Richard Thurnwald, Ethno-psychologische Studien an Südseevölkern auf dem Bismarck-Archipel und den Salomo-Inseln (1913)

Thurnwald’s ethnopsychological monograph, published as the sixth supplement to the Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung, presents investigations undertaken alongside ethnographic and anthropological fieldwork in Melanesia during 1906–1909. Its organizing problem is how psychological comparison can distinguish individual capacities from the habits, interests, and expressive conventions acquired within a culture. Thurnwald explicitly presents his findings as preliminary contributions to method and problem formation. Research conducted locally, with linguistic competence, takes precedence over deductions from travellers’ reports or collected objects. Yet this contextual approach coexists with a hierarchical account of cultural development and an openly colonial interest in managing relations between Europeans and island populations.

The work moves from experiments through pictorial expression and language to a broader account of mental disposition and social life. A fifth section documents the twenty-one plates; appendices supply picture-naming responses, weight-illusion observations, and a Samoan visitor’s account of Sydney in German translation. The Samoan material extends the comparison beyond the principal Melanesian field and reinforces Thurnwald’s insistence on differences among peoples grouped under the category of “primitive” societies.

The experiments examine hand strength, colour discrimination and naming, attention, memory, suggestion, counting, association, and the transmission of reports. Their strongest methodological point is that performance cannot be interpreted independently of the task’s familiarity, the subject’s motivation, or prior instruction. Encouragement changes dynamometer results; practice and fatigue alter counting strategies; mission schooling supplies associations with letters and Christian symbols. Colour experiments particularly separate perceptual ability from linguistic classification:

Die Benennung von Sinneswahrnehmungen deckt sich bekanntlich keineswegs mit der Unterscheidung der Sinneswahrnehmungen.

English translation: The naming of sensory perceptions is, as is well known, by no means coextensive with the discrimination of sensory perceptions.

Accurate sorting of coloured wool therefore does not require colour terms corresponding to European categories. Names drawn from taro, birds, earth, and other familiar objects can encompass hues that Europeans separate. Thurnwald interprets these classifications through practical and emotional interests: the object remains salient while its colour has not necessarily become an independently isolated property. His association experiments pursue this process of abstraction, showing how a concrete comparison can become a description of shape or position. Conversely, identical geometric-looking motifs do not establish identical meanings or prove cultural transmission.

The extensive discussion of drawing applies the same distinction between capacity and convention. Thurnwald compares drawings elicited by the researcher with palm-trunk incisions, ornament, and sculpture. Pencil technique, individual aptitude, remembered knowledge, and the purpose of explanation all affect the result. Most importantly, a drawing does not transparently disclose everything its maker perceived:

Daher kann der Ausdruck nur das Minimum des Eindrucksmaterials wiedergeben.

English translation: Expression can therefore reproduce only the minimum of the material supplied by the impression.

He distinguishes contour indication, decomposing description, and attempts to combine forms spatially through perspective, while resisting their straightforward identification with historical epochs. Mixed viewpoints, enlarged significant details, and omitted body parts often communicate knowledge rather than reproduce a single optical appearance. Drawings of ships, houses, plants, and fishing reveal selective attention to useful or striking features. In sculpture, rigid poses may derive from the treatment and display of corpses rather than from failed observation of living movement. Although European perspective remains his standard of spatial mastery, he also defines artistic achievement through economy of expression and force of effect.

The language section connects abstraction to semantic development. Indigenous words do not simply reproduce the domains of their German equivalents: a term can unite an object, its appearance, its action, and associated sensations. Thurnwald treats local contact English as evidence of this organization of meaning, examining extended word senses, circumlocution, reduplication, and grammatical relationships. His descriptions repeatedly rank such expression below European language, but his examples also expose the inadequacy of literal translation. Apparently bizarre utterances become intelligible when their broader semantic range and concrete analogies are understood.

The account of mental disposition generalizes more confidently than the experimental evidence warrants. Assertions about passivity, intellectual fatigue, limited historical memory, and weak causal combination draw on small, sometimes deliberately selected groups and on observations of servants and mission pupils. Nevertheless, the discussion of magic qualifies the suggestion of an intrinsically defective mentality:

Man kann nicht behaupten, daß es sich in diesen Fällen um Mangel an Logik handelt, nicht die Logik ist mangelhaft, sie ist ganz genau dieselbe wie unsere, sondern die Bestandteile, mit denen die Logik manipuliert, sind andere.

English translation: One cannot maintain that these cases involve a lack of logic; it is not the logic that is deficient—it is exactly the same as ours—but the components with which logic operates are different.

Magic operates through relationships between appearances, analogies, names, and images that participants regard as dependable. The difference lies, for Thurnwald, in the complexes being connected and the extent to which their properties have been analytically separated. Accounts of kinship solidarity, women’s economic importance, children’s practical independence, and learning by imitation further connect psychology to social arrangements.

The closing treatment of European contact turns comparison back upon the observer:

So ist gegenseitiges Mißverstehen die Grundlage der Beziehungen zwischen Schwarz und Weiß.

English translation: Thus mutual misunderstanding is the basis of relations between Black and White.

Thurnwald describes dispossession, coercion, broken promises, and incompatible expectations of work as sources of resistance and violence. He seeks psychological understanding partly to secure productive colonial “symbiosis,” not to abandon colonial rule. The monograph’s historical significance lies in this tension: its attention to translation, experimental context, expressive purpose, and shared logic unsettles simplistic judgments of inferiority, while its developmental rankings and economic objectives repeatedly restore them.