At the much-noticed symposium on the Austro-German anthropologist Richard Thurnwald in Paris in July 2021, Thurnwald’s biographer Marion Melk-Koch (born 1954) presented him as an opponent of National Socialism in her keynote speech. This led to heated discussions, but also irritation, in the auditorium.^[1] As far as the Nazi era is concerned, Melk-Koch’s presentation essentially followed her 1989 biography, based on her dissertation.^[2] Although groundbreaking for Thurnwald research, the book was heavily criticized for its portrayal of Thurnwald during the Nazi era; one reviewer even accused the author of “lying about history and life” (Geschichts- und Lebenslüge).^[3]

This article is about historical source criticism. The example of Thurnwald will be used to show why historical source criticism is methodologically necessary to dispel (self-serving) myths that persist in our discipline, especially when it comes to the infamous Nazi period. The work follows in the theoretical tradition of George W. Stocking, who explicitly prioritizes biographical, institutional, and historical contextualization over “presentist” concerns.^[4] In the following, I will demonstrate on the basis of historical source criticism how the use of sources concerning Thurnwald during the Nazi era can lead to erroneous conclusions.

Born in Vienna, Richard Thurnwald (1868–1954) is considered one of the most influential anthropologists in the German-speaking world. He founded ethnosociology and was a representative of functionalism with a focus on social change. From 1931 to 1936, he taught in the United States and lectured at Harvard, Yale, and the University of California. In 1935, he was appointed honorary professor at the University of Berlin. However, his application to establish an institute was rejected because he then had already exceeded the age limit of 65. When the University of Berlin was reopened after the war in 1946, Thurnwald was appointed Professor of Ethnology and Sociology. Thurnwald was classified by the US occupation authorities as an opponent of the Nazis, who had supposedly never been active in colonial politics.

This image persisted for decades, not only in German-speaking countries, as the following three examples show. Writing from UC Berkeley in 1968, the social anthropologist Wolfram Eberhard (1909–1989) made the following claims about Thurnwald for an influential social science encyclopedia:

Thurnwald was the first German sociologist and one of the first in Europe to make special studies of processes of acculturation and adjustment in Africa. These studies, which he made with his wife, Hilde Thurnwald, avoided the ‘colonial ethnological’ approach that influenced British anthropological thinking for some time.^[5]

Much more recently, the editors Alan Barnard (1949–2022) and Jonathan Spencer (born 1954) said about Thurnwald in 2010:

Although he was an outspoken opponent of the Nazis, he returned to Germany from the United States in 1936 […]^[6]

And finally, Viktor Stoll stated about Thurnwald in 2020:

Although Thurnwald did not openly break with Mühlmann during the war years […] the relationship between student and teacher degenerated rapidly as Mühlmann’s Nazi sympathies increased. The situation became so difficult that Mühlmann eventually ‘denounced’ Thurnwald to the government, forcing the aged ethnologist to flee from Berlin to Holstein in late 1943 for his family’s safety.^[7]

In sum, from these three claims one would be tempted to derive the following picture of Thurnwald’s activities during the Nazi era: Firstly, Thurnwald allegedly did not pursue a colonial-ethnological approach (1968); secondly, Thurnwald was supposedly an explicit opponent of Nazism while living in the USA (2010); and thirdly, Thurnwald was putatively even a victim of the Nazi regime (2020). The three articles referenced here thus have one main element in common: they contain false statements. This becomes clear when one looks at the sources on which these statements are based: the authors have consistently used sources that either date from the post-war period or were not related to the Nazi era. This is a methodological failure based on a “presentist” approach which, in Thurnwald’s case, leads to completely erroneous conclusions.

In the following, I would like to show how these errors arose. Let us begin with Eberhard’s statement that Thurnwald did not use a colonial political approach. From the context of his lexical contribution, it is clear that the author is referring to Thurnwald’s book Black and White in East Africa, published in 1935, which is the result of Hilde (1890–1979) and Richard Thurnwald’s joint field research in East Africa in 1930.^[8] From today’s perspective, the book is written in a surprisingly modern way and does not in fact contain any explicit colonial political agenda.^[9] However, Eberhard’s concluding sentence gives the impression that Thurnwald kept his distance from colonial issues altogether. This, however, is wrong. What Eberhard completely fails to mention is his academic teacher’s involvement in colonial politics during the Nazi era.

In October 1938, Thurnwald took part in the so-called Volta Conference in Rome. The week-long conference was dedicated to Africa and was organized by the Fondazione Alessandro Volta of the Italian Academy of Sciences and by leading African and colonial scholars (some of them involved in politics and business) from fourteen European countries. With this conference, a few days after the Munich Agreement, Fascist Italy pursued the recognition of Italian conquests in Africa and the claim towards a leading role in colonial policy among the European powers.^[10] It was hardly mandatory for participants to take active positions on colonial policy, as the lectures by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954) indicate. Thurnwald, on the other hand, presented his colonial policy approach based on racial biology in the final discussion:

The separation of the races [is] an imperative that benefits white and black alike. […] By advocating against mixing and for the separation of the races, we are demonstrating our love both for the African and for ourselves, whatever European nation we belong to.^[11]

The Swedish conference president Gerhard Lindblom (1887–1969), who, like Thurnwald, had conducted his ethnographic field research in British East Africa, reaffirmed Thurnwald’s colonial policy plea in his closing remarks.^[12] In light of the fact that this leading anthropologist from Nazi Germany publicly argued “against mixing and for the separation of the races” at a conference in Mussolini’s Italy in 1938, post-war statements acquitting him from having pursued any active engagement for colonialism are profoundly inadequate.

In the summer of 1939, Thurnwald published a book of almost five hundred pages entitled Koloniale Gestaltung (Colonial Design), in which he made it clear that Germany had “found itself again under National Socialist leadership.”^[13] This would become Thurnwald’s main colonial work, receiving numerous laudatory reviews at the time from a wide range of disciplines in Nazi Germany. The most detailed review was written by Rudolf Karlowa (1876–1945), a former governor of German New Guinea who knew Thurnwald personally. Karlowa recommended Thurnwald’s book because of its National Socialist orientation. In contrast to the mistaken methods of Western democracies, he argued, Thurnwald delineated the principles of colonial organization that “must be striven for in the National Socialist development of the colonies.”^[14] Conversely, Thurnwald also recommended Karlowa’s colonial works such as the 1939 book Deutsche Kolonialpolitik (German colonial policy), in which Karlowa argued for the “unconditional prohibition of marriages between people of white and colored race,” which also included the “prohibition of extramarital sexual intercourse between them.”^[15] In his review in March 1940, Thurnwald emphasized that Karlowa had laid the foundation for “a new system of colonial policy in line with National Socialist doctrine” with this book.^[16] It is well known that by contrast to his pre-1945 positions, Thurnwald then strictly avoided the colonial topic after 1945. In fact, it is this post-war legend that has shaped Thurnwald’s enduring image to this day.^[17]

The second misconception — that Thurnwald was an opponent of the Nazis before his return to Berlin in 1936 — presents more of a challenge for source criticism. This is because Thurnwald’s correspondence in the American context proves that he was indeed in close correspondence on friendly terms with Franz Boas (1858–1942), Edward Sapir (1884–1939), and Robert H. Lowie (1883–1957). Thurnwald was teaching at Yale University when the Nazis took power in Germany. As is well known, Boas wrote a letter of protest to Reich President Paul von Hindenburg at the end of March 1933.^[18] Thurnwald reacted by telling Boas in a supportive way that he also rejected Nazism.^[19] In April 1936, he explained to Lowie that he had difficulties returning to Berlin for this same reason (Fig. 1a):

A return to Berlin is difficult for various reasons. One of them is that now the adherence to the Nazi party is required from students as well as teachers of the university.^[20]

At the very same time, however, he also asked the administration of the University of Berlin to set up a separate institute for him. From New Haven, he turned to Eugen Fischer (1874–1967), the leading Nazi anthropologist, writing to him on February 9, 1936:

In the meantime, the colonial idea has been officially recognized.

