Historian Benjamin Wurgaft and anthropologist Merry White’s Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture features no images produced by a food stylist; nor does it include instructions about how to make any dish. Instead, the authors interweave stories and analyses of food — its production, its preparation and the meanings people attach to eating — to provide a fascinating cultural and historical overview.

People hunted and gathered food for thousands of years before they developed systems of agricultural subsistence. Wurgaft and White concentrate on how food was produced after agriculture’s arrival, noting the debates that rage in archaeology about its origins. Did people invent cultivation, drawing on observations of the reproductive cycles of animals and plants? Or did climatic change foster the conditions for sedentary settlements that required more intense food production?

Technological changes, migration and population pressure all contributed, and it is probably impossible to isolate any specific causal chain. But whatever the essential conditions were, the results were transformative — of landscapes, ecologies, work, crops, foods and ways of eating.

Wurgaft and White begin by exploring how the domestication of plants and animals spread across world. Drawing on James Scott’s historical analysis of state formation, they dismiss the notion of simple linear progress from nomadic barbarism to settled civilisation. Pastoral nomadism and sedentary farming coexisted for millennia. But they note that farming does appear to “encourage a particular style of cooperative work and social life” and that the material qualities of grain — it can be stored, transported and exchanged for other goods — “aided the rise of the state.” Wheat, rice and corn fed courts, armies and bureaucrats.

The relationship between imperialism and agriculture is complex and the authors succinctly summarise debates about their interaction. Roman and Persian empires, for instance, were built on the wheat that flourished in the regions they originally occupied. The Han Chinese empire was based on rice, and — as the authors write — “no other civilisation, until the rise of industrial agriculture in modernity, reached the same heights of agricultural productivity.” Deforestation, terracing and irrigation, nitrogenous fertilising and soil modification enabled intensification on a grand scale.

All along, productivity and population growth were interacting with changes in agricultural practices and cooking techniques. Deforestation, for example, meant that food preparation had to be quick in order to use a minimum amount of fuel; hence, the invention of the wok and a cuisine using small, thinly sliced meat and vegetables.

As Wurgaft and White observe, we know much more about the dining habits of the wealthy than we do of the poor. The feasts of Roman emperors, medieval courts and aristocratic households were far more likely to be documented than the everyday meals of peasants. Moreover, they were more varied and abundant. Descriptions of patrician feasts, from the Romans to the British Edwardians, reveal an astonishing range of meats, imported fruits and beverages. Patterns of consumption have always reflected economic and social status, with bread and cakes made from fine, white flour exclusively for the rich, and coarse grains providing bread and porridges for the majority. When famines strike, the poor starve.

The history of changing food and eating habits is the history of the movement of people, plants and animals across continents and between nations. During the Middle Ages, people from northern Europe encountered new foods as they waged wars and made pilgrimages. Conquerors brought back new ingredients and slaves who knew how to prepare them; pilgrims returned with a taste for “foreign” dishes and drinks. The use of rare and exotic ingredients, then as now, was indicative of wealth, social status and worldly sophistication. Spices, imported from China, India and the Middle East, were used not only to preserve food but also to display social status and cultural capital.

But the most dramatic transformation of European and Asian cuisines occurred during the “Columbian exchange” that followed the conquest and colonisation of the Americas. Historian Alfred Crosby, who coined the term in his 1972 book on the subject, revealed the complexity and extent of transatlantic exchange and the magnitude of its impact across the globe. Wurgaft and White endorse his view that this constituted a “tectonic shift” in agriculture, staple foods, national cuisines and eating habits.

Plants and foodstuffs now associated with Mediterranean cuisines, such as tomatoes, capsicums and corn, were initially treated with suspicion. Potatoes — disparaged as suitable only for peasants and their animals — were embraced by the bourgeoisie after cooks discovered their delicious flavour when combined with cream and butter. It is difficult to think of Italian food without tomatoes and astonishing to imagine the foods of Korea, India and other Asian countries without chillies.

People and plants flowed in both directions. Sugar, originally from India, was an established crop but a luxury foodstuff in Spain by the sixteenth century. Until the eighteenth century, honey remained the main culinary sweetener for rich and poor throughout Europe; then, with colonisation and the exploitation of African slave labour, sugarcane plantations flourished in the Caribbean.

English sweet puddings, German cakes, Belgian chocolate and French patisserie, all relatively recent inventions, evolved in the context of the Atlantic slave trade. Rice varieties from West Africa were introduced to feed slaves in the Caribbean and Central America, and were only gradually replaced by Asian varieties a century later. Peanuts arrived in Northern Africa from Peru and Bolivia, and were incorporated into many regional African cuisines. Creole cuisines in the southern states of America were dominated by rice and Old World vegetables, especially okra.

Ways of Eating, a broadbrush history written for a general readership, is full of fascinating stories. Vignettes interspersed between chapters describe specific food producers, foodstuffs, culinary techniques and cultural ideas about food. White, recounting a visit to a coffee plantation in Panama where the highly prized gesha beans are produced, compares her tour to a hajj, not only a signal of “a coffee person’s seriousness of intent” but also a means of gaining esoteric knowledge and status in the world of coffee connoisseurs. Gesha coffee’s apparently unique flavour ranges “from a tea-like smokiness to something like grapefruit peel.”

Novelty, rarity and heritage varieties continue to lure the gourmet and the chef. Pepper and cinnamon, once rare commodities, are now so common as to be mundane. Even so, spice’s exotic appeal persists, and for the discerning consumer Tellicherry pepper from Malabar or Kampot pepper from Cambodia are more prestigious than common black pepper, their use in a recipe lending cachet to dish and chef.

The emphasis on authenticity or the exact replication of a dish from a region or a restaurant menu is a recent phenomenon. White suggests that those who denigrate dishes that don’t match some culinary Platonic ideal make “a fetish of the social and environmental conditions that make an ingredient or dish possible.” Food has fashions and recipes have always depended on the availability of ingredients as well as the skill and imagination of cooks.

In fact, all “national” cuisines have adopted novel foreign ingredients and adapted recipes to local tastes. Japanese Hawaiians invented Spam sushi. After Senegalese soldiers in the French colonial army developed a taste for nem, sold as street food in Hanoi, some returned home with Vietnamese wives whose adaptations of the recipes using local ingredients naturalised these fried rolls. Senegalese nem are different from the Vietnamese originals — but they are not ersatz, just distinctive. The same can be said of Japanese croissants or Australian gelato. White and Wurgaft are clearly connoisseurs of food, but their book challenges ideas about refined taste, authenticity and tradition.

Colonisation, commoditisation, industrialisation and globalisation have transformed diets at an unprecedented rate. Rare and exotic ingredients that were formerly delicacies for the wealthy can now be found on supermarket shelves. Food has always provided ways of expressing cultural identity, regional differences, degrees of sophistication and economic status. Wurgaft and White trace these processes over centuries and across the globe. Their conclusions are both celebratory and thought-provoking.

Agriculture has brought humans extraordinary benefits, but it has also resulted in disastrous depletion of soils and environmental devastation. Many foods arrive in our homes with a heavy carbon footprint. The most common foods touted as “fair trade” are coffee, bananas, tea and cocoa — all grown in countries where many people, including growers, continue to live in poverty. There are ironies and paradoxes in contemporary ways of eating, and the combined forces of history and anthropology are excellent ways of thinking about them. •

Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture
By Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White | University of California Press | $45.95 | 256 pages

The post Making a meal of it appeared first on Inside Story.

In our times Indigenous people live in nation-states in which sovereignty, territory and laws are defined and maintained by the descendants of the settlers who invaded and conquered the original inhabitants. Although the terminology used to describe them has shifted from “Natives” to “Aborigines” to “Aboriginals” to “Indigenous” and “First Nations People,” the colonisers have consistently disregarded their primal relationship to land. In many countries, indigeneity is increasingly defined in terms that constrain membership of specific social groups and limit the territory Indigenous people can claim.

Taiwan has experienced successive waves of colonisation over several centuries. The original inhabitants were Austronesians, who were themselves the original colonisers of the Pacific region. They now constitute about 3 per cent of Taiwan’s total population. Like their counterparts in Canada and Australia, they feel the dispossession of their land deeply.

As in other nations where settlers imposed state control over land, indigeneity is highly politicised. Indigenous Taiwanese are entitled to six representatives in parliament but remain disadvantaged socially and economically. They have higher unemployment, they are poorer and their life expectancy is lower. They are culturally marginalised by the dominant Han Taiwanese population and experience discrimination in education and employment.

Using standard human development statistics, Simon notes that the Taiwanese Indigenous population is much better off than Canadian First Nations people. (Had he used Australian statistics, the gap would be much greater.) Simon documents the current resurgence of indigeneity as a political and cultural issue in the context of the Taiwanese government developing policies of recognition.

