ABSTRACT
Leo Viktor Frobenius was born in Berlin, Germany, on June 29, 1873. With an autodidactic background, Frobenius became an ethnologist and culture historian and one of the most famous researchers on Africa during the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1904 and 1935, he carried out twelve expeditions to various African countries to collect ethnographic data, oral traditions, material objects, and folklore. As a theoretician, he developed the idea of “cultural morphology,” which conceives of cultures as living organisms, that is, they are born, and progress through “infancy,” “youth,” “adulthood,” “old age,” and finally, “death.” They are dominated by Paideuma, a kind of cultural soul that is considered to act more or less independently of men. Irrationalist ideas of this type have always met with skepticism, and have been mostly discarded by modern research. However, much of the data from Frobenius’s field research, and particularly his immense collections of fairy tales, legends, fables, sagas, and myths, proved to be of lasting value.