[…]

I don’t need to say a word about my political views, which you have known for years.^[21]

Three months later and still from the USA, Thurnwald wrote to the dean of the University of Berlin (Fig. 1b):

As I have already said, I would like to put [my] experiences, especially those of the last five years, which have not cost the German fatherland a penny, at the service of the National Socialist state.^[22]

In order to increase his credibility with the dean, he fell into a racist line of argument borrowed from Nazi jargon:

I fought in the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie and in Sociologus against thoroughly contaminated marxistic-talmudistic sociology as it was represented by a group of especially Frankfurter Jews in Germany that also held others under their spell. At that time, I presented an alternative American non-Jewish dominated sociology whose research was more realistic and based on facts than was the Jewified (verjudet) German sociology.^[23]

Thurnwald wrote these confessions of allegiance to National Socialism from New Haven, even using the same typewriter which he had previously used for his letters to Boas and Lowie.^[24] George Steinmetz (born 1957), who first examined this contradictory evidence, has assessed Thurnwald as a “highly adaptive” personality and ascribed him a “split habitus” in Bourdieu’s sense, the profile “of a man without fixed qualities.”^[25] Thurnwald also enclosed a draft with his application, from which it emerged that the planned institute was to be devoted primarily to future colonial policy. Thurnwald called for the preparation of “closed settlement areas” for whites in the highlands of the former German colony of East Africa. In order to gain plantation land for European settlers, natives were to be resettled in the lowlands. He argued:

The natives don’t mind such climate change as much as the Europeans.^[26]

This type of reservation-based policy would, naturally, have to be based on strict racial segregation. Thurnwald further developed this vision after his return to Berlin, but he had already elaborated its basic draft while in the USA. From New Haven, he also submitted a prospectus for five courses for the 1936 winter semester at the University of Berlin, including two on colonial policy.^[27] It is true that Thurnwald was not a member of the Nazi party (NSDAP).^[28] This made it somewhat easier for him to reconnect in the post-war period with his previous networks in the USA. In turn, this also helped him to found the Institute for Ethnology and Sociology at the Free University of Berlin.

Figure 1a (above), 1b (below). On the same day, April 22, 1936, Thurnwald sent two letters from Yale University: To Lowie, he presented himself as an opponent of the Nazis who did not want to return to Berlin. To the authority of the University of Berlin, on the other hand, he described himself as a convinced National Socialist and applied for an institute for “Völkerforschung.” © University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Robert Harry Lowie Papers © Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University Archive

In preparation for our extensive co-edited work Völkerkunde zur NS-Zeit aus Wien (Ethnology during the Nazi era from Vienna, 2021), an important methodological insight became apparent: documents from private archives convey correspondence and network communications that may be much more authentically sincere than archives held by the authorities. During the National Socialist era, people spoke much more openly in private letters about topics not to be addressed in front of the authorities.^[29] As convincing as this finding may be, however, there are exceptions. As far as Thurnwald is concerned, his private correspondence with Robert H. Lowie is a very revealing channel of communication. Thurnwald’s letters initially convey the impression that he entrusted Lowie with matters that would and should not have been accessible for the Nazi authorities because of the likelihood of reprisals. Thurnwald wrote the most revealing (and previously unpublished) letter at the beginning of September 1939 from the high Grisons in Switzerland, after he had given a lecture at the Eranos conference in Ascona.^[30] His report from neutral Switzerland to the USA begins with the following words:

It was impossible to write from Germany anything which could offend an official of the Gestapo. All the letters pass the secret examination of the police. It has become still worse now.^[31]

Although the argument sounds very plausible at first glance, on closer inspection it is wrong, as letters from Nazi Germany to the USA were only systematically censored after the US had entered the war at the end of 1941. Thurnwald would therefore not have had to break off his correspondence with Lowie after his return to Berlin. The letter goes into great detail about the tense political situation in Nazi Germany at the outbreak of the Second World War. It describes the Nazi regime as a “reign of terror” (Schreckensherrschaft), and explicitly rejects Adolf Hitler’s warmongering with pointed attributions:

At the moment, a crisis seems to have reached a peak. One can only wish that the whole witchcraft game of the Austrian shaman is finally coming to an end. I believe that at least 2/3 to 3/4 of the German population, if not more, would welcome the end of the reign of terror. For now, this reign of terror will be intensified and the rest of the intoxicated, the ‘drunk and possessed’, will hopefully be sobered up over time. I just fear that the awakening will be bloody.^[32]

It may well be that this social analysis authentically reflects Thurnwald’s world of thought. However, it contradicts the factual level of his actions. As shown above, Thurnwald had published the book Koloniale Gestaltung just a few weeks earlier, which identifies him as an explicit supporter of the Nazis. Thurnwald thus conveyed to Lowie a political description of the situation that corresponded less to his own convictions than to the approval of his addressee. Robert H. Lowie was the son of Jewish Hungarian parents, and he had spent the first ten years of his life in Vienna.^[33]

On the factual level of actual decisions and practices, it cannot be denied that as of 1936 Thurnwald decided to return to Berlin and explicitly shared the racist colonial policy of the Nazi regime in his publications. What he told his colleagues about this is therefore of secondary importance for the interpretation, and perhaps constitutes an effort to confidentially explain and justify these decisions after the actual fact. Thurnwald’s level of practical action cannot be discussed away, let alone be relativized, even if the content of his private correspondence presents apparent deviations. The statement published in one of anthropology’s most widely used reference books that Thurnwald “was an outspoken opponent to the Nazis” therefore should be discarded due to its flagrant misrepresentation of the available evidence.^[34]

The third set of inadequate statements addressed at the beginning of this text concerns Thurnwald’s disciple Wilhelm E. Mühlmann (1904–1988), who had been a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA) since 1935 and was therefore banned from teaching at the University of Berlin in 1945. It has been repeatedly claimed, including in an entry (2020) to the Bérose encyclopedia, that Mühlmann denounced Thurnwald, which is why the latter had to flee from Berlin to Holstein in 1943. This picture is historically incorrect and only dates from the post-war period, as will be shown below.

First of all, there was indeed a dispute between Thurnwald and Mühlmann. However, it was not about differing views on National Socialism, but about an editorial dispute in the journal Archiv für Anthropologie, which ignited in March 1942 over a review of Mühlmann’s book Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace).^[35] Thurnwald and Mühlmann were co-editors of this journal and Mühlmann accused Thurnwald of having published the review without his consent, which Thurnwald denied. The dispute escalated and in October 1942 Thurnwald and Mühlmann parted ways, leading to the closure of the oldest journal of anthropology in the German-speaking world.^[36]

This break between Thurnwald and Mühlmann is documented in several letters. For example, Thurnwald wrote to the Austrian ethnologist Dominik J. Wölfel (1888–1963) in Vienna at the end of 1942:

For clarification, I would just like to inform you that all relations between me and Mühlmann have been broken off for good. The reasons lie in Mühlmann’s behavior and in his conduct towards me, namely in letters he sent to others.^[37]

This dispute was about personal insults, not National Socialist statements pro or contra. The reason why Thurnwald left Berlin and moved to eastern Holstein was also different, and had nothing to do with his alleged persecution. The 74-year-old Thurnwald had contracted an inflammation of the hip joint – so he could hardly walk and had to use sticks.

Thurnwald took a leave of absence from the university in October 1943 and hoped to cure his leg/hip ailment in a secluded lake district near Lübeck. He suffered from this illness until the end of his life, as photos from the post-war period prove.^[38] On October 25, 1943, he wrote to the dean of the university from Holstein (Fig. 2):

I have been taking a cure for my leg ailment here for some time, […] But I was strongly advised not to stop the cure yet and to continue for at least another four weeks. So I hope to be able to return to Berlin by beginning of December and take up my lectures.^[39]

However, this did not happen. Thurnwald extended his leave because he preferred to devote himself in seclusion to the (never-published) colonial treatise upon which he was working at the time.^[40] From the point of view of source criticism, it is evident that political reasons, such as persecution, played no role in this decision.

