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

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Anthropologists in the middle decades of the twentieth century primarily described and analysed the “traditional” life of First Nations people who had experienced minimal contact with white settlers. An imagined dichotomy between “traditional” and “non-traditional” peoples was deeply ingrained in the field; those whose lands had been intensely occupied were assumed to have lost their culture and were therefore not seen as worthy subjects of anthropological study.

Rose’s book, The Wind of Change in Central Australia: The Aborigines at Angas Downs, 1962, was different. Set on a desert pastoral station, it focused on the changes in Anangu social and cultural life brought about by the encounter with tourists, cash and commodities .

Not surprisingly, The Wind of Change has largely been overlooked in the canon of desert ethnography. Rose was only incidentally interested the traditional life of Anangu, or what he referred to as their “cult life.” As a devout Marxist and committed member of the Communist Party, he filtered his ethnographic study through a materialist lens. A process of “detribalisation,” as he called it, was taking place on the station, accelerated by the commodification of material culture and the encounter with the cash economy that had emerged with tourism in the region. As he saw it, the “traditional” way of life on Angas Downs had virtually disappeared by 1962.

The strangeness of Rose’s ethnography struck me when I first laid eyes on it. As I flicked through the pages, my eyes danced over the text and tables and came to dwell on the black-and-white photographs scattered throughout that captured people and everyday life on the station. Unlike other ethnographies of the time, the people in The Wind of Change were photographed wearing settler clothing, collecting rations, receiving haircuts, playing card games and trading with tourists.

I was particularly struck by the last pages of the book — 150 black-and-white portraits of the people living on Angas Downs during the four months of Rose’s fieldwork. The photographs were immediate and intimate in their close focus on the faces of the people they captured. Some looked uncomfortable, as though Rose’s request to photograph them was perhaps an annoyance, while others were smiling and seemed happy to have their picture taken. The portraits, which represented several generations, are arranged in grids of three-by-three over sixteen pages.

No names accompany the photographs; rather, they are numbered from 1 to 150. Who were these people, I wondered, and what had drawn so many of them to this place?

In 2012, half a century after it was published, I took Rose’s The Wind of Change on a journey back into the country on which it was produced. I moved from Ngunnawal Ngambri Country, in the place now known as Canberra, to Mparntwe in Central Arrernte Country, otherwise known as Alice Springs.

Not long after I arrived, I took out a loan and bought a green 80 Series Toyota Landcruiser, which soon assumed the role of beloved and trustworthy travelling companion. Over the following four years, we travelled tens of thousands of kilometres throughout the Central and Western deserts. This act of travelling to the heart of the continent echoed the journeys of countless white settlers who came to this place before me, in search of something. Yes, I was seeking to learn about the history of Angas Downs. But I was also searching for insights into the settler historical imagination and ways of seeing the past.

As a white settler who grew up in a regional Victorian town which local memory didn’t acknowledge as being on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, I was troubled by the silences and white noise that dominated Australian history writing throughout much of the twentieth century. I wanted to explore the implications of different ways of knowing the world for historical research and writing in a colonised settler nation.

I also wanted to engage with my own nagging sense of dislocation. We all inherit the consequences of colonialism and, as psychologist Craig San Roque describes it, I have felt “displaced from my integrity by the very act of displacing others from theirs.” And so, in exploring other ways of knowing the past, I have also wanted to explore what it means to belong on stolen land.

When I began this project, I was acutely aware of the ways in which research and colonialism were deeply entangled in what Edward Said referred to as the West’s “will to power.” Here in Australia, as elsewhere, white settler researchers, academics and writers have sought to categorise, describe and speak for the “Other” in an effort not only to understand but also to control, manipulate and even incorporate First Nations peoples and ways of knowing.

Mindful of this, I sought to develop an approach to research that wouldn’t own or consume the knowledges I engaged with. Rather, I wanted to explore how engaging with these knowledges might help us to better understand our shared past.

Rose’s book was the catalyst for my encounter with Anangu in the remote community of Imanpa, a place with strong connections to Angas Downs. Around 200 kilometres southwest of Mparntwe, 160 kilometres east of Uluru and a few kilometres off the Lasseter Highway, Imanpa is home to mostly Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara speakers.

The Wind of Change is a rare book and most Anangu I met had never seen one before. They had no interest in the ethnography itself. Rather, it was the photographs they wanted to see. I became known as the “kungka [young woman] with the book.” When Anangu saw my Landcruiser arrive in the community and pull up at the store, I would inevitably hear shouts along the lines of, “Hey, kungka, I want to see that book!” Over a four-year period, I travelled from Mparntwe to Imanpa, and beyond, working with Anangu and learning how to see and understand this place.

The copy of The Wind of Change I carried with me bears the marks of the process — the front and back covers have fallen away, some pages have come out, and many other pages are dog-eared, stained and worn thinner by the countless pairs of hands that turned them over and over, and over again.

As Anangu mobilised Rose’s photographs to tell stories, this ethnographic artefact was made into a very different kind of object. The grids of numbered portraits were transformed into a family photo album. Holding the book in their hands, they would move through the portraits, one by one, and tell me who each person was, how they were related to them, and where the person, or their family, was now. Their reading of Rose stretched through time and space, weaving threads of memory that intimately connected the living present with the past world he captured.

Anangu stories tracked and traced the various social and cultural practices that intersected at Angas Downs, revealing how people came to make a place for themselves in the wake of colonialism. Listening to them, I heard histories that are obscured by the single, fixed idea of the pastoral station. What emerged was an understanding of this place as living — made and inhabited by Anangu, even though, at first glance, it appeared to be the product of white settler intervention.

The book that emerged from my research traces the rise and demise of Angas Station over half a century. It tracks the complex and creative social and cultural practices the Anangu mobilised to make sense of the places that emerged when white settlers came to the desert.

Top row, left: Sandra Armstrong at Bloodwood Bore, Angas Downs, in 1962. Sandra was “No. 90” in Frederick Rose’s portraits. Sandra Armstrong holding a photograph of herself from the Frederick Rose archive during a research trip to the Mitchell Library in 2013. Sandra said that she worked with Rose and would sit with him looking through his photographs and he would ask her “What do you call this one?” and she would tell him the language the names for kin relationships. SLNSW Frederick Rose Papers Box 8
Top row, right: Sandra Armstrong holding a photograph of herself from the Frederick Rose archive during a research trip to the Mitchell Library in 2013. Source: Shannyn Palmer
Bottom row, left: Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack at Bloodwood Bore, Angas Downs, 1962. This photograph is “No. 1” in Frederick Rose’s book, The Wind of Change in Central Australia: The Aborigines at Angas Downs, 1962. Placing Tjuki as No. 1 reflected Rose’s recognition of Tjuki’s senior status at Angas Downs. Sandra Armstrong too said of Tjuki’s authority, “Old Tjuki Tjukanku was really ninti [knowledgeable], he was number one.” SLNSW Frederick Rose Papers Box 8.
Bottom row, right: Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack on the veranda of his house at Imanpa Community in 2013. Rhett Hammerton.

When I first started visiting Imanpa, numerous people told me that if I wanted to learn more about Angas Downs I should seek out Tjuki Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong, whose families were among the earliest arrivals at Angas Downs. They considered themselves, and are thought of by many, as having the most knowledge, and therefore the authority, to speak for this place.

I met Tjuki for the first time in June 2012. I had travelled to Imanpa to see Sandra, whom I had met previously, by chance, when she grabbed my wrist as I was walking past an ATM in Yulara and asked me to help her retrieve her card from the machine. She had no idea who I was, or what my interest in Angas Downs was, but I recognised her immediately.

On that day in June I was unable to find her in Imanpa and so I went to sit on a bench across from the community store. As I sat there, I noticed Tjuki and his wife Rosie slowly shuffling towards the store. As they approached, I asked them in Pitjantjatjara how they were and whether they had seen Sandra. They hadn’t. I explained that I had an old book with lots of photographs from Angas Downs and was hoping to find Sandra to talk to her about the station. Tjuki replied, “Angie Downs, that my Country.”

Tjuki and Rosie made their way over to where I was sitting on the bench and I handed him Rose’s book. Tjuki smiled and laughed as he flicked through the pages of photographs, and when he came across the portrait of himself, he turned to me and said, “That’s me when I young fella, no whiskers.” I had heard that Sandra was at Angas Downs, so I asked Tjuki and Rosie if they would like to come for a drive to the station to see if she was there. Tjuki stood up without hesitation and looked to me to point out which Landcruiser we would be travelling in. That was the first time I visited Bloodwood Bore, and the only time I spent on Angas Downs with both Tjuki and Sandra.

Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack was born around 1926–28.  His life history began before white settlers had really begun to penetrate the desert. Over four years we travelled together, recording his stories. It was important to me, and also for future generations of his family, that his life history was recorded in his language, Pitjantjatjara.

Tjuki, as he liked to be called, was a gifted raconteur, and many of his stories were long and detailed. My grasp of Pitjantjatjara was rudimentary at best when we first started working together, so we collaborated with oral historian and Western Desert language interpreter and translator Linda Rive. She travelled with us, interpreting Tjuki’s oral histories in place, and later translating and transcribing into English the recordings made with him.

Our trips “out bush” always revolved around food. Before leaving, I would prepare a meal in the camp oven, and when we arrived at our destination we would begin by building a fire. Once we were settled on camping chairs, cups of tea in hand, Tjuki would begin remembering while the food cooked among the coals. Where possible, he chose the locations in which the recordings took place, and who was present. He also decided which stories we would record once we got to a location, and these were inevitably shaped by the place in which we found ourselves.

Sandra Armstrong was born nearly a generation after Tjuki, in 1942. When I met with her at Bloodwood Bore on that day in June, Sandra told me that the place where we sat was her Country. She showed me where Anangu lived on the station; where the old homestead used to be; and the site of the “chalet” that catered to thousands of tourists who passed through Angas Downs station in the late 1950s and 1960s, on their way to Uluru.

As we sat drinking tea, Sandra motioned to the site of the old chalet and told me that she used to work there, preparing meals for the tourists and cleaning up after them. She also recalled that two men called Captain and Harry Brumby would go from Angas Downs to catch wild camels, and then bring them back to the station to break them in. Over the years that followed, Sandra and I travelled widely together, and much of what I learned from her evolved from many hours spent driving, sitting and talking.

Whereas Tjuki, Linda and I visited various locations on Angas Downs and the surrounding country, Sandra and I travelled further afield in the Central and Western deserts, and as far away as Sydney, as well as spending time together at Bloodwood Bore, Imanpa and Anthelk-Ewlpaye (Charles Creek) town camp in Mparntwe. Travelling to, and experiencing, the landscape was critical in my developing an understanding of this place grounded in its physical reality. Visiting ruins, rock art sites and water sources, and learning place names informed my developing awareness of Angas Downs as a place steeped in the Tjukurpa, deep time and historical time.

Learning while on the move, I also came to understand that mobility is a fundamental fact of desert life, and it was the path, not the place, that was the key to understanding Angas Downs.

Both Tjuki and Sandra were on a mission to have their knowledge and their relationship to Angas Downs recorded. They were aware that I wanted to learn more about Angas Downs in order to write a history of this place, but they had their own reasons for choosing to work with me. Despite the different circumstances under which they were recorded, Tjuki’s and Sandra’s life histories have a certain politics in common.

Although their experiences varied, their stories amplify a central statement about their identification with Angas Downs as ngura, or Country. Their oral histories are very much about a present concern that speaks to a fraught politics of place, recognition and sovereignty.

Places accrue people and stories, in multiple layers, over time. Some of these stories come to dominate how we see and interpret a place, while others are obscured from view. While Angas Downs is ostensibly a pastoral station, pastoralism is only a fraction of the story of this place. We can’t understand Angas Downs without the stories and the memories of the people who lived there. Listening to them, a very different kind of place emerges from that conjured in the myths and histories of pioneers and pastoralists that have dominated understandings of the past in Australia — particularly in the Northern Territory.

Travelling with and learning from Tjuki and Sandra, I came to understand that more than a spatial location, or simple stage for human action, places are complex constructions, made from local cultural material and practices, and the interactions between people, other species and the land. •

This essay draws on the introduction to Shannyn Palmer’s Unmaking Angas Downs, Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, published last week by Melbourne University Press

The post Revisiting Bloodwood Bore 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.

Now Graeber’s book on pirates has been published in English, and unlike many of his earlier (and, we would suggest, finer) works it is likely to be available in a bookshop near you. But those picking up Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia as a first foray into Graeber’s work may be left wondering what all the fuss is about. After some promising passages in the introduction, the vast bulk of Pirate Enlightenment is preoccupied with reframing the history of a small area on Madagascar’s coast.

Though it is evidently part of an intensive, erudite and carefully thought-out argument, Graeber’s exposition comes with muted academic credentials. The referencing style makes it hard to follow exactly who said what in this debate, at least on our reading, and there is no map or glossary. As with conversations between twitchers, part of the pleasure is in the seemingly arcane detail, but this pleasure is not easily shared by outsiders.

The details Graeber patently enjoys concern Betsimisaraka (an apparently egalitarian settlement that sometimes masqueraded as a kingdom), Zanahary (meaning “God” and also the name of the heir of the imputed “King” of Betsimisaraka), mivorika (a ritual practice) and Zana-Malata (descendants of pirates living in Madagascar today). Graeber proceeds as if a familiarity with and interest in these can be assumed, much as more conventional writers often assume readers are familiar with key European Enlightenment thinkers.

To continue the pirate metaphor, Pirate Enlightenment may leave many readers feeling marooned. That said, we are glad it was published. And glad we read it. Even if we still can’t say we thoroughly understand this period of Madagascar’s history, we did enjoy watching Graeber think about and through it.

Pirate Enlightenment is all we have of Graeber’s work on pirates, a topic that bookends his career. He first picked up the interest when he met descendants of pirates in Madagascar during his PhD fieldwork, and it again occupied him at the time of his death. But readers would certainly get more out of Pirate Enlightenment if they had a sense of the greater trajectory of Graeber’s work. A treasure map, of sorts.

O Captain! My Captain!

Holly remembers first reading Graeber in 2006 on a long-haul flight from New York to Bangkok. The book, published in 2004, was Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and it seemed to break every rule of anthropological writing at that time. There was no ethnographic vignette. Ideas were presented simply. It was small enough to fit in your pocket. It was funny, and hopeful. It spoke directly, not to or through French theorists from the 1970s.

Holly was reading it because James C. Scott, a professor of politics at Yale, had told her he thought Graeber was a genius. Scott and Graeber had worked together at the university, but Graeber was dismissed the year before Holly arrived. As a freshly minted PhD graduate, she was electrified by even a second-order brush with genius. Fragments was electrifying, too. It had an “as if” quality: Graeber was writing about an anarchist anthropology, an anthropology that did not yet exist. He was writing as if it could exist, and should, a position that was radical for its time.

Josh’s first dose of Graeber was Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. This 2001 book felt like an invitation to the kind of discussion he had yearned to have with colleagues. Again there was an “as if” quality: Graeber spoke as if we all knew that a debate about value was raging, but in fact his work was part of bringing it into reality. Next on Josh and Holly’s reading list was Graeber’s 2007 Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, a book that succinctly encapsulated a vision for anthropology as a “reservoir of possibilities.”

This prefigurative quality to Graeber’s early books was part of his practice as an anarchist anthropologist. At the time of his death, the tagline on his Twitter account commanded: “I see anarchism as something you do not an identity so don’t call me the anarchist anthropologist.” Perhaps the closest he came to conceding to the label was when he said, “I’m a scholar who subscribes to anarchist principles and occasionally acts on them.”

Yet Fragments still stands as the most comprehensive attempt to think about anthropology and anarchism together. Even if he never aspired to be “the” anarchist anthropologist, Graeber’s work did eventually come to constitute an example of actually existing anarchist anthropology. In that sense, Fragments can be read as a gesture towards an anarchist anthropology yet to come, and Graeber’s later work as bringing that anthropology into being. It outlined what Graeber saw as the three most important directions in anarchism at the time of writing: the anti-globalisation movement, the struggle against work, and democracy. He went on to write an ethnography of the first, and a popular salvo about each of the other two.

Fragments also identified a new theory of the state and authority as a priority; and he went on to co-author On Kings with Marshall Sahlins (in our estimation this is perhaps his best but most overlooked book). And it proposed that anthropologists can find inspiration for conceptual work in the ideas and practices of activists; in his later intellectual work, he elaborated on the anti-globalisation movement’s use of “play” as a practice, and the Occupy movement’s practice of “care.”

In this way, Fragments can be read as a recipe for the career that was to come, a foreshadowing of the general shape of the contributions he would make. Graeber’s anthropology seems to have grown to fit his own sense of what an anarchist anthropology would look like.

He did this work despite spending half of that career feeling as if no one was particularly interested in what he was up to. From the publication of Value in 2001 until Debt: The First 5000 Years appeared in 2011, he was relatively unknown, even in his own discipline. He had published two very long ethnographies (Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar in 2007 and Direct Action: An Ethnography in 2009) that demonstrated his commitment to ethnography as detailed description as well as the more theoretical books about value, anarchism and possibilities. But from his perspective at least, these seemed to fall on deaf ears.

It was a situation he wore heavily. He described to both Josh and Holly a sense of “exile” from US academia, a sentiment he also aired in his books. He found refuge within London’s system of universities, where he could at least work but had to struggle with extensive administrative work.

Debt, largely written at Goldsmiths College, was the first book he produced in exile. From its publication to his death in 2020 at the age of fifty-nine, his career entered a new era — one he would barely live long enough to enjoy — in which his combined activism and intellectual work earned him global recognition as a public intellectual. Thrilled, he spent 2011 busy figuring out his next project. He applied for and received a Leverhulme grant to return to Madagascar but instead went to work with the activist group Adbusters in Canada and then helped with the Occupy Wall Street action. While he is often credited with coming up with the slogan “We are the 99 per cent,” he only claimed to be part of the conversation during which the slogan emerged.

Graeber never aspired to be a captain — of a ship or an activist movement or an intellectual sectarian group. Our evocation of the Walt Whitman poem “O Captain! My Captain!” is tongue-in-cheek; Graeber wrote several very entertaining parodies of sectarian groups that had arranged themselves around a Great Man and the ideas attributed to him. Instead, he aspired to be part of important conversations. And, as we both knew Graeber before he was a well-known public intellectual, we do miss the conversations with our friend.

In that sense, the reference to the poem is not so misplaced. We believe the best way to “Walk the deck my Captain lies” (to quote Whitman further) is to carry on the conversation. We don’t propose to create another “-ism” based on Graeber’s oeuvre, or an awkward adjective from his name. Instead, we believe that anthropology and activism after David Graeber can be — and we hope will be — carried on by all of us from our own unique perspectives, with purpose, and in dialogue with one another. In short, it won’t be him, it will be all of us.

X marks the spot

The conclusion to Pirate Enlightenment begins with the opening of a Malagasy folktale: “God and Man were inseparable companions. One day God said to Man: why don’t you go for a walk around on earth for a while so we can find some new topics for conversation.”

We wish that Graeber had translated his French source in gender-neutral English, or at least explained his choices, because surely what he means by “God” and “Man” is the deity and humanity. Leaving this quibble aside, the quotation foreshadows some of the most important themes of his conclusion: “conversation is always one of the principal forms of human activity everywhere — all humans, throughout history, have divided their time largely between working, playing, resting, and discussing things with one another.”

Graeber used this foundational assumption to reread existing evidence about the imputed egalitarian pirate settlements in Madagascar, which had previously been dismissed by historians as tall tales. These become thinkable when one assumes these people were just as capable as experimenting with new political possibilities as the European Enlightenment thinkers who came after them.

Accordingly, Graeber reads the egalitarian settlement of Betsimisaraka not as an unexplained anomaly but as a great achievement made by mature people who knew of different political possibilities from around the world, including aboard pirate ships. If this enclave was cut off from the slave trade and hierarchical rule that was so evident elsewhere, it was no mistake. It was the result of an intentional experiment in political possibilities.

Likewise, he asks us to understand the Enlightenment not as a Western invention that sprang sui generis from a few Great Men’s minds, but as the result of a conversation that involved many parties. Quite possibly, these conversations involved stories about Betsimisaraka, even if these were garbled in the confused accounts of pirates.

For readers with some knowledge of anthropology, it might help to think here of Marshall Sahlins’s “structure of the conjuncture.” Like Sahlins’s much earlier account of the arrival of Captain Cook’s ships in Hawaii, Graeber argues that when pirate ships reached the coast of Madagascar they didn’t so much instigate change as become incorporated into an ongoing process of political experimentation. Part of this process — as news, scandal and outlandish tale — made its way back into the salon conversations and writings now associated with the Enlightenment.

