Between Dogma and Data: Wilhelm Schmidt and the Afterlives of 19th-Century Ethnolinguistics

Abstract

Father Wilhelm Schmidt SVD (1868-1954) was one of the great linguistic and ethnological information hoarders of the early 20th century. Through the missionary Society of the Divine Word, he coordinated an army of trained fieldworkers who supplied him with information for his twelve-volume synthesis of world religions, his atlas of the world’s languages, and the journal Anthropos. Schmidt saw himself as practicing Catholic modern science, based on historical criticism and observational data. His guiding tenet was that language structures and material culture were linked to intersecting patterns of original Kulturkreise (cultural spheres), each with their own form of primeval monotheistic religious awareness. In other words, Schmidt sought to confirm Catholic dogma through data; a confirmation bias that mainly taints his ethnological work. This article investigates to what extent it also informed his more technical linguistic work, and how the two are interrelated.