Herder argued that each human community is unique and separate from its neighbors. He notes that climate and geography have had huge impacts on the customs of different peoples, each of which expresses its own “genius” in the ways they have adapted to local circumstances. Unlike Hegel, who simply wrote off Africa as irrelevant to human history, Herder took a sympathetic view of non-European cultures. Like a contemporary cultural anthropologist, he was more interested in describing than in evaluating other peoples. And, in an age well before the big European push to colonize the globe, he
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