A Slovak-born scholar in Habsburg Hungary named the science of comparing peoples
In 1783 Adam Franz Kollar, writing in Vienna, defined ethnologia as the study of nations' origins, languages, customs and institutions. He grew up among Slovaks in a kingdom crowded with languages, and that patchwork, plus the Ottoman retreat from the Balkans, pushed him to ask how peoples differ.
Kollar lived from 1718 to 1783, and his definition appeared in a Latin work on the public law of the Kingdom of Hungary. He wanted scholars to trace each people's homeland and ancient settlements so as to judge nations better in their own day. Ethnology has been treated as an academic field since that late eighteenth-century moment, especially in Europe.
Its relationship to ethnography is a division of labour. Ethnographers live with a single group and record it; ethnologists take that material and compare cultures against one another. Ambitions have been large: reconstructing human history, identifying cultural invariants such as the incest taboo, and generalising about human nature, an idea philosophers from Hegel and Marx onward have attacked. National traditions diverged, with cultural anthropology dominating in the United States and social anthropology in Britain, though the lines between the three labels keep blurring.
The field carries an older inheritance. European voyages to the Americas in the fifteenth century sharpened the idea of the 'Other', cast either as brutal savage or noble savage, a split that fed ethnocentric thinking. Claude Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology later challenged the notion of linear progress and the supposed divide between societies with and without history. He pointed to Montaigne's essay on cannibals as an early example of the discipline, while critics from Nietzsche to Foucault and Derrida disputed his search for universals.
France became a major centre from the early 1950s, with figures including Levi-Strauss, Paul Rivet, Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen and filmmaker Jean Rouch. Marcel Mauss's 1925 essay on gift exchange remains one of its most cited texts.
Source: Ethnology
