Paul Kirchhoff

Paul Kirchhoff ( * 1900 in Hörste, † 1972 in Mexico City), pseudonym Eiffel was a German philosopher and anthropologist and a communist activist.

He studied at the Friedrich- Wilhelms- University, specializing in Mexican Anthropology. Kirchhoff belonged in 1920 to the founding members of the Communist Workers Party of Germany ( CAPD ) in this and its affiliated operating organization AAUD he was active until 1931. In the same year he emigrated after a visa for a research stay in South Africa was him for political reasons have been denied in the United States of America, where he stayed until 1934, an exile group of the Trotskyist International Communists of Germany ( IKD ) and then due to its rejection of the advocated by Leon Trotsky policy of entrism in the Revolutionary Workers League ( RWL ) committed by Hugo Oehler, in both organizations belonged Kirchhoff on the line. The end of 1936, Kirchhoff was expelled from the U.S. and fled to Mexico, where in 1937 the left-communist Grupo de Trabajadores Marx Followings (GTM ) and their magazine Comunismo cried into life, which had only a few years was.

In 1938 he was the co-founder of the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City. He conducted research at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, where he produced significant results about the Mexican culture.

1943 Kirchhoff led the term Mesoamerica for the classification of ethnographic phenomena in the Mexican- Central American region, and so unified a diverse and dynamic cultural space after the "Cultural Area" concept of American cultural anthropology.

As an advocate of diffusionism Kirchhoff was - similar to Robert von Heine-Geldern and Gordon F. Ekholm - hard to run the indirect detection through comparisons of Asian and American cultural phenomena such as art styles, Prints, Calendars and polytheistic idea systems that the cultures of the Americas under have developed and influence in contact with the civilizations of the Old World.

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