Simon’s ethnography focuses on two of Taiwan’s Indigenous groups, the Sediq and the Truku, mountain people who were once subsistence farmers and hunters. They grew millet and reared pigs, the latter to be used mainly in marriage, propitiation, the celebration of significant events and other rituals. Simons outlines the history in some detail and discusses the effects of successive colonists (Chinese and Japanese) on Indigenous lives.

The Sediq and Truku cosmologies and ways of life drew no basic distinction between “culture” and “nature.” Gaya, the concept that dominates their lives, encompasses ideas of the sacred, ancestral law, moral relations between people and their environment, and cultural values. It can also simply mean a “mode of life.”

Simon explores Gaya in five “ethnographic reflections,” each one devoted to a specific cultural concept or practice. He begins with Samat, the forest animals hunted by Sediq and Truku men, exploring the relationships between humans and their prey as well as the accumulated effects of colonial exploitation of forest resources. Hunting is a masculine activity and accomplishment, making it a contentious issue for contemporary Sediq and Truku men who resent and resist government restrictions on this activity. But for centuries hunting prowess also involved headhunting and, as Simon explains, this too was inspired by Gaya.

Although headhunting was outlawed by the Japanese in the late nineteenth century, the practice continued for decades, rendered easier by the introduction of guns. Simon depends on early Japanese sources for his descriptions, noting similarities to other Austronesian cultures. As in Borneo and some parts of the Solomon Islands, the taking of heads was a means of attaining masculine adulthood and increasing the strength or power of one’s group. Heads were trophies taken in vengeance, but once displayed they were incorporated as ancestors, welcomed into the village and offered food and drink. Women danced before them and sang songs to them.

In the chapter on “Heart,” Simon explores the moral and political domains of Indigenous life. As in many cultures, the heart is the metaphorical locus of interpersonal relationships and emotional states. Personal trust is a major factor in political allegiance. Prior to colonial governments’ insistence on appointing leaders for bureaucratic purposes, Truku and Sediq were egalitarian, with leadership status earned rather than inherited. Men became leaders because of their generosity, courage and capacity to influence people.

These “Big Man”–based forms of political organisation have been described for other Pacific Austronesian societies. Given the prevalence of local feuding and the taking of heads, it is unlikely that these societies are, or were ever, more democratic or peaceful than other political systems where conflicts often escalated into violence.

As evidence of the persistence of Gaya, Simon stresses the ethical and moral principles that people appeal to in contemporary life. In many respects, though, these virtues — generosity, goodness and loyalty­ — are consonant with those in most cultures. Given that Truku and Sediq people are now almost all practising Presbyterians or Roman Catholics, and have been for decades, they themselves appear to have recognised similarities between Gaya and Christianity. But they have abandoned almost all the rituals associated with their old religion: while they still kill pigs on special occasions, now the religious dimensions of the practice “vary greatly according to community, household, and even individual preferences,” says Simon, adding: “Some families invite the Presbyterian pastor to pray before the pigs are slaughtered.”

Simon doesn’t explore such a radical transformation of practices once linked to ancestor worship, instead glossing it as part of the “flow and ebb of religious practices.” Sometimes he dismisses an Indigenous explanation, presumably because it is in some way at odds with his own understanding. Analysing the meaning of headhunting, for instance, he reports that “people told [him] that their ancestors believed that the heads held energy,” but premises that observation by saying “Perhaps because they have read it in ethnographies.”

This is a complicated book. In many respects it is a conventional ethnography, documenting and describing the lifeworld of Indigenous Taiwanese mountain people. Simon has lived and studied the people of whom he writes for almost two decades and has a clear command of the languages they speak.

It is also an exercise in anthropological reflexivity, with Simon describing his relationships with Sediq and Truku individuals, his data collection methods, his experiences as part of their communities and the knowledge he has gained during more than a decade of fieldwork. As a Canadian, he compares and contrasts Indigenous knowledge and politics in Taiwan with those of his home country.

Simon is also concerned to “decolonise the way in which we do ethnography, putting local, Indigenous ontologies at the heart of the reflection and writing.” This entails embracing Sediq and Truku ways of experiencing and understanding the world by eschewing distinctions between nature and culture. It means accepting other, alien forms of knowledge as true — or at least as true as Western, scientific understanding of the material world. Ideas and concepts that appear “irrational,” or simply fanciful to a Western observer must be accepted as ontological truths: thus, ghosts, spirits and omens are manifestly real because Indigenous people experience them as such.

This analytical move — “the ontological turn” — has been a subject of debate within anthropology for decades. In many respects it is simply an extreme form of relativism; but it is also an attempt at intellectual restitution, refusing to relegate indigenous knowledge to “belief systems.” It also demands a rather different interpretation of the meaning of the word “ontology” from that used in philosophy, where it refers to the philosophical discourse about “being” and “existence.”

Within anthropology it has taken on the meanings Simon gives it when he refers to “a mode of living” or “the concepts that people use to understand their existence.” Although he distances himself from the term “culture,” he uses the term “ontology” in ways that make it synonymous with “culture” or “cosmology,” at least as these terms are commonly understood. His insistence on Gaya’s continuing grip on Indigenous ontology invokes a sort of ethnic essentialism at odds with the evidence of historical, social and cultural changes that challenge or repudiate the concepts or practices that inform it. As in the majority of societies where they have been subjected to colonial appropriation and mass settlement, the lives of Indigenous people have been transformed and so has the world they inhabit.

Truku and Sediq people, like other Indigenous people, are engaged in a politicised cultural resurgence that aims to reclaim their identity and culture. As Simon’s ethnography reveals, this resurgence is constrained and articulated in terms of an indigeneity defined by the state.

Swathes of land have become the Taroko National Park, where hunting is banned. People work in the local Asia Cement factory and as day labourers. They perform aspects of their cultural identity for a thriving tourist trade. Much of their social life revolves around their churches. They attend schools and learn Chinese. Some go to universities and even become anthropologists. The majority vote for the conservative Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, rejecting the Democratic Progressive Party — which would appear to have policies more protective of Indigenous rights — on the grounds that the KMT manages the economy more effectively.

Given the abundant evidence of dramatic social change over centuries of successive colonisation, Simon’s insistence on continuity and the persistence of radical ontological difference is ultimately distracting and unconvincing. Certainly Sediq and Truku people emerge from this study as “truly human,” but not quite in the way its author proclaims. •

Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa
By Scott E. Simon | University of Toronto Press | C$38.95 | 388 pages

The post Being human appeared first on Inside Story.

A large room downstairs housed Oceanic artefacts, including a carved wooden child’s coffin that especially struck me. Nearby, a diorama featured an Australian Aboriginal family: these were Australia’s Other People, carefully designed and composed to convey life in the precolonial era, frozen in time and space.

Melbourne’s museum was an eminently nineteenth-century institution, its tone and approach echoing counterparts in Britain, Europe and the United States of America. These museums are the subject of anthropologist Adam Kuper’s new book, The Museum of Other People, a bracingly idiosyncratic account of the materials they have collected and the controversies they have fuelled.

Kuper opens by tracing the history of ethnological and anthropological museums, documenting their colonial origins and the intellectual debates they have generated. The French were the pioneers, establishing the first public museums after the revolution to display objects seized from aristocrats’ palaces. The king’s large-scale cabinet des médailles, “a sort of royal attic, crammed to overflowing with a jumble of ancient and exotic artefacts,” was transferred to the Royal Library in 1795, joining a multitude of other artefacts, sculptures and antiquities.

When Edme-François Jomard began work curating the cabinet materials in 1828, his ambitious plan for an ethnographic museum began to take shape. It was to be a collection that would be “scientific,” revealing “the history of the physical man and the moral man.” Didactic and teleological, it would reflect human progress and the “degree of civilisation” attained by people elsewhere in the world, with Paris as the zenith.

Jomard and his contemporaries were aware of the dramatic changes being wrought in previously isolated places by colonialism, trade and interaction with Europeans. His ideas about collections came to be known as “salvage anthropology” — an effort to preserve the items made prior to colonial intervention in non-European people’s lives.

Organising and presenting Other People’s artefacts in a museum posed the curatorial questions that dominate Kuper’s historical narrative. Jomard’s view, still relevant, was that ethnographic items should be arranged by their function in order to reveal how people outside Europe met the need for shelter, food, defence and other fundamentals. Geography was irrelevant for Jomard because the assemblages themselves rendered visible humanity’s trajectory from primitive to civilised.

Debates about taxonomy, categorisation and the heuristics of museum exhibitions have raged ever since. A competing schema was advanced by Philipp Franz Balthasar von Siebold, “a medical doctor, cosmopolitan adventurer and dealer in oriental antiquities,” when he made his case for an ethnographic museum in Leiden. He too stressed the need to exhibit artefacts that revealed human advancement from “savagery” to civilisation, but insisted that the taxonomic principle should be geographical, involving “the practical study of peoples” rather than the juxtaposition of items of similar genres from diverse cultures.

