Comparative ethnography
vMusical instruments played a considerable role
in these early analyses partly because the morphology of sound-producers is
very distinctive and partly because there seemed to be a link between formal
complexity and ‘high civilisation’ (we
have pianos, hunter-gatherers have
rattles).
vThe enterprise was global but Africa played a
major role in the German imagination and many major scholars worked on African
material culture. Frobenius, for example, conceived an Atlas Africanus which would map African material culture in
great detail and some folios of this were published, but much more was
collected and today it lies unused in the archives of the Institute that bears
his name in Frankfurt.