Germany, 1890s: ‘Cultural circles', geography and reactionary politics

While the battle for a theology-friendly phenomenology was ravaging the Dutch discipline, a young German seminarist was studying at a recently established Catholic missionary school in the Limburg, the southernmost province of the Netherlands.

Expectedly, Schmidt's ideas too were deeply rooted in a peculiar reaction against evolutionary ideas. Curiously, this disciplinary reaction, arisen in Germany in the latest decades of the nineteenth century, was an offshoot of a post-Darwinian interpretation of the development and transmission of cultural ideas, which Schmidt saw as practical and promising enough to tackle the o rigin of religion itself. The movement became widely known as the Kulturkreislehre, that is, the theory of the ‘cultural circles' intended as geographically enclosed cultural environments marked by a distinctive historical makeup (Andriolo 1979: 133). The concept of kulturkreis as ‘an area of human civilization within which a uniform material culture can be demonstrated to have existed' (Sharpe 1986: 181) had been elaborated on as a bridge between contemporary ethnology and prehistory mainly by German ethnologists Bernhard Ankermann (1859-1943), Fritz Gräbner (1877-1934) and Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) based on the diffusionist approach to culture advanced by zoologist, ethnologist, journalist, political activist and geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904).

Influenced by the German reception of Darwinian evolutionism and its local political nuances, Ratzel posited that human culture could be understood in terms of collective processes dominated by migration and competition originating in the availability of favourable geophysical conditions (Smith 1991: 136, 141-2). Although he refused a rigid environmental determinism, Ratzel nonetheless set forth a nomothetic approach, i.e. a biology-like model ruled by laws regulating state behaviour, based on ‘struggle and selection on a national level' (Stoddart 1966: 694), while discarding almost entirely the core Darwinian concepts of randomness, chance and individual specificity, resulting in the justification for both a ‘migrationist colonialism' and a policy of expansion (Smith 1991: 91-2, 143; cf. Smith 2008: 184-5). Uniting historical philology and its obsessive focus on invaders with Moritz Wagner's (1813­1887) biological law of migration,¹⁵ Ratzel elaborated the following points:

1. the presence of similar features in material objects produced by distant peoples testifies to previous contacts between them, contacts otherwise documentarily unattested;

2. the larger the number and spatial distribution of said cultural features, the greater the chance to discover a reliable historical route of cultural transmission or pattern of migration;

3. the clustering of such traits into patterns characterizing a specific area denotes what would later be labelled as a proper kulturkreis;

4. as a corollary later expanded by Ratzel's followers, the organic unity and interrelation between mental culture and material production would make it possible to infer from non-mathematical but observational trait analysis both the ‘formation of whole cultures' and their historical relationships in toto (Smith 1991: 142-3, 145).¹⁶

Notwithstanding Ratzel's apparent acknowledgement of the heuristic inefficiency of the concept of race (replaced by the primacy of culture) and his plea for inclusiveness with regard to other non-Western cultures, his views were unabashedly Pan-Germanic, ethnocentric, teleological and fervently colonialist (Smith 1991: 147-8; Smith 2008: 186-8). Indeed, in the following decades, Ratzel's human geography and ethnography, both focused on historical blocks of unstable ecological adaptation always threatened by human migratory movements in which peoples have to migrate and conquer new territories to survive,¹⁷ became a geopolitical tool sympathetic to imperialist expansion and missiological concerns (that is, reflecting the missionary work of evangelization to convert non-Christian peoples to Christianity).

Within the nascent movement, two outsiders stood out: Frobenius, who had not completed any official course of study and yet succeeded in being eventually co-opted

within German academia (at the University of Frankfurt, since 1932), and Schmidt, who started as seminary professor, and was only later co-opted as lecturer first and then professor in Austria and Switzerland, from 1921 onwards. While Frobenius worked mainly within the framework of an imperialist ethnology, Father (or, in Latin, Pater) Schmidt became the patron of modern missiological anthropology (Smith 1991: 156; cf. Sharpe 1986: 182; Dietrich 1992). Both were able to exploit institutional sources of funds to achieve their goals, that is, private donors and public museums, ultimately gaining the support of German emperor Wilhelm I I (for Frobenius) and both the Austrian and Vatican establishments (in the case of Schmidt, who had also been father confessor to the last Hapsburg monarch, Karl I; see Conte 1988; Spottel 1998; Klein- Arendt 2010).

Although interested concerns had been present in some distinctively different configurations (see Chapter 2, §A preliminary note on imperialism, postmodernism, and science), the Kulturkreislehre worryingly set a new standard for the outspoken institutional relationship between imperialism, internal racial policy, irrationalism and academic research. Both Frobenius and Schmidt used their theories to support actively the racial politics behind the establishment of the German colonial empire, to foster anti-Semitism and, in the specific case of Schmidt, to advance Caesaropapist politics under the Austrian clerical fascist regime on the basis of racist, ethnocentric and theological theses - as well as advocating the expansion of Italian fascist domination in Africa on the very same racist grounds implied in his formulation of the Kulturkreislehre (see Conte 1988; Spottel 1998; Connelly 2007; Pyrah 2008; Mischek 2008).

i. e. the particular, non-universalistic and immaterial soul of every population, while Schmidt's universal history of religions was resolved by and within Urmonotheismus, that is, the primordial monotheism that, according to Schmidt, had been revealed by God to the very first human inhabitants of the Earth (Smith 1991: 160; Spottel 1992).¹⁸