Einführung

Abstract

The following three texts come from a conference that took place at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris in December 2016 and the resulting exchanges and cooperation in the framework of a Franco-German research project on the history of ethnology entitled “Anthropos”. They look at the time-bound conditions that accompany knowledge production and its discourses. Two articles consider the development of learned societies that were major scientific incubators for the emerging discipline in Germany and France. The third article examines the intense collaboration and their mutual inspiration in the field of ethnological museums. In each case, factors beyond a purely ‘academic’ interest were at work in shaping the development of the young discipline.