Beyond empire

In an influential critique of the anthropology discipline, published in 1968, Kathleen Gough argued that the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century period, when anthropology became established as a ‘modern science’, was the time when ‘Western nations were making their final push to bring practically the whole pre-industrial, non-Western world under political and economic control’.³⁸ Portman’s practice as an anthropological photographer provided strong evidence for Gough’s criticism, for it reveals an ethnographic gaze that is manifestly, indeed violently, imperial.

In contrast, Thomson was writing at a time when imperialism was increasingly contested from within and without. His was an epoch when Australia and other former colonies were consciously developing their national traditions, often in reaction to the valorisation of all things British.

When considering the examples of Portman and Thomson, it might be tempting to discern in them a linear progression: to identify an evolutionary path within anthropology’s history, beginning with a regime of discipline and surveillance and ending with a model of participant observation, an ‘ethnography of empathy’, we could call it. But this would be simplistic. A more accurate appraisal acknowledges that the desire to engage holistically with someone else’s worldview and the desire to hold that person captive in a scientific gaze have both been part of anthropology since its inception.

The tension between empathy and objectification is fully apparent in events key to anthropology’s emergence in Britain. The Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1843, was the first association of anthropologically minded persons in the British Isles; its forebear was the Aborigines’ Protection Society, itself an offshoot of the anti-slavery movement.³⁹ While this branch of anthropology’s pedigree is unequivocally humanitarian, its influence on the discipline waned in the decades that followed.

Far from championing the rights of indigenous populations, many nineteenth-century anthropologists commonly justified their project purely in terms of ‘salvage’. For the benefit of science, data must be collected prior to the extinction of native populations. The influence of Darwin is fully discernible in Victorian anthropology. The major nineteenth-century anthropologists, men such as Tylor, Frazer and, in the United States, Lewis Henry Morgan, were proponents of social evolution. Analysing such phenomena as kinship and marriage customs, technology, or religious and spiritual beliefs, they devised hierarchical models of human development, in which ‘lower races’ such as the Australian Aborigines represented the lowest echelons of human development, in contrast to people such as themselves who occupied the evolutionary pinnacle. Applied in the human sphere, biological evolution transformed from scientific theory into outright ideology. Competition between species was transferred onto the competition between the races or divisions of humanity. The historical forces of empire, including such ‘trivialities’ as the dispossession and annihilation of entire indigenous populations, could be passed off as the work of nature, ever efficient in consigning the unfittest to oblivion.

The unravelling of evolutionary anthropology and its disavowal by a new generation of anthropologists in the early twentieth century are beyond the purview of this chapter; that story has been told in detail by George W. Stocking Jr. and by Kuklick.⁴⁰ Functionalism was the intellectual tradition that succeeded social evolutionary theory. Radcliffe-Brown and the Polish-born Bronislaw Malinowski were champions of this new method, which dispensed with the old hierarchies of race and concentrated instead on the interrelationships between the institutions that make a society functionally cohesive. The personal experience of conducting ethnographic fieldwork became much more important in functionalism and the theoretical models that ensued.

Stocking describes how Malinowski, fresh from his immersion in the world of the Trobriand Islanders, ‘conceived the notion of a “New Humanism” centred on “living man, living language, and living full-blooded facts” ’.⁴¹ The closeness between anthropologists and the people referred to as their ‘informants’—although they might as readily be thought of as educators or colleagues—is a reminder of the astonishing variety of relationships formed as a result of empire. They can range from the intimacy of marriage to the most exploitative and violent forms of subjugation. Kuklick, like many writers, emphasises that cross-cultural contact can ‘foster self-doubt as well as arrogance’.⁴² It can present the effects of empire as a field of observation, even to an observer who is empire’s servant.

In the present era, anthropological methods are routinely used for documentation and data collection that serve the interests of once colonised people. In the gathering of evidence to support native title claims to land, many anthropologists are employed by indigenous councils or community organisations. They have become the servants of ‘the native’. The vast collections of data and objects amassed by anthropologists in the past have become resources for descendant communities, who use them for education of the young, for advancement of their political agendas, or simply for pleasure. In Arnhem Land, for example, Donald Thomson’s photography and material culture collections have been meticulously studied. His documentation of egg hunting in the Arafura Swamp provided the inspiration for Ten Canoes (2006), a feature film directed by Rolf de Heer, set at a time prior to European settlement and shot on location with descendants of the men who guided Thomson. It was one of his photographs, showing men in ten canoes, that was singled out to de Heer as especially significant and which steered the conception of the film. Although knowledge of traditional canoe-making no longer survived in that area, it was possible to manufacture the bark vessels used in the film by studying examples collected by Thomson.

