Culture Wars

Context, Models and Anthropologists' Accounts

Deborah James, Evelyn Plaice, Christina Toren, Deborah James, Evelyn Plaice, Christina Toren

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780857456618, 9781845456412
• eBook ISBN: 9781845458119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The relationship between anthropologists' ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are, themselves, implanted within specific cultural contexts which generate particular kinds of theoretical discussions. The contributors to this volume reject the premise that ethnographer and informant occupy different and incommensurable "cultural worlds." Instead they investigate the relationship between culture, context, and anthropologists' models and accounts in new ways. In doing so, they offer fresh insights into this key area of anthropological research.

Chapter 1

Alliances and Avoidance:
British Interactions with
German-speaking Anthropologists,
1933–1953

Andre Gingrich

Although the investigation of separate national traditions of anthropology is a very fruitful exercise, one to which Kuper has contributed substantially, it represents only one step in the creation of the ‘cosmopolitan anthropology’ for which he has called.¹ His pioneering work in this field shows – in the case of British and American traditions – how contexts mould academic concerns and how these concerns shape their contexts in turn (Kuper 1973, 1999a, 1999b). Debates in specific national settings, he shows, have been ‘generated within, and in relation to, real . . . dilemmas’ which those settings present (Kuper, in Gibb and Mills 2001: 214). But he has also noted the danger that these separate national traditions can become ‘inward-looking and isolated’ (ibid.) His active encouragement of the development of other schools and efforts to promote dialogue and debate amongst and between these – in part through the formation of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) – represent important moments in the struggle against such isolationism, and in the creation of new cosmopolitan standards in anthropology.

The extent to which ongoing connections have occurred between these allegedly separate traditions has often, however, been overlooked. German Völkerkunde, for example, is sometimes thought to have been so tailored to the maintenance of Nazi ideology and practice during the Third Reich that it bore very little resemblance to its intellectual counterparts in the rest of Europe or in the U.K. The present chapter attempts to set the record straight. It documents the extensive interactions which British and German-speaking anthropologists had with each other, and shows how all the major trends of international anthropology had specific German equivalents: historical diffusionism, functionalism and structuralism. The German case thus challenges facile assumptions about the neatness of fit between anthropologists’ socio-cultural background and their concerns and theoretical preoccupations.

Anthropology in Germany: The Background

Germany’s history between the (‘second’) Reich’s foundation in 1871 and the First World War has been aptly described by some authors as part of the country’s belated entry process into modernity (Böhme 1972; Eder 1985; Dumont 1994). In 1848, the bourgeois and liberal revolutions in various German countries and principalities had failed to achieve democratic liberties and a unified German state for the promotion of the domestic market economy. It was almost a quarter of a century later that Prussia, as the strongest among the remaining principalities, thus implemented Germany’s unification through military and administrative means ‘from above’. After 1871, those forces that had come to power inside the newly founded German empire also began to act as the junior newcomer in the European and colonial fields of growing imperial rivalry. In increasingly successful ways, the natural sciences and humanities were promoted at the service of these ambitions and aspirations at home and abroad.

Völkerkunde emerged as the established professional German term, around the turn of the twentieth century, for what became known as social anthropology in the British realm.² Literally meaning ‘(academic) knowledge about (foreign) peoples’, urban museums were the field’s first institutional sites during the second half of the nineteenth century (Penny 2002; Penny and Bunzl 2003). During the first decades of the twentieth century, the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde (Museum of Anthropology) was the largest museum of its kind in the world, based on collections from German colonies (until 1918) in Africa and Melanesia, but also from the Americas and elsewhere.

Germany’s defeat in 1918 and the loss of her colonies accelerated ongoing changes inside academic life. Folklore studies or Volkskunde – that is, knowledge about the (domestic, German) people – was made into a specialized academic field of its own, while Völkerkunde could no longer pursue its priority for collecting ethnographic objects in the colonies and elsewhere. By the 1920s, its institutional centres of gravity eventually shifted to university departments, similar to earlier developments in Britain, France and the United States. In the course of these shifts, Völkerkunde largely became separated from Anthropologie (physical anthropology), although many researchers and teachers were still trained in both, and many museum departments and learned academic societies continued to cover both under one name. This continued to characterize the institutional academic landscape until Hitler came to power in 1933.

