With the rise of imperialism, the centuries-old European tradition of humanist scholarship as the key to understanding the world was jeopardized. Nowhere was this more true than in nineteenth-century Germany. It was there, Andrew Zimmerman argues, that the battle lines of today's ''culture wars'' were first drawn when anthropology challenged humanism as a basis for human scientific knowledge. Drawing on sources ranging from scientific papers and government correspondence to photographs, pamphlets, and police reports of ''freak shows,'' Zimmerman demonstrates how German imperialism opened the door to antihumanism. As Germans interacted more frequently with peoples and objects from far-flung cultures, they were forced to reevaluate not just those peoples, but also the construction of German identity itself. Anthropologists successfully argued that their discipline addressed these issues more productively—and more accessibly—than humanistic studies. Scholars of anthropology, European and intellectual history, museum studies, the history of science, popular culture, and colonial studies will welcome this book.
CONTENTS......Page 6
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......Page 8
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS......Page 10
INTRODUCTION......Page 12
PART I......Page 24
CHAPTER 1 Exotic Spectacles and the Global Context of German Anthropology......Page 26
CHAPTER 2 Kultur and Kulturkampf: The Studia Humanitas and the People without History......Page 49
CHAPTER 3 Nature and the Boundaries of the Human: Monkeys, Monsters, and Natural Peoples......Page 73
CHAPTER 4 Measuring Skulls: The Social Role of the Antihumanist......Page 97
PART II......Page 120
CHAPTER 5 A German Republic of Science and a German Idea of Truth: Empiricism and Sociability in Anthropology......Page 122
CHAPTER 6 Anthropological Patriotism: The Schulstatistik and the Racial Composition of Germany......Page 146
PART III......Page 158
CHAPTER 7 The Secret of Primitive Accumulation: The Political Economy of Anthropological Objects......Page 160
CHAPTER 8 Commodities, Curiosities, and the Display of Anthropological Objects......Page 183
PART IV......Page 210
CHAPTER 9 History without Humanism: Culture-Historical Anthropology and the Triumph of the Museum......Page 212
CHAPTER 10 Colonialism and the Limits of the Human: The Failure of Fieldwork......Page 228
CONCLUSION......Page 250
NOTES......Page 260
BIBLIOGRAPHY......Page 340
INDEX......Page 368
