The terms “liberal” and “liberalism” have many different meanings. Consider, for example, the two terms’ social usage in everyday colloquial parlance, and in different temporal contexts, languages, and situations. When we shift our attention away from colloquial parlance and concentrate instead on the relation between liberalism and the history of anthropology, particularly from the late 19th to the early 20th century in continental Europe, then our usage of the two terms is informed by concepts that were shaped by academic research, most notably in history and the history of science. This is what contributors to the present section of Ab Imperio are attempting to elaborate:^[1] Was there a liberal paradigm in the history of anthropology in continental Europe just before and after the start of the 20th century? If so, what were its manifestations, and who its protagonists? What were its qualities and its limits within the realm of academic research? What, too, were its relations to society and culture at large during the late stages of the three entities that are discussed here – that is, the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires before the end of World War I? And if such a liberal paradigm did exist – at least to an extent, and for some period of time – what were the forces in society and in academia that contributed to its collapse? Once we frame a set of research questions about liberalism within this explorative project of academic inquiry, the term’s meaning itself is dissociated from its present colloquial connotations and becomes reformulated in its proper historical and cultural context.

AN IMPLICIT LIBERAL PARADIGM: SUBSTANCE AND CONNOTATIONS

The answer to the first research question can now be affirmed, at least tentatively. Previously known evidence has been reassessed and hitherto unknown materials have been presented that, taken together, allow us to argue that to varying extents and for differing durations of influence, a liberal paradigm did indeed influence research records in the anthropology of continental Europe before the end of World War I. Following Benoit Massin^[2] this insight is innovative and refreshing, in that it explicitly contradicts teleological reasoning about the history of anthropology around the turn of the century. Empirical identification of the liberal paradigm thus contradicts certain speculations and assumptions that the development of anthropology in the German-language area was directed, from the outset, toward the atrocities of Nazism’s racist anthropology. This insight also helps us to remain cautious about assumptions that anthropology was programmed from the beginning to become a tool of nationalism in countries like Hungary or Romania, or, for that matter, that it represented a necessary precondition for a Marxist paradigm in Bolshevist Russia after 1917. By contradicting such teleological reasoning, the answer to the first question encourages us to examine more closely the different alternatives and connections that shaped the activities of more than two generations of research in the anthropology of that era.
A set of common academic indicators of the liberal paradigm of the time can be seen in its inductive, empirical methodology and its non-Darwinian theoretical confirmation of coexistence among various cultures and “races” within a spectrum defined, in essence, by imperial boundaries. In this sense, the liberal paradigm was compatible with prevailing imperial interests in political cohesion and domestic stability. In the three empires under scrutiny here, the pluralist conception of racial and cultural coexistence was not egalitarian. It implied, rather, a double hierarchy – one leading ethnic and racial group above all the rest, and other hierarchies within each of the ethnic and racial groupings. These conceptual hierarchies both informed and legitimized orientalization and colonial practices. Nevertheless, the layered hierarchies of races and cultures were seen as being capable of basically coexisting with and benefiting from one another. Moreover, these pluralities of hierarchical cultures and races were conceptualized as ultimately originating from one source: monogenesis was part and parcel of anthropology’s liberal paradigm. In its time, however, the paradigm held no monopoly in the various fields of anthropology: it competed explicitly with other schools in Russia, and was by no means uncontested in Germany or the Habsburg realm. Still, between roughly 1870 and 1917/18, the liberal paradigm was more influential than others in the anthropology of these three empires.
To my mind, these indicators suffice as basic criteria. They demonstrate that there was an essential common denominator among what we may now call different versions of the liberal paradigm in anthropology. The liberal paradigm itself contrasted clearly with two other paradigms prominent at the same time. The Social Darwinist paradigm was then launching its idea that competition and struggle between cultures and races were the preeminent forces in human evolution; in time, many of its supporters joined forces with nationalists of all kinds. By contrast, the Marxist paradigm was propagating its idea that cultural and physical diversity among humans was much less significant than other primary factors such as economic infrastructure and class struggle. These two paradigms would eventually succeed for some time in various of the successor states to the three empires, but before the end of World War I it was not yet clear how this would be decided.
