The archive.

In Buin, on Bougainville, Thurnwald gathered the sociological materials of 1906 and 1909 that fill this third volume on people, state, and economy — presenting them as documentary reporting that leans on the islanders' own accounts to hold theory and observer bias at bay. Genealogical tables, 1,672 persons across thirty-seven of them, become instruments for reconstructing kinship, mortality, and a fertility decline he ties to venereal disease and colonial contact. Shell money, he shows, serves not commerce but bridewealth, alliance, and compensation, the bride-price matching what is paid for a slain life, while exogamy reads as peace-making between once-hostile groups. The chief, wealthy but no judge, rules as a primus inter pares, and every punishment is cast in the form of revenge.

Das Individuum ist oft wichtiger, als die Institution.

English translation: “The individual is often more important than the institution.”

Against W. H. R. Rivers, who held that the structure of a society could be reconstructed from its kinship terminology alone, Thurnwald enters a careful demurral. Kinship terms, he grants, offer valuable indications of social organization, but Kroeber's objections—that psychological association, linguistic borrowing, and semantic drift also shape them—must be honored. Drawing parallels between Indo-European words like Ahne and Enkel and Melanesian usage, and tracing how European cousin-terms shift through borrowing, he argues that so-called classificatory systems answer to no single pattern: they encode belonging, marriage prohibition, and protection rather than mere degree of descent. Peaceful eras elaborate such orders while war simplifies them, and similar circumstances may generate similar systems independently. Kinship names, treated as layered historical products, become guides toward earlier forms of human life.

Aber ebenso unzweifelhaft übertrieben erscheint die Exaktheit, mit der Rivers seine Folgerungen zieht.

English translation: “But equally unquestionably exaggerated is the exactness with which Rivers draws his conclusions.”

About the beginnings of the state, Thurnwald observes, there has been more speculation than research—and against that speculation he sets the evidence of his own South Sea fieldwork. He builds a three-part typology: Papuan gerontocratic democracy resting on clan equality, Melanesian aristocratic differentiation emerging through migration and shell-money wealth, and Micronesian-Polynesian oligarchy in which ranked lineages monopolize land and food. Authority among the Papuans, he insists, rests on the elders' auctoritas rather than any power of command, and chieftainship exists only in appearance, dissolving when circumstances change. The Geschlechterstaat arises where a few lineages seize the sources of subsistence. Yet the stages remain constructive tools, inductive scaffolding, never to be mistaken for the ebb and flow of concrete historical happening.

Erst die Berührung verschieden gearteter Menschen und ihrer Kulturen führt zu politischen und sozialen Neugestaltungen.

English translation: “Only the contact of differently constituted peoples and their cultures leads to new political and social formations.”

Contributed to the memorial volume for Max Weber, this essay refuses the abstract rational homo oeconomicus and grounds economy instead in the biological balance of intake and expenditure that humans share with organisms and animals. Economic life, for Thurnwald, emerges from instinct through intelligence, invention, and organization, driven as much by prestige, magic, luxury, and group feeling as by calculation. He distinguishes constant psycho-physiological factors from local geographic ones and from the progressive accumulation of technique, tracing production and exchange values from clan sharing to tribute, primitive money, and finally the coal-and-machine economy that shifts power from land toward finance, industry, and labor. The gathering of prestige objects, he cautions, is not yet capital formation. Economy is treated throughout as a life function shaped by biology, psychology, environment, technique, and politics.

Das Verhältnis der Menschen zum Boden bildet zu allen Zeiten ein Grundproblem der Wirtschaft und der Politik.

English translation: “The relationship of human beings to the soil constitutes at all times a fundamental problem of economy and politics.”

A tjurunga is not a soul but a second body, binding an Aranda man to his totem ancestor and arming him with creative power; kugi, in central New Guinea, names an undifferentiated swarm of the dead, of illness, and of the uncanny. Assembled as a reader in the history of religion, this 1927 volume gathers source accounts of Australian, Papuan-Melanesian, and Polynesian-Micronesian belief, arranged so that each idea sits inside its own social and material culture. Thurnwald sets tjurunga songs and kangaroo-increase rites beside the Kai notion of Seelenstoff—soul-substance clinging to shadow, name, and voice—and the Marind-anim Majo cult of coconut fertility. The Polynesian materials turn on mana, against which no one can prevail, and on tapu, which means not holy or defiled but forbidden through sanctity or custom.

Die Welt der „Seelenstoffe“ umgibt den Eingeborenen ringsum mit geheimnisvollen Kräften, so daß er kein Ding, keine Begebenheit, abstrakt betrachten kann.

English translation: “The world of "soul-substances" surrounds the native on all sides with mysterious forces, so that he cannot contemplate any thing or any event in an abstract manner.”

From his editorial desk in Zehlendorf on 15 June 1931, Thurnwald answers Dr. Ernst Harms with the courteous firmness of a journal editor holding a line. Writing for the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie, he reports that the contributions to the symposium, already excessively swollen, have been definitively closed, and that Harms's submitted review of Halfdan Bryn's book falls short of the scientific standards the journal is obliged to impose. One door he leaves ajar: a manuscript on the theory of an experimental Völkerpsychologie may be considered once he can examine it in hand, and Harms is directed to the publisher C. L. Hirschfeld about his lecture on folk character and cultural progress. A brief document, it catches the gatekeeping labor behind an interwar scientific periodical.

