BASTIAN, ADOLF. - Ethnologist, b. at Bremen on 26 June 1826, d. at Trinidad on 2 February 1905. In 1869 he founded with Virchow the Berliner Anthropologische Gesellschaft; in 1886 he was appointed director of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. He undertook many journeys. Among ethnologists he is known as the advocate of the Elementar-gedanke, i.e., the uniformity of fundamental conceptions among all primitive peoples, a uniformity based on the unity of the human spirit and its manifestations, irrespective therefore of cultural relations that may have occurred through the encounter and intermingling of different cultural zones.
This theory, if true for the fundamental psychological needs of the human spirit, has met with reasonable opposition from the followers of the historical-cultural school, who maintain that certain similarities or equalities in different cultures, whether in the mental or material or orgological sphere (equalities which often manifest themselves in considerable numbers and in various fields of intellectual or practical activity), can be explained only by the encounter and consequent exchange of ideas and experiences.
The works in which B. expounded his theory are: *Der Völkergedanke im Aufbau einer Wissenschaft vom Menschen* (Berlin 1881); *Ethnische Elementargedanken in der Lehre vom Menschen* (ibid. 1895).