Siebold’s argument was complicated by its coincidence with debates about evolution and the emergence of theories of social change, some of them analogues of Darwinian ideas of species evolution in the natural world.

The British Museum’s ethnographic collection, meanwhile, began with the donation of a large, miscellaneous collection of artefacts by Sir Hans Sloane, who had made his fortune using slaves on his Jamaican plantations and treating wealthy patients in London. The collection was boosted by items brought back by sea captains, explorers and travellers; Joseph Banks oversaw the display of material gathered during James Cook’s Pacific voyages in the “Otaheiti or South Sea Room,” later adding items from West Africa, the Arctic, Mexico and Australia.

For many years ethnographic material was housed with the museum’s natural history collection. Between 1970 and 1997 a dedicated ethnographic museum, the Museum of Mankind, was curated by qualified anthropologists, its exhibitions stressing the social and historical contexts of items usually from a specific region. But the department was closed by the new director when the ethnology department moved back to the main building in Bloomsbury. Kuper deplores this decision and maintains that lumping all the ethnographic material together was a retrograde step, a reassertion of simplistic Enlightenment notions of human progress.

Many of the prestigious collections in European, American and British museums include items that were unequivocally war booty. Napoleon Bonaparte “elevated looting to a patriotic duty,” says Kuper, parading seized treasures through Paris, and items from campaigns in Italy and Egypt remain in French museums to this day. The British Museum houses hundreds of items from the Summer Palace of the Qing Dynasty, looted and razed in 1860, as well as Benin bronzes carried off by the British troops who defeated the king of Edo (now part of Nigeria) in 1897.

The appropriation of property was perceived as a natural right. Conquest and pillage characterised colonial wars, and the victors took home the spoils. Some of them, but by no means all, ended up in museums — the Parthenon marbles being but one controversial example. Colonial administrators, missionaries and traders often donated items they had been given, or had taken possession of, in contexts that are now judged unethical.

In fact, the colonial origins of major collections colour perceptions to the point where it is wrongly assumed that most were misappropriated. When a member of the panel of experts advising the Humboldt Forum in Berlin resigned in 2018 because of delays in determining provenance, she said she wanted to know “how much blood is dripping from a work of art.” In fact, the majority of items in European museums were bought or exchanged in arrangements that suited both parties.

By far the most controversial items in these museums’ collections are human skeletons and body parts. The rationales for their initial collection varied, but medical science, archaeological research and the ethnological study of racial variation account for most of the vast numbers of bones that museums and universities still hold. Displays of bizarre or grotesque items — shrunken heads and scalps, for example — were drawcards that confirmed racist ideas about the barbarity of the colonised. Graves were desecrated, mortuaries raided and macabre installations of skulls set up to illustrate human diversity and evolution.

As recently as 1993 Vienna’s ethnographic museum displayed skulls in a sequence that reflected Nazi racial “science” — beginning with australopithecine, progressing through chimpanzees to “Bushman,” and implying that the latter were less “evolved” as humans than homo sapiens from Europe. Although the exhibition was removed after protests, many museums have large numbers of human bones in storage. They now pose serious dilemmas for museum curators, for indigenous people whose ancestors’ remains were taken, and for governments.

Kuper examines the complex moral and practical problems of restitution and repatriation. Few would oppose the return of bones and human remains for respectful burial, but the question isn’t straightforward. Some cultures favour cremation or exposure, and some have paid no respect at all to ancestral remains. In many cultures, in fact, burial was introduced by colonial administrations (often on grounds of hygiene) and reinforced by missionaries. To whom should trophy skulls by returned? To those who killed and decapitated their enemy, then decorated or shrunk them? To the vanquished? How would they be identified?

Kuper doesn’t shy away from contentious issues. He is alert to the ironies that pervade claims of provenance, identification, reclamation and protection. Items collected as examples of “primitive” culture, such as the masks of Dogon in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are now considered “works of art” and command high prices in international auctions. In the first decade of the twentieth century, French artists, including Picasso, Vlaminck and Gauguin, entranced by carved masks from Africa and Oceania, enthusiastically embraced “Primitivisme” as a way of distinguishing themselves from their bourgeois forebears. Thus, paradoxically, the primitive became synonymous with modernism.

The ambiguous relationship between “art” and the artefacts made by non-Europeans continued in France with the construction of the Musée du Quai Branly — Jacques Chirac, which now houses treasures previously held by the Musée de L’Homme and other French ethnographic museums. The anthropologist Maurice Godelier, a member of the planning committee, proposed that it should be a “postcolonial museum that set artefacts in the context of their production,” but that view was rejected in favour of displays that emphasised aesthetic qualities.

Similarly, the Humboldt Forum in Germany and the National Museum of Denmark abandoned ethnographic display for twenty-first-century European aestheticisation. But Kuper is dismissive of the art/artefact distinction: “So what is primitive art? The stuff that isn’t in a museum of anthropology.”

Assumptions about the heritage or cultural value of artefacts to contemporary descendants are similarly fraught. Muslim generals from northern Nigeria, who disliked pagan antiquities, deprived museums of funding. Some former colonies lack buildings or storage space, and their governments are reluctant to fund museums. Many people in Africa and the Pacific are devout evangelical Christians who regard carved totems or statues as evidence of satanic worship in their benighted past.

In 1991 when I showed photos of Papua New Guinean artefacts held in the British Museum to the descendants of their producers in Misima, people were delighted. They marvelled that they still existed. When I asked whether they wanted them back, there was general agreement that if they were returned they would deteriorate and be eaten by termites. They were happy for them to be kept safe in England, and proud that the craftsmanship of their forebears could be seen by others. In 2013, though, the speaker in Papua New Guinea’s parliament ordered the destruction of the ten-metre totem pole and nineteen masks that decorated its Grand Hall on the grounds that they were “ungodly.”

When the Smithsonian decided to revamp its African gallery, it set up an advisory committee comprising Americans of African descent, Africans and scholars of Africa. Members had such major disagreements about which image of Africa should be projected that four separate sections were set up to accommodate them.

The colonial origins of ethnographic museums ensure they can be variously interpreted as the patrimony of the victorious nations, the lost cultural heritage of the colonised or, more neutrally, evidence of human diversity, ingenuity and achievement. Kuper quotes French president Emmanuel Macron’s response to the question of repatriation: “African heritage cannot be held prisoner by European museums.” But curators of French museums were more cautious: Stéphane Martin, director of the Musée du Quai Branly, countered by saying that “museums should not be held hostage to the painful history of colonialism.” Certainly, like statues honouring slave traders and colonial dignitaries, museums bear heavy symbolic loads.

Returning artefacts to their places of origin is also beset by more practical problems. Museums in many postcolonial states have been robbed, sometimes by those who are responsible for the collections. Rightful owners are not always clearly identifiable: small kingdoms have been subsumed into larger nations, for example, and are now disenfranchised minorities. Kuper describes how Nigerian politicians “routinely visited the national museum” to select gifts for foreign dignitaries. In the 1970s, just as the director of antiquities was mounting his case for the return of Benin bronzes, the head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, presented Queen Elizabeth with one such object from the national museum, which now resides in Windsor Castle.

At the same time, indigenous people in the United States, Canada and Australia remain adamant that many items in museums should be returned and placed under their custodianship. As postcolonial research increasingly acknowledges and documents European invasions, massacres, suppression of cultures, and destruction of the worlds that inspired art and technology, so museum holdings gain symbolic political meaning. When so much has been destroyed, objects in museums are both the remnants and the tangible representations of a culture that once thrived. In reclaiming them, indigenous people are asserting their continued integrity and identity.

Kuper sympathises with museums’ predicaments. Drawing on the observations of curators of major museums in Europe and the United States in interviews and other sources, he illuminates the immense problems surrounding exhibitions.

Museums rarely display even 10 per cent of their holdings. Geography, chronology, function and material still inform most exhibitions and sometimes unintentionally reinforce archaic ideologies of social evolution. Anthropologists and archaeologists have long abandoned terms such as “primitive” and “savage,” and race is now considered a social construct, but notions of racial essentialism and social evolution are deeply entrenched in the public consciousness. As the furore surrounding Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu demonstrated, the idea that hunting and gathering is “inferior” and less “civilised” than farming pervades Australia’s understanding of its Indigenous people. These ideas die hard.

Impressive in its scholarly breadth, The Museum of Other People is written for a general reader, full of stories, arguments and thought-provoking commentary. In its final sections, which deal with contemporary museums, Kuper abandons impartiality and presents his opinions vigorously. He defends anthropological expertise and favours exhibitions that concentrate on material from specific, regionally defined cultures. He is sceptical about the reliance on indigenous knowledge as the primary basis for identification and repatriation. On the issue of “scholarship vs. insider knowledge” he asks: “Can only the Native speak with authority about the Native? And if so, which Native should be elected to speak?” He offers several examples where indigenous expertise has proven false, such as Huichol shamans’ misidentification of artefacts from Mexico held in the Berlin ethnographic museum.

