4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
How can ethnology compare cultures across continents without flattening them into evolutionary stages or freezing them into isolated culture areas? Composed in 1945 and published a decade later, this methodological essay answers by way of source criticism: ethnographic “facts” are produced through uneven encounters between observers who differ in patience, language, and purpose, and cannot be treated as interchangeable units. Thurnwald credits the culture-circle theory of Gräbner, Ankermann, and Schmidt with recognizing diffusion, yet rejects its rigid Kulturkreis schemata; he embraces Malinowski’s functionalism for attending to living institutions, then faults it for excluding history. Insisting that no single continent suffices for developmental history, he treats subsistence — hunting, hoe agriculture, pastoralism, seafaring — as the engine of hierarchy and assimilation, and makes cultural history a form of human self-knowledge.
Wir dürfen uns diese Vorgänge nicht statisch vorstellen, sondern im ganzen dynamischen Ablauf.
English translation: “We must not conceive these processes statically, but in their entire dynamic course.”
Royal authority in Hammurabi’s Babylon depended on institutions it did not simply replace: lineages, temples, households, and privileged associations. In this completed section on the state, Richard Thurnwald reads laws alongside royal letters and contracts to ask how kingship cut across inherited dependencies while continuing to govern through them. His distinctive emphasis falls on overlapping functions: temples stored and lent as well as taught, while figures translated as merchants also collected dues and directed exchange. Legal distinctions between free people, royal dependents, and enslaved people make these relationships tangible through unequal compensation and punishment. Readers encounter a reconstruction of government through personal obligations rather than an impersonal apparatus—one whose tentative institutional identifications and evolutionary assumptions remain open to scrutiny.