The Primitive Within: The Entanglements Between Anthropology and Folklore Studies in Germany, 1850s–1930s by Christof Dejung

The Primitive Within (Oxford University Press, 2026) is the first book to examine the relation between German folklore studies and colonial anthropology in the age of empire. It expounds how anthropologists and folklorists aimed to compare rural cultures in the European hinterland to supposedly primitive societies in the colonial peripheries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This allows for a reconsideration of two fields that all too often have been examined in isolation. Whereas folklore studies has been interpreted as an aspect of nation-building, anthropology has been primarily examined in its relation to imperialism. The links between these two areas of research—and their eventual separation—have barely been examined in any detail to date.

By taking Germany as an exemplary case, this book addresses the following questions:

• How did scholars think about comparing traditional cultures that were thousands of kilometres apart?
• Why were such cultural ties eventually severed at the turn of the twentieth century?
• How was the study of so-called primitive societies linked to metropolitan class struggles and assertions of territorial sovereignty, such as nationalism and imperialism?
• How far was the shifting relation between overseas and domestic primitivism caused, or accompanied, by the increasing importance of racial theories after the end of the First World War?
• And, last but not least, how was the study of primitivism linked to the concept of historical temporality?

Christof Dejung is Professor in Modern History at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He is the author of Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market (2018) and the co-editor, together with David Motadel and Jürgen Osterhammel, of The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (2019).