Rationalism and Irrationalism in Early German Ethnology: The Controversy between Schlözer and Herder, 1772/73.

This paper explores the origins of the terms ‘ethnography’, ‘ethnology’, ‘Volkskunde’. ‘Völkerkunde’, and ‘NaturvöIker’. These ‘ethnos-terms’, which stress human cultural diversity over the fundamental units of mankind were coined by a group of mutually known scholars in the late 18th-century Germany. This paper argues that they came out of the special German brand of Enlightenment rather than from Preromanticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]