'Humanity in the chrysalis stage': Indigenous Australians in the anthropological imagination, 1899-1926

British Journal for the History of Science

Volumn 39, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 535-568

  Kuklick, Henrika ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750989364     PISSN: 00070874     EISSN: 1474001X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087406008405     Document Type: Review

References (325)

1. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, London, 1899.
2. I am hardly the first historian to have observed that Native Tribes received considerable attention immediately upon its publication; see e.g. G. W. Stocking, Jr., After Tylor, Madison, WI, 1995, 95-6.
3. They saw the Arrernte as typical of the Aborigines of their region: B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, London, 1904, 1.
4. Gillen was post and telegraphs stationmaster, stipendiary magistrate and sub-protector of Aborigines for South Australia. His formal schooling ended when he was twelve. His work for the Horn Expedition included writing an essay for its Report, 'Notes on some manners and customs of the Aborigines of the McDonnell ranges belonging to the Arunta tribe', in Report on the Work of the Horn Expedition to Central Australia (ed. B. Spencer) 4 vols., Melbourne, 1896, iv, 161-96.
5. Spencer also provided Stirling with information and did so even before his meeting with Gillen served to enhance his interest in anthropology. See D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby, 'So Much That Is New' : Baldwin Spencer, 1860-1929, Melbourne, 1985, 122.
6. Stirling regarded his report as inadequate from an anthropological standpoint. It was filled with apologies for his failures to obtain various types of information about Aborigines' behaviour and long on description of Central Australia's indigenous foodstuffs and other commodities that settlers might be able to use. B. Spencer (ed.), Report on the Work of the Horn Expedition to Central Australia, 4 vols., Melbourne, 1896, iv.
7. J. Mulvaney, 'F. J. Gillen's life and times', in 'My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer (ed. J. Mulvaney, H. Morphy and A. Petch), Melbourne, 1997, 1-22, 6, 13;
8. H. Morphy, 'More than mere facts: repositioning Spencer and Gillen in the history of anthropology', in Exploring Central Australia (ed. S. R. Morton and D. J. Mulvaney), Chipping Norton, NSW, Australia, 1996, 135-49.
9. Spencer and Gillen, Exploring Central Australia, op. cit. (1), 48; see also especially 25-6.
10. E.g. Spencer and Gillen, Exploring Central Australia, op. cit. (1), p. v.
11. Spencer and Gillen's claim was hyperbolic. They had been given local identities, but they did not have 'fully-initiated' status, not having experienced the rites de passage that would have conferred it. As Stirling revealed in the Horn Expedition Report, there were ceremonies to which Gillen could not gain access. Spencer, Exploring Central Australia, op. cit. (4), vol. 4, 71.
12. Spencer and Gillen, Exploring Central Australia, op. cit. (1), 584-6, 618-35, 218-51.
13. For the photograph of the 'operator' see Spencer and Gillen, Exploring Central Australia, op. cit. (1), 247.
14. For a discussion of the importance of photography to Spencer and Gillen see B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, Across Australia, 2 vols., London, 1912, ii, 363.
15. Photographs reproduced in Spencer and Gillen, Across Australia, op. cit. (1), as well as in Spencer and Gillen's later works, did not approach the sensationalism of some of the pictures Gillen took for the Horn Expedition Report;
16. see Plates 24 and 26, representing circumcision and subincision ceremonies respectively, in Spencer, Across Australia, op. cit. (4), iv.
17. For early assessments of the importance of Native Tribes, a number of which place it in the context of Spencer and Gillen's work in general, see E. S. Hartland, review of The Natives Tribes of Central Australia, Folk-Lore (1899) 10, 233-9;
18. H. Ling Roth, review of The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Nature (1899) 59, 511-12;
19. E. Durkheim, review of The Native Tribes of Central Australia, L'Année sociologique (1900) 3, 330-6;
20. [M. Mauss], review of The Native Tribes of Central Australia, L'Année sociologique (1900) 3, 205-15;
21. C. H. R. [C. H. Read], review of The Northern Tribes of Central Australia by Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, Man (1904) 4, 143-4;
22. B. Malinowski, review of Across Australia by Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, Folk-Lore (1913) 24, 278-9;
23. W. W. Newell, review of The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Journal of American Folk-Lore (1900) 13, 72-5;
24. W. I. Thomas, review of The Northern Tribes of Central Australia by Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen and of The Native Tribes of South East Australia by A. W. Howitt, American Journal of Sociology (1905) 10, 700-1.
25. The index in the Australian journal Oceania, first published in 1930, says 'see Aranda' under the entry 'Arunta'. The spelling 'Arunta' was what Norman B. Tindale characterizes as the product of Spencer's 'very-English' mishearing of the name, which led to inappropriate stress on its second syllable rather than its first; see his Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, Berkeley, 1974, 155.
26. It was Spencer's habit to compose by cutting up his and Gillen's publications and pasting his extracts into his drafts. See his letter to his publisher, George Macmillan, complaining that he is having a hard time writing in his accustomed mode because he cannot afford to pay the high prices now charged for used copies of his old books, which indicates that a market existed for reprints: 23 March 1927, Macmillan Archive, British Library (subsequently MA), Additional Manuscript (subsequently Add. MS) 55158.
27. For textbooks which make references to Spencer and Gillen's work, as well as reprint sections from it, published over a considerable span of time, see e.g. V. F. Calverton (ed.), The Making of Man, New York, 1931, 281-305;
28. C. S. Coon (ed.), A Reader in General Anthropology, New York, 1960, 214-36;
29. R. Deutsch, Perspectives: Anthropology, St Paul, MN, 1999, 41;
30. M. Harris, Culture, People, Nature, 5th edn, New York, 1988, 461;
31. M. C. Howard and J. Dunaif-Hattis, Anthropology: Understanding Human Adaptation, New York, 1992, 534;
32. R. R. Marett, Man in the Making: An Introduction to Anthropology, London, 1927,147-8;
33. M. Mead and N. Calas (eds.), Primitive Heritage, New York, 1953, 166-75;
34. R. Piddington, An Introduction to Social Anthropology, Edinburgh and London, 1950, 100;
35. J. J. Poggie, Jr., G. H. Pelto and P. J. Pelto, The Evolution of Human Adaptation, New York, 1976, 262-4. Of these texts Marvin Harris's may be the most significant for present purposes, since Spencer and Gillen are not formally cited in it, but it is clear that Harris is referring to their work when he observes that the 'Arunta of Australia provide one of the classic cases of totemic ritual'.
