A Priest Ethnologist in South America and Central India: Life and work of Wilhelm Koppers

The Search for the “Supreme Being” : Ethnographic Research in South America

His first field research took Koppers to Tierra del Fuego in 1921/22 (from December to March), where he accompanied his confrere Martin Gusinde (1886–1969) on his third expedition. An important research question was whether the “Tierra del Fuego people” were non-religious, an assertion by Charles Darwin (1809–1882) that had dominated the research literature since the 1830s (Koppers 1924b : 5, 139). Koppers and Gusinde were particularly interested in the Yámana (also known as Yagan), who had been decimated from 2,500 to around 70 individuals since 1880 by the effects of European-American colonization (Koppers 1924a : 309 ; 1924b : 2). At a meeting in a “washroom” on January 23, 1922, “three or four older women” told them about Watauinéwa, which means “the old, eternal, unchanging one.” According to the women, Watauinéwa was a “sky god” who could be compared to the Christian God (Koppers 1924b : 141 ; cf. Pavez 2012 : 66 ; Charuty 2019 : 20-21). Koppers and Gusinde then collected more than sixty prayers that bore living testimony to the Watauinéwa faith (Koppers 1924a : 312 ; Koppers 1949 : 199). Since a Christian influence could be ruled out, the two Steyl priest-ethnologists were convinced that the Yámana worshipped a “supreme being” (Koppers 1924b : 139), an empirical evidence that seemed to support Schmidt’s hypothesis of primordial monotheism. The culmination of their field research was their admission into the indigenous tribe, which was achieved mainly through Gusinde’s preparatory work after they had participated in a youth consecration and a ceremony for adult men (Koppers 1924b : 45-92, 101-134 ; Koppers 1949 : 190-192).

The publication of the research results, especially the insights into the spiritual life of the Yámana, made Koppers and Gusinde internationally renowned as anthropologists. When Karl von den Steinen (1855–1929) heard their lectures at the 21st International Congress of Americanists in Gothenburg in August 1924, he is said to have stated to Father Wilhelm Schmidt : “You can be proud of such students ! [4]” (Schmidt 1925 : 806). Koppers and Gusinde’s ethnographic account Unter Feuerland-Indianern (Among Tierra del Fuego Indians), published by Koppers in spring 1924 [5], left a deep impression on Robert H. Lowie (1883–1957). In his review he wrote : “Fathers Koppers and Gusinde have placed us all under great obligations, and we may reasonably expect much further enlightenment from their prospective monograph” (Lowie 1924 : 415). Even Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), an opponent of the theory of cultural circles, had to acknowledge the book : “Le livre du P. Koppers va vider bien des encriers” (Fr. Koppers’ book will empty many an inkwell, Mauss 1923-1924 : 403). This was not a compliment, however, because Mauss expressed fundamental doubts about Gusinde’s and Koppers’ methodical analysis of the existence of a “supreme being” among the Yámana (Charuty 2019 : 33). A certain tension between Koppers and Gusinde remained, at first sight about respective rights of authorship in their ethnographic results. This tension continued to grow, and to inform their subsequent mutual relations and their careers.

Institute Founder and Opponent of the Aryan Nazi Northern Thesis

In July 1924, Koppers habilitated at the University of Vienna with a thesis on economic ethnology (Koppers 1924c : 375-682), became an Austrian citizen in the same year and was appointed Associate Professor of Ethnology in 1928. When the Institute of Ethnology was founded at the University of Vienna in 1929 [6], Koppers became its head and was given a full professorship at the beginning of 1935. He turned the institute into one of the most important centers of socio-cultural anthropology in continental Europe, where the future professors Clyde Kluckhohn (1905–1960), Masao Oka (1898–1982), Douglas L. Oliver (1913–2009) and Helmut Petri (1907–1986) studied until 1938. In 1937, Schmidt’s “Handbuch der Methode der kulturhistorischen Ethnologie” (The cultural historical method of ethnology) was published, to which Koppers had made significant contributions. Koppers specified Graebner’s diffusionist relationship criteria for field research and demanded that field researchers should not only consider individual cultural elements when collecting data, but the entire material and spiritual culture (Schmidt 1937 : 86). The handbook became the standard work of the Vienna School of ethnology and was translated into English in 1939 by Koppers’ confrere Sylvester A. Sieber (1908–1962). Thanks to the preface written by Kluckhohn, it was particularly well received in American anthropology (Kluckhohn 1939 ; Herskovitz 1941 ; Steward 1941).

