Ethnologist, born in Bremen, NW Germany. He studied at Berlin, Heidelberg, Prague, Jena, and Würzburg, and travelled widely, collecting material for his ethnological studies in most continents. He is best known for his theory that variations in folk cultures could be traced back to the effects of local geographical conditions on a basic set of elementary ideas (Elementargedanken) common to mankind.
Adolf Bastian (Bremen, German Confederation 26 June 1826 - Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 2 February 1905) was a 19th century polymath best remembered for his contributions to the development of ethnography and the development of anthropology as a discipline.
Bastian was born into a prosperous bourgeois German family of merchants. He studied law at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, and biology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and the University of Würzburg.
Bastian became a ship's doctor and began an eight year voyage which took him around the world. He returned to the Confederation in 1859 and wrote a popular account of his travels along with an ambitious three volume work entitled Man in History, which became one of his most well-known works.
In 1861 he undertook a four-year trip to Southeast Asia and his account of this trip, The People of East Asia ran to six volumes. For the next eight years Bastian remained in the territory of the North German Confederation, where be became involved in the creation of several key ethnological institutions in Berlin. He has always been an avid collector, and his contributions to Berlin's Royal museum was so copious that a second museum, the Museum of Folkart, was founded largely as a result of Bastian's contributions.
In the 1870s Bastian left the German Empire and began travelling extensively in Africa as well as the New World.
Works and ideas
Bastian is remembered as one of the pioneers of the concept of the 'psychic unity of mankind' -- the idea that all humans shared a basic mental framework. According to Bastian, innovations and culture traits tended not to diffuse across areas.
While Bastian considered himself to be extremely scientific, it is worth noting that he emerged out of the naturalist tradition that was inspired by Johann Gottfried Herder and exemplified by figures such as Alexander von Humboldt. As a result, he was extremely hostile to Darwin's theory of evolution because the physical transformation of species had never been empirically observed, despite the fact that he posited a similar evolutionary development for human civilization.
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