Paulina Alcocer & Johannes Neurath
Preuss’ philologic anthropology is situated between two radically different strands of humanist science: Seler’s Mexican Studies are based on positive archaeological and philological methods, limiting themselves to deciphering and the edition of primary sources. Usener’s comparative philology is defined as anthropology and its aim is the reconstruction of the whole spiritual and material life of a given people. During his lifetime Preuss was recognized as an ethnographer, but his contributions to theory have been rarely acknowledged. We want to point out that his originality is the transposition of German morphologic tradition to the study of ritual practice on an intermediate level between ethnographic particularism and then fashionable anthropological universalism.
Searching for an explanatory principle of religious conceptions, Preuss focussed on the comparative study of ritual expression and developed a set of theoretical tools –like and “magic mode of thinking”—which combine a genuine interest in native theories on the power of ritual enunciation and an appreciation of the transformative capacity of Amerindian deities. Many of his insights can be philosophically grounded in Humboldt’s Sprachdenken and in what is here called the Humboldtian tradition. At the same time we can discover their potential for contemporary debates in anthropology.
Preuss felt attracted to the field of Americanist studies because he perceived the possibility to trace back the ritual origins of drama. He documented rituals dealing with their own origin and featuring all kind of playful mimetic elements that coexist with complex cosmic symbolisms. It is in this field he had a brief encounter with Aby Warburg who published one of Preuss books in his series Vorträge aus der Bibliothek Warburg. The two scholars shared common influences (Usener) and many interests — above all, the conviction that the materiality of gesture and aesthetic expression is much more than an epiphenomenon or embellishment, but a necessity for the existence of culture. The Kreuzlingen lecture makes evident that Warburg actually was inspired by Preuss at developing his ideas on art.