The representatives of a liberal paradigm in anthropology often combined liberal academic values with liberalism in other spheres. In some cases, academic and nonacademic liberalism became personified by the same group of actors. In Germany, Virchow and some of his followers represented such a union of interests through their parallel pursuit of liberal academic and political activities. In Russia, where political activism was more restricted, Anuchin was a key representative of anthropology’s liberal paradigm, and he also cooperated with the liberal press. In Austro-Hungary, free trade and freedom of movement were advocated by a number of those who were central to the shaping of anthropology under a liberal paradigm. Taken together, these connections and biographies indicate the range of wider values embraced by liberal scholars: freedom to vote, freedom of expression, of speech, and certainly of research, and freedom of trade. These were the values of classical liberalism in the later part of the 19th century, although they may or may not be confirmed explicitly for each individual case. What counts as a primary criterion for investigating a liberal academic paradigm is the set of academic indicators outlined above, which shaped their anthropology.
Although we are able to acknowledge the existence of such a liberal paradigm and to outline its qualities and effects, its dynamics, and its limits, one important qualification is indispensable. Unlike other influential scientific paradigms of that era, the liberal paradigm had no explicit, globally acknowledged opera magna that would have served as its intellectual foundation and from which its followers might have derived their inspiration. Darwinists could and did rely on the works of Darwin and his various interpreters. Historicists relied on Ranke and others, and Marxists of various directions interpreted the theories of Marx and Engels for their respective academic and political purposes. But liberal anthropologists of the late imperial era in continental Europe relied largely on the texts of the leading figures in their respective empires, and rarely did those works attain much influence beyond the empires in which they had been elaborated. The German language zone represented something of an exception in this respect, since Virchow’s influence was also towering in the German-speaking parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.^[3] Yet even Virchow, the single most widely acknowledged and respected researcher in his field,^[4] did not achieve the kind of influence that would have made his work the central and paradigmatic source of inspiration and reference among Russian or Hungarian anthropologists. Some language zones thus had their key thinkers, while others had their own.
These key thinkers certainly influenced and enriched one another through their works and reputations, and this promoted parallels and similarities among them. To my mind, these identified parallels and mutual influences allow us to use the concept of a “paradigm” for these purposes. The absence of any single, transimperial set of new magna opera that would explicitly define and orient that paradigm, however, requires that we qualify the “liberal paradigm” as an implicit one in its time. It could not rely on an overarching and acknowledged set of transimperial works, but instead was based in parallels and similarities among the various works of its respective key thinkers in each empire and language zone. We may conclude from this insight that the emergence of the liberal paradigm was due not to cumulative and revolutionary transformations inside academic research alone, but to external and nonacademic factors that seem to have played an equally important role. Crucial among these factors is the compatibility of the liberal paradigm – its intellectual contents, its sociocultural orientation, its political implications – with imperial cohesion and stability. Among the wider spectrum of research orientations that were compatible with imperial cohesion and stability, the liberal paradigm by and large represented a modernist orientation.
Compatibility, however, does not necessarily imply an original causal relation. Bismarck’s governmental authorities certainly did not at first invite Virchow and his followers to carry out the research they had in mind. Yet once the liberal paradigm gained some momentum, it was accepted and, eventually, encouraged and supported from above. Neither Virchow’s Schulstatistik in Germany nor Ivanovski’s mapping of human diversity in Russia could have been carried out, published, or attained any authoritative status without the consent and support of the relevant imperial offices and governmental desks. Marina Mogilner (in this volume) provides us with a brilliant and persuasive example of the powerful influence exerted by the liberal paradigm once it became established. After all, the publication of Dzhavakhishvili’s ideological and nationalist thinking could be kept at bay with the help of Anuchin’s and Ivanovski’s liberal orientation in anthropology. To say that the liberal paradigm was an implicit paradigm by no means implies that it was not influential. Rather, this case demonstrates the field of intersecting interests of power between imperial order and academic liberalism in anthropology.