Kuper is also highly critical of the epistemic relativism that characterises approaches by academics and activists who argue for the decolonisation of knowledge. He remains committed to the necessity of anthropological curation and scathingly dismisses the uncritical embrace of identity politics in exhibitions. He concludes with a plea for a “cosmopolitan museum” that “will make room for challenging perspectives and contrasting points of view, so long as these are backed by research rather than appeals to mystical insight or to the authority of identity.”

Kuper’s ideal museum strikes me as an impossibility. Even as curators strive to divest their displays of colonial representations and introduce comparisons and diversity, museums remain imbued with their history. Thinking back to my childhood experiences in the old Melbourne Museum, I wonder about that child’s coffin. How had it been obtained? Was it even a coffin? Now, as an anthropologist, I suspect that it was simply a storage container, for food or precious objects. Polynesians wrapped bodies in mats for burial.

Did I simply imagine it was a coffin? If so, my childish attribution testified to the sorts of things that often characterised museum collections — items redolent of the macabre, the alien and the dead. Shrunken heads, sarcophagi, mummies and bones.

Contemporary museum exhibitions already incorporate many of the ideas that Kuper presents as “cosmopolitan.” Bones and shrunken heads have been consigned to storage facilities or sent home. But the political battles continue over restitution, and over the decolonisation of places that once attested to distinctions between “Other People” and “Civilised People.” •

The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions
By Adam Kuper | Profile Books | $49.99 | 432 pages

The post Other people’s objects appeared first on Inside Story.

During a crucial period, though, from the 1880s to the 1930s, imperialism was foundering while the study of its subjects flourished. In her new book, In Search of Us, historian Lucy Moore traces the evolution of anthropology during that time by profiling leading American and European practitioners.

Franz Boas, her opening subject, is often characterised as the “Father of American Anthropology” and his 1883 stint in the Canadian Arctic with Inuit people is considered the first real anthropological fieldwork. Proud and ambitious, he had studied physics, philosophy and geography — his thesis was on colour perception — and fought duels with several students who insulted him.

As a German Jew, Boas’s prospects of academic appointment in his own country were limited. Having collected and curated items for museum display in Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1889 to take up an appointment at Clark University. But his research into children’s growth offended local sensibilities and his stay there proved short-lived. Anxious to remain in America, he worked for a time in museums.

Boas’s early works reflect the nineteenth-century concern with material culture and biological difference. He rejected the notion that physiological variation between human populations indicated racial characteristics that could be hierarchically ranked. He viewed physical racial differences as environmentally determined and modified by cultural factors.

Back in the academy and established as a professor at Columbia University, his focus on culture was more marked, and his students were encouraged to study language, myths, rituals and social behaviour rather than material culture. But the association between museology, ethnology and anthropology endured.

Moore documents the “moral murkiness” of anthropology’s subject matter in this pioneering period. Skulls and skeletons, along with sacred objects, clothing, tools, canoes and weapons, were routinely collected — often by ethically dubious means — for museums in Europe and America.

Among the expeditions was a British voyage to the Torres Strait, led by Alfred Cort Haddon, another of Moore’s main characters, which collected many artefacts now residing in the British Museum. Haddon’s group included the polymath William Rivers, whose training in medicine and psychology was gradually integrated into his research. Rivers’s ideas about anthropology were strongly influenced by his scientific studies and he sought to establish methodologies that were rigorous and holistic in scope.

Unlike many of his successors in British anthropology, Rivers was extremely sensitive to the impact wrought by colonialism, including the spread of venereal disease and alcoholism. He surmised, too, that its psychological effects would render people hopeless and could lead to “racial suicide.”

The idea of salvage ethnography, whereby researchers sought to describe and interpret cultures before they were contaminated by colonial intervention or faded away, dominated anthropological research in the early twentieth century. Most of the anthropologists Moore writes about coupled this concern with a concept of culture as a bounded entity, encompassing kinship systems, languages, cosmologies, rituals and myths.

Just what counted as elements of a “culture” was based on Western ideas of human capacities, though, and the teleological assumption that “civilisation” was a historical culmination. Progress from barbarism necessitated the ideal of a primitive society and the gradual evolution of social and cultural formations that constituted a civilised state.

Edvard Westermarck, a Finn who was as much a philosopher as an anthropologist, produced a book on the history of human marriage before going into the field. His work was inspired by questions of universality and cross-cultural comparison — of customs, moral values and understandings of identity.

In spite of his grandiose intellectual aspirations, Westermarck emerges from Moore’s book as a modest, tolerant and sympathetic scholar. He referred to informants as “teachers,” prefiguring the shifts in nomenclature adopted decades later by a generation of researchers eager to acknowledge their sources as at least their equals. But his academic ambitions were to some extent thwarted by his fieldwork experiences in Morocco. Entranced by the country, the people and the way of life, he might have been the first anthropologist to have “gone troppo.”

Certainly he was the first influential scholar to offer criticisms of disciplinary ethnocentrism after coming to the “somewhat disappointing but not altogether unwholesome conclusion that the belief in extreme superiority of our Western civilisation really only exists in the Western mind itself.”

Moore explores the tensions and contradictions inherent in ethnographic research, constantly alluding to the ambiguities in fieldwork experiences. She invokes the image of a “double-sided mirror,” describing how the anthropologist “sees her own society reflected darkly back at her when she looks at another society and the society she observes begins to see itself through her eyes.”

Participant observation and immersion in others’ daily lives were the research processes that distinguished true ethnographic research from the armchair ethnology of predecessors, which had relied on reports by colonial officials, missionaries and travellers. Just what the people who had an anthropologist living among them thought remains mysterious, although a rich literature of memoirs documents diverse reactions, including amusement, astonishment and grudging tolerance.

All the anthropologists Moore writes about believed they were establishing a scientific discipline with strong theoretical underpinnings and rigorous methodologies. Observing communities and interpreting social and cultural activities were construed as activities that would produce a “science of society” based on human universals.

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski both used functionalism as the theoretical basis for collecting data and making anthropological claims. But where Radcliffe-Brown’s functionalism followed Durkheim’s theories about social solidarity, Malinowski focused on humans’ biological needs, arguing that all social and cultural behaviour could be understood as rational means of fulfilling them.

Both men demanded admiration and each attracted dedicated acolytes (and enemies). Radcliffe-Brown’s fieldwork in Australia between 1910 and 1912 was conducted with Daisy Bates, an enthusiastic amateur ethnologist who spoke several Aboriginal languages and had spent years collecting and recording linguistic and cultural data on many Indigenous groups. She expected a collaborative research relationship, but Radcliffe-Brown clearly considered her a mere “informant.”

Bates publicly denounced Radcliffe-Brown for plagiarising a manuscript she had given him. Her interest in Aboriginal culture was passionate and untutored, her methods those of the meticulous collector rather than the scientist. She saw herself as an advocate. Being a woman with no tertiary education, her achievements were remarkable, but they earned only disdain from Radcliffe-Brown.

Not that his academic peers fared any better. He viewed the work of most American anthropologists, especially women, as intellectually inferior. Thin-skinned when criticised, he was described as “impenetrably wrapped in his own conceit” by Ruth Benedict, the first woman to be president of the American Anthropology Association.

Malinowski inspired similar devotion from his students but emerges as a far more charismatic figure. More significantly for his long-term influence on anthropology, he supported female students, several of whom had illustrious careers. Moore dubs him “The Hero,” and his anthropological writings indicate that he too saw himself in this light — adventurous, trailblazing, courageous.

His posthumously published diaries and letters reveal that he was also hypochondriacal, self-pitying and not quite so enmeshed in the daily life of Trobrianders as he would have had his readers believe. He took with him into the field an arsenal of medicines, including quinine, cocaine, arsenic, purgatives and emetics, as well as an extraordinary quantity of tinned food.

His influence on British anthropology was immense. A century later, his Argonauts of the Western Pacific continues to inspire debate. His postgraduate students included Raymond Firth, Edmund Leach, Hortense Powdermaker, Phyllis Kaberry and Jomo Kenyatta — each of whom went on to become leaders in their areas of study (and, in Kenyatta’s case, prime minister of Kenya).

This was a time when science was revered as the vehicle of social and economic progress. Anthropologists, struggling to present their work as “useful,” argued that their clear and detailed analyses of specific societies could inform government policies and assist in maintaining peaceful relations and promoting economic development.

It was these claims that contributed to anthropology’s reputation as “the handmaid of colonialism.” But, as Moore and many others have pointed out, there is very little evidence that colonial officials drew on anthropologists’ knowledge or insights. More often, they were considered disruptive of racial boundaries and ignored.

