Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses two studies from Germany: Heinrich Berghaus, Grundlinien der Ethnographie [Basic Principles of Ethnography] (1849) and Theodor Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker (1859-72). Both produced ethnographic studies without leaving the country. What was ethnographic about their work?

Paper long abstract:

The “Malinowskian Revolution” (Jarvie 1964) has been amnesic in equating ethnography with fieldwork. Since then, ethnography is considered valid only when based on fieldwork. This assumption has led to a marginalization of earlier ethnographers, who were ignored and sidelined. Before Malinowski (1922), ethnography wasn’t a method but a research program for describing and comparing cultural and social aspects of ethnic groups and nationalities. As explained in Before Boas (2015), ethnography emancipated out of moral history, historia civilis, during the eighteenth century. When the subject was introduced in England in 1834, George Long translated ethnography with “nation-description.” During the nineteenth century, there was a growing interest in ethnography. Ethnographic studies based on (early forms of) fieldwork are most interesting, but some ethnographies were library studies, based on reports by travellers, compilations of work by others. This paper discusses two studies from Germany: Heinrich Berghaus (1797-1884), Grundlinien der Ethnographie [Basic Principles of Ethnography] (Stuttgart 1849, 404 pp.) and Theodor Waitz (1821-1864), Anthropologie der Naturvölker [The Anthropology of Natural Peoples] (Leipzig 1859-1872, 6 vols.). Both produced detailed ethnographic studies without leaving the country. The same goes for J.C. Prichard’s Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (3rd ed. 1836-47) and R.G. Latham’s Descriptive Ethnology (1859). What was ethnographic about their work? How can ethnography be ethnographic without fieldwork?