Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones

Front matter

REINHARD JOHLER, CHRISTIAN MARCHETTI, MoNIQUE SCHEER (EDS.)

World War I and the Cultural Sciences in Europe

[transcript] Histoire

Contents

^A Time Like No Other”: The Impact of the Great War on European Anthropology 9 MONIQUE SCHEER, CHRISTIAN MARCHETTI, AND REINHARD JOHLER

Adapting to Wartime: The Anthropological Sciences in Europe

Continuity and Change in British Anthropology, 1914-1919 29 HENRIKA KUKLICK

Afterword

After the Great War: National Reconfigurations of Anthropology in Late Colonial Times

List of Contributors

Name Index viii

"A Time Like No Other": The Impact of the Great War on European Anthropology

Disciplinary histories of anthropology in Europe generally recognize World War I as an important caesura. Most attempts at periodization locate the beginnings of the discipline among Enlightenment philosophers, travelers, and missionaries, and then proceed to a phase in the nineteenth century characterized by the paradigm of natural history, moving toward evolutionary theory. It is also the phase of anthropology's increasing institutionalization, primarily in learned societies and museums. This continues up to 1914—and there the narrative tends to break off, picking up again in the interwar period. Very little has been said about what exactly was happening in the field of anthropology from 1914 to 1919. It is as if historians have assumed that the entire field had taken a break during that time, for one of several reasons: Some of its practitioners were forced to remain outside Europe for a time, as in the case of many who were at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Melbourne in August of 1914, when World War I broke out. Some served on the battlefield —and some of them perished there. The rest, it is assumed, simply “lay low,” lecturing to the diminished numbers of students at the universities and managing their museums with ever-decreasing funds. Indeed, to a certain extent, this was the scenario in much of Europe during these years. More importantly, the beginning of the interwar period has also seemed an opportune place for historians to define a new phase in anthropology, because of the enormous influence of Bronislaw Malinowski's publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922. His work, together with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's The Andaman Islanders published in the same year, are viewed as marking the decisive turn away from the paradigms of the nineteenth century, a turn away from speculative histories of humankind and toward a functionalist analysis of present-day societies. World War I, as an event, provides a clear break to this narrative in intellectual history revolving around the (arguably dominant) British tradition because before 1914 anthropology was an armchair discipline; after the war, it never would be again.

Of course, this is a very general and perhaps somewhat unfair characterization of the historiography of anthropology, which has also been at great pains to explode the myths and to complicate the overly simple narratives which the field has cultivated over the last century and to present more nuanced accounts.' The present collection represents another contribution to this effort, one that seeks to address the rupture created by World War I by asking if it was, in fact, such a clear break outside the sphere dominated by British anthropology and, if so, whether it was the same kind of break everywhere in Europe. The contributions to this volume all take a close look at what anthropologists did during the years 1914-1919 in a broad range of European countries, from Great Britain to Czarist Russia. The book's most intensive focus is on the area in which the (arguably) second-most dominant tradition of anthropology was at home: the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. In these countries, it will be shown, there was indeed quite a bit of anthropological work taking place, not only in spite of the privations of wartime, but often within a framework the war itself had made possible.

Armed interventions that were connected with Europe's military and economic domination ofthe non-European world is one arena in which to measure the impact of military conflict on the scientific practice of anthropology. This relationship between colonialism and the cultural sciences is a topic which has received much scholarly attention in recent years,” with civil administrative

1 SeeHenrika Kuklick, ed., A New History of Anthropology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Fredrik Barth, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman, One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology; The Halle Lectures (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

2 The pathbreaking collection on this topic: Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973). An adequate overview of the relevant literature cannot be given here, but as it has been dominated by treatments of the Anglo-American schools, a few titles dealing with intersections of colonial knowledge and the cultural sciences in Continental Europe should be mentioned: Claude Blanckaert, ed., Les politiques de l'anthropologie, discours et pratiques en France (1860-1940) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001); Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Emmanuelle Sibeud, Une science impériale pour l'Afrique? La construction des savoirs africanistes en France, 1878-1930 (Paris: Éditions de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2002); H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl, eds., Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

