Irmgard Sellnow

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Irmgard Sellnow (born Seeberger ; born February 9, 1922 in Hamburg , † 2010 ) was a German ethnologist .

Irmgard Sellnow attended elementary school and then did an apprenticeship as a banker. She worked in this profession until 1946. She attended the workers and farmers faculty in Dresden in 1946/47 and joined the SED in 1947 . In the same year she began studying social sciences and ethnography at the University of Dresden . In 1950 she graduated as a social scientist and became a research assistant at the Julius Lips Institute of the Karl Marx University of Leipzig (KMU). In 1951 Irmgard Seeberger married the legal historian Werner Sellnow and moved to Berlin, where she began to work at the Institute for Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin . There she was a scheduled scientific aspirant from 1952 to 1955. Sellnow received his doctorate in November 1956; reviewers were the prehistorian Karl-Heinz Otto , the folklorist Wolfgang Steinitz and the Soviet ethnographer Sergej A. Tokarev . The dissertation was entitled Basic principles of a periodization of prehistory. With special consideration of the period of dissolution of the Urgemeinschaftsordnung, illustrated by ethnographic examples , published in 1961. From 1958 she was initially a scientific assistant, then head of the Africa department of the Institute for History of the German Academy of Sciences (DAW). Field research led Sellnow to Ghana in 1965/66 . In 1965 she became deputy director of the Institute for Orient Research at the DAW. After its dissolution in the course of the academy's reform in 1969, she worked in the same function at the newly founded Central Institute for Ancient History and Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR from 1970 . In 1969 she was also appointed professor at the academy. From 1978 she was a member and treasurer of the Executive Committee of the International Union for Anthropological and Ethnological Science of UNESCO . Sellnow retired in 1982.

After the academy reform, Sellnow was involved in many large projects, often in a leading position. So she led the ambitious major project world history up to the development of feudalism and was together with Joachim Herrmann head of the project Productive Forces and Social Formations in the Pre-Capitalist Era . In 1974 she was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze .

Fonts

  • Basic principles of a periodization of prehistory. A contribution based on ethnographic material , Academy, Berlin 1961 (Völkerkundliche Forschungen, Vol. 4)
  • Tradition and Non-Capitalist Path of Development in Africa. Problems of overcoming pre-capitalist social conditions in the base and superstructure , DVW, Berlin 1971
  • The role of the popular masses in the history of pre-capitalist social formations. For the XIV. International Congress of Historians in San Francisco 1975 (Ed. With Joachim Herrmann ), Academy, Berlin 1975 (Publications of the Central Institute for Ancient History and Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, Vol. 7)
  • World history up to the development of feudalism. Ein Abriss (management), Academy, Berlin 1977 ( publications of the Central Institute for Ancient History and Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR , Vol. 5)
  • Productive forces and social formations in the pre-capitalist era (Ed. With Joachim Herrmann), Academy, Berlin 1982 (publications by the Central Institute for Ancient History and Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, vol. 12)

literature

  • Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X , pp. 569-570.

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