36. See e.g. G. W. Stocking, Jr., 'The ethnographer's magic: fieldwork in British anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski', in idem, The Ethnographer's Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology, Madison, WI, 1992, 12-59, 24.
37. A. W. Howitt, 'The native tribes of South-East Australia', Folk-Lore (1906) 17, 174-89; Lang quoted on 185.
38. C. H. Read, 'Prefatory note' to Part II, 'Ethnography' (ed. C. H. Read), in Notes and Queries on Anthropology (ed. J. Garson and C. H. Read), 2nd edn, London, 1892, 87-8; quote on 87.
39. Originally entitled Notes and Queries on Anthropology for the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands, Notes and Queries was published at irregular intervals from 1874 to 1951. As its original title indicates, the questionnaire was initially drawn up with the expectation that virtually any traveller could gather useful information. Notes and Queries was not the only anthropological questionnaire circulated, but it was the most important; drawn up by committees that were broadly representative of the range of acceptable anthropological opinion at the various times it was printed, it constitutes an index to successive iterations of conventional anthropological wisdom. See e.g. G. W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology, New York, 1987, 258.
40. A. C. Haddon to Baldwin Spencer, 5 May 1902, in the Spencer Papers, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (subsequently SP), Box 1.
41. Near-contemporaries, Spencer and Haddon were both trained as biologists and were professional rivals as such before they became like-minded anthropologists : Haddon was the runner-up in the competition for Spencer's Melbourne chair. For Haddon's endorsement of detailed study of a delimited area, as well as an account of the vicissitudes of his career, see H. Kuklick, 'Islands in the Pacific: Darwinian biogeography and British anthropology', American Ethnologist (1996) 23, 611-38.
42. For one statement of the claim that trained anthropologists were more accurate and efficient observers of native peoples than such long-term resident observers as colonial officials, see C. G. Seligman, quoted in R. Temple, Anthropology as a Practical Science, London, 1914, 44.
43. Seligman was a member of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, which Haddon organized. For intimations of suspicion that work done by anthropologists based outside the metropole might be inferior, see e.g. the exchange of letters between J. L. Myres and J. G. Frazer in the J. L. Myres Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford (subsequently MP), MS Myres 15,
44. Myres to Frazer, 14 March 1909,
45. and Frazer to Myres, 16 March 1909, which discuss an unrealized proposal that an expedition be sent to Central Australia to check Spencer and Gillen's findings. The proposal was considered by a number of prominent anthropological figures, including Myres (a classicist-anthropologist, Oxford's Wykeham professor of ancient history, 1910-39), Haddon, and R. R. Marett (reader in social anthropology at Oxford from 1910 to 1936). Candidates for the hypothetical expedition, which would have been sponsored (at least in part) by the BAAS, included W. H. R. Rivers and his student A. R. Brown (later Radcliffe-Brown).
46. For one expression of doubts about the virtues of fieldworkers see N. W. Thomas, 'Australian marriage customs', Folk-Lore (1907), 18, 306-18.
47. Thomas's opinions echoed Lang's, to a degree; see A. Lang, 'The origin of totemic names and beliefs', Folk-Lore (1902), 13, 347-93.
48. See e.g. the letter of J. G. Frazer to J. L. Myres, 16 March 1909, describing Spencer and Gillen's work as 'the finest examples of anthropological work done in the field that have ever been published'; MP, MS Myres 15.
49. Frazer once considered becoming a fieldworker himself and joining his friend Haddon's Torres Straits expedition; see R. Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work, Cambridge, 1987, 65.
50. Frazer also enthusiastically promoted the career of Bronislaw Malinowski, the person often credited with pioneering the modern style of fieldwork, and attended his lectures at the London School of Economics in the summer of 1920; see J. G. Frazer to George Macmillan, 2 March 1921, MA, Add. MS 55140.
51. R. R. Marett, Anthropology, London, 1912, 147.
52. Malinowski, Anthropology, op. cit. (10), 278.
53. Frazer was an editorial advisor to Macmillan (also his publisher) and promoted the book on the advice of his correspondent, Lorimer Fison, who was also one of Spencer and Gillen's anthropological mentors (Native Tribes was dedicated to Fison and his frequent collaborator A. W. Howitt). See J. G. Frazer to George Macmillan, 23 August 1897, MA, Add. MS 55134.
54. See Baldwin Spencer to George Macmillan, 8 June 1898, MA, Add. MS 55158.
55. Frazer took responsibility for non-editorial decisions because slow postal services made consulting the authors difficult. He also proofread the manuscript, selected illustrations and annotated it with queries for the authors. He stopped Macmillan requiring Spencer and Gillen to respond to the criticisms of their work made by the book's other reader, E. B. Tylor. See e.g. J. G. Frazer to George Macmillan, 1 January 1898, 22 April 1898, 13 September 1898, and 24 November 1898, MA, Add. MS 55135.
56. Frazer hoped that, together with A. W. Howitt and W. E. Roth, Spencer and Gillen would produce an analysis 'exposing current misconceptions of Australian facts', as he wrote to Howitt, 23 October 1906, Howitt Papers, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne (subsequently HPV); see also, in the same collection, Spencer to Howitt, 7 October 1904.
57. For Frazer's repeated plea to keep facts and theories separate see Spencer to Frazer, 12 July 1899, printed in Spencer's Scientific Correspondence with Sir J. G. Frazer and Others (ed. R. R. Marett and T. K. Penniman), Oxford, 1932, 3-19.
58. Native Tribes was not the only book Frazer marketed to Macmillan in order to put into circulation information that he understood as especially useful to him; see e.g. his endorsement of the work of W. W. Skeat, letter to George Macmillan, 22 March 1899, MA, Add. MS 55135.
59. Frazer also invoked Spencer's views in support of his own, arguing that he and Spencer must have interpreted Australian evidence correctly since they had independently reached identical conclusions. See e.g. J. G. Frazer, 'The origin of totemism', Fortnightly Review (1899), 71, 647-65, 835-53, 664;
60. J. G. Frazer, 'Observations on central Australian totemism', Journal of the Anthropological Institute [later the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and subsequently JAI or JRAI] (1899) 28, 281-6;
61. J. G Frazer to A. W. Howitt, 24 July 1898, HPV, Box 1049.
62. Frazer was able to arrange a special-purpose meeting of the Anthropological Institute at which Spencer spoke about his and Gillen's forthcoming book. Frazer to John Murray, 9 December 1898, MA, Add. MS 55135.