The present chapter discusses British interactions with anthropologists from the German language zone in the two decades after 1933 – that is, before, during and after the Second World War. I want to identify major trends and to illustrate them through a few significant examples. With a specific interest in the different groups of German-speaking anthropologists with whom their British colleagues interacted, I shall try to outline what is known from previous and current research, and to formulate a few hypotheses and suggestions for the future.

During the Nazi period, the partial institutional and organizational differentiation between physical and social anthropology that had been achieved before 1933 was now reversed to some extent. In several important instances, it was replaced by a new racist Nazi priority for close cooperation between both fields under the rubric of ‘racial studies’. Recent assessments of Völkerkunde in the period right after the Nazis had come to power (Hauschild 1995; Streck 2000; Gingrich 2005) have clarified the widespread support for Naziism of most institutional representatives of Völkerkunde in Germany. It has been pointed out that the transition had been a fairly smooth one, because many professional anthropologists either had already sympathized with Naziism before it came to power, or because after the Nazi takeover many others adjusted to the fact. Given the elitist organization of German academia in general, and of Völkerkunde in particular, the number of Jewish and democratic opponents to Naziism with formal positions inside Völkerkunde had been relatively low from the outset. Most of them were persecuted, forced into emigration, or murdered either before or after the war began. By 1935/6, institutional academic Völkerkunde was already as firmly controlled by the Nazis as most other fields in the humanities in Germany. With Austria’s occupation in March 1938, the same type of violent process swept through the second largest Völkerkunde institute in the German language zone (Gingrich 2006a). With the exception of that institute’s later subordination under Naziism, Völkerkunde was therefore fully integrated into the Nazi Reich long before the war began.

It would be naive, however, to assume that the full integration of an academic field into Naziism went hand in hand with a monolithic inner structure of that field. On the basis of explicit academic allegiance to state and party in theory and practice, Naziism accepted the coexistence of various research directions within all kinds of fields and even promoted them out of its own social Darwinian premises and priorities. Moreover, historians have pointed out that while Naziism itself presented dictatorial internal coherence on all levels, in reality it always combined in bizarre ways with quite the opposite, namely with fierce and frequently chaotic internal competition (see Byer 1999). This, then, was the institutional and ideological context to be kept in mind when discussing anthropology under Hitler: Völkerkunde had several different research directions, whose representatives were mostly eager to demonstrate their support for Naziism, and who competed for official recognition within the Third Reich against each other, and within a context of Nazi funding sources and offices competing, in turn, among themselves (ibid.)

In this context, many German social anthropologists also attempted to enhance their academic and intellectual affinity with the Nazis’ ‘racial studies’ and to particular Nazi versions of physical anthropology. In their own terms, proponents of Völkerkunde were relatively successful in proving their usefulness either through their interests in ‘applied anthropology’, or by means of their ‘theoretical’ proximity to Nazi ideology, or both. Key examples of ‘applied’ anthropology under the Nazis include the activities of Otto Reche and Karl Anton Pluegel. Reche held the chair at Leipzig and was responsible for official racial identification reviews. The results of these reviews determined the extent to which individuals were said to belong to an inferior race, which could, in turn, imply a decision about life and death (Geisenhainer 2003). Another case in point is Karl Anton Pluegel, who held a key position in the Nazis’ Kracow Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit during the German occupation of Poland and contributed to the planning and establishment of the Jewish ghetto (Michel 2000). In ideological terms, Wilhelm E. Mühlmann represents the most prominent case of German anthropological efforts toward reorientating the whole field in line with Nazi priorities while at the same time contributing to the Nazi worldview by anthropological means (Michel 1991). Compared with what is known about other fields (Hausmann 2001), I estimate that, through the allocation of grants and institutional positions, Völkerkunde became part of an upper echelon of subjects within the humanities and social sciences which were clearly promoted under Hitler – together, that is, with fields such as psychology, German studies, Celtic studies, folklore studies (Volkskunde), Indo-Aryan studies, or archaeological prehistory.