At the start of an epilogue to his 1996 dissertation (largely about history in Madagascar), Graeber defines political action as “actions intended to influence people who are not present when the action is being taken.” He differentiates this from political power, or “the ability to stop others from acting that way.” Most accounts of history privilege political power, according to his definition, meaning they are about domination and control.

Pirates never had empires or dominions as such, but they did spread stories. In Graeber’s assessment, “Pirate ships surrounded themselves with stories of daring and terror, one could even say, armed and armoured themselves with such stories, but on board ship, they seem to have conducted their affairs through conversation, deliberation and debate.” These stories resulted in actions: people all over the world became afraid to ship the ill-gotten gains of colonialism.

Centuries later, the stories still circulate. Arguably like Graeber himself, pirates made use of this very ordinary capacity for conversation to speak as if another world did exist, and as a way of bringing alternatives into being. Graeber understood the Enlightenment as this kind of conversation — one that began as a pleasurable pursuit and ended up changing the world. At least some of that change was emancipatory.

Dialogism was basic to Graeber’s work. It informed his understanding of human nature, his approach to ethnography, his politics and his vision for anthropology. (We detail this conclusion in our forthcoming book, As If Already Free: Anthropology and Activism After David Graeber.) A commitment to dialogism means recognising that ideas and insights never emerge whole from the mind of one thinker. Graeber understood ideas as learned from and shared in ongoing dialogue with others, including everyday people. That included his engagement with contemporaries, but also those who came before and, he hoped, those still to come.

Graeber often approached conversation as a form of play in which new and possibly previously unthought of possibilities could be toyed with, and sometimes even come into being. As he wrote in the preface of Pirate Enlightenment, “I hope the reader has as much fun as I did.” He was partly inspired to take play seriously after his involvement with the alter-globalisation movement, which deployed giant puppets and other playful imagery. He used play to think through social possibility: often free play generates its own rules (play with no rules is not fun for long) and sometimes is the beginning of a game which solidifies into a new enduring arrangement.

This processual view of human being, which he once described as “Heraclitean,” assumes that “what is most essential about human beings is not what they are at any given moment, but what they have the capacity to become.” It follows from this view of human experience that social movements and revolutions cannot be a European invention. In the Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), he and co-author David Wengrow argue that all people everywhere have the capacity for intentional social change, and this fact likely explains much of the diversity we see in the ethnographic record, history and prehistory. In Pirate Enlightenment, he argues that there is no reason to assume that fables and facts about pirates weren’t part of the political experiments of the Enlightenment.

He believed that people, everywhere, are capable of radical self-conscious experimentation. Moments of play, temporary rules or social movements can solidify so that “we tend to become slaves of our own creations.” He was not opposed to rules: he saw them as an inevitable part of everyday human experience and a necessary part of any play that remains fun long-term. His vision for freedom was not a freedom from rules, but rather a freedom to choose the rules one lives by, and to live in awareness that one has that potential, knowing new rules could always be erected and old ones torn down. In this sense, Pirate Enlightenment can be read as continuing themes that are more fully developed in his other works.

Pirate Enlightenment also introduces themes not yet fully developed. The idea that the control of women’s sexuality sits at the core of inequality but can also be resisted with fundamentally egalitarian consequences is an important thread, though to our reading it appears nascent. Perhaps he would have developed this more in later works.

Looked at this way, it is heartbreaking to be left wondering what we lost when Graeber left far too soon. Looked at another way, though, the conversation goes on. His books can be read as invitations to conversation. If Pirate Enlightenment is a desert island, it is also a sandpit for play, a creative space for generating new ideas. Indeed, this could be said about all his work. As we hope it will be. •

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
By David Graeber | Allen Lane | $35 | 208 pages

The post A reservoir of possibilities 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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Peter Sutton writes:

“Did Australian anthropology retreat to an ivory tower during its ‘postmodern turn’ in the 1980s,” asks Stephen Bennetts in Australian Book Review, “and lose the ability to engage a broader audience in the way Dark Emu, for all its flaws, has clearly done so powerfully? Perhaps.”

And perhaps not. Too many exceptions come to mind. We discuss them in Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, but you could start with Philip Clarke’s Where the Ancestors Walked, which should have sold a lot more than its 5000 copies since 2003.

Bill Gammage claims in Inside Story that Pascoe’s academic critics are people in disciplines where “jargon and theory are eminent,” and whose remedy for being alarmed by Pascoe’s disinformation “is to talk to each other.” Not in our case. We have written our assessment of Dark Emu for a broad public. As far as possible, we are theory-free. Our publishers had to reprint three times in the first month and the total run has now reached 15,000. Jargon only gets that kind of audience in Paris. Gammage has got the wrong targets in mind.

A lot of editors commissioning reviews of Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? in the last few months make the false assumption that professional historians are the most relevant and best-qualified scholars to assess not only Pascoe’s book itself but also our forensic assessment of it. It follows from that bit of bad guesswork that it is documentary historians who are the scholarly masters of pre-conquest Australian food production, fertility rituals, lexicons, toolkits, ecological knowledge, shelter construction, apparel and residential patterns, and the analysis of archaeological evidence and dating methods.

A few historians, like Geoffrey Blainey and Gammage, have made the effort to study the old cultures as they were in the early contact phase, by consulting some of the vast literature in which field anthropologists have reported to a wider world what they have learned from Indigenous mentors of standing and knowledge. Pascoe largely ignores these sources.

The topics tackled by Pascoe in Dark Emu were not predominantly those that have long been the province of documentary historians of Aboriginal Australia. Regardless, Pascoe is often curiously described as a “historian.” His topics are ancient cultural, technological and ecological practices within the Aboriginal world, not records of frontier and later dealings with the colonisers. Who, then, is the methodological cuckoo in the nest?

Gammage says both Pascoe and Sutton “leave out words that don’t suit.” The context here is explorer Mitchell’s 1839 descriptions of grasslands. Gammage supplies an extension to our quotations, but they add nothing of substance to the question here: does a plain on which the grass has been pulled out demonstrate anything more than that the women had extracted the grass stems to collect the seeds? Why is Mitchell’s description of such a grass plain “suggestive of farming” as Gammage claims?

Having not read our book except for what he calls cherrypicking, Gammage would not have known that it has a later quotation from Mitchell. These words certainly don’t suit either Pascoe or Gammage. In 1848, the experienced explorer, having lived in Australia since 1827, refers to “the failure of all attempts to persuade these free denizens of uncultivated earth to forsake it for the tilled ground. They prefer the land unbroken and free from the earliest curse pronounced against the first banished and first created man.” Adam and Eve, banished from Eden, were forever condemned to a life of agriculture.

Gammage prefers white explorers as sources because, he says, “they were there.” But so also were the hundreds of senior Aboriginal mentors of dozens of anthropologists and quite some archaeologists of the last hundred years. There were also the anthropologists who lived among the free people beyond the frontier: Ursula McConnel, Lauriston Sharp, Norman Tindale, Donald Thomson and others. We discuss their respectful and rich records in our book.

Gammage’s claim that our responses given at an ANU–Canberra Times Meet the Author event were “infused with possibles and alternatives” is false. Dr Walshe’s caveats over site dating were the normal scientific cautions, unlike the reckless claims made by Pascoe in Dark Emu and since. The evidence is in the recording of that event.

Bill Gammage has had high scholarly standards but has not applied them to Pascoe. Why? Is academic tolerance of bad Aboriginal history, bad anthropology and bad archaeology okay if the author identifies as Aboriginal? Universities are in enough trouble as it is. •

Keryn Walshe writes:

In being so charmingly simple, Bill Gammage’s response to the debate about our book fails to identify science as playing a highly critical role when assessing a “history and polemic” such as Dark Emu. No reviewer to date has commented on Dark Emu’s unhinged use of scientific findings.

As an archaeologist, I prefer to work from archaeological evidence. Interrogating the data is a basic scientific principle that Bruce Pascoe didn’t apply when he was piling up Dark Emu’s evidence for farming and village life. Its absence is a significant omission, as is the omission of key parts of citations from explorers’ journals. Claims of food preservation and storage, agricultural implements and villages of stone houses are no small matters.

Dark Emu’s archaeological evidence lies entirely in the extraordinary size and number of “stone houses,” the unheard-of practice of smoking eels inside gum trees, and discoveries of agricultural implements in collections. Apparently, all of this was deliberately hidden from “us” across some 150 years.

There is no credible scientific evidence that eels were smoked at Lake Condah, and this fact removes all possibility of sedentism. This has serious implications for arguing a population of 700 or, more radically, 10,000. “Stone houses,” as a term, distracts the imagination from the reality of a low, small circle of stone over which foliage was arranged in order to form a temporary shelter. Their frequency of habitation remains unclear, and some of these perimeters of stone may have acted as no more than a windbreak during peak eel season.

Interestingly, there has been no reviewer response to Dark Emu’s inclusion of cylcons (or silcons) as agricultural implements. After comprehensive research identifying their primary role in men’s ceremonial practices was published eighty years ago, all were eventually removed from public display in Australia’s collecting institutions. Excluding these 3000 or so ceremonial objects from the clump of agricultural implements leaves just thirteen heavy stone objects (aka “Bogan picks”). Dark Emu avoids offering a time length for the practice of Indigenous agriculture in this country, but does vaguely wave a hand at a piece of ground stone from the Cuddie Springs megafauna site, which is proposed to be some 32,000 years old. Momentarily ignoring the fact that the thirteen implements selected for agriculture are absolutely not, that is not much to show for those thousands of years of laborious activity.

Gammage steps away from Pascoe’s ill-founded claim of 120,000 years for Indigenous occupation of Australia, to settle for the more popular 65,000 years. As no explanation is given, Gammage may as well stay with 120,000, as both figures have been hotly debated at the scientific level. Far more scientifically reliable is 50,000 years of occupation.

Historians may well demand accuracy when drawing from archival material, but it seems that when drawing from science, uncritical reading is perfectly acceptable. •

The post The trouble with history appeared first on Inside Story.

Australian anthropologist Nicholas Thomas’s new book starts with that knowledge. In this account of what is known about the great historic voyages and voyagers across the Pacific, we journey with him backwards and forwards in time, following winds and currents from the east to the west and north to the south of what was once called mar del sur, the South Sea. Thomas is the umpteenth anthropologist or archaeologist or historian to take readers on this journey, and one of the best.

Knowledge of the great canoe voyages that settled islands as distant as Aotearoa/New Zealand and Rapa Nui/Easter Island resides in Islander histories and culture, and has enchanted human and social scientists for as long as the connection between them has been known. Anthropologists and linguists, archaeologists and historians have tried to pin down where, when, how and, elusively, why the ancestors of Polynesians, Melanesians and Micronesians travelled so far, settling islands thousands of kilometres apart.

Voyagers is a long, richly illustrated essay setting out these arguments. It is also, in one sense, the backstory of Thomas’s own discipline and his position as director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge.

Some of Thomas’s disciplinary predecessors were both from the Pacific and scholars of the Pacific. He sets out the career and ideas of Te Rangi Hīroa (also known as Peter Buck, 1877–1951), for example, Māori physician, anthropologist and director of Honolulu’s Bishop Museum. Hīroa wrote Vikings of the Sunrise (later published as Vikings of the Pacific) in the mid 1930s, seeking to publicise Polynesian maritime history, geography and culture, and detailing the navigational knowledge that enabled journeys between Tonga, the Cook Islands, Samoa, New Zealand, Hawai’i, the Marquesas and more.

Hīroa was one of many to consider and reconsider, just like Thomas, the various theses of Pacific migration and ancient connection through seafaring. In the 1930s, he favoured an early Indonesian then Micronesian route over what was then the more popular thesis of a Melanesian entry into the Pacific. “Where” and especially “when” have endured as major lines of inquiry in the archaeology, anthropology and history of Oceania.

The most gripping part of Voyagers, however, is Thomas’s exploration of the “how”: the technicalities of different kinds of Islander wayfinding and navigation, of canoe construction and design. Precisely how mariners, then and now, fix their position and their direction from rising and setting stars, triangulating with islands that are not necessarily, and perhaps even rarely, in view, is fascinating and ultimately more interesting than speculations about “why.”

Thomas explains the technique and tradition of fixed departure points from various islands, coordinated with a specific rising star. He shows how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European navigators noted, with real interest drawn from their own experiential knowledge, how Pacific voyagers typically departed from a particular point on the coast — a point that stayed fixed as the canoe sailed offshore and was then aligned and coordinated with a particular star that was known to direct the way to a known island. There was a temporal dimension, then, to departure: losing sight of that landmark had to align with the rise of the celestial mark, the particular evening star, itself located within a group of surrounding stars as fixed points.

Thomas has been reading and re-reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of Pacific voyages for decades. He knows the British, German, Dutch and French expeditions as intimately as anyone. He doesn’t shy away from the impacts of European colonialism, but this (refreshingly) is not his “lesson” for the reader. His great knowledge allows us to discern a genuine and sometimes even humble interest in the European observers of Pacific voyaging. We can rely on him to keep finding surprising gems therein.

Divided by culture, history and language, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors of so many expedition accounts were not just mariners but often navigators too. Of course they looked and listened and learned from what Islanders were doing. If they remarked on the curious Islander pattern of departing from a particular place, not any place, there was likely something to it; after all, the Islanders had specialist knowledge held by few, if any, others, even the ocean sailors of the world.

Popular fascination with Pacific voyagers is greater than for other seas and other journeys in the oceanic world. Thomas traces and explains the enduring interest that saw generations of re-enactments, canonically the Kon-Tiki expedition in the late 1940s, that have sought to validate theses about connections between South America and Polynesia. Over the 1970s and 80s a sub-industry emerged, both evidentiary and educational, including the longstanding expeditions of the Honolulu-based Polynesian Voyaging Society. With his great museological knowledge, the polymathic Thomas is able to explain to us just where and how these re-enactments modelled their vessels, and how accurately. Those early canoes might have been sketched by artists on the Dampier, Wallis, Cook and D’Urville voyages, but less than a handful of genuinely old canoes remain, and Thomas knows where to find them.

This is a book filled with material culture — pottery, artefacts, a Tahitian adze with coconut-fibre binding collected on one of Cook’s voyages. It is filled also with language, the diverse yet often linked vocabularies across Oceania, and the work of those who tried to make sense of them. And our own wayfinding within this book is marked by charts and maps, a design of real beauty.

The maps and charts that open the book immediately humble anyone who thinks they know the Pacific. We can readily recognise “Oceania” as a whole, from Papua New Guinea and Australia across to Rapa Nui, and from the Chatham Islands south of Aotearoa/New Zealand to Hawai’i. But turn the page and we see all the islands that make up Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, known to few but those for whom they are home, and to brokers like Thomas. Saipan and Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands, and Enewetak and Rongelap in the Marshall Islands, Atafu and Fakaofo in the Tokelau Islands; these are places with specific histories of voyaging that Thomas insists — but lightly — we also need to recognise.

As we would expect, James Cook is important in this account. Thomas is a Cook expert, no doubt about it. As he explains to us, Cook was one of many, including the earlier William Dampier, to think about, listen to and learn from other voyagers within and across the South Sea. Many of them sketched and painted the images from his three Pacific voyages that illustrate this book.

Some of the precious artefacts collected, exchanged or occasionally simply taken during those voyages serve as evidence for Thomas’s adjudication of various theses on the where, when, how and why of Pacific canoe voyages. Some, indeed, are treasured in Thomas’s own museum in Cambridge. Some of the linguistic information gathered by Cook, his officers and his mariners likewise serves as evidence, calibrated alongside many current languages and the archaeological evidence, especially of the “Lapita” pottery.

Occasionally Thomas describes his own, often fascinating, first-person encounters and “discoveries.” He tells us about a conference trip to Taiwan, for decades understood to be the deep-time departure point for that group of linguistically defined migrating Oceanic peoples known as the “Austronesians.” Although he knew the pattern of movement, he didn’t expect to recognise the tattoos in one of the remoter parts of Taiwan that he visited. They were similar to many he had seen across Oceania (he is also co-editor of Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West), offering a different kind of confirming evidence of deep historical and cultural connection.

This vignette reminded me of They Are We, Emma Christopher’s film about an Afro-Cuban community. Cultural practices — dances and songs ­— proved crucial in linking this small community with descendants of the same ancestors in Sierra Leone. The cultural recognition was clear, if direct in that instance and mediated in Thomas’s telling. And yet in Thomas’s instance, the material and cultural connection that survives as tattoos is a link over thousands of years, while Christopher’s instance is a link over hundreds of years.

For years now, historians and anthropologists of early colonial eras and encounters have been interested in the mediators, the go-betweens, the brokers. Tupaia is one of the better-known brokers between his own home and culture in the Society Islands and Banks, Cook and his men, as well as between and with Māori with whom Tupaia found he could talk. In 2018, indeed, Tupaia outshone Cook during Britain’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage in the Endeavour, which departed from Deptford in 1768.

In some ways Thomas is himself a skilled and knowledgeable go-between. With precision and deep learning, he surveys the written accounts, the voluminous expeditionary evidence, our current knowledge of Islanders across the various archipelagos, and extant material objects and artefacts. He is also a skilled broker of scholarly knowledge for the so-called “interested reader.”

Voyagers appears in The Landmark Library, published by Head of Zeus Press, “a record of the achievements of humankind from the late Stone Age to the present day, a kind of history of civilization.” The series is highly successful, with a tried and true brief that would equally be at home in the 1920s and 2020s. But who and what is Head of Zeus Press? This ten-year-old London-based independent publisher seems to have defied the odds, publishing hybrid e-books and strongly designed generalist non-fiction such as this. It has secured seasoned and award-winning authors like Thomas as well as debut authors.

The Landmark Library series offers an old-fashioned idea, “the history of civilisation,” that still has legs. But with books on Shakespeare, the British Museum, Magna Carta, the Royal Society, railways, Stonehenge and the Book of Kells, it’s a metropolitan not a cosmopolitan history of civilisation. Voyagers is a geographic and cultural outlier, and one wonders if it started its publishing-idea life as James Cook. If so, what a blessing to have Nicholas Thomas take it on and twist civilisation around and back again. •

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At least, this seems to be Pascoe’s appeal. As he writes on the back cover of the second edition of Dark Emu, “If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers, and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes, and did construct a system of pan-continental government and generated peace and prosperity, then it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.”

The repeated, emphatic “did” hints at Pascoe’s belief that in allowing the reader to look at evidence of Aboriginal people’s constructive behaviour he is undoing a history of suppression or neglect that has stopped Australians from knowing that Aboriginal people practised agriculture. To position oneself as revealing obscured or suppressed truth is powerfully to befriend the reader; that appeal is intensified if the stated aim is to deepen the reader’s bond with “our land.”

Irresistible? In 2016 Dark Emu won both the Indigenous Writer’s Prize and Book of the Year in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards; in two other competitions it made the short list. Young Dark Emu won the Australian Booksellers Association’s Children’s Book of the Year and the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Eve Pownall Award for Information Books, and was shortlisted in four other competitions. A teaching resource book, Dark Emu in the Classroom, has also been published.

Now two academics, anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe, have called Dark Emu into question. In their new book Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate — of which Sutton wrote eleven chapters and Walshe two — they argue that Pascoe’s reading of the evidence has been determined by his firm belief that Aboriginal people gave birth to agriculture. They draw attention to many instances of Pascoe’s minimising or ignoring evidence that “the Old People” (as Sutton respectfully calls them) were hunters and gatherers, and emphasising evidence of what he sees as “agricultural” elements of their economy and society: grouped and durable dwellings, food storage, grain harvesting. Pascoe has graciously welcomed Sutton and Walshe’s critique.

In some respects, Pascoe and his two critics converge. To smash the orthodoxy (as he presents it) that Aboriginal people were nomadic, Pascoe describes them as “more or less sedentary” and as “sedentary or semi-sedentary.” Sutton embraces “semi-sedentary” (erroneously remarking that “semi-sedentary is not mentioned in Dark Emu”) and goes on to cite many instances of academic and popular works published since 1938 that characterise pre-colonial mobility in that way: people foraged within a range of intimately known country, sometimes stayed for long periods in one camp, and even built structures that they could leave and return to find intact.

What Sutton and Walshe question is whether this was an agricultural society. They chip away at so many parts of Pascoe’s thesis that it is, in my opinion, demolished. To give but one example, in his chapter “The Explorers’ Records” Sutton cites evidence that Pascoe could have mentioned but chose not to. He compares Pascoe’s quotations from the explorers’ records with his own, longer quotations — exposing Pascoe’s tendency to omit words that cast doubt on his view that explorers were reporting what they observed as agricultural practices.

The intellectual combat is not as straightforward as this in every chapter. Sometimes the reader must work harder and make choices. For example, Walshe, an archaeologist, devotes eleven pages to considering a small number of stone implements housed in Australian museums. They demand her consideration on the basis that, according to Pascoe, they are “crucial to our understanding of Aboriginal agricultural history.”