63. See e.g. also Frazer to Myres, 16 March 1909, op. cit. (17).
64. Stocking, Frazer to Myres, 16 March 1909, op. cit. (14), 26.
65. For references to Spencer and Gillen's work as Spencer's alone see Frazer to Myres, 16 March 1909, MA, Add. MS 55135, in which Frazer's defence of the pair's work is expressed as a testament to Spencer's 'accuracy and fidelity'.
66. See also B. Malinowski, 'Anthropology', Volume 1 of the three supplementary volumes published for the 13th edn of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, London and New York, 1926, 131-40.
67. Frazer's earlier position was expressed in the first edition of The Golden Bough, London, 1890.
68. E. S. Hartland, Presidential Address, 'Totemism and some recent discoveries', Folk-Lore (1900), 11, 52-80, 57-8.
69. On Frazer's importance in stimulating the controversy see A. A. Goldenweiser, 'The views of Andrew Lang and J. G. Frazer and E. Durkheim on totemism', Anthropos (1916), 11, 948-70, 953.
70. E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (tr. K. E. Fields), New York, 1995 (1912), 7.
71. Frazer, 'The origin of totemism', The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, op. cit. (24), 648.
72. As Patrick Brantlinger has documented, arguments that Australian Aborigines were inferior forms of humankind date to the beginning of British colonization of their land. Long before the promulgation of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, Europeans in Australia pronounced that Aborigines constituted 'the connecting link between man and the monkey tribe', as Peter Cunningham did in 1827, quoted in Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, Ithaca, 2003, 117. On the general theme of Australia as a 'zoological garden of living fossils ' see R. A. Stafford, 'Annexing the landscapes of the past: British imperial geology in the nineteenth century', in Imperialism and the Natural World (ed. J. M. MacKenzie), Manchester, 1990, 67-89, 81-2.
73. For a sense of the breadth of the audience in Spencer and Gillen's day for whom invocations of the truly primitive nature of Australia's Aborigines served a variety of argumentative purposes, see the theologian B. L. McElroy, speaking against eugenics during the First World War era, quoted in M. S. Pernick, The Black Stork, New York, 1996, 59;
74. the psychologist J. B. Watson, exhorting his professional colleagues to restrict their experimentation to animals because even the most primitive form of human behaviour (the Aborigines) was too complex to be studied in a rigorously scientific manner, in his influential 'Psychology as the behaviorist views it', Psychological Review (1913) 20, 158-77, 168;
75. and the German geneticist Fritz Lenz saying in 1921 that Aborigines represented humankind in its most physically primitive form, quoted in R. N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, Cambridge, MA, 1988, 52.
76. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta, London, 1927, p. vii;
77. Spencer and Gillen, The Arunta, op. cit. (1), 54.
78. Others made similar statements: A. W. Howitt, 'On the organisation of Australian tribes', Transactions of the Royal Society of Australia (1889), 1, 96-137.
79. A. C. Haddon, 'Manners and customs of the Torres Straits islanders', Nature (1890), 42, 637-42, 638.
80. See also Spencer and Gillen, Nature, op. cit. (1), p. vii.
81. For the formulaic description see W. H. R. Rivers, 'Report on anthropological research outside America', in W. H. R. Rivers, A. E. Jenks and S. G. Morley, The Present Constitution and Future Needs of the Science of Anthropology, Washington, DC, 5-28;
82. and Spencer and Gillen, The Present Constitution and Future Needs of the Science of Anthropology, op. cit. (1), p. vii.
83. For a particular case see the dramatic population decline reported in L. Fison and A. W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, Melbourne, 1880, 181-3.
84. For a general discussion see R. McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939, Melbourne, 1997.
85. For naturalists' observations see Charles Nicolson to John Lubbock, 1857, Avebury Papers, British Library (subsequently AP), Add. MS 49638;
86. P.M. Byrne to Baldwin Spencer, 18 April 1895, SP, Box 1A.
87. Spencer and Gillen, P.M. Byrne to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (2), 720;
88. Spencer and Gillen, P.M. Byrne to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (1), 575.
89. Spencer and Gillen, P.M. Byrne to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (9), ii, 300;
90. see Spencer and Gillen, P.M. Byrne to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (1), 7-8, 17-18.
91. Publishers evidently saw books that described peoples who were supposedly on the brink of extinction as highly marketable - as the last words on their subjects. See e.g. J. G. Frazer's endorsements of manuscripts to George Macmillan, all in MA: on an Australian study by A. W. Howitt, 13 April 1903, Add. MS 55136;
92. on Charles Hose and William McDougall's work on Borneo, 29 September 1908, Add. MS 55137;
93. on John Roscoe's book on the Baganda, 28 September 1909, Add. MS 55137.
94. On the marketing strategies used by exhibitors of groups of indigenes who were employed to perform mock versions of their distinctive lifeways in circuses, expositions, fairs and other such sites of mass entertainment see R. Poignant, Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle, New Haven, 2004, 77.
95. R. A. Jones, 'Robertson Smith and James Frazer on religion', in Functionalism Historicized (ed. G. W. Stocking), Madison, WI, 1984, 31-58.
96. One source of Frazer's initial judgements about totemism is his own reprint of his 1887 monograph; see J. G. Frazer, 'Totemism', in idem, Totemism and Exogamy, 4 vols, London, 1910, ii, 1-87.
97. J. G. Frazer to George Macmillan, 8 November 1889, MA, Add. MS 55134. It was probably not irrelevant to Frazer's lifelong interests that he also wrote an article on 'Taboo' for the 1888 Britannica.
98. See J. G. Frazer to George Macmillan, 23 August 1897 and 13 September 1898, MA, Add. MS 55135;
99. and J. G. Frazer, 'On some ceremonies of the central Australian tribes', Report of the Eighth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Melbourne: 1900, Melbourne, 1901, 312-21.
100. Spencer and Gillen, Report of the Eighth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Melbourne: 1900, op. cit. (1), 170.
101. Quotations, which make points Frazer made repeatedly, come from his Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (39), iv, 5, 27,
102. and 'The beginnings of religion and totemism among the Australian Aborigines', Fortnightly Review (1905), 78, 162.
103. Spencer and Gillen's descriptions of Arrernte inability to understand disease and death as natural, rather than consequences of malicious human action, were initially tentative; see Spencer and Gillen, Fortnightly Review, op. cit. (1), 265, 356, 536-48.
104. But they soon became assertive; see F. J. Gillen, 'Presidential address' to Section F, Anthropology, Report of the Eighth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Melbourne: 1900, Melbourne, 1901, 109-23.
105. Spencer drafted notes for Gillen's paper; see Mulvaney and Calaby, Report of the Eighth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Melbourne: 1900, op. cit. (3), 182.
