Missing Links. Indigenous Life and Evolutionary Thought in the History of Russian Ethnography
Abstract
The history of Russian social anthropology has long been best known for the work of three, late nineteenth‐century “exile ethnographers,” each sent to the Russian Far East for their anti‐tsarist activities as students. All three men—Vladimir Bogoraz, Vladimir Iokhel'son, and Lev Shternberg—produced voluminous and celebrated works on Russian far eastern indigenous life, but it was the young Shternberg who had perhaps the most profound effect on setting the agenda for the canonic evolutionist line soon to take hold in late Russian imperial and early Soviet ethnography. This essay draws on archival, library, and field research to revisit the life and work of Shternberg in order to tell the story of “group marriage” that he documented for the life of one Sakhalin Island indigenous people, Gilyaks (or Nivkhgu, Nivkhi). Documented in this way by Shternberg, the Nivkh kinship system proved a crucial “missing link” for Friedrich Engels, who had long been eager to provide evidence of primitive communism as man's natural state. For Gilyaks, the die was cast. Their role as the quintessential savages of Engels’ favor made them famous in Russian and Soviet ethnographic literature, and significantly enhanced their importance to Soviet government planners. This essay tracks that episode and its aftermaths as a pivotal moment in the history of Russian social anthropology and of evolutionist thought more broadly.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bewi.201900022?af=R
Zwischen Mimesis und Typus. Die rassenanthropologische Lektüre altägyptischer Menschendarstellungen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert
Abstract
Im Zuge der archäologischen Erschließung Ägyptens und des Vorderen Orients im 19. Jahrhundert kamen zahlreiche Menschendarstellungen aus den Kulturen des Altertums zum Vorschein, die auch jenseits der Altertums‐ und Kunstwissenschaften große Faszination auszuüben vermochten. Dabei wurden insbesondere altägyptische Statuen und Reliefs weniger als ästhetische Repräsentationen, sondern als mimetisch‐typologische Darstellungen wahrgenommen, die nicht nur bestimmte Individuen, sondern ganze Völker mit ihren charakteristischen physischen Merkmalen abbilden. Vor diesem Hintergrund avancierten Abbildungen dieser Bildwerke zu wichtigen visuellen Referenzen anthropologischer Publikationen und sollten die Konstanz vermeintlicher Rassenmerkmale und damit die Gültigkeit wissenschaftlicher Klassifikationen belegen. Anhand vornehmlich deutschsprachiger Publikationen aus dem 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert rekonstruiert der Beitrag die epistemologischen Voraussetzungen und bildästhetischen Prämissen der anthropologischen Lektüre altägyptischer Menschendarstellungen und geht der Frage nach, warum sich dieses Verfahren weitgehend auf Objekte aus den Kulturen des Alten Orients konzentrierte. Im Fokus steht hier die klassizistische Kunst‐ und Körperauffassung, die auf der einen Seite einer anthropologischen Lektüre von Objekten aus der klassischen Antike im Wege stand, auf der anderen aber dazu beitrug, den ägyptischen jenen mimetischen und typologischen Charakter zuzuweisen, der sie als visuelle Referenzen auch für die physische Anthropologie attraktiv machte.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bewi.201900021?af=R
The Science of Empire: Darwinism, Human Diversity, and Russian Physical Anthropology
Abstract
Summary: The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the “natural history of humanity” in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in the a priori accepted developmental evolutionary model. The other constructed a new language that undermined the idea of species/subspecies/races/nations/ as stable, externally bounded, and internally homogeneous units and attempted to rationalize imperial hybridity. The article's main focus is on the latter classificatory narrative, its relational methodology, and the protostructuralist units of comparison that it produced.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bewi.201900020?af=R
Stoffe auf Reisen: Die transnationalen Akteure Jan Czochralski und Ludwik Hirszfeld und die lokale Bedingtheit der Entstehung von Wissen
Abstract
At the beginning of the 20th century, research on material substances such as blood and metals was in high demand, as is apparent from the successful careers of the serologist Ludwik Hirszfeld (1884–1954) and the metallurgist Jan Czochralski (1885–1953). Both were leading experts of their time, their transnational biographies – spanning the German‐speaking countries and Poland – were remarkably similar, and they both played important roles in the development of their respective disciplines. This paper explores how their contributions were closely tied to the circulation of their respective research materials – blood and metals – and of knowledge about them throughout Europe and beyond. These examples forcefully demonstrate that, in order to fully understand how specific, widely accepted bodies of knowledge emerge, both local situations and the material conditions have to be considered. Drawing on Latour's actor‐network theory, the transnational stories of serology and metallurgy demonstrate the range of human and non‐human actors, practices, and techniques that contributed to the circulation of knowledge, to its successful application, and also to occasional failure in specific geographical and cultural contexts.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bewi.202000002?af=R
„Trotz mancher Schwierigkeiten“. Zu den Auslandsreisen deutscher Geisteswissenschaftler zwischen 1933 und 1945
Abstract
In the years of National Socialism, and even during World War II, German scientists traveled abroad extensively. While international travels by natural scientists were studied in some detail, travels by scholars in the humanities have been studied to a much lesser degree, even though travel documents offer valuable insights into the regulated internationality of National Socialism. – We provide a first overview of international travels of scholars in the humanities between 1933 and 1945. The examples demonstrate how travelling academics dealt with conflicting expectations, justified their intentions, articulated disappointment, offered pragmatic advice for the further shaping of contacts abroad, and in this way became active participants of the resource ensemble of academia and politics. The study is based on extensive material from the political archive of the Auswärtiges Amt and the archive of the Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung from the Bundesarchiv which to this date have been hardly explored.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bewi.202000001?af=R
Inhaltsverzeichnis: Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 1/2020
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 43, Issue 1, Page 5-5, March 2020.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bewi.202080111?af=R
Laboratory Notes, Laboratory Experiences, and Conceptual Analysis: Understanding the Making of Ohm’s First Law in Electricity
Abstract
Georg Simon Ohm's work in the field of electricity led to what is now considered to be the most fundamental law of electrical circuits, Ohm's Law. Much less known is that only months earlier, Ohm had published another law—one that differed significantly from the now accepted one. The latter entailed a logarithmic relation between the length of the conductor and a parameter that Ohm called “loss of force.” This paper discusses how Ohm came up with an initial law that he felt compelled to correct a few months later. We analyze Ohm's publication as well as his laboratory notes, relating them to our own laboratory experiences while using the replication method to study his work. We also discuss the conceptual background of Ohm's work. We conclude that he was significantly influenced by French studies in the field of electricity, most notably the ones by Charles Augustin Coulomb.
Quelle: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bewi.201900019?af=R