Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Han F. Vermeulen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 746 pp.

Abstract

Vermeulen shows that the expansive moment of ethnography and ethnology was the 1740s, and the scholars involved were Germans who worked in and on peoples in the Russian empire. This was the period in which the keywords ethnographia (or völker-beschreibung) as the description of peoples and ethnologie as the comparison of peoples or nations acquired its technical status as a kind of scientific inquiry in its own right, and began to be complexified into distinct subtypes with varied methodological directions.