106. The observation in Native Tribes that Aborigines were ignorant of the facts of procreation was anticipated in the Horn Expedition Report, figuring in E. C. Stirling's dismissal of the possibility that Aborigines had contrived their subincision ceremonies to serve contraceptive purposes. See Spencer, Report of the Eighth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Melbourne: 1900, op. cit. (4), iv, 34.
107. Spencer and Gillen, Report of the Eighth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Melbourne: 1900, op. cit. (1), 124;
108. Frazer repeatedly congratulated himself on his perceptive interpretation of this particular finding by Spencer and Gillen. See e.g. J. G. Frazer, 'Beginnings of religion and totemism', op. cit. (43), 455,
109. and Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (39), iv, 73-4.
110. Spencer and Gillen, Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (1), 34, 60, 73.
111. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (39), iv, 38, 56, 55.
112. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (39), iv, 15.
113. For the contempt in which Frazer held all of those who differed with him about totemism see Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (39), iv, 43-55, 93-103.
114. He felt that the Durkheimians, in particular, consistently misinterpreted his work; see Ackerman, Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (19), 165.
115. Baldwin Spencer to A. W. Howitt, 7 October 1906, HPV.
116. See Frazer's attempt to show John Lubbock the error of his ways; Frazer to Lubbock, 12 November 1901, AP, Add. MS 49667.
117. On the ruination of his relationship with E. B. Tylor see Frazer to George Macmillan, 13May 1900, MA, Add. MS 55135.
118. On the end of his friendship with Andrew Lang (who also fought independently with Spencer and Gillen and attempted to force changes in Native Tribes by appealing directly to George Macmillan) see Frazer to Macmillan, 22 October 1898 and 25 October 1898, MA, Add. MS 55135;
119. Frazer to Macmillan, 12 August 1904, MA, Add. MS 55136;
120. Lang to Macmillan, SP, Box 3;
121. Lang to Spencer, 12 June 1899 and 30 June 1899, SP, Box 3.
122. J. R. Swanton, review of Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship by J. G. Frazer, American Anthropologist (1906), NS, 8,157-60;
123. and review of The Secret of the Totem by Andrew Lang, American Anthropologist (1906), NS, 8, 160-5.
124. See e.g. A. R. Brown (later Radcliffe-Brown), 'The definition of totemism', Anthropos (1914), 9, 622-30;
125. J. G. Frazer to John Lubbock, 12 November 1901, op. cit. (49);
126. N.W. Thomas, 'Australian marriage customs', Folk-Lore (1907), 18, 317-18.
127. Durkheim, Folk-Lore, op. cit. (29), 93;
128. J. W. Powell, 'An American view of totemism', Man (1902), 2, 101-6.
129. See E. B. Tylor, 'Remarks on totemism, with especial reference to some modern theories respecting it', JAI (1898), 28, 138-48, 142.
130. See also E. B. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, London, 1870, 277-86;
131. E. B. Tylor, 'On a method of investigating the development of institutions, applied to laws of marriage and descent', JAI (1888), 23, 245-72, 261.
132. Tylor's discussion of totemism in the fourth edition of Primitive Culture, published in 1903 (originally published in 1871), respectfully cited Frazer's work, but reiterated his argument that the phenomenon was but a variant of animism; see R. R. Marett, Tylor, New York, 1936, 156 n.
133. See F. B. Jevons, 'The place of totemism in the evolution of religion', Folk-Lore (1899), 10, 369-83, 371.
134. J. Lubbock, On the Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man, London, 1870, 296.
135. A. A. Goldenweiser, 'Reconstructions from survivals in West Australia', American Anthropologist (1916), NS. 18, 476-8;
136. Baldwin Spencer to J. G. Frazer, 10 March 1908, in Marett and Penniman, American Anthropologist, op. cit. (24), 109-10.
137. Anthropologists hostile to Spencer and Gillen had contacted Strehlow, hoping to elicit the sort of information they wanted, of which his predecessor at the Hermannsburg Mission had published intimations. See N. W. Thomas, 'The religious ideas of the Arunta', Folk-Lore (1905), 16, 428-33.
138. As Walter F. Veit has observed, however, there were very few footnotes to Spencer and Gillen's work in Strehlow's, and at least some of them may have been inserted by the editor of Strehlow's first volumes, Moritz Freiherr von Leonhardi. See W. F. Veit, 'Social anthropology versus cultural anthropology: Baldwin Walter Spencer and Carl Friedrich Theodor Strehlow in central Australia', in The Struggle for Souls and Science (ed. W. F. Veit), Strehlow Research Centre Occasional Paper Number 3, Alice Springs, 2004, 92-110, 103.
139. C. Strehlow, The Aranda and Loritja Tribes of Central Australia (ed. M. F. von Leonhardi and others), 7 vols., Frankfurt am Main, 1907-20. I read these in an unpublished 1991 translation by H. D. Oberscheit in the possession of the Strehlow Research Centre, Alice Springs, Australia, for the loan of which I am grateful. Spencer spoke only Pidgin, on which Gillen relied heavily. See von Leonhardi's prefaces to Volumes 1 (1907) and 3 (1910). It is possible, however, that Gillen's mastery of local language has been underestimated. During the time that Spencer and Gillen were in the field together, Spencer reported to Lorimer Fison that 'Gillen now has the language pretty well';
140. Spencer to Fison, 21 November 1896, SP, Box 1.
141. See e.g. Thomas, Spencer to Fison, 21 November 1896, op. cit. ( 57);
142. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (39), iv, 59.
143. Spencer to Frazer, 10 March 1908, op. cit. (56).
144. In 1901 von Leonhardi initiated his collaborative relationship with Strehlow, asking him to answer questions he thought were raised by Spencer and Gillen. See his preface to Strehlow, Spencer to Frazer, 10 March 1908, op. cit. (58), i.
145. Strehlow, Spencer to Frazer, 10 March 1908, op. cit. (58), i.
146. Durkheim, Spencer to Frazer, 10 March 1908, op. cit. (29), 89;
147. Veit, Spencer to Frazer, 10 March 1908, op. cit. (57), 106.
148. M. Mauss, 'An intellectual self-portrait', in Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute (ed. W. James and N. J. Allen), Oxford, 1998, 29-42, 34. The editorial hands that shaped Strehlow's work are not always identifiable in the volumes published after von Leonhardi's death, which occurred before the publication of Volume 4 in 1911, Mauss's correspondence with Strehlow has been lost, and there is no way to determine the impact of Strehlow's work on his thinking, but Mauss's assistance in reading Strehlow's manuscript is acknowledged in Volume 5 (1913).