Inviting the reader to look “with an open mind” at these tools that he believes could have been hoes for tilling soil, Pascoe laments that they have been little studied. Walshe’s approach is not to say they have not been used as hoes but to ask why anyone should believe that they were. She begins by pointing out that these objects have been studied – as “picks” and “cylcons.” Documented Aboriginal testimony points to cylcons being used in ceremonies to maintain the land’s fecundity. Picks (studied since the 1940s) are likely to have been used when hafted — that is, as an axe-head — for breaking open timber. If such items are “crucial” evidence of agriculture, as Pascoe declares in Dark Emu, then Walshe has effectively questioned this particular “crux.”

For Pascoe and those devoted to his thesis, though, this might not be enough. His mind open to a new interpretation of the picks, Pascoe (teamed with historian Bill Gammage and Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones) hosted a museum exhibition, Bunha-bunhanga: Aboriginal Agriculture in the South-East, whose catalogue declares that the picks were “used to cultivate the murrnong [yam] fields” — speculation presented as fact.

Walshe’s eleven pages on cylcons and picks confront readers with a choice. Do we continue to warm to Pascoe’s speculation (ignoring the extant scientific literature as an artefact of benighted scholarship), or do we accept that we just don’t know how Aboriginal people used these objects? Can the available research show that they were never used as hoes, we might ask.

Pascoe, inviting us to believe in a might-have-been that no one can disprove, is answered by Sutton and Walshe, asking why anyone should believe a proposition that lacks supporting evidence. Walshe’s cool presentation of what is known about the use of these objects will leave some readers… well, cold. The idea that picks and cylcons were hoes solicits readers who feel that Aboriginal people would be more admirable if they could be shown to be not so very different from us. Many readers will want to make that commitment.

Pascoe and his two critics differ not only in their marshalling of evidence but also in their imagined readerships. Much of the Sutton and Walshe book assumes a reader who thinks that a proposition lacking supporting evidence is probably not true. Pascoe’s work is often an explicit appeal to readers willing to reconsider orthodoxy, positioning them as victims of colonists’ self-justifying “hunter-gatherer” myth, ready now to see that Aboriginal people were really agriculturalists. In his own words, Pascoe aims “to give rise to the possibility of an alternative view of pre-colonial Aboriginal society,” a flattering invitation to Australians’ self-renewal.

Sutton is aware that Pascoe’s readers have feelings, that they may be searching “for forgiveness, or reconciliation, or the undoing of the colonial crimes of their forebears,” and that this may dispose them to welcome Pascoe’s explicit invitation to a new way of seeing. One of Sutton’s responses is to argue that Pascoe’s self-proclaimed iconoclasm is spurious, as much in Dark Emu has been said before.

That Aboriginal people were “ecological agents” — changing the landforms and biota as they lived from them — has been accepted by researchers for many years. By setting fire to the country and by digging edible flora out of the ground (thus overturning soil) and planting the inedible portion back in the hole, hunter-gatherers had a “profound effect on the distribution of forest and grassland,” wrote Norman Tindale in 1959. Tindale even used the term “proto-agriculture” in a 1974 publication to refer to evidence that Aboriginal people sometimes stored food in excess of immediate requirements. (Sutton is critical of that term’s implied view that agriculture would have been a forward step from hunting and gathering.) A book called Resource Managers: North American and Australian Hunter-Gatherers came out in 1982 (with Sutton as co-author of one chapter).

Such examples (and Sutton gives more) tell us of academic, not popular, acceptance of the idea that Aboriginal people were canny and intentional manipulators of nature. Pascoe’s position as revealer of neglected or suppressed truth could still be justified by saying that he is the first to disseminate esoteric research on Aboriginal people’s ecological agency. Sutton challenges that as well, pointing to several popularising books and audiovisual projects since the 1970s that have celebrated the ecological agency of pre-colonial Aboriginal society. What Pascoe learned as a child in the 1950s, he says, is not what the Australian public has been learning in recent years.

But Sutton’s strongest disagreements with Pascoe are less about evidence than about what he sees as two major flaws in how he frames his argument in Dark Emu. First, Pascoe implicitly endorses an outmoded theory of human history known as “social evolution.” And second, he has not understood Aboriginal people’s comprehensively spiritual understanding of their world.

“Social evolution” was the gift of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who argued that the manifest variety in human societies arose from the fact that some societies had progressed faster than others through a series of civilisational stages that all human societies could and would traverse. The orthodox British colonial view that Pascoe seeks to overturn was that Aboriginal society was a real-life example of humanity still functioning at the most primitive stage — living by hunting and gathering.

Had Pascoe published Dark Emu 120 years earlier his foil would have been another bestselling author, Benjamin Kidd. In 1894 Kidd achieved high sales and several translations by arguing in Social Evolution that it was natural for simple societies to die out when they came in contact with the more complex society that now occupied their country. Pascoe’s pertinent message would have been that Aboriginal society was more complex than merely “hunter-gatherer.” It was in “marked movement towards agricultural reliance”; it was “burgeoning agriculture” — an economy worthy of more respect.

“In denying the existence of the economy,” Pascoe writes in Dark Emu, “[the British] were denying the right of the people to their land, and fabricating the excuse that is at the heart of Australia’s claim to legitimacy today.” By emphasising how agricultural the Aboriginal people really were, Dark Emu seeks to reimagine Indigenous Australians as dispossessed sovereigns and to undermine non-Indigenous Australians’ assurance that, by colonising Aboriginal people, Britain was enacting humanity’s natural progression.

Sutton needs no convincing that Australia’s history is a story of colonial conquest and usurpation, but he objects strongly to Pascoe’s way of questioning Australia’s “legitimacy.” The “most fundamental flaw” of Dark Emu, he writes, is that it implicitly endorses the social evolutionists’ scale of human value: by seeking to redescribe the Old People as agriculturalists it has conceded too much to the idea that agriculture is a higher stage than “hunting and gathering.” Sutton urges us to admire the Old People for what they were rather than for what, in Pascoe’s view, they were becoming.

Sutton’s plea for the inherent worth of the hunter-gatherer way of life (and implicitly, for the right of the Old People and their descendants to assert their unceded sovereignty) is a product of “cultural relativism.” In the “human sciences,” cultural relativism began to replace “social evolution” in the second decade of the twentieth century. It has been axiomatic for the research community on whose works Sutton and Walshe rely, and it has been buttressed, since the 1940s, by emerging international law concepts such as the right of “peoples” to “self-determination.” Popular assent to Pascoe’s assumption that Aboriginal people were more admirable for being agricultural suggests that cultural relativism has not yet undermined social evolution in popular thinking about human history.

The second of Sutton’s fundamental objections to Pascoe is that in his materialist conception of “economy” he can’t conceive that the Old People’s persistence in hunting and gathering entailed their intellectual rejection of agriculture. Here we should note that in this book, as in his previous book, The Politics of Suffering, it is clear that Sutton’s field work on Cape York formed him ethically and intellectually.

In the 1970s Sutton lived on Cape York with groups collectively known as the Wik. There his teachers explained how vital to human existence it was to talk to “country” in quotidian action and in ceremony. Recounting that learning, Sutton then combines his own observations of Wik on country with reports made by other researchers to argue that what we call an “economy” has been, for the Old People, a spiritualised practice; they understand “country” as imbued with spirits consubstantial with the humans who live off it.

The getting of food enacts an ontology that we have learned to call “the Dreaming.” In what Sutton calls “spiritual propagation” and “spiritual gardening,” the fertility of the biota is understood to be inherent, maintained by living off and with it. Pascoe’s preoccupation with “material methods of species cultivation” briefly acknowledges this spiritual dimension but fails to understand its significance: it was a way of seeing nature to which agricultural improvement was irrelevant. To issue this corrective to Pascoe’s “modern Eurocentric attitude” is what Sutton believes he owes his teachers.

So, what is at stake? Melbourne University Press chose the title Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? In Dark Emu Pascoe hints at discomfort with that stark binary: “Arguing over whether the Aboriginal economy was a hunter-gatherer system or one of burgeoning agriculture is not the central issue.” Rather unhelpfully, he explains: “The crucial point is that we have never discussed it as a nation.” The two sentences work against each other: why would the nation discuss “it” if “it” is not “the central issue”?

In my view, beyond the (undoubtedly important) issue of how to describe pre-colonial Aboriginal society is an issue of contemporary civics: how to respect “Indigenous knowledge” in a way that meets the Uluru Statement’s demand for “truth-telling.” To respect and include “Indigenous knowledge” we need some way to identify what it is. Pascoe’s invitation to revise and renew our view of Aboriginal civilisation and Sutton and Walshe’s challenge make clear that “Indigenous knowledge” takes many forms.

Pascoe is probably Australia’s most widely read and influential Aboriginal intellectual (with Stan Grant a possible rival) and he is likely to remain so because of schools’ take-up of Young Dark Emu. Yet his “Indigenous knowledge” is enriched, or burdened, with borrowings from the colonists’ intellectual traditions: from the Enlightenment the notion that some societies are “ahead” of others (see page 70 of Young Dark Emu), and from secular social science his materialist framing of “economy.” Sutton and Walshe are not Indigenous but they have spent years training to re-present “Indigenous knowledge” in terms that are scientifically credible because (unlike “the Dreaming”) their accounts are open to refutation. Truth-telling’s best hope is to keep in mind the distinction between teller and tale. •

Related: Tom Griffiths on reading Bruce Pascoe

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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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A Wikipedia entry would presumably be titled “Frederick Rose (anthropologist).” It would provide the key dates of Rose’s life (born 22 March 1915, died 14 January 1991). It would mention that he grew up in London, studied at Cambridge, left England in 1937 to become an anthropologist in Australia, and worked as a government meteorologist from 1937 to 1946, and then as a Canberra-based public service research officer for the next seven years.

A Wikipedia entry might tell us that Rose did ethnographic research in northern and central Australia, some of it while working for the Bureau of Meteorology, and that he published several books about Aboriginal culture. We might also learn that he was a committed communist, that he was implicated in the spy scandal that followed the defection to Australia of Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov in 1954, and that he then left the public service, worked as a wharfie for a couple of years, and in 1956 emigrated to the German Democratic Republic, where he became a professor of social anthropology.

I first heard of Fred Rose around thirty years ago, soon after I embarked on a PhD in the Department of Pacific and Southeast Asian History at the Australian National University. A young East German anthropologist wanted to come to Australia to do research, one of my supervisors told me. Could I tell the department whether, in my opinion, she was a bona fide scholar? She had two articles in an East German anthropology and archaeology journal to her name, one of them about bark paintings and the other about the nineteenth-century Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Truganini.

The applicant came with recommendations from Dymphna Clark, the wife of the university’s larger-than-life emeritus professor of history. It was Rose who had elicited Clark’s support for the young East German, but it also seemed to be Rose who was responsible for the fact that the request was being dealt with by Pacific historians rather than by anthropologists. Rose had co-authored her academic papers, but the correspondence with my university suggested that he was perhaps more than just a mentor. The matter was evidently delicate.

I was intrigued. Why would the East German authorities allow Rose’s young colleague to visit Australia – not for a brief visit to attend a conference, but for several months? In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev had just been elected general secretary of the Communist Party. In Poland, martial law (imposed after the conflict between the state and Solidarity) had been lifted in 1983, and the communist party seemed willing to tolerate a gradual liberalisation of Polish society. In the German Democratic Republic, however, Erich Honecker and the Socialist Unity Party governed with an iron fist and rejected all suggestions for reform. For many East Germans, reform would have been synonymous with the ability to travel to Western countries, but apart from pensioners, who were allowed to visit relatives in West Germany, only a select few were granted exit visas. They included the country’s top athletes, artists and scientists – provided, of course, they could be trusted to return. Rose’s protégé didn’t fit any of these categories.

Fred Rose photographed with Manning Clark in Ellery Crescent, Canberra, on 5 April 1962. ASIO/National Archives of Australia

I seem to recall that a visiting fellowship was offered to the young woman despite rather than because of the politics involved. The university’s Pacific historians believed that they were doing a good deed by allowing an anthropologist writing about Australia and the region to gain some first-hand knowledge of the peoples she purported to study. I still remember clearly the day we broke the news to her by phone. After one of the department’s senior researchers had failed to make himself understood – speaking very slowly but with the strongest Australian accent – it fell to me to tell her that, yes, the ANU would accommodate her, and that we were hoping that her government would allow her to come.

I was in Papua New Guinea doing fieldwork during the time she spent in Canberra, and didn’t meet her until soon after the Berlin wall came down. I was visiting her home town of Leipzig to see for myself what the Wende – the East German transition to democracy – was all about. I was impressed by the civil rights activists who had occupied the Leipzig office of the Stasi secret police and who told me about its repressive practices and its paranoia, and amazed when I learnt about the extent to which the Stasi could rely on a network of informers. But I was also taken aback by the fact that everyone else I talked to identified as a victim of communism, and was eager for capitalism’s supposed material benefits.

In Red Professor, the young East German anthropologist is called “Anna Wittmann.” I’m not sure why the authors have chosen to conceal her identity, but I’ll follow their lead. “Wittmann” isn’t the only person from Rose’s life given a pseudonym: a “Heidi Manne” plays a marginal role as a junior Australian diplomat; she went on “to become UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner,” so her real name is not hard to guess.

Monteath and Munt confirm what those dealing with Wittmann’s application to visit ANU suspected: that she was Rose’s lover. He had met her when they were both living in Leipzig and working for the local Museum of Anthropology. They possibly had a child together.

Fred Rose had an “innate ability to compartmentalise his life,” according to Monteath and Munt. He was a passionate campaigner for Aboriginal rights yet a dispassionate empiricist when writing about Aboriginal cultures. He was a conscientious Canberra public servant and an active member of the Communist Party. He was caught up in relationships with women (frequently with more than one at a time) but kept his private life separate from his politics.

The compartment that receives particular attention in Red Professor is Rose’s interaction with intelligence agencies, both in Australia and in East Germany. Did he spy for the Soviet Union while working as a public servant in Australia? The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO, clearly thought so, but the evidence is inconclusive. He was most likely the man codenamed “Professor” in Soviet cables decrypted by the United States during its Venona program. But the Petrovs had never met him and were not able to implicate him, and despite a lengthy and detailed investigation he was not charged with betraying government secrets.

The accusations levelled against him in Australia eventually precipitated Rose’s move to East Germany. They also prompted him to identify as a victim and to exaggerate the importance ASIO assigned to him. In 1954 and 1955, his role was investigated by the royal commission set up by the Menzies government in response to revelations about a Soviet spy network in Australia. The commission “profoundly affected Rose’s life,” Monteath and Munt write. “It left psychological scars that never fully healed… Rose found it increasingly difficult to clear his mind of the possibility that he was being watched.”

Rose’s paranoia was matched by that of Australia’s spymaster, ASIO director-general Charles Spry. Spry was forever suspicious, and often his suspicions were unfounded. Somebody like Rose, who made no secret of his allegiance to the communist cause, confirmed Spry’s bifurcated view of the world. In fact, as Monteath and Munt observe, “It is tempting to view [Spry] as an inverted image of Fred Rose.”

While Rose’s involvement with Soviet intelligence was never proven, there is little doubt about the unsavoury role he would play as an informer for the East German state security agency Stasi, reporting on his colleagues, his students, his wife and his son Kim. In Rose’s view, it was all for a good cause. I wonder how much his unwavering commitment was influenced by the treatment he received, or thought he received, at the hands of a fiercely anti-communist Australian government.

Perhaps we could better understand Rose’s role as a Stasi informer, and his identity as a communist, if we compared his life in East Germany with those of three of his contemporaries. The first is Walter Kaufmann, a German Jew who arrived in Sydney in 1940 on the infamous Dunera. Like Rose, he became a communist in Australia and, again like Rose, he left Australia in the 1950s to live in the German Democratic Republic. Kaufmann seems never to have fully assimilated to life in the GDR; perhaps his coming-of-age in Australia proved as formative as his childhood in Germany. Then there was John Peet, an English journalist who moved to East Germany in 1950, became a propagandist for the communist regime and remained a communist until he died in 1988, but who was nevertheless able to be critical (and, to the best of my knowledge, never offered his services to the Stasi). And finally, there was Wolfgang Steinitz, the subject of an excellent biography by the German historian Annette Leo. Like Rose, he was a prominent anthropologist in East Germany who remained loyal to his communist ideals; unlike Rose, he grappled with the contradictions between these ideals and the socialist reality.

Fred Rose preceded his young colleague to Canberra in 1986, and I was introduced to him one day in the Coombs Building’s tea room. He seemed to blend in with the overwhelmingly white, male, middle-aged, cardigan-wearing crowd. I would have been too shy to engage somebody who was evidently holding court in conversation. But I also told myself that I had little interest in him. Having checked out his anthropological writings when I’d been asked to report on his protégé’s scholarship, I had found his observations about Aboriginal kinship on Groote Eylandt too dry and his ideas about anthropology antiquated.

Now I much regret that I didn’t get to know Fred Rose when I had the opportunity – if only because I am now curious about his status as an anthropologist. Was he “certainly a poor anthropologist, inadequately trained (in spite of his Cambridge degree) and intellectually arrested,” as the ANU’s inaugural chair in anthropology, Fred Nadel, thought in 1950? Or did he do “highly original work” and make contributions to kinship studies that “rate comparison” with the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, as another Australian-based anthropologist, Kenneth Maddock, wrote after Rose’s death?

In one respect at least, he appeared to be ahead of his time. In a book about Aboriginal Australia published in German in 1969, he wrote about the impact of European settlement on Aboriginal societies:

How have their views of the environment changed…? At the same time the interesting question arises: How have European settlers’ perceptions of Aborigines changed during the same period? The relations between Aborigines and white settlers have always been marked by the mutual influence they had on one another.

In the 1960s, most Australian anthropologists would have been baffled by Rose’s idea of exploring the influence Aboriginal people had on settler-colonial society.

Neither Rose’s reputation as an anthropologist nor his putative role as a spy for the Soviets would have warranted a full-length biography. Both in his professional life, and as a true believer in communism and the party that claimed to be best positioned to work towards it, Rose comes across as obsessive, conservative and somewhat dour – although I concede that my reading of Red Professor may have been shaped by memories of my fleeting encounter three decades earlier. It’s interesting that he emigrated to a communist country, but his role as a Westerner in Walter Ulbricht’s and Erich Honecker’s East Germany seems surprisingly unremarkable, particularly compared with the activities of his fellow countryman, John Peet.

That leaves one compartment of Rose’s life: his relationships with women. Monteath and Munt treat this aspect of his biography with kid gloves – or maybe they think it incidental to Rose’s persona as a researcher and writer, as a communist and as a spy. Often we have to rely on inferences, and very often we are invited to rely on Rose’s version of events. Occasionally comments about Rose’s sex life smack of a false sense of camaraderie (“Put colloquially, Rose was a dog inclined to stray from the porch”). Potentially, however, the contradictions between the personal and the political are what make Rose a fascinating biographical subject.

Take his early years in Australia, for example, when he was engaged to Edith Linde, a German woman he had met in England who would later join him in Darwin and eventually become his wife. According to Monteath and Munt (who rely on Rose’s draft memoirs), while working as a government meteorologist in Darwin, Rose became concerned that his ethnographic moonlighting could be interpreted as a cover for having sex with Aboriginal women. To “forestall any such accusations… he resolved to establish a relationship with a white woman” (who turns out to be the married manager of a local hotel, and “a keen golfer”).

Edith too was a communist. She would precede her husband to East Germany, where she too willingly worked for the Stasi and provided information about her husband, among others. Throughout most of Fred and Edith’s relationship, her allocated role was as mother of their children; other women in Rose’s life were lovers, former lovers and potential lovers.

There is nothing dour about Fred Rose’s relations with women. With his keen interest in the opposite sex, Rose presented himself as a likeable and lively character. Political scientist Coral Bell, who worked in the Department of External Affairs in Canberra in the second half of the 1940s, remembered Rose as “a great charmer who always seemed to be at everyone’s parties.”

And despite all his compartmentalising, his private life and his work as an anthropologist sometimes seemed to intersect. As he grew older, he was often more than twice the age of his lovers. At the same time, the aspects of Aboriginal society that seemed to hold particular interest for him were polygyny and gerontocracy, which he considered to be “reciprocally dependent.”

Biographers have to make do with the sources at their disposal. In this case, many of the sources were written by Rose himself. We know nothing about the Darwin woman whose role it was to provide proof that Rose’s relations with Indigenous women were purely professional. We know little about how Edith experienced the relationship with her husband. And, more’s the pity, Anna Wittmann’s side of the story is missing altogether. •

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For many Indigenous Australian scholars, and many scholars who identify as postcolonial, anthropologists are the enemy from the colonial past. As culpable as the murderers or mission managers, worse than the politicians and more devious than the overtly racist population, anthropologists are seen as wolves in sheep’s clothing, exploiting Aboriginal knowledge without accepting any mutual obligation. Indigenous historian John Maynard even claimed that Geoffrey Blainey’s book Triumph of the Nomads had “delivered Aboriginal people from the hands of the anthropologists” in 1975.