Figure 2. In the Nazi context, Thurnwald explained to the Berlin university authorities that he had moved to Holstein because of his leg ailment, but would resume his lectures in December 1943. © Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University Archive

After the end of the war, Thurnwald, like all professors at the University of Berlin, had to answer for his activities under National Socialism. In the questionnaire used to determine his political affiliation, Thurnwald stated that he was “against National Socialism.” In July 1945, he wrote to the university management:

I had broken with Dr. habil Mühlmann when he expressed a strong National Socialist attitude […]^[41]

In the following months, he increasingly embellished this statement. This is particularly evident in his letters to Robert H. Lowie with whom, significantly, he had entertained no correspondence during the war even when it would have been possible (i.e. until the Pearl Harbor attacks). In October 1946 he wrote to him:

But do not think I have abandoned anthropology. I have worked much in this direction, particularly while we lived in Holstein from 1943 to end of 1944. We went there, so to speak, in flight from the Nazis, and on account of M. E. Mühlmann’s intrigues.^[42]

Another letter to Lowie sent a few months later reads (Fig. 3b):

Thus I had to leave Berlin in 1943, in order to escape concentration camp.^[43]

This justification sounds downright ridiculous, as it completely distorted historical events. It served solely to present himself to his US colleagues as a political opponent of the Nazis. He also wrote letters with similar content to the director of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London (Fig. 3a):

I succeeded however to escape the concentration camp.^[44]

I have chosen to dwell on Thurnwald’s letters to Lowie not least because they have served as a primary source for the Bérose article from 2020. The author assesses the historical reality of the Nazi era based on post-war archival sources. As we have seen, this is methodologically completely inadmissible – especially as Thurnwald’s case involves a dramatic political transition from a totalitarian regime to a democratic system after 1945.

Figure 3a (above), 3b (below). In the context of the post-war period, however, Thurnwald wrote to his colleagues that he had to flee from Berlin to Holstein in October 1943 as an opponent of the Nazis in order to escape the concentration camp. © Archive Royal Anthropological Institute; © University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Robert Harry Lowie Papers

The image of Thurnwald as an opponent of National Socialism has persisted for many decades up to the present day. It was nurtured by “presentist” sources, which may be highly problematic for assessing the Nazi era. The decisive factor was Thurnwald’s successful self-portrayal, which manifested itself in his international correspondence in the post-war period. For this reason, a number of leading representatives of anthropology were prepared to see Thurnwald as an undisputed authority who was well-connected academically in the US and was not suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis. Finally, the role of his wife Hilde Thurnwald should not be overlooked. She was instrumental in polishing up Thurnwald’s image. In 1950 she organized a festschrift for Thurnwald that included contributions from representatives of US anthropology such as Robert H. Lowie, Alfred L. Kroeber (1876–1960), and Laura M. Thompson (1905–2000).^[45] This proves that Thurnwald’s post-war image “improvement” was quite successfully received during his lifetime. In the 1970s, Hilde Thurnwald also set up a foundation to promote Thurnwald’s work. The Thurnwald biography by Melk-Koch was in fact supported by the Hilde Thurnwald Foundation, which from the outset gave the entire book project the stale aftertaste of a commissioned work in the interests of the person being profiled.^[46] From the late 1970s, however, counter-narratives based on historical source criticism also emerged which made clear that Thurnwald’s image as a non-colonial anthropologist and opponent of Nazism was not quite as coherent as Richard and Hilde Thurnwald had sought to suggest.^[47]

[1] This study was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (P 33427-G). I would like to thank Andre Gingrich for his helpful suggestions and critical comments, Mehmet Emir for the photographic design (both: Austrian Academy of Sciences) and David Shankland (Royal Anthropological Institute London) for providing archival material. This is an extended version of my presentation of December 6, 2023 at the First International Conference on the History of Anthropology, “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures,” Panel 1 at the University of Pisa (Italy), see https://hoaic.cfs.unipi.it/. All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.

[2] Marion Melk-Koch, “Encounters with Richard and Hilde Thurnwald” (July 8, 2021, keynote). This controversial aspect is not considered in the conference report: see Laurant Dedryvère and Christine Trautmann-Waller, “Unsichere Felder. Hilde and Richard Thurnwald’s ethnological research,” cultura & psyché – Journal of Cultural Psychology 3 (2022), 1–10.

[3] Wolfgang Müller-Limberg, “[Review:] Marion Melk-Koch, Auf der Suche nach der menschlichen Gesellschaft: Richard Thurnwald (1989),” Anthropos 87 (1992): 290–292, here 292. At the colloquium “Ethnologie und Nationalsozialismus” (Ethnology and National Socialism) at the University of Cologne in November 1990, many were also unconvinced by Melk-Koch’s lecture on Thurnwald. This shows that the controversy is not new and that Melk-Koch’s “objectivity” on this point was already being questioned more than thirty years ago; see Lothar Pützstück and Thomas Hauschild, “Ethnologie und Nationalsozialismus Bericht über das Kolloquium ‚Ethnologie und Nationalsozialismus‘, 17.–18.11.1990, Universität Köln,“ Anthropos 86, 4/6, 1991, 576–580, here 579.

[4] Ira Bashkow, “On history for the present: revisiting George Stocking’s influential rejection of ‘presentism’,” American Anthropologist 121:3 (2019): 709–720.

[5] Wolfram Eberhard, Thurnwald, Richard, in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Vol. 16, ed. David L. Sills (New York: The Macmillan Company & The Free Press, 1968), 20–22, here 22.

[6] Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2010), 750.

[7] Viktor Stoll, “‘Social Scientist par excellence’: The Life and Work of Richard Thurnwald,” in Bérose – Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie (Paris, 2020): 1–17, here 8.

[8] Richard Thurnwald, Black and White in East Africa. The Fabric of a new Civilization in East Africa. A Study in Social Contact and Adaptation of Life in East Africa. With a Chapter on “Women” by Hilde Thurnwald (London: Routledge, 1935).

[9] Ralph Linton, “[Review:] Richard Thurnwald, Black and White in East Africa (London 1935),” American Sociological Review 1:6 (1936): 1015–1016.

[10] Holger Stoecker, Afrikawissenschaften in Berlin von 1919 bis 1945. Zur Geschichte und Topographie eines wissenschaftlichen Netzwerkes (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008), 272.

[11] Richard Thurnwald, “Discorso,” in Convegno di Scienze Morali e Storiche: 4-11 ottobre 1938; tema: L’Africa: 2. Convegno di Scienze Morali e Storiche, 1938, Rom (Rome: Reale Accademia d’ Italia, 1939), 1570.

[12] Gerhard Lindblom, “Discorso,” in Convegno di Scienze Morali e Storiche: 4-11 ottobre 1938; tema: L’Africa: 2. Convegno di Scienze Morali e Storiche, 1938, Rom, 1570–1571.

[13] Richard Thurnwald, Koloniale Gestaltung. Methoden und Probleme überseeischer Ausdehnung (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1939), 13, 15.

[14] Rudolf Karlowa, “[Review:] Richard Thurnwald, Koloniale Gestaltung (Hamburg 1939),” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft 53 (1940): 372–373, here 373.

[15] Rudolf Karlowa, Deutsche Kolonialpolitik (Breslau: Hirt, 1939), 35.

[16] Richard Thurnwald, “[Review:] Rudolf Karlowa, Deutsche Kolonialpolitik (Breslau 1939),” Deutsche Literaturzeitung. Wochenschrift für Kritik der internationalen Wissenschaft 61:9–10 (1940): 206–209, here 209.

[17] Thurnwald’s first article on the colonial topic appeared in 1905. After returning from his field research in the Solomon Islands and Micronesia (1906–09), he argued for an “applied ethnology” that should be placed at the service of “colonial policy”. He also proposed the founding of ethnological institutes, which were to be supported by “colonial policy”. Cf. Richard Thurnwald, “Angewandte Ethnologie in der Kolonialpolitik,” Internationale Vereinigung für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft und Volkswirtschaftslehre in Berlin (ed.), Verhandlungen der ersten Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Vereinigung für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft und Volkswirtschaftslehre in Berlin zu Heidelberg vom 3. bis 9. September 1911 (Berlin: Vahlen, 1912), 59–69, here 68.

