From Culture to Cultures : or Anthropology in the Desert

Timothy Mason, Université de Paris 8, 2004

A : Introduction

In what follows, I will argue that the anthropology of the late nineteenth century, however marked by the ideology of its time, was based upon a scientific project which, if it had been possible to follow it through with methodological rigour and application, might well have furthered our understanding of human organization and sociality, and of our species' place within the natural order. This project was abandoned, to be replaced by an insistence upon one methodological mode - participant observation in the field - which, however fruitful it may be when put at the service of a theoretically founded approach to human activity, cannot, by its very nature, bear the weight which has been placed upon it.

I believe that this is true of anthropology in general, at least as it is practiced in the English-speaking world. However, I have chosen here to concentrate on the ethnography of Australia. It would be impossible in the space of a single article to address the whole of ethnology - indeed, the Australian material itself is already rich and interesting enough that I can do little more here than scratch a few rapid sketches in the sand. I will begin with a glance at what I take to be the present disarray within the ethnographical universe, brought to the light of day by the battles over the Hindmarsh Island Bridge affair. For some, this story, with its twists and reversals, is seen as emblematic of the torn state of Australia itself. Here I will leave such large questions to the politologists and pundits ; what interests me is the degree to which it illustrates divisions and tensions within the academy which we can find, in slightly different but nevertheless parallel forms, in South American, in the United States, in Canada or in Africa.

I will then go back in time to the work of Spencer and Gillen. I will argue that Gillen's observations of the people he called the Arunta achieved order and validity because, largely through Spencer's coaching and prodding, the master of Alice Springs telegraph station became a fully committed member of the scientific community¹. It is today common practice to dismiss Spencer and Gillen because of their evolutionism ; I suggest that, on the contrary, it was their attempt to further the evolutionary project that gave their work body, and that the riches of their results should have lead not to its abandonment, but to its refinement.

But abandoned it was ; I next turn to the two men who were most vociferously responsible for this as regards the Australian domain². Both men attempted to replace evolutionism with one form or another of functionalism, thus turning their backs on biological insight to adopt biological metaphor. Neither was to be particularly convincing in their theoretical formulations, but Malinowski was able, through his powerful ethnographical monographs on the Trobriand Islanders, to appeal to the imagination of a public hungry for exoticism, while Brown's structuralist approach to kinship appeared to satisfy the canons of scientific rigour.

Malinowski's writings placed the work done in the field at the very centre of both public and academic conceptions of anthropology. I now look at someone who completely gave herself over to the field ; Daisy Bates quit her life as a pastoralist's wife to set up her tent among the Aborigines. For some forty years she was to live among them, recording their languages, their myths and their ceremonies, and administering to what she conceived of as their needs. Her intellectual legacy consists of numerous newspaper articles, copious field-notes, and a book, 'The Native Tribes of Western Australia', which was finally published in 1985, forty years after her death. I will suggest that although Bates was certainly eccentric and idiosyncratic, and although her standing as an ethnologist is precarious, she reveals much about the evolution of the discipline from a way of knowing to a way of becoming.

On firmer academic ground stands the doyen of Australian ethnology, A.P. Elkin. I will here be looking at his book "Men of High Degree", which marks most clearly the moment when the anthropological establishment had to come to terms with the fact that the objects of their study were men and women, just like them. From there, I will go on to glance at some later work in which the ethnologist seems, in the end, to learn as much, if not more, about herself as she does about her target population.