Anthropology has become the whipping boy targeted by scholars who want to be postcolonial and believe they can bestow on colonialism’s victims their rightful place in a postcolonial world. But the condemnation of anthropology seems bitterly unfair when, for many decades, anthropology was the only scholarly discipline that took Aborigines seriously. Many ethnographers became the trusted recorders of the knowledge that senior Aboriginal men and women wanted to preserve.

I contend that throughout the first half of the twentieth century the discipline as a whole was politically heroic. Both its practices and its explicit arguments contradicted standard conceptions of “backward savages.” Ethnography then employed fundamentally anti-racist, anti-colonial and even anti-state frameworks. While reliant on many of the tropes of their time, and using language we now find offensive, ethnographers fundamentally sought to relate as equals to people who were known pejoratively as primitive and governed accordingly.

I don’t seek to relieve particular Australian anthropologists, or the discipline as a whole, of responsibility for the ways they were implicated or active in colonial schemes and structures. Rather, I argue that wholesale condemnation of the anthropological endeavour has become shallow and moralistic, and an excuse for continued misperception of that complex, contradictory and contentious phenomenon known as “traditional Aboriginal culture.” There is a postcolonial fantasy that wants to achieve redemptive virtue by condemning the past rather than understanding the complex political and social legacy that colonialism created and bestowed on us all.

Classical anthropology

In the light of others’ attempts to delegitimise anthropology in toto, I have moved from being a critic of classical ethnographic research in the 1980s to being its defender in the twenty-first-century. It appears to me that postcolonial aspirations have discarded the baby of classical ethnographic research with the bathwater of the colonial legacy. The heart of that discarded baby continues to beat, for instance in the Gunapipi and Yappaduruwa ceremonies that still today gather hundreds of people from across Arnhem Land. Such ceremonial work is concealed from the nation – except when Traditional Owners insist on road closures that annoy emissaries of the state. The role of ceremonial and other traditions in current Aboriginal politics is a fraught question, disputed among Indigenous peoples – and by the odd anthropologist.

My modest aim here is to recall some early ethnographic work in order to reconsider its significance. When, during the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition of 1898, W.H.R. Rivers and A.C. Haddon recognised the significance of the “classificatory” system of kinship in the Torres Strait and collected detailed information about its forms, they were opening up a field of scholarship that continued to grow for decades. In documenting the kinship system, they were also providing a necessary foundation for establishing positive personal relationships with Indigenous peoples.

The kinship diagram (below) that accompanied me when I first lived with Rembarrnga people in southern Arnhem Land in 1975 was a valued legacy of their work.

Subsection (skin) diagram adapted from L.R. Hiatt’s Kinship and Conflict (1965)

The intricacies that I had found puzzling and obscure in the lecture hall at Sydney University became foundational elements of my everyday relationships with Rembarrnga people. The diagram began to make perfect sense when I was adopted as Lorna Martin’s sister, becoming Ngaritjan, the same “skin” as her. It showed how everyone else was related to me – as classificatory “mother” (mula), potential “husband” (bunji), “daughter” or “son” (mula), or two distinct kinds of cousins and nieces and nephews – matrilateral or patrilateral. Rembarrnga children absorb the kinship terminology, structure and associated orientations from infancy, just as language is learned. The principle named by anthropologists as the “equivalence of same-sex siblings” was a valuable maxim that saved me from the embarrassment of confusing a “sister’s” children, for instance, with a “brother’s” children. Throughout Aboriginal Australia quite different kinds of relatives call forth different responsibilities and emotions. The children of same-sex siblings are “parallel cousins,” often classified as full siblings.

The kinship diagram that was so valuable to me was not the result of a single ethnographer’s research. After Haddon had developed the “genealogical method,” dozens of fieldworkers collected detailed accounts of what became known as the “subsection systems,” noting especially the differences between the four-section system of central Australia and the subdivided eight-section system in the north. Ethnographers devised varied diagrams to represent the marriage rules and the reproduction of kinship structures over time. They also documented ceremonial practices, economic exchange, family structures, power relations and metaphysics, as well as everyday life.

W. Lloyd Warner was an exemplary early ethnographer. In 1926, when the nation’s press saw Arnhem Land as inhabited by “murderous black savages,” this young graduate from Harvard lived for lengthy periods immersed in the social life of the Murngin (now Yolngu) people. The title of Warner’s book, A Black Civilization, was itself a challenge to public perceptions, and its detailed account of Murngin society remains so today. At Warner’s final parting from his loved and admired friend Mahkarolla, each man wept as he recognised that distance was about to sever forever the friendship they had developed.

Of many other early ethnographers, let me mention two more notables. Phyllis Kaberry’s 1939 Aboriginal Woman: Sacred and Profane was a rich and evocative depiction of family relationships and everyday life, based on long-term fieldwork in the Kimberley. Donald Thomson travelled extensively with the Wik people in North Queensland and the Murngin in Arnhem Land, publishing, among other things, “The Joking Relationship and Organised Obscenity in North Queensland,” as well as Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land in 1949. He also left a marvellous archive of photographs and other objects. These are no small matters.

It should also be noted that ethnographers – and other whitefellas – faced severe obstacles to participating in Aboriginal social worlds until not long before my own first fieldwork in the mid 1970s. In the name of protecting Aboriginal people from rapacious whites, and to avoid what was known as the “half-caste menace,” state and territory protection laws prohibited “consorting” with Aborigines. Anthropologists’ desire to participate in Aboriginal social life was a challenge to the separatist regimes that monitored interaction between racially categorised populations by issuing permits for particular purposes. By 1975 such separatist legislation had been abandoned, but people of the Northern Territory cattle country still despised anthropologists, contemptuously calling us “Aboriginal lovers.” It seemed to me that this term expressed pastoralists’ fears of Aborigines and of the implicit challenge that these “primitives” posed to everything pastoralists stood for – private property, accumulation, hierarchy, individualism. In taking Aborigines seriously, anthropological practice was subversive. In subtle but shocking ways the Northern Territory public showed us extreme disapproval.

It now appears that postcolonial scholars express a more resounding disapproval of ethnographers. We are condemned, not for being friends of Aborigines but for being exploitative, just like the pastoralists. To understand how such accusations emerged, we need to grasp the ambitions and context of early ethnography.

Anthropology’s ambitions

When anthropology emerged as a discipline in the late nineteenth century, European intellectuals were working on the frontiers of knowledge of human variation, contemplating human history in a new evolutionary light. Australians, as Aborigines were known, caught the attention of these scholars because of the contrast between their simple technology and small-scale groupings on the one hand, and their elaborate ceremonial life supported by marvellous theories about the nature and origins of the world, and their intricate but flexible social structures, on the other.

Speculation about Australians’ place in early human social history competed with recognition of their sophistication and moral significance in the world. Spencer and Gillen’s early work in central Australia took up international debates about human origins and particularly the elementary forms of human society. One dispute was about whether “group marriage” existed in central Australia, following the observation that categories of relations were classified as possible spouses. “Group marriage” was soon shown to be a misinterpretation – a confusion of actual spouses with legitimate marriage partners. This is one example of how early research was trying to make sense of utterly different social institutions.

In anthropology, the term “radical alterity,” or “otherness,” does not refer to different human beings, but to the radically different ways that equivalent human beings construct, reproduce and grapple with their social worlds. What early twentieth-century ethnographers sought was not some general, romantic or narcissistic knowledge of “otherness,” but an understanding of particular peoples in their own conditions and on their own terms. The radical implications of this search are clear. Ethnographers showed that there was nothing normal or natural about any particular social arrangement, whether a language or philosophical belief, a family grouping, an economic system or a form of politics. Early anthropological studies greatly expanded conceptions of human ways of being in the world by offering comparisons between Europeans’ self-acclaimed “civilisation” and a range of other social arrangements.

But Europe was not decentred. The fledgling discipline of anthropology took others seriously but counter-moves arose with the racial “science” that was also thriving in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Europe. The negative images and reputation bestowed on peoples deemed “backward” were Europe’s defences against the challenges that these others represented. But it is crucial to recall that many powerful European thinkers refused to endorse the human hierarchy that was being established by colonial states. While involuntary participants in the language and evolutionary thinking of their times, they were excited by the challenges being offered to normative conceptions of human society and human being. Thus, dismissing Australia’s ethnographic literature because of its colonial context is equivalent to discarding the work of pioneering thinkers – Darwin, Freud or Marx – because they shared their intellectual world and its language with the morally and scientifically contemptible work of racial “science.”

Philosophers, psychologists, biologists and philologists responded to the expanded conceptions of the human by asking how far human societies could vary. Did these others, assumed to be historically prior, have true languages, laws, religions, politics, economies? Were their cosmologies coherent? The answers, explored and documented by anthropological fieldwork, were overwhelmingly “yes.” Human beings are fundamentally alike and have created societies with equivalent institutions. While other newly established social sciences were fully occupied with studying Europe’s past and present, social anthropology developed a method of systematically researching, recording and interpreting the nature of non-European societies, and called it “ethnography.”

As the new discipline of social anthropology flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, demographically small-scale and technologically simple societies were of greatest interest. The earliest systematic ethnographic studies were mainly in Africa, the Arctic, Melanesia and Australia, and pursued serious questions about the nature of social life – its necessities and contingencies. Baffling political systems, elaborate economies and intriguing metaphysical meanings played out in rich ceremonies; and all were recorded and interpreted with intense curiosity to reveal both the power of human imaginations and certain common human structures and forms of expression. A better understanding of the varieties and limits of human existence was a core concern of early anthropologists and one shared with a wide range of thinkers around the globe – including many who were known by anthropologists as their “informants.”

Now, over a century after the first anthropological expedition to Australia, the kind of knowledge those scientists and their successors pursued appears to have lost its legitimacy and relevance. The enterprise of understanding radical alterity, other ways of being in the world, is no longer popular or even significant in most intellectual and scholarly circles. How this came about can be traced through a more particular history at the University of Sydney, where the first anthropology department in Australia was established in 1926.

Political tales of the 1970s

When I began an arts degree in 1970 it was the anthropology department at Sydney University, which then included linguistics and prehistory, that was knowledgeable about Aborigines. It is important to recall that there were no identified Aboriginal scholars and that no other discipline made any contrary claim. Because the discipline’s pride had been in recording and analysing “traditional Aboriginal culture,” questions of social change, the “mixed race” majority, and the role of the state received little attention. Although A.P. Elkin, professor of anthropology at the university, had encouraged this kind of fieldwork in New South Wales, others designated it “sociology” in attempted disparagement. Historians had as yet taken little interest in Aborigines and there was no Australian Cultural Studies to attend to contemporary cultural shifts. Further, the rare appearance of an Aboriginal person at an academic seminar caused discomfort, sometimes with a muttered anxiety that the discipline was becoming “politicised.”

Neophytes like me were turning on their disciplinary elders, criticising their narrow focus on “traditional culture” and the lack of attention to social change. Armed with an emerging international literature and powerful theoretical developments critical of Eurocentric scholarship, we were contesting anthropology’s agenda, demanding that cultural practices be given economic and political contexts. We challenged ideas of static “traditional culture” because, we argued, “cultures have histories and colonisers have cultures.” The positivism, empiricism and lack of reflexivity that characterised the more tedious ethnographies were also on our critical radar. (Emerging feminism determined my own PhD research into Indigenous women’s control over fertility.)

It was also in the 1970s that Aboriginal people began to emerge in the media as forceful spokespeople demanding land rights, and by the 1980s Aboriginal authors, activists and students were participating in political debates and in academic seminars. They largely ignored anthropology, perhaps because by valorising “traditional culture” we had accepted the governing categories that authenticated some Aboriginal people over others. An exception was the young anthropologist Marcia Langton, who published a seminal essay in 1982 on anthropology’s traditionalism, “Urbanising Aborigines: The Social Scientists’ Great Deception.” The essay became a powerful weapon for those trying to shift the boundaries of Australian anthropology.

My own harsh critique of Elkin, Ronald Berndt and Kenneth Maddock referred to their arrogance in naming their subject “The Australian Aborigines” when they ignored the majority of Australian Aborigines. But I valued the ethnographic literature that had illuminated the original Australians’ social structures, which were, and are, still unrecognised and treated with a lack of respect in public discourse. To return to the familiar metaphor, we young critics of traditionalism assumed that the dirty colonial bathwater had not drowned the ethnographic baby or its referent, Aboriginal social life. We desired an expanded ethnographic focus on relationships between settler and Indigenous populations, the nature of colonial rule, and new Aboriginal social forms of adjustment or resistance to changing conditions.

The conflict between the priorities of anthropological elders and those of the recently empowered Indigenous rights activists was illustrated in the clash between Les Hiatt, then reader in anthropology at Sydney University, whose research had been conducted in Arnhem Land, and Gary Foley, an emerging Aboriginal intellectual and land rights activist. Did “Aboriginal politics” refer to national, racist politics or to Aborigines’ traditional forms of political practice? No reconciliation seemed possible between Foley’s anger at the lack of scholarly attention to Aboriginal disempowerment and Hiatt’s passionate sense of the significance of an Indigenous politics that was virtually unrecognisable as politics to Western political science. (Maddock described the Aboriginal polity as “a kind of anarchy, in which it was open to active and enterprising men to obtain some degree of influence with age, but in which none were sovereign.”)

A dispute between two American ethnographers working in central Australia illustrates the critical perspective that was emerging in anthropology. Eric Michaels, a pioneering visual anthropologist from the University of Texas, was documenting the impact of television on remote Aboriginal communities. He published The Aboriginal Invention of Television in Central Australia in 1986, the same year that Fred Myers from NYU published his acclaimed ethnography Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self. Michaels was critical of Myers’s book. He hoped it was “the last of the ethnographies” in which classical anthropology attempts to capture a culture within the covers of a book. Researchers, he said, must now ask “not just whether the ethnography is ‘helpful’ in some absolute sense, but will its subjects regard it as so.” Michaels documented the way that secret-sacred categories, localism and personal ownership of important knowledge – crucial principles to central Australian Aborigines’ knowledge system – stood in opposition to the incoming mass media’s principles, where knowledge is universally valid, publicly available and not subject to personal rights or authority. The Aboriginal men who Michaels knew were concerned about their cultural future, and Michaels’s impatience with Australian anthropology stemmed from his acute sensitivity to those apprehensions.

During my studies I was torn between two impressive figures in the Sydney department. Les Hiatt represented the past and Jeremy Beckett the future of Australian anthropology and I did not want to follow one by discarding the other. Beckett, initially a Marxist thinker, had begun his research in western New South Wales among people who were then known as “half-castes.” In a mass lecture theatre in 1971 Beckett played his recordings of the subversive, witty, satirical songs of grassroots intellectual Dougie Young, which sowed a seed of my future work. Hiatt, anarchist and libertarian, was politically conservative but a radical thinker who occasionally and deliberately shocked moral orthodoxies. During a flurry of public debate about cannibalism in Australia, he defended Yolngu mortuary rites, arguing that there could be no greater testament to feelings of unbearable loss than the desire to ingest a morsel of the lost loved one’s flesh. This was not a productive political strategy!

Aboriginal studies had become politically fraught. My fellow students conducted fieldwork elsewhere and the new ethnographers in Australia were mostly overseas scholars. Established Australian anthropologists were resisting the influences of poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism as well as that of the incoming Indigenous scholars.

Engaged anthropologists?

Scholars and intellectuals do not lead, but follow social change, and it was the loss of colonial authority that led to the emergence of postcolonial critique. Before the 1970s, anthropologists, as individuals, were not postcolonial or neo-colonial, but they tended to be anti-colonial. Ralph Piddington, for instance, is reputed to have danced around a Western Australian campfire singing “The Red Flag” in the early 1930s, an action that led to his exile to New Zealand, where he ran a progressive anthropology department. In 1968 W.E.H. Stanner’s immensely popular and influential ABC Boyer Lectures predicted that what he named “the great Australian silence” would not survive “the research that is now in course.” He believed that more accurate, informative accounts of Aboriginal societies would replace negative stereotypes. While contributing to the acceptance of difference, Stanner unwittingly conveyed a sense of inevitable tragedy – that Aboriginal traditions will not adapt and survive in changed forms, but rather will be misunderstood, trampled on and destined to disappear.

Fierce rivalries occasionally erupted among anthropologists about the proper direction of government policy. In the 1930s Donald Thomson and others argued for expanding reserves, such as Arnhem Land, to allow Aboriginal societies some protection from pastoralists’ and miners’ incursions. They were accused of protectionism and separatism, or of trying to keep the Aborigines in zoos in order to study them. Others, such as Elkin and Ronald Berndt, promoted the then progressive policy of ensuring Aborigines access to schooling and other mainstream institutions. They were later reviled as assimilationists. Most busy ethnographers saw themselves as apolitical, with their attention fixed on gaining a proper understanding of the complexities and specificities of knowledge and practices among “traditionally oriented” Aborigines. For some, the discipline had been politically progressive in trying to give responsible advice to the Australian states, whose longstanding oppressiveness was being laid bare, initially by Charles Rowley. It should be noted that the Aboriginal people with whom ethnographers engaged before 1970 were largely remote from government processes; their own languages, literally and metaphorically, were barriers to their engagement in public debate.

While the ambiguities of individual morality may be rendered irrelevant in the face of two centuries of invincible colonial rule, individual culpability cannot be ignored. Elkin, professor of anthropology from 1932 until 1956, was never a popular figure among anthropologists. In his own eyes, he was a great reformer, determined to improve Aborigines’ lot while conducting extensive scientific research. He also endorsed the British nuclear tests and for years dominated the infamous NSW Aborigines Protection (later Welfare) Board.

But Elkin, like all of us, was not simply one thing. His passionate reformism aside, he demonstrated that the ethnographic imagination is able to transcend the constraints of its cultural milieu. While an ordained minister of the Anglican Church, Elkin’s respect and admiration for those he called Aboriginal Men of High Degree (1977) is palpable. His book detailed their extraordinary powers and “outstanding personalities,” and Elkin says:

Medicine men are not impostors. They practice their profession in the way that they and their fellow tribesfolk have inherited, and that they believe, and have found, to be effective.

The fact that even a conservative Christian, a good citizen of the empire, could deliberately contradict popular stigmatising images of Aborigines by demonstrating that “medicine men” were serious intellectuals, is surely testament to anthropology’s counter-hegemonic core. Another example is Norman Tindale, infamous for his painstaking measurements of Aboriginal bodies, who demonstrated that the popular images of Aborigines as nomadic wanderers unattached to places were quite mistaken.

It is the practice of ethnography – the sharing of everyday life with others, investing one’s own subjectivity in an other social realm beyond one’s everyday comfort zone – that ideally allows the anthropologist to think outside the normative discourses of her or his own social realm. But this method appears to contradict conventional ideas of proper scientific method, and anthropology has always had an ambiguous relationship with science and scientism. Earlier ethnographers such as Warner, Thomson and Kaberry wrote rich and descriptive accounts, although their faith in precise observation and description was entirely empiricist and realist, expressed in exhaustive and often exhausting detail. In the 1950s and 60s more impersonal, objectivist styles of writing emerged as anthropologists attempted to give their work more authority by mimicking the biological sciences. Critic Mary Louise Pratt noted: “How, one asks constantly, could such interesting people doing such interesting things produce such dull books?”

It was not, though, the writing style that led to the overturning of anthropological authority in Australia. The very notion of anthropological authority became anathema as colonial authority frayed – or appeared to. When the Commonwealth took responsibility for Aboriginal policy after the 1967 referendum, a large body of racist legislation was rescinded, formal equality before the law was established, and state-funded Aboriginal organisations were launched across the nation.

But severe tensions emerged as the agendas of the Australian government, academic anthropology and Indigenous activists moved in different directions. Scholarly knowledge production shifted when historians at last recognised that “White Australia has a Black history” and began to reveal the price Aborigines had paid for national prosperity. As historical research flourished in the 1980s and public perceptions shifted, it was accounts of Australian colonialism that became known as “Aboriginal history,” and these reframed public discourses about the nation’s past. Historians became the primary scholars recognised in the burgeoning academic field known as Aboriginal Studies. Powerful and revealing Aboriginal autobiographies that emerged at this time remained largely outside the purview of history scholars, as did classical Indigenous cultures. With few exceptions, white historians’ accounts of their ancestors’ collective colonial crimes positioned Aborigines primarily as colonialism’s victims.

The new intellectual order

The pre-1970s anthropological imagination lacked the sense that Aboriginal societies could be incorporated within the state and become participants in the Australian nation without being destroyed. Postcolonial thought simply rejected this idea and paid little attention to the profound adjustments Aboriginal societies throughout the continent were making to colonial conditions.