If this outlines some of the more general background in the period prior to and during the war, before going on to discuss British interactions with German anthropologists during the 1933–1953 period we must highlight a few contextual aspects that were more specific to the prewar years. After Hitler came to power, his government was eager to demonstrate and to improve his ‘new Germany’s’ respectability and its external image. There were ideological as much as strategic reasons why Great Britain represented a key arena for these prewar Nazi propaganda efforts. In turn, these Nazi propaganda efforts consisted of regular demonstrations within Britain aimed at demonstrating that normal, good research was taking place in Hitler’s Germany. This should help to introduce what otherwise might come as an unpleasant surprise.

The Prewar Years, 1933–1939: Alliances, Mostly

The years before the Second World War display a dense network of alliances and interactions between Great Britain and Germany. This is true for many fields of economic, social and cultural life in general, and for much of academia, including most fields that related, in one way or another, to the colonies. In these contexts, British–German anthropological interactions played a not insignificant role. Germany lost its colonies in Africa and parts of the Western Pacific in 1918. Less than fifteen years later, when Hitler came to power in Berlin in January 1933, most German colonial linguistic and ethnographic expertise persisted, ready to be reinvigorated but without its ‘own’ colonial fields of practice. German colonial academic expertise thus seemed to be available, and, to an extent, it was. Besides, as an institutionalized language, German continued to be the major international academic lingua franca that it had been since the nineteenth century. Long-term factors, colonial German practical expertise and Germany’s academic status all help to explain the extent of continuing cooperation between British and German anthropologists until 1939. In a way, it seems that British academia dealt, from a distance, with Hitler’s rise to power in a similar manner to the way in which many German academics dealt with it in their much more immediate contexts: the pursuit of ‘business as usual’ was a widely prevailing attitude.

These and other long-term factors were advanced, and peaked, together with a well-known third element: British ‘appeasement’ as personified, of course, by Neville Chamberlain. So, an uncomfortable fact has to be acknowledged: from Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 until the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, six and a half years passed that were shaped by relatively intense interactions and alliances in anthropology. These were pursued by a number of major British academic institutions and their anthropologists, and by the official anthropological representatives of a Germany already ruled by Nazi dictatorship. Those years of relatively intense alliances were in fact somewhat longer than the war period itself. Because of the war, and because of everything that became known about Nazi crimes against humanity before and during its course, those pre-1940 academic alliances became something of an embarrassment later, often passing into oblivion after 1945. The years of prevailing British–German alliances in anthropology, however, were not monolithic and unambiguous. They had their internal resistances, their ups and downs, their rivalries and contests.

One of the main British institutional platforms for British–German alliances in anthropology before September 1939 was the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in London (today’s IAI). The debate about its changing roles and functions in colonial history (Kuklick 1991; Kuper 1996: 99–101; Mischek 2002: 46–56) seems to have clarified that the London African Institute was not the exclusive, single-purpose tool of British colonial interests, as some authors have tended to portray it. Rather, it was an international, or ‘global-colonial’, centre, and in this sense it also functioned as a clearing house and a research forum.

In this context, German, and German-speaking, experts on Africa held senior institutional positions in the institute right up until 1939. Most prominent in the hierarchy was the German linguist Diedrich Westermann, one of the institute’s two directors and coeditor of its journal, Africa. Since the late nineteenth century, German research in and about Africa had been held in fairly high esteem in Britain, and this continued in several practical ways until the war broke out. Westermann had been a Protestant missionary in Africa for almost two decades and he never became a member of the Nazi party. His skills and competence as a linguist are beyond doubt. Yet from 1933 onward, he also acted as one of the Nazis’ top academic representatives and as advisor for their rising colonial ambitions in Africa (Mosen 1991; Byer 1999: 305). These ambitions eventually turned out to be seriously practical: while tacit cooperation with the Portuguese Salazar regime in Africa was continued during the war, German expertise in and about Africa also contributed to open Nazi support for Boer academic and political ambitions in southern Africa, and to Hitler’s logistical back-up for Mussolini in eastern Africa. These ambitions intensified during the first phase of the Second World War (before the Stalingrad battle), i.e. together with the fall of Paris and with Rommel’s northern African campaign.³ German interests in the African Institute before 1939 thus were not harmless. Moreover, Westermann’s role as codirector and coeditor at the African Institute until 1939 was not a unique case: several Völkerkunde experts on Africa from Germany and Austria also served on various executive councils and governing bodies. Among them were not only those who supported Naziism, it should be said, but also those from the Vienna theological diffusionist school, such as Wilhelm Schmidt and Paul Schebesta, who were then ousted after Austria’s annexation in 1938 (Mischek 2002).

