Bastian, Adolf

BASTIAN, ADOLF. - Ethnologist, b. in Bremen on 26 June 1826, d. in Trinidad on 2 Feb. 1905. He founded with Virchow the Berliner Anthropologische Gesellschaft in 1869; in 1886 he was appointed director of the ethnographic museum of Berlin. He made many journeys. He is known among ethnologists as the upholder of the Elementargedanke, that is, of the uniformity of the fundamental conceptions among all primitive peoples, a uniformity based on the unity of the human spirit and of its manifestations, thus disregarding the cultural relations that may have taken place through the encounter and interweaving of different cultural zones.

This theory, if it is true as regards the fundamental psychological needs of the human spirit, has met with a reasonable opposition on the part of the followers of the culture-historical school, who maintain that certain similarities or identities of different cultures, whether in the mental field or in the material or ergological field (identities that often appear in considerable number and in the different fields of intellectual or practical activity), are explained only by encounter 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).

Nicola Turchi