Adolf Bastian (Bremen, 1826-Port of Spain, 1905) German ethnologist.Descendant of a merchant family, he studied law, natural sciences and medicine.As a surgeon, he enlisted in the navy, which allowed him to travel the world for eight years.The acquired knowledge allowed him to write his work The man in history (1860), where he developed a political psychology (social and cultural) and proposed an ethnographic development based on data from all humanity, to achieve a Weltanschauung unitary, mediating between science and knowledge.He always stressed the urgency of constituting an empirical basis for the collection of testimonies (objects, original or derived cultural experiences, representations and conceptions of the world) of the "natural peoples" in the process of disappearing. The work of Bastian became active in 1861, when the German physiologist Rudolf Wagner, a foreign member of the Paris Anthropological Society, tried to found another similar institution in Ger
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