[18] Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, Franz Boas: Shaping anthropology and fostering social justice. Critical studies in the history of anthropology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 373.

[19] American Philosophical Society (APS), Philadelphia, Franz Boas Papers (FBP), Mss.B.B61; Thurnwald (from New Haven) to Boas, 26.03., 30.03. and from Sydney, 12.09.1933. Cf. Melk-Koch 1989, 272; George Steinmetz, “La sociologie et l’empire: Richard Thurnwald et la question de l’autonomie scientifique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 5, 185 (2010): 12–29, here 25.

[20] University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library (UC BL), BANC MSS C-B 927, Robert Harry Lowie Papers (RHLP); Thurnwald (from New Haven) to Lowie, 22.04.1936.

[21] Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University Archive (HU UA), Personalakten (personnel files, PA) nach 1945, Thurnwald, Richard, vol. 5, fol. 5–6, here 5; Thurnwald (from New Haven) to Fischer, 09.02.1936.

[22] Ibid., fol. 7–8, here 7; Thurnwald (from New Haven) to Dean Ludwig Bieberbach, Cover letter and draft plan for an institute for “Völkerforschung,” 22.04.1936.

[23] Ibid., fol. 8. As translated in Karla Poewe, “Liberalism, German Missionaries, and National Socialism,“ in Mission und Macht im Wandel politischer Orientierungen, eds. Holger Stoecker and Ulrich van der Heyden (Stuttgart: Steiner 2005), 633–662, here 642.

[24] For example APS, FBP, Mss.B.B61; Thurnwald (from New Haven) to Boas, 14.02.1936.

[25] George Steinmetz, “Neo-Bourdieusian theory and the question of scientific autonomy: German sociologists and empire, 1890s–1940s,” Political Power and Social Theory 20 (2009): 71–131, here 93; and Steinmetz 2010, 25.

[26] HU UA, PA nach 1945, Thurnwald, Richard, vol. 5, fol. 10.

[27] Ibid., fol. 19; Courses, Thurnwald (from New Haven) to Dean Bieberbach, 05.05.1936.

[28] Uwe Wolfradt, “Zum Psychologie-Verständnis von Richard Thurnwald,“ cultura & psyché – Journal of Cultural Psychology 3 (2022): 47–58, here 55.

[29] Andre Gingrich and Peter Rohrbacher, “Völkerkunde zur NS-Zeit aus Wien: Einleitung der Herausgeber,“ in Völkerkunde zur NS-Zeit aus Wien (1938–1945): Institutionen, Biographien und Praktiken in Netzwerken, eds. Andre Gingrich and Peter Rohrbacher (Vienna: Verlag der OEAW, 2021), 15–32, here 26.

[30] Richard Thurnwald, “Primitive Initiations- und Wiedergeburtsriten,“ in Vorträge über die Symbolik der Wiedergeburt in der religiösen Vorstellung der Zeiten und Völker. Eranos-Jahrbuch VII/1939, ed. Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (Zürich: Rhein-Verlag, 1940), 321–398.

[31] UC BL, RHLP; Thurnwald (from Bernardino, Switzerland) to Lowie, 02.09.1939. Original in English.

[32] Ibid. After the first paragraph written in English, Thurnwald then switches to German: “Augenblicklich scheint ein Höhepunkt einer Krisis erreicht zu sein. Man kann nur wünschen, dass sich das ganze Hexenspiel des österreichischen Schamanen endlich dem Ende nähert. Ich glaube, dass wenigstens 2/3 bis 3/4 der deutschen Bevölkerung, wenn nicht noch mehr, das Ende der Schreckensherrschaft begrüssen würden. Denn jetzt wird diese Schreckensherrschaft noch gesteigert werden und der Rest der Berauschten, der ‘Besoffenen und Besessenen,’ wird hoffentlich mit der Zeit ernüchtert werden. Ich fürchte nur, das Erwachen wird blutig werden.”

[33] Julian H. Steward, Robert Harry Lowie 1882–1957. A Biographical Memoir (Washington D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1974), 176.

[34] Barnard and Spencer 2010, 750.

[35] Georg Friederici, “[Review:] Wilhelm E. Mühlmann, Krieg und Frieden (Heidelberg 1940),” Archiv für Anthropologie, Völkerforschung und kolonialen Kulturwandel 27:3-4 (1942): 169–176.

[36] Cf. Udo Mischek, Leben und Werk Günter Wagners (1908–1952) (Gehren: Escher, 2002), 107f.

[37] Private archives Bettina Hainschink; Thurnwald to Wölfel, 09.12.1942. Thurnwald had already announced his break with Mühlmann to Diedrich Westermann two months earlier: “After everything that has happened, working with Mühlmann is impossible and degrading for me.” Cf. Lautarchiv of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 01/23, fol. 108; Thurnwald (from Berlin) to Westermann, 10.10.1942.

[38] Melk-Koch 1989, 283.

[39] HU UA, PA nach 1945, Thurnwald, Richard, vol. 6, fol. 208; Thurnwald to Dean Hermann Grapow, 25.10.1943. Cf. Peter Rohrbacher, “Das Ringen um Kolonialexpertise: Richard Thurnwalds Mitarbeit an kolonialen Handbüchern über Afrika während des Zweiten Weltkriegs,“ cultura & psyché – Journal of Cultural Psychology 3 (2022): 115–129, here 124.

[40] Rohrbacher 2022, 125f.

[41] HU UA, PA nach 1945, Thurnwald, Richard, vol. 7, [fol. 3]; Thurnwald to Rector Eduard Spranger, 09.07.1945.

[42] UC BL, RHLP; Thurnwald to Lowie, 15.10.1946. Original in English.

[43] UC BL, RHLP; Thurnwald to Lowie, 05.02.1947. Original in English.

[44] Archive Royal Anthropological Institute, Germany 95/20/1; Thurnwald to the President of the RAI, 07.09.1945. Original in English.

[45] Hilde Thurnwald, “Richard Thurnwald – Lebensweg und Werk,“ in Beiträge zur Gesellungs- und Völkerwissenschaft. Professor Dr. Thurnwald zu seinem achtzigsten Geburtstag gewidmet (Berlin: Gebr. Mann 1950), 9–19.

[46] Melk-Koch 1989, 9 and 285.

[47] The following are exemplary: Poewe 2005; Steinmetz 2009, 2010; see also Klaus Timm, “Richard Thurnwald: ‘Koloniale Gestaltung’ – ein ‘Apartheids-Projekt’ für die koloniale Expansion des deutschen Faschismus in Afrika,“ Ethnographisch-Archäologische Zeitschrift 18:4 (1977): 617–649.

This year marks the centenary of São Paulo’s 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art).^[1]Funding for this article was provided by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, of which the author is currently a fellow. During this watershed moment in Brazil’s intellectual and cultural production, self-declared Modernists exhibited their paintings, performed prose, and distributed their writings at São Paulo’s Theatro Municipal and elsewhere. One of its key protagonists was Mário de Andrade (1893-1945), often considered the “pope” of Brazilian modernism. At least in Brazil, Andrade is also synonymous with the institutionalization of ethnography in São Paulo, where he founded the Sociedade de Etnografia e Folclore.^[2]For a broader consideration of Andrade’s work at the Departamento de Cultura, see “Mário de Andrade no Departamento de Cultura de São Paulo,” March 24, 2022.

Introduction

On November 15, 1889,^[1] Ahmed Midhat (1844–1912), a prolific Ottoman journalist and novelist, announced in his newspaper Tercümân–i Hakîkât (Interpreter of Truth): 

The pleasant travelogue of the compassionate Ahmet Midhat Efendi, his grace, where all his observations, thoughts, and expertise on events from his previous journey to Europe are presented, will be published as of tomorrow! (Tuğluk 2018, 145).^[2]

The account of his impressions and ideas on the European cities he visited between August 15 and October 25, 1889, first appeared in a daily series as Avrupa’da Bir Cevelân (A Tour in Europe, hereafter Cevelân).^[3] It was published as a book in 1890, read widely in Istanbul and beyond.^[4] The Ottoman Sultan, Abdulhamid II (1842–1918), even ordered its distribution to the European and American diplomatic missions (Asiltürk 1995, 576). These two different audiences—one at home and one abroad— invite closer analysis of the textual and ideological features of this remarkable text.