Audrey Richards, one of Malinowski’s postgraduate students, was an advocate of utilitarian, applied research who believed Africans should be trained in all disciplines. She saw the need for sustenance as the primary human function, making food provision, understanding of nutrition and methods of cultivation crucial areas of social inquiry.

Richards worked in several African colonies and in the Colonial Office, including a period as founding director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda and time at the African Studies Centre in Cambridge. Richards fostered “a unique period of discourse between high government and intellectuals black and white,” reports Moore, and her reputation as a superb teacher and fieldworker remains unsurpassed.

Although Moore calls her “The Bluestocking,” she emerges as far more down-to-earth, pragmatic and funny than any of the book’s other subjects — perhaps because she was more committed to improving the lives of others than pursuing an illustrious academic career.

Of the three American female scholars included in In Search of Us (the other two are Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict), Zora Neale Hurston is undoubtedly the most lively, creative and intriguing. Extroverted, charming and, after a considerable struggle, highly educated, she is now better known as the author of novels about the lives of poor Black Americans in the American south, including Their Eyes Were Watching God and Barracoon.

Assisted by Franz Boas and his colleague Melville Herskovits, Hurston obtained grants to work in Florida “to gather materials dealing with the traditional beliefs, legends, sayings and customs of blacks and, implicitly, to demonstrate their richness and beauty.” Notwithstanding the obvious prejudice she faced as a Black woman finding academic employment, she distanced herself from the civil rights movement. She was an individualist, libertarian and often contrarian, and opposed all forms of discrimination, affirmative or negative. She aspired to live in a world in which racial distinction was irrelevant.

If Malinowski’s hypochondria and heroism seemed self-dramatising, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s experiences in the interior of Brazil are hair-raisingly dramatic. Like his contemporaries, he sought to study — via survey rather than immersive observation — a tribe “untainted” by colonial interventions. His first expedition was almost anachronistic, as he intended to collect artefacts for the Musée de l’Homme while documenting the culture of Indigenous Amerindians. He traversed the Mato Grosso with “a caravan of fifteen mules, thirty oxen and an unreliable truck… as well as twenty local youths of Portuguese ancestry,” accompanied by his anthropologist wife Dina, a French biologist and a museologist from the Brazilian national museum, whose interests were more archaeological.

The expedition was besieged by insects, including a minuscule bee, the vector for an eye infection that affected everyone except Claude. His wife returned to Paris while he continued his journey westwards for several months. He studied the Nambikwara people, who had “one of the most rudimentary forms of social and political organisation that could be imagined,” and eventually encountered his untainted tribe, only to find that he could not understand them at all and could “make no use” of his observations.

Despondent and disillusioned, he wrote Tristes Tropiques, an account of the expedition and a personal, melancholic reflection on the human condition. It was acclaimed as a literary work. His influential anthropological writings came later, after he had developed his theory of structuralism.

Moore maintains that she is interested in the motivations — personal and intellectual — of the anthropologists about whom she writes, rather than in the critique of their colonial connections. But each individual’s biography necessarily includes descriptions of their political views, and their fieldwork experiences required interactions with, and responses to, colonialism and racial discrimination.

These twelve people emerge as having liberal, sometimes radical attitudes to controversial contemporary issues. All were humanists who emphasised the dignity of the people they described and sought to represent their cultures as complex but comprehensible to Western sensibilities. They embraced a cultural relativism that emphasised human equality. Lévi-Strauss insisted that “civilisation impoverished humanity as much as it enriched it; anthropology might just as easily be termed entropology. All one could hope to do was to spread humanism to all humanity.” Claims of scientific authority were abandoned.

Humanist anthropology insisted on the dignity and value of human beings, regardless of race, gender, colour or national status. Moore argues that the architects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 “were fundamentally influenced by the work done in anthropology over the previous decades.” Cultural relativism ushered in worldviews that confronted old hierarchies and celebrated difference. In the wake of the second world war, the universal “human family” that had been the foundational assumption of anthropology became the basis of the international legal recognition of “equal and inalienable rights.”

Now, however, as Moore acknowledges in her conclusion, this anthropocentric ideal of “the supreme value of the human person” is being challenged by the problems of climate change, environmental destruction and the extinction of animal and plant species, all of which threaten human survival. •

In Search of Us: Adventures in Anthropology
By Lucy Moore | Atlantic Books | $34.99 | 320 pages

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One of Tett’s colleagues once queried the relevance of her doctorate on marriage rituals in Soviet Tajikistan to her work at the FT. Using this as her starting point, she demonstrates how anthropology provided the training and intellectual framework she needed to scrutinise banking, business corporations, factories, international industrial collaboration and technological change.

It’s important to bear in mind that Tett is famous for being one of the few people to predict the global financial crisis — several years before it occurred, in fact, after she became alarmed by the peculiarities of capital markets, derivatives and securitisation. Following her instincts, she began exploring the culture of banking and finance using standard ethnographic methods.

First she learned the language. Banking jargon is replete with terminology that is almost impenetrable to outsiders. CDO (collateralised debt obligation) and CDS (credit default swap) mean little to a person taking out a mortgage, as does the fact that their debts might be “bundled” with others and “sold on” to investors. In her efforts to discern the patterns created by these exchanges of risk and debt, she discovered a clash between what these innovations were meant to achieve for banks — reduced debt — and what appeared to be happening — increased debt. The predicted “market correction” was simply not happening. “Risks,” she wrote, “were building inside this strange, shadowy world.”

Although she was accused of scaremongering and her characterisations of the financial world were heavily criticised, Tett was undeterred. Her methods required the ingenuity that is essential when studying powerful people and their institutions. She attended conferences, interviewed people, read a great deal, and generally immersed herself in the culture. All the while she was maintaining a critical eye, looking out for gaps in the narrative, for contradictions between what people said and how they behaved.

Describing her fieldwork in Anthro-Vision, Tett questions widely held assumptions about the “natural” functioning of market forces and exposes the fanciful reification of money and its exchange. She reveals how bankers and financiers can effect economic change in complex ways, and how and why impending financial disasters can sit comfortably in their blind spots.

To show another way of working within large organisations, Tett describes how Genevieve Bell, now the distinguished professor in ANU’s School of Cybernetics, broke new ground after she joined Intel’s research division in 1998. Bell began by launching a cross-cultural study of consumers in India, Australia and Malaysia, where her band of researchers discovered that people used their technological devices very differently from how their designers envisaged.

Other comparative research into facial recognition and artificial intelligence applications has found striking differences between attitudes, behaviour and use in the United States and China. Americans tend to see them as a form of invasive surveillance that threatens their privacy and personal freedom; Chinese people are generally more comfortable with scrutiny, viewing it as a form of state-endorsed security.

On the urgent topic of how best to manage contagious diseases, Tett argues for cultural sensitivity by telling the story of how Ebola was eventually contained in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. The early assumption was that people’s behaviour would change if they understood how Ebola is transmitted, and attended medical facilities immediately symptoms developed. Quite apart from the difficulty of getting treatment within an underdeveloped healthcare system, Ebola continued to spread because people could not abandon their customs surrounding death and burial. Family gatherings, at which the deceased’s body would be embraced, were a major factor that simple prohibition failed to stop.

Tett describes how Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist at Harvard who heads Partners in Health, had for decades advocated community-based treatment that respects local cultures and social context. The advice he and other anthropologists provided to hospitals and health centres had a dramatic impact on the spread of the disease.

To date, Tett observes, anthropologists have had little influence over how Covid-19 has been managed. Attitudes towards face masks, and ideas about family gatherings and religious rituals vary greatly, yet policies have generally been top-down, informed almost entirely by medical scientists. Technical solutions, such as contact-tracing applications for mobile phones, haven’t prevented people from transmitting infection (although the use of QR codes to track people’s movement, at least in Australia, provides the means for isolating contacts after the event).

Rational measures derived entirely from medical science might seem simple, but cultural understandings of certain practices are constructed within “webs of meaning” that privilege some human actions over others. Thus, kissing the corpse and sitting in a small room with other mourners are intrinsic to West African ideas of honouring the dead. Failure to do so invites opprobrium and disaster. Thus, too, British prime minister Boris Johnson initially refused to don a face mask, even while exhorting other citizens to do so, because masking has negative connotations and is “foreign,” and controlling what British people wear infringes their individual rights. In London or Sydney, refusing to wear a mask can be considered an act that demonstrates individual autonomy and freedom — cultural ideals that not only are seen as natural in a liberal democracy but are also more highly valued than responsibility to others.

Anthropological techniques are obviously useful in market research, and many of Tett’s examples illustrate the complex interweaving of cultural assumptions, social values and consumer choice. She shows how widely anthropological research is used in the United States and how different ethnography is from surveys that simply collect factual data and make correlations based on categories such as age, gender and political allegiance.

