Biography
Bastian was born in Bremen, 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 outside the German Confederation. He returned to the Confederation 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. For the next eight years Bastian remained in the territory of the North German Confederation, where he became involved in the creation of several key ethnological institutions in Berlin. He had always been an avid collector, and his contributions to Berlin's Royal museum was so copious that a second museum, the Museum of Folkart, was founded largely as a result of Bastian's contributions. Its collection of ethnographic artifacts became one of the largest in the world for decades to come. He also worked with Rudolf Virchow to organize the Ethnological Society of Berlin. During this period he was also the head of the Royal Geographical Society of Germany. Among others who worked under him at the museum was the young Franz Boas who later founded the American school of ethnology.
In the 1870s Bastian left the German Empire and began travelling extensively in Africa as well as the New World.
He died in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago during one these journeys in 1905.
Read more about this topic: Adolf Bastian
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