A : Sixes and Sevens

Diane Bell, writing in response to criticisms of her book "Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World that is, was, and will be", after noting that Tim Rowse has accused her of writing a 'truncated ethnography', asks :

I wonder if Rowse would categorise what Fred Myers terms 'the first full scale ethnography of the Pintupi" as 'truncated' in that he worked with six men and one woman ... and thus had limited access to the knowledge of all the other women and uninitiated youths? Would Rowse consider the memory culture of the Lower Murray recorded by Ronald and Catherine Berndt 'truncated' in that two primary informants inform their 624 pages concerning the Ngarrindjeri?³

The question is rhetorical. But it demands an answer. Bell here reveals the astonishing fragility of the anthropologist's claim to be conducting a scientific project. The fieldworker's reliance on one or two informants, who, by the very nature of the game, are unlikely to be in any way representative of the people whose community the ethnologist imagines, may not totally invalidate her observations and conclusions, but must seriously circumscribe their epistemological standing. The ethnography so founded is, in the end, the academically ordered record of the one or two meaningful relationships that the writer succeeded in establishing during her one or two years sojourn. Viewed scientifically, such works can pretend to offer little more than tentative illustrations of theoretical points the full grounding of which must be looked for elsewhere⁴.

Yet modern anthropology has founded itself, at least since Malinowski's series of monographs on the Trobriand Islander was published, on just that. This happened, I will argue, because when anthropologists found themselves faced with seemingly intractable flaws in the theoretical base - the theory of social evolution - upon which their science had been erected, instead of refining the concepts in the light of the discoveries and the difficulties that they had thrown up, they simply abandoned it. Despite attempts to replace the founding paradigm - usually gerrymandered constructions that barely survived the life-times of their conceptors - the profession shifted its legitimation from an appeal to the canons of science to an appeal to the authenticity of personal experience⁵. It is this that has come to be seen as the factor that unites anthropologists - not its objects, or its theories about those objects, which can vary radically from time to time and from place to place, but the method :

This diversity of subject matter, topic, and paradigm, spilling over into the domains of various other disciplines and genres, leaves us with the increasingly difficult question, what is it that makes us special ? Where is that "essential continuity" that links us to our anthropological ancestors ? The answer has to be field work, which by my book is no mean thing⁶.

This reliance on intensive observation⁷ lead to a dissipation of the concept of culture as it had been used by the founders of the discipline. In a sense, this was a just return to original sources ; as adumbrated by the thinkers of the German reaction to the Enlightenment, culture, rooted in the particular and specific conditions under which each people lived and forged its soul, could only be multiple. Tylor, however, implicitly rejected this ; as mankind was one, so too was culture. One might find different societies on different points along the evolutionary trajectory, but this was of secondary importance from a theoretical point of view - although primary from the methodological one.

From this point of view the case of Australia is uniquely fruitful. It is on this continent that the anthropological project appears in its greatest clarity, for various reasons, among which are the rapid pacification of the original inhabitants, and the apparent simplicity of social form and of technology that their adaptation to the ecological conditions entailed. This encouraged the perception of the Australian tribes as of particular interest to the anthropologist, and at the same time facilitated the investigative work.

For the survival of societies that had advanced less along the pathway to civilization, and which were open to observation, offered the anthropologist the opportunity of a window into the world that was. In this view, Australia, home of such peoples as the Kurnai or the Arunta, who could be conceived of as representing the very earliest stage of evolution, offered the most fruitful of such opportunities. The Australian ethnographers were to work in a laboratory of the human soul, from which they would emerge with proof of the inner nature of our humanity.

Of course, as is often the case when a nice theory is taken to the lab, the results, at first promising, were ultimately disappointing. It is perhaps true to say that Australian ethnology has never quite recovered from that disappointment. To illustrate the point, let us look at the circumstances under which Bell found herself forced to defend her work against Rowse's strictures.

The Hindmarsh Bridge Affair

Bell's book is about the 'women's business' which rose to national prominence in Australia as a result of protests sparked off by the project of building a bridge from the mainland to Hindmarsh Island in the estuary of the Murray River in the mid-90s. A Royal Commission was set up to investigate the claims and counter-claims that had arisen from the affair, and the conclusions of the Commission were such as to cause disarray among Australian anthropologists, for it was made clear that in the opinion of the commissioner, they had behaved unprofessionally.

The Commissioner dismissed as a fabrication the contention on the part of a number of local women that Hindmarsh Island was a sacred site, of particular significance to fully initiated women. A subsequent civil court case effectively denied this, the judge holding that the women were telling the truth. These judgments were highly dependent upon the expertise of the anthropologists, for the women themselves refused to give evidence on the grounds that they could not reveal secret knowledge in this way to unauthorised persons.

