Couttenier, Maarten (Author)
This research tries to obtain two main goals. First, this doctoral thesis wants to give a clear view on the history of Belgian anthropology in the period 1882- 1925, with special attention to the museum in Tervuren. Op until now, the history of early Belgian anthropology remained a 'missing link' in scientific research, a void that this dissertation tries to till. The inauguration of the Anthropological Society of Brussels (SAB) in 1882 was chosen as the starting point of this study. This society concentrated on physical anthropology, a discipline that tried to categorise people in different races based upon physical features. It was only after the inauguration of the permanent museum in Tervuren (1898) that cultural evolutionism and diffusionism became popular in Belgium. Secondly, the text offers new insights in the field of historical anthropology and the diachronic approach of social memory. The history of early Belgian anthropology, colonial ethnography and museology is set in the specific cultural and historical context of the age of 'heroic' modernity during the last turn of the century. The life world in the studied time period was characterised by an immense belief in ones own abilities and a simultaneous feeling of loss, both caused by the constantly accelerating modernisation. This study shows that anthropological insights were used to define the 'self' and formed an answer to the feeling of loss caused by modernisation. The identity of Belgian anthropologists became defined in confrontation with the 'other', a very broad category that included labourers, women, criminals, prehistoric men and the colonized. The contact with the colony ultimately served as an inverted reflection for the western bourgeoisie who needed a form of self-definition and situated civilisation within the own society. One can state that the growing distance between past and present, which was caused by modernity, partly became bridged by portraying Africa as a continent where the early history of Europe still was laid at in the present. Anthropology, in this way, offered an answer to the nostalgia for a lost world.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. C 65/03 (2004): 605. UMI pub. no. C817421.
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