With an entirely autodidactic background, he originated the cultural-historical concept of Kulturkreise (cultural circles) and the theory of cultural morphology, which is based on comparing items of material and immaterial culture to understand regional cultures as well as universal culture. One of his key terms was Paideuma, the “cultural soul” of the peoples of the world, which could be interpreted from the expressive styles of the objects being studied.
Frobenius's work consists of more than 270 articles and books and combines precise ethnographical descriptions and illustrations, travel experiences, folktale texts, and sketch maps of tale motifs, all written in an idiosyncratic cultural-philosophical diction. His theory of narrative motif research and stylistic analysis is largely laid down in his books Vom Kulturreich des Festlandes (On the Continental Empire of Culture, 1923) and Kulturgeschichte Afrikas
(Africa's Culture History, 1933). Through this work, Frobenius rehabilitated Africa as a continent having its own true history and exerted great impact upon the negritude movement. After having started as a private archivist and freelance ethnologist and writer Frobenius became director of the municipal Museum of Ethnology of Frankfurt in 1932 and honorary professor of the University of Frankfurt in 1934. With his excellent relations to Emperor Wilhelm II, Frobenius organized twelve larger expeditions to major regions of Africa in between 1904 and 1932. On these expeditions, he collected material artifacts, oral traditions, and rockart images. The bulk of his folktale collection appeared in the series Atlantis: Volksm€archen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas (Atlantis: Folktales and Folk Literature of Africa), which came out in twelve volumes from 1921 to 1928 and which documents more than 620 tales, fables, legends, “chapters” of epics, and other narrative genres from the Maghreb, Sahel, western and central Sudan, Kordofan, the Guinea Coast, Kongo-Kasai, and Zimbabwe. This corpus contains tales of animal and human characters, of heroes and hunters, of tricksters and demons, as well as erotic miniatures, creation myths, and griot traditions. Scholars criticize Frobenius for his indirect method of recording texts by using interpreters and languages of wider communication instead of the specific vernaculars, which further detracts from the storytellers' authenticity through the subsequent translation into German. Nevertheless, specific narrative styles can be distinguished. A recent trend in contemporary African scholarship is to retranslate the volumes of the francophone countries into French since many of Frobenius's recordings retain unique significance and high value for contemporary societies.
A small volume of twenty-nine tales translated into English was published by Frobenius and Douglas Fox in 1937 under the title African Genesis. The Atlantis volumes have been integrated into the general tale type and motif indexes of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. The Frobenius-Institute at the University of Frankfurt houses the researcher's unpublished diaries and field notes. A project currently underway will make some 430 tales from Frobenius' southern African recordings available in English in the form of a tale-type, motif, and keyword index.