Anthropologists became embarrassed about claiming expertise above the expertise of Aboriginal people themselves. Yet they were, of course, experts on particular matters on the basis of their scholarship and their relationships with senior Aboriginal men and women who represented traditions that had been largely destroyed in the south. But speaking of “traditional culture” gradually became anathema – it might imply that Aboriginal people were fixed in traditional worlds that carried the taint of the primitive.

Aboriginal people in the south, who had been dispossessed of their country a century or more before, began to claim authority over a unified Aboriginal culture that incorporated contemporary conditions and retained only symbolic ties to what is popularly referred to as “the oldest culture in the world.” Those Australian anthropologists whose conception of “Aboriginal culture” was still limited to the classical traditions were rescued from irrelevancy by the advent of a new role as expert witnesses in native title cases. Now named “native title anthropologists,” they segued smoothly into a niche within the Australian state’s postcolonial projects, supplying evidence largely on the basis of traditional cultural practices whose representational nomenclature – clan, patriline, descent group – had been established within the discipline in an earlier era. A new literature, now known as native title anthropology, began to detail Indigenous connections with country in relation to Australian law. This work does not question the authority and good will of the state. In Australia, the whole discipline of anthropology is now often equated with expertise in “Aboriginal culture,” perhaps because few local anthropologists have taken up other ethnographic subjects.

The postcolonial literature deconstructing the intellectual paradigms of colonialism has aimed to nail the moral and epistemological flaws that pervaded the era rather than to appreciate what was accomplished despite those burdens. (For example, Patrick Wolfe’s 1999 work, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology.) Rereading the earlier Australian ethnographies, mining them for the gems buried there, seems too high a hurdle for current scholars who show little interest in the Aboriginal societies that were the subject of these works, but whose unique histories are not fashionable in social science departments.

The limits of the postcolonial challenge

The intellectual movements of postmodernism and poststructuralism developed as part of the fraying of the power and legitimacy of colonial empires. Postcolonialism refers to an aspiration named, though not invented, by intellectuals. Fuelled by the empowerment of colonial subjects, a set of liberating ideas became a popular platform for research and writing across the social sciences. It was during – and perhaps owing to – the growth of this movement in Australia in the 1980s that anthropology was rebranded as fatally flawed because complicit with colonialism. But I am arguing that the colonial context of the earlier Australian ethnography makes the work more, not less valuable. While the foundational flaws in that literature are now obvious – exclusive attention to classical Aboriginal traditions and a tendency to objectify human subjects – it nonetheless provides rich information about a social world that has never been properly recognised, respected or related to as the original Australian culture.

The wholesale condemnation of anthropological research as exploitative and worthless is, I believe, childish, superficial and wrong. A body of knowledge – however flawed and limited – is condemned unread, a positive approach to social variation is ignored, and important forms of social life can continue to be dismissed as merely primitive and anomalous in the contemporary world. The political myopia of earlier times is easily condemned. Too often the past era’s common sense is retrospectively dismissed, sometimes merely on the basis of a standard descriptive language – terms like “native,” “savage” and “primitive” – that is taken to have today’s meanings. A lack of intellectual generosity refuses recognition of what the ethnographers did achieve.

My aim is to counter a popular hubris that takes pleasure in its own enlightenment by remaining ignorant of the past. What has been lost when new generations of Australian students can learn nothing of the genius of small-scale social organisation, linguistic complexity and Indigenous ontologies? The ethnographic classics merit respect and their enduring significance should be recognised. To understand the complexity of contemporary Aboriginal politics, some knowledge of the gap between traditional Aboriginal values and normative mainstream assumptions about social life – family relationships, authority structures, moral regimes – is surely necessary. Older anthropology is deemed a moral failure for its use of objectivist language that relied on the ethnographer’s authority, and for alleged political quietism, but surely another moral failure is to have lost interest in those other Australian traditions, ones that are difficult to understand and that find little room in the intellectual imaginations of Westerners. The refusal of radical difference is a deeper sign of poor race relations, particularly in remote Australia. •

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This war is unlikely to end soon. But the lack of realistic prospects for either a negotiated peace or a decisive military victory during the next few months hasn’t stopped international bodies and organisations associated with the Syrian opposition from planning for the time after the Ba’ath regime is removed.

More than eighteen months ago, the Public International Law & Policy Group, or PILPG, released a report outlining “recommendations for measures that an interim Syrian government could take in the days immediately following President Bashar al-Assad’s departure.” According to its website, PILPG “provides legal assistance to states and governments with the negotiation and implementation of peace agreements, the drafting of post-conflict constitutions, and the creation and operation of war crimes tribunals.”

PILPG operates in a crowded marketplace. Over the past two years, there have been numerous such proposals, many of them put forward by parties that are, much like PILPG, hoping to play a role in Syria’s transition to democracy. Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most experienced, of these is the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice, or ICTJ, which in September published a briefing paper by its vice president, Paul Seils, titled “Towards a Transitional Justice Strategy for Syria.” Seils argues for the creation of a “nationally owned and respected process that embraces and promotes the possibility of engendering a rights-respecting society through truth, justice, reparations, and reform.”

Seils’s recommendations are in line with the approach advocated by the ICTJ elsewhere. In its view, countries ought to adopt a combination of four transitional justice measures in the aftermath of gross human rights violations or violent conflict: truth commissions; courts or criminal tribunals; symbolic and material reparations; and institutional reforms. Together, Seils writes, these measures will “restore belief in the idea of fundamental human rights as a basis for the social contract between the citizen and the state.”

When they argue for a particular approach in post-conflict Syria, Seils and the ICTJ are drawing on past cases in which it can be argued that transitional justice measures failed to produce the desired results, either because they didn’t reflect the needs and wishes of the communities involved or because they were applied selectively.

Take the case of Cambodia. Under the Khmer Rouge, which governed Cambodia from 1975 until 1979 but controlled parts of the country for much longer, about two million people, or a quarter of the population, were murdered, disappeared, or starved or worked to death. Since the defeat of the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, Cambodia has gone through several periods of transition, each of them with its own mix of transitional justice measures. Initially at least, these were hardly “nationally owned and respected,” as they were implemented under the tutelage of Vietnam (which occupied Cambodia between 1979 and 1989) and then, from 1989 until 1993, the United Nations Transitional Authority.

Cambodia has experimented with a range of measures to deal with human rights violations in its recent past, including amnesties, trials, memorial museums, an annual day of remembrance, and a historical commission. Thirty-four years after the end of Khmer Rouge-led Democratic Kampuchea, however, transitional justice is far from complete. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia, which were set up in 2006 after lengthy negotiations between the Cambodian government and the United Nations, have so far only concluded just one of four scheduled cases: last year, a court of appeal sentenced Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, to life imprisonment after finding him guilty of crimes against humanity and breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

Only a handful of prominent Khmer Rouge leaders have been prosecuted. Duch was the senior Khmer Rouge cadre in charge of the regime’s security apparatus, including the infamous Tol Sleng prison. Also facing the Extraordinary Chambers was the regime’s deputy prime minister, Ieng Sary, who had been one of only two defendants before the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal set up in 1979. He had been sentenced to death in absentia, but later pardoned by King Norodom Sihanouk. He was indicted again in 2007, this time by the Extraordinary Chambers, but died earlier this year before the case against him could be concluded.

“Ordinary” perpetrators, who carried out the killings ordered by Duch and other leaders, or who denounced neighbours to the Khmer Rouge, have so far not been prosecuted. Also, the transitional justice measures have focused on the four years when the Khmer Rouge formally ruled all of Cambodia, and thereby exclude human rights violations perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge before 1975 or after 1979, and by other parties, such as the security apparatus of General Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic, which directly preceded Democratic Kampuchea.

When they attempt to assess the effectiveness of historical justice, the United Nations and international organisations such as the ICTJ tend to focus on the big picture, which does indeed look comparatively positive. Today, Cambodia is a constitutional monarchy with regular parliamentary elections (although, as Human Rights Watch notes, “Prime Minister Hun Sen has kept himself in office more than twenty-seven years through force and intimidation”). While Hun Sen is a former Khmer Rouge cadre, there is no indication that the Khmer Rouge, or a regime resembling that led by Pol Pot, Ieng Sari and others, could make a comeback in the short or medium term. The Extraordinary Chambers work slowly, but they are prosecuting at least some of the worst perpetrators who were in power in the second half of the 1970s. History books have been rewritten to reflect the reality of Khmer Rouge rule, and memorials and museums built that commemorate the suffering of Cambodians during that period.

WHAT the big picture doesn’t reveal, however, is how historical justice plays out on the ground. It pays scant attention to the regional differences within Cambodia, and to the fact that the impact of the Khmer Rouge on city-dwellers was different from its impact on people in rural areas. It says nothing about how ordinary Cambodians experienced the terror of the Khmer Rouge and the justice-making that followed it.

In 2002 and 2003, Eve Monique Zucker did fieldwork in a remote village in the highlands of Cambodia’s Kompong Speu province, in the southwest of the country. In her book Forest of Struggle, she calls that village O’Thmaa. For the people of O’Thmaa, the four years of Democratic Kampuchea were just one chapter in a thirty-year period marked by extreme violence and displacement. In fact, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the villagers of O’Thmaa were able to finally return home.

From 1970 until the late 1980s, the mountainous region where O’Thmaa is located was known as Prei Brâyut or the Forest of the Struggle. It was here that the Khmer Rouge established a stronghold before taking control of the rest of the country, and it was here that they found a refuge during the civil war following the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea.

From 1970 until the mid-1990s, all able-bodied men of O’Thmaa, as well as many of its women, were made to fight with or against the Khmer Rouge. Some of them fought first on one side, and then on the other. Nearly all the adult men were killed during that time, most of them by the Khmer Rouge.

Families were split, with some of the men fighting with Lon Nol, and others with the Khmer Rouge. But that was not the worst of O’Thmaa’s thirty-year war. Because the Khmer Rouge couldn’t identify enemies solely by their appearance, they could never be sure that people “were who they said they were or who they appeared to be.” When in doubt, the Khmer Rouge executed those who could be suspected of being enemies. Given their paranoia about the allegiances of ordinary Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge was receptive to denunciations. “Villagers informed on other villagers, accusing them of being unfaithful to revolutionary movement,” Zucker writes. “Those accused would be taken away by the Khmer Rouge to be killed.”

Much of Zucker’s book is about a man she calls Ta Kam, who was one of the very few male O’Thmaa villagers to survive the terror of the Khmer Rouge. He owed his good fortune not to luck but to his denunciation of many of his neighours to the Khmer Rouge, who appointed him village chief.

In the early stages of her fieldwork, Zucker perceived Ta Kam not as a killer but “as a warm, grandfatherly, and revered elder.” The idea that people whose husbands or fathers had been delivered to the Khmer Rouge would allow the perpetrator to live in their midst seemed inconceivable. But while the people of O’Thmaa didn’t seek revenge against Ta Kam, they did exclude him from their affairs.

Zucker believes that Ta Kam served an important function in O’Thmaa. He was the embodiment of “all the betrayals by his generation.” But they ascribed immorality to his acts rather than to his person, and considered him amoral rather than innately evil. In conversation, it became clear to Zucker that Ta Kam saw himself in much the same way: as a pawn who could not be held responsible for serving powerful outside forces.

Ultimately, the villagers of O’Thmaa sought to forget the violence that tore their community apart, and the individual actions that triggered and fanned that violence. They have pretended to themselves and to outsiders that they live in harmony with one another, and have tried to contain the immorality of the past to the actions of someone who, by supposedly lacking morality, could not be blamed for the deaths of neighbours and kin.

According to Zucker, the villagers’ attempts have only been partly successful: “gaiety and communal spirit were rare in O’Thmaa. Hardship, distrust, and fear… crippled social interactions… [I]t seemed that few people went far out of their way to help a neighbour in need.” While they could contain memories of betrayal, Ta Kam’s presence reminded them of a time when social ties were ruptured. Given that he was the only man of his generation still alive, they were also prevented from gaining knowledge about O’Thmaa’s traditions and about a time when the villagers were able to trust each other.

If, for the villagers of O’Thmaa, “immorality is ideally to be removed or erased rather than recorded and inscribed,” then their strategies for mending the social fabric are very different from those advocated by the ICTJ and like-minded organisations. The people of O’Thmaa don’t seek the truth, and they don’t see the point in memorialising a past in order to guard against its recurrence. But while the transitional justice measures adopted in Cambodia privilege the inscription of injustices over their erasure, they resonate with local practices in one respect: the Extraordinary Chambers also try to contain the immorality of the past by attributing the genocide to a handful of individuals.

Zucker’s ethnography is a useful reminder that there is more to the aftermath of violence than can be successfully managed with the help of transitional justice instruments designed by the ICTJ or the PILPG. Forest of Struggle is also evidence of the strength of ethnography: competent ethnographers pay very close attention to the life worlds of people, and often concern themselves particularly with those who tend to appear on the West’s radar either as statistics or as mute images.

Zucker is able to derive meaning from what she saw during her fieldwork in O’Thmaa: the effects of a destructive past on people who were often not even born when neighbours and kin turned on each other. I would have liked to know more about how the villagers of O’Thmaa felt and talked about the predicament of living with a known perpetrator in their midst. How painful was it for those who lost husbands or fathers to ignore Ta Kam? Didn’t they imagine taking revenge? And if they did: how much of an effort was it not to act?

It might be unfair to Zucker to end on that note, because my response to Forest of Struggle must surely have been influenced by the fact that I read it as one of a pair of books I chose to review, and the other half of that pair, Kimberly Theidon’s Intimate Enemies, is one of the most moving and thought-provoking works of non-fiction I have read in long while.

THEIDON’s approach is very different from Zucker’s. While Zucker makes sense of tangible features of social life – such as the presence of Ta Kam – in present-day O’Thmaa, Theidon seeks to understand how the people she worked with were experiencing the past and the various attempts to come to terms with it.

Theidon writes about the aftermath of the violence that gripped Peru between 1980 and 2000. Like in Cambodia – or in Rwanda or Bosnia, for that matter – the conflict in Peru often pitted neighbours against each other. In other South American countries – most notably Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil – human rights violations were perpetrated by agents of the state, sometimes following a period in which left-wing armed guerrilla groups (such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay) had resorted to assassinations to bring about an overthrow of the government. The military juntas governing Chile (1973–90), Argentina (1976–83), Uruguay (1973–85) and Brazil (1964–85) targeted mainly people identified with the political left, including student activists and trade unionists. In Chile and Brazil, indigenous people asserting their rights were also persecuted. But the violence did not amount to anything resembling a civil war, and the vast majority of the population was not affected by disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killings. In fact, at times at least, the military juntas enjoyed broad popular support.

Peru’s was an entirely different story. That country had experienced military dictatorships for much of the twentieth century. The Peruvian left had also suffered repression under military rule, particularly in the early 1930s and 1940s. But in 1979, at a time when other countries in South America’s Southern Cone were ruled by military juntas, the Peruvian general Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who had been in power since 1975, presided over a return to democratic rule. Presidential elections, the first in sixteen years, were scheduled for 18 May 1980.

On the eve of these elections, the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, burned the ballot boxes in the small town of Chuschi in the Andean highlands province of Ayacucho. Sendero had been active for a few years, particularly in Huamanga, the capital of Ayacucho, where its founder Abimael Guzmán taught philosophy at the local university. The symbolic burning of the ballot boxes marked the beginning of an armed conflict that eventually involved four parties: Sendero; a second and smaller group of insurgents, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement; the Peruvian military; and so-called rondas campesinas, self-defence groups that were set up to protect rural communities from the Senderistas. As the conflict escalated, the government resorted to increasingly unlawful measures and, under president Alberto Fujimori, Peru joined the list of countries governed by authoritarian regimes.

While people in the remote mountain villages of Cambodia’s Kompong Speu province experienced violence and displacement for far longer than the residents of Phnom Penh, nobody living in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 remained unaffected by the Khmer Rouge’s terror. The twenty-year violence in Peru, on the other hand, had a huge impact on some segments of the population but barely affected others. Almost four in five of the recorded 69,280 people killed between 1980 and 2000 in Peru lived in rural areas, and three in four were native Quechua speakers. In other words, the vast majority of victims were indigenous campesinos living in the Andean highlands. These were people who had long been considered to be at the bottom of a racially informed social hierarchy.

Unlike in Cambodia, Peru’s peace process and transitional justice instruments were not prompted by outside intervention. Also unlike in Cambodia, the conflict was largely over by the time the regime changed, with both the Túpac Amaru and Sendero Luminoso militarily defeated and their leaders dead or imprisoned. In 2000, president Fujimori, not long after winning an unconstitutional third term in rigged elections, resigned and fled the country. His successors supported a reversal of his anti-terrorist legislation and a revoking of his amnesty laws. Alejandro Toledo, who was elected president in 2001, was himself a Quechua speaker and sympathetic to those who had suffered most during the violence. The truth and reconciliation commission set up under interim president Valentín Panigua had Toledo’s full support.

When that commission announced its findings in 2003, many Peruvians were shocked to learn of the extent of the violence and the number of fatalities. Not only had Ayacucho and neighbouring Andean regions borne the brunt of the terror inflicted by Sendero and the military. The fact that tens of thousands had been killed had not registered in the country’s capital Lima, because, as Theidon observes, the dead “were people who – in the national imaginary – had counted for little during their lives and went largely unaccounted for in their deaths.”

The fratricidal nature of the violence in O’Thmaa between 1970 and the late 1990s also characterised the twenty-year war in the provinces of Ayacucho where Theidon has done her research since the mid-1990s. The violence split families and village communities, pitting neighbours and kin against each other.  Remembering what is referred to in Quechua as the sasachakuy tiempo – the difficult time – one of Theidon’s informants said that: “We were terrified of our projimos – terrified of our neighbours, of our brothers.”

Both in O’Thmaa and in many places in Ayacucho, the perpetrators and their victims came from the same communities, with the former often remaining in close proximity to the families of those they had murdered or had denounced to Sendero or the Khmer Rouge. This made it difficult for these communities to collectively identify as innocent victims after the end of the violence. The “lack of strongly distinguished categories of victims and perpetrators,” Zucker observes, contributed “to the difficulties in reconstituting the social and moral community in O’Thmaa village.”

Like Zucker, Theidon wanted to know how ordinary people try to repair a social fabric that has been torn to shreds by extreme violence. What happened after the violence had stopped, with “ex-Senderistas, current sympathisers, widows, orphans, rape survivors, and army veterans” now having to live side by side? Both Zucker and Theidon were interested in the rebuilding of a moral order. Theidon was also asking how “moral discourse is embodied,” and how people recovered access to emotions and sentiments, such as caridad, the compassion for fellow human beings, that were lost during the violence. She explored how Ayacuchanos, after years of dehumanising violence, once more attempted to learn how to be human.

Theidon does not idealise this rehumanising process and the reestablishment of order that preceded it. Some former Senderistas were invited to confess and repent, and were then forgiven and allowed to remain in the community. Others were killed – not out of rage, but in order to reconstitute communities. One of Theidon’s informants described these killings calmly and matter-of-factly: “[W]e started cleaning our communities. We cleaned them – all of the people who’d been with those guerilleros.”

Like the villagers of O’Thmaa, the campesinos of the Peruvian highlands have tried to forget. “My memories suffocate me,” several women told Theidon. “What we need most are pills to make us forget,” one of them said, summarising the views of a group of women who had been asked which health care services were a priority in their community. Another woman told a team gathering information for the truth and reconciliation commission: “When I forget, I’m well. Remembering, even now, I just go crazy.” “Forgetting is not simply a strategy of domination employed by the powerful against the weak,” writes Theidon. “Rather, it may be a state that is fervently desired by those who suffer from the afflictions of memory and seek relief from the heavy weight of a painful past.”

Like Zucker, Theidon is intrigued by the lack of spontaneous revenge killings after the end of the violence, which is remarkable if only because some of the violence directed against neighbours would have been prompted by vengefulness. “I have been working with these villages since 1995 and no one has picked up a rifle to kill someone in anger,” she writes. But we should not assume that all victims have simply renounced revenge and hatred and the desire for retribution.

Those most keenly interested in revenge – and least in a position to effect it – are women and adolescent boys. For some of the women, especially the widows who witnessed the murders of their husbands, “reconciliation [sits] like a lump in their stomach and a constant irritant in their heart.” These lumps often make them physically ill: “So many years swallowing their rage, and so many ulcers.” After all, they have had to live with people who not only murdered their loved ones but also are often better-off than they are after the loss of the family’s breadwinner.

“When I see them or remember, I feel sulphur flow through my veins,” one widow told Theidon, describing her experience of encounters with perpetrators living in her village. “Enduring conditions of social and economic inequality are not conducive to the reconstruction of social life and sociability,” writes Theidon. Her book is also an argument for some form of redistributive justice, to alleviate the material inequalities created or exacerbated by the violence and perhaps to address the fact that reconciliation sits like a lump in the stomach of those who lost loved ones and livelihoods.