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power structures receiving as much, or more, attention than anthropologists working in, or for, the military per se. A focus on collaborations between anthropologists and the military during World War II has also been pronounced: The cooperation between German anthropologists and the National Socialist state, for some time a subject of research within Germany,’ has also received recent attention from Anglophone scholars.* Anthropologists were extensively involved in resettlement projects in eastern Europe and in consulting the regime on issues of determining the racial status of populations in occupied areas of Europe.’ Activities of US anthropologists during this time have also been quite thoroughly examined, most recently and systematically by David H. Price. They either lent their particular expertise to the government or used opportunities created by the war to do research from which the government ultimately benefited." Margaret Mead was a leading force behind the application of anthropology to build American morale, devise effective propaganda, and help

3 For example: Thomas Hauschild, ed., Lebenslust und Fremdenfurcht: Ethnologie im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995); Wolfgang Jacobeit, Hannjost Lixfeld, and Olaf Bockhorn, eds., Völkische Wissenschaft: Gestalten und Tendenzen der deutschen und ósterreichischen Volkskunde in der ersten Hálfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Bóhlau, 1994).

4 Gretchen E. Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

5 See the series Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus, edited by Reinhard Rürup and Wolfgang Schieder for the Presidential Commission of the Max Planck Society, in particular the following volumes: Doris Kaufmann, ed., Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus: Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven der Forschung (Góttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2000); Hans-Walter Schmuhl, ed., Rassenforschung an Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten vor und nach 1933 (Góttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003); idem, Grenzüberschreitungen: Das Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik, 1927-1945 (Góttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005).

6 David H. Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

7 Price cites a report by American Anthropological Association (AAA) secretary Fred Eggan written in 1943 stating that "Over one half of the professional anthropologists in this country are directly concerned in the war effort, and most of the rest are doing part-time war work. The comprehensive knowledge of the peoples and cultures of the world which anthropologists have gathered through field research has proved of great value to both the Army and the Navy, and to the various war agencies." (Quoted in David H. Price, "Lessons from Second World War Anthropology: Peripheral, Persuasive and Ignored Contributions," Anthropology Today 18 [2002]: 14-20).

plan efficient food rationing practices.* Her husband, Gregory Bateson, was one of many anthropologists who worked for US intelligence during World War IL? and her associate Ruth Benedict gathered data on the Japanese "national character" in American internment camps during the same war. Anthropologists were also involved in the administration of these camps. Benedict's popular study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, was commissioned by the government as a sort of manual for the occupying forces of Japan after 1945." Clearly, the ethical issues surrounding the Allies' involvement in war work from 1939 to 1945 are overshadowed by the perception of this conflict as a “good war" and a cause worth fighting for.? The minority dissent among anthropologists against this kind of work grew considerably after 1945, but members of the field in the US continued to do war-related work throughout the Cold War era.? In contrast, in Europe, during the postwar period, further collaboration between anthropologists and the state seems to have been at a fairly low ebb, as anthropologists all over Europe, but certainly far more forcefully in the German-speaking countries, had learned from the murderous collaborations of World War II that such cooperation should be avoided at all costs.

8 See Carleton Mabee, "Margaret Mead and Behavioral Scientists in World War Il: Problems in Responsibility, Truth, and Effectiveness," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 23 (1987): 3-13.

9 See David H. Price, "Gregory Bateson and the OSS," Human Organization 57 (1998): 379-384.

10 See Orin Starn, "Engineering Internment: Anthropologists and the War Relocation Authority," American Ethnologist 13 (1986): 700-720.

11 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1946). On Benedict's wartime work, see Judith Schachter Modell, Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life (Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press, 1983), 267-271. David H. Price has done extensive work on the involvement of American anthropologists with military intelligence organizations. See, for example, his "Anthropologists as Spies," The Nation 271, no. 16 (November 20, 2000): 24-27.

