Primitiveness and Sovereignty: Conceptions of Temporality in Anthropology and Folklore Studies in Germany (1850s-1930s)

在这个项目中，我认为在19世纪末和20世纪初的欧洲社会，对领土主权和社会权力的主张与特定的临时性概念密切相关。该项目以德国为典范，研究如何重新定义落后和原始的概念，这些概念最初是城市精英为了合法的殖民扩张和国内社会中的大都市优势而使用的，以便成为地区和国家传统的基础。这是可能的，因为当代的原始概念包含两个相互矛盾的含义：一方面，它可以在大都市中心内用来为殖民地和欧洲腹地落后的边缘地区的统治辩护；另一方面，它可以用来指永恒的传统，从而支持区域和国家对特性和自我赋权的追求。这个项目通过关注人类学和民俗学的新兴科学学科来考察原始的这些矛盾和不断变化的含义，直到19世纪末，这两个学科一直密切相关。人类学的许多学者考察了国内人民和殖民地人民，许多后来民俗学研究学会的创始人理所当然地最初是人类学学会的成员。然而，在世纪之交，这些联系逐渐松动，对国内文化的民俗化审查越来越多地融入国家和地区的历史叙事。该项目考察了证明这种分离是合理的时间性模式，并探索了在多大程度上伴随着种族理论在人类学研究中的重要性增加。因此，它与约翰尼斯·法比安(Johannes Fabian)和尼古拉斯·托马斯(Nicholas Thomas)等学者关于时间结构在人类学中的重要性的开创性著作联系在一起，但通过将他们的发现与民族主义和国内权力斗争等欧洲内部过程联系起来，开辟了全新的研究轨迹。特别是，通过分析原始性的两种不同含义之间的认识论转变，以及通过审查所涉及的社会政治过程，该项目在一个分析领域和一个理论框架内，分析了欧洲社会历史学家所描述的传统发明，以及全球历史学家和后殖民学者所研究的非欧洲文明的另一方面。这一假设经常被引用在后殖民和全球历史著作中；然而，到目前为止，只有少数研究在实证分析中真正实施了这一假设。

In this project, I argue that in late 19th and early 20th century European societies, claims for territorial sovereignty and social power were closely interlinked with particular notions of temporality. By taking Germany as an exemplary case, the project examines how notions of backwardness and primitiveness, initially used by urban elites in order to legitimate colonial expansion and metropolitan predominance within domestic society, could be redefined in order to become the foundation of both regional and national traditions. This was possible because the contemporary concept of primitiveness involved two contradicting implications: On the one hand, it could be used within metropolitan centres for justifying the dominance of backward peripheries in the colonies and the European hinterland; on the other hand, it could be used to refer to timeless traditions and hence support regional and national quests for identity and self-empowerment. This project examines these ambivalent and ever-shifting implications of primitiveness by focusing on the emerging scientific disciplines of anthropology and folklore studies, which were closely interrelated until the late 19th century. Many scholars from anthropology examined both, domestic and colonial peoples and many later founders of societies for folklore studies had initially been members of anthropological societies as a matter of course. These ties, however, were gradually loosened at the turn of the century and folklorist examinations of domestic cultures were increasingly integrated into national and regional historical narratives. The project examines the modes of temporality which justified this dissociation and explores in how far it was accompanied by an increased importance of racial theories in anthropological research. It therefore ties in with seminal works of scholars such as Johannes Fabian and Nicholas Thomas on the significance of temporal structures in anthropology but opens up completely new research trajectories by relating their findings to intra-European processes such as nationalism and domestic power struggles. In particular by analysing the epistemological shifts between the two different implications of primitiveness and by examining the sociopolitical processes involved, the project analyses what was described as inventions of tradition by European social historians on the one hand and the othering of non-European civilisations studied by global historians and postcolonial scholars on the other within one field of analysis and one theoretical framework. This postulate is often cited in postcolonial and global historical writings; however only a few studies so far really have implemented this claim in empirical analyses.