149. Commenting on one of Lang's papers, Haddon said that Lang 'cleared the ground of his adversaries as dramatically as savages clear the ground for cultivation, by burning all they find growing on it!' See A. Lang, 'The origin of totemic names and beliefs', Folk-Lore (1902), 13, 347-93, with comments by members of the audience to whom he presented it, 393-7; Haddon is quoted on 393.
150. Lang, Folk-Lore, op. cit. (64), 371, 381;
151. see A. Lang, 'J. G. Frazer's "Totemism and Exogamy"', Anthropos (1910), 5, 1092-108.
152. L. Fison to A. W. Howitt, 5 September 1905, HPV.
153. A. Lang, 'A theory of Arunta totemism', Man (1904), 4, 67-9, 68.
154. Quoted in Stocking, Man, op. cit. (1), 59;
155. see Lang, Man, op. cit. (65).
156. A. Lang, 'Method in the study of totemism', American Anthropologist (1912), NS, 14, 368-82.
157. Lang, American Anthropologist, op. cit. (65).
158. Many members of the Vienna School belonged to Catholic religious orders (as Schmidt did), and they had a special interest in religion. R. Heine-Geldern has charted Schmidt's intellectual career, and places his theoretical conversion at the time that he wrote an analysis of the Arrernte, in 1908. See R. Heine-Geldern, 'One hundred years of ethnological theory in the German-speaking countries', Current Anthropology (1964) 5, 407-18, 413.
159. W. Schmidt, 'Totemism in Fiji', Man (1908), 8, 152-3,
160. and Primitive Revelation, London, 1939 (a compilation of his writings produced from 1912 onwards), especially 100-5, 162, 214-15;
161. see also C. Kluckhohn's discussion of Schmidt's 1914 article, 'Kulturkreise und Kulturschichten in Su ̈damerica', in 'Some reflections on the method and theory of the Kulturkreislehre', American Anthropologist (1936), NS, 38, 157-96, 177.
162. Schmidt, Primitive Revelation, op. cit. (72), 69, 121, also 108, 120.
163. Schmidt, Primitive Revelation, op. cit. (72), 21, also 286.
164. Schmidt, writing in 1926, quoted approvingly by R. H. Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory, New York, 1937, 198.
165. For contemporary reverence for Elementary Forms see e.g. P. Smith and J. C. Alexander, 'Durkheim's religious revival', American Journal of Sociology (1996), 102, 585-91.
166. See also the argument made in the recent translation of Elementary Forms that its precepts still stimulate (and are validated by) contemporary social scientific enquiry; K. E. Fields, 'Translator's introduction', pp. xvii-lxxiii.
167. Durkheim, Translator's Introduction, op. cit. (29), 85, see also especially 55, 88, 186-7.
168. His own review was published in L'Année sociologique in 1913;
169. it is quoted in S. Lukes, Emile Durkheim, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1973, 471, in which also see 451-2.
170. E. Sapir, 'Anthropology and social psychology', Psychological Bulletin (1912) 9, 454-61; the quotation is on 461.
171. A. A. Goldenweiser, Review of Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse by Emile Durkheim, American Anthropologist (1915), NS, 17, 719-35, 723.
172. Goldenweiser, American Anthropologist, op. cit. (78), 719.
173. A. A. Goldenweiser, 'Totemism, an analytical study', Journal of American Folk-Lore (1910), 23, 178-293;
174. idem, 'Exogamy and totemism defined: a rejoinder', American Anthropologist (1911), NS, 13, 589-97, 596.
175. J. R. Swanton, 'The social and the emotional element in totemism', Anthropos (1914), 9, 288-99, esp. 290-7.
176. See e.g. Franz Boas's criticism of Durkheim for 'arbitrarily ' focusing on the role that identification of humans with animals played in rules of exogamy, in his 'The origin of totemism', American Anthropologist (1916), NS, 18, 319-26, 323.
177. See Boas's unpublished 1910 lecture, 'The relation of Darwin to anthropology', manuscript in the possession of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, available online at http:// www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/ journal/issues/v42n3/013002/013002.text.html.
178. W. H. R. Rivers, 'The terminology of totemism', Anthropos (1914), 9, 640-6, 640.
179. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (tr. J. Strachey), New York, 1950 (Vienna, 1913), 3-4 n; Freud's italics.
180. M. Weber, Sociology of Religion, posthumously published in 1925,
181. cited in B. Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion, New York, 1987, 71.
182. B. Malinowski, 'Totemism and exogamy', in The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski (ed. R. Thornton and P. Skalník, tr. L. Krzyzanowski), Cambridge, 1993 (originally published in three parts, 1911-13, from the portion of the essay originally published in 1911), 125-99, quote on 140. Malinowski's Polish writings were strongly critical of the totemism literature and, in particular, of Frazer, whom he flattered shamelessly in his English writings.
183. See Gillen to Spencer, 17 November 1902, in 'My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer (ed. J. Mulvaney, H. Morphy and A. Petch), Melbourne, 1997, 416, 419;
184. Spencer relayed this view to Frazer, 7 June 1903, in Marett and Penniman, My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (24), 80;
185. Powell, My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (52).
186. Spencer to Frazer, 7 June 1903, in Marett and Penniman, My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (24), 93.
187. Spencer and Gillen, My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (2), p. vii.
188. Spencer and Gillen, My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (2), 491, 492-3; the statements Spencer and Gillen quoted to illustrate possibilities of misinterpretation were in Pidgin, implying that this would be the usual medium of communication between travellers of European origin and their indigenous informants.
189. Spencer and Gillen, My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (2), pp. xii, xiii.
190. Stirling in Spencer, My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, op. cit. (4), iv, 12.
191. The American historian J. Franklin Jameson, describing the professionalization of history in 1902, quoted in P. Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession, New York, 1988, 52.
192. See B. Lightman, 'Victorian sciences and religions: discordant harmonies', Osiris (2001), 16, 343-66.
193. There is a voluminous literature on the professionalization of academe that stresses that academics of this era were threatened with the loss of their jobs unless they were able to persuade their employers and the public that their work was apolitical and dispassionate. An early specimen of this genre is M. O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905, Lexington, KY, 1975;
194. another is Novick, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905, op. cit. (93).
195. For one international comparison of professorial constraints and strategies see C. Charle, 'Patterns', in A History of the University in Europe (ed. W. R̈egg) (Volume 3 of a projected 4), Cambridge, 2004, 33-80.
