concerned with the anthropological study of European societies. This suggestion was taken up by the founders of a European association, the Societe Internationale de Folklore et d’Ethnologie, in 1964 and a Europe-wide journal Ethnologia Europaea in 1967. Still, it is obvious that inconsistencies in disciplinary names will persist between and within European societies. However, at the turn of the new millennium in many continental European societies, ethnology not only continues to be widely used as a disciplinary designation, but has been adopted and even reinvented to suggest a new direction taken in the anthropological investigation of European cultures past and present (Kaschuba 1999). As social and cultural anthropology are redefining themselves as the analysis of cultural complexity in a global framework, European ethnology promises to bring this new anthropological approach to the study of European societies and their cultures of late modernity, and might ultimately prove capable of overcoming the old split between intraand extraEuropean fields of research in continental anthropology.

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