According to Theidon, redistributive justice ought to involve more than the distribution of material compensation: “One thing that could be redistributed is the shame that has been unjustly apportioned to women; this shame should belong to the rapists, who have enjoyed total impunity.” Truth telling is widely considered essential in the transitional justice context. For women who were the victims of rape, this often means “narrat[ing] their experiences in an idiom of sexual vulnerability and degradation.” The gang rapists’ silence “is left undisturbed,” Theidon comments. “I have never heard anyone ask a man: ‘Did you have blood on your penis?… Did you penetrate her vagina or her anus?… How many times?’”

Theidon is more than an advocate on behalf of rape victims and widows. Her rage and her despair are palpable, and that is appropriate in a book that deals with violence and with the emotions of those who experienced it. Commenting on how women conveyed their experiences through their body language, Theidon writes: “What they said verbally was complementary, at times secondary, to the body language they used: what made me feel their words were their gestures. My body would serve as one of my ‘key informants’.” That describes the anthropologist’s methodological approach. But it could also be read as symptomatic of the author’s admirable ethical stance.

Theidon felt her informants’ words, and she makes us, her readers, feel these words – as they are translated and communicated in Intimate Enemies – and feel with those who uttered them. That results in a book that is both hard to read and difficult to put down. It is perhaps no surprise that an earlier, Spanish-language version of Theidon’s account inspired Claudia Llosa’s remarkable 2009 feature film La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow) about a woman who had been raped during the sasachakuy tiempo and transmitted memories of her suffering to her daughter with her breast milk. Theidon is aware of the effects of her words. Towards the book’s end, she says, “I realise that readers might feel emotionally taxed by the time they reach this afterword.”

TRANSITIONAL justice “is not the monopoly of international tribunals or states,” Theidon writes. “[I]ndividuals and collectives also mobilise the ritual and symbolic elements of these transitional processes to deal with the deep cleavages left – or accentuated – by civil conflict.” Surely, then, there is a need for tribunals and states to take note of the stratagems employed by those most affected by conflict, particularly when these stratagems seem to work.

But often, “‘transitions to democracy’ and ‘national reconciliation’ are simply the reworking of elite pacts of governance or domination,” Theidon finds. “To date there has been scant ethnographic research on the points of disjuncture between popular notions of justice, pardon, and reconciliation and the ways in which these concepts are deployed by transitional and successor regimes.” My sense of the scholarship, particularly work published over the past five years, is that her bleak assessment is no longer true; there have been numerous detailed ethnographic studies of vernacular concepts of justice in places such as Rwanda, Uganda, Liberia, Nepal, Guatemala – or Cambodia, for that matter. But they seem to have had little impact on how NGOs and governments see transitional justice proceeding. The prescriptions offered for Syria don’t seem to be informed by ethnographic research, and make little mention of the need to find solutions that assist the people most affected by the violence to repair relationships within their communities.

Zucker’s and Theidon’s work suggests that one dogma of transitional justice, in particular, needs to be challenged. “There is one equation that infuses the work of truth commissions: more memory = more truth = more healing = more reconciliation,” Theidon writes. “[I]t is the logic that guides these commissions and the politics of memory that characterise our époque.” In fact, there is no convincing evidence for this equation, or for the claim that “more memory” would inoculate people and prevent a repeat of violence. In questioning the validity of the equation, I am not suggesting that the salvation lies in forgetting as much as possible. In fact, to forget usually means remembering something else. Conversely, “more memory” often implies that we become more oblivious to aspects of the past that are not recounted in truth commissions and memorialised with the help of state-sponsored ceremonies and monuments.

The “politics of memory that characterise our époque” have been largely shaped by attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust and the crimes of Nazi Germany, particularly in postwar West Germany. Truth commissions are now often modelled on what seemed to work well in South Africa. I am not arguing that we should ignore such precedents, but merely suggesting that more attention be paid to their historical and cultural contingency. In fact, much could be learned from Kimberly Theidon’s work in Peru. Even those jockeying for a lucrative consultancy contract in the new Syria may find it useful to know how the campesinos of Ayacucho tried to put their lives together after they had stopped killing each other. “What may serve national goals – amnesties, top-down ‘reintegration’ of former combatants in staged reconciliation ceremonies, and militarily enforced pacification campaigns,” writes Theidon, “may unintentionally complicate local processes of social repair.” •

The post “When I forget, I’m well. Remembering, even now, I just go crazy” appeared first on Inside Story.

THERE is a cosy and largely unremarkable genre of British daytime television, usually relegated to the early afternoon timeslots that busy people rarely notice, which revolves around the buying and selling of antiques and collectibles. Members of the public will search for antiques in various places (usually at markets, sometimes in their own homes), before bringing them to auction in the hope of making a small (often very small) profit. These shows are not at all glamorous. They are set in small towns and middle-class neighbourhoods and their presenters tend towards the eccentric. It is not uncommon for competitors to go home with just a few pounds, or even to end up making a loss.

But the programs do have a quiet allure, principally because the viewer is always aware that the next item might turn out to be worth a small fortune. For me, they evoke intense nostalgia; as a student in the deepest throes of procrastination, I would often sit on my ragged sofa, cup of tea in hand, and guiltily watch episodes of Bargain Hunt or Cash in the Attic, telling myself that I would get back to the thesis just as soon as I had seen how much the next teapot fetched.

The auction process lends itself well to television. Viewers quickly learn the backstory of any item brought to sale and then become invested in the outcome. As bids increase, suspense steadily builds; the process can be strung out, according to the requirements of the next commercial break, or swiftly culminate with the fall of the hammer. In the real world, too, auctions have become an increasingly popular way to buy and sell, and have come to dominate the trade in fine art and antiques. But what are the elements of auction that make it so compelling for both buyers and sellers, not to mention for the many people employed by the auction houses and their associated businesses?

This question is considered in quite some detail in Christian Heath’s new book The Dynamics of Auction. Heath, a professor of work and organisation at Kings College London, tells us that although auctions date back to the Romans, the structures and customs that we’re familiar with mostly developed in post-medieval Western Europe. By the first half of the eighteenth century, the British auction house looked more or less as it does today: having examined a detailed catalogue of goods for sale, buyers had their bids for furniture, merchandise, art or collectibles managed in a public process by an auctioneer. This stability of form means that auctions are a reassuringly familiar way of making sales at great pace and across a variety of situations.

In Heath’s words, “Auctions provide a solution to a social problem.” They offer a speedy and transparent way of selling goods using a process that can work equally well for items that sell for a few dollars or those worth a few million dollars. In contrast to some popular representations of auctions as dangerous or unpredictable, Heath emphasises how important it is for auctions to be seen as trustworthy and legitimate. These very public performances of buying and selling, played according to long-established conventions, render transparent the inherently unstable act of negotiating a sale between strangers for an item that may be unique. The trust and legitimacy comes not only from the reputation of the particular auction house, but also from the very specific actions and interactions that happen at auctions. The words, gestures and practices of everyone involved in the auction happen in particular and recognisable ways.

Heath provides several chapters of closely studied examples of how the people who make up an auction — the staff of an auction house and the potential buyers in the room — interact in a nuanced way to preserve trust and transparency. Auctioneers must practise a finely honed craft of managing bids: first enticing reluctant bidders, then accepting bids according to a strictly “first in” basis, working to “establish a run” back and forth between two bidders to move the price steadily upwards. Only when a run is exhausted will the auctioneer turn to other bidders waiting to jump in. Such rules are observed not only through words, but also through gestures, as auctioneers sweep their arms and move their bodies from left to right. Being attentive to bids can be made harder for an auctioneer by the equally nuanced physical behaviour of customers; while bidders obviously need to catch the attention of the auctioneer, they often want to keep others in the room from knowing their identity or level of interest. While overseeing the current run of bidding, an observant auctioneer will notice how a potential bidder in the audience moves his pen, or shifts her body slightly in preparation to raise her hand.

The auction’s need for clarity can be seen most vividly at the moment of the strike of the hammer. “It is not a sound that can be sustained,” writes Heath, “and serves to mark the precise moment at which the contract is concluded,” rendering the conclusion of the sale transparent to all in the room. With bidders having been warned by the auctioneer that a sale is imminent (in itself another chapter’s worth of discussion from Heath), there can be no going back once the hammer has struck.

As Heath explains, economists have for some time puzzled over one seemingly illogical aspect of the auction’s popularity: the winning bidder must always know that he or she has paid a higher price than anyone else thought an item was worth. Why, then, would a purchaser feel satisfied with the price paid? While there are occasional cases of buyers trying to backtrack, or pushing for the price to rise in smaller increments, on the whole the conventions of the auction seem to discourage this from becoming a problem. In practice, at least, the “winner’s curse” doesn’t seem to have diminished the popularity of auctions and auction houses.

Although recent years have seen several of Britain’s best-known auction houses take hits from the global financial crisis, and suffer the odd scandal, money continues to flow even at the highest end of the auction market, in the selling of art for many millions of dollars. While more established art markets may have receded, art is as subject as any other commodity to the trends of the global economy; the areas of fastest growth in high-end art are now largely prompted by the desires of wealthy buyers from Russia, Asia and the Middle East. The emergence of online auctions, and the introduction of online bidding as well as telephone bidding in the standard auction house, have also contributed to the globalisation of auctions in the contemporary era.

The Dynamics of Auction doesn’t dwell exclusively on the most expensive end of the auction market; much of the study concentrates on the more frequent sales of curios and collectibles in small auction houses across the smaller towns and regional cities of England. It is a careful and detailed book, but it does not make light reading for the casual browser. It is likely to be of greatest interest to researchers looking to replicate Heath’s methods for tracing and analysing the social moment of the auction. He and his team recorded video footage of hundreds of auctions across Britain, and studied the footage to identify what is common in the minute actions, gestures and inflections of phrases that make the auction what it is. The project represents a kind of sociology that retains a deeply empirical focus — working from extensive data to construct its argument — but which also understands the seemingly minor nuances of everyday interactions that we must all learn in order to participate successfully in social conventions. It is hard work to carry out — and not always easy work to read, even when written as clearly and structured as neatly as the work of Professor Heath. Much easier, perhaps, to sit back and watch another auction on the telly. •

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Diane Austin-Broos has been thinking about it too. In 2009 she published a superb ethno-history of one of the communities I visited in that formative journey. Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia is about Hermannsburg and how it shaped and was shaped by the culture of the Christianised Arrernte. Her new book, A Different Inequality, is equally committed to putting Aboriginal culture into history. But it does more than that: Austin-Broos essays a history of Australian intellectuals’ recent ideas about culture, equality and Indigenous entitlement.

Austin-Broos’s central point is that remote Aborigines are different from Australians as a whole in two ways that matter to public policy: their “culture” is not only their painting, their language and their cosmology, it is also their physical deprivation and insecurity, their filth, sickness and danger. Her insistently ambivalent depiction of remote Aboriginal communities resonates with the memory of my emotional confusion in May 1981, as I was introduced to a Hermannsburg family whose dignified friendliness was and was not belied by the sickening squalor of their unhoused bedding and cooking utensils and their scabby dogs.

What are we to do for people who grow up in such conditions? Austin-Broos’s primary proposal, given in her final chapter, is sound but hardly novel: children must be schooled to literacy and numeracy. She points to factors that have retarded remote Aboriginal primary education: the cost of delivering to decentralised communities, unstable schools, poorly trained teachers and parental diffidence. How to arouse Aboriginal parents’ interest in better education for their children? To that question she gives no clear answer. Rather, she evokes the Aboriginal values, economic practices and land ownership patterns that combine to militate against the ambition – common sense to most Australians – to advance self and family through investment in “human capital” and through determined and geographically mobile job-seeking. She admits to being unsure whether remote Aborigines really have the choice of trading off some of the security of their remote poverty on the chance of some of the health and prosperity of the mainstream. If there is a policy that would “reconcile current cultural attachments in communities with employment and capacity growth” then Austin-Broos aspires to be the author who spells it out. In her perplexity about how to solicit Indigenous engagement with what she considers to be improving activities, she is not alone.

While conspicuously unable to put her finger on the remedial actions that would sustain the primary education of remote Aboriginal Australians, Austin-Broos is confident that she knows the errors of other writers’ thinking. Most of her book is a description of what she calls a “failed debate” between two broad schools of thought. One she characterises as “opposing separate development,” the other as “defending the homelands.” Her account of that debate suffers from her eagerness to dichotomise a complex discussion.

Before she describes these two schools, she reviews the recent history of the discipline of anthropology (in which Austin-Broos is an outstanding academic practitioner). In writing about Aboriginal Australia, she argues, few anthropologists have grasped how much Aboriginal culture has been changed by colonisation. (She names some exceptions, without noticing that David Martin’s writing on Aurukun exemplifies the approach that she commends.) Instead of describing the regionally specific historical dynamics of these communities, most anthropologists have tended to “reify” Aboriginal culture, she says, rendering “culture” in terms of its continuities with pre-colonial values and practices.

That anthropology has evoked a classical model of Aboriginal culture is clear in Austin-Broos’s own ten-page epitome of the classical account; it is her book’s finest achievement. In elucidating the model she asserts its relevance but warns of its insufficiency; it no longer fully describes how Aboriginal people in remote regions live, for it neglects to say how much they suffer, now, in a morbid structure of massive socioeconomic inequality. A policy-relevant and honestly compassionate anthropology should go beyond this classical account in order to describe and explain persistent psycho-social and physical pathologies and material poverty. A realistic understanding of remote Aboriginal communities is not possible, she concludes, if all we see in the “homelands” is the survival of “Aboriginal culture” described in wholly positive terms. These communities are not “bounded wholes,” but “variable, changing, and ‘fractured’ by encapsulation in the state and by their marginal economies.”

How has this complex truth (cultural difference turned problematic, in a structure of inequality) eluded the two sides of the “failed debate”? I am not persuaded by Austin-Broos’s “balanced” (to use her own self-description during an event in Sydney in August) position on the politics of difference and the politics of equality. That is, I think she overstates the singularity of her own position and caricatures work with which she actually shares ground. Her account of the debate has two flaws that make it more self-serving than accurate: the two sides are poorly labelled, and her reading of others’ work is often unsympathetic and sloppily expressed.

That there is a responsibility to read and report colleagues’ work sympathetically is a point that Austin-Broos herself made in Sydney. During that discussion, I pointed out that her book’s index qualified the crucial concept “inequality” with the adjective “socioeconomic.” I asked her if the index was accurate. Or had the indexer not seen that a notion of “political inequality” was implicit in her argument, even if she had not used the phrase “political inequality”? Austin-Broos replied that Aborigines’ inequality was certainly political as well as socioeconomic: “If you know where and how to look, there is plenty about political inequality in this book.” I agree: her critical remarks on the NT Emergency Intervention imply that she sees Aborigines as suffering from political inequality.

Austin-Broos would have written a better book (and kept better standing with her dismayed colleagues) had she known “where and how to look” for the implicit arguments with which she shares ground in much of the research that she takes to task. For example, it is important to Austin-Broos that Aboriginal people be described as “in distress” and as “suffering” (the success of Peter Sutton’s The Politics of Suffering has promoted the latter word’s importance). When she cannot find these words in some commentaries on the Intervention, she writes that the authors (unnamed academics at the Australian National University’s Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, or CAEPR) “seemed disinclined to dwell on social suffering or distress as part of homelands life.” Within a few lines this condition of being “disinclined to dwell” has hardened: “the failure of those who defended the homelands was reluctance to acknowledge distress and the salience of poverty.” A few pages later: “some of those who defended the homelands were unwilling to acknowledge the distress in the remote communities and the salience of poverty.” The words that I have italicised insinuate, with escalating trenchancy, the unnamed authors’ moral callousness, implicitly celebrating Austin-Broos’s courage and sensitivity. Had she read these authors more generously she might have inferred compassion – notwithstanding the absence of the words “distress” and “suffering” – as real as her own. Knowing how and where to look when reading others’ writing is itself an ethical investment.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS figure mostly on one side of Austin-Broos’s map of the “failed debate” – as romantic, reifying advocates of policies that they hope will sustain Aboriginal homelands. Against them are those who “oppose separate development.” According to Austin-Broos, the latter see the misery and pathology of the homelands, but they see little else. For these critics, land rights, the various policies that have enabled decentralisation and the channelling of public funds through Aboriginal service-delivery organisations have all – unintentionally – prolonged Aborigines’ exclusion from Australian society and occasioned much suffering. In this “anti-separatist” school of thought Austin-Broos includes John Reeves, Helen Hughes, Colin Tatz, Boni Robertson, Peter Howson, Roger Sandall, Christopher Pearson, Peter Sutton, Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, Gary Johns and Bob Gregory. Conceding that there are significant differences of opinion among these writers (on land rights, on the duties of the state, and on the nature and significance of Aborigines’ continuing cultural difference), Austin-Broos nonetheless sees them as – variously – “anti-separatist.”

This could be a defensible lumping together if we had an idea of what Austin-Broos means by “separatism.” The index doesn’t include “separatism,” and Austin-Broos never pauses to say what she means by that word. Neither “separatism” nor “anti-separatism” emerges from her account as a coherent policy perspective.

Austin-Broos uses the term “defending the homelands” to label the romantic, “unwilling to acknowledge distress” side of the debate. We can infer, from her binary approach, that the essence of “separatism” is to “defend” the homelands. What policy would that be? Here we encounter another problem of terminology. Austin-Broos uses “homelands” to refer not only to “small communities” (as small as ten to twenty people, living on their own country) but also to “remote communities” (such as the former missions and government settlements) that now amount – in some cases – to small towns of up to two thousand people. This distinction within “remote” has policy significance; as certain larger “remote communities” have been selected as sites where services will be concentrated, costly support for the many tiny communities is being discontinued. I presume that by “defending the homelands” Austin-Broos means a wish to continue or exceed past levels of support – housing, vehicles, CDEP (Community Development Employment Projects) funds – for the tiny outstations that radiate out from these larger remote hubs.

In her account of the “defence” of government support for this highly decentralised pattern of residence, Austin-Broos seeks to “distil a public position indicative of CAEPR.” Her distillation is too smooth by half, and again the problems are Austin-Broos’s fondness for crystalline dichotomies and her question-begging names for the policy positions that she would distinguish.

For example, she distinguishes a “community-based” from a “human capital” approach. The “community-based” approach flows from the analysis of remote Aboriginal communities’ cultural and physical distance from large, diverse labour markets. For about twenty years, researchers have argued that there is a good chance that the education of remote Aboriginal children will prepare them for jobs that do not exist, in these regions, in sufficient quantities to make a difference to the rate of unemployment. Austin-Broos does not dispute that analysis, but she implies that those making it have been indifferent to education. That is, she aligns her advocacy of primary education with her advocacy of a “human capital” approach, while associating CAEPR with “the community-based approach rather than a human capital one.” This is a false dichotomy, for both the “human capital” approach and the “community-based” approach aspire to a credible vision of remote Aboriginal education.

What is missing from Austin-Broos’s account of “the CAEPR view” is any sympathy for the difficulty that faces those who try to say what a “community-based” education should be. The problem does not arise from assuming – in a romantic way – that education will cost remote Aborigines their culture. Writers associated with CAEPR have been alive to the possibility of education for remote Aborigines, but they have been curious (as Austin-Broos is) about what kind of education could attract Aboriginal parents’ commitment. The pathway from education to employment will not work in some regions unless education and labour-market strategies consider the peculiarities of regional labour markets and the aspirations of parents. I don’t know any researcher in this field whose response to the difficulties of the remote education–employment transition (or human capital formation, to use Austin-Broos’s term) is to discount education for Aborigines.

Time and again, Austin-Broos reads arguments for region-specific education and economic development strategies as if they were arguments for “Aboriginal”-specific development strategies. There may well be some unsophisticated policy-thinking that falls into this trap – invoking a general and romantic model of “Aboriginal” rather than considering the potential and the limitations of each region. If this is what she means by “separatism,” then one can endorse her condemnation of it. However, the work that Austin-Broos has targeted is not “separatist” in either the spatial or the fiscal sense; it is more precisely characterised as “regionalist,” and it is better, more persuasive work than Austin-Broos concedes.

Austin-Broos’s book works best when she sticks closely to what individual writers have said over time. She can be a generous and respectful reader. But her “distillation” of “the CAEPR view” compromises her account of particular arguments that have come out of that organisation. She attributes to CAEPR “the view that major employment growth would be incompatible with the maintenance of cultural difference,” for example, and she writes that CAEPR seeks to interpret Aborigines’ socioeconomic inequality as if it were merely their way of expressing and perpetuating cultural difference.

