"FROBENIUS Léo (1873-1938) History of African... Lot 4039

"FROBENIUS Léo (1873-1938) History of African civilization (trans. Back H. and Ermont D.). Paris, Gallimard, NRF, 2nd ed. 1938. "Service Presse. 370pp. (Accident.) Histoire de la civilisation africaine questions and challenges the ideological basis according to which Africa was not civilized prior to its colonization by Europeans. Léo Frobenius (1873-1938) is a German ethnologist, anthropologist and archaeologist who was a key figure in German ethnography. After various expeditions to Africa, he founded the Institute for Cultural Morphology in Munich in 1920. After various expeditions to Africa, he founded the Institute for Cultural Morphology in Munich in 1920. He became honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt in 1932, and director of the city's Museum of Ethnography in 1935. Frobenius is one of the first ethnologists to question the ideological basis of colonialism, challenging the idea that Europeans found truly savage peoples in Africa, to whom they brought civilization (Wikipedia); this is the thesis he defends in his famous book Kulturgeschichte Afrikas : Prolegomena zu einer historischen Gestatlehre published in Germany in 1933, and translated in France as Histoire de la civilisation africaine; but as Jacques Madaule noted in his review of the book, "It may [...] seem strange to hear about African civilization. We have, in fact, become accustomed to considering that there is no other civilization worthy of the name than the European, the Asian and perhaps the American ([...] pre-Colombian America). Undoubtedly Egypt is African; but Egyptian civilization is usually considered in relation to those that developed around the same time in the neighbouring regions of the Near East, especially in the country of Sumer and in Elam. In a word, it does not seem that Africa has ever known an original and properly African civilization. This is a prejudice to which the work of Leo Fr