The Diversity of Hunter Gatherer Pasts by Bill Finlayson;Graeme Warren;

Author:Bill Finlayson;Graeme Warren;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part 2: Diversity, comparisons and analogies

Chapter 7

Let’s start with our academic past: the abandoned ‘Vienna School’ and our hunter-gatherer pasts

Reinhard Blumauer

This paper recapitulates an era of Austrian ethnology that has become famous as the Wiener Schule der Völkerkunde [‘Vienna School of Ethnology’]. The proponents of this school conducted extensive field research among hunter-gatherer societies and used them as analogies for the very beginning of our human past. This approach, however, was in many ways quite exceptional: it may be the only paradigm that was both abandoned and declared obsolete by its own followers. So why should we start thinking about it again half a century later? What can we learn from an abandoned paradigm? Just to make it clear – this paper is not about reviving this paradigm. Yet it seems worth taking a closer look at its pitfalls. After all, it is so much easier to detect dead ends in the approaches of others than in our own way of thinking. And when it comes to dead ends, the Vienna School has a lot to offer. Nevertheless, it is also an intriguing starting point that should not be overlooked just because the paradigm was declared obsolete. The following paper focuses only on some of the issues raised by the Vienna School, such as the comparative approach, categorisations, ideology, dogmatism and interdisciplinary cooperation.

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