CAEPR’s founding director, Jon Altman, is the main victim of this caricature, and A Different Inequality will do Australia a disservice to the extent that it encourages readers to dismiss his work as “romantic” and blind to “suffering.” Jon Altman has done more than any other researcher to develop a model of the remote Aboriginal economy that is empirically based and policy-realistic. He sees regional economies as made up of three sectors: production for the market, subsistence production, and public-sector subsidies, including welfare payments to individuals. The content and size of each of these three sectors vary by region and through time. Altman’s framework can be applied region by region to identify the natural, human and political resources upon which a realistic development strategy could be based. (His model is just as relevant to regions in which there are few Aborigines.)

The work of regional specification using Altman’s categories is just beginning – and, as Austin-Broos observes, the profiles of Central Australia and of Arnhem Land (where Altman mostly works) are likely to be different. A program of applied research based on Altman’s framework is at risk unless policy-makers and research funders read with scepticism Austin-Broos’s far-too-rough guide to the “politics of debate about remote Aboriginal Australia.” •

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Our group soon attracted the curiosity of the villagers, who took a break from their work in the surrounding fields to greet us and discuss our transport problem. A woman with a baby on her back brought plastic chairs and sat down with us to hear more about the country my friend Dani and I came from. All the while, her baby cried heartbreakingly.

The woman told us that she and the baby had been sick for a few days now. In an attempt to distract the child from its sorrows, I began to swing the colourful bracelet I was wearing. In no time the baby stopped crying and began to giggle. Its mother, visibly relieved, planted the child on my lap and said, “She likes you. You can take her with you.” Dani and I laughed at what we thought was a joke and so did the other women around us. But the baby, glowing hot from a fever, refused to go anywhere else and spent the next few hours on my lap, playing, sleeping and cuddling up to me.

When our tro tro was repaired and we got ready to say goodbye, I turned towards the mother to hand her baby back. But she refused to take the child. “You take her with you,” she said, “Take her to your country. You can be her mother and look after her.” Shocked at what seemed to be a serious proposal, I asked if she wouldn’t miss her daughter if she were sent off with a stranger. “Look,” she said, “my child is ill, she has a very high fever and I don’t have any medicine. There’s nothing here in this village, but where you come from she will have happiness and a good life. She wants to come with you.”

I left the village without the baby. Its heart-rending cry as I boarded the tro tro and waved goodbye has disturbed my dreams ever since, and I’m still baffled by the readiness of this woman to give away her only child to a stranger for a supposedly better life. Was life in the village really so miserable? Would there be no happiness in the baby’s future life? How was I to explain that in the part of the world where I came from people’s paths weren’t necessarily paved with happiness? And these thoughts led me to the underlying question: what, in the end, makes life worthwhile?

In this new book, Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want, anthropologist Michael Jackson sets off on a journey to explore exactly this feeling of existential dissatisfaction, this deeply human belief that life should offer us more than what it currently does. Returning to visit the Kuranko people in the village of Firawa in Sierra Leone – the place where his first ethnographic fieldwork took him more than thirty years ago, and where later he lived for a time – he tries to understand what constitutes human wellbeing. Sierra Leone frequently appears in lists of the world’s “least liveable” countries and is usually represented as a place of poverty, hopelessness and conflict. Using ethnography as a tool to look deep into people’s everyday lives, Jackson shows that wellbeing is about more than financial or material stability.

Since Jackson first went to Sierra Leone, much has changed. On a political level, the country has been through a bloody civil war, traditional belief systems have been challenged, religious observance has changed and migration to other parts of the world has left its traces. The Kuranko people with whom Jackson has established long-lasting relationships have also changed – and so has the ethnographer himself. But he has stayed in touch with them through thick and thin, and it is the accounts of everyday life that he has collected along the way that make this poetically written book so gripping.

For an anthropologist, the technique of ethnography is, as Jackson puts it, “a way of thinking oneself through in the place of another.” During his thirty years of fieldwork the New Zealander, who is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University, has shown that the themes that preoccupy scholars can be communicated to a wider audience. His books engage readers by presenting the stories yielded by relationships he has built with people during his fieldwork, and it is through the way they see the world that broader existential questions are raised and illuminated. As a phenomenologist, he never imposes ideas or frameworks on people’s realities; instead, he focuses on “things as they are” and on the way they unfold in front of our eyes when we engage with others and their experiences. But his large body of work looking at “others” in order to reflect on “ourselves” is never simply a cultural critique of “the Western world.” In unfolding the struggles, heroic deeds, victories and losses of people’s everyday lives, he touches on the very basics of a shared humanity that he aims to look at in the light of its connections rather than its disparities.

At times, Life Within Limits reads almost like a travel essay. The anthropologist isn’t moving around in the way one would imagine the classic solitary researcher on a mission to observe how “others” define wellbeing. Instead, Jackson is accompanied by his seventeen-year-old son Joshua and his young Kuranko friend Sewa, who migrated to London some years ago. The company of the two young men, one making his first visit to Africa and the other visiting his home country, enriches the journey. Joshua’s experiences reconnect his father to his own early travels through the country; Sewa, whose story as a migrant in London featured in Jackson’s previous book, Excursions, allows the anthropologist to look at the topic of wellbeing through the “double lens” of someone who was born into Kuranko society and left it behind in the hope of a better life in Europe.

For Sewa, everything in his home country is different from how he remembers it. The characterisations of mutual regard, solidarity and friendship, which he had so often used in London to describe life in his childhood village, have disappeared. Jackson takes Sewa’s story as a starting point to think about the role of the past in our existential longing for something that goes beyond what life can offer us. This common human characteristic – the belief that the world was once a happier place but has fallen apart – shows that wellbeing, rather than being a simple and achievable goal, is a necessary fiction to keep us believing that there is something to live for. “Like the idea of utopia,” Jackson writes, “the idea of well-being captures a universal yearning to be more than we presently are and to have more than we presently possess.”

While material poverty plays an important role in the longing many young people feel for another, better place, it isn’t necessarily the decisive factor. In Firawa, social harmony has traditionally been of greater importance and – at least during Jackson’s first travels to Sierra Leone – poverty was accepted by people as being in the nature of things. But this view has changed radically. People now believe that poverty is the fault of those in power who have become wealthy at the expense of others. According to Jackson, this material scarcity translates into an existential feeling of being without, of being outside the same potentialities of other people’s lives.

It is with the story of ten-year-old Sira from Firawa that Jackson comes close to the heart of the complexities that surround human wellbeing. One evening, when he is sitting around the campfire with Sewa, a group of young girls approaches them to sing a few songs. The anthropologist is immediately fascinated by the poetic and thoughtful lyrics. Later he finds out that one of them, Sira, had composed all the songs. Jackson becomes interested in the girl’s story and visits her home. He is struck by the poverty. Sira and her mother live in a house that was burned down during the war and has only partly been repaired. Her mother’s only belongings are a mortar and pestle, a winnowing tray, a water pot and a fishing net. Sira used to be an excellent student, but she had to leave school after four years when her father left them and her mother could no longer afford the fees. As well as her talent for storytelling, the little girl also has the gift of divining. Twice a week she is visited by two djinns, she says, who show her how to collect medicinal plants from the bush and prepare herbal medicines to cure illnesses.

Although Sira doesn’t have enough to eat she complains not about a lack of food but about the lack of love, recognition and opportunity. This makes Jackson wonder what his own response to her plight should be. Would enabling her to go back to school help her or would raising her hopes for a better life simply complicate things further? Perhaps she has already worked out a way of coping within the limits of her situation through the stories she tells in her songs? As Jackson remarks, it is never possible to know a situation so fully that one can judge with certainty how to respond. “We act with good intentions, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” he writes. “We think we choose, but our situations also choose us.” But these thoughts don’t stop him from choosing to enable Sira to go back to school by paying her school fees.

For the Kuranko people the most important thing is to find the best way to bear the burdens of life. Drawing on this perspective, Jackson comes to the conclusion that wellbeing is not so much a reflection of hopes as a matter of learning how to live within limits. In Sira’s case, this means “making a virtue of her lot by singing on an empty belly.” Learning how to deal with the obstacles of everyday life entails more than the dream to escape or to be rescued. The difference between traditional and modern societies is first and foremost a difference between the limits humans have to struggle with. What really matters is that humans need to have a sense that they are not mere victims of whatever situation life throws them into. Rather, they need the feeling that their actions and thoughts make a difference.

The real value of Jackson’s books lies in the way he manages to hold a mirror to ourselves by examining the way others perceive the world. Ours is a time in which happiness is seen as a measurable state to which everyone is entitled. Countries like Sierra Leone not only appear at the very bottom of international rankings of “happiness” or “quality of life” but have come to represent places where life is almost “unliveable.” By dismissing suffering, pain and effort – those necessary counterparts of happiness – we risk losing the tools to deal with constraints; any deviation from monotonous happiness is perceived as a major disruption.

Anthropologist Arthur Kleinman once met a seventy-eight-year-old American artist who suffered from leukaemia. Tired by the attempts of people around him to make him hope for a happy ending, he asked, “Do I have to go with a smile on my face? That seems to me ridiculous, and insulting.” I think this man’s question helps to explain why the Ghanaian woman’s drastic call for my help was so disturbing. I was about to return to a highly individualised world in which people are led to believe that anything is possible and there are no borders or limitations – a view of life drastically out of step not only with life in that village, but also with human life in general. As Hannah Arendt writes in The Human Condition, pain and effort are not simply symptoms that can readily be removed from our lives; they are modes in which life makes itself felt. Referring to Greek mythology, she concludes that the “easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless existence for humans. What marks us as genuinely human is exactly our ability to move amid the limits of the world we are born into.

That knowledge won’t stop me from hoping things have changed for the better for the girl and her mother. Nor will it stop me from thinking that limitations are distributed unfairly. We mustn’t demand that the poor and desperate simply accept these constraints. The people whose stories we hear in Jackson’s book show that, despite everything, humans never cease to push the boundaries and will go on hoping for the easy life of the gods. •

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THIS IS a story about an Englishman, an Irishman and the strange career of the Australian conscience. It begins at the top of a rocky hill in Central Australia, at sunset, on or about Friday 20 July 1894. The Englishman and the Irishman have just met, and there is romance in the air. They are in a magical place at a magical time of day. Each is an exotic to the other. Baldwin Spencer, the Englishman, is a professor. Frank Gillen, the Irishman, is a postmaster. Spencer, aged thirty-five, is the son of a wealthy, protestant industrialist from Manchester and a relatively recent immigrant, now resident in Melbourne. Gillen, thirty-eight, was conceived in Ireland but born in Australia to Catholic store-keepers in a South Australian country town. Spencer is an Oxford graduate, Gillen an autodidact. Gillen is tending to the portly while Spencer is slight; each sports a big droopy moustache. Both are charming and gregarious, love a pipe, a whisky and a yarn, and they follow politics and world affairs with a nice balance of agreement and dispute. Both are of liberal mind, anti-clerical, and pro the development of the Australian continent and an Australian nation, but Baldwin is an Empire man and for Capital, while Frank is an ardent Home Ruler with Socialistic tendencies. Both are modern men. And both are utterly fascinated by the Aborigines. They would become the most famous – and infamous – duo in the history of Australian anthropology.

By the time Frank Gillen met Baldwin Spencer he had been in Central Australia for almost exactly half of his life, but his encounter with the Aborigines began before he even got there. Early in 1874, when he was an eighteen-year-old operator at the Adelaide terminus of the brand-new Overland Telegraph Line, Gillen was the recipient of a grim message from the Barrow Creek repeater station, nearly 1200 miles north in the wilds of Central Australia. Two of the station’s staff had just been speared by “treacherous natives” while taking the evening air and listening to one of their number play the violin. Over the hours that followed the young Gillen played a part in a scene that might have come from Rider Haggard. He was the intermediary in poignant exchanges between the dying stationmaster in Barrow Creek and his wife in the Adelaide GPO. Gillen was vehement in support of the vigilante squad of linesmen from the stations up and down the Line who rode out and slaughtered dozens of men, women and children.

Just over a year later Gillen was on his way north to take up a position at another of the Line’s remote stations, and he kept a diary. Like the hero of the film Dances with Wolves, Gillen advances wide-eyed and excited through succeeding layers of the frontier to its very edge, the point of that unfathomable moment of First Contact. Our sense of the young man’s deepening wonder is heightened by the way his journey slows as it advances, commencing at speed in the train, then moving to stage coach to buggy to horseback. His measure of progress through the frontier, half-consciously used, is the appearance of the Aborigines. Early on he sees layabouts, beggars, half-castes and drunkards. Later there are shepherds and trackers, much valued by pastoralists and policemen. Seven weeks after leaving Adelaide, now more than 600 miles away, he arrives at Peake, generally regarded at that time as the point beyond which firearms should always be carried. “There are dozens of Niggers about here, very few of them possess the luxury of an article of Clothing…,” he reports. “They live principally on Snakes, Lizards and herbage and all look in excellent Condition.” At every way station Gillen makes a point of visiting the Natives “for a yabber” and to build up his word lists, one of Aboriginal names, the other of more than a hundred terms and phrases arranged in alphabetical order: Al-lelia (Grass), Apra (Gum tree), Al-linga (A long distance), Anima (Sit down).

The absence of animosity toward the Aborigines in Gillen’s diary is striking. It might even be that its boisterous, jocular comments about the Aborigines and their squalid circumstances betray a young man’s moral unease. Whatever the case there is no doubt that over the succeeding years Gillen’s comprehension of the Aborigines and their experience of the whitefellas took a place in his mind at least as prominent as his earlier outrage at their “treachery.” The Aborigines were a familiar part of life on the Line’s repeater stations, first as potential adversaries, then as mendicants. The Charlotte Waters station (south of Alice Springs), where Gillen spent most of his first decade or so in Central Australia, was designed to serve as a fort but soon became an almshouse. Gillen made the most of daily interactions with the local people to get to know them and their baffling ways. So far did his sympathies grow that in 1891, not long before meeting Baldwin Spencer, he charged the notoriously violent policeman William Willshire with the murder of two Aboriginal men. Willshire’s conduct was not so different from that which a couple of decades earlier Gillen had emphatically supported.

By then Frank Gillen was officer in charge of the Alice Springs repeater station and therefore a justice of the peace, local magistrate and Sub-Protector of Aborigines. Sitting on top of the rocky hill with his new mate Baldwin Spencer, Gillen was master of all that he surveyed, the most senior civil servant between Port Augusta, 750 miles to the south, and Darwin, 1000 miles north. Down below was his redoubt, the telegraph station, “quite a little settlement in itself [as he and Spencer wrote some years later] with its operating room where day and night the machines are ticking ceaselessly: separate quarters for the officers in charge; dining, mess and living rooms for the operators, four in number; rooms for the line men; battery room, shoeing forge, blacksmith’s shop and all other essentials of a little settlement that must be able to provide for many a sudden emergency…” Gillen was referred to by his mates as His Catholic Majesty, the Pontiff, the Amir of Alice Springs.

Baldwin Spencer, too, was living an adventurous life. A decade earlier, as a twenty-six-year-old, a recent Oxford graduate and a newly married man, he had set sail for the Antipodes, 12,000 miles away, to take up the post of professor of biology at the University of Melbourne. Hyperactive, enchanted by “so much that is new” in the strange continent (his phrase, later borrowed to become the title of his biography), he was soon regarded as an inspired appointment, likely to return in the not-too-distant future to a chair at Oxford. But a trip to Central Australia, and a new friendship, would change all that.

As a star of Victoria’s scientific firmament Spencer had been nominated by the colony’s premier as its representative on the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia, funded by the eponymous William Horn, a wealthy South Australian pastoralist. Spencer was the expedition’s biologist, not its anthropologist, but “biology” then was a broad church, and on his first trip deep into the continent’s interior Spencer simply couldn’t help himself. Like the youthful Frank Gillen two decades earlier, he was scarcely off the train at its terminus at Oodnadatta, 330 miles south of Alice Springs, before he began taking photographs and making notes on the Natives. By the time the expedition’s camels had padded all the way to Alice Springs, on a route that included a circumnavigation of the western MacDonnell Ranges, he was as interested in the Aborigines as in flora and fauna.

Most members of the Horn expedition headed for home just a few days after reaching the Alice Springs telegraph station, but Spencer did not. He stayed for nearly three weeks to complete his collections and investigations. But he also spent hours on end exploring Frank Gillen’s impressive store of knowledge of the Natives. It was later said that Baldwin Spencer’s greatest discovery was Frank Gillen. The converse was also true. When in 1912 Frank Gillen died of a debilitating neurological disorder Spencer wrote to Gillen’s widow the kind of letter we might all hope to write at such a time. “As I often told him,” Spencer told Amelia Gillen, “my meeting him at Alice Springs made all the difference to my life and I like to think that it made, as he told me also, a great difference to his… No one ever had a better friend and comrade than he was and I look back on his friendship as one of the greatest privileges and blessings of my life.”

SPENCER was scarcely back in Melbourne from the three-week stay in Alice Springs before the letters began to flow. (Sadly, Gillen’s widow burned Spencer’s letters to Gillen, but from Gillen’s side we can follow the course and sense the intensity of their correspondence.) “As I sit here in the old ochre smelling den, which you know so well,” says Gillen in his first letter, “I can imagine you demonstrating the anatomy of a Cockroach to a lot of Callow Youth… do you, I wonder, ever wish that you could transport yourself to the wilds of the McDonnells [sic]. I often wish that you could, I missed you very much indeed…”

The centre of their correspondence was, of course, the Aborigines, and it was therefore semi-illicit. Spencer had not been appointed to the Horn expedition to study Aborigines – that was the job of one of his colleagues, Dr Edward Stirling – and so Spencer came perilously close to treading on an academic colleague’s turf. The problem was compounded by the fact that Spencer was editor of the expedition’s reports, and therefore in frequent contact with Stirling. Gillen, too, was constrained by the fact of Stirling, or was meant to be anyway. He had established what was in effect an exclusive-provider arrangement with Stirling several years before the Horn expedition had turned up in Alice Springs, sending him information and artefacts. What’s more, Gillen had undertaken to give Stirling new material to help fill out his findings from Horn.

As the Gillen–Spencer correspondence flourished their respective relationships with Stirling frayed. As in a bedroom farce, Spencer and Gillen tried to tiptoe their way around Stirling’s room but left behind a trail of letters, chance encounters and protestations of innocence. Gillen’s long, excited letters to Spencer suggest that he was the motive force in the friendship. Gillen badly wanted to make a name for himself, not so much through wealth (although he kept plunging, vainly, on mining shares) or power (although he flirted with going into politics) as through recognition. He really, really wanted a place in the sun. Spencer must have looked like his big chance.

For his part Spencer was well embarked on a distinguished career as a biologist, but he also knew that mapping the evolution of homo sapiens was one of the hottest intellectual fields in the English-speaking world. While still a student at Oxford he had attended the first lectures on anthropology ever given in Britain, and subsequently got a vacation job helping the eminent E.B. Tylor set up what was to become one of the world’s greatest anthropological museums, the Pitt Rivers. On the eve of Spencer’s departure for Australia soon after, Tylor wrote to suggest that he might “come into contact with interesting questions of local Anthropology… [and] do valuable work in this line as well as in your regular biological work.” Soon after he arrived in Melbourne Spencer sought out the leading “ethnologists” Alfred Howitt and Lorimer Fison. He realised that the findings of these and other ethnologists could be placed in the vast panorama unveiled by Charles Darwin. “Australia is the present home and refuge of creatures, often crude and quaint, that have elsewhere passed away and given place to higher forms…” he later wrote. “Just as the platypus laying its eggs and feebly suckling its young, reveals a mammal in the making, so does the Aboriginal show us, at least in broad outline, what early man must have been like…”

Within six months of Spencer’s stay in Alice, Spencer had arranged for Gillen to visit Melbourne, and Gillen had sworn not to give Stirling his newest, most exciting insights. In Melbourne Gillen stayed with the Spencers and was introduced by Spencer to Howitt and Fison. Back in Alice from Melbourne, floating, Gillen wrote to Spencer, telling him that it would be “a calamity to me if your interest in the subject cooled down.” A month later, in December 1895, Spencer had committed to working with Gillen. They would write a book together.

Then Gillen got lucky all over again. He’d heard of a big cycle of ceremonies known as the “Engwura,” never seen by white men. By the mid 1890s the decimation of the Aboriginal population in the Alice Springs area by violence, disease, malnutrition and simple demoralisation was such that it seemed that the great festivals might never be held again. Could he turn it on for his friend, and their book? Gillen’s standing among the Arunta (Arrente) had been greatly boosted by his efforts to have Willshire brought to justice. What’s more, he was in a position to offer the food and water needed for an extended gathering of 200 or more people. By mid 1896 it was agreed that Gillen and Spencer (artfully elevated by Gillen to the status of his “brother”) would observe and record the hitherto secret ceremonies to be conducted later in the year.

