Anthropology and antihumanism in Imperial Germany [electronic resource] /
by Andrew Zimmerman.
- University of Chicago Press, c2001.
- 1 online resource (ix, 364 p.) : ill.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 329-356) and index.
Exotic spectacles and the global context of German anthropology -- Kultur and kulturkampf: the studia humanitas and the people without history -- Nature and the boundaries of the human: monkeys, monsters, and natural peoples -- Measuring skulls: the social role of the antihumanist -- A German republic of science and a German idea of truth: empiricism and sociability in anthropology -- Anthropological patriotism: the Schulstatistik and the racial composition of Germany -- The secret of primitive accumulation: the political economy of anthropological objects -- Commodities, curiosities, and the display of anthropological objects -- History without humanism: culture-historical anthropology and the triumph of the museum -- Colonialism and the limits of the human: the failure of fieldwork.
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 imperiali.