Koppers reached additional prominence in 1929 with research into the religious history of the Indo-Europeans (Koppers 1929 : 1073-1089), in which he took up the linguistic theories of Otto Schrader (1855–1919), who had located the origins of the Indo-Europeans in the steppes of southern Russia. When it became apparent that a commemorative publication was planned for Herman Hirt (1865–1936), the leading Indo-Europeanist in National Socialist Germany, in which the so-called northern thesis was to be underpinned and expanded by using methodologies of cultural history and physical anthropology with over forty contributions (Arntz 1936), Koppers decided to publish a refutation from the perspective of “ethnology”/socio-cultural anthropology. His edited volume came out in 1936 with almost 800 pages and eight articles that strengthened the so-called eastern thesis and made an important statement against the völkisch-national socialist claim that the Aryans originated in northern Europe (Koppers 1936).

One notable contribution came from the Australian-British archaeologist V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957). His article, “The Antiquity of Nordic Culture”, located the origin of key fossils for the Indo-European migration, such as battle axes and corded pottery, not in northern Europe, as claimed by proponents of the northern thesis, but in the Near East (Childe 1936 : 517-530). Koppers and Childe had met at the First International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in London in the summer of 1934. They formed an intellectual alliance of convenience to combat the northern thesis advocated by the National Socialists, although they held different political positions otherwise. This alliance initially manifested itself in their joint active opposition to the writings of the biological“anthropologist” and scientific racist Hans H. K. Günther (1891–1968) and his then ally, archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931) (Immervoll & Rohrbacher 2023 : 257).

On November 18, 1937, Koppers gave the lecture “Der nordische Mensch und die Indogermanenfrage” (Nordic man and the Indo-European question) in the University of Vienna’s Auditorium Maximum. His ethnological explanations, according to which “Aryan cultural achievements” were not endogenous but of external origin, contradicted the National Socialist idea that Germanic peoples were the “Aryan master race” and “founders of culture”. His lecture explicitly attacked the Nazi racial ideology :

The threat to the spirit and the humanities posed by materialism back then largely corresponds to the totalitarian claim and attack of a one-sided racial ideology today. One can twist and turn the blood-soil doctrine [7] however one wants, it basically does not go beyond blood materialism or, at best, biologism [8]. (Koppers 1938 : 249)

Although the lecture was published in the journal Anthropos, it only appeared as an offprint “due to the circumstances at the time” and was not included in the volume (Haekel 1961 : 4 ; Piepke 2015 : 121).

Expulsion from Vienna, Field Research in Central India and Exile in Switzerland

After the “Anschluss” of Austria to the Nazi state, Koppers was dismissed as a professor at the University of Vienna in April 1938 on the instructions of the Ministry of Education (his academic retirement income was revoked on March 20, 1939). He left Austria in June 1938 and undertook a research trip to Central India from October 1938 to December 1939, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (New York City, Paris), the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (Paul Rivet) [9], the National Museum in Copenhagen (Kaj Birket-Smith (1893–1977) and by his friend Alexander Gahs (1891–1962), a Croatian priest and professor of theology at the University of Zagreb (Svirac 2006 : 299-311). In India, he carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the indigenous Bhil people and interpreted them as descending primarily from a pre-Aryan hunter-gatherer population. Koppers relied primarily on linguistic surveys, which showed that many words in the Bhil language, which belongs to the Indo-European language family, were in fact of non-Aryan origin. For example, the ethnic term Bhil, whose etymological interpretation leads to Dravidian, translates as “bow people”. Koppers’ cultural-historical investigations revealed that the Bhil must have originally spoken a different language before adopting Gujarati (Koppers 1948 : 44, 82 ; Koppers & Jungblut 1976 [10]).

During his field research in Rambhapur (in the former principality of Jhabua), Koppers could draw on the infrastructure provided by Catholic missionaries. He received most of his support from his confrere Leonhard Jungblut SVD (1906–1979), who had published a grammar of the Bhil language in 1938 (Jungblut 1938) and spoke the local language. Their most important language informant was the 50-year-old catechist Master Ivo, who had converted to Christianity as a teenager and provided well-founded information on the Bhil traditions (Rohrbacher 2021 : 1498).

