2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Shell valuables in Buin can buy pigs and manufactured objects, but not ordinarily taro: money’s reach is a social arrangement, not a given. In this contribution to the 1939 edition of the Lehrbuch der Völkerkunde, Richard Thurnwald examines economic organization through kinship, customary obligation, prestige, and political dependence rather than monetary calculation alone. Reciprocal help complicates household self-sufficiency; chiefly generosity connects distribution with power. These cases let readers distinguish planning from market exchange and wealth from capital without assuming that economic purposes stand apart from religious or social life. Thurnwald’s attention to local valuations also sits uneasily beside his hierarchical civilization language and racial and biologized assumptions—a tension that marks the limits of his account of economic diversity.
Wir sind es ja, die einzelne Tätigkeiten als „wirtschaftlich“ bezeichnen und herausheben.
English translation: “It is we, after all, who designate and single out particular activities as "economic.”
Germany's colonies, stripped away at Versailles and held under mandate, are the immediate provocation of this 1939 study, which recasts their loss as economic strangulation rather than wounded vanity. Yet Thurnwald's ambition is systematic: colonization as a recurring human phenomenon, older than capitalism, whose methods he compares across Portuguese slave-raiding, the Spanish encomienda among the Maya of Yucatán, the Dutch cultivation system in Java, the French Code noir and St. Domingue, and British expansion from Virginia to the Gezira cotton scheme. His own Deutsch-Neu-Guinea supplies the opening case, from Rabaul's plantations to goldfields opened by aircraft. He rejects a purely Marxist reading of empire, frames expansion as a biological and social movement of peoples, and ties its future to National Socialist colonial policy.
Kolonisation gehört zu den großen bewegenden und Geschichte schaffenden Kräften der menschlichen Gemeinschaften aller Völker und Zeiten.
English translation: “Colonization belongs among the great moving and history-making forces of human communities in all peoples and ages.”
Do the so-called primitive peoples truly lack logical and causal thought? Thurnwald, drawing on first-contact encounters in New Guinea, the Solomons, and Africa and citing Jung on the limits of the psyche, answers no. Hunting, planting, house-building, and trapping all proceed by sound causal reasoning; magic enters only where causal relations turn opaque, as when a Buin man's festering arm is traced to coconuts stolen from a tabooed palm and healed through payment, rite, and appeal to the demon Orómrui. He reads headhunting, name magic, tjurunga stones, omens, and totemism as internally coherent theories of where life-force resides, and holds that all knowing is interpretation, modern minds included. Primitive thought, diffuse and unexact, survives in the fatigued and the neurotic today.
Doch beurteilen wir die Gedanken und Riten nur zu oft von unserem Standpunkt am Schreibtisch und im geheizten Zimmer mit hochgezogenen Augenbrauen und überlegenem Lächeln.
English translation: “Yet all too often we judge these ideas and rites from our vantage point at the desk in a heated room, with raised eyebrows and a superior smile.”
Thurnwald divides his science in two: ethnography gathers the facts, ethnology interprets their tangled connections of time, people, thing, and place. Writing in 1948, he defends German ethnology against the charge of having been mere colonial propaganda, then lays out the fieldworker's discipline—long residence, repeated checking, no suggestive questions smuggling in high-gods or the Oedipus complex. He weighs evolutionism, the Kulturkreislehre of Frobenius, Gräbner and Schmidt, and Malinowski's functionalism, and settles on two leading factors: the procurement of food and contact between cultures. The unilinear march from hunter to herder to farmer is rejected; cases such as the Iramba plateau and the colonial dissolution of Ngoni order show culture as an uneven, accretive process rather than a ladder of stages.
Der Weg des Fortschritts ist holperig.
English translation: “The path of progress is bumpy.”
Written in the aftermath of a catastrophe its author dates to 1932–1945, this closing synthesis measures humanity's ascent against its recurring descent into madness. Thurnwald traces self-domestication from foragers through plant cultivators and pastoralists to the Metal Age and the archaic state, giving Überschichtung—the superimposition of specialized groups, herders over cultivators—pride of place as the engine of caste, serfdom, and slavery. Institutions of kinship, economy, law, and religion are read through cases from Maori communal redistribution and Buin shell money to the Sumerian temple economy, while universal religions appear as reforms against aristocratic cults. The verdict is somber: technical command of external nature has far outrun any comparable command of social life, whose domestication remains grievously unfinished.
Die Menschen haben die Natur in nicht unerheblichem Ausmaß zu meistern verstanden, doch nur wenig ihr Zusammenleben.
English translation: “Human beings have managed to master nature to no small extent, but their common life only very little.”
Only the foreign, Richard Thurnwald insists, first opens a path to knowledge of ourselves — and from that premise unfolds a vast comparative anthropology of the human mind, tracing its awakening, growth, and errancy from the earliest Naturvölker through the archaic civilizations of Egypt, Peru, and Babylon. Against the older evolutionism that ranked cultures on a single ladder toward European reason, Thurnwald reconstructs a paleopsychology of participation, in which surrounding reality is lived personally rather than confronted as impersonal object. He works through Mittelpunktgefühl, mana, totemism, projection, sacrifice, and the slow emergence of high gods, arguing that error is no accident but built into the very symbolic powers — naming, analogy, projection — that make understanding possible. Rationalization of life, he warns, will never be complete.
Die Welt ist für sie ein erweitertes Selbst.
English translation: “For them the world is an extended self.”
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.”