Richard Thurnwald and the Transimperial Fate of German Colonial Ethnology, 1896-1926

Abstract

This dissertation examines the transnational development of early twentieth century international social anthropology in the context of imperial rivalries, colonial governance, and liberal internationalism. In doing so, this project explores the internationalization of a "Lost Generation" of German ethnologists, exemplified by the renowned scholar Richard Thurnwald (1869-1954), from fin de siècle antecedents in Austro-Hungarian Bosnia to field research projects for Anglo-Australian mandate administrations in New Guinea during the interwar period. German ethnologists were at the forefront of a broader alignment of applied anthropology and colonialism in the West before World War One. After the brutal suppression of the Herero Rebellion in Southwest Africa (c. 1906), Germany faced rising international scrutiny over her capacity to economically develop her colonies while simultaneously executing the mission civilisatrice – the inherent contradiction within the concept of “Sacred Trusteeship” that I term the “Mandate Dilemma”. To head off this threat to its imperial legitimacy, Germany adopted a contemporarily unique policy of "scientific colonialism" which combined ethnological expertise with rational governance in pursuit of Sacred Trusteeship – an intellectual approach that I term “Mandate Governmentality” – to secure its right-to-rule against the imperial ambitions of its Great Power rivals. This convergence of necessities spurred a scientific revolution of a unique form of German colonial ethnology – of a distinct “Mandate Ethnologie”. Following the loss of their colonial laboratories in 1919, “imperial piggybacking” German ethnologists found ready employment throughout the Anglophone world as a “reservoir of knowledge” in a postwar liberal internationalist system that promoted indigenous self-determination. This "Lost Generation" of German Mandate Ethnologists became integral in guiding the implementation and expansion of Mandate Governmentality in interwar Anglo-Australian sub-imperialism that were subjected to the oversight of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission. This dissertation ultimately challenges the standing historiographical paradigm that British colonial administrations were innovative in their approach to colonial governance. It instead proposes that Anglo-Australian formal and informal imperial intervention in the colonized periphery after 1919, exemplified in New Guinea, was the adoption of a uniquely German power-knowledge construct of Mandate Governmentality and Mandate Ethnologie.