PAUL KIRCHHOFF: BIOGRAPHY, STUDIES AND THEORIES, WORKS - ARTE - 2025

Paul Kirchhoff was an anthropologist, ethnologist and philosopher whose main contribution was the creation of the term Mesoamerica. Born in Germany in 1900, he acquired Mexican nationality after working in that country for some years.

His mother, Minna Wentrup, was Kirchhoff's main reference figure during his childhood, especially after the death of his father when he was still very young. His influence, along with that of the socialist leader Karl Liebknecht, a friend of the family, was essential for Kirchhoff to receive an outstanding education and to acquire social and political values.

Paul Kirchhoff

After having worked on various projects, Kirchhoff moved to Mexico in 1936. There he devoted himself to studying the anthropology and ethnology of the entire region. In addition, he was one of the founders of the National School of Anthropology and History and held the chair of Anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The anthropologist participated in most of the Pan-American congresses that took place at that time. His most important contribution was the concept of Mesoamerica, which delimits the social, geographical and ethnographic studies of an area of ​​Latin America that ranges from central Mexico to a part of Costa Rica.

Biography

Paul Kirchhoff Wentrup was born on August 17, 1900, in the town of Hörste, in the German province of Westphalia.

His father, the architect Richard Kirchhoff, passed away when Paul was just a few years old, so he had to grow up with his mother, Mina Wentrup, a woman with great social and political concerns.

Mina Wentrup was a friend of the wife of Karl Liebknecht, a socialist leader of the time who was shot in 1919. According to biographers, Liebknecht's influence on the young Kirchhoff was remarkable and was one of the causes of his ideological evolution.

Studies

Kirchhoff carried out his first studies between 1907 and 1919 in the city of Berlin. Later, between 1919 and 1926, he studied theology, economics, philosophy, and ethnology at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg, and Leipzig.

In Leipzig, the center of ethnological studies in Germany, he trained with Fritz Krause, considered one of the fathers of economic anthropology.

Thanks to Franz Boas, who was also born in Westphalia, Kirchhoff was awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1927 he moved to England to study for a semester to learn the language.

The following year, Kirchhoff left for the United States to continue his training. His stay there lasted until 1930.

First jobs

During his stay in the United States, Kirchhoff carried out his first works, among which he highlighted the study of the grammatical forms of the Navajo Indians.

On his return to Germany in 1931, he graduated in ethnology. Her thesis dealt with the organization of kinship in some tribes in the jungles of South America.

After this, he began working as an assistant to the director of the American section of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Konrad Th. Preuss.

Problems for their ideology

Kirchhoff traveled to England in 1932 to prepare a project to be carried out in Rhodesia. Specifically, it was a study on the native workers of the copper mines of that country. However, the British government vetoed his participation because of his membership in the German Communist Party.

The same thing happened when he tried to enter Samoa, so he had to remain in England. There he began to collaborate with Malinowski, despite the fact that he often disagreed with his theories.

A scholarship to study private land ownership in Ireland allowed him to move to Dublin in 1933. A year later, he began working as a researcher for the Museum of Man in Paris.

In 1935 he accepted a commission from Boas to conduct research on the Guajiros of Venezuela and Colombia for Columbia University.

Mexico

After a time residing in Chicago, Kirchhoff moved to Mexico. At that time, the country was governed by Lázaro Cárdenas and the undersecretary of the Ministry of Public Education, Luis Chávez, proposed that he teach ethnology classes at the National Museum of Anthropology.

Kirchhoff offered those classes for a year. Later he became a founding professor, together with Daniel Rubín de l Borbolla, of the Department of Anthropology of the School of Biological Sciences of the National Polytechnic Institute.

In 1940 he was one of the speakers at the First Inter-American Indigenous Congress, held in Pátzcuaro. His presentation was entitled "The contributions of ethnologists to solving the problems that affect indigenous groups."

