Hendrik Frederik Vermeulen

Fieldwork and footnotes : studies in the history of European anthropology

The history of anthropology has great relevance for current debates within the discipline, offering a foundation from which the professionalisation of anthropology can evolve. The authors explore key issues in the history of social and cultural anthropological approaches in Germany, Great Britain, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Slovenia and Romania, as well as the influence of Spanish anthropologists in Mexico to provide a comprehensive overview of European anthropological traditions.

Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment

To use “magisterial” and “compendious” about this book may understate the case. Vermeulen’s monograph on the “genesis” of ethnography and ethnology will sit as a large and imposing bookend on any history of anthropology shelf for many years to come. It is hard to give any kind of effective summary of a work involving such a vast cast of intellectuals and such wide historical and geographical range. The outline points, though, are as follows. Modern cultural anthropology (Vermeulen calls it sociocultural anthropology; I don’t have space here to show why I think this is mistaken), inherits its core themes from two approaches developed in the enlightenment: ethnography and ethnology. Gottfried Leibniz (particularly his relationship with Russian emperor Peter the Great) turns out to be a cornerstone, not only in the story of how ethnography became its own type of study, but also how and where it was studied. It was Leibniz who began the program of research in Russia and who emphasized the study of language as definitive in understanding ethnos. Language was crucial for Leibniz as a revealer of reality, hence the varieties of language were crucial revealers of the variants of reality. This is a theme that has never gone away in cultural anthropology.