Paul Kirchoff
Paul Kirchhoff (Halle, Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, August 17, 1900-Mexico City, December 9, 1972) was a German philosopher, ethnologist and anthropologist, nationalized Mexican. He is famous for being the one who coined the concepts of Mesoamerica, Aridoamerica and Oasisamerica.
He was the son of architect Richard Kirchhoff and had his wife: Minna Wentrup de Kirchhoff. Paul Kirchhoff had a strong sense of social justice and was a fervent defender of the freedom of the spirit, regardless of the danger or prejudice that he faced for that act. After losing his father at a very young age, he lived his childhood with his mother, who took care of his education and finances. She was a "woman of political and social concerns, a friend of the wife of the German socialist leader Karl Liebknecht, shot in 1919, admired by Kirchhoff and from whom it is said he received the fundamental influences that shaped his sociopolitical interests during his youth".
Studies and professional life
1907-1919: He completed his first studies at the Gymnasium in Berlin-Zehlendorf.
1919-1926: He studied Philosophy and Letters at the University of Berlin, specializing in American Ethnology. Later, he took two semesters of religious sciences at the University of Freiburg, where it is said that Ernst Gross (Professor at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin) reinforced his interest in ethnology. That is why he moved to Leipzig, then the center of German ethnology, where he was a student of Fritz Krause.
1927: With the help of Krause, he obtained a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation, for which he studied a semester in England, where he learned the English language. By then he had already studied French, Latin and Hebrew.
1927-1930: He traveled to the United States and studied under the anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir. He also studied the grammatical forms of the Navajo people and the Athabascan languages.
1928-1934: He was an assistant professor at the Museum of Ethnography in Berlin (1928-1934) and at the Trocadero Museum, now defunct, Paris (1933-1934).
1931: He returned to Germany and received a doctorate in Ethnology with a thesis on the organization of kinship among the forest-dwelling tribes of South America. He worked as a volunteer assistant to ethnologist Konrad Theodor Preuss, director of the American section of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin.
1937: He arrived in Mexico, a country to whose study he devoted most of the rest of his days.
1938: He was a co-founder of the National School of Anthropology and History, originally linked to the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), where he taught Ethnology courses until his death.
1938-1939: In addition to the academic courses, Kirchhoff organized a seminar on Marxism at his home for students of the IPN Anthropology Department. Among his assistants was Ricardo Pozas Arciniega, who was one of his closest disciples. There they directly studied texts by Marx and Engels, for example, "The origin of the family, private property and the State" and "Capital", seeking to apply them to ethnological studies.
1943: He defined the Mesoamerican cultural area in his work Mesoamerica, published that same year
1952: He was appointed full-time researcher in the Anthropology Section of the Historical Research Institute (UNAM), where he remained until his retirement 13 years later.
1953-1954ː Defined the cultural areas of Aridoamérica and Oasisamérica.
1960-1962: He spent his sabbatical year, actually a year and a half, granted by UNAM at the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt and at other European institutions. He got the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to contribute the funds to study the region of Puebla and Tlaxcala in an interdisciplinary way.
1962ː He returned to the Institute for Historical Research (UNAM), where he hypothesized the original relationship between Mesoamerican and Asian cultures, especially those of India, a perspective that brought him face to face with Alfonso Caso.
1963ː The presentation of the paper "The Adaptation of Foreign Religious Influences in Prehispanic Mexico”, at the meeting of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, deepened his differences with Alfonso Caso.
1965ː He retired from UNAM.
1971ː He was invited to give a seminar at the Universidad Iberoamericana, the content of which was reflected in a posthumous publicationː Structural Principles in Ancient Mexico, which came out in 1983.
1972ː Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, director of INAH, commissioned him to reissue the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, which Kirchhoff had written in 1958. Paul Kirchhoff died that same year.
Interesting facts
- Kirchhoff was very grateful to his master Fritz Krause who, according to his words, owes him “the best... that a teacher can give to his disciple: the approach to the formulation of new questions.”
- In March 1930 he traveled along with the geographer Gottfried Pfeifer to the region of the May tribe, next to the lower course of the May River in northern Mexico.
- He left Germany in 1936. He was deprived of his nationality as a Jew. He was exiled to Mexico, where he adopted Mexican nationality in 1941. After the Second World War, he visited his country of origin several times, leaving his country of adoption aside.
- Between 1961 and 1962 Paul Kirchhoff cooperated with the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, born of his desire to intensify scientific collaboration between his new and his old homeland. This project occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, where archaeological exploration was carried out in the Puebla Valley. According to Kirchhoff's own words, its purpose is "the clarification of the historical interpretation, propelled by representatives of the most diverse branches of the investigation, of the inhabitants of this region of Puebla-Tlaxcala, including their relations with this region itself."
- Paul Kirchhoff died in 1972, being considered one of the most renowned anthropologists in Mexico, leaving a legacy of published works, as well as unpublished works, which are at the Institute of Anthropology in Puebla.