The opening volume of a five-part survey of human society sets itself against sociology's habit of generalizing from a narrow European sample, and against the Kulturkreis theorists who treated cultural goods as museum objects passed mechanically between peoples. Thurnwald's method is the representative Lebensbild: concrete communities—Polar Eskimo, Bushmen, Andaman Islanders, Copper Eskimo, Maori—shown whole, so that institutions appear functioning inside real cultural systems rather than sorted into ideal types. Foragers are ranged by habitat across ice, steppe, forest, and water, then plant-cultivators and herders. Running through everything is a distinction he presses hard: the irreversible accumulation of technique and knowledge against the reversible, pendulum-like swings between mother-right and father-right. Institutions such as blood revenge or asylum, he warns, cut across so-called culture circles and cannot be identified mechanically with them.

Die Feldbauer sind bei den Expansionen keine „Imperialisten“, sondern eher Gründer neuer Tochtervölker und Niederlassungen, sie sind „Kolonisatoren“, aber keine „Eroberer“.

English translation: “In their expansions, agriculturalists are not "imperialists" but rather founders of new daughter peoples and settlements; they are "colonizers," but not "conquerors.”

Every human gathering, this essay argues, acquires structure almost at once: amorphous mass exists only in the first instant before attractions, repulsions, subgroups, and leaders crystallize out of it. Thurnwald names the winnowing of leaders Siebung and separates it sharply from biological selection—masses actively choose whom to follow—then shows why institutional leadership, fixed in statutes, offices, and inheritance, must sooner or later collide with the natural kind. Sociation itself he treats as process and complementarity: persons associate because they need and complete one another, from sex and age in the family to the division of labor in a workshop. He classifies its forms as Masse, Ballung, and Kristallisation, argues that organizations gain a life of their own by depersonalizing relations, and closes on the conviction that neither individual nor mass alone explains any social form.

Das Führertum ist eine Komplementärerscheinung der Masse. Masse braucht Führertum, der Führer Masse.

English translation: “Leadership is a complementary phenomenon of the mass. The mass needs leadership, the leader needs a mass.”

Both the narrative of unbroken progress and the fashionable theory of cultural cycles come under fire here as ego-centered, value-laden, and half-mystical—the notion of peoples and states ageing through youth, maturity, and decline among them. What can actually be compared across cultures, Thurnwald argues, is only material culture and knowledge: tools, procedures, medicine, natural science, which diffuse far more readily than law, morals, or religion, as Japan's selective adoption of European technology shows. He reconstructs apparent cycles from the recurring encounter of cattle pastoralists and hoe-farmers—exchange, tribute, warfare, sacred kingship, bureaucracy, dynastic collapse—as situational patterns rather than mystical recurrence, drawing analogies from Central Africa to Egypt, Rome, and tsarist Russia. Development and cycle, he concludes, can be clarified only through value-free socio-psychological analysis of situation-types and chains of effect, never through subjective valuation.

Während rückschauend — je nach unseren Kenntnissen der technischen und Wissensgeschichte —, die verzweigten Linien des Aufspeicherungsvorgangs verfolgt werden können, ist es vorausblickend nicht möglich, die entscheidende Bewegungsrichtung herauszufinden.

English translation: “While in retrospect—depending on our knowledge of technical and intellectual history—the branching lines of the accumulation process can be traced, prospectively it is not possible to discern the decisive direction of movement.”

Karl Bücher's picture of an original closed household economy, sealed off from trade, is the adversary this third volume keeps returning to; Thurnwald rejects it as a construction unsupported by ethnography or history. Reciprocal giving, barter, ceremonial exchange, and market fairs, he shows, reach down to hunters and gatherers; the Trobriand Kula circulates armrings and necklaces as prestige rather than property, while Northwest Coast potlatch turns wealth into power through ceremonial dispersal, not hoarding. He coins Naturkapital for the self-renewing capital of seed and herds in moneyless economies, traces money from preferred exchange objects to cowries and cattle, and reads women and slaves as the earliest concentrated labor capital. Against Durkheim and Bücher he denies that economic development reduces to a growing division of labor, calling economic activity a psychically and socially conditioned process.

Was wir Wirtschaft nennen, kommt erst durch die Organisierung der Menschen eines bestimmten technischen Könnens zustande.

English translation: “What we call economy comes about only through the organization of people possessing a certain technical capability.”

The evolutionary set-pieces of ethnology are dismantled one by one in this second volume: primordial promiscuity and group marriage, read by Morgan and MacLennan out of Hawaiian kin-terms, and bride capture as an original form of marriage, which Thurnwald re-explains as staged ritual resistance rather than real abduction. Family, kinship, and the men's houses, initiations, and secret societies that overlay them are his subject. Mother-right and father-right, he insists, almost never appear in pure logical form; classificatory kinship sorts people by social obligation, not genealogical degree. Marriage orders teem with positive prescriptions, not only prohibitions, and what Europeans call incest is often better named social disgrace. Milk kinship and blood brotherhood extend the same logic, binding strangers into kin through the magical power of substance.

Es gibt ja keinen Menschen an sich, sondern nur männliche oder weibliche, junge oder alte.

English translation: “There is no such thing as a human being in the abstract, but only male or female, young or old ones.”

Profit-seeking, this comparative survey insists, is no natural law of economic life but a peculiarity of modern society. Ranging across Melanesia, Micronesia, East Africa, Sumer and archaic Babylon, Thurnwald treats economics not as mere food-getting but as a social system woven from household reciprocity, rank obligation, ritual, and the conservative force of tradition. He dismantles the tidy evolutionary sequence of hunting, pastoralism and agriculture, follows Edward Hahn in separating hoe from plough cultivation, and reads kula exchange, potlatch display, wergeld and temple redistribution as forms in which wealth circulates for prestige rather than gain. Against Max Weber he derives the Babylonian governor's estate from earlier temple administration, and against Carl Bücher he denies the self-sufficient manor. Capital first appears, he argues, in herds and standing crops.

A characteristic feature of primitive economics is the absence of any desire to make profits either from production or exchange.