BASTIAN, ADOLF. - Ethnologist, born in Bremen on 26 June 1826, died in Trinidad on 2 Feb. 1905. In 1869 he founded, together with Virchow, the Berliner Anthropologische Gesellschaft; in 1886 he was appointed director of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. He made many journeys. Among ethnologists he is known as the proponent of the Elementargedanke, that is, of the uniformity of fundamental conceptions among all primitive peoples, a uniformity based on the unity of the human spirit and its manifestations, thus disregarding the cultural relations that may have arisen from the encounter and interweaving of different cultural zones.
This theory, while valid with regard to the fundamental psychological requirements of the human spirit, met with reasonable opposition from the followers of the historical-cultural school, who maintain that certain similarities or identities among different cultures, both in the mental sphere and in the material or ergological sphere (identities which often appear in considerable number and in the various fields of intellectual or practical activity), can be explained only by contact and the 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); Ethische Elementargedanken in der Lehre vom Menschen (ibid. 1895).