Richard Thurnwald, Aufbau und Sinn der Völkerwissenschaft (1948)

Thurnwald’s Academy lecture is a postwar program for ethnology as a historical sociology of humanity. Ethnography, he says, gathers and preserves materials; Völkerwissenschaft begins when those materials are interpreted as relations among time, people, place, institutions, and thought.

Die Ethnologie aber, die Völkerwissenschaft, reicht weiter, sie befasst sich mit den oft sehr verschlungenen Zusammenhängen in Zeit, Volk, Sache und Ort, die sich an die einzelnen völkerkundlichen Ermittlungen knüpfen.

English translation: Ethnology, however—the science of peoples—reaches further; it concerns itself with the often very tangled interconnections of time, people, thing, and place that attach to the individual ethnographic findings.

Against the suspicion that ethnology serves colonial propaganda, Thurnwald defines its object as “der Mensch,” his forms of association, and the psychic forces moving them. The opening sections therefore stress fieldwork: language, distrust, misunderstanding, patient questioning, and source criticism. A collector’s hurried tour can fill museum crates, but cannot grasp social life.

Ich möchte sagen, ein Aufenthalt an einem Ort von weniger als drei Vierteljahr bis zu einem Jahr ist vergeudete Anstrengung. Der Einheimische, der mit dem Europäer nicht vertraut ist, denkt schwerfällig und ist mißtrauisch. Er muß allmählich Vertrauen gewinnen.

English translation: I would say that a stay in one place of less than three quarters of a year up to a year is wasted effort. The native, who is not familiar with the European, thinks ponderously and is mistrustful. He must gradually gain confidence.

The lecture then reviews the main ordering schemes of the discipline. Evolutionism supplied stages; Kulturkreis and “kulturhistorische” approaches stressed diffusion; Malinowski’s functionalism redirected attention to what a trait does within a living whole. Thurnwald accepts something from each, but rejects every exclusiveness: function without history misses transformation, diffusion without sociology reduces culture to traits, and evolutionism becomes false when it imposes a single path.

His own organizing principle is the preservation of life. Subsistence is not a simplified economic base but the center around which techniques, kinship, values, ritual, and imagination gather.

Das Wichtigste ist unzweifelhaft die Erhaltung des Lebens und damit dessen, was wirklich oder vermutlich ihr dient. In erster Linie rückt darum die Beschaffung des Unterhalts.

English translation: The most important thing is without doubt the preservation of life, and thereby of whatever really or presumably serves it. First and foremost, therefore, comes the procurement of subsistence.

Thus “Wildbeuter,” planters, and cattle herders appear as historical-cultural horizons rather than rigid stages. Foragers already possess plant and animal knowledge; planters develop clan land-rights, marriage alliances, fertility symbolism, and women’s agricultural importance; herders generate youth organizations, herd-property, cattle as early capital, and sky- and animal-centered religious forms. This is why Thurnwald rejects the familiar sequence hunter–herder–farmer:

Soviel steht fest, daß die alte Auffassung von einem Jägerleben des Menschen, dem die allgemeine Stufe eines Hirtentums folgte, aus dem die Stufe eines Bauernlebens entstand, zu einlinig ist und den Tatsachen sicher nicht entspricht.

English translation: This much is certain: the old conception—that human life passed through a hunting stage, followed by a general stage of pastoralism, out of which a peasant mode of life emerged—is too unilinear and surely does not correspond to the facts.

The central conceptual move is Überschichtung, the layering produced when specialized groups meet. Cultural contact may lead to alliance and exchange, but also to domination: herders, seafarers, or war leaders may impose themselves on cultivators, producing dynasties, castes, offices, servile groups, mixed languages, and later rehomogenized societies. His cases—Iramba, Ciga, Bena, Manchu, Zulu, Ngoni—show that similar pressures yield different results because every society is a “Kausalbündel,” a bundle of interacting causes. Still, two recurrent “Leitfaktoren” stand out:

In solcher Weise treten 1. die Nahrungsgewinnung als Leitfaktor, ebenso wie 2. der Kontakt zwischen Kulturen ausschlaggebend hervor.

English translation: In this way there emerge as decisive: 1. the procurement of food as the leading factor, and equally 2. contact between cultures.

The section on plough agriculture extends this logic to archaic states. The plough combines cultivation with domesticated draft animals and permits denser population, tribute, coerced labor, slavery, colonate forms, and kingship. Yet technology never explains everything: older kinship, priesthood, conquest, ritual prestige, and administrative ambition alter its consequences.

Progress, finally, is real but uneven. On the material side it means cumulative differentiation: new skills presuppose older ones, coexist with them, narrow their use, or revive them in crisis.

Eine solche Anhäufung von Fertigkeiten und Kenntnissen kennzeichnet den Fortschritt.

English translation: Such an accumulation of skills and knowledge characterizes progress.

Moral and religious progress is less secure. Technical advance may enlarge communication and peace, but also domination and dependency. Ethical religions raise standards, yet do not abolish violence or self-deception.

Der Weg des Fortschritts ist holperig.

English translation: The path of progress is bumpy.

The closing image replaces a ladder of stages with a “Kulturlandschaft” of heights, ravines, and separate ascents. The lecture’s lasting relevance lies in this methodological pluralism: field experience, historical comparison, subsistence, contact, power, and meaning must be read together.

Bei diesen Betrachtungen ist es vor allem wichtig, sich nicht mit Einteilungen oder Begriffen zu begnügen, sondern das Augenmerk muß auf das Funktionieren und die Zusammenhänge gerichtet sein.

English translation: In these considerations it is above all important not to content oneself with classifications or concepts; rather, attention must be directed to functioning and to interconnections.