196. Note that employees of German universities were, as civil servants, especially vulnerable to dismissal on the grounds that their politics were unsound. Max Weber's classic 'Science as a vocation' (in From Max Weber (ed. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills), New York, 1958, 129-56), originally a lecture delivered in 1918, remains a telling analysis of the career constraints that academics in Germany and the United States negotiated at this time. This is not to say that academics have been consistently obliged to be cowardly. They have had considerable public authority at some times. Now is not one of them.
197. See e.g. R. Martin (ed.), Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University, Durham, NC, 1998.
198. Ray Lankester to Alfred Russel Wallace, 6 July 1909, Wallace Papers, British Library, Add. MS 46438.
199. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (39), iv, 63.
200. Frazer wrote for general readers, hoping to inspire changes in their attitudes and behaviour, 'not merely [for] professed students of mythology and anthropology'; see e.g. Frazer to George Macmillan, 13 November 1899, MA, Add. MS 55134.
201. Describing the message of the first edition of The Golden Bough to Macmillan, he wrote, 'The resemblance of many of the savage customs and ideas to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity is striking. But I make no reference to this parallelism, leaving my readers to draw their own conclusions'; Frazer to Macmillan, 8 November 1889, MA, Add. MS 55134.
202. Spencer and Gillen apparently shared Frazer's views about religion; see e.g. Gillen to Spencer, 30 July 1897, in in 'My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer (ed. J. Mulvaney, H. Morphy and A. Petch), Melbourne, 1997, 177.
203. On the letters Frazer received from his readers see R. Ackerman, 'General introduction', in Selected Letters of Sir James George Frazer, Oxford, forthcoming.
204. Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, A History of Anthropological Thought (ed. André Singer), New York, 1981, 141 (in an essay on Frazer evidently dating to around 1933, the argument of which Evans-Pritchard subsequently reiterated in his lectures);
205. and see R. Lowie, Primitive Religion, New York, 1948 (1924), 145.
206. See N. Peterson, 'Studying man and man's nature: the history of the institutionalization of Aboriginal anthropology', Australian Aboriginal Studies (1990), 7, 6-12.
207. Sydney also seemed a suitable base for training colonial officials to serve in New Guinea, which had become a virtual colony of Australia under the League of Nations mandate; see Stocking, Australian Aboriginal Studies, op. cit. (1), 339-47.
208. Peterson, Australian Aboriginal Studies, op. cit. (98), 7.
209. W. Howells, Mankind So Far, Garden City, NY, 1947, 191-2.
210. In both France and German-speaking areas, anthropology moved beyond museums at this time. Among German-language anthropologists, a range of diffusionist approaches, of which the Vienna School's was one, were embraced by the generation that came to dominate the field after the deaths of the nineteenth-century giants Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow, and the first chair in a German university devoted solely to ethnology (as opposed to physical anthropology) was established at Leipzig in 1920; see H. G. Penny III, 'Traditions in German language', in A New History of Anthropology (ed. H. Kuklick), Oxford, forthcoming.
211. In France social anthropology in the Durkheimian mode sustained by Mauss did not gain an institutional home until 1925, when the Institut d'ethnographie of the University of Paris was founded, headed by Mauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Paul Rivet (a physical anthropologist). See V. Karady, 'French ethnology and the Durkheimian breakthrough', Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (1961), 12, 165-76.
212. Much of the scholarship exploring the intellectual consequences of different structures of university systems has been inspired by the work of Joseph Ben-David; see e.g. the collection of his essays, Scientific Growth, Berkeley, 1991. But the questions Ben-David raised have as such also provoked recent scholarly interest. See e.g. Charle, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, op. cit. (94);
213. as well as other essays in the same volume, especially M. Klinge, 'Teachers', 123-61;
214. and K. H. Jarausch, 'Graduation and careers', 363-89.
215. R. H. Lowie, 'A new conception of totemism', American Anthropologist (1911), NS, 13, 189-207; quote on 189.
216. See A. A. Goldenweiser, 'Totemism', in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (ed. E. R. A. Seligman and A. Johnson), 15 vols., New York, 1934, xiv, 657-61; this reiterates the arguments he had made in his professional youth.
217. See e.g. E. Sapir, 'Anthropology and sociology', in The Social Sciences and their Interrelations (ed. William Fielding Ogburn and Alexander Goldenweiser), Boston, 1927, 97-105; see Lowie's discussion (op. cit. (97), 157-60, also 189) of the work by Swanton, Goldenweiser and Ruth Benedict that exposes Durkheim's flaws.
218. Lowie, The Social Sciences and Their Interrelations, op. cit. (75), 212, in which he identifies positive features of Durkheim's work; see also his remarks upon Lévy-Bruhl and Radcliffe-Brown's good qualities, 217, 223.
219. For a similar position held by a rather different sort of Boasian see A. L. Kroeber, 'History and science in anthropology', American Anthropologist (1935), NS, 37, 539-69, 562.
220. Kluckhohn, American Anthropologist, op. cit. (72), 174.
221. Malinowski, American Anthropologist, op. cit. (26), 136.
222. Marett, American Anthropologist, op. cit. (20), 121;
223. see also E. O. James, An Introduction to Anthropology, London, 1919, 113.
224. W. H. R. Rivers,' Is Australian culture simple or complex?, Report of the Eighty-Fourth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Australia: 1914, London, 1915, 529-30.
225. British Association for the Advancement of Science, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, London, 1929, 76, also 77-9. That there were no diffusionists on the committee that drew up this manual, which was otherwise theoretically ecumenical, denotes the diffusionists' practical irrelevance in British anthropology by 1929. The death of the much-admired Rivers in 1922 figured in their decline, as did the functionalists' success in securing an enormous proportion of the funds available to support anthropological research in this period.
226. See H. Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945, New York and Cambridge, 1991/1992, especially 186, 211.
227. J. W. Swain translated it as The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, London and New York, 1915.
228. J. G. Frazer, 'Preface', in B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, London, 1938, p. viii.
229. See e.g. Malinowski, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, op. cit. (26), 131, in which he included Spencer and Gillen's works in his list of the most important recent works in anthropology.
230. See M. W. Young, Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, New Haven, 2004, 517-18, 563-6;
231. Mulvaney and Calaby, Malinowski: Odyssey of An Anthropologist, op. cit. (3), 267, 322-6.
232. See the 'Bibliographical note' in B. Malinowski, 'Magic, science and religion', reprinted in his Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, Garden City, NY, 1954 (1925), 90-2.
