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Leo Viktor Frobenius (29 June 1873 – 9 August 1938) was an ethnologist and archaeologist and a major figure in German ethnography. ==Life== He was born in Berlin as the son of a Prussian officer and died in Biganzolo, Lago Maggiore, Piedmont, Italy. He undertook his first expedition to Africa in 1904 to the Kasai district in Congo, formulating the African Atlantis theory during his travels. Until 1918 he travelled in the western and central Sudan, and in northern and northeastern Africa. In 1920 he founded the ''Institute for Cultural Morphology'' in Munich. In 1932 he became honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt, and in 1935 director of the municipal ethnographic museum. In 1897/1898 Frobenius defined several "culture areas" (''Kulturkreise''), cultures showing similar traits that have been spread by diffusion or invasion. With his term ''paideuma'', Frobenius wanted to describe a gestalt, a manner of creating meaning (''Sinnstiftung''), that was typical of certain economic structures. Thus, the Frankfurt cultural morphologists tried to reconstruct "the" world-view of hunters, early planters, and megalith-builders or sacred kings. This concept of culture as a living organism was continued by his most devoted disciple, Adolf Ellegard Jensen, who applied it to his ethnological studies.〔(Short Portrait: Adolf Ellegaard Jensen )〕 It also later influenced the theories of Oswald Spengler.〔Leon Surette, (''The Birth of Modernism'' ), McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1994, p. 63.〕 During World War I in 1916/1917, Leo Frobenius spent almost an entire year in Romania, travelling with the German army for scientific purposes. His team performed archaeological and ethnographic studies in the country, as well as documenting the day-to-day life of the ethnically diverse inmates of the Slobozia prisoner camp. Numerous photographic and drawing evidences of this period exist in the image archive of the Frobenius Institute〔Mihai Dumitru, (''Leo Frobenius în România'' )〕 Frobenius taught at the University of Frankfurt. In 1925, the city acquired his collection of about 4700 prehistorical African stone paintings, which are currently at the University's institute of ethnology, which was named the Frobenius Institute in his honour in 1946. His writings with Douglas Fox were a channel through which some African traditional storytelling and epic entered European literature. This applies in particular to ''Gassire's lute'', an epic from West Africa which Frobenius had encountered in Mali. Ezra Pound corresponded with Frobenius from the 1920s, initially on economic topics. The story made its way into Pound's ''Cantos'' through this connection. In the 1930s, Frobenius claimed that he had found proof of the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis.〔"Leo Frobenius", ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', 1960 edition〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Leo Frobenius」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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