The production broke new ground for its collaborative spirit, and it has the distinction of being the first feature film to be made entirely in an Australian Aboriginal language.⁴³

Anthropologists have long won prestige in their own societies by studying and reporting on foreign cultures. They have benefited from the expertise of knowledgeable persons within those cultures, and this is sometimes a source of resentment. While it is unlikely that anthropology will ever be free from accusations of exploitation, its mutability in adapting to the exigencies of a post-colonial world provides further confirmation of its always ambiguous relationship to empire. No longer can anthropology be categorised simply as ‘the West looking at the Rest’, for persons from nearly all nationalities and ethnic groups have taken anthropological training. Societies that once considered themselves ethnically homogenous have become overtly multicultural, and with this transformation the metropole, the factory, the office, the suburb or the rural town can as readily provide a ‘field’ for the anthropological researcher as the rainforest tribe.

Notes

1 Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964).

2 ‘Anthropology, n.' and ‘anthropologist, n.' OED Online. Oxford University Press, www.oed.com. ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/view/Entry/8436?redirectedFrom=anthropology and www.oed. com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/view/Entry/8434?redirectedFrom=anthropologist (accessed 18 December 2012).

3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (NewYork, 1970), pp. 345, 376-377.

4 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), Notes and Queries on Anthropology for the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands (London, 1874), p. 4.

5 ‘Ethnology, n.' OED Online. Oxford University Press, www.oed.com.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu. au/view/Entry/64820?redirectedFrom=ethnology (accessed 19 December 2012).

6 Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, 2001), p. 37.

7 Martin Thomas, The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist (Sydney,

2011), pp. 241-244.

8 Zoe Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815--45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester, 2005).

9 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade', The Economic History Review, Vol. 6 (new series), No. 1 (1953), pp. 1-15.

10 Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 6.

11 Driver, Geography Militant, p. 14.

12 Ibid, p. 49.

13 Kuklick, The Savage Within, p. 25 and chap. 5; George W. Stocking Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951 (Madison, 1995), chap. 6.

14 BAAS, Notes and Queries, pp. iv-v.

15 Ibid.

16 Satadru Sen, ‘Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures: M.V. Portman and the Andamanese’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2009), pp. 364-379, p. 364.

17 ‘Mr. M.V. Portman’ (Obituary), The Times (London, England), 22 February 1935, p. 16. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 January 2013.

18 Sen, ‘Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures’, p. 365.

19 Ibid.

20 M.V. Portman,.Notes on the Languages of the South Andaman Group of Tribes (Calcutta, 1898), p. iii.

21 M.V. Portman, ‘Photography for Anthropologists’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Vol. 25 (1896), pp. 75-87, p. 76.

22 Christopher Pinney, ‘The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography’, in Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Anthropology & Photography I860--1920 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 74-95, p. 81.

23 Portman, ‘Photography for Anthropologists’, p. 76.

24 Ibid., p. 77.

25 Sen, ‘Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures’, p. 375.

26 Nicolas Peterson, ‘A Biographical Sketch of Donald Thomson’, in Donald Thomson, Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land (Carlton, 2003), pp. 1-21, p. 3.

27 Thomson, Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land, pp.

148-160.

28 Thomson, Report on Expedition to Arnhem Land, 1936--37 (Canberra, 1939), p. 5.

29 Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land (Melbourne, 1949).

30 C.C. Macknight, The Voyage to Marege': Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia (Carlton, Vic.,

1976).

31 Cited in ‘Statute of Westminister’, in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History (South Melbourne, 2001), p. 615.

32 Jack Cross, Great Central State: The Foundation of the Northern Territory (Adelaide, 2011), chap. 1.

33 Missionary activities in Arnhem Land are detailed in Catherine H. Berndt and Ronald M. Berndt, Arnhem Land: Its History and its People (Melbourne, 1954).

34 Peterson, ‘A Biographical Sketch of Donald Thomson’, p. 7.

35 See Ted Egan, Justice All Their Own: The Caledon Bay and Woodah Island Killings 1932--1933 (Carlton South, Vic., 1996).

36 Thomson, Report on Expedition to Arnhem Land, p. 13.

37 Kuklick, The Savage Within, pp. 18-20.

38 Kathleen Gough, ‘Anthropology and Imperialism’, Monthly Review, Vol. 19, No. 11 (1968), pp. 12-27, p. 13.

39 Henrika Kuklick, ‘The British Tradition’, in Henrika Kuklick (ed.), A New History of Anthropology (Malden, MA, 2008), pp. 52-78, p. 52.

40 See Kuklick, ‘The British Tradition’; and Stocking Jr., After Tylor.

41 Stocking Jr., Afier Tylor, p. 267.

42 Kuklick, The Savage Within, p. 26.

43 See Therese Davis, ‘Remembering Our Ancestors: Cross-Cultural Collaboration and the Mediation of Aboriginal Culture and History in Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer, 2006)’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2007), pp. 5-14; and Martin Thomas, ‘The Crackle of the Wire: Media, Digitization and the Voicing of Aboriginal Languages’, in Norrie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leeuwen (eds), Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp. 71-90.

Beyond empire

More on the topic Beyond empire: