Adolf Bastian
| Adolf Bastian | |
|---|---|
Adolf Bastian
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| Born |
26 June 1826 Bremen, German Confederation |
| Died | 2 February 1905 (aged 78) Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago |
| Fields | anthropology |
| Influences | Johann Gottfried Herder |
| Influenced | Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Franz Boas |
Adolf Bastian (26 June 1826 – 2 February 1905) was a 19th-century polymath best remembered for his contributions to the development of ethnography and the development of anthropology as a discipline. Modern psychology owes him a great debt, because of his theory of the Elementargedanke, which led to Carl Jung's development of the theory of archetypes. His ideas had a formative influence on the "father of American anthropology" Franz Boas, and he also influenced the thought of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell.
Bastian was born in Bremen, at the time a state of the German Confederation, into a prosperous bourgeois German family of merchants. His career at university was broad almost to the point of being eccentric. He studied law at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, and biology at what is today Humboldt University of Berlin, the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and the University of Würzburg. It was at this last university that he attended lectures by Rudolf Virchow and developed an interest in what was then known as 'ethnology'. He finally settled on medicine and earned a degree from Prague in 1850.
Bastian became a ship's doctor and began an eight-year voyage which took him around the world. This was the first of what would be a quarter of a century of travels. He returned to Germany in 1859 and wrote a popular account of his travels along with an ambitious three volume work entitled Man in History, which became one of his most well-known works. In 1861 he undertook a four-year trip to Southeast Asia and his account of this trip, The People of East Asia ran to six volumes.
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