Anthropologists investigate why people make choices, and much of the complexity they identify derives from the fact that social values change. Tett offers the case of a childcare company that asked anthropologist Meg Kinney to find out why enrolments were so much lower than rates of website searches — what was deterring interested parents from enrolling? Conventional data showed how parents were using the website, but didn’t explain why they failed to pursue the matter. Using video ethnography, Kinney observed parents in their home discussing the services offered. She found that the people designing childcare programs, mostly born before 1975, placed far more emphasis on education and reassurance than did “millennial” parents, who wanted their children to be adaptive and resilient.

Tett also explores how environmental sustainability and the challenge of climate change have transformed corporate notions of moral responsibility. She discusses the strategies of ESG (environment, sustainability, governance) that BP and other corporations have embraced in response to criticism, but points out that the persistence of the profit motive means that many changes are made with an eye to the market advantage that derives from being “green.” This is hardly a novel anthropological interpretation —many activists have been alert to “greenwashing” for decades — but Tett moves the argument along by bringing in her earlier work on financial organisations, which prompts the insight that “the words around ESG are changing the money flow” in positive ways.

Anthro-vision is written for a general readership and aims to convince people in the worlds of business and industry of the value of anthropological research. Tett does acknowledge that the information and insights an anthropologist can offer are not always the ones hard-headed business figures might want to hear. Anthropological advice to mining companies can certainly fall on deaf ears in Australia, where disasters such as the destruction of the cave at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia testify to the fact that anthropological knowledge continues to be seen as either irrelevant or obstructive to modern business practice.

In a postscript to anthropologists, Tett concedes that many anthropologists would rather not engage in research that enhances business operations, perhaps enabling them to increase profits and power in a profoundly unequal world. But she also emphasises the advantages of influencing policies that can promote change based on the recognition of both common humanity and cultural diversity. At a time when the social sciences and humanities are in the firing line in universities across Australia, her conclusions about the value of anthropology are particularly germane. •

Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life
By Gillian Tett | Random House Business | $35 | 282 pages

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Of the five women Frances Larson writes about, all of whom studied anthropology at Oxford in the first three decades of the twentieth century, only Blackwood, the youngest, emerged more or less unscathed from the struggle to become a scholar in a man’s world. Where her four predecessors — Barbara Freire-Marreco, Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka and Winifred Blackman — faced opposition, discrimination and hardship, she was able to forge an academic career and gain considerable recognition.

Freire-Marreco, Routledge, Czaplicka and Blackman were adventurous optimists. Having found remote places in which to conduct their fieldwork, each lived among people whose languages, social arrangements and cultures were alien to them. They wrote articles and books and gave lectures to learned societies, but they never received the recognition or the academic employment of their male counterparts.

Anthropology was construed at the time as “salvage ethnography.” Its practitioners observed customs, collected artefacts and provided accounts of how they believed indigenous people had lived before the disease, dispossession and death spread by colonial intrusion. In the belief that racial differences existed, they measured bodies and made detailed descriptions of physical features ­— stature, hair type, skin colour — deemed to be racially specific.

Having gained a distinction for her diploma of anthropology, Barbara Freire-Marreco was awarded a research fellowship at Oxford in 1909 and went to New Mexico to live with and study a Pueblo Native American community. She came from a supportive and relatively wealthy family. Originally intent on spending time among “real savages,” she settled into life in the less daunting Santa Clara Pueblo, a reservation established by US president Theodore Roosevelt in 1905.

Missionisation, the loss of control over land and forced school attendance for children had already transformed their culture, but members of the community continued to perform traditional rituals and, in secret, tried to maintain cultural integrity. Freire-Marreco learned the language, immersed herself in daily life and effectively engaged in what came to be called “participant observation.” Although she published articles based on her research, she lacked confidence in her skills as an ethnographer and was painfully aware of the gaps in her knowledge.

Maria Czaplicka came to Oxford from Poland intent on making a career as an anthropologist. She was brilliant, volatile and tenacious. With no family wealth to fall back on, she needed a salaried position once she had completed her diploma, and none was available to her. Her mentor, Professor Robert Marett, and the head of Somerville College, Emily Penrose, managed to scrape together enough funding for her to work on a book, Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology, that drew together all available Russian and Slavic texts. Frances Larson calls it “a triumph of translation and synthesis.”

Czaplicka was determined to undertake fieldwork in central Siberia in 1914 and began organising an expedition. Her team comprised two women — one an ornithologist, the other an artist — and an American man, Henry Hall. It’s possible Hall was her lover, but he remains a shadowy figure who was apparently ineffectual as a researcher. The field trip must surely constitute one of the harshest and most hazardous in the history of anthropology: Czaplicka contended with blizzards, near starvation, illness and freezing temperatures. Her stamina and determination were extraordinary. Her return to Oxford coincided with the outbreak of the Great War and she began working in Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum while taking on civilian wartime duties.

Katherine Routledge is a more conventional subject. She was wealthy, accustomed to getting her own way and unencumbered by qualms about the advantages deriving from her position in a colonial state. Her interest in anthropology was piqued by her encounter with Kikuyu people in British East Africa, where her husband had acquired a large property. Together they wrote a book, With a Prehistoric People: The Akikuyu of British East Africa, which revealed how her gender gave her access to women’s lives and enriched her ethnography.

Routledge’s wealth allowed her to develop her anthropological interests further afield. She had a boat built, hired crew and went with her husband to Easter Island and later to Mangareva, where she studied the people and their artefacts. She produced a book, The Mystery of Easter Island, and gave lectures on her research.

After studying anthropology, Winifred Blackman became an assistant at the Pitt Rivers Museum, cataloguing artefacts. She was inspired to work in Egypt by her brother Aylward, an archaeologist who held an academic position at Oxford. After seven years earning an income to support her widowed mother and younger siblings, she was able to join him on a dig, and so began her passionate interest in the lives of Egyptian peasants. She undertook nineteen field trips, learned Arabic, lived with local people and shared their daily lives. But although she published The Fellahin of Upper Egypt as well as numerous articles, she struggled to find funding for her research trips, relying on payment for collecting items for the pharmaceutical tycoon, Sir Henry Wellcome, and minor grants.

Beatrice Blackwood met Maria Czaplicka in 1912, their friendship blossoming when Blackwood began to assist Czaplicka in preparing her book. Blackwood enrolled in the diploma course in 1916 and embarked on a career in museum anthropology. During the first world war, when women took on jobs that had previously been exclusively male, Blackman, Czaplicka and Blackwood found employment and encouragement from senior academic men, but only Blackwood established a stable career.

Unlike her predecessors, Blackwood was also able to take out a degree. Women had been allowed to attend lectures and sit exams before 1920, but were unable to formally graduate. But once they were granted the vote in 1918, attitudes changed. Blackwood also studied anthropology at a time when the discipline’s theories of cultural evolution were being eclipsed by new, scientific approaches. Bronislaw Malinowski, an exact contemporary and friend of Czaplicka, was at the London School of Economics teaching his version of functionalism and insisting that long-term participant observation was anthropology’s primary research methodology.

This new approach had a profound effect on Blackwood’s fieldwork. She wanted to follow Malinowski’s lead by studying a “stone age” society “untouched” by the presence of colonial administrators, missionaries, white settlers and traders. But although his publications had given the impression that his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands enabled him to describe the culture and social order as it existed prior to European intrusion, a mission, a resident magistrate and pearl trader were already settled there.

During her three research trips to Melanesia between 1929 and 1938, Blackwood chafed at the constraints imposed by the government anthropologist and director of native affairs, Edward Chinnery. He was concerned about her personal safety and clearly didn’t think that a woman should embark on fieldwork in communities that were very far from direct administrative control. While her book Both Sides of the Buka Passage, based on her fieldwork in the Solomon Islands, testifies to her precise, diligent fieldwork, she was dissatisfied with her achievements as a scholar. She held the position of assistant curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum until her retirement.

Undreamed Shores is not only biographical; it is also a history of women’s education in anthropology in England during the early twentieth century. Faced with opposition from parents and family, condescending patrons and institutions blighting their careers, Larson’s five subjects had to depend on male patronage and support. Their heroism in the face of patronising and demeaning attitudes from men was extraordinary. They wrote learned articles and books, gave lectures and taught, but never gained the sorts of recognition and career security accorded their male peers.

The price could be very high. Maria Czaplicka committed suicide after her application for a fellowship was rejected — the recipient being a young man with no degree and no training in anthropology. Katherine Routledge and Winifred Blackman spent the last years of their lives in mental hospitals, their tragedies only slightly tempered by the fates of the two other heroines. Barbara Freire-Marreco turned down the opportunity of an academic position in America to support her husband’s career, first in England, then in Spain. Beatrice Blackwood abandoned her hopes of further fieldwork and appeared satisfied with her conscientious curatorial work at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

These were the pioneers whose struggles enabled the women of future generations to follow their passions, work in inhospitable environments and find fulfilment in academic careers. Indeed, by the second half of the last century, the discipline was remarkable for the number of women — Margaret Mead, Phyllis Kaberry, Mary Douglas, Lucy Mair and, more recently, Marilyn Strathern — who not only became professors in prestigious universities but are also still acknowledged as major theorists.

