Heinrich Meinhard

Heinrich Meinhard PhD
File:Meinhard, Heinrich.jpg
Born	1900
Died	1975
Residence	385 Woodstock Road, Oxford [1949]
Occupation	anthropologist
Society Membership membership ordinary fellow left 1975 deceased elected_AI 1940.04.23

Notes

House Notes

1940.04.23 nominated and elected forthwith
1975.11 death noted

Notes From Elsewhere

1938. Heinrich Meinhard, a German refugee, starts work at the museum. He had been previously at Berlin Museum, he catalogues accessions. his work paid by Society for the Protection of Science and Learning. [PRM]

The successor to the readership, Heinrich Meinhard (1900-1975), arrived in England seeking refuge from Nazi Germany in 1937, where his Jewish wife was in danger.53 He was initially supported by the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning,54 which assisted him in finding a place at Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum where he and his volunteer wife worked on cataloguing various ethnographic collections. In the Museum’s Annual Report for 1938, Henry Balfour gratefully acknowledges “the assistance of Dr. Heinrich Meinhardt, a
distinguished orientalist from Berlin University”. According to the 1944-45 Report, he subsequently left “to work on an Ethnographical Survey of Africa for the International Institute of African Languages and Culture”, conducting fieldwork in Africa, with cattle pastoralists in the interlacustrine region. The parallels with his ambitious predecessor cease there. His appointment to the readership in 1950 was strange. Or as a colleague of EvansPritchard – who knew Meinhard in Oxford -- put it to me chuckling, when I mentioned my puzzlement over Meinhard’s selection, “oh, that was one of E-P’s55 naughty appointments”.56

Meinhard was like someone from Jevons’ era, a continental intellectual trained in Sanskrit studies with interests in museums and the ancient world, curiously out of step with then ascendant social anthropology. This ascendancy marked a striking switch of disciplinary interests and graphically illustrates the provisional character of the subject’s identity. Until he retired, Meinhard used black and white glass lantern slides in lectures (together with
proverbial yellowing dog-eared notes), which for students was somewhat whimsical, like being transported back in time. As Beattie (1982:558) commented, regarding some of Meinhard’s lecture notes deposited in Oxford, they were “largely based on data outside the ordinary run of ethnography familiar to most English-speaking students”.

It seems that after the chronic insecurity he experienced upon leaving his post as curator of Indian civilisation at the National Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, Meinhard slumped into the haven of a tenured post. While he saw to his teaching and administrative duties, he conducted no research, or at least none that resulted in any publications, except for a contribution in retirement to a festschrift for his patron (Meinhard 1975), which
interestingly given earlier comments on Bede and Symeon as proto-ethnographers concerns Medieval Teutonic patrilineal kinship. His only other publications, so far as I can trace them, were his doctoral thesis, as required in German academia, and two brief communications in Man (Meinhard 1928, 1939, 1940) that concern South Asian history (drawing on ancient Hindu texts to discuss the Shiva sect, prototype musical instruments and divine king
regicide). Although his “extensive ethnographic survey in East Africa . . . resulted in a valuable set of lectures on the peoples of the area: these although fairly widely circulated in typescript were never published” (Beattie 1976:326).57
Nonetheless, in a generous obituary, Beattie (1976:326) observes that Meinhard was “a scholar and teacher of unusual distinction . . . [who] played an important part in the development of African studies” and, commenting
on his apparently lacklustre record, that his “publications were few, owing largely to the very exacting standards of scholarship he set himself”. [FROM: DURHAM ANTHROPOLOGY: A PROVINCIAL HISTORY OF A PROVISIONAL DISCIPLINE Sillitoe, P. (2018) ']

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