Stephen Fuchs
Stephen Fuchs was an Austrian Catholic priest, missionary, and anthropologist who researched the ethnology and prehistory of India. After obtaining a Ph.D. in ethnology and Indology from the University of Vienna in 1950, Fuchs moved to India where he assisted in founding the Department of Anthropology at St. Xavier's College in Bombay. After a brief imprisonment for being misidentified as a German missionary by the British government during World War II, Fuchs founded the Indian Branch of the, later renamed the Institute of Indian Culture. Fuchs, because of health concerns, moved to Austria in 1996 and died at the age of 91 in Mödling, Austria.
In his research, Fuchs conducted field studies in Central India. He focused particularly on the customs and beliefs of modern Indian tribes. Originally when he moved to India, he researched solely the social and cultural customs of modern-day central Indian tribes. After founding the Institute of Indian Culture, Fuchs researched the cultures of ancient India, back to India's original inhabitants.
Early life and education
Fuchs was born on 30 April 1908 at Bruck an der Mur in Styria, Austria. Later, his family moved to Graz, where he studied at the advanced mission high school of the Society of the Divine Word from 1922 to 1927. He joined the SVD's in 1927, and studied philosophy at St. Augustine in Bonn, Germany from 1927 to 1930, and theology at St. Gabriel in Mödling, Austria from 1930 to 1934. In Mödling, he took linguistics classes from Wilhelm Schmidt who taught ethnology and linguistics at the seminary of St. Gabriel. It was after coming in contact with Schmidt that he decided to become an anthropologist.Later in 1934, he was ordained and appointed by the SVD's to one of its missions that was opened in 1932 in Indore,, in India. There, he learned English, Hindi, and the local dialects of Madhya Pradesh, before carrying out studies and fieldwork in central India. In 1947, the SVD General chapter decided that there should be an ethnologist in each of its mission areas, and consequently, he was commissioned by the SVD to study ethnology. He went back to Austria in 1948 and began studying at the University of Vienna for a Ph.D. in the fields of ethnology and Indology. He was able to complete his PhD in 1950, just two years, because of the large amount of field material he brought back from India to Austria and the articles he had already published on ethnography. For his Ph.D. dissertation, he studied the Bhumias' ritual of "horse sacrifice" and highlighted the relatedness between Aryans' Ashvamedha and their ritual of sacrificing a horse.
Research
Along with being an anthropologist, Fuchs was a Catholic priest and missionary. Fuchs saw himself predominately as a scientist and a researcher. Bernd Pflug writes, "It is hard to say who was the more dominant in Fuchs—the missionary or the scholar? There is evidence for both, but looking at his anthropological research as a whole over more than six decades, it seems plausible to argue that the scholar in Fuchs had always the upper hand though this hand was tied to the task of mission." Fuchs believed that he could combine his "missionary work with scholarly contributions to early Indian civilisation". He spent several decades undertaking studies in India on the country's ethnology and prehistory. The tribal and "small-scale communities" of India were the primary focus of his research in central India. He did anthropological research on the "earliest inhabitants of India" to elucidate "the prehistory of the 'primitives or aborigines' and the early history of the 'high' cultures of India".He was an editorial board member of the Asian Folklore Studies. He had a "deep fascination" for the cultures of the tribal and dalit peoples of India. Sebastian M. Michael, the director of the Institute of Indian Culture, writes: "...like Wilhelm Schmidt, he was convinced of the need to collect historical material about simple people throughout the world in order to understand humanity. His commitment developed into a veritable love affair with India and her rich tribal and dalit heritage." Wilhelm Schmidt had mentored Fuchs, however, Fuchs dissociated himself from Schmidt's culture circle theory which Pflug considers to be "rigid". According to Pflug, Fuchs "accepted a somewhat more flexible form of culture area theory". Josef Salmen viewed him as a cultural anthropologist.
