Han F. Vermeulen. Before Boas

The title of Han F. Vermeulen’s Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment suggests a discrete, focused study of the emergence of a discipline in a specific time and place. But Vermeulen’s long, intricate book ends up dealing, sometimes at length, with a staggering number of topics: the longer pre- and post-history of anthropology, and not just in Germany but also in France, Britain, and the U.S. Vermeulen also discusses the history of other disciplines—including history, geography, and biology—in multiple countries. He investigates the history of German universities, the role of Pietism in universities, modernization in Russia under Peter the Great, and scientific expeditions to Siberia and Arabia. There is a Begriffsgeschichte of key terms and extended discussions of a variety of thinkers, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Carolus Linnaeus, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in the eighteenth century, and E. B. Tylor and Franz Boas in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. The book repeatedly reminds us of various historiographical themes, such as the role of empire and colonialism, as well as the role of post-Said “Orientalism,” in defining the human sciences. It also gestures toward the theory of history, invoking (and then repudiating) Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the “paradigm” and using (without explanation) Imre Lakatos’s idea of a “research program.”

Archaeology · Art · Enlightenment · Ethnography · German · Literature · Theology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies