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Graebner, Fritz (1877–1934) By Kotte, Claudia
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Robert Fritz Graebner was a German ethnologist whose theory of Kulturkreis (culture circle) launched a cultural historical approach to ethnology. After finishing his dissertation on medieval history, Graebner worked as an assistant at the Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin (1899–1906), where he studied the cultures of Oceania. He compared artefacts and plotted them geographically in order to discover patterns of cultural traits.