12 Cf. Price, "Lessons from Second World War Anthropology,” 15.

13 The role of anthropologists during the Cold War was less unambiguous, however: They did not always know that they were being funded by the CIA, and some were harrassed by the US government for their dissenting views. See David H. Price, "Cold War Anthropology: Collaborators and Victims of the National Security State,” Identities 4, nos. 3-4 (1998): 389-430; idem, "Anthropology Sub Rosa: The AAA, the CIA and the Ethical Problems Inherent in Secret Research," in Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice, ed. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, 2nd ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003), 29-49. An important study on the involvement of anthropologists in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War is Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

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Comparably extensive research is not available for World War I. In some cases, this may be because there simply was no extensive cooperation between anthropologists and the military during this time. In the US, for example, many of those anthropologists who were deployed will have turned their trained eyes to the cultural idiosyncrasies of the military, as Ralph Linton did during his two years of service during World War L" though not all of them published their observations. But these would have been strictly personal efforts, reflected upon after the war. It appears that only a few anthropologists took part in bona fide “war work" or used their expertise to publicly support the war effort.? In Europe, this practice seems to have been more firmly anchored during World War I, where intellectuals and scholars on both sides of the front lines engaged in a guerre des plumes beginning in the fall of 1914.5 Émile Durkheim, for example, was among the prominent members of the Parisian "Committee for Studies and Documents on the War" founded to distribute "objective analyses"

14 See Ralph Linton, "Totemism and the A. E. F.,” American Anthropologist 26 (1924): 296-300; in which he discusses the identity-building functions of symbols among the divisions of the American Expeditionary Force on the frontlines in France and the "superstitious" beliefs soldiers had in regard to these symbols. As Clyde Kluckhohn relates in a biographical sketch, it was said that "Linton angered [Franz] Boas by returning to Boas's classes at Columbia in uniform, and that Boas excluded Linton from the courses" for that reason (Biographical Memoirs, vol. 31 [Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1958], available online at http://www.nasonline.org under "Publications").

15 Franz Boas publicly criticized four American anthropologists for using their professional status as fieldworkers in Central America as a cover for espionage. Their activities were defended by the AAA, which issued Boas a censure also implying that, as a native-born German, his loyalty to the American war effort was questionable. See George W. Stocking, "The Scientific Reaction against Cultural Anthropology, 1917-1920," in Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, ed. George W. Stocking (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 270-307; David H. Price, "The Shameful Business’: Leslie Spier on the Censure of Franz Boas,” History of Anthropology Newsletter 28, no. 2 (2001): 9-12.

16 See Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914-1918 (Edinburgh, UK: Donald, 1988); Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg, Der Aufruf “An die Kulturwelt!": Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfánge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg, Historische Mitteilungen: Beiheft 18 (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1996); Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare 10 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

of the character and origins of the war against the German Empire." German and Austrian anthropologists, too, were not beneath writing propaganda pamphlets, giving public lectures on the racial composition of the enemy soldiers or contributing to wartime exhibitions of images of the enemy, in photographs or plaster casts of the heads of prisoners-of-war (POWs). This activity, in addition to the extensive use of POW camps as a site for anthropological research,” came at a decisive moment for the institutionalization of this scientific field as an academic discipline in most European countries. Thus, to what extent the First World War might be seen as an important part of the political history of the establishment of this science is a question that this volume wishes to explore.

World War I had some unexpected effects. Its length more or less mandated the length of Malinowski's stay in the Trobriand Islands. The fieldwork standards resulting from his extended presence there, which were to become paradigmatic, can therefore be viewed as a fruit of wartime. However, it is not such accidental or serendipitous influences of the war which are examined in this volume, but rather those which emerged from a conscious decision to utilize the war situation for research purposes, whether with or without a scientific aim that was thought to somehow aid one's own side in battle.

17 Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect, 75.

18 See the contribution by Andrew D. Evans in this volume as well as Monique Scheer, "Vólkerschau' im Gefangenenlager: Anthropologische 'Feind"-Bilder zwischen popularisierter Wissenschaft und Kriegspropaganda 1914-1918," in Zwischen Krieg und Frieden: Die Konstruktion des Feindes; Eine deutschfranzösische Tagung, eds. Reinhard Johler, Freddy Raphaél, Claudia Schlager, and Patrick Schmoll (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2009), 69-109. On the contributions of anthropologists to the war exhibitions of 1916/17 in Germany and Austria, see Christine Beil, Der ausgestellte Krieg: Präsentationen des Ersten Weltkriegs 1914-1939 (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2004), 193-207; Britta Lange, Einen Krieg ausstellen: Die Deutsche Kriegsausstellung 1916 in Berlin (Berlin: Verbrecher-Verlag, 2003), 40-63. On the war exhibitions in Vienna generally, see Maureen Healy, "Exhibiting a War in Progress: Entertainment and Propaganda in Vienna 1914- 1918," Austrian History Yearbook 31 (2000): 57-85.