Mesoamerica
His most recognized and used contribution is the concept of Mesoamerica, which allows delimiting social and ethnographic studies of an area of Latin America that ranges from central Mexico to part of Costa Rica.
In his essay Mesoamerica, its geographical limits, ethnic composition and cultural characters, he laid the foundations for the use of the concept Mesoamerica, defining it as a sociocultural super-area, delimiting a geographical area and pointing out the similarities and differences of the cultures of the peoples that they inhabited it
Summary of Mesoamerica, its geographical limits, ethnic composition and cultural characteristics
In the geographical classifications of the indigenous cultures of America, two main types are distinguished:
- The first, either divides the continent simply in North and South America, or intersectes between the two parties a third: "Mexico and Central America" or "Middle America". The biogeographic dividing line that marks the San Juan River between Nicaragua and Costa Rica is accepted as a limit between North and South America. Another case happens when "Mexico and Central America" includes the entire territory from the northern border of the Mexican Republic to the eastern border of Panama.
Both divisions and their variants have major drawbacks when used for more than simple geographic location of cultural phenomena.
- The second type of geographical classification brings together American indigenous cultures in five large areas:
1.The gatherers, hunters and fishers of North America.
2.The lower growers of North America.
3.The superior cultivators (e#34;high cultures#34;).
4.The lower growers of South America.
5.The gatherers and hunters of South America.
Geographical boundaries and ethnic composition: It can be said that at the time of the Conquest, a series of tribes that we can group into five divisions were part of Mesoamerica:
1. Tribes that speak languages hitherto unclassified, such as Tarascan, Cuitlateca, Lenca, etc.
2. All the tribes of the Mayan, Zoque, Totonac and Huave linguistic families form a group that we could call Zoque-Maya or Macro-Mayance.
3. All but two tribes of the Otomi, Chocho Popoloca and Mixteca families, the Chorotega-Mangue family and all the tribes of the Trique, Zapotec and Chinanteca families forming a group called Macro-Otomangue.
4. All the tribes of the Nahua family and a series of other tribes of Yuto-Aztec descent, such as the Cora and the Huichol, whose grouping into families is not yet definitive.
5. All tribes of the Tlappaneca-Subtiaba and Tequisisteca families that belong to the Hokano group of Sapir.
An analysis of this ethnic composition of Mesoamerica, at the time of the Conquest, indicates:
- Of all the linguistic families that form part of Mesoamerica, only one, the otomi, has some members that do not belong to this cultural group.
- Two linguistic groups formed by families of the macro-otomangue and the zoque-maya would remain within Mesoamerica.
- Tribes of these two groups, and also of the Nahua family, come as a result of migration, to the last geographical limits of Mesoamerica, both in the North and in the South.
Cultural characters: In the distribution studies undertaken by the International Committee for the Study of Cultural Distributions in America, to clarify the problem of Mesoamerica, we found three large distribution groups.
1. Elements exclusively or at least typically Mesoamerican.
2. Elements common to Mesoamerica and other cultural super-areas of America.
3. Significant elements due to their absence in Mesoamerica.
Works
Articles:
- “Matrimony, Parentesco and Genealogy of the Indigenous Tribes of North America No-Andina” (Heirat, Verwandtschaft und Sippe bei den Indianerstämmen des nördlichen nichtandinen Südamerika) under the title “The Family Organization of the Forestry Tribes of South America” (Die Verdätscha). "Verwandtschaftsbezeichnungen und Verwandtenheirat" (Family and Marriage Issues) in the "Zitschrift für Ethnologie" (1932).
- The adaptation of foreign religious influences in Prespanish Mexico (Review Diogenesis) (1964)
Essays:
- “Mesoamerica, its geographical boundaries, ethnic composition and cultural characters” (1943).
Books:
- “The jars and their neighbors according to the sources of the sixteenth century” (1939).
- “Giographic distribution of cultural elements attributed to the Olmecas of Traditions” (1942).
- “Relations between the area of hunter collectors from northern Mexico and the surrounding areas” (1943).
- “The hunter collectors in northern Mexico” (1943).
- “Ancient ethnography” (1948).
- The Author of the Second Part of the Mexicayotl Chronicle (1951).
- “The Principles of Clanship in Human Society” (1955).
- "The tolteca-chimecas route between Tula and Cholula" (1958).
- "Two types of relations between peoples in Ancient Mexico" (1963).
- Structural principles in ancient Mexico (Obra póstuma, 1983). Teresa Rojas Rabiela and Amelia Camacho editoras. Mexico, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social.
Unpublished works, preserved in the Institute of Anthropology of Pueblaː
- “El Valle popblano-tlaxcalteca” (1962)
- “The Great Guidelines of Toltec History” (1964)
- “Cholula, the Holy City of Ancient Mexico” (ca. 1964)
- “The Cuatlalpan or Itztocan Province” (s.f.)
- “The establishment of the seven Chinese tribes in the territory of the current states of Puebla and Tlaxcala” (s.f.)
- “Die vorspanische Geschichte des gebietes Puebla-Tlaxcala und seiner Rolle in der Geschichte des Hochlandes von Mexiko” (s.f.).