The ethnicity of knowledge : statistics and Landeskunde in late eighteenth-century Hungary and Transylvania

Abstract

the ethnicity of knowledge This essay discusses the emerging field of statistics in the multiethnic lands of the Habsburg Monarchy. It analyzes how the science of the social realm used ethnographic description (Volkerbeschreibung) to underscore the claims to the social predominance of German and Hungarian elites in Hungary and Transylvania. It is known that the end of the eighteenth century corresponds to the institutionalization of a number of scholarly disciplines in the academic centers of the Holy Roman Empire. These disciplines developed in the framework of the German tradition of state sciences (Staatswissenschaften), as well as the philological, historical and ethnographic fieldwork of German scholars in the Central and Northern Asian territories of Russia. Ethnography as a descriptive and comparative study of peoples emerged thus from a quasi-colonial context in Siberia, to be adopted later as an academic discipline in the institutions of composite and multiethnic states. Both in Russia and the German and Habsburg context the scientific exploration of the human resources served economicadministrative purposes. It had to be the adequate tool of governing social differences, the latter being ‘translated’ in ethno-cultural terms by ethnographers 1 .