to describe patterns of human bodily practice as rites and ceremonies, music and dance, sports and exercises, play and game, beyond ideas and weltanschauung :de:Weltanschauung;
to identify analogies between patterns of bodily behaviour, and patterns of thinking ;
to compare forms of behaviour across different times and cultures by patterns and rather than by meaning;
to compare patterns of behaviour, of thinking and of mentalities in different fields of society, as in economic behaviour, military behaviour, concepts of natural sciences, proceedings and atmospheres in literary works, and social movements;
The Historical Behaviour Studies were established in 1971 by August Nitschke :de:August Nitschke and Henning Eichberg as a department of the University of Stuttgart. The Department of Historical Behaviour Studies was part of the newly established Institute of Social Research, side by side with departments of social planning and social economy. Later on, historians like Johannes Burkhardt :de:Johannes Burkhardt, Andreas Kalckhoff, Harald Kleinschmidt, Volker Saftien and Michael Walter joined the department. Others like Wolfgang Christian Schneider, Andreas Gestrich :de:Andreas Gestrich, Mathias Beer und Katja Erdmann-Rajski worked in connection with the department and used similar methods of research. The research of this Stuttgart school of studies in human behaviour was to a certain extent parallel to the History of Mentalities from France, to the Cultural Sociology from Germany and Denmark, and to the Historical Anthropology or Alltagsgeschichte from Germany which arose in the 1990s. Referring to Ruth Benedict, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault, the patterns of human behaviour were called “”.
The Stuttgart school of Historical Behaviour Studies directed special attention towards fundamental and abrupt changes of behavior and society, as they could be observed in the context of the Renaissance 1550–1650, of the Industrial Revolution around 1770–1820, and in cultural change around 1900–1930. Other changes were studied for the Middle Ages. These historical case studies could lead to questions concerning the significance and change of behaviour at present and in the future. A particular characteristic of the Stuttgart studies of historical behaviour was the comparative turn towards non-Western societies like Indonesia, Japan, and China. While the Stuttgart school generally focused on “describing” and “understanding” different forms and changes of historical behaviour, the “explanation” of cultural difference and change was discussed diversely. Eichberg emphasized the irreducible otherness of foreign behavior; “extraneous” patterns withdraw from the explanations of the external observer and develop, also in modernity, on ways quite different from Western standard. Nitschke :de:August Nitschke tried to find explanations for the historical dynamics of different cultures by models of energy and time expectation; this met with observations of self-organization as reported in physics and biology. Common for the Stuttgart school was a skeptical distance towards the traditional explanation of historical change by ideologies, individual intentions, general social structures or one global process of sociocultural evolution.
Influence on international research
The Historical Behaviour Studies contributed among others to the history of popular culture, and of peace and war, to the study of paradigm changes in natural sciences, to the history of art and of the public sphere. They had a special impact on the international study of body culture. The Danish school of body culture studies developed the analysis of – social space, social time, inter-human relations, atmospheres and emotions, and the objectifying of :wikt:movement|movement – towards the study of sport and other movement cultures in diverse societies and social formations.
Literature
Beer, Mathias : Eltern und Kinder des späten Mittelalters in ihren Briefen. Familienleben in der Stadt des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Nürnberg: Stadtarchiv Nürnberg. Eichberg, Henning : Der Weg des Sports in die industrielle Zivilisation. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Erdmann-Rajski, Katja : Gret Palucca: Tanz und Zeiterfahrung in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert: Weimarer Republik, Nationalsozialismus, Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Olms. Gestrich, Andreas : Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kalckhoff, Andreas : "Historische Verhaltensforschung: Ethnologie unserer Vergangenheit. Die Konfiguration eines Aufstandes im 10. Jahrhundert", in Gehlen, Rolf & Wolf, Bernd : Werner Müller zu seinem 75.Geburtstag, Unter dem Pflaster liegt der Strand 11. Berlin: Karin Kramer. Kintzinger, Martin et al. : Das Andere Wahrnehmen. Beiträge zur europäischen Geschichte. August Nitschke zum 65. Geburtstag gewidmet. Cologne: Böhlau. Kleinschmidt, Harald : Tyrocinium Militare. Militärische Körperhaltungen und –bewegungen zwischen dem 14. und dem 18. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Autorenverlag Nitschke, August : Die Bedrohung. Ansatz einer historischen Verhaltensforschung. Stuttgart: Klett Saftien, Volker : Ars saltandi. Der europäische Gesellschaftstanz im Zeitalter der Renaissance und des Barock. Hildesheim, New York: Olms. Schneider, Wolfgang Christian : Ruhm, Heilsgeschehen, Dialektik. Drei kognitive Ordnungen in Geschichtsschreibung und Buchmalerei der Ottonenzeit. Hildesheim, New York: Olms. Walter, Michael : Grundlagen der Musik des Mittelalters. Schrift – Zeit – Raum. Stuttgart: Metzler. About the influence of Historical Behaviour Studies: Lorenz, Maren : Leibhaftige Vergangenheit. Einführung in die Körpergeschichte. Tübingen: Diskord. Mallinckrodt, Rebekka : Bewegtes Leben. Körpertechniken in der Frühen Neuzeit. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
