1. Adolf Philipp Wilhelm Bastian was a 19th-century polymath remembered best for his contributions to the development of ethnography and the development of anthropology as a discipline.
16 Facts About Adolf Bastian
1. 2.
Adolf Bastian's ideas influenced the "father of American anthropology" Franz Boas and comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell.
3.
Adolf Bastian studied law at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, and biology at what is Humboldt University of Berlin, the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and the University of Wurzburg.
4.
Adolf Bastian finally settled on medicine and earned a degree from Prague in 1850.
5.
Adolf Bastian became a ship's doctor and began an eight-year voyage that took him around the world.
6.
Adolf Bastian returned to Germany in 1859 and wrote a popular account of his travels along with an ambitious three-volume work entitled Man In History, which became one of his most well-known works.
7.
Adolf Bastian relocated to Berlin in 1866, where he became a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 1869.
8.
Together with Robert Hartmann, Adolf Bastian initiated the ethnological and anthropological journal, Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie in 1869.
9.
Adolf Bastian worked with Rudolf Virchow to organize the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory, which would use the ZfE as its main publication outlet.
10.
Adolf Bastian was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1886.
11.
Adolf Bastian died in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago during one of these journeys in 1905.
12.
Adolf Bastian argued that the world was divided into different 'geographical provinces' and that each of these provinces had the same stages of evolutionary development.
13.
Adolf Bastian argued that the mental acts of all people everywhere on the planet are the products of physiological mechanisms characteristic of the human species.
14.
Adolf Bastian proposed a "genetic principle" by which societies develop during the course of their history from exhibiting simple sociocultural institutions to becoming increasingly complex in their organization.
15.
The more one studies various peoples, Adolf Bastian thought, the more one observes that the historically conditioned "folk ideas" are of secondary importance compared with the universal "elementary ideas".
16.
Adolf Bastian believed that the "elementary ideas" are to be reconstructed scientifically from "folk ideas" as varying forms of collective representations.