THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE IN ENLIGHTENMENT GERMANY by MICHAEL C. CARHART ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

I study the scientific use of travel literature in early modern Europe. in addition to the logistics of field research, I examine the way travel reports were used by scholars back home in Europe who attempted to construct complete scientific systems of nature and humanity. In The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany, I reconstruct a generation of scholarship on the cusp between the early-modern and modern eras, as a wave of revolutions and republican unrest swept across Europe and its colonies in the late eighteenth century. Looking with urgency on European progress and decadence, this generation invented a new category of social analysis, "culture." In the eye of the political storm stood Germany-decentralized, disunified, in modern scholarship often portrayed as politically backward. Yet I find that in terms of science and scholarship, Germans were often the ones who developed the most innovative methods of wringing obscure information out of ancient texts and juxtaposing it with modern travel literature. The discussion of "culture," however, extended from Edinburgh to St. Petersburg, and I am careful to place figures like J. C. Adelung, C. G. Heyne, J. G. Eichhorn, and J. G. Herder in conversation with the rest of Europe. In this eighteenth-century science -- and the humanist antecedents on which it was based -- lie, if not the origins, then at least some of the roots of anthropology, sociology, and classical philology. In order to illustrate how these human sciences were practiced, I offer narrative vignettes on the investigation of feral children, Tahitian natives, and archaeological expeditions to Yemen, to Syria, and into the texts of the human past.