19 Andrew D. Evans, "Anthropology at War: Racial Studies of POWs during World War I,” in Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire, eds. H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 198-229; idem, "Capturing Race: Anthropology and Photography in German and Austrian Prisoner-of-War Camps during World War I,” in Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, eds. Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson (London: Routledge, 2002), 226-256; Margit Berner, "Die 'rassenkundlichen' Untersuchungen der Wiener Anthropologen in Kriegsgefangenenlagern 1915-1918,” Zeitgeschichte 30 (2003): 124-136.

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During World War I, German and Austrian anthropologists, aside from taking part in domestic morale-building war exhibitions and giving learned lectures on the physical and cultural characteristics of the enemy, did not apply their expertise to psychological warfare on the front lines or engage in espionage.” One could say, perhaps, that, from 1914 to 1918, anthropologists supported the war effort as much as they were permitted, but that the state had not yet fully recognized what kinds of roles they could play. Instead, as a result of their constant struggle to secure research funding, anthropologists sought to use the war effort primarily to help support themselves. In order to access opportunities and spaces created by the war for their own research purposes, they implied a usefulness of their field for the greater good of the nation or empire, though it cannot necessarily be said that their work directly aided the war effort. The ethical questions which are at the center of research on the application of anthropological knowledge to warfare become strongly pronounced from the Second World War onward. In the First World War they are no more—but also no less—than potential issues. Here, we are looking at a development in its infancy, the initial establishment of the links between cultural scientists and the warfaring state, on which later cooperation would build. Thus, while ethical questions are not completely excluded from the discussion in this volume, they are not the focus of inquiry. The contributions to this volume seek to explore a broader territory in which such ethical questions are embedded. How did the experiences of wartime influence individual researchers' thinking and help to frame the questions of their research? Which anthropological practices were dictated by, or cultivated in, wartime? In what ways did such influences impact the field as a whole? What trajectories were set or adjusted due to the outbreak of the war? In other words, this volume seeks to address Eric Wolf's call for “a more layered understanding of the forces—both external and internal—that formed [anthropology]" at this most crucial juncture of the field's development.?!

As stated above, by focusing on World War L this volume concentrates on the European anthropological traditions, not only because the US entered the war later, but also because American anthropologists apparently did not involve

20 One exception to this rule was Leo Frobenius's plan to travel secretly to his former fieldwork areas in the Sudan and use his influence there to incite a rebellion against the British. This plan was never carried out, however, as his impolitic behavior on his way there sabotaged the effort. See Peter Heine, "Leo Frobenius als politischer Agent: Ein Beitrag zu seiner Biographie," Paideuma 26 (1980): 1-5.

21 Eric Wolf, "Anthropology among the Powers" Social Anthropology 7, no. 2 (1999): 121-134, quote from p. 121. This was the key address to the Fifth Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Frankfurt in 1998.

