The German ethnologist Gustav Klemm (1802–67) occupies a rather problematic position in the history of ideas, alternately hailed as a seminal figure in the development of concepts of race and culture, or belittled as a rather derivative marginal thinker. This article seeks to clarify Klemm's significance by rooting his theories in their contemporary intellectual and social context. It argues that his system, a linear model of human development driven by the interworkings of race and culture, grew from an attempt to (...) synthesize Enlightenment notions of universal progress with major shifts of the mid-nineteenth century, including experiences of dramatic social, political and technological change, commitments to constitutional liberalism, and changes in contemporary ethnology and museology. His works therefore illustrate the complex manners in which ideas of heredity, environment, civilization, development and gender could be blended in this often neglected period, and how their meanings and implications altered as syntheses were built. (shrink)

Franz Boas’ articulation of a new historicist and relativistic framework for anthropology stands as the founding moment of the discipline. Accordingly, scholars have sought to trace its source and inspirations, often concluding that Boas’ thought was shaped almost exclusively by his German background and characterized by a foundational methodological tension. Here, I instead show that Boas’ most creative early work benefitted from close interaction with debates in psychology and that his methodological reflections were part of the much wider series of (...) discussions in North America engendered by the importation of the German Geistes-/ Naturwissenschaft debate. Central to such debates, as well as to anthropological ones in these years, were the contested definitions of the human mind and of knowledge. Recovering this shared focus reveals the importance of such questions to Boas’ early writings, allowing us to better reconstruct his views on anthropology and to appreciate how he approached the question of how to justify the bounding of human knowledge into specific disciplines. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende llevar a cabo una aproximación a dos obras tan enigmáticas y complejas como son "El ritual de la serpiente" de Aby Warburg y "El libro rojo" de Carl Gustav Jung, para así buscar un sentido a partir de la confrontación de estas dos obras. Partiendo de los referentes comunes de los dos autores se podrán establecer relaciones entre la idea de inconsciente colectivo de Jung y la de supervivencia de Warburg ya que el territorio común y compartido (...) entre los dos autores es la noción de imagen. Ambos sienten una profunda fascinación por el mundo de las imágenes, uno desde la historia del arte y otro trabajando con el alma humana, cuya forma natural de expresión, según él, es precisamente la imagen. Tanto para Warburg como para Jung la imagen está profundamente ligada a un momento de crisis y por esa razón resulta imprescindible cuestionar estas imágenes que surgen de lo profundo para poder aliviar el sufrimiento. (shrink)