In 1942, he was also one of the promoters of the creation of the National School of Anthropology and History. Likewise, he participated in the organization of the Mexican Society of Anthropology.

A few years earlier, the Nazi government in Germany had withdrawn his citizenship and Kirchhoff had decided to become a Mexican national.

It was during this stage of his life, specifically in 1943, when he published his most recognized work: Mesoamerica, its geographical limits, ethnic composition and cultural characteristics.

U.S

Kirchhoff returned to the United States in 1947 and remained in that country working as a research professor at the University of Washington until 1955. During this time he was investigating the calendar systems created in Mesoamerica, in addition to studying the relations between America and Asia in ancient times.

Last years

After finishing his work in the United States, the ethnologist returned to his host country, Mexico. His next work was carried out in the Anthropology Section of the Institute of Historical Research of UNAM, which had just been founded.

In 1958 he gave a congress in Germany, a country to which he returned in 1960 to teach in Bonn and Frankfurt. During the following years, he returned to his country of origin on several occasions, always to give courses and give conferences. Likewise, it promoted an interdisciplinary research project on the Puebla-Tlaxcala region.

His last years of life were spent teaching ethnology classes at the ENAH. This occupation lasted until the moment of his death, on September 13, 1972, in Mexico City.

Studies and theories

As noted, Kirchhoff's main contribution was the creation of the Mesoamerican concept. This has made it possible to delimit all kinds of social and ethnographic studies of the Latin American area that ranges from central Mexico to part of Costa Rica.

Creation of the Mesoamerica concept

Map of the cultural areas of Mesoamerica - Source: Yavidaxiu from the maps Image: Topographic30deg N0W90.png and Image: Topographic30deg N0W60.png, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

The essay Mesoamerica, its geographical limits, ethnic composition and cultural characters was published for the first time in 1943. The author looked for the elements that the cultures and peoples of a certain area of ​​America had in common and that differentiated them from the rest of the continent. To achieve this, Kirchhoff listed those unique cultural features of these peoples.

With this work, Paul Kirchhoff became the creator of the Mesoamerica concept, which he defined as a cultural area inhabited by several indigenous peoples of different languages, but who shared a history and common cultural traits.

Among the elements that the author took into account were the two types of writing that were used in the area: pictography and hieroglyphs. In addition, he also pointed out the production of books made with amate paper or animal skins.

Kirchhoff also looked at the calendars, both the prophecy and the solar, and an architectural style with a large number of stepped pyramids and stucco floors. Finally, his work especially highlighted the gastronomy of the area, based on the same products: corn, beans, squash and cocoa, among others.

Geography of Mesoamerica

Within the geographical classification, Kirchhoff pointed out that the indigenous cultures of the American continent were divided into two types.

The first of these types divides America simply into north and south, although sometimes it introduces a third zone sandwiched between the previous ones: Mexico and Central America. The line that would separate North America and South America would be the San Juan River, between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

When the intermediate zone is incorporated, the limits go from the border of Mexico with the United States to the eastern border of Panama.

The author pointed out that this classification had great drawbacks if it was intended to be used for something more than simple geographic location.

The second of the types of geographical classifications grouped the indigenous peoples into five large areas.

The first would include the hunter-gatherer peoples of North America and the second the inferior cultivators of North America.

From these two areas the predominance of corn began, something fundamental, according to Kirchhoff, to delimit Mesoamerica. In this way, the third geographical area would be occupied by the superior cultivators, the so-called high cultures.

The two remaining zones would be those inhabited by the lower cultivators of South America, on the one hand, and by the gatherers and hunters of South America, on the other.

Ethnic composition of Mesoamerica

According to Kirchhoff's essay, when the Spanish conquerors arrived in Mesoamerica, there were five groups of indigenous peoples in the region:

1. Peoples whose language had not been classified, such as the Cuitlatecas, the Lencas or the Tarascos.

2. The cultures that spoke Mayan, Huave, Totonac and Zoque root languages. This group can be called zoque-maya or macro-mayance.