As the official appointee of Abdulhamid II, Ahmed Midhat joined the eighth Congrès international des orientalistes as an Ottoman delegate. He began his trip on a steamer in Istanbul and, disembarking in Marseille, traveled throughout Europe by train. After the Congress in Stockholm-Cristiana (Oslo), Ahmed Midhat spent twelve days at the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) in Paris before extending his trip to Geneva, Montreux, Luzern, Konstanz, Vienna, and onto Trieste, where he took a ship back to Istanbul. 

In Cevelân, Ahmed Midhat revealed an “Other” of the Ottomans: Europe. He wrote in particularly vivid terms of his admiration for European machinery. During his travels and at the Exposition Universelle he encountered European material developments he could only have imagined when writing his earlier novels. Interestingly, Ahmed Midhat found another “Other” at the fair—the Muslim Arab, who also became a subject of his gaze.

Ahmed Midhat’s interests in evolutionist and materialist writings framed his own work. Moving beyond the dichotomies of “East and West,” “Self and Other,” and “colonizer and colonized,” he conceived all developments as medeniyet-i umumiyye, the global civilization that belongs to all peoples. He brought to light different sides of development and progress, with particularly revealing viewpoints on technological, social-cultural, and moral issues, managed with unusual savoir-faire. However, at times, his stance—despite his wish to be “objective”— was a partial one, his attention wavering between the material and the spiritual qualities of European development. Like European ethnographers, he was not immune toward ethnocentrism or homogenizing discourses towards complex societies and cultures. 

In what follows, I focus on Ahmed Midhat’s impressions of the Exposition Universelle 1889 in Paris in Cevelân. First, I make sense of Ahmed Midhat’s “evolutionary desires,” the term I use to describe his commitment to the idea, informed by Social Darwinism, that Ottomans should aspire to match Europe’s level of material development. Ahmed Midhat’s evolutionary desires encapsulate—but cannot be reduced to—his keen interest in (and envy of) the material, infrastructural, and industrial developments in Europe as he experienced them firsthand on his journey. He aspired for the Ottomans, too, to build grand avenues and boulevards, majestic bridges, impressive squares, and well-kept public gardens. He also wanted the Ottomans to produce and utilize the latest infrastructural technologies, such as rapid transport tools like locomotives and tramlines as well as electricity and lighthouses. These desires can only be understood in the context of his “imperial nostalgias” and “western anxieties,” imbued with longing for the glorious Ottoman past. Ahmed Midhat deployed this necessarily ethnocentric “imperial nostalgia” as a critical strategy to cope with, if not to overcome, his western anxieties, which he mainly expressed through discontent with European modernity and what he perceived as its weak morals.

Cevelân is notable not only for its literary merits but also for its distinctively positioned ethnographic insights into “Europe.” Ahmed Midhat himself defined travel literature as a cornerstone for the advancement of knowledge (Herzog and Motika 2000, 140). Cevelân offers evidence of a cross-cultural production of knowledge and conveys issues of transculturation, border crossing, and self-location, long before they emerged in twentieth and twenty-first century anthropology. Furthermore, Ahmed Midhat’s writing should be evaluated as an important and understudied contribution to the history of Ottoman anthropology and ethnology.

In the 1850s, scholars in Turkey created a complex and dynamic non-Western anthropological tradition, which flourished by way of “traveling theory” (Birkalan-Gedik 2018, 2019). It incorporated theories of evolution, materialism, and development, which carried considerable social and political weight in Ottoman society at the turn of the 19th century (Kerim 1941; Hanioğlu 2005; Göçek 1996). Edward Said understood “traveling theory” as a process through which theory changes as it is transported into new geographical or historical contexts, reframed according to the intentions of its new adopters (Said 1983, 226; 2001). In this sense, travel is not a unidirectional movement but can ramify into polyvalent roots and routes. Delving into multiple ways of traveling—literary and metaphorical—and their implications for the history of anthropology (Rubiés 2000; Clifford 1989), Cevelân sheds light on an underexamined era of Ottoman anthropology, in which the eloquent gaze of an “Orientalist” (Dumont 2010; Findley 1998; Sagaster 1997) traveler illuminates both his own culture and those he observed. 

Ahmed Midhat: Cosmopolitan and Cultural Broker

Ahmed Midhat wore many hats. An impressive intellectual, he authored novels, short stories, and opinion pieces in the Tanzimat Era (1839–1876), when the Ottoman Empire was widely seen to be in decline (İnalcık 1976). He was a cosmopolitan, entrepreneur, and cultural broker who navigated the complexities of the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. 

Multiple ideological mainstreams defined this period; at different points of his life Ahmed Midhat seemed to fit each of them. The Young Ottomans insisted on modernization and keeping the millet system, which was based on the idea of non-territorial autonomy, whereby various religious groups were categorized as culturally autonomous, despite their geographic dispersion (Barkey and Gavrillis 2016); Islamists leaned on the idea of restoring and strengthening the Caliphate; Turkish nationalists relied on Turkish-ness as the dominant identity base (Berkes 1959). Political societies, like the Young Ottomans, believed that new “scientific” developments could coincide with and enrich religious knowledge. They aimed to show Islam as a contemporaneous religion in accord with science and development. While this idea stood in contrast with the view of certain elites who thought of Islam as one of the main causes of the country’s declining fortunes, debates on science and religion continued in following years. Again, introducing science was not a simple shift from “religion” to “science” (Yalçınkaya 2015; Poyraz 2010). Attitudes towards science and scientific development that were sympathetic to religion further smoothed developments in philosophy, anthropology, and medicine, enabling disparate disciplinary spheres to knit together in distinct ways (Shefer-Mossensohn 2015, 3). 

Born in Istanbul to a family of merchants, Ahmed Midhat grew up in dire conditions. A “Jack-of-all-trades” (Findley 1998), as a young man he received the patronage of Midhat Paşa (1822–1884), a western-oriented political leader under whom his transcultural perspectives bloomed. Later, as an entrepreneur, Ahmed Midhat set up his own printing house in Istanbul and maintained strong relations with the Ottoman government, working as the deputy manager of the sanitary commission (Okay 1989).

Scholars name Ahmed Midhat as the “first social Darwinist” among the Ottoman literati (Doğan 2012 [2006], 133–176). Ottoman social scientists also widely debated materialism, a framework which allowed the elite to discuss the origins and diffusion of humans, outside the confines of religious thought (Öktem 2012, Poyraz 2010). None of these developments were free of turbulence, as the secular elite had to navigate these ideas under the Muslim Sultan. 

Some scholars have argued that Ahmed Midhat was exiled for his close relationship with materialist and positivist thinkers (Mardin 2000 [1962]). But though his journals and newspapers circulated the German materialism of Ludwig Büchner (Hanioğlu 2005; Kalaycıoğulları 2016, Mardin 2000 [1962], 66), he publicly defended Islam, a point that complicates his intellectual position. His stated stances in Cevelân reveal “the conformity of Ahmed Midhat’s ideas with the cultural politics of the Hamidian regime” (Çekiç 2009, 4). In this travelogue, the author locates himself as a border-crosser, relying on his social and political relations such as with the Sultan Abdulhamid II, the benefactor who appointed him to attend the congress in Sweden and provided the funds for his European travel in Europe.

Avrupa’da Bir Cevelân between Literature, Travel, and Anthropology

While Ahmed Midhat’s writings have been studied by scholars of Turkish literature and history, anthropologists have neglected them.^[5] Cevelân offers critical perspectives for the study of the history of anthropology in Turkey, and for the global history of anthropology. Notably, his route from the Ottoman Empire to Europe and back subverts the conventionally recognized directions of “colonial travel” (Clifford 1989), challenges the immobility of the “Other,” and brings an important twist to the study of travel literature, especially within the frameworks of alterity and hybridity. 

