Universal Key to All Mythologies and Primordial Culture: Antiquarianism and Atiology in the 19th Century

这一分项目涉及18世纪和19世纪的普遍神话，以及它们对后来的民俗学家和人类学家解释神话的意义。早些时候收集并消化成神话系统的材料，就人类历史而言，是作为原始文化的病因学模型。我们的方法将是历时的，跨越各个时代，在这些病因学叙述中寻找连续性和变化，这些叙述已经开始于17世纪和18世纪伟大的古物起源故事。将有两个焦点。首先，对风暴女神、雾女、白娘子等具有气象内涵的女性神话的研究：在神话系统的所有范式转换中，这些现象不断需要新的解释，因此它们成为一个特别具有启发性的投影面。第二个焦点是19世纪波罗的海神话研究人员的工作，特别是立陶宛神话和流行诗歌。这些研究人员有病因学的野心，希望将文化的起源追溯到物质原因，最终以带有潜在殖民主义势头的原始主义叙事告终。在这种情况下，我们将问，除其他外，民俗学研究在阐述神话关键方面发挥了什么作用，它们如何从前辈收集的材料中获益，以及这些起源故事在研究外国文化方面发展了什么思想逻辑潜力。

This subproject addresses the universal mythologies of the 18th and 19th centuries and their significance for the exegesis of myth among subsequent folklorists and anthropologists. The material that had earlier been collected and digested into mythological systems was meant to serve, in relation to the history of humani-ty, as an aetiological model of primeval culture. Our approach will be diachronic, cutting across the epochs to look for continuities and transformations within these aetiological narratives, which began already in the great antiquarian origin stories of the 17th and 18th centuries. There will be two focuses. Firstly, the study of feminine mythologies with meteorological connotations, such as storm goddesses, fog witches and White Ladies: across all the paradigm shifts of the myth-systems, these phenomena continually de-manded new explanations and so they become an especially revealing projection surface. The second focus is the work of the 19th-century myth researchers on Baltic and in particular Lithuanian mythology and popular poetry. These researchers had an aetiological ambition, of tracing the genesis of culture back to a material cause, which culminated in narratives of primitivism with an underlying colonialistic momentum. In this context we will ask, among other things, what role folklore studies played in the elaboration of keys to mythologies, how they profited from the material collected by the previous generations and what ideo-logical potential these origin stories developed in the study of foreign cultures.