So, to an extent, contributions from the German language zone to the London African Institute did reflect some modest variety within Völkerkunde. On the level of academic training and publications, several among those who were about to become most prominent representatives of German Völkerkunde under Nazi rule received funding and training through the African Institute, or published in its journal. Two important examples are Hermann Baumann and Günter Wagner.

Baumann was a leading representative of what we may call the German school of secular diffusionism, to be distinguished from the Vienna school of Catholic theological diffusionists. Two generations before Baumann, the early phases of that same school of secular diffusionism had been the formative environment for Franz Boas during his Berlin years, and he took some of that with him to the United States (Bunzl 1996; Jacknis 1996; Cole 1999: 83–105). By the mid 1930s, Baumann had gained a name as an expert on Angola, and in fact was one of the few German secular diffusionists with a serious field work record in Africa. Simultaneously, he belonged to the inner circle of early Nazi party members in the field of Völkerkunde. In 1934, Baumann published an article in the African Institute’s journal, in which he presented some of his ethnographic field material from Angola in his diffusionist perspective. He combined this with a fierce attack on his contemporary in African studies in Germany, Leo Frobenius at Frankfurt. He argued that Frobenius had separated the notion of ‘culture’ from the notion of ‘race’ in an unacceptable manner (Baumann 1934). The mere publication of this article in a prominent London-based academic journal decisively promoted Baumann’s opaque career within the ‘Reich’ (Braun 1995), and accelerated the fall of the Frobenius phenomenological school into official disgrace (Heinrichs 1998; Schuster 2006). It is thus hard to deny that in some crucial instances, the almost seven years of alliances between British and German anthropology had clear effects. They gave international academic legitimacy to the rise of racist German views in anthropology, and they helped to further marginalize the views of those who did not explicitly share those racist ideologies. After all, Frobenius’s main follower, Adolf Jensen, would soon be among those in anthropology who were marginalized and persecuted by the Nazis (Gingrich 2005: 108, 116; Schuster 2006).

British institutional interactions thus provided some opportunity to upgrade the dominant trend of secular diffusionism in German Völkerkunde. British anthropology’s primary interest, however, was devoted to the more recent trend of German functionalism. Richard Thurnwald continued to be its leading and internationally best-known figure – well known as a person and, in Britain, appreciated with some reservations as an author.⁴ Inside Germany, many junior scholars regarded Thurnwald’s brand of functionalism with its social Darwinist tendencies as an example to be followed, and as an alternative to diffusionism’s historical speculations (Gingrich 2005: 118), a development that was observed with some sympathy in Britain. In fact, it seems a viable hypothesis to me that German functionalism was viewed from the British side first and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction Culture, Context and Anthropologists’ Accounts
• Chapter 1 Alliances and Avoidance: British Interactions with German-speaking Anthropologists, 1933–1953
• Chapter 2 Serving the Volk? Afrikaner Anthropology Revisited
• Chapter 3 ‘Making Indians’: Debating Indigeneity in Canada and South Africa
• Chapter 4 Culture in the Periphery: Anthropology in the Shadow of Greek Civilization
• Chapter 5 Culture: the Indigenous Account
• Chapter 6 We are All Indigenous Now: Culture versus Nature in Representations of the Balkans
• Chapter 7 Which Cultures, What Contexts, and Whose Accounts? Anatomies of a Moral Panic in Southall, Multi-ethnic London
• Chapter 8 ‘What about White People’s History?’: Class, Race and Culture Wars in Twenty-first-Century Britain
• Chapter 9 A Cosmopolitan Anthropology?
• Chapter 10 The Door in the Middle: Six Conditions for Anthropology
• Chapter 11 Adam Kuper: an Anthropologist’s Account
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index