Before anthropology became an academic discipline, travelers, missionaries, merchants, and bureaucrats supplied ethnographic knowledge to diverse audiences. As James Clifford argues, such documents helped constitute cultural anthropology (1997, 64). Other scholars discuss the factual errors of earlier European travelogues saturated with Christian piety and cultural prejudices. Eriksen and Nielsen situate what they call “proto-anthropology” between “travel writing” and “social philosophy”; it is when these two discursive modes are fused, “when data and theory are brought together, that anthropology appears” (Eriksen and Nielsen 2013, 6–10).

Furthermore, Clifford asserts that the “geography of distance and difference alters in postcolonial/neocolonial situations, as power relations of research are reconfigured, as innovative technologies of transport and communications are deployed, and as ‘natives’ are recognized for their specific worldly experiences and histories of dwelling and traveling” (Clifford 1996, 7). His words may guide our approach to the contexts of colonialism in the Ottoman Empire and particularly to an “Orientalism alla turca” a term that illustrates the changing roles of what was earlier thought to be the “immobile” Other. Orientalism alla turca defines the complexity of Ottoman attitudes toward their multiple others. Pointing to a recent historiographic turn, Özgür Türesay notes that since the end of the 1990s, several historians offered terms such as “Ottoman orientalism,” or “Ottoman civilizing mission” whereby Ottoman’s relations to Europe and to the Arab populations were discussed in new frameworks. In a broader sense, an “Ottoman colonialism” emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century in which the Ottoman elite conceived the boundaries of the empire as a part of colonial setting. Adopting a civilizing mission towards the Arab periphery, Ottomans displayed a metropolitan identity by which they sought to educate the Arab populations (Türesay 2013: 128-129). Ahmed Midhat’s positionality in Cevelân provides important insights in this context.

Travel was a well-known practice in the Ottoman Empire for centuries, both toward Europe and to the Arab provinces. The circulation of diplomatic envoys in the eighteenth-century was influential in introducing new scientific and technological knowledge and practices. The sefâretnâme, a sub-genre of travel writing, recounted journeys and experiences of ambassadors in a foreign land (Georgeon 1995); these private, political documents, addressed to the Sultans and their high administration, were not allowed to circulate beyond the Ottoman palace (Göçek 1990, 80). The fact that the Ottoman Empire was both an object and an origin for ethnographic narratives complicates standard notions of “imperial travel writing,” by presenting a non-Western but still imperial perspective.

In this light, Ahmed Midhat’s travel accounts stand as “partial truths” written by an observer who was partially an ethnographer (Birkalan 2000) engaged in something akin to fieldwork, and who also acted as a “go-between” (Borm 2000) mediating imaginaries of both Orient and Occident. If “travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity,” as Clifford (1997, 2) writes, we might make sense of Ahmed Midhat’s récit detailing his contacts with Europe as itself an unfinished project—an “in-between” text which yields new insights into perhaps another way of “imperial writing” and its boundaries.

Under the light of Orientalism alla turca, as way to challenge the existing narrative on colonialism and anthropology, I suggest that Ahmed Midhat’s writings were very much attuned to a cosmopolitan style. Locating himself in the text as participant and observer, he emphasized the sensual, the personal, and the autobiographical with a dynamic textual brilliance. He described his own movements vividly, speaking to the senses of the reader in a decidedly poetic way. As in later realist anthropologies, the primary subject of the Cevelân is the essence of “being there.”

Ahmed Midhat’s presence continually intruded into the frame, showing that not only had he been there, but (as classical ethnographies would also claim) that his text could take the reader “there” as well. Strikingly, however, for Ahmed Midhat time was urgent: he ran to keep his schedule, unlike ethnographers who may have had better control of their time. While realist ethnographies of the twentieth century tried to hide time and historicity in an “ethnographic present,” Ahmed Midhat continually and carefully noted dates, counting the number of weeks or months precisely since his departure from İzmir. 

Long before anthropologists spoke of “blurred genres,” Ahmed Midhat’s handsomely embellished travel accounts crossed lines of genre to report on how Europeans lived, ate, and shopped in the times of emergent modernity. But if the Western gaze looked for vanishing “primitives,” or exotic dancers as the “Other” (Young 2008), Ahmed Midhat sought vanishing “European morals” and Muslim women, which simultaneously constituted his complex subjects. He presented his impressions both of everyday life and of the extravagant displays of Paris’s World’s Fair to an audience in Istanbul— the cosmopolis, the world city and seat of the Sultanate. These identifications shed distinctive light on “travel as a cosmopolitan praxis” (Clifford 1997), positioning Ahmed Midhat as a cosmopolitan, modernist author whose observations of Europe serve as a cautionary tale. 

Ahmed Midhat had written about Europe even before his first trip in his 1876 novel Paris’te Bir Türk (A Turk in Paris). In Cevelân he noted, “I traveled the European cities mentally; I almost saw them” (147). He had a well-formulated view of which countries constituted “Europe.” For instance, he noted that Russia did not concern him, as he believed that they were behind European civilization (397). An exception of another sort was Sweden: the Swedes made a remarkable impression because, according to him, they supported material developments without giving up their moral values (155). 

Ahmed Midhat’s journey allowed him to claim a powerfully authoritative voice in Cevelân and to present a “totalizing discourse” on Europe. This authority was also visible, though pointing in a different direction, when, during an audience with the King of Sweden, he put himself in the role of defender of the political stance and situation of the Ottoman Empire (138). Ahmed Midhat deployed the category of “self”—a totalized view of the Ottoman empire— in order to manage relations with the “other”— a totalized view of Europe. Such self-conscious juxtapositions, in my view, represent a very post-modernist “sense-making” of anthropological categories. By selectively applying an objectifying gaze on both Europe and the Ottoman empire, he effectively challenged conventional oppositional categories of “East” and “West” or “Self” and “Other.”

In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt introduced the notion of “transculturation” as a remedy to interpretations of travel accounts that assumed a unidirectional relationship between voyagers and the so-called colonial periphery and presented the latter as irredeemably passive. Transculturations are the processes through which travelers revise presupposed ideas about the cultures of “others” as well as one’s own. Pratt situates these processes in “the contact zone”—“social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths” (1996, 34; 2008 [1992], 6). But the travel account Ahmed Midhat wrote, as the emissary of an imperial power, raises interesting complications. Should we consider the Ottomans, as well as European powers, as colonizers? If so, what happens when two colonial powers meet in the “contact zone,” and within the borders of Europe? Or should we look for more embellished analytical perspectives to make sense of Cevelân?

Exposition Universelle 1889, Paris, and Cevelân

Ahmed Midhat’s writings were part of a longer trajectory of participation by Ottoman intelligentsia in World’s Fairs. For the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris, Sultan Abdülaziz, wishing to “partake in the cultural life of Europe” (Çelik 1992, 96; Gök 2003), had installed a mosque, a residence, a bath, and a fountain at the Ottoman Pavilion, at the invitation of Emperor Napoléon III. At the 1889 World’s Fair, the Ottoman presence was limited to one Tobacco Pavilion, placed among the “other” eastern cultures, as Ahmed Midhat notes (570–71). 

World’s Fairs were systems of representation on a grand scale and effective mechanisms of cultural production. Çelik and Kinney note that “among their novel technologies was the creation of ersatz habitats; these scenarios of a reductive presentation of different cultures generated easily apprehended, symbolic imagery” (1990, 35). Exposition Universelle 1889 relied heavily on archaeological and anthropological displays (Greenhalgh 1988, 36) as well as cultural façades, entertainment concessions, and other vivid national and corporate displays to impress visitors. 

Above all, technological displays appealed to Ahmet Midhat. Mechanical industry, which was displayed at the Champ de Mars next to the Eiffel Tower, immediately caught his eye, and he visited the machinery multiple times; he was so impressed with technological developments that he once left the visiting hall as the last visitor (650–661). Within this arena, he traveled on a passenger train and used the elevator of the Eiffel Tower, exclaiming, “it is this kind of machinery that makes life so easy!”

