Anthropology and the German Enlightenment

Anthropology and the German Enlightenment
Author: Katherine M. Faull
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1995
Genre: Anthropology
ISBN: 9780838753057

"What was the role of anthropology in the German Enlightenment? Why did this discipline emerge as one of the most popular modes of inquiry in the eighteenth century, permeating fields as disparate as aesthetics, medicine, and law? As the essays in this volume show, the "body" of Enlightenment knowledge was by no means universal." "During the German Enlightenment the study of nature, humanity, and everything that humanity created was the topic of the day. But the period that defined moral reason as the sovereign human faculty also applied its scrutiny to the body that such a mind inhabited. What did it look like? Could moral superiority be deduced from physiognomy?" "In the massive effort to "educate" the German populace on what were seen to be the fundamental, a priori differences (physical and moral) between the sexes and the races, the European bourgeois man was considered to embody all human virtues and talents and stem from the only race and sex capable of ruling itself democratically and rationally. To examine the role of anthropology in this enterprise, contributors to this volume were asked to investigate what constitutes the German Enlightenment's interaction between its self-proclaimed rationalism and the pervasive presence of the non-rational; that is, the corporeal."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Anthropology of the Enlightenment

The Anthropology of the Enlightenment
Author: Larry Wolff
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 678
Release: 2007-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804779430

The modern enterprise of anthropology, with all of its important implications for cross-cultural perceptions, perspectives, and self-consciousness emerged from the eighteenth-century intellectual context of the Enlightenment. If the Renaissance discovered perspective in art, it was the Enlightenment that articulated and explored the problem of perspective in viewing history, culture, and society. If the Renaissance was the age of oceanic discovery—most dramatically the discovery of the New World of America—the critical reflections of the Enlightenment brought about an intellectual rediscovery of the New World and thus laid the foundations for modern anthropology. The contributions that constitute this book present the multiple anthropological facets of the Enlightenment, and suggest that the character of its intellectual engagements—acknowledging global diversity, interpreting human societies, and bridging cultural difference—must be understood as a whole to be fundamentally anthropological.

Before Boas

Before Boas
Author: Han F. Vermeulen
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 670
Release: 2015-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0803277385

The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Before Boas delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology's academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnography and ethnology originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the "natural history of man." Han F. Vermeulen explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Great Britain in tracing how "ethnography" originated as field research by German-speaking historians and naturalists in Siberia (Russia) during the 1730s and 1740s, was generalized as "ethnology" by scholars in Göttingen (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) during the 1770s and 1780s, and was subsequently adopted by researchers in other countries. Before Boas argues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on "other" cultures but on all peoples of all eras. Following G. W. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century.

Enlightenment Anthropology

Enlightenment Anthropology
Author: Carl Niekerk
Publisher: Max Kade Research Institute
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780271096865

Explores the origins of modern anthropology in the European Enlightenment, and how it was intertwined with a complex history of colonialism and racism.

The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany

The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany
Author: Michael C. Carhart
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674026179

In the late 1770s, as a wave of revolution and republican unrest swept across Europe, scholars looked with urgency on the progress of European civilization. Carhart examines their approaches to understanding human development by investigating the invention of a new analytic category, "culture."

Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the German Enlightenment:‎ The Anthropological Foundations of Immanuel Kant's Political Thought

Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the German Enlightenment:‎ The Anthropological Foundations of Immanuel Kant's Political Thought
Author: Roey Reichert
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

The overarching claim I advance here is that to understand Kant's political thought, it is ‎necessary to understand his philosophical anthropology. This I demonstrate by examining Kant's ‎conceptual relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Besides the introduction and ‎conclusion, the dissertation follows a fourfold topical division into philosophical anthropology, ‎philosophy of history, political philosophy, and ethics.‎The dissertation begins with the intellectual and historical context in which Kant developed ‎his novel 'pragmatic' approach to anthropology and the unique features he identified in the ‎human species. These include three rational predispositions: the technical, the pragmatic, and the ‎moral, which, through social interaction and history, respectively develop into culture, ‎civilization, and morality. Crucial is Kant's positing of a moral teleological end for the human ‎species (Bestimmung). The anthropological analysis of the human species leads Kant to the ‎conclusion that cosmopolitanism is intrinsic to its character, and that its Bestimmung lies in a ‎‎'cosmopolitically united' system-a universal moral community. For it to fulfill its cosmopolitan ‎Bestimmung, it is incumbent upon humanity to first eliminate the chief impediment to its ‎progress-namely, the perpetual state of war between states. This it will achieve primarily ‎through rational political institutions; states ought to first reform themselves into republics and ‎then establish a "Federation of nations" (V lkerbund) as a guarantor of perpetual peace.‎ Here I make an intervention in a long-standing debate within Kant scholarship over the ‎ostensible oscillations he made regarding his preferred form of cosmopolitical government. I ‎claim that Kant's anthropology demonstrates that the universal moral community can only be ‎constituted under the condition of a singular universal political community-therefore, the ‎V lkerbund must ultimately coalesce into a "World-republic". To this end, I further advance the ‎argument that, far from being antithetical to his cosmopolitan vision, nation-states are, in three ‎major ways, conducive to it on Kant's own terms: since, (1) they prevent global tyranny, (2) their ‎common idioms provide the most solid foundations for republics, which eventually (3) makes ‎them amenable for cosmopolitical unification. The upshot, however, is that although nationalism ‎has a cosmopolitan role to fulfill, cultural diversity has only secondary value for Kant-it is ‎merely a particular means to a universal end. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the ‎immense amount of time that humanity must traverse for it to fulfill its moral Bestimmung.‎

China in the German Enlightenment

China in the German Enlightenment
Author: Bettina Brandt
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2016-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442617004

Over the course of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals shifted from admiring China as a utopian place of wonder to despising it as a backwards and despotic state. That transformation had little to do with changes in China itself, and everything to do with Enlightenment conceptions of political identity and Europe’s own burgeoning global power. China in the German Enlightenment considers the place of German philosophy, particularly the work of Leibniz, Goethe, Herder, and Hegel, in this development. Beginning with the first English translation of Walter Demel’s classic essay “How the Chinese Became Yellow,” the collection’s essays examine the connections between eighteenth-century philosophy, German Orientalism, and the origins of modern race theory.

German Ideology

German Ideology
Author: Louis Dumont
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226169521

In Dumont's words, the Frenchman sees himself "as being a man by nature, and a Frenchman by accident" while the German feels he is "a German in the first place, and a man through his being a German." Furthermore, while individualism in the French fashion stresses equality and centers in the sociopolitical domain, in Germany it focuses on the uniqueness, the irreplaceability of the individual subject and the duty to cultivate it by self-education (Bildung).