Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment by Han F. Vermeulen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment by Han F. Vermeulen Rainer Buschmann Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 746pp. Han Vermeulen presents the reader with a tome, which, as the title indicates, promises to explore German anthropology before the illustrious American career of Franz Boas. His work is based on a doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Leiden in 2008, and combines a robust text with an extensive note and bibliography section that exceeds 200 pages. Besides primary source material drawn from archives located mostly in Germany and Russia, Vermeulen employed the years since finishing his dissertation to incorporate a very impressive array of secondary sources spanning many European languages. A word of caution should be addressed to those readers who expect Vermeulen’s book to follow along the line of George Stocking’s Victorian Anthropology (1987) and After Tylor (1995; this volume may have inspired Vermeulen to pick his own title) as they might find themselves disappointed as well as delighted. Stocking’s grand two-volume book represents a thorough rendition of the institutionalization of British Anthropology throughout the 19th and the 20th centuries. Vermeulen accomplishes both less and more in the work under review. On one hand, his timeframe is limited to the 18th century, which he successfully argues to be of crucial importance to the formation of the terms “ethnology” and “ethnography” in Central Europe. On the other hand, his book transcends German-speaking lands to explore the development of these terms as they diffused to a wider world. Nine chapters structure the book. Following an introductory section, three sections investigate the impact of the German Enlightenment in Russia, an area crucial for the development of ethnography and its comparative [End Page 1249] dimension. A fifth chapter throws light on an Arabian expedition that carried significant German participation. Chapters 6 and 7 then focus on the institutional settings that molded the terms ethnology and ethnography. An important epilogue traces the reception of German ideas following their development in Central Europe. The work closes with a concluding chapter that ties Vermeulen’s proposed new genesis of German ethnography to the existing body of literature on the history of anthropology. While most historians of anthropology point to the 19th century for the genesis of the terms ethnography and ethnology, Vermeulen maintains that their intellectual cradle is located in 18th century Central Europe. Many German scholars, in absence of a nation-state before 1871, had to attach themselves to foreign expeditions to further their studies. The role of Pacific and North America has been the subject of many publications in the past. Vermeulen suggests one additional understudied area: Siberia. It is in this region where, in the first half of the 18th century, German scholars, most notably Gerhard Müller, developed curiosity and engagement with ethnography and encouraged a comparative dimension to peoples around the world. Vermeulen argues further that the studies derived from these expeditions were of limited importance for colonial expansion. The administrators sent out to Siberia neither consulted ethnography nor developed any interest in this newly formed study when it came to their administration of the peoples, newly integrated into the expanding Russian Empire. The description of cultures (ethnography) developed through German explorers on the margins of the Russian Empire. The entrenchment of the comparative dimensions (ethnology), Vermeulen argues, has its origins in the ivory towers of Vienna and Göttingen. Most prominently, it was A. C. Schlözer who employed the ethnological method to move from regional history to universal history. Once these terms were established, they diffused to the rest of the world starting in the late 18th century. In his study of the intellectual diffusion, Vermeulen pays close attention to France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. It is here where the Dutch author parts with George Stocking in proposing a transnational understanding of the discipline. Vermeulen also argues for a different origin of the term anthropology, which emerged out of the fields of natural sciences and anatomy. It was only with Franz Boas’s arrival in the...