Visiting the Gallery of Machines, inventions for small industries such as sewing and weaving fascinated him: “The Singer sewing machines produce superior quality of work very fast”; “The silk looms can contribute to the national economy.” He also made comparisons: “Ottomans, too, had set up silk looms in Bursa, Athens, and Thessaloniki,” but he found them inferior to what he saw at the fair (654–659). His entrepreneurial spirit appears in his remark that development is not only about quality but also about mass production. 

Material developments, such as large avenues and boulevards, great bridges, impressive squares, and well-kept public gardens attracted Ahmed Midhat to modernity. Locomotives, train tracks, rapid transportation, and tramlines, along with electricity and lighthouses, formed a great part of his “evolutionary desires”—a yearning for progress, informed by his intellectual investments in social Darwinism. Yet, both curious and cautious, he refused to accept everything Europe offered. In Cevelân Ahmed Midhat illuminated, or textually created, a society in which technological developments conflicted with traditional morality. Thus, his accounts are a vehicle to explore important technological advancements but also to express his wistful yearning for the past glories of the Ottoman Empire through criticism of the morals and values of “nineteenth-century European society.”

Eiffel Tower, Electricity… and Other Imperial Nostalgias?

Cevelân reported on Paris’s unforgettable fin-de-siècle extravaganza. He raved about electric lighting, along with large and small machinery. He offered compelling accounts of steel construction for the Eiffel Tower, which he saw as an outstanding symbol of technological improvement, appearing even more beautiful at night as red electric bulbs adorned it (537). 

In fact, Ahmed Midhat was impressed by all kinds of light. This was already the case in Stockholm, a city that truly captivated him and which he called the most beautifully lit-up city in Europe. Thanks to its lighting systems, he said, “nights turn into days;” thousands of lanterns and candles in addition to electric bulbs illuminated the Drottningholm Palace (170–173). At a vacation palace, away from the center of the city, he saw electricity produced by a mobile steam machine. He perceived all of this within the framework of “medeniyet-i umumiyye”–global civilization, a pool of shared, advanced technologies, not necessarily limited to Europe, but the property of the world. At this thought, his text begins comparing his observations in Europe to what he had seen in the Ottoman Empire: he recalled seeing lights as great as those in Europe in Istanbul and Kordonboyu–İzmir, though without the same quality and extent. His desires quickly followed his comparisons: he next expressed the wish that “we should also have places that light up, like in Paris” (47). At this moment, his admiration for progress, his “evolutionary desire,” shifted to “imperial nostalgia,” the wish to restore his homeland to a lost greatness. 

Ahmed Midhat noted that using steel and lace construction, France had quickly erected the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of its empire, the highest building in the world at the time. When he saw it for the first time, he disliked it aesthetically. He called it “grotesque,” and compared its height with the height of minarets in Istanbul’s Yeni Cami, the New Mosque (95). However, the Eiffel Tower would function for him as a site of transculturation. On his second visit, he changed his mind and praised its architecture (560–562). 

To understand Ahmed Midhat’s fascination with the settings of the fair and particularly his “imperial nostalgias,” the work of On Barak (2013) on transportation and communication in twentieth-century Egypt offers important perspectives. Barak argues that people may perceive and experience “universal” technologies, such as electricity, steamers, railways, telegraphs, tramways, and telephones, differently in various social-cultural contexts. While in the West they symbolized standardization and punctuality, in Egypt they contributed to the production of unique “counter tempos” that pushed back against “dehumanizing European standards of efficiency, linearity, and punctuality” (Barak 2013, 5). Following Barak’s line of thought, it is clear the juncture of Ahmed Midhat’s evolutionary desires and imperial nostalgias was as a site of creative tension.

Ahmed Midhat leveraged his opinions of the Eiffel Tower and other technologies to reflect upon and promote Ottoman values. He balanced his newfound admiration for the tower with pages-long praise for the great achievements of the “East,” thus evoking his imperial nostalgia. He culled historical examples ranging from Mehmed the Conqueror to Avicenna along with other political leaders and scientists who contributed to the ideals of “progress.” The Ottomans “performed” science at the great medreses and libraries. They maintained terakkiyât-ı maneviye (spiritual development), which he opposed to mere fazilet-i maddiye (material virtue). In this way, they were able to conquer the Mediterranean and sail to the Indian Ocean. Therefore, it would be a great mistake to represent the Ottomans (as many in the West had done) as a people primarily fond of pleasure. Yet, Ahmed Midhat wrote, there was a new trend among the West: now Westerners were researching the real traditions of the East, valuing reality over fantasy. He offered the Eighth International Congress of Orientalists in Stockholm as evidence (185–187). In this way, his imperial nostalgia served as the basis for corrections to the misrepresentations made by “ignorant” Europeans. 

Street of Cairo: Ahmed’s Western Anxieties

As a visible representative of a foreign land, Ahmed Midhat—who chose to wear a fez—was pronounced in his Ottoman attire. He was among those Muslim visitors who, according to Çelik (1992), “became a part of the display, often as the major attraction” (15, emphasis mine): Visitors from the Muslim world, such as Tunisia, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire, were part of the amusement for European fairgoers. However, these visitors were not only “populations on display.” As von Plato has demonstrated in her work on exhibition cultures and mass audiences in nineteenth-century France, the French’s perceptions of foreigners also influenced their self-perception (2001). Likewise, Ahmed Midhat’s remarks on “Muslim women dancing” show the ways the Fair influenced his notions of himself, within the broader contours of his embedded otherness and as a man talking about women. Or, put differently, Ahmed Midhat’s own “degrees of Otherness”—in Francesca Vanke’s words (2008, 198)—were illustrated in the ways he described other “others” on display: Muslims, namely Arabs from the Ottoman provinces—fell under the purview of the Ottoman “Other,” or under orientalism alla turca. This was because of the imperial power connections between the mainland Ottoman Empire and their exoticized Arab provinces like Egypt.

His account of the Exposition Universelle’s celebrated “Street of Cairo” regarding politics of gender, sexuality and public space was highly critical:

The Street of Egypt (Cairo) in the Exposition Universelle (Sergi-i Umumî) is a place that has provoked many objections to the morals of the French society. It has been considered the most beloved site by spectators—not because of its industrial products, donkeys, or donkey riders, or for the elegant architecture of the Egyptian-style buildings, but because of the spectacle of these singers and dancers and their belly dancing. Although by and large these performers had Muslim names, it is clear they are not Muslims. They are mostly Tunisian and Egyptian Jews; and some are Coptic Orthodox Christians from Egypt. The many arousing obscene postures and movements of their bodies cannot be taken as something everybody likes and approves [in Muslim nations]. Moreover, it is known that to watch such dances in Tunisia and Egypt requires going to obscure places, and such entertainment is considered debauchery (535). 

How can we make sense of this passage, especially if we consider that “in 1889 the number of spectators who came to watch the Egyptian belly dancers averaged two thousand per day” (Çelik and Kinsley 1992, 39)? In this passage, Ahmed Midhat spoke to two totalizing arguments. By denying a Muslim origin to the female dancers, he pushed back against Orientalist representations of Muslim lands as sensual and permissive. At the same time, alleging that the dancers were Jewish or Christian, he presented yet another essentialist view about Western women. According to him, Muslim women would never wear such costumes and dance in this way—while Christian and Jewish women evidently lack such scruples! For Ahmed Midhat, this staging encapsulated the violence of Western representations of the Orient. Yet, we do not know if he was aware of the Parisian dance practices in bars and clubs at the time, which might have contributed to his totalizing arguments about “European women.” 

Fair organizers claimed their presentation of the Street of Cairo was rooted in archaeological exactitude and “authenticity.” However, in Ahmed Midhat’s view it was not the street’s shops and musicians, artisans, or donkey drivers that drew spectators to the pavilion, but the female dancers. For Ahmed Midhat, the Street of Cairo was, in Pratt’s terms, a contact zone, a transcultural site. But rather than helping him overcome his prejudices about Europe and the Orient, it reinforced them. In the end, he exchanged what he saw as a stereotype with a different stereotype, about the Orient and the West, about women, about morals, and, certainly, about himself.

