Adolf Bastian was born June 26, 1826 in Bremen, Germany. He studied law at the University of Heidelberg and natural sciences and medicine in Berlin, Jena and Würzburg. In 1850, he earned a medical degree from Charles University in Prague. After this, he traveled as a ship's doctor to Australia, Peru, the West Indies, Mexico, China the Malay archipelago, India and Africa. This led him to write Der Mensch in der Geschichte (1860). These travels were also the beginning of his ethnographic work. From 1866-1871, he explored Asiatic countries which resulted in the work, Die Völkerdes östlichen Asien.
Adolf Bastian is known as a founder of ethnography. His extensive travels led him to believe that all individuals had some similar elementary ideas because of a general psychic unity of mankind. He believed that Völkergedanken (folk ideas) develop differently among societies due to different physical surroundings and historical events. He believed that there are only a small number of elementary ideas, or Elementargedanken, that result in the different folk ideas. The elementary ideas are uniform to all people. In order to prove his belief in psychic unity, he collected data on the resemblances of artifacts and of behavior. He believed that "environment is largely responsible for the form which behavior and artifacts take and that migration and contact provide a mixture of ideas, some eventuating in civilizations." (Winick)
Adolf Bastian is sometimes called an evolutionist but a unique one at that because he didn't believe in unilinear evolution. Rather, he believed there were multiple possible outcomes from the same beginning. He also had a monogenetic view of human origins when others believed that the races were evolved separately.
After traveling through the Asiatic countries, Adolf Bastian taught at the University of Berlin. While living in Berlin, he founded the ethnographical museum Köngliche Museum für Völkerkunde and the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory. Bastian continued to travel around the world throughout his life. He died in Port of Spain, Trinidad while on a return voyage from one of his several trips.
Books by Adolf Bastian:
Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 1860 (3 volumes)
Sprachvergleichende Studien mit besonderer Berucksichtigung der indochinesischen Spracher, 1870
Die Lehre vom Denken zur Erganzung der Naturwissenschaftlichen Psychologie, fur Unberleitung auf die Geistwissenschaften, 1902-05 (3 volumes)
Resources
Baldus, Herbert. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol 2, The Macmillan Company & The Free Press, 1968
Winick, Charles. Dictionary of Anthropology, Philosophical Library, NY, 1956
Written By: Anthropology Students at Minnesota State University, Mankato