HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English) on Leo Frobenius’ Australian anthropology.
Kuba, Richard, 2024. “Frobenius’ Culture History in Australia: Dead Ends and New Insights,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Leo Frobenius is one of the most famous and influential German anthropologists of the 20th century. While his collection of ethnographic data and oral traditions enjoyed general recognition, as well as his comprehensive documentation of African rock art, in which he saw a kind of “Picture Book of Cultural History,” Frobenius was already an intensely controversial figure during his lifetime. One of the first Europeans to recognize the historicity of African cultures, he became a principal reference for the protagonists of “Négritude,” who aimed at re-establishing the cultural self-awareness of African peoples. This article explores the less-known Australian side of Frobenius’ anthropology, namely the scientific and political contexts of the final research expedition initiated by him in 1938–1939, when he sent five members of the Institut für Kulturmorphologie (directed and founded by him; today Frobenius-Institut) to the Kimberley region in northwestern Australia. This expedition followed the tradition of nearly two dozen others that Frobenius had led or initiated since 1904, primarily in Africa, with the aim of documenting what were perceived as “ancient” cultures threatened by imminent disappearance. In the Kimberley, the expedition was among the earliest ethnographic research efforts in the area, focusing particularly on documenting rock art along with related myths and narratives. The specific theoretical and practical approaches developed by Frobenius over more than 25 years significantly shaped the resulting documentation—whether visual, written, phonographic, or through the selection of collected objects. The article reconstructs the context and course of the expedition, primarily based on archival sources. While Frobenius’s distinct anthropological approach, characterized by the “ethnographic expedition” and an idiosyncratic emphasis on “culture,” continued to influence his collaborators and successors for a few decades after his death, the gap between Frobenius’s approach and international trends in anthropology was perceptible from the 1930s onwards. This contrast would only grow, reinforcing the “maverick”—or, for that matter, anachronistic—aspect of his endeavors. Richard Kuba (Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology, Frankfurt), however, examines the Frobenius-Institut Australian expedition’s aftermath, drawing on historical publications by its members and insights from a recent collaborative research project. Eighty-five years later, the extensive materials from this expedition are being rediscovered, reassessed, and digitally returned to the source communities, giving new relevance and meaning to the historical archive.
This article is part of a series of six papers originally delivered in the panel “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives” held during the First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures” (4–7 December 2023, online). The conference was co-organized by the EASA’s History of Anthropology Network and the Università di Pisa with the support of Bérose and ten other history of anthropology stakeholders. The panel was convened by David Shankland (Royal Anthropological Institute; University College London, UK), Christine Laurière (CNRS/UMR9022 Héritages, France) and Frederico Delgado Rosa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, CRIA Centre for Research in Anthropology, Portugal). The article is also part of a series of papers within the BEROSE Leo Frobenius encyclopedic dossier coordinated by Hélène Ivanoff (Institut für Kulturanthropologische Forschung an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) and Richard Kuba (Frobenius-Institut für Kulturanthropologische Forschung, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt).
The other articles within the “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives” series are:
“En torno al argumento del anacronismo y la Escuela Histórico‑Cultural en la Argentina: hacia un abordaje discrónico,”by Axel Lazzari
“Anthropology, Photography, and Painting: Jean Gabus and Hans Erni in Mauritania 1951‑1952,” by Serge Reubi
“Fieldwork on the Banks of the Pilcomayo River: The Place of Erland Nordenskiöld in Pre-Malinowskian Traditions of Ethnography,” by Anne Gustavsson
“How Moscow Did Not Become a World Centre of Marxist Anthropology: Liudmila V. Danilova and the Fate of Soviet ‘Revisionism’ in the 1960s‑1970s,” by Sergei Alymov
“Through the Speculum of the Psyche: Paul Radin at the Eranos ‘Tagungen’,” by Zsofia Johanna Szoke
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