Although Ahmed Midhat could not help but speak, directly and indirectly, about the Ottoman “self” in his text, he barely mentioned the Ottoman Tobacco Pavilion. Rather, he found alterity—his “others”—in the Street of Cairo exhibit. His criticism of the seemingly misrepresented Orient and Muslim women was in line with his conviction of the moral corruption of European modernity. “Admittedly,” he wrote, “in Europe, if a man falls down in the street and dies, not one of the thousands of men who run to watch feel obligated to give him a sip of water” (386). In other parts of his travelogue, he lectured on declining religious values: “Europeans, as they became enlightened and materially developed, mentally declined and ceased to talk about religion” (771). He had already undercut his claims to the moral high ground, however, by earlier sharing with his readers that he once became so drunk that he even got entirely lost himself (675)! 

Despite such humanizing admissions, his expressions of moral indignation are added to ethnocentric effusions of cultural exceptionalism and Ottoman pride: “My mind ventured around the morality and the mores of the Ottomans. Oh, Ottomans, My dear! Every aspect of the empire has been adorned with Highness. Can one imagine another nation with such grace as the Ottomans, in the entire world?” (111). 

By wearing his fez, he emphasized his Ottoman identity and outlook. When an engineer asked him “Monsieur, are you Jewish?” he reported to reply: “No, Effendi, I am not. I am an Ottoman, and among the best, as I am Turkish and Muslim. I write in the Ottoman script, which is written with the Arabic script, which is recognized as having derived from Hebrew.” Rather than making a concluding remark, he opened a new discussion, where, with these words, he presented his identity, his sense of belonging in essentialist terms, at a period when terms such as “Ottoman” versus “Turk” had become important in Ottoman elites’ discussions of westernization and modernization. 

Conclusion

Certainly, Ahmed Midhat was not the only Ottoman to report on Europe; many others in the same period admired Europe and so-called European developments. My aim has been to show that in Avrupa’da Bir Cevelân, Ahmed Midhat enjoys a liminal position, oscillating between admiration and rejection. Faced with European spectacle he feels at times desire and nostalgia, and, at times, jealousy and anxiety. I have illustrated these points by identifying his evolutionary desires, imperial nostalgias, and western anxieties, all of which are presented (for consumption by Istanbul’s intellectuals—and possibly for European and American diplomats) within materialist and social Darwinist frames. 

While Cevelân can serve as a source for considering the social implications of evolutionist thought, Ahmed Midhat brought a twist. Fashioning himself as a curious observer committed to development, he became an enthusiastic scientist when describing Europe, calling on Ottoman political and intellectual leaders to emulate European support of science. At the same time, he cautioned them not to leave behind their traditional values. His affinity for both Western development and critique of its moral decline clearly shows his caution regarding the existing Ottoman political order. Returning from exile, he became even closer to Abdulhamid II’s view of combining western development with a firm perpetuation of Islamic values, which he presented as “spirituality” or “religion” in more general terms.

As an authoritative writer aiming to instruct his readers on “Europe,” he participated in and observed European society and everyday practices. Rather than completely admiring or rejecting the “Europe” formulated by previous travelers, he brought a cosmopolitan experience, and, at the same time, never abandoned his essentialist attachment to “Eastern” spiritual qualities. Orhan Okay summarizes Ahmed Midhat’s vision thus: “Ottomans can reach the level of European material development, but Europe cannot reclaim the morality that it had lost”; his ideal society combines East and West, joining high technological development with high morality (Okay 1975, 772, 52–53). In other words, he both approached and distanced himself from Europe. According to Carter Findley, Ahmed Midhat shows how “an Ottoman thinker could creatively engage with Europe and yet resist its cultural power, a power that–if omnipresent—was not omnipotent” (1998, 49). 

Avrupa’da Bir Cevelân, then, was a text fulfilling three missions at once. First was an academic, internationalist mission: at the Orientalist Congresses he defended the Orient and criticized Westerners for their lack of knowledge about Eastern civilizations. His second, popular mission was to translate Europe for his readers and educate them on its technological and industrial developments; here, at times, he presented Europe as a cautionary tale, often falling into moralism. Put blandly, he argued that material progress and moral decay had gone hand in hand in contemporary Europe and warned his fellow Ottomans against making the same mistake. Lastly, with the intention to distribute his book to foreign diplomats in the United States and England, he also taught that the Ottomans did not belong to the “backward” Orient. He presented Ottomans to a wider international audience as competitors in global civilization, and as a uniquely glorious empire in its own right. 

Acknowledgements

This article is part of a project funded by DFG (Deutsche Forschung Gemeinschaft/German Research Foundation), Traveling Theories: Die Geschichte der Anthropologie in der Türkei (1850–1950) which critically examines the history of anthropology in Turkey over a century. The author thanks Taylor Moore, Rosanna Dent, and John Tresch for their valuable comments and edits on the text. 

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[1] The Ottoman Empire with the Tanzimat Period, ca. 1839, and the Republic of Turkey, until 1926, used the Rumi (Roman) calendar, based on the Julian calendar. The date in Roman calendar in the original is 3 Teşrîn-i Sānî 1305. My title borrows the term from Herzog and Motika who aimed to locate Ottoman Empire within postcolonial studies and offered a new way of thinking about the Ottomans relationship with the Western world as well as with its Arab colonies. In short, Orientalism alla turca conveys the emergent imperialist attitude of the Ottomans along European lines. See: Herzog and Motika 2000. Additonally, Özgür Türesay notes (2013) that since the end of the 1990s, several historians, including Selim Deringil, Ussama Makdisi, and Thomas Kühn, have offered terms such as “Ottoman orientalism,” or “Ottoman civilizing mission” to discuss Ottoman’s relations to Europe and Arab populations. An “Ottoman colonialism” emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman elite adopted the ways of thinking of their enemies, the great imperialist nations, and began to conceive of their boundaries as part of a colonial settings.

[2] Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 

[3] “A Tour in Europe” is one possible translation for the title Avrupa’da Bir Cevelân. Cevelân, often used as a compound verb as “cevelân et-” means strolling, or promenading. “Seyâhat” is more common for traveling and “seyahatnâme” is the name for travelogue. Ahmed Midhat’s “travel” implies passing joyful time but also investing mental and physical labor, especially when one considers that he was 45 years old when he took the journey.

[4] Ahmed Midhat published the travelogue in Ottoman script, the alphabet used in the written records of the Ottoman Empire from ca. 1300 and in Turkey from 1919 until the official adoption of the Roman alphabet in 1928. The present work on Avrupa’da Bir Cevelân uses the edition in Roman alphabet with translator’s notes (Pala 2015) and consults the original in Arabic script when needed.

[5] See for example: Ursinus 1987; Boer 2002; Esen 2014; Gonzales 2012. Okay’s treatment of Ahmed Midhat’s mentality towards Europe (1975) remains as a notable source.

We at HAR were very excited to learn about the recent publication of Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon’s Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898. The book features the previously unpublished journals of Cambridge zoologist and anthropologist Alfred Haddon, who worked in the Torres Strait and New Guinea in 1888 and 1898. “Kastom” is a dynamic concept which refers to contemporary knowledge and practices that derive authenticity from a perceived origin in the pre-colonial past. It’s defined further in the Torres Strait Islander Commission Act (2005 (2019)): “Ailan [Island] Kastom means the body of customs, traditions, observances and beliefs of some or all of the Torres Strait Islanders living in the Torres Strait area.” Haddon’s extensive documentation, originally seen as salvage ethnography, is currently used by Islanders as a means of connecting with the past and as a crucial resource for maintaining and revitalizing aspects of kastom in the present.

Recording Kastom analyzes and contextualizes the journals and intimate documents Haddon sent to his wife Fanny for information and safe-keeping. These documents reveal many details of day-to-day life in the field, including the central role played by the Islanders in his collecting practices. The book’s authors, Anita Herle (AH) and Jude Philp (JP), agreed to virtually sit down with HAR editors Cameron Brinitzer (CB), Freddy Foks (FF), and Laurel Waycott (LW) for a chat. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.