Before Koppers, the Bhil had hardly been studied ethnographically. The significance of Koppers’ fieldwork lay in the first comprehensive ethnography of the Bhil, which included documentation of their seasonal activities and rituals, the treatment of diseases and the practice of magic. While working in the field, Koppers discovered his passion for filming and photography. He wrote from Rhambapur to his Superior General in Rome in April 1939 : “So far I have made diligent use of the photographer [sic] and film camera. When one walks around here in India as an ethnologist, one comes across things every moment that deserve to be recorded : India is a living museum !” [11]

Koppers produced more than three thousand photos [12] (Koppers 1940-1941 : 267) and shot three ethnographic films with a 16 mm silent film camera. [13] Probably the most impressive film was a documentation of the so-called hook swinging at the Gal Bāpsi festival on March 6, 1939 in the village of Kairawad (near the town of Jhabua). The deity Gal fishes young men who are hung from a ten to twelve meter high pole and swung through the air (Koppers 1948 : 154-155 ; Manndorff 1963) [14]. To record the songs at the festivals, Koppers used a phonograph that was sent to him in India by the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in April 1939 [15]. A total of thirty Bhil songs were recorded on reels (Koppers, Wilhelm, 1940-1941 : 267) [16]. Koppers acquired almost seven hundred ethnographica from the Bhil (and some from the Korku and Baiga), which he gave to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris [17], the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen [18], the Bern Historical Museum [19] and the University of Fribourg [20].

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Koppers was interned for six weeks in the Central Internment Camp Ahmednagar (today in Maharashtra). The British did not classify Koppers as an Austrian but as a “German citizen”. In the camp he met his former university assistant Christoph Fürer-Haimendorf (1909–1995), who was also interned (Gingrich 2021 : 1585). Koppers’ early release in mid-October 1939 probably came about through the intervention of Kenneth de Burgh Codrington (1899–1986), the director of the India Museum in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and with the help of the family of Fürer-Haimendorf’s wife, who had best contacts with the colonial administration in British India (Rohrbacher 2021 : 1506).

From 1940 to 1945, Koppers stayed in Froideville near Fribourg (Switzerland), where he analyzed and published his field research material from Central India at the Anthropos Institute (Koppers 1942 : 141-152 ; Henninger 1961 : 8). During his exile time in Switzerland, he had serious intentions of moving to the United States. He received important support from his Austrian colleague Robert Heine-Geldern (1885–1968) in New York, a Southeast Asia specialist, who had gone into exile in the US in 1938 (Neller 2021 : 1529-1652). Although funding from the Rockefeller Foundation was largely secured, Koppers’ move to the United States failed solely for reasons internal to the Order. The main concern of the order’s leadership was that Koppers’ departure would jeopardize the existence of the Anthropos Institute in Switzerland (Rohrbacher 2021 : 1510f).

After the end of the Second World War, Koppers returned to Vienna and in December 1945 resumed his chair and the directorship of the Institute of Ethnology, which he held until his retirement in September 1957. In 1949, he published his most important monograph, Der Urmensch und sein Weltbild (Primitive Man and His World Picture). [21] The work combined the results of his field research with questions of human origins and primitive monotheism. The significance of the book, which was translated into five languages, [22] lies in its theologically influenced approach of viewing humans as having been endowed with religion, language and culture from the very beginning [23]. Building on the biological approaches of Adolf Portmann (1897–1982), Koppers rejected radical Darwinism as well as Lucien Lévy Bruhl’s (1857–1939) theory of “prelogical thinking” in primitive man.

Rejection of the Theory of Cultural Circles and New Approaches to Universal Historiography

The regionally limited cultural circles as postulated by Bernhard Ankermann (1859–1943) and Fritz Graebner (1877–1934) were adapted by Schmidt and further elaborated into a heuristic system for a universal historiography [24]. Schmidt’s theory of cultural circles also understood diffusion as a basic historical principle for interpreting cultural diversity as the result of cultural-historical processes. In contrast to Graebner, Schmidt postulated a primordial monotheism and a new theory of nomadism (Schmidt 1915-1916 : 607), which he further developed together with his student Koppers (Schmidt & Koppers 1924 : 506, 512). The theory was based on the assumption that the domestication of herd animals had its origins in southern Siberia. There, prehistoric hunters had made the reindeer the “first herd animal”. Schmidt and Koppers thereby elevated nomadism to an independent and worldwide “pastoral culture”, which was derived from hunter-gatherers and played an important role in the development of complex civilizations, or so-called high cultures. This nomad(ism) theory of the Vienna School of ethnology was intended to reform the conventional evolutionist three-stage theory, but also to refute the studies of Eduard Hahn (1856–1928), who derived nomadism from sedentary agriculture in Mesopotamia and did not regard it as an independent economic form (Hahn 1905 : 96f). With their cultural-historical nomad theory, Schmidt and Koppers clearly distanced themselves from Grafton E. Smith (1871–1937) and William J. Perry (1887–1949), who had founded the school of British diffusionism with a pan-Egyptological approach (Immervoll & Rohrbacher 2023 : 264). As conclusive as this nomad theory of the Vienna School was, it lacked substantial archaeological evidence.

