Christoph Wulf - Historical Anthropology

Historical Anthropology

Wulf’s anthropological research takes as its starting point the insight that the philosophical and pedagogical anthropologies whose focus was on white Western male human beings have lost their claim to universality. For this reason we today need to proceed from a polycentric anthropology. The focus is no longer on European images of humanity and Western thought. Other cultures have the same right to make statements about humans from their perspective. In view of this situation, what is required is a historical and cultural relativization and differentiation of anthropology that also needs to avoid extreme relativism and arbitrariness. In the globalized world, this situation leads to an increase in the complexity that will determine the living conditions of people in the future.

Logic and Passion (Logik und Leidenschaft): The human body was the focus of this first phase of anthropological studies, which was realized with Dietmar Kamper. This was result of the first book issued together with Dietmar Kamper, “The Return of the Body” (“Die Wiederkehr des Körpers”), with which the specific historical anthropology of the Berlin anthropological research was founded. Within its framework, 10 international, transdisciplinary studies were created, which later received the title “Logic and Passion” (“Logik und Leidenschaft”). More than 150 researchers and philosophers from 25 disciplines and more than 10 countries cooperated in this project that spanned decades. This research differs from the historical anthropology in historical scholarship in that it is more oriented than the research of the historians toward making a contribution to an understanding of our current era, that is, toward a diagnosis of the present. After the end of normative anthropologies associated with the dominance of European/Western science, philosophy, and culture, it was considered imperative to develop forms of anthropological thought and research that would do justice to the changed living and development conditions in the globalized world. Through transdisciplinary and transcultural research, a historical anthropology was created in which the human body, its senses, and cultural practices in their European form were of central importance. For this historical-anthropological research, the dual historicity, i.e., the historicity of researchers and the historicity of the studied phenomena, was of constitutive significance. The mysteriousness of the human body caused humans to be understood as homo absconditus, i.e., as beings who are only partially accessible and understandable to themselves. In addition to the rediscovery of the body and of the senses, the topic of this research was the history of the soul and the unfathomability of the sacred, the mysteriousness of love and of the beautiful, and the mystery of time and of silence.

Humankind and Its Culture (Der Mensch und seine Kultur): The task of this book, which was more than 1000 pages in length and translated into several languages, was to reconstruct 100 fundamental relations and relationships of human beings to the world and investigate them in a handbook of historical anthropology. The historical, cultural, and social localization and diagnosis of the era sought to be achieved with this work was carried out with a consciousness for the dual historicity and culturality as well as the contingencies associated with this. Even the intensive interdisciplinary cooperation changed nothing about the unavoidably fragmentary character of these investigations. However, this created the basis for continuing investigation of social diversity and the improvement of historical self-understanding and of cultural self-interpretation. The anthropological study of the world and self-relations grounded in history and culture led to insights that could result in a new (reflexive) understanding of many everyday functional interrelationships. Such experiences lead to skeptical questions regarding history as a history of progress and appropriation, the logic of the concept to be identified, the scope of the hermeneutics, and the self- and world-constitutive subject. Such skepticism led to a consciousness of the historical and cultural relativity and anthropological insight. In contrast to previous interpretations, the consciously accepted preliminary nature of anthropological knowledge is not seen as a deficiency, but as a gain. The quality of this knowledge is a consequence of the fundamental indeterminableness of humans, from which the openness for the other and for the other’s knowledge results, providing motivation to look for ways to increase the complexity of anthropological knowledge. The contributions were arranged into seven chapters with the following headings: Cosmology, World and Things, Genealogy and Gender, Body, Media and Education, Coincidence and Fate, and Culture.

Anthropology: History, Culture, Philosophy (Anthropologie: Geschichte, Kultur, Philosophie): On the basis of an analysis of central paradigms of anthropology, Wulf here further developed the concept of a historical anthropology into a historical-cultural anthropology. This is created in an exchange with the paradigms of evolution/hominization, of philosophical anthropology, of anthropology in historical scholarship (historical anthropology), and of cultural anthropology / ethnology. Today it is considered imperative to develop anthropology as a transcultural and transdisciplinary research field that involves the interleaving of general and particular, global and local, and diachronic and synchronic perspectives with the goal of researching the unitas multiplex of humankind. In view of this aspiration, it is not possible to narrowly guide the concept of anthropology in one direction or the other. That’s why a dynamic concept of anthropology that is open to change is recommended here. With this anthropology concept, epistemological conditions are created which respond to the demands of anthropological research in a globalized world. This anthropology concept has no systematic character, but instead one that is more heuristic. It can be specified and modified depending on the context. Its heuristic value consists first and foremost in making research multidimensional both in terms of content and method and thus more capable of conforming to the world’s changing conditions.

Pedagogical Anthropology (Pädagogische Anthropologie): Wulf’s basic thesis for the justification of the necessity of pedagogical anthropology states that upbringing and education constantly contains images of people – anthropological images. Without anthropological assumptions about people and about how upbringing, education, and socialization is to occur, upbringing and education is not possible. In order to bestow continuity on the research in the field of pedagogical anthropology, in 1992 Wulf initiated the founding of the Pedagogical Anthropology Commission in the German Society for Educational Science (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft). This initiative was supported by Dieter Lenzen, Klaus Mollenhauer, Konrad Wünsche, Theodor Schulze, Eckart Liebau, and Max Liedtke. It was later joined by the following: Johannes Bilstein, Jörg Zirfas, Michael Göhlich, Birgit Althans, Micha Brumlik, Maike Sophia Baader, Doris Schuhmacher-Chilla, Helga Peskoller, Stephan Sting, Ursula Stenger, Hans-Rüdiger Müller, Gabriele Sorgo, Edgar Forster, Christian Rittelmeyer, Gisela Miller-Kipp, Anja Tervooren, Kristin Westphal and many other colleagues. This research takes its starting point in the works of pedagogical anthropology which were created after the Second World War and whose most important representatives included: Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Heinrich Roth, Andreas Flitner, Rudolf Lassahn, and Hans Scheuerl. Over the years, this commission initiated and led by Wulf treated many fundamental topics. The approx. 20 books that have been issued in the meantime cover a broad spectrum of pedagogical-anthropological research. They include books on the history and theory of pedagogical anthropology, on anthropology of perception and aesthetics, on play, imagination, and work, on pedagogical action, including its anthropological and ethical basic conditions, on the role of space, time, and institutions in pedagogical work, on the meaning of nature and religion, generation, love, and friendship, on the senses, and on questions regarding gender. What the authors of these studies have in common is that they are convinced of the importance of the historical and cultural dimension of anthropology and they are attempting to develop important perspectives for the understanding of upbringing, education, and socialization in the world of today using philosophical reflection as well as historical and ethnographic research. They are also convinced that, due to European and global changes, pedagogical research and work sorely need fundamental anthropological research that is to contribute to a better understanding of upbringing, education, and socialization in the various parts of the world. It is no longer sufficient to localize upbringing and education in national contexts. The European orientation also needs to be supplemented through the recognition of Asian, Latin American, and African perspectives, i.e., global influences need to be taken into account.