Gefangene Stimmen, Internierte Körper

Author(s)

Britta Lange, Andre Gingrich

Abstract

The present article explores the thesis that during World War I, an earlier unity between ethnography and physical anthropology increasingly dissolved and became disrupted. This thesis is examined through the case study of a research sojourn at the German POW camp of Wilnsdorf, where Vienna anthropologist Rudolf Pöch and his collaborators were invited to pursue the kind of measurements and documentation which Pöch had initiated during the war in Austrian POW camps. While Pöch's original research proposals and project plans for POW camps still had claimed to investigate some of the major, overarching problems of anthropology and ethnography, the researchers soon lost sight of those theoretical questions when their investigation produced such a wealth of data that processing them did completely absorb them. The technical aspect of growing specialization in data processing, however, went hand in hand with a gradual shift of methodological interest. By consequence, the ensuing new thrust upon methodological autonomy for physical anthropology facilitated a theoretical re-orientation for both fields as well. After the war, and after Pöch's early death, this eventually led by the late 1920's to the establishment of separate university departments for physical anthropology and for Völkerkunde. Each of these two fields now followed theoretical premises that were difficult to reconcile, and that had little in common with the unified field of anthropology and ethnography that had existed in the pre-war years.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

External organisation(s)

Unknown External Organisation Unbekannt/undefiniert

Journal

Anthropos

Volume

109

Pages

599-612

No. of pages

14

ISSN

0257-9774

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5771/0257-9774-2014-2-599

Publication date

2014

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504009 Ethnology

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Anthropology, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/e8c2f8c9-5305-4fa3-b7e3-f9e2ae9d341d