From the 1930s onwards, Koppers increasingly doubted the cultural circle theory, as individual cultural circles could not be reconciled with archaeological finds (Koppers 1931 : 223-243 ; Koppers 1941 : 481-525). In June 1952, at an international anthropological congress in New York, he revoked the “pastoralist culture circle” and thus an essential aspect of the culture circle theory (Koppers 1952a : 79). It was only after his teacher’s death that Koppers completely rejected the overall concept (Pusman 2008 : 268), but continued to adhere to the cultural-historical method of ethnology founded by Graebner and to Schmidt’s postulate of an “ethnological proof of God” on an empirical basis (Koppers 1949 : 235 ; Rohrbacher 2021 : 1515).

In the 1950s, Koppers attempted to redefine the relationship between prehistory and ethnology in numerous articles (Koppers 1952b : 11-65 ; Koppers 1953 : 1-16 ; Koppers 1957 : 369-389). At the Fourth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, in Vienna in September 1952, he argued for a “historical-ethnological proof” in which prehistory should not play a decisive role (Koppers 1953 : 16). Most prehistorians regarded Koppers’ demand as an inadmissible intrusion into their field of research. In particular, Richard Pittioni (1906–1985), part-time professor and chair of prehistory at the University of Vienna (Pittioni 1952 : 288) since 1946 (Friedmann 2011 : 73), referred to the great temporal difference between prehistoric and ethnological cultural forms, which would prohibit a direct “correlation.” All recent cultural forms, he argued, however “primitive” (urtümlich) they might appear, arose only after the Stone or Ceramic Age (Pittioni 1952 : 290). Pittioni abruptly terminated ongoing attempts to continue collaboration between prehistory and ethnology as suggested by Koppers.

In the further course of this interdisciplinary debate, Koppers limited his approach to the field of complex civilizations, i.e. to “high culture” research (Hochkulturforschung) of the Late Neolithic and drew on the research of Heine-Geldern, a representative of “secular” diffusionism, who methodically combined high culture research with socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology (Heine-Geldern 1955 : 1-16 ; Dostal 2002 : 451). Koppers and Heine-Geldern jointly argued that the emergence of the high cultures of Egypt, the Mediterranean, China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia had a unified starting point in the Near East. This monogenetic approach in high culture studies was seen as a universal-historical counter to Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), and Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), whose approaches to the philosophy of history assumed multiple and independent centers of high cultures albeit informed by a shared Axial Age (Achsenzeit), in Jaspers’ terminology (Koppers 1957 : 369-389).

Koppers’ achievements were recognized by a number of scientific societies and institutions, which appointed him as a member or corresponding member [25]. In his approximately thirty years of teaching, he supervised over one hundred dissertations. His students include Rolf Ehrenfels (1901–1980), Fritz Flor (1905–1939), Josef Haekel (1907–1973) and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1909–1995). Koppers’ field research in Central India had a lasting impact on the Institute of Ethnology in Vienna, even after his death. His student and confrere Stefan Fuchs (1908–2000) founded the Institute of Indian Culture in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1950 (Pflug 2021 : 153-168), which served as a training center for doctoral students in Vienna until the 1970s.

Throughout his life, Koppers stood in the shadow of his teacher Wilhelm Schmidt. For this reason, his outstanding position in the history of anthropology is usually overlooked. As a co-founder of the Vienna School of Ethnology, he developed a largely independent research profile. In contrast to Schmidt, Koppers conducted field research over longer periods of time. Koppers was also active as an ethnographic collector, photographer and documentary filmmaker. His basic scientific attitude was always characterized by scepticism, which manifested itself above all in his late (self-)critique of culture circle theory. Koppers’ most important international legacy was the founding of the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Vienna in 1929, which he brought up to international standards in research and teaching. Koppers was one of the initiators of the First International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in London in 1934, was a permanent member of the congress council and from 1934 to 1961 one of the vice presidents of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. On February 10, 1961, the Vienna City Council posthumously awarded him the Silver Medal of Honor of the Federal Capital of Vienna (Henninger 1961 : 14 ; Handbuch der Stadt Wien 1963 : 272).

References

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