233. There are no references to Spencer and Gillen where they should be in Malinowski's first major work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, New York, 1961 (London, 1922);
234. this had a preface by Malinowski's then patron, J. G. Frazer, and was published by Routledge after Frazer failed to persuade Macmillan to accept it. Frazer to Macmillan, 2 March 1921, op. cit. (19).
235. See L. S. Hiatt, Arguments About Aborigines, Cambridge, 1996, 122.
236. Australasia, edited and extended by A. R. Wallace, a part of Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel, London, 1879, 100.
237. Gillen, Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel, op. cit. (44), 109;
238. see Spencer and Gillen, Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel, op. cit. (1), 532.
239. D. Parkin, 'An interview with Raymond Firth', Current Anthropology (1988), 29, 327-41, quote on 335.
240. Various influences have been postulated, and Evans-Pritchard himself intimated that he had formulated his ideas in consequence of (often hostile) engagement with the works of Frazer, Lévy-Bruhl, Malinowski, Rivers and C. G. Seligman (his thesis supervisor); see e.g. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 'The morphology and function of magic', American Anthropologist (1929), NS, 31, 619-41;
241. idem, op. cit. (97), 144.
242. See also Malinowski, 'Magic, science and religion', American Anthropologist, op. cit. (116), 86,
243. and Argonauts, op. cit. (116), esp. 73-6.
244. See e.g. the bibliography of his popular lectures on social anthropology: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Social Anthropology, London, 1951.
245. For just some of the recent work that cites Evans-Pritchard see A. Heinz, 'Savage thought and thoughtful savages: on the context of the evaluation of logical thought by Lévy-Bruhl and Evans-Pritchard', Anthropos (1997), 92, 165-73;
246. S. Jacobs, 'Two sources of Michael Polanyi's prototypal notion of incommensurability: Evans-Pritchard on witchcraft and St. Augustine on conversion', History of the Human Sciences (2003), 18, 57-76;
247. R. Jennings, 'Zande logic and western logic', British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (1989), 40, 275-85;
248. R. Pool, 'On the creation and dissolution of ethnomedical systems in the medical ethnography of Africa', Africa (1994), 64, 1-20.
249. B. Malinowski, 'Science and superstition of primitive mankind', Nature (January-June 1923), 111, 658-62, 659.
250. On Frazer as a popular .gure see M. Beard, 'Frazer, Leach and Virgil: the popularity (and unpopularity) of The Golden Bough', Comparative Studies in Society and History (1992), 34, 203-24.
251. Malinowski, 'Science and superstition of primitive mankind', op. cit. (122), 659;
252. Malinowski, 'Science and superstition of primitive mankind', op. cit. (26), 133.
253. Ackerman, 'Science and superstition of primitive mankind', op. cit. (19), 269.
254. A. C. Haddon, Magic and Fetishism, London, 1906, 41.
255. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (39), iv, 55.
256. Many anthropologists denied that group marriage had ever existed, since it represented a level of behaviour so base that it was beneath even the most primitive of humans; see Spencer and Gillen, Totemism and Exogamy, op. cit. (2), 74.
257. Frazer, 'Preface' to Malinowski, Argonauts, op. cit. (116), pp. vii-xiv.
258. Frazer had argued that totem ceremonies should be 'of high interest to the economist, since they served practical as well as emotional purposes, furnishing the oldest example of a systematic division of labor amongst the members of a community'; Frazer, 'On some ceremonies', op. cit. (41), 113.
259. And see B. Malinowski, 'The economic aspects of the Intichiuma Ceremonies' (1912), in The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski (ed. R. Thornton and P. Skalník, tr. L. Krzyzanowski), Cambridge, 1993, 209-27.
260. Malinowski, The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski, op. cit. (26), 133.
261. Baldwin Spencer to W. E. Roth, 30 January 1903, SP, Box 1A. As the protector of Aborigines for Queensland, Roth was able to devote considerable time to anthropological enquiry.
262. Mulvaney and Calaby, op. cit. (3), 169.
263. Radcliffe-Brown and his students endorsed some of Spencer and Gillen's findings and criticized others. See e.g. W. L. Warner, 'Kinship morphology of forty-one north Australian tribes', American Anthropologist (1933), NS, 35, 63-86;
264. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, 'The social organization of Australian tribes', Oceania (1930), 1, 34-63.
265. See e.g. N. Peterson, 'Totemism yesterday: sentiment and local organisation among the Australian Aborigines', Man (1972), NS, 7, 12-32;
266. J. Morton, 'The effectiveness of totemism: "increase ritual" and resource control in central Australia', Man (1987), NS, 22, 453-74.
267. Spencer and Gillen, Man, op. cit. (1), p. vii.
268. See Spencer to Frazer, 7 June 1903, in Marett and Penniman, Man, op. cit. (24), 78.
269. L. Fison to E. B. Tylor, 17 August 1883, in transcripts of Fison's letters to Tylor (subsequently FL), Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies, Canberra (subsequently AIATSIS), MS 2567;
270. Fison here refers to Henry Sumner Maine, but he and Howitt were given to similar complaints about both Australian observers and British armchair scholars. See e.g. Fison to A. W. Howitt, 29 August (n.d., but possibly 1906), HPV;
271. Fison to Tylor, 23 August 1882, FL, AIATSIS, MS 2567.
272. Explaining why they dedicated Native Tribes to Fison and Howitt, Spencer and Gillen said that their mentors had been 'the first to really understand the Australian native', while Fison and Howitt said that Spencer and Gillen had 'reached the same conclusions as we did'. See Spencer to Howitt, 23 February 1898, HPV;
273. A.W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, London, 1904, p. ix.
274. Spencer and Gillen measured indigenes' physical attributes, calculating both typical attributes and variations about the mean. They noted Aborigines' highly cultivated sensory skills, useful in surviving in a wild environment, as well as their tolerance for stimuli (both physical and emotional) that were painful for white men. See Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, op. cit. (1), 25, 37-46, 53, 130, 483, 510, 604.
275. See e.g. Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, op. cit. (1), 11;
276. Fison to Tylor, 23 August 1882, op. cit. (136).
277. R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria with Notes Relating to the Habits of the Natives of Other Parts of Australia and Tasmania. Compiled from various sources for the Government of Victoria, 2 vols., Melbourne, 1878, i, p. liv. Howitt was among Brough Smyth's sources.
278. A. W. Howitt, 'On the origin of the Aborigines of Tasmania and Australia', Presidential address, Section F, Ethnology and Anthropology, Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Seventh Meeting, Sydney, 1898, Sydney, 1898, 723-58, quote on 747.
