DONNER, KAI. Finnish scholar Karl Reinhold (Kai) Donner (1888–1935) united British anthropology and Northern ethnography. Born into a Swedish-speaking family, Donner was educated in the religious liberalism and bilingualism that prevailed in Finnish universities at the beginning of the twentieth century. His father, Otto Donner, was a professor of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics at the University of Helsinki; in 1883 he founded the Finno-Ugric Society, a nationalistic organization that studied the languages, ethnology, and history of Finno-Ugric peoples.

In 1908 Donner's studies in Budapest introduced him to Hungarian research in Finno-Ugristics (Hungarian is an Ugric language). Three years later he went to Cambridge University, where he became familiar with British anthropological models. This is significant because until the turn of the twentieth century Finnish scholars wrote mainly in German and rarely ventured outside the spheres of German and Russian science.

The ranking scholars of British anthropology at that time...