Background
Bastian was born in 1826 in Bremen, at the time a state of the German Confederation, into a prosperous bourgeois German family of merchants.
Bastian was born in 1826 in Bremen, at the time a state of the German Confederation, into a prosperous bourgeois German family of merchants.
Adolf Bastian studied law at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, and biology at what is today Humboldt University of Berlin, the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and the University of Würzburg.
In 1850 Bastian sailed as a ship's doctor to Australia on the first of many travels. From then until 1903 he journeyed intermittently throughout the world to the Near East, to both shores of the Pacific, to the west coast of Africa, to southern Asia, and, especially, to the Far East.
With Rudolph Virchow he formed the Society of Anthropology in 1869 and the Society for the Investigation of Interior Africa in 1870, both in Berlin.
Bastian was undoubtedly one of the preeminent German scientists of the nineteenth century trying to forge the new discipline of ethnology or socio-cultural anthropology, which still considers him a founding father.
He was the pioneers of the concept of the 'psychic unity of mankind' – the idea that all humans share a basic mental framework. This became the basis in other guises of 20th century structuralism, and influenced Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious.
In 1873, he was one of the founders and first director of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, and served as its first director.
According to Bastian, the contingencies of geographic location and historical background create different local elaborations of the "elementary ideas"; these he called "folk ideas" (Völkergedanken). Bastian also proposed a "genetic principle" by which societies develop over the course of their history from exhibiting simple sociocultural institutions to becoming increasingly complex in their organization.
Bastian may have inherited from his merchant father his administrative skills, as well as his love of encountering peoples all over the world.