Frances Larson’s meticulously researched book draws on a wide range of archival material, as well as the artefact collections and publications of the five anthropologists, to capture the women’s strength and tenacity. Like their contemporary male counterparts’ endeavours, their work was multidisciplinary, blending interests in physical ethnology, archaeology, folklore and collecting for museums, and informed by a theoretical eclecticism and social evolutionism that was already being eclipsed by social anthropology. But this book makes clear that they were all consummate fieldworkers who “dared to navigate the edges of society and push at the boundaries of what it meant to be a woman.” •

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In a new book about Freeman, Truth’s Fool: Derek Freeman and the War over Cultural Anthropology, Peter Hempenstall uses what he calls “a biographer’s perspective and historians’ tools” in order to “excavate the muddy waters of the Freeman–Mead debates.” But any attempt at excavating waters, muddy or clear, is probably doomed by their tendency to rush back in and find their own level. In spite of Hempenstall’s sympathetic efforts, the murk surrounding Freeman’s critical appraisals of Mead’s Samoan work remains. But his book does trace the anthropologist’s trajectory, ambitions, achievements and struggles — both personal and academic — carefully and with intellectual generosity.

John Derek Freeman was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1916. The favoured child of a domineering, fiercely Presbyterian mother, he was talented and ambitious. After graduating from teacher training in 1934, he studied psychology and philosophy at Victoria University College, though he didn’t complete his degree. He was involved in radical student politics, having been galvanised, like many of his contemporaries, by the anti-fascism of Franco’s opponents in the Spanish civil war. Apparently an accomplished primary school teacher, he took up a teaching position in Samoa in 1940. His experiences in a village there stirred an interest in anthropology that had already been piqued by Ernest Beaglehole’s seminars at Wellington. Nevertheless, as Hempenstall shows, Freeman’s move into anthropological study was circuitous.

Initially a pacifist, he enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Volunteer Reserve after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. After he joined the NZ navy in 1943, he was stationed at an officers’ training school at Plymouth in England; from there, he travelled regularly to London, attending seminars in anthropology. After the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 he was on the ship sent to Borneo to accept the Japanese surrender. This was his first encounter with Iban people, who would become his major subject.

After his demobilisation, Freeman decided to pursue an academic career. Raymond Firth, who was professor of anthropology at London School of Economics, engineered his admission to postgraduate studies despite his having no degree. During his Plymouth sojourn Freeman had become friends with Edmund Leach and Meyer Fortes, both of whom would become professors at Cambridge. Leach was influential in Freeman’s decision to focus his doctoral research on the Iban — not, as Hempenstall writes, because he had undertaken fieldwork for his own PhD there (Leach’s thesis was on Highland Burma) but because he had surveyed tribal communities in Sarawak after the war for the Colonial Social Science Research Council. The Iban Dayaks were one of the tribes Leach suggested.

Freeman’s PhD thesis and his numerous articles on Iban society and culture established his reputation as a meticulous fieldworker and a major figure in Borneo studies. His detailed report on Iban agriculture remains a classic text, testimony to his painstaking anthropological fieldwork, and Borneo scholars generally hold him in high regard. But he was already jealous of his reputation and Hempenstall records that he “engaged in trench warfare against those who would usurp his authority in Iban studies.” He continued to publish on Borneo and undertook further fieldwork there in the mid 1970s. He had in mind to write the definitive study of Iban religion, but this project never eventuated. Given his dedication to writing works that would introduce new paradigms and theoretical transformations — and so generate a “Big Idea” — and his punctiliousness about amassing information before embarking on an analysis, his failure to publish was predictable. It was a recurring theme in his career.

As the title of Hempenstall’s book indicates, Freeman’s notoriety within the discipline now rests mainly on his attack on Margaret Mead’s book Coming of Age in Samoa. Freeman’s book was published in 1983, after Mead’s death, timing that incurred much criticism from her defenders. Hempenstall defends the delay, citing Freeman’s perfectionism and the intervention of administrative responsibilities during the 1970s. (Freeman claimed that he had been accumulating material on Mead for many years.) Margaret Mead and Samoa generated a vast number of critical responses from anthropologists. It also attracted considerable media coverage, particularly in the United States where Mead’s fame as a public intellectual ensured that a denunciation of this kind would attract wide attention. Later, Freeman’s view was given sympathetic treatment by David Williamson in his 1996 play Heretic.

Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928, was based on Mead’s first ethnographic fieldwork, conducted when she was twenty-four years old. Written for a popular audience, it presented an argument about human plasticity during adolescence. She maintained that Samoans did not experience the vicissitudes associated with adolescence in America and attributed this difference to their permissive attitudes to sexuality and their expression in adolescent sexual relationships. Assuming that puberty and the biological changes it brought were the same for all humans, she argued that culture, rather than biology, was the factor that accounted for cross-cultural variation in human behaviour.

By the 1970s Derek Freeman had become highly critical of anthropologists who stressed culture and childhood socialisation (another of Mead’s interests) as the forces determining social conduct and moral values. Influenced by the ethological research of biologists such as Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, he believed that biological factors were the primary determinants of behaviour — that nature rather than nurture should be the primary subject of study by anthropologists. He wanted to establish an ethological laboratory at the Australian National University for this purpose.

As Freeman himself declared, he did not discount culture as a factor in human behaviour. Most of his ethnographic writing falls squarely into the sociocultural field. But he had become entranced by the idea that much human behaviour was best explained biologically. The final section of his book about Mead sketches his ideas about how anthropology should combine biological or ethological research with detailed analysis of specific cultures. This was his Big Idea, but it was not novel. Most anthropologists premised their examinations of culture on the assumed biological similarities of human populations, and indeed criticised racism from this standpoint. In this vein, Mead’s other postwar works stressed her ideal of peaceful coexistence. Freeman’s contention that all American anthropology reflected a belief in “cultural determinism” was a straw man.

Much of Freeman’s critique of Mead focused on her presentation of material about Samoan society and adolescent behaviour that directly contradicted prevailing views of adolescence in America. Freeman regarded her account of Samoan sexual activities as a slur on Samoans’ morality and, given his proprietorial attitude to the people he lived with, deeply offensive. He countered her findings with material from his own research. As many reviewers pointed out, Freeman’s Samoan adolescents inhabited a rather Hobbesian world full of violence, stress, strict moral codes and punishment — devoid of the relaxed, liberal attitudes that Mead had described. Hempenstall appears to accept Freeman’s characterisation of American anthropologists as “absolute cultural determinists” and to discount many of their arguments against Freeman. He calls them his subject’s “enemies.” While he acknowledges one critic, Paul Shankman, to be “sober-minded…, patient and well-versed in Samoa’s cultural history resources” and concedes that he “breached Freeman’s defences” on the subject of ceremonial virginity, he is still eager to defend Freeman’s arguments as having “a consistent moral compass,” as if that somehow removes them from shaky ground.

Freeman was delighted in 1987 when, during the making of a film on the controversy, an octogenarian Samoan woman claimed that she was Mead’s informant and that she had been joking when she spoke with her about secret nocturnal trysts with boys. He believed this was the clinching piece of evidence and that, after the bruising encounters with Mead’s defenders, he would finally emerge victorious. He published another book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, in 1999, which summarised the debate from his viewpoint and used the interviews with the Samoan woman to suggest that Mead’s representation of Samoan adolescence was simply the result of a hoax. Shankman’s research exposed the flaws in Freeman’s use of this material, revealing that the woman had spent only one day with Mead and that Freeman had been extremely selective and inconsistent in his use of interview material. The anthropological community generally accepted Shankman’s research and his conclusion that Freeman had failed utterly to prove that Mead had been hoaxed.

Freeman was a Popperian, dedicated to the notion of anthropology as a “true science” that should proceed from hypothesis to testing, subjecting findings to rigorous scrutiny through processes of empirical falsification. But while Karl Popper himself held that all truth was provisional and that the scientific method meant that any finding must be open to falsification, Freeman was convinced he had found the truth about Samoan adolescence. He was a dogmatist rather than a sceptic, utterly confident that his methodology and his findings were uniformly unassailable. In placing so much emphasis on the testimony of one elderly woman, his zeal for “truth” was exposed as merely the stubborn desire to win the argument.

“Freeman inhabited a strong moral universe,” Hempenstall observes. In practice, this meant he was extremely judgemental of others and quick to express outrage over events or behaviour that he considered immoral. He was especially upset by sexual behaviour that he considered reprehensible. I recall vividly his astonishment and horror when he discovered that Margaret Mead had been bisexual. Mead’s published autobiographical material about her relationship with Ruth Benedict had given clues to its sexual nature, which was known by many people in the anthropological community, but it had apparently escaped his notice until 1981. He accosted me one morning, asking in an almost accusatory tone whether I was aware that Mead was a “sexual deviant.”