ELEMENTS OF AN ACADEMIC FIELD’S HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY

We thus could speak of a set of “partial connections” between academic and nonacademic spheres of liberal values and activities in the era of anthropology under discussion. Outlining these partial connections in politics, in the media, or by reference to the economic sphere has been helpful in answering some parts of the second question above, about the relationship between the “liberal” researchers and their sociocultural environment. Our understanding can be further enriched by considering some aspects of the researchers’ biographies that have been presented in this volume and elsewhere in the literature. In a sociological perspective, by far the majority of our key actors came from the upper and lower urban middle classes, very few from the aristocracy, and virtually none from the working poor. In cultural terms, they mostly belonged to their empires’ respective religious and linguistic majorities, although minority representatives did play an interesting role in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires (e.g., the nationalist roles of Popovici from Romania or Dzhavakhishvili from Georgia). Of course, the prevalence of their origins among ethnic and religious majorities and the urban middle classes was common to any kind of academic staff in those decades. In our context, however, it does provide some additional affirmation of their loyalties toward the existing empires. Within this pattern of loyalty, liberalism was among the options available to urban middle-class perspectives. In this context, a closer examination of individuals, and of clusters and networks among individuals, yields interesting results.
Tracing these networks allows us to identify various generations of “founding fathers” who had their forerunners and predecessors and, even more importantly, their followers and successors. The founding fathers developed academic programs of research and teaching under a liberal paradigm, succeeded to an extent in its institutional implementation, established an imperial and international network of cooperation around the new institutional centers, and trained a number of more or less loyal disciples and followers. In this sense, the preeminent founding fathers of liberal anthropology in Germany (and the German language area at large) were Virchow and Bastian, and in imperial Russia it was Anuchin. The founding fathers of liberal anthropology in Vienna and in Budapest entered the stage somewhat later and, in part because of that, seem to have been both less liberal and less influential (by their own standards) among potential followers.^[5] Pöch’s chair in Vienna, for example, was established as late as 1912, long after some of the major imperial ethnographic projects (such as the Kronprinzenwerk^[6]) had been launched under the partial influence of a liberal paradigm. Pöch’s students were also much less than enthusiastic about a liberal orientation in their studies. In this sense, Budapest’s and Vienna’s versions of the liberal paradigm in anthropology differed from the others in some significant ways.
We thus may take the Berlin and Moscow cases as representing the more prototypical examples of small, institutionalized social pyramids of founding fathers and their disciples and followers, combined with related networks of alliances in academia and beyond. Other networks and clusters competed with their liberal rivals. This is most obvious in imperial Russia, with its three strong, competing clusters (Moscow, Kiev, St. Petersburg), but it also can be identified in imperial Germany among minor networks in anthropology that pursued alternative paradigms such as Darwinism or Creationism.
In addition to the founding fathers’ institutions and networks, and those of their primary competitors, maverick anthropologists appear to constitute another feature of the period, perhaps more distinctive during that era of anthropology’s history than in others. This may be due, to some extent, to the strong element of trial and error inherent in any formative phase in the history of a discipline. In another sense, however, it may be that it was precisely the pervasive context of academic liberalism itself that left more room for maverick researchers than one might expect in other phases of academic history. Nopcsa and Krauss are two cases in point, indicating that the somewhat weaker and belated institutionalization of anthropology in the Austro-Hungarian Empire represented an even wider field for nonconformist activities than was the case in Russia and in Germany.
In their own times, Krauss and Nopcsa certainly represented unconventional outsiders. If, however, we inspect some dimensions in their biographies through a wider and comparative perspective, we see that they may not be as unique as appears at first sight. Nopcsa’s habit of dressing in local Albanian attire, for example, not only foreshadows a subsequent pattern of “going native” among more recent generations of ethnographers and anthropologists, but also had its parallels among some ethnographers from Austro-Hungary who did their fieldwork elsewhere, including Wilhelm and Maria Hein from Vienna, who dressed in local costume during their fieldwork in southern Yemen in 1901/2.^[7] Similarly, Nopcsa’s ambition to become politically active in his own fieldwork area of Albania had many parallels among other ethnographers and anthropologists: Eduard Glaser (a native of what then was called Bohemia) tried to convince Emperor Franz Josef to make his own fieldwork site of northern Yemen, then an Ottoman domain, a new colony for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.^[8] These cases may in turn be seen as early and somewhat unhappy precursors of an established subfield in the colonial and postcolonial ethnography of more recent eras: “applied anthropology.” In their research, both Krauss and Nopcsa addressed topics of violence in local Balkan contexts that intersected with Muslim influence. I appreciate Christian Marchetti’s fine exercise in his contribution to this volume, in which he interprets their practices as examples of what I have called “frontier orientalism”.^[9] This kind of cultural and political orientation engages with male violence among nearby “oriental” cultures – those close to one’s own border – as opposed to the “orient overseas” as it is construed in classic colonial orientalism. In addition, frontier orientalism did not follow the dichotomous arrangements of classical orientalism, but allowed for a more diversified pattern of perspectives,^[10] as Nopcsa’s and Krauss’s examples confirm.
