Introduction

Abstract

Abstract In the nineteenth century, there appeared a new group of academic disciplines that took culture as a primary object of scientific study. These included anthropology in its many varieties, human geography, culture history, and branches of psychology that focused on culture. In other fields, the concept of culture became a significant part of the apparatus of interpretation. Bodies of theory about culture emerged, often overleaping the boundaries between disciplines. The development of these “cultural sciences” was an international phenomenon to which people of all major European nations and the United States contributed. But distinctive national approaches also revealed themselves, each largely shaped by the public context of intellectual life in a particular country.