3. With the exception of two of them, the Otomi peoples, Chocho Popoloca and Mixteca, the Chorotega-Mangue family and those peoples that belonged to the Zapotec, Trique and Chinanteca families.

4. The cultures of the Nahua family and other Yuco-Aztec peoples.

5. The peoples of the Tlapaneca-Sutiaba and Tequisisteca families

After analyzing this ethnic composition, the author reached several conclusions. The first was that only the Otomí linguistic family had members who did not belong to the cultural ensemble. On the other hand, Kirchhoff pointed out that the speakers of the Macro-Ottomangue and Zoque-Maya languages ​​did belong to Mesoamerica.

Other works

Another of Kirchhoff's most outstanding works is entitled The principles of the clan system in human society. The author was recovering a matter that had interested him for years, to the point that it was the basis of his doctoral thesis.

This thesis, published in two parts, studied the classification of kinship systems, both globally and among the indigenous peoples of America.

This new essay became a kind of third part of his thesis and is considered a great example of evolutionary literature.

Kirchhoff sent his work in 1945 to the American Anthropologist magazine, but those responsible for the publication forced him to develop a critical apparatus. The author, despite the fact that his students offered to write them, decided to postpone publication.

Ten years later, a publishing house published the essay in English. For the Spanish version it had to wait until 1976.

Plays

Articles

- “Marriage, Kinship and Genealogy of the Indigenous Tribes of Non-Andean North South America” (Heirat, Verwandtschaft und Sippe bei den Indianerstämmen des nördlichen nichtandinen Südamerika) under the title of “The Family Organization of the Jungle Tribes of South America” Verwandtschaftsorganisation der Urwaldstämme Südamerikas) (1931).

- The adaptation of foreign religious influences in Prespanish Mexico (Revista Diógenesis) (1964)

essays

- "Mesoamerica, its geographical limits, ethnic composition and cultural characteristics" (1943).

books

- "The Tarascans and their neighbors according to 16th century sources" (1939).

- "Geographic distribution of cultural elements attributed to the Olmecs of traditions" (1942).

- “Relations between the hunter-gatherer area of ​​northern Mexico and the surrounding areas” (1943).

- "The hunter gatherers in northern Mexico" (1943).

"Ancient Ethnography" (1948).

- The Author of the Second Part of the Crónica Mexicayotl (1951).

- "The Principles of Clanship in Human Society" (1955).

- "The route of the Toltec-Chichimecas between Tula and Cholula" (1958).

- "Two types of relations between peoples in Ancient Mexico" (1963).

- Structural principles in ancient Mexico (Posthumous work, 1983). Teresa Rojas Rabiela and Amelia Camacho editors. Mexico, Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology.

Unpublished works, conserved in the Institute of Anthropology of Puebla

- "The Poblano-Tlaxcala Valley" (1962)

- "The great guidelines of Toltec history" (1964)

- “Cholula, the sacred commercial city of Ancient Mexico” (ca. 1964)

- "La Cuautlalpan or Province of Itzocan" (nd)

- "The establishment of the seven Chichimeca tribes in the territory of the current states of Puebla and Tlaxcala" (nd)

- "Die vorspanische Geschichte des gebietes Puebla-Tlaxcala und seiner Rolle in der Geschichte des Hochlandes von Mexiko"

References

1. Kirchhoff, Paul. Mesoamerica. Obtained from dimensionantropologica.inah.gob.mx
2. Original towns. Paul Kirchhoff. Obtained from pueblosoriginario.com
3. García Mora, Carlos. Paul Kirchhoff Wentrup, Co-founder of the National School of Anthropology and History. Obtained from diariojudio.com
4. Revolvy. Paul Kirchhoff. Retrieved from revolvy.com
5. Barbezat, Suzanne. What is Mesoamerica ?. Retrieved from tripsavvy.com