Krauss became much more widely known than Nopcsa, primarily through his own publications on diverse sexual practices and the fact that, for diverse reasons, these were extensively quoted. It is largely due to this particular aspect of Krauss’s writing, and to conservative reactions against it, that his academic reputation suffered. Although some of his ethnographic observations were inappropriate from the outset, and others did not stand the test of time, there are elements in his prolific writing that continue to deserve attention. In fact, Krauss in some ways may be seen as an early contributor to what I am prepared to identify as a minor “Jewish moment” in the history of early folklore studies and Völkerkunde in the German language zone before and after World War I. This Jewish moment involved folklorists and early cultural anthropologists alike. Eduard Glaser was part of it, and his works remain an acknowledged authoritative source in South Arabian studies today.^[11] Franz Boas, the founding figure of US anthropology, also belonged to that moment during his early years.^[12] Born and raised in Westphalia, Boas studied with Bastian and Virchow in Berlin and carried out his first expedition on Baffin Island as a Berlin Museum mission, before he emigrated to the United States. Many of the Jewish moment would follow him, but others would be unable to do so. During the 1920s in Vienna, Eugйnie Goldstern and Marianne Schmidl continued the Jewish moment, the first in folklore studies as a former student of Van Gennep,^[13] and the second as an expert in the anthropology of African material culture.^[14] Both suffered severely during the decline of liberalism in academic research, from the double discrimination against women and Jews. Both would be murdered in Nazi concentration camps.^[15]
My argument is that in the history of German-speaking ethnography and folklore studies before and immediately after the collapse of the German and Habsburg empires, this minor “Jewish moment” and the liberal paradigm were mutually supportive. The liberal paradigm offered Jewish intellectuals the opportunity and the hope for more freedom in their own professional activities, and also provided an intellectual and cultural context for upward social mobility, respect, and integration. To that end, Jewish scholars had to enhance, expand, and strengthen the liberal paradigm. In turn, folklore studies and cultural anthropology could benefit from the specific perspectives that came from a group whose members were vitally interested in the peaceful coexistence of diverse cultural communities in an imperial context.
As in academic medicine and the early development of psychoanalysis, but to a much lesser and more dispersed extent than in those two fields, a Jewish moment existed in the history of German-speaking anthropology and folklore studies before and after World War I. It faded and ended in concert with the decline of anthropology’s liberal paradigm. In a way, however, the earlier, and more diffuse, minor Jewish moment in the history of German-speaking anthropology preceded another, better known, and more substantial Jewish moment when Franz Boas became the founding father of anthropology in the United States, which continued with the preeminence in the field of several of his students, such as Robert Lowie and Edward Sapir.^[16]
A closer inspection of some of the early maverick anthropologists thus reveals that several were not as isolated as it may appear. Instead, they often represented unconventional precursors of tendencies that would develop in more substantial ways later on, and elsewhere. Seen from another angle, the dispersed Jewish and non-Jewish maverick folklorists and anthropologists represented merely one end of a continuum that had at its other end the tight networks and social pyramids of solidly institutionalized anthropology. Maverick researchers had to rely primarily on individual research projects; for obvious reasons, large team projects could be carried out only by the institutionalized centers. These centers and their representatives continued individual research efforts, but in the long run, they prospered with major team projects and their success peaked together with them.

