Ein Sozialwissenschaftler, den die Ethnologie faszinierte – Frühe theoretische Prägungen im Werk von Richard Thurnwald

Abstract

A social scientist who was fascinated by ethnology - early theoretical influences in the work of Richard Thurnwald

The present analysis examines the main early theoretical and conceptual influences that remained significant in Richard Thurnwald’s work. While also considering subsequent ramifications, this research question is primarily applied to the early work and academic life of one of the 20th century’s most influential and best-known social anthropologists from the German-speaking world. The relevant phases scrutinized here concern Thurnwald’s sojourns between 1890 and late in 1900 in Vienna, Bosnia and Graz – then all under Austro-Hungarian Habsburg rule. The main question about those crucial theoretical and methodological influences that Thurnwald brought with him to Berlin in late 1900 thus leads to a clear first answer: At that time, Thurnwald was already a fully trained social scientist whose formative years had been shaped by some of the best-known theoreticians of his day. Among them, it is argued that the theoretical influence of his main Vienna teacher, social scientist and economist Carl Menger, was far more pervasive than that of others. The impact by Thurnwald’s intellectual counterpart in Graz, sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz, was second and complementary to that. On these theoretical levels, Thurnwald brought a “proto-functionalism avant la lettre”, featuring a comparative emphasis with early interests in superpositioning processes and in the relevance of social Darwinism. On the methodological levels, Thurnwald had accomplished one of the first fieldwork projects by any formally trained social scientist, based on his good skills in locally relevant languages and by his preference (against other available options) for small scaled dialogical participant observation. In political terms Thurnwald at first remained the liberal conservative he had been before his Berlin arrival, with an interest in maintaining a dominant German-speaking colonial rule such as he had experienced and served in Bosnia.