Worldly Provincialism introduces readers to the highbrow background that drove the emergence of German anthropology. Drawing at the latest paintings at the heritage of the self-discipline, the members reconsider the old and cultural connections among German anthropology, colonialism, and race. via displaying that German highbrow traditions differed markedly from these of Western Europe, they problem the general assumption that Europeans in a foreign country shared a typical cultural code and behaved equally towards non-Europeans. The eloquent and well-informed essays during this quantity exhibit that early German anthropology used to be fueled through greater than an easy colonialist force. particularly, a variety of highbrow background formed the Germans' wealthy and multifarious curiosity within the cultures, religions, physiognomy, body structure, and historical past of non-Europeans, and gave upward push to their wish to connect to the broader world.
Furthermore, this quantity demands a extra nuanced figuring out of Germany's status in postcolonial reports. unlike the present view of German imperialism as a right away precursor to Nazi atrocities, this quantity proposes a key perception that is going to the guts of German historiography: there is not any transparent trajectory to be drawn from the complicated ideologies of imperial anthropology to the race technology embraced by way of the Nazis. rather than counting on a nineteenth-century reason for twentieth-century crimes, this quantity finally illuminates German ethnology and anthropology as neighborhood phenomena, most sensible approached when it comes to their very own worldly provincialism.
H. Glenn Penny is Assistant Professor of background on the college of Missouri, Kansas City.
Matti Bunzl Assistant Professor of Anthropology and heritage on the college of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.