This collection of essays, mostly written by historians, focuses on the 19th- and early 20th-century history of German anthropology. The editors hope to correct the continued underappreciation of the importance of early German research.

German anthropology has followed a path different from that of the Anglo-American (and French) tradition. Germany’s late formation as a nation-state (1871) and its acquisition of colonies only in the 1880s partly explain this, as does its defeat during World War I and the impact of Nazism. During most of the 19th century German anthropology was characterized by liberal humanism, interested in documenting “cultural plurality and historic specificity” (p. 1) and in better understanding the German Volksgeist (genius or spirit)—in contrast to Anglo-American cultural evolutionism. Franz Boas subsequently introduced this liberal, historical perspective to U.S. anthropology, and the British turned to structural-functionalism. In Germany the discipline adopted an objective and deductive scientific stance that stressed cultural differences linked to environmental and racial contrasts.

The editors point out that although the colonial experience was important to German anthropology—both providing locations in which to work and influencing methods and objectives—it was not the only contextual factor shaping the discipline. Intellectual developments “from within the German context” also mattered (p. 10). They emphasize that there was no “seamless march toward” anthropology as a race science from the late 19th century onward (p. 28). The historical situation during that period, as shown by this volume’s contributions, was more complex.

The essays are not explicitly arranged thematically. The first two focus on 19th-century German anthropology. Harry Liebersohn describes how Pacific natives were perceived by German explorers–scientists Adelbert Chamisso early in the 19th century and Augustin Krämer at the turn of the 20th century. He indicates how their view of natives—the former naive romantic, the latter more practical scientific—contrasted because of their respective historical contexts. This case also “suggests a distinctive German cultural mission” (p. 32) that diverged from the longer Anglo and French colonial history. Matti Bunzl examines the late 19th-century journal, Zeitschrift fürVölkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, and the degree to which it (and folk psychology) reflected German–Jewish relations. The journal was a liberal Jewish undertaking that, among other things, tried to show that Jews could integrate into the German cultural tradition without loss of their identity. Culture, to the Jewish editors of the journal (Steinthal and Lazarus), is malleable, a view that became less appreciated as the 19th century progressed.

The following two essays make the 19th- to 20th-century transformation of German anthropology their principal theme. H. Glenn Penny takes the “rise and fall of Bastian’s museum” in Berlin (p. 90)—the most important late 19th-century ethnographic museum in Germany—to illustrate the shift from the inductive perspective that stressed cultural diversity in a unitary humanity to one that emphasized human cultural differences within geographic and racial constraints. Sierra Bruckner examines commercial ethnographic displays in which troupes of natives toured the countryside. At first praised by the anthropological community as encouraging the education of the bourgeois populace, these displays received increasing criticism in the 20th century by the new generation of anthropologists for seeking to satisfy the entertainment needs of an increasingly proletarian audience.

The growth of racial science in German anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is the subject of essays by Andrew Zimmerman, Andrew Evans, and Pascal Grosse. Zimmerman traces the history of German anthropometry in colonial Africa and elsewhere. Because of the resistance of local subjects, he notes the tendency among scholars to rely on measurements of bodily remains of natives shipped to Germany. He addresses the ethical issues involved, while arguing that the objectification of the natives for such scientific examinations easily led to racial interpretations. Evans concerns himself with anthropometry conducted within World War I POW camps operated by Germans and Austrians. He finds that the context of these prisons and the emotions of the Great War encouraged a “conflation of race, nation, and Volk” (p. 20) and its application not only to overseas natives but also to Europeans considered enemies. Grosse traces the acclimatization debate. Could Europeans, especially Germans, physically adapt to the tropics? Initially, German anthropologists answered negatively. As the call for German settlements in the newly acquired colonies grew, however, the argument shifted and eventually ended with the eugenic position that selective breeding could create tropically adapted Germans.

Rainer Buschmann and Robert Gordon focus on the relation between the German colonial experience and anthropology. Buschmann describes a relatively positive dimension of this relation by taking the case of Albert Hahl, governor of German New Guinea. Frustrated by the tendency of German anthropological expeditions to concentrate on collecting material culture and measuring body parts, he advocated the need to study current conditions among natives through actual fieldwork (anticipating Bronislaw Malinowski) and by adopting a broader ethnographic perspective. This would improve the science and be more relevant for colonial governance. Although some anthropologists responded (most notably Richard Thurnwald), ultimately Hahl’s call fell on deaf ears. Gordon paints a more negative picture of the interface between colonialism and anthropology. German settlers in German South-West Africa at first wanted to eliminate or exploit the “racially inferior” local Bushmen population. When the region became a mandated territory of South Africa after World War I and scientific interest in the Bushmen increased, these same settlers used the natives to ensure their own cultural survival, advertising their “special knowledge” about the natives to the scientific community, while retaining their racial bias even well after World War II.

In the final contribution to this volume, Suzanne Marchand reaches beyond Germany to cover German-speaking anthropology, specifically in Austria. She examines the role of religion, a dimension, the editors lament, that so far has been neglected by historians of anthropology. The author identifies the critical role of Catholicism in Austria and the absence of colonies in accounting for the divergence of Austrian from German anthropology. Another factor was the work of the energetic Father Schmidt. During the first half of the 20th century Schmidt became the pivotal figure in Austrian anthropology, his mission to document, by means of the diffusion-based Kulturkreislehre, that “pygmies” (p. 288) in Africa and Southeast Asia had monotheistic traditions that became corrupted in more complex societies. His was a conservative but not racist anthropology, demonstrating that the racist paradigm was not an inevitable outcome of anthropology in the German-speaking world.

This is a rich set of insightful essays. Scholars interested in the history of anthropology in general, not only that of Germany, will find this work of considerable value. Three critical points are worth mentioning. First, the editors and some of the contributors seem to favor the “Counter-Enlightenment” (p. 11) humanistic project of 19th-century German anthropology with its stress on cultural plurality, pure native traditions expressed through their individual Volksgeister, and the disruptive influence of the West. They fail to point out that this relativist and essentialist view of culture played nicely into the hands of those who later linked culture to race. The notion of “Volk,” as containing some lasting Geist, or spiritual essence, was one generally shared by both 19th-century liberal anthropologists in Germany and 20th-century Nazi ideologues. By contrast, classical cultural evolution anchored in the idea of psychic unity may have been less subject to such distortion. Second, although the editors and some of the contributors establish a link between 19th-century German liberal anthropology and the early Boasian tradition in the United States, they fail to point out the extension of this link (via Ruth Benedict) into contemporary U.S. anthropology in the form of hermeneutic anthropology and cultural essentialism of Clifford Geertz and others. Finally, maps of German colonial Africa and the Pacific would have been of considerable help, and the index does not do justice to the scope of this volume.