It was conceived in a broad, encyclopedic attempt to review the life and growth of society; it was determined by the interest in an application of «scientific» methods («laws») to sociohistorical phenomena including religious ideas and institutions (theory of stages of development), and finally by the endeavor to include the material gathered in anthropological and
ethnological research.
(a) Philosophical preoccupation with the various types of cultural activities on an idealistic basis (Johann Gottfried Herder, G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Gustav Droysen, Hermann Steinthal, Wilhelm Wundt); (b) legal studies (Aemilius Ludwig, Richter, Rudolf Sohm, Otto Gierke); (c) philology and archeology, both stimulated by the romantic movement of the first decades of the nineteenth century; (d) economic theory and history (Karl Marx, Lorenz von Stein, Heinrich von Treitschke, Wilhelm Roscher, Adolf Wagner, Gustav Schmoller, Ferdinand Tonnies); (e)
ethnological research (Friedrich Ratzel, Adolf Bastian, Rudolf Steinmetz, Johann Jakob Bachofen, Hermann Steinthal, Richard Thurnwald, Alfred Vierkandt, P. Wilhelm Schmidt), on the one hand; and historical and systematical work in theology (church history, canonical law — Kirchenrecht), systematic theology (Schleiermacher, Richard Rothe), and philosophy of religion, on the other, prepared the way during the nineteenth century for the following era to define the task of a sociology of religion and to organize the material gathered by these pursuits.7 The names of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Werner Sombart, and Georg Simmel — all students of the above - mentioned older scholars — stand out.
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Ethnological data collection such as ours, including the collection of terms in the local vernacular, can open new avenues of
research about variations in ecology, fauna and flora,» they conclude.
Highlights of the installation include the diptych slide projection Dispossession (2013), which explores Attia's
research on the Vatican's collection of
ethnological artifacts; Artificial Nature (2014), a floor sculpture constructed of many antique prosthetic legs; and a work composed of two large - scale reproductions of historical paintings depicting Catholic masses, Émile Jean - Horace Vernet's The First Mass in Kabylia (1854) and Victor Meirelles's The First Mass in Brazil (1861).