Initial research
Fuchs initiated his studies by researching the Chamar caste's socio–cultural life, and wrote his first article in 1937 in Anthropos on the customs, marriage, and festivals of the Chamars. He researched central India's tribal communities, including the Korkus among who he stayed recurrently, learned the Korku language, and garnered data on their customs, festivals, and religious beliefs. He worked among the Balahis of Nimar for nearly a decade. He studied their culture, beliefs, and social organizations.During the second world war, along with other missionaries from Germany, he was designated as an enemy alien by the British government in India and sent to a prison camp. His research work was halted for the duration of his imprisonment. He was later set free in 1945 after it came to light that he was an Austrian. During his confinement, he went back through the observations and notes that he had assembled on the beliefs and customs of Nimar's Balahis, and later in 1950 in Vienna, published a book titled The Children of Hari: A Study of the Nimar Balahis in the Central Provinces of India. After his release in 1945, he began studying the Gonds and Baigas, and resumed studies among the Korkus. Around this time, he developed interest in the Bhumias of Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh in whose villages he oftentimes stayed for long durations of time. In Madhya Pradesh, he carried out research on the Bhumias, Bhils, Bhilalas, Balahis, Gonds, Korkus, and sweeper castes; and in Uttar Pradesh, he conducted research on the Chamar people in the Varanasi and Ballia districts. Later, he studied in Austria between 1948 and 1950 for his doctorate degree.
Later research
After completing his PhD. in 1950 from Austria, Fuchs moved back to India and assisted in the establishment of the Department of Anthropology at Mumbai's St. Xavier's College, and worked as a lecturer in cultural anthropology at the college from 1950 to 1954. He later resigned to dedicate all of his time to conduct field research. In 1950, he established the Indian Branch of the Anthropos Institute at Mumbai as its founder and director. He delivered lectures on the cultures of ancient India at the University of Bombay and was a visiting scholar of anthropology and philosophy of India at the University of San Carlos in the Philippines between 1961 and 1962. The Anthropos Institute in Mumbai was renamed in 1976 as the "Institute of Indian Culture" and later gained recognition as a centre for postgraduate research in anthropology and sociology from the University of Mumbai.Owen Lynch noted that Fuchs had researched India's politico–religious movements that had been narrated but not acknowledged as messianic, including the Satnampanth and Mahdi movements. Fuchs had studied 46 such movements and compiled those movements in his book Rebellious Prophets: A Study of Messianic Movements in Indian Religions . Fuchs supported M. N. Srinivas's theory of Sanskritization by offering examples in the book. Fuchs had argued that the idea of a savior or messiah exists not only in the Biblical Christian thought, but it has persistently surfaced in the Indian religious movements and occurrences through historical and mythological persons of note, e.g. Vaishnavism.
Fuchs researched the ancient history of India, particularly the Aryans, Dravidians and India's autochthonous peoples, the aborigines who, according to him, represented India's earliest populace. His anthropological research on the earliest populace of India led him to cast light on the prehistory and early history of India's aborigines and "high" cultures, respectively. He was of the opinion that the Aryans were migrating to India and Europe from the inner Asian regions which had resulted in the genesis of the Indo-European language family. He believed that to ascertain the origination of the practice of untouchability, the Indologists must "penetrate deeply enough" in the history of the peoples who have had ascendancy in India.
Written work
Fuchs' The Origin of Man and His Culture was reviewed by Harumi Befu of the University of Michigan who raised concerns over and questioned Fuchs' knowledge of paleontology, racial classification, and the advances in genetics. Befu further noted that Fuchs offered "only stages and no mechanism or process of evolution from one stage to another." Fuchs, however, drew some praise from R. K. Mutatkar for his unbiased approach towards the "discussion of the theory of anthropology" despite taking in the "Indian material"; though, Mutatkar noted that Fuchs attempted to offer "too much" information in a single book, and as a consequence, several key topics got inadequate coverage.Fuchs' Rebellious Prophets: A Study of Messianic Movements in Indian Religions was assessed by Kenelm Burridge and Owen Lynch. Assessing the book, Burridge noted that Fuchs assembled "a wide range of much neglected material on Indian 'messianic' movements". Lynch stated that Fuchs did "a factual reporting of the data at hand". Indiana University's David Bidney reviewed Fuchs' coauthored book Essays in Ethnology that comprises 13 essays, all of which have "historical ethnology as developed by Fritz Graebner, Wilhelm Schmidt, Wilhelm Koppers and their followers" as the common subject matter. Assessing the essays, Bidney stated that though the authors were focused on the prehistory, they did not "clarify and resolve the basic issues" which their predecessors left for them. The Korkus of the Vindhya Hills was a volume having Fuchs' research on the "geographical environment and material culture", history, economy, and belief structure of the Korkus. University of Delhi's Sudha Gupta noted that Fuchs had done fieldwork among the tribal people of Vindhya hills region for over 20 years. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf viewed his research as a "meticulous analysis" of the subject matter.