FROBENIUS, LEO (1873–1938), was a German ethnologist and philosopher of culture. Leo Viktor Frobenius was born July 29, 1873, in Berlin, where he spent his early years. Even in his youth he devoted himself enthusiastically to the investigation of African cultures, collecting all available written and pictorial material that dealt with particular ethnological motifs. (Later, these materials became the matrix for an Africa archive that Frobenius assembled.) Despite the fact that he never received a high school diploma and did not complete a university program, Frobenius achieved extraordinary success in his scientific pursuits.

Stimulated by the work of Heinrich Schurtz (whom Frobenius claimed as his teacher), Friedrich Ratzel, and Richard Andree, Frobenius was responsible for introducing a new way of scientific thinking into the field of ethnology. His new concept, hinging on the term Kulturkreis ("culture circle"), first appeared in his 1898 work Der Ursprung der afrikanischen Kulturen (The origin...