Gillen didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. It could go for a week, he told Spencer. In the event the ceremonies started before Spencer arrived in early November and continued non-stop, with up to six ceremonies a day throughout his eight-week stay. It was still not done when he left in January. Because they couldn’t figure out what would happen when, and for fear of missing something, they constructed a rough bough shelter on one side of the ceremonial ground, a few hundred yards from the telegraph station, and camped there for the duration. They met frequently with the men who did know what would happen when. Photographs of the two white and thirteen black patriarchs present one of those images in which at one moment the Aborigines look to be completely familiar and at the next completely Other. There they are, for all the world a conference committee (an academic conference committee in fact) exuding the authority of great learning, but these are also men who, by chanting exactly the right words in exactly the right sequences, by wearing the right designs and decorations, by leading their fellow-initiates through the necessary gestures, cries and steps, joined the ancestral beings with whom we and the world began.

The Engwura made great copy. Spencer and Gillen’s account of it takes up 150 of their book’s 670 pages. But content wasn’t the main thing. Other white men, including earlier ethnologists, had described various ceremonies, some in original condition, some reconstituted, but no one had ever been present at such a sustained revelation of the Aboriginal spiritual world, vast, intricate, deadly secret. Indeed no one had ever done such intensive and such privileged “fieldwork,” as their collaboration with the Arunta would now be termed. It seems to have been an unforgettable experience for the two men, Gillen particularly. After the book was published and the day before he left Central Australia for a posting Down South, Gillen sent Spencer the last of his many missives from Alice, a telegram: “Leaving for Adelaide tomorrow, taking last look at Engwura ground today. Fixing site for Erection Stone pillar there.” (The pillar, if erected, has not survived.)

The Engwura experience sustained an extravagant burst of creative energy. Gillen’s frenzy of activity and excitement was the subject of much acerbic banter from mates of Gillen’s who had in turn become correspondents of Spencer’s. “Gillen I never hear from,” one wrote to Spencer, “[H]e is working like a Trojan, night and day, at his Ethnological notes. Rumour has it that he recently got up in his Sleep and adjourned to the washhouse from which there presently came a sound of chanting accompanied with vigorous stamping of feet: and on the astonished Night Operator going to see what was the matter, he found the Pontiff, artistically decorated… corroboreeing away like an Aroondah warrior!”

Gillen’s letters to Spencer were running to forty pages and 6000 words, most without the benefit of paragraphing or punctuation, and he sent long field reports as well. We’re unravelling their systems, he would crow. We’re daily getting deeper into their mysteries! As his ambitions soared so did his anxiety. What if Stirling or any one of a number of rival ethnologists cracked it first? No, they can’t, they won’t be able to! Just look at this table of relationships! I’m getting evidence from far afield (which meant from colleagues up and down the Line). They’ll never figure out the eight-class version of the kinship system. It’s so hard to know when you’ve really got to the bottom of things. Poor old Stirling didn’t even know who’d been subincised and who not.

Spencer began drafting the book as soon as he was back in Melbourne from the Engwura, at speed. The first three of what became nineteen chapters were in Gillen’s hands by May 1897, only four months after the Engwura. You write like a dream! Gillen told him. Spencer kept firing off questions, puzzles, suggestions, Gillen chasing them down, loving it, the excitement of the hunt, the stimulus of Spencer’s “seething mind.” The chapters kept flowing up to Alice and back. It is going to be a great book! Gillen told Spencer. We look forward to the book of the century, one of the mutual mates wrote to Spencer. Gillen’s ambitions ran yet further ahead. I want to describe all of Australia’s tribes, he told Spencer, perhaps not realising that there were more than 500 of them, or had been anyway. You work like a steam hammer, he told Spencer as more chapters turned up in the post, you are working too hard, you must take a break. He didn’t. By March 1898, a bare fifteen months after the Engwura, less than four years after the two men met, a manuscript of 200,000 words, nineteen chapters, four technical appendixes, a glossary, index, an Authors’ Preface, 133 illustrations (mostly photographs) and two detailed maps was on its way to London.

But the course of this true love had not run entirely smooth. There had been spats, not many, but vivid ones, and about big things.

GILLEN’s understanding of both the Aboriginal apprehension of the world and their experience of oppression deepened rapidly as he worked toward the book. A few months after the Engwura he wrote to Spencer in anguish for his own and others’ actions in taking Aboriginal “churinga” (tywerrenge), inscribed boards and stones of deep spiritual significance. They had been collected in great number by the Horn expedition and then by one of Gillen’s mates and by Gillen himself until he realised how much they meant to their owners. He stopped collecting and asked his friend to stop too. He didn’t, with the result that the Aboriginal man who had revealed where the churinga could be found was put to death for sacrilege. “This upsets me terribly,” Gillen told Spencer. “I would not have had it happen for 100 pounds… I bitterly regret ever having countenanced such a thing and can only say that I did so when in ignorance of what they meant to the Natives… [I watched] them reverently handling their treasures – It impressed me far more than anything else I have witnessed.”

There was no cost to such sentiments, of course, coming as they did conveniently after the event. But scarcely a letter of Gillen’s fails to remark on the utter demoralisation of the Aborigines, their misery and the vicious incomprehension of the whites as to Aboriginal actions. He reports many incidents of shooting, of unjust punishment, of death from disease. He flares in anger at pastoralists who appropriate the best portion “for the exclusive use of their stock and relegate the Nigger to the barren wastes which are often destitute alike of game and tradition.” He is scathing about the Europeans’ ignorance of Aboriginal religious life. He even went, or tried to go, a step further than asserting its existence. He groped toward an understanding of its equivalence. The churinga (he wrote) are “sacred” in the sense that the sacramental wafer is sacred to the Roman Catholic. Aboriginal belief in the magical power of the churinga was like a Lourdes pilgrim’s belief in the Virgin Mary. He reckoned that the Dream Time (his neologism) wanderings were “startlingly like the wanderings of the Children of Israel.” Missionaries, Gillen said, were intent on wiping out the Aboriginal spiritual universe simply because it was rival to their own. Gillen was a proto-pluralist.

Sometimes he was even more than that. He was an anti-colonialist. “After I read your last letter I would have given a tenner to be alongside side [sic] you just to give you… a bit of my mind in return for your gratuitous attack on my Countrymen,” he stormed at Spencer. “With that arrogant assumption of superiority so characteristic of your Nigger annihilating race, you sneer at the Irish… You thank God that you are an Englishman, I thank God that I am not. I have no ambition to belong to such a race of Hypocrites. The British Lion shows his teeth but everyone, even you who are steeped in prejudice, know that those teeth are only decayed stumps and the poor old brute cannot bite. The stumps are good enough to crush niggers armed with weapons less dangerous than pea-shooters and that’s about all…” He often told Spencer that he (Spencer) was blinded by his imperial allegiance, that he wore “jingo goggles,” that “[your] environment has been too much for you – The hide bound toryism which encircles the walls of all british universities has got you in its grasp.” He foamed at the “oppressing, restraining, stifling, squelching, at times annihilating” of the Irish by the English, of England’s “old policy of crushing Irishism out of the Irish.”

This strand in the Gillen–Spencer relationship, occasionally prominent, rarely absent, has been passed over lightly by scholars, perhaps because so little of the contention between the two men is apparent in the upshot, Native Tribes of Central Australia.

Most of the book consists of loosely linked descriptions, and most of the descriptions are of ceremonies (of marriage, initiation, increase, and so on), but there were also scores of pages describing “magic,” social organisation, and “customs” (“knocking out of teeth; nose boring; growth of breasts; blood; blood-letting; blood-giving; blood-drinking; hair; childbirth; food restrictions; cannibalism” was the list of sub-heads to one chapter). Native Tribes is really a series of display cases filled with exotica. Material life, how the Aborigines actually earned a living, what governed their movements across their lands, how they brought up their children, what day-to-day life was like, all these were scarcely noted. Although Spencer and Gillen were the first to realise that “dreaming tracks” criss-crossed a landscape crowded with events and beings, and thus twigged to the rich omnipresence of Aboriginal spiritual life, they did not attempt to see it from the inside. They stared at what could be seen, from a distance. An appendix provides fifty-three measurements of the physiognomy of thirty numbered individuals. No individual is named or thanked, and differences in behaviour, personality and outlook are not recorded. Spencer and Gillen had returned from the site of a human catastrophe bearing a book about the fascinating things that had been there before.

Only rarely does the question of relations between black and white that so exercised Gillen find expression in their book. At five or six points appear sentences about the unwholesome influence of the whites (however kindly disposed they might be), the speed and inevitability of degeneration and extinction, and the declining numbers, all culminating in the following much-quoted passage. “[T]aking all things into account, the black fellow has not perhaps any particular reason to be grateful to the white man… To come in contact with the white man means that, as a general rule, his food supply is restricted, and that he is, in many cases, warned off from the water-holes which are the centres of his best hunting grounds, and to which he has been accustomed to resort during the performance of his sacred ceremonies; while the white man kills and hunts his kangaroos and emus he is debarred in turn from hunting and killing the white man’s cattle. Occasionally the native will indulge in a cattle hunt; but the result is usually disastrous to himself, and on the whole he succumbs quietly enough to his fate, realising the impossibility of attempting to defend what he certainly regards as his own property.”

The book’s reception almost matched Gillen’s fantasies. “In immortalizing the native tribes of Central Australia,” wrote Sir James Frazer, the eminent authority of the day, “Spencer and Gillen have at the same time immortalized themselves.” Native Tribes immediately became enshrined in the pantheon of anthropological classics. It influenced and was relied upon by such foundational works of the twentieth century as Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913). It was a popular as well as academic success. Spencer in particular was in ever-increasing demand as a journalist and lecturer (on one occasion even filling the cavernous Melbourne Town Hall to capacity). Gillen was lionised in his home town and received at Government House. Spencer went Home on a victory lap and returned with his FRS. Their fame was such that funds were raised to send them on a year-long trip across the continent which resulted in two more books, Native Tribes of Northern Australia (1904) and Across Australia (1912). After Gillen’s death in 1912 Spencer wrote more books based on their work together, including one in their joint names, and became the nation’s foremost expert on Aboriginal affairs as well as the grand old man of the infant discipline of Australian anthropology.

One hundred and twenty years after the publication of their first book, Spencer and Gillen’s fame has not entirely faded. The telegraph station is a museum now. Some of the buildings in Spencer’s photographs have gone but most are still there and in good nick, too good really. The old telegraph office, with its high counter, pigeon-holes and telegraphic paraphernalia is particularly authentic-looking, but also pristine, like a lounge room when visitors are expected. Gillen’s den, that magic cave of spears and boomerangs and churinga, of clutter and whisky and pipe-smoke, is now just a room. There are photographs taken by Spencer and Gillen of the Aborigines and of Spencer and Gillen, their big droopy moustaches making them look like a stage duo or (as Gillen had fibbed) brothers. The texts describing them are oddly like Spencer and Gillen’s descriptions of the Arunta, as if seen through a pane of glass. Spencer is the subject of a magisterial biography by John Mulvaney and J.H. Calaby, and Mulvaney has collaborated with Howard Morphy and Alison Petch to publish two volumes of letters to Spencer, one volume of Gillen’s, the second of other Central Australian correspondents. These are works on which many, including myself, have depended.

But much of Spencer and Gillen’s faded fame has turned into obloquy. That process began before Spencer’s death in 1929. To the rising generation of academic anthropologists Spencer and Gillen seemed old hat and, increasingly, skeletons in the discipline’s cupboard. At the entrance to the splendid Aboriginal galleries of the Museum of Victoria, where Spencer was for many years honorary director, are two TV screens playing a loop of an imagined dialogue between Spencer and one of the impresarios of the Engwura cycle in which the wise old man chides Spencer for his unacceptable thinking. Despite the efforts of scholars, including Mulvaney and Morphy in particular, references to Spencer and Gillen in scholarly work and in more general commentary on “Aboriginal affairs” often depict them as archetypes of “scientific racism.” They would be better seen as bearers, shapers and captives of the Australian conscience.

WITH HIS constant agonising over the question of how to regard and behave toward the Aborigines, and his erratic swerves from one answer to another, Frank Gillen is almost a personification of the strange career of the Australian conscience. Like many others then and since his sense of right and wrong was formed by post-Reformation Christianity and Enlightenment humanism, but greatly intensified in his case by an Irish comprehension of colonial power.

Understanding that power, however, did not protect him from it. Gillen’s most courageous, even reckless, attempt to follow the dictates of conscience was in having William Willshire stand trial for murder. But it was Gillen, not Willshire, who lost that battle. The citizens of South Australia raised a substantial fund for Willshire’s bail and defence, successfully conducted by the colony’s leading QC, Sir John Downer. The Adelaide press pilloried Gillen, and applauded Willshire’s acquittal.

Gillen’s meeting with Spencer followed soon after this debacle, and in him Gillen encountered another form of cultural power. Spencer encouraged Gillen’s intellectual development and often boosted Gillen’s confidence and soothed his fears, but he also exercised, or simply embodied, an overwhelming national, institutional and intellectual power. It would be nice to imagine that Spencer, shaken by Gillen’s half-garbled but powerful insights, canvassed whether they should put the whole anthropological project aside and work up a volume to be titled The Destruction of the Native Tribes of Central Australia. Or perhaps even British Colonialism and the Destruction of the Native Tribes of Central Australia. But that didn’t happen, of course. My guess is that Spencer didn’t respond directly to these parts of Gillen’s letters except to mollify and sympathise. In effect Spencer – anthropology – said to Gillen: no, no, don’t look over there, look over here! Anthropology averted its gaze. It was an averted gaze. In fact, it was an averted gaze that said that it wasn’t. Trust Me!, anthropology said to Gillen, I am Science.

Whatever Spencer did or didn’t say to Gillen probably doesn’t matter. Gillen was excited by what anthropology was revealing as well as troubled by things it didn’t. His sense of right and wrong was at war not just with the world around but also with that within, with what he wanted. And Spencer brought what Gillen wanted so tantalisingly close that he simply could not resist. Gillen had no sooner vented his rage at Spencer’s “arrogant assumption of superiority” than he swerved away again, avoiding that one, last, fatal word. “Bah! I can’t keep my temper,” he wrote, “I shall grow abusive if I don’t stop. Ive [sic] had a smoke and feel better.” We might even talk about the hidden injuries of colonialism to explain Frank Gillen’s moral and psychological vulnerability, and equivocation. On the churinga, for example, he started out being opposed to collecting them then thought it must be okay because Stirling said so then changed his mind again as he learned “what they meant to the Natives” and eventually sold his collection.

There was weight of argument, too, or at least its force of attraction for Gillen: what could be seen in Central Australia and elsewhere in the spread of “civilisation” was not British colonialism or the greed of the cattlemen or the brutality of people like Willshire but the working out of a great logic, an irresistible process by which creatures quaint and crude give way to “higher forms.” What a calming doctrine this must have been for someone of Gillen’s temperament and outlook. Anthropology was a solution in the mind to a problem that could not be solved in the world.

But if Gillen makes a good Faust, Spencer does not make a very good Mephistopheles. For reasons of biography, temperament, training and domicile, Spencer’s conscience had nowhere near as much work to do as Gillen’s, but it was not entirely idle. He was a man of goodwill given specific form by the Dissenting Christianity of his upbringing and the progressivist humanism of his student days. He was influenced and educated by Gillen as well as Gillen by him. We might not like Spencer’s answers to the problems posed by conscience, but that does not mean that he was indifferent to them. Spencer’s diaries, much of his journalism, and above all his wonderful photographs, all suggest that his response to Aboriginal people was much broader and more complex than that seen in his anthropology. It might not be going too far to suggest that anthropology got the better of him as well as Gillen.

The defining quality of their work was not scientific racism but muddle, both of thought and feeling. At some points they belittled Aboriginal rituals and beliefs elsewhere documented with care and respect. Often they expressed admiration and affection for Aboriginal people and urged their readers to do the same, yet also talked about them as if they were a sub-species. The people Gillen routinely referred to as Niggers were also regarded by him as close friends. Spencer and Gillen asked their audiences to put themselves in the Blackfellas’ place but wrote almost exclusively from the whitefellas’ angle. They reminded their readers, however circumspectly, that the white man took the Aborigines’ food and water then exercised terrible violence if the Aborigines took the white man’s cattle, but they also talked about the destruction of Aboriginal societies as if it were a contagion, something as mysteriously fatal as it was inevitable. Gillen did his level best to have a cop sent down for murder yet remained (with Spencer) a vehement defender of the vigilante squads that hunted down dozens of Aborigines after the Barrow Creek killings.

Conscience was at work in everything Spencer and Gillen did, in their struggles with each other and with their own needs and desires as well as with the world around. The chronic and insistent problem was that their culture’s wants were incompatible with its beliefs (or what it wanted to believe its beliefs were, anyway). There are few villains and fewer heroes in the story of black and white in Australia; Spencer and Gillen were, like many others, neither, and both. If their conscience was never victorious, nor was it ever entirely vanquished, even in their anthropology. Their “science” did provide a powerful rationalisation for the conduct of white toward black and, more fundamentally, an angle of gaze that made it very difficult to see the things that so exercised Gillen. But anthropology was, and did, other things as well. It paid attention to the Aboriginal world when no other form of disciplined enquiry was interested. Its gaze was selective, but clear, certainly relative to its predecessors. William Horn, sponsor of the scientific expedition that brought Spencer and Gillen together in the first place, expressed a widely held view when he wrote that “the Aborigine” had no religion and no traditions, merely the mindless repetition “with scrupulous exactness” of “a number of hideous customs and ceremonies which have been handed from his father.” Spencer and Gillen, informed by their detailed scientific observations, knew that this was simply not accurate, and said so. Their anthropology allowed them to detect a spiritual world of unsuspected extent, complexity and feeling, a revelation that made possible the eventual transformation of racism into pluralism. Their anthropology’s empiricism was, in its way, a search for truth, the beginnings of an effort at comprehension that has continued ever since.

THAT SPENCER and Gillen’s anthropology was so influential and popular suggests that they shared with many others the need to find a new basis for moral comfort. They helped to give expression to a shift of a kind that a Kuhn or a Gramsci would quickly recognise, an abrupt movement from the dominance or hegemony of one paradigm of thought and feeling to another, provoked by a change in historical circumstances – in this case from a predominantly frontier to a post-frontier culture, a shift from a contempt and hatred unafraid to name itself to the averted gaze and crocodile tears of the great Australian silence.

Twenty or thirty years later Australia’s circumstances were again changing, this time through the emergence of a worldwide anti-colonialism, and the Australian conscience entered another phase in its strange career. Spencer and Gillen’s old anthropology became an important stalking horse for the new. The peerless W.E.H. Stanner, whose phrase “the Australian conscience” I have borrowed, was and saw himself as a conscience struggling (as he put it) to “escape” from Spencer and Gillen’s style of thinking. Even Stanner, along with many subsequent critics of our forebears, took for granted the conscience that brought him to criticise Spencer and Gillen, forgetting that his own conscience was as much a part of Australia’s history as the conduct it abhorred, and that the Australian conscience was as generative of Spencer and Gillen’s work as of his criticisms. Their work owed much to conscience, and Stanner owed much to it. It was Spencer and Gillen who gave him an attention to the Aboriginal experience when most preferred to ignore it, and the rigorously “scientific” form of enquiry essential to his “escape.” Stanner’s anthropology, which did so much to establish post-racist pluralism in Australia, was as much the offspring of Spencer and Gillen’s racist anthropology as its conqueror.

The beneficiaries of Stanner’s “escape” have also found it difficult to recognise the way conscience has worked, in the past, and in ourselves. One difficulty is empirical – the workings of conscience are often subterranean, and its results are often perverse – and that may be why historians and others have often failed to notice it. But the main problem is that we, like Spencer and Gillen (and Stanner), seek comfort.

The obvious advantage of concentrating on Spencer and Gillen’s vices is in highlighting our virtues. But to see only how we differ from them is to hide from the things we have in common with them. When on their transcontinental trek in 1901 Spencer and Gillen reached Alice Springs, they repaired once more to the rocky hill behind the telegraph station. “We found it difficult to realise [Gillen’s journal records] that it is 5 years since we last sat here together… puzzling over many things that were then strange to us but which have since been made clear and now lie enshrined in our book.” They believed that they had comprehended the Aboriginal universe and had seen its future. It is plain to us that that was a delusion of their age. But our age has delusions too. Perhaps one of them is represented by the playlet that greets visitors to the Museum of Victoria’s Melbourne Museum. In telling us that Spencer was a racist baddie it tells us that we are post-racist goodies, and implies that the conflict between conscience and interests culminated in the eventual victory of the former, with us. •

As noted above, the term “the Australian conscience” is Stanner’s. “Strange career” is from C. Vann Woodward’s 1955 classic The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Whether Spencer and Gillen’s hill-top sunsets began during Spencer’s first Alice Springs visit or the second (for the Engwura) I have been unable to establish.

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