I shall not here make any attempt to pronounce on the rights and wrongs of this particular case. My interest is in the discussion that it aroused in anthropological circles : to some extent, after the conclusions of the Commission were published, there was a feeling that the whole profession had been put in jeopardy. So it was not surprising when, after the subsequent civil case, Paul Burke, assaying the judge's conclusions, was able to write of "the sense of relief felt by most anthropologists at the rejection of negligence claims against the anthropologist at the eye of the Hindmarsh maelstrom.⁸" Nevertheless, divisions did become visible ; commenting on the affair a little later, Kenneth Maddock wrote :

The Coronation Hill and Hindmarsh Island affairs show that when Aboriginal claims become embroiled in public controversy the accuracy and integrity of anthropological work can be questioned. In particular, the use to which anthropologists put information can, with some justification, be cynically regarded if they appear to be blurring the boundary between the anthropologist as expert and the anthropologist as partisan or advocate. Yet there are real problems for anthropologists in knowing where to draw the line⁹.

Maddock's strictures are relatively muted : those of Ron Brunton, who left an academic post in anthropology because, to his way of thinking, the discipline had become "captured by Aboriginal groups which control their access and censor research¹⁰", were far more overt. He sees the Hindmarsh affair as yet further proof of the accuracy of his diagnosis and accuses anthropologists "of construct(ing) whole incentives around their (the Aborigines') victimhood rather than pulling themselves out of disadvantage through their own efforts¹¹"

But accusations that Australian anthropologists have grown too close to their subjects are no new thing. Take, for example, an affair that took place in the days when Elkin was the doyen of Australian anthropology. A young researcher, Ralph Piddington, gave an interview to a newspaper reporter in which he denounced the ill treatment of Aborigines that he had witnessed during his fieldwork, stating that they were quite simply slaves. The local administrator complained to A.P. Elkin, then professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney, about Piddington's behaviour, offering a number of smears on the character and behaviour of the researcher. Elkin ensured that Piddington would never again work in his jurisdiction. Geoffrey Gray argues that Elkin consistently maintained a policy of censorship, suppressing any attempt by fieldworkers, including the Berndts, and Olive Pink - to whom we shall return later - as well as Piddington, to reveal the brutish realities of Aboriginal life¹².

Elkin's refusal to perturb the great and the good arose in essence from the deal that his predecessor in the chair had made with the governing authorities : Radcliffe-Brown had agreed to set up an anthropology department that would both further the cause of scientific ethnography and train and advise the officials of the colonial administration. Although Radcliffe-Brown himself sought out greener pastures, apparently in part because he found applied anthropology boring, the deal remained in place when Elkin took over. Both funding and placement of field-workers depended upon the good will of the very government officials who were formally responsible for the well-being of the Aborigines ; given the power which these men exercised over the lives of station-based First People, to draw attention to poor conditions was to draw attention to their failings.

There is, then, nothing new in the fact that members of the profession find that their voices are stifled or shaped by concerns other than their own. When Les Hiatt complains that the Pitjantjatjara Women's Council allows anthropologists working with them to submit their theses only with their prior written consent¹³, the interest of the observation is not that the anthropologist is subject to strict control, but that the anthropologist is subject to the strict control of the people she studies, rather than of the colonial administration within whose bailiwick they live.

That a science - any science - should be open to political pressure and control is not, in itself, shocking¹⁴. The social sciences are particularly exposed ; only to the extent that practitioners can point to a solidly constituted body of observationally founded theory can they hope to create sufficient social space to enjoy some degree of autonomy. Let us now turn to why it was that the anthropologists turned their backs upon the tools that might have allowed them to keep that space open.

B : The Scientific Project

Gillen in the Desert

Gérard Leclerc's model of the development of the social sciences through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries¹⁵, has front-line agents of the state - doctors, missionaries, police-officers and so on - as repositories of knowledge about the objects of administration. In the homelands, these are the