METHODS, SPECIALIZATION, AND COLLAPSE

By necessity, large team projects were led and carried out by representatives of well-established institutional centers of research. Their representatives also frequently promoted their careers and positions by participating in large team projects that were carried out by divisions of the state, such as the imperial army or navy. Notably in Germany, urban communes also sometimes acted as cosponsors or independent mentors of research.^[17]
In Russia, the imperial army carried out regular anthropological documentation during its recruitment procedures, and ethnographers and physical anthropologists from the Russian Empire, together with their US counterparts, played an important part in the Jesup North Pacific expedition around the turn of the century. In Germany, the Schulstatistik and two great colonial expeditions to Melanesia are key examples of such large, state-sponsored projects before and after the turn from the 19th to the 20th centuries. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, one may cite the Kronprinzenwerk^[18] or the K.u.K. Suedarabien-Expedition.^[19]
In most cases, these large projects during the more peaceful decades before 1914 were “interdisciplinary” from their inception. This was the case, at least to an extent, if they are judged by the methods and goals that were pursued, but also in terms of the academic training and degrees of those who participated. The researchers were trained doctors of medicine and philologists, biologists and folklorists, historians and archaeologists. Interdisciplinarity, however, is too imprecise a term for the actual fluidity of disciplinary boundaries and flexibility of differentiations during those formative years. In fact, it was through some of these large projects that certain standards of methodological procedure and of evaluating results were first established. This sometimes took place in the larger projects long before the same standards reached the laboratory, museum, or university. Large teamwork followed the example set by the natural sciences, and physical anthropology played a leading, if not dominant, role in many of these projects. At the same time, physical anthropologists still were supposed to be systematically interested in cultural variation, and cultural anthropologists and ethnographers were expected not to ignore physical variations. Likewise, folklore studies (later institutionalised as Volkskunde in the German language area) and sociocultural anthropology (already known as Völkerkunde in German) in the German and in the Austro-Hungarian empires were overlapping elements within the same field. In several cases, all of these diverse research activities were carried out by one and the same researcher.
By establishing standard procedures and divisions of labor through teamwork, the large anthropological projects of the late imperial period established and solidified specialization and trained a junior generation of scholars according to the new parameters. In turn, specialization became standard, and together with the increased amount of detailed data, this tended to strengthen the separate realms of specialization – and the gaps between them. Accumulating along two or three generations of large projects in the respective empires, subdisciplinary specializations gradually increased to new thresholds of disciplinary boundaries. Shortly before World War I, Volkskunde and Völkerkunde had established their differing journals, museums, and societies in the German-speaking countries, in Hungary, and in Russia. Physical anthropologists and sociocultural anthropologists maintained a close interaction to a certain extent, but in their respective subfields they drifted apart, as well.
In the long run, increased technical and empirical specialization helped to undermine the liberal paradigm’s hegemony. Once folklore studies and sociocultural anthropology became separated, it became much easier for those who all along had given priority to studying “one’s own” culture to claim it as an absolute necessity, and to proclaim the relative insignificance of studying “other” cultures.
From the outset, this separation had been part of academic life in imperial Germany, with its seemingly monolinguistic and almost monoethnic composition at home, and with its overseas colonies in Africa and Melanesia. In Germany, this situation combined well with a reinvigorated theorizing that claimed to take its inspiration from Herder’s distinction^[20] between Kulturvölker (“peoples of culture”), now to be studied by Volkskunde, and Naturvölker (“peoples of nature”), now to be studied by Völkerkunde. A seemingly clear-cut political and territorial separation between “at home” and “overseas” thus favored an earlier institutional separation between Volkskunde and Völkerkunde before World War I. This reached a new institutional stage after the war, with the installation of separate university departments. In a related development, some among the younger generation of physical anthropologists began during the 20th century’s first decade to relate their findings quite explicitly to that clear-cut distinction between colonial cultures and a superior German culture.
By contrast, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires were territorially coherent. One may speak of colonies in their cases as well, but their colonies were not overseas or on the other side of the globe. Their polyethnic but coherent imperial territory included both central domains and quasicolonial domains. Anthropological and ethnographic research that displayed a minimum of loyalty toward these empires’ cohesion had to be at the very least nonnationalist, if not overtly antinationalist.^[21] Hungarian and Austrian folklorists and sociocultural anthropologists thus felt encouraged to maintain the proximity between folklore studies and sociocultural anthropology. The mainstream’s older generation pursued this perspective under their various versions of a liberal paradigm for some time after Virchow’s death – virtually until the empire collapsed, and beyond.