Hempenstall’s coverage of Freeman’s intellectual development, scholarship and controversial attack on Mead is clear and consistent, but in his discussion of the other notorious aspect of Freeman’s life — his sanity — he enters trickier territory. Hempenstall is at pains to clear Freeman of the accusation of “madness” that was often levelled at him, yet he describes numerous instances where Freeman’s mental state was clearly abnormal and his behaviour bizarre.

Freeman was diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder in 1974 and was treated for a short period with lithium. He abandoned the treatment because it interfered with his mental acuity. His diaries over a twenty-year period reveal a “constant struggle for mental equilibrium,” according to Hempenstall. As Freeman wrote, “I have no doubt that I am an individual prone to manic-depressive affective reactions.” He had at least three well-documented manic, delusional events in his life.

The first case, mentioned by Hempenstall, occurred in Sarawak in 1961 and involved Tom Harrisson, curator of the Kuching Museum, of whom Freeman was highly critical. Freeman, horrified by a display of Dayak carvings that he judged to be obscene, pornographic and “fake,” went to the museum, took photographs of the items he found offensive and smashed one of them. The carvings were copies of the originals made by Dayak craftsmen whom Michael Heppell, an authority on the art and material culture of the region, describes as “superb” craftsmen.

Hempenstall suggests that stories about Freeman cutting the penises off carvings is an exaggeration and maintains that only one museum statue was broken. But other sources attest to his penis-lopping in the home of his mortal enemy Tom Harrisson. Heppell writes:

My first source of what happened is Alastair Morrison who lived next door in Pig Lane and a number of people working in the Museum had the same view. Derek went to Pig Lane and Harrisson’s house to confront him and he was not there. He let himself in (no one locked their doors then), confronted the servant and then grabbed a (no doubt hair tufted) handy machete and cut off the penises of a few of the statues. So the story went, he must have swept them up into a tidy heap as that was how they were when people entered the house (the servant of course was not interviewed about such detail). By this time a police patrol had arrived — all Iban. They were on the street when Derek exited. He hailed them in Iban telling them that he was one of the Iban Immortals from Panggau and that he was heading back to town. The Iban police simply let him go.

Freeman was convinced that Harrisson was a psychopath, writes Hempenstall, and that the statues were “exercising a degree of mind control that [was] inspiring a local cult, in cahoots with Soviet Russia, to undermine the Sarawak government.” He flew to Singapore, then to Karachi, intending to proceed to England and encourage authorities to have Harrisson removed. The High Commissioner in Karachi had him examined by a psychiatrist and then contacted the Australian National University. His head of department travelled from Australia to collect him and accompany him home.

Hempenstall maintains that his account rests on two independent sources, Judith Heimann and Hiram Caton, but in fact both of these authors relied almost entirely on Freeman’s version of events. For Freeman, this episode was the first of his great intellectual transformations. He experienced a “cognitive abreaction: a sudden and deep realisation of the inadequacy of the assumptions of contemporary anthropology.”

The second “emotional and psychological crisis” occurred in Melbourne in 1965 after he delivered a paper offering a critique of Freud’s Totem and Taboo at a conference of psychoanalysts. He was admitted to hospital and given electric shock treatment and tranquillised. Another “abreaction” came in 1967 when he had a delusory, manic episode in Samoa; on that occasion he was inspired to embark on his attack on Margaret Mead’s ethnography. He appeared to think that a thorough refutation of Mead’s first book would usher in a new paradigm for anthropological inquiry. For most anthropologists, the task he set himself was simply “breaking a butterfly upon a wheel.”

Hempenstall recounts so many instances of abnormal behaviour, florid emotional reactions and extreme responses to people and objects that offended Freeman’s moral sensibilities that his constant insistence on Freeman’s sanity seems to fly in the face of his own evidence. He appears to think that the episodic nature of Freeman’s “breakdowns” is proof that he was not “mad.” He discounts the labelling of abnormal conditions as pathological, invoking Foucault to bolster his objections.

But when colleagues and others called Derek “mad,” they were using the term colloquially rather than offering a psychiatric diagnosis. While rumours occasionally circulated that Derek was in need of psychiatric treatment, people used “mad” to describe his strange, extreme, often anti-social behaviour. “Mad” is no longer a clinical term, but it is certainly pejorative — and Freeman invited hostile responses.

Freeman was also a prude. Two of his “abreactive” episodes were provoked by representations of sexual activities by “his people.” He believed that he was correcting slurs and insults aimed at the Iban and the Samoans. He was also definitely more than “eccentric” when he attributed agency to objects. The NZ historian Keith Sinclair, who shared a cabin with him on a naval voyage from New Zealand to Melbourne in 1944, once described him to me as “barking mad.” He recounted how Derek gave sanctimonious lectures to sailors on the perils of extramarital sex and had a collection of rounded stones that he polished regularly and thought gave him protection. (His use of various talismanic objects appears in Hempenstall’s account at several points.) He attributed evil emanations to the Dayak carvings he destroyed and also, much later, when he objected to an Aztec calendar stone displayed at the university. For someone who maintained that he dealt only in scientific truth, he was remarkably superstitious.

In his day-to-day life, Freeman’s behaviour towards his students and colleagues was often unnecessarily combative. He could never drop an argument or agree to differ. He appeared to revel in his belligerent pursuit of any opponent, however trivial the dispute. According to Hempenstall, he was well aware that his responses to people were extreme and he strove to restrain his florid emotional reactions. This self-awareness was not apparent in any of the adversarial interactions that I witnessed. Indeed, the main reason many thought him “mad” was because he appeared unable to control his emotions and would insist on winning every argument.

He was also a misogynist. Hempenstall alludes to his bad treatment of his wife Monica (as does a scene in Williamson’s play) but ignores his attitude towards women in general. He treated visiting female scholars, colleagues and graduate students appallingly, ostentatiously scribbling notes, reading the newspaper, groaning, rolling his eyes and shaking his head as if he could not believe what he was hearing — all of it designed to unnerve any woman giving a seminar paper. His questions were invariably hostile or dismissive. He publicly bullied and verbally abused Dr Marie Reay, the only senior woman in the department. He once threw several draft chapters of a graduate student’s thesis on the floor and declared that he would have her scholarship withdrawn. Like many of his students, she changed supervisors and successfully completed her thesis.

If ever a woman challenged him, his reactions were so extreme as to appear deranged. I recall vividly one seminar in which he was insisting that all Samoan women were chaste before marriage and that this was undeniable because of the practice of digital defloration and the inevitable bleeding that occurred. He began waving an open book that had an illustration of this, as if this clinched his argument. Diane Bell, then a graduate student, expressed scepticism that all Samoan women would be equipped with hymens that would bleed copiously. When he insisted that this was the case, she asked, “Are you suggesting that Samoan women are pre-adapted for this practice?” Aware that she was not only sceptical of his claims but was mildly ridiculing his biologism, he became incandescent with rage. Bell stood her ground and made him appear silly. For days afterwards he would harangue unwilling listeners with tirades against “that woman.”

On the morning following this seminar he came into my office and began pacing up and down, repeating his claims about “scientific methods” and “incontrovertible evidence.” When I protested that asking the parents of young women about their daughters’ virginity was unlikely to produce reliable evidence, and that any other “scientific” evidence would be impossible to obtain, he began denouncing me as a “cultural determinist.” I sat at my desk, trying to keep calm, but actually rather frightened that he might hit me, such was his anger. Then he suddenly switched tack. He knew that I had worked for Edmund Leach as librarian and research assistant for six years and began upbraiding me for falling under his “malign structuralist influence.” He then began to speak in more measured tones, explaining his critique of structuralism, almost as if he was unaware of the extraordinary rage that he had vented minutes before. He left my office with a cheery farewell.

Freeman’s erratic outbursts, his apparent inability to see his bullying behaviour as professionally inappropriate and distressing to his victims, his insistence that he invariably had intellectual grounds for attacking people — all these contributed to the widely held view that he was mentally unbalanced. Yet complaints to the head of department were usually dismissed with condescending mollification — “That’s just Derek” — and his “madness” was used by male colleagues to excuse and justify his behaviour.

Peter Hempenstall has written an apologia for his difficult subject. It is to his credit that he discusses the behaviour that earned Freeman his reputation for “madness,” but his attempts to disprove the facts of his mental state dominate the biography in ways that undermine his claims for Freeman’s scholarly legacy. Freeman never produced a work that set out his Big Idea about the relationship between biology and sociocultural anthropology. His behaviour in academic roles as a postgraduate supervisor and departmental head was often disruptive and counterproductive. Hempenstall appears to consider the lack of acknowledgement in the official Australian National University history a slight. I suspect it was because Derek Freeman had become too much of an embarrassment. •

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