279. Fison to Tylor, 26 January 1883, FL, AIATSIS, MS 2567.
280. Spencer and Gillen, Fison to Tylor, 26 January 1883, op. cit. (1), 26;
281. Gillen to Spencer, 13 May 1898, in 'My Dear Spencer': The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer (ed. J. Mulvaney, H. Morphy and A. Petch), Melbourne, 1997, 219.
282. And see B. Spencer, president, 'Inaugural address', Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Fifteenth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Hobart Meeting [actually held in Melbourne], January 1921, Melbourne, 1921, pp. liii-lxxxix, lxvi;
283. for Spencer the multiplicity of Aboriginal languages was the telling example of how the cultures of local groups could speedily diverge sharply from one another, a process that began with geographical isolation. See Spencer and Gillen, Report of the Fifteenth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Hobart Meeting, op. cit. (1), 12-15.
284. As an undergraduate, Spencer attended E. B. Tylor's lectures, and Spencer and Gillen's admiration for Aborigines' practical skills may be the strongest evidence of Tylor's influence on their perceptions. Tylor observed that indigenes everywhere gained practical knowledge through 'observations' and 'trial by experiment', see his Anthropology, 2 vols., New Delhi, 2001 (facsimile of the 1881 edition), ii, 84-5.
285. See e.g. L. H. Morgan, Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines, Volume 4 of Contributions to North American Ethnology, printed by the Government Printing Office for the Department of the Interior, US Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, Washington, 1881.
286. A. W. Howitt, draft manuscript, 1908, in Howitt Papers, AIATSIS, MS 69, Box 2.
287. Spencer and Gillen, Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines, Volume 4 of Contributions to North American Ethnology, op. cit. (1), 46; and see 56, 96-100, 196, 381.
288. Fison to Tylor, 17 August 1879, in FL, AIATSIS, MS 2567;
289. Spencer and Gillen, Fison to Tylor, 17 August 1879, op. cit. (1), 108.
290. Howitt, Fison to Tylor, 17 August 1879, op. cit. (32), 101.
291. Spencer and Gillen, Fison to Tylor, 17 August 1879, op. cit. (1), 8, 31.
292. See e.g. B. Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia, p. xi;
293. Hiatt, Rights for Aborigines, op. cit. (117), 18, 26, 34;
294. Peterson, Rights for Aborigines, op. cit. (133), 24-5.
295. Crooke, quoted in Kuklick, Rights for Aborigines, op. cit. (111), 259.
296. For an example of a work revealing concern about the unfortunate consequences of indigenes' population decline see W. H. R. Rivers (ed.), Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia, Cambridge, 1922.
297. My generalizations about the ideology of white settler societies are documented in a range of studies: Brantlinger, Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia, op. cit. (31);
298. H. Kuklick, 'Contested monuments: the politics of archeology in Southern Africa', in Colonial Situations (ed. G. W. Stocking, Jr.), Madison, WI, (1991), 135-69;
299. McGregor, Colonial Situations, op. cit. (34);
300. M. Sommer, 'Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives: William Sollas's (1849-1936) anthropology from disappointed bridge to trunkless tree and the instrumentalisation of racial conflict', Journal of the History of Biology (2005), 38, 327-65;
301. B. Trigger, 'Archaeology and the image of the American Indian' (1980), in idem, Artifacts and Ideas: Essays in Archaeology, New Brunswick, 2003, 45-66;
302. D. S. Trigger, 'Introduction: disputed territories: land, culture and identity', in Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity (ed. D. S. Trigger), Hong Kong, 2003, 1-27.
303. Howitt, Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity, op. cit. (141), 753.
304. J. W. Gregory, 'The antiquity of man in Victoria', Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria (subsequently PRSV) (1904), NS, 17, 1, 120-44, 123 and 133, in which Gregory relies on Spencer's authority;
305. B. Spencer, 'The origin of cuts on bones of Australian extinct mammals', PRSV (1911), NS, 24, 1, 92-123.
306. Spencer's working relationship with Gregory was brokered by his long-standing professional supporter E. Ray Lankester (whose high opinion of Spencer was formed when he served as an examiner of Spencer's work for his BA degree, and who ultimately served to help Spencer secure his Melbourne post, writing one of Spencer's recommendation letters). On Spencer and Lankester's relationship see Mulvaney and Calaby, PRSV, op. cit. (3), 32-3, 45-6.
307. For Lankester's prompting of Spencer and Gregory's scientific cooperation see Lankester to Spencer, 15 October 1899, SP, Box 1.
308. Gregory, Lankester to Spencer, 15 October 1899, op. cit. (153), 141.
309. L. W. G. Bücher, 'An investigation of fifty-two Tasmanian crania by Klaatsch's craniotrigonometrical methods', PRSV (1912), NS, 25, 1, 122-34.
310. Rivers, PRSV, op. cit. (110);
311. Spencer, 'Inaugural address', PRSV, op. cit. (143), p. lxxxi.
312. Spencer and Gillen, PRSV, op. cit. (2), 16;
313. Spencer and Gillen, PRSV, op. cit. (1), 117, 596;
314. Spencer, 'Inaugural address', op. cit. (143), pp. lxvii, lxxiii.
315. See also Spencer and Gillen, 'Inaugural address', op. cit. (1), 1-9, 575, 587-8.
316. Spencer and Gillen, 'Inaugural address', op. cit. (9), i, 123, 188-9; ii, 307-8.
317. On fears that Europeans would degenerate in Australia see R. White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980, St Leonards, NSW, 70-1.
318. See also William Lowe, 'The tropics and pigment: the physical properties of pigment and its physiological importance in the protection of living organisms, especially man', PRSV (1911), NS, 24, 2, 353-66.
319. For example, in one notable instance, in 1891, Gillen attempted to hold a white policeman liable for the murder of an Aborigine; Mulvaney, PRSV, op. cit. (5), 6-7.
320. Spencer quoted in Mulvaney and Calaby, PRSV, op. cit. (3), 284, and see also 271, 280-9;
321. Spencer, 'Inaugural address', PRSV, op. cit. (143), p. lxxxi.
322. F. Wood Jones, Australia's Vanishing Race, Sydney, 1934, 19, 29, 6, 39, 40.
323. As Tim Rouse sensibly suggests, a policy of 'self-determination' for Aborigines today should admit the possibilities that some might prefer to sustain their traditional lifeways, while others might 'choose to take their chances in towns and cities, making use of mainstream institutions'; see T. Rouse, Indigenous Futures, Sydney, 2002, 6.
324. Spencer, Indigenous Futures, op. cit. (4), i, p. x.
325. See Lukes, Indigenous Futures, op. cit. (76), 77.