Wolfgang Rudolph (ethnologist)

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Wolfgang Rudolph (born March 16, 1921 in Berlin-Wedding ; † May 11, 1999 ) was a German ethnologist , editor (1961 to 1973) and publisher (1973 to 1996) of the journal Sociologus - a journal for empirical ethnosociology and ethnopsychology founded in 1925 , and professor at the Free University of Berlin.

Life

At the end of the war, Rudolph was taken prisoner and returned in 1945. In the first post-war years he was a casual worker, in viticulture in Franconia / Bavaria and in agriculture in Altmark / Saxony. In 1947 he began studying ethnology at the University of Mainz with Adolf E. Jensen and Adolf Friedrich . In 1948 he broke off his studies for financial reasons, went back to Berlin and completed a degree as an interpreter for English and Russian at the Harnack School. In this profession he was initially also employed: January 1949 to February 1950 at the Magistrate of East Berlin in the Department of Economics; March 1950 to March 1955 with the East Berlin electricity works, finally dismissed because of his residence in West Berlin . In April 1951 he married Ursula Seidel; The couple had three children, first their son Gero, then their daughters Marianne and Hildegard.

As early as the summer semester of 1955, he continued his studies at the Institute for Ethnology at the Free University of Berlin. In 1958 he received his doctorate with Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch , student of Richard Thurnwald and his successor at the FU, with summa cum laude. From March 1958 to September 1958 he was a research assistant at the FU Institute, October 1958 to March 1960 research assistant and civil servant on revocation, April 1966 academic councilor and initially a probationary civil servant, April 1967 for life, October 1967 assigned to a permanent position, associated with this, from the 1968 summer semester, the obligation to undertake appropriate teaching. His smooth career in administrative law went hand in hand with advances in his research:

In 1958, 1962 and 1964 to 1965 he carried out a total of about one and a half years of field research with the East Anatolian and West Iranian Kurds, in 1967 he completed his habilitation. On May 31, 1967 he received the Venia legendi for ethnology. He was now a private lecturer and was proposed to the Scientific Council. In September 1968 he was offered a full chair in ethnology at the University of Mainz, but turned it down; there he saw the continuation of his research not guaranteed. In August 1969 he had the status and title of a scientific councilor and professor; In April 1971 he was appointed professor. In 1970 and in later years he was in charge of the Institute for Ethnology, initially on behalf of Westphal-Hellbusch.

In 1971/1972 he spent a year researching at NIAS in Wassenaar in the Netherlands. In October 1982 he took early retirement.

Rudolph was a cultural and social scientist who was strictly committed to empiricism and for whom the factual could not be an end in itself; an inductionist who placed the detail in the logically inferred larger whole; a theorist for whom the intercultural was the yardstick for creating concepts; a systematist who was able to combine empiricism, induction and theory in an interdisciplinary manner; all in all an ethnologist and human researcher who recognized the uniqueness of his subject among the empirical human subjects and understood the signs of the times for their integration. '

The highlight of his scientific life's work is his book Systematic Anthropology (1977), in whose scientific-theoretical organization Peter Tschohl, an ethnologist at the University of Cologne, participated. The work is the integration of the empirical human sciences par excellence, the overcoming of cultural-scientific thinking on a scientific basis, in consistency and foresight almost without parallel, the anticipation of what research collectives usually present as the result of a certain period. The solitary achievement, if it had been up to Rudolph, could have been the basis for interdisciplinary research in a collective, at the Institute for Ethnology at the FU or at the planned Institute for Integrated Anthropology. It was tragic for him and for German ethnology that it didn't come to that. ”

Trivia

June 1, 1970: “The managing director of the Institute for Ethnology at the FU, Wolfgang Rudolph, declares in a letter to President Kreibich that he is not ready to work with the Red Cells, as they are >> anti-democratic and anti-constitutional << and tried to prevent him from fulfilling his duty of loyalty to the state. Rudolph calls on the President to delete all election lists of the Red Cells in the departmental elections and to forbid their activities within the FU. "

Fonts

  • The Problem of Cultural Values ​​in the Works of Modern American Ethnology. Dissertation. Free University of Berlin 1958.
  • Cultural Relativism: Critical Analysis of a Discussion of Fundamental Issues in American Ethnology. Habilitation thesis. Free University of Berlin 1968.
  • Ethnology: to determine the position of a science. Tübingen 1973.
  • with Peter Tschohl : Systematic Anthropology. Munich 1977, ISBN 3-7705-1468-8 .
  • Gender roles in a cultural comparison. In: Norbert Bischof, Holger Preuschoft (Hrsg.): Gender differences: origin and development - man and woman from a biological point of view. Beck, 1989, ISBN 3-406-06007-2 .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Egon Renner: Obituary . Sociologus 1999, p. 119-125 .
  2. ^ Karol Kubicki, Siegward Lönnendonker : The Free University of Berlin 1948–2007: from the foundation to the excellence competition . Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-89971-474-6 , pp. 196, 4 .
personal data
SURNAME Rudolph, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German ethnologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 16, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Wedding
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 1999