If disciplinary separation and differentiation in some ways facilitated fields of operation for anthropologists guided by nationalist priorities, the opposite was true as well. New nationalist guidelines and paradigms could be fought through much more easily under the cover of disciplinary specialization and differentiation. Carrying out an exclusive project on, say, the Romanians or the Georgians could be lobbied for on the premise that it allowed the first application of highly specialized methods in physical anthropology. To an important degree, this kind of advanced specialization under new paradigms got underway during World War I, when the German and especially the Austro-Hungarian empires carried out large-scale anthropological and ethnographic investigations in prisoner of war camps. The Habsburg army’s ethnographic expedition in the occupied zones of Montenegro and Albania, although carried out during the last phase of the war, differs from the POW camp projects in so far as it still contained strong elements of liberal research interests. These were applied with a truly “frontier oriental” perspective, with the aim of possibly controlling the studied populations and territories as dependent allies.
Quite different interests and practices prevailed in the POW camp research projects. Andrew Evans has convincingly argued that these were decisive for the paradigmatic shifts in the anthropology of Central Europe that took place after the war.^[22] His argument can be further substantiated by pointing out that these POW camp projects provided cheaper, faster, and more extensive research opportunities for larger groups of researchers than what had been possible during the pre-war years. Simultaneously, the POW camp situation, with its enforced laboratory conditions and its dehumanization of POWs, created a reified, extremely hierarchical research situation. These factors combined with the prevailing Zeitgeist of confrontation, imperial chauvinism, and legitimized hatred that pervaded public opinion during the war,^[23] and they became an independent source of contributions to the downfall of the liberal paradigm in the anthropology of the Austro-Hungarian and German empires. In addition, the fact that this paradigm was implicit may have made it difficult to defend against the more explicit paradigms that were on the rise. With the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917, and of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires in 1918, the most influential and obvious of all liberal research conditions itself collapsed. Thereafter, while it was sometimes possible to uphold anthropology’s liberal paradigm of the late imperial era, there was no extra-academic need to do so.

CONCLUSION: HUNGRY YOUNG HYENAS

The rise of nationalism before and during World War I, the rise of a racist paradigm in physical anthropology during and after World War I, and the full institutional separation between folklore studies and sociocultural anthropology were not directly and causally related. They had their respective internal dynamics, but they evolved during the same overall period, and they reinforced one another. Outside of what had been imperial Russia and what now became the Soviet Union, a landscape of new nation-states had emerged, from Ireland to Finland and from Poland to Albania. The end of the liberal paradigm was prepared by the Communist regime in Russia and the Soviet Union through the promotion of its own political premises and theories. In similar but different ways, the de-imperialised condition of new nation-states without colonies in Central Europe radically changed the defining contexts of research for anthropology as well.
In a masterful way, Marius Turda again^[24] shows in this volume that it is impossible to understand the spread and full development of nationalism in Europe without racism as its constitutive element. In turn, this key role of racism in the expansion of nationalism requires an acknowledgement of a neo-Darwinian, racist anthropology that became dominant in conjunction with the decline of liberalism. Gobineau, Chamberlain, and Gumplowicz had been influential ideologists in the later part of the 19th century, and they prepared the ground in intellectual and public opinion. In their time, however, physical anthropology in the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires had refrained from adopting their ideology, and had pursued its non-Darwinian liberal orientation. It was only decades later, in the years before, during, and after World War I, that neo-Darwinian nationalism and racism gradually became the new paradigm inside the academic fields of anthropology themselves.
Inside the new, de-imperialized landscape of central Europe after 1917/18, a whole generation of junior scholars pursued and promoted their careers along these lines. Some, like Egon von Eickstдdt, had gone through their first professional experiences in POW camp projects;^[25] others, like Otto Reche,^[26] had been part of large colonial-imperial projects; still others, like Aurel Popovici, successfully promoted separation and secession. They had propagated nationalist chauvinism, like Mihály Réz, and they had studied what they called human “bastardization” in the colonies, as had Eugen Fischer.^[27] Under the claim of more modern, more accurate, and more politically desirable research programs, they were to contribute decisively to the darkest years of the 20th century.^[28]