Adolf Bastian And the Psychic Unity of Mankind: The Foundations of Anthropology in Ninteenth Century Germany

by Klaus-Peter Kopping

Adolf Bastian mapped a program for anthropological re- search in the nineteenth century that is still accepted in the international scholarly community today. Despite this, Bastian is not widely known as its founder. This is the first time that seminal pieces of the work of this much-neglected scholar have been translated into English. Bastian had an impact, directly and indirectly, on geography, psychology, comparative religious studies, and ethnology in the twentieth century. This volume demonstrates why that is so. Klaus-Peter Kpping is professor of anthropology at the Ruprecht-Karls-University, Heidelberg, Germany.

Genres: Anthropology

264 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2005

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adolf Bastian was a German Ethnologist and polymath who coined the phrase "psychic unity of man." Studying divers cultural around the globe he came to understand that myths, rituals and technology was too similar in too many disparate places to be accounted for by the diffusion model of cultural artifacts and transmission of what today we would call a cultural meme. Instead he came up with the concept of "elemental idea," which Jung called an archetype.

This book contains the only substantial English language translation of Bastian's work. He was a horrible, disorganized writer, and Kopping did a great job of editing his material down to make it intelligible.

[Enas]

Creo que el libro es fundamental para entender la escuela del evolucionismo en la antropología