Herman Karl Haeberlin

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Herman Karl Haeberlin (born September 11, 1890 in Akron , Ohio , † February 12, 1918 ) was a German anthropologist . Haeberlin was considered the hope of American anthropology . His most important legacy, however, is only his notes, as he died early of diabetes .

Life

Haeberlin's parents were from Prussia and his mother's family, Alma Fedderson, had settled in Akron , Ohio , where her father worked as a roofer and her mother as a hatter . Haeberlin's father, a German engineer , had come to work there in 1883 and acquired American citizenship in 1888. On March 19, 1885, he married Alma Fedderson. After the birth of their daughter Elsa (1886) and their son Hermann (1890), they lived in Akron until the end of 1906. Then they returned to Germany to live in Düsseldorf . Elsa studied music, Hermann studied ethnology .

Haeberlin began his studies in Leipzig and continued it in Berlin . There he met Franz Boas in 1913 , but Karl Lamprecht and Wilhelm Wundt were also among his teachers. In 1914, Haeberlin followed Boas to New York and investigated gender and gender symbols (Father Sky, Mother Earth) among the pueblos of the southwest in his dissertation . Although he turned against Alfred Kroebers , the leading Boas student dogma, the latter offered him a position in Berkeley , but Haeberlin soon gave it up and turned east.

Haeberlin focused more on the artistic expressions of cultures in the broadest sense and pursued James Teit's research on the basket weaving art of the Salish groups, but also on the pottery of Culhuacan near the Mexican capital . He was also interested in the Aztec language , the Nahuatl . His fundamental question was the relationship between the individual and society, as well as the important factors of individual thinking, feeling and acting. Concepts of diffusion research , however, were alien to him.

In 1916 he toured the area on Puget Sound in the extreme northwest of the USA, in Washington State , to do anthropological research on Snohomish , Snoqualmie and other ethnic groups in the Tulalip Reservation. The Salish were interesting because they were represented in two cultural areas at the same time, the coastal Salish and the inland Salish . The language family was thus represented in the coastal area and on the plateau. In addition, he learned Puget Salish , a dialect of the coastal Salish, which is now called Lushootseed . Before that, he had already researched German and American archives and museums and also worked as an archaeologist in Puerto Rico .

Like many of his colleagues, he was also given the task of procuring Indian artefacts, but he did not look for it in the far north-west, as most did, but in the less popular Washington. He had his collecting commission from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York . In 1916 he published his first essay on one of the central rituals of the region, which at the time was still Spirit Canoe, but today it is called Shamanic Odyssey . This was followed by a contribution on the importance of the doubling of syllables as a means of achieving meaning shifts.

His publication activity was ended by his untimely death, but his notes of 42 booklets proved to be a treasure trove. Franz Boas handed the 41 notebooks - No. 13 was only rediscovered almost 70 years later - to his colleague Erna Gunther. She brought them to Seattle in 1920 and published Haeberlin's ethnographic notes in 1924 in a German summary in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie and his Puget Sound Salish mythologies in English. In 1930 she published the German text again, this time in English. Since Haeberlin's handwriting was lost in the meantime, it had to be translated back from German into English. Helen Roberts published Haeberlin's music research.

Boas re-passed Haeberlin's materials, and as such, they are in the hands of Gladys Reichard at Indiana University today . At that time she was working on the Coeur d'Alene of Idaho , or their language. With the help of Haeberlin's materials, she graduated from Lawrence Nicodemus, a native speaker. Then Boas passed the documents - again without comment - on to Stanley Newman, who was working on the Nuxalk language , the northernmost Salish language.

Haeberlin was buried in Akron. The only thing on his tombstone is “HK HAEBERLIN SEPT. 11, 1890 FEB. 12, 1918 ".

Fonts

  • The Idea of ​​Fertilization in the Culture of the Pueblo Indians , Lancaster, Pennsylvania 1916 (= Memoirs ot the American Anthropological Association , Vol.III, No. 1, Jan.-Mar. 1916), Ph. D. , Columbia University, 1915 .
  • SBeTeTDA'Q, A Shamanistic Performance of the Coast Salish , in: American Anthropologist 20 (1918) 249-257.
  • Frederica de Laguna and A. Irving Hallowell (Eds.): American Anthropology, 1888-1920, Papers from the American Anthropologist , University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2002, pp. 695-717.

Hermann Haeberlin's notes

  • together with Erna Gunther: Mythology of Puget Sound . In: Journal of American Folklore . Volume 37, 1924, pp. 371-438.
  • together with Erna Gunther: Ethnographic notes on the Indian tribes of the Puget Sound . In: Journal of Ethnology . Volume 56, 1924, pp. 1-74.
  • together with Erna Gunther: The Indians Of Puget Sound . In: University of Washington Publications in Anthropology . Volume 4, No. 1, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1930, pp. 1-84.
  • with James A Teit and Helen Roberts: Coiled Basketry in British Columbia and Surrounding Region . In: Bureau of American Ethnology - Annual Report . Volume 41, 1928, pp. 119-484.
  • with Helen Roberts: Songs of the Puget Sound Salish . In: Journal of American Folklore . Volume 31, 1928, pp. 496-520.

literature

  • Franz Boas : In Memoriam Herman Karl Haeberlin , in: American Anthropologist 21 (1919) 71-74.
  • Jay Miller : Regaining Dr. Hermann Haeberlin. Early Anthropology and Museology in Puget Sound, 1916-1917 , Lushootseed Press, 2007.

Remarks

  1. ↑ This and the Following, according to Jay Miller, 2007
  2. ↑ His later colleague Erna Gunther (1896–1982) graduated from Barnard College in 1919 , then studied anthropology with Boas (Magister 1920). She followed her husband Leslie Spier to the University of Washington in Seattle , but did her Ph. D. in the late 1920s at Columbia University , Washington, short biography Erna Gunther, from the University of Washington libraries, Seattle
personal data
SURNAME Haeberlin, Herman Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Akron , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 1918