themselves in their professional capacity. Within Europe, too, there were differences in the intensity with which anthropologists chose to use the war situation to further their research. It appears, for example, that in France, the war years were indeed ones in which anthropologists pursued little active research. The "study of man" in France had been characterized since the mid-nineteenth century by deep rifts dividing the work of the ethnographers in Africa (who were often part of the colonial administration) from that of the theoreticians in Paris, most especially the physical anthropological school around Paul Broca and somewhat later the Durkheimian school, which, in turn, were also deeply divided from one another. There was no university chair for physical or cultural anthropology in France, only museums, learned societies, and teaching schools which could not confer university degrees. By 1913, Marcel Mauss was still lamenting the stagnation of ethnography due to a lack of sufficient institutions and drew up a proposal for the creation of a Bureau of Ethnography attached to the university.? Nothing came of it, as war had been declared and many French ethnographers and anthropologists were called to the front lines. The effect of the war on French anthropology, therefore, was of a more indirect nature. As Emmanuelle Sibeud has recently argued, the academicians who had been loathe to cooperate with "colonial ethnographer/administrators," viewing them as theoretically uninformed amateurs, reconsidered this stance after 1918. Durkheim and Mauss in particular had avoided contact, as they were politically critical of France's colonial engagement and feared ethnology could become ahandmaiden to it. However, “World War I and its aftermath changed ethnologists’ relationship to colonial regimes,” writes Sibeud, because the “engagement of intellectuals in the war effort had fostered an expansion of the possible relationships between scientific networks and political authorities"? Furthermore, the war had taken the lives of many of Mauss's students; Durkheim lost his own son in 1917 and died shortly thereafter himself. Mauss concentrated in the interwar years, therefore, on salvaging what was left of his school and chose to put aside prewar rivalries with the colonial ethnographers, viewing them now as a useful network for the production of ethnological data. The establishment of the Institut d'ethnologie at the Sorbonne in 1925, granting anthropology full academic status in France, was the direct result of this "alliance struck [...] between academic ethnology and colonial domination"^ and—one might

22 Marcel Mauss, "L'ethnographie en France et à l'étranger," Revue de Paris (1913), 549, 820-821; cited in Alice L. Conklin, "The New 'Ethnology' and 'La Situation Coloniale' in Interwar France," French Politics, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (2002): 29-46, quote on pp. 32-33.

23 Emmanuelle Sibeud, "The Metamorphosis of Ethnology in France, 1839- 1930," in Kuklick, A New History of Anthropology, 96-110, quote on p. 107.

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add—a direct result of changes in thinking brought about by World War I. Whereas in other European countries the war caused a stronger differentiation between the subdisciplines, leading physical and social anthropology to drift further apart, in France it appears the war had a major role in bringing these disparate fields together. Since, however, the practice of anthropology in spaces created by the war did not play a significant role, French anthropology lies outside the purview of this volume.

Accounting for ideological shifts in German anthropology has enlivened the discussion of this particular country's history of cultural science. Studies, such as those by Robert Proctor and Benoit Massin,” have considerably substantiated the argument that German-speaking anthropology was governed by a politically liberal paradigm before World War I. Contrary to the notion that racial theory had developed in a more or less straight line of völkisch thinking from Johann Gottfried Herder's Volksgeist to National Socialist science, recent studies have emphasized that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, German anthropologists were committed to a rather fluid, hybridist theorization of race which was not tightly bound to concepts of nation or Volk.” The leading figures in the burgeoning academic field of anthropology, Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) and Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), were united in their skepticism of the Darwinian model. Bastian taught his own brand of evolutionary theory,

25 Robert Proctor, "From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German Anthropological Tradition," in Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology, History of Anthropology 5, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 138-179; Benoit Massin, "From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and 'Modern Race Theories' in Wilhelmine Germany," in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, History of Anthropology 8, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 79-154.

26 See most recently Andre Gingrich, "Liberalism in Imperial Anthropology: Notes on an Implicit Paradigm in Continental European Anthropology before World War I,” Ab Imperio 8, no. 1 (2007): 224-239; Andrew D. Evans, "A Liberal Paradigm? Race and Ideology in Late-Nineteenth-Century German Physical Anthropology," Ab Imperio 8, no. 1 (2007): 113-138. See also Matti Bunzl and H. Glenn Penny, "Introduction: Rethinking German Anthropology, Colonialism, and Race," in Penny and Bunzl, Worldly Provincialism, 1-30. The discussion on the connections between political liberalism and anthropological theory originated with Woodruff D. Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany 1840-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). On the roots of German Volkskunde [folklore studies] in cultural anthropology and its liberal orientation, see Bernd Jürgen Warneken, ""Vólkisch nicht beschránkte Volkskunde’: Eine Erinnerung an die Gründungsphase des Fachs vor 100 Jahren,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 95 (1999): 169-196.

based on the assumption of a "psychic unity of mankind" manifest in universal Elementargedanken [elementary thoughts] which found their expression among different peoples in their particular Völkergedanken. Bastian placed great emphasis on the influence of geographical and climatic factors on cultural progress and did not discount the impact of contact between different peoples on their developmental trajectories, but his name became associated with the idea that, left to their own devices, any human group would develop along the same evolutionary scheme dictated not by the "struggle for existence,” but by the very fact of their being human." Virchow’s progressive liberalism was evinced in his political work as a member of the German Reichstag, where he was a vocal opponent of Otto von Bismarck's policies as well as of rising anti-Semitism. Like Bastian, Virchow held fast to the monogenetic view of human diversity and conceived “race” as a purely physical category which had no bearing on the ways that humans construed their political and cultural units as nations or ethnicities.” The influence of these two men on the field of anthropology in German-speaking science can hardly be overestimated: The first open attack against the evolutionary paradigm they represented—the "diffusionist revolt" of 1904?— was not launched until after Virchow's death and Bastian's final departure from Europe.? Moreover, as Massin has shown, full acceptance of Charles Darwin's theory in anthropological circles in the German-speaking world was delayed out of respect for Virchow's opposition to it.*' Its implementation in connection with the recently rediscovered Mendelian laws of genetics heralded the decline of the liberal paradigm in the field during the first decade of the twentieth century.

27 Cf. Klaus Peter Kópping, "Enlightenment and Romanticism in the Work of Adolf Bastian: The Historical Roots of Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century," in Fieldwork and Footnotes: Studies in the History of Anthropology, eds. Hans Vermeulen and Arturo Alvarez Roldán (London: Routledge, 1995), 75-91.

28 For a balanced treatment of Virchow's anthropological engagement, see Constantin Goschler, Rudolf Virchow: Mediziner, Anthropologe, Politiker (Cologne: Bóhlau, 2002), 179-185, 318-350.

29 This term was coined by Woodruff D. Smith; see his "The Social and Political Origins of German Diffusionist Ethnology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14 (1978): 103-112; idem, "Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum," German Studies Review 3 (1980): 51-68. On diffusionism as a theory particularly endemic to German-speaking ethnology, see Werner Petermann, Die Geschichte der Ethnologie (Wuppertal: Hammer, 2004), 579- 642.

30 Bastian saw Europe for the last time when he departed for the Caribbean in 1903 at the age of 78. He died in February 1905 in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

31 Massin, "From Virchow to Fischer," 114-120.

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The shift to an illiberal brand of German anthropology which aligned race with nation and fundamentally questioned the basic sameness of all humans was not fully completed, however, until after the cataclysm of World War I. This argument has been presented most forcefully by Andrew Evans, who has traced this process in the biographies of individual researchers working in the POW camps of the German and Austrian Empires.? In this volume, Evans looks at the broader effects the war had on the mindset of German anthropologists as well as the impact of international academic isolation on the field as a whole. Subscription to a "catastrophic narrative" of the impact of the war on German anthropology was not a prerequisite, however, for all the contributions to this volume. An equally strong argument has been made for continuities in German anthropology that emphasize the affinity of the liberal worldview with the colonial project: Both the assertion of the essential unity ofthe human species as well as the organization of diversity into civilizational hierarchies provided ideological support for imperial endeavors. From this perspective, the fundamental shift in German anthropology takes place much earlier and in close connection with the Reich's accumulation of colonized territories in the late nineteenth century. The historian Andrew Zimmerman sees anthropologists defining themselves primarily over and against the hegemonic discourse of humanism, valorizing the methods of the natural sciences, objectifying their objects of study, and expanding the domain of culture and history beyond the confines of Europe.? From the perspective of their common “antihumanism,” the divide between liberals and illiberals would be viewed as secondary.

The contributions to this volume, while not necessarily conceived of as direct interventions in this debate, were certainly written with it in mind. German anthropology's liberal heritage had a far-reaching impact, not only to the US, where Adolph Bastian's student, Franz Boas, established a cultural anthropology founded on many of his teacher's philosophical and methodological principles,” but also in eastern Europe, from where many anthropologists came to German cities for their training. The fate of the liberal paradigm in other continental European countries is a question that could deserve more attention.” Furthermore, the insight into a more nuanced account of German

32 Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

33 Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

34 See Matti Bunzl, "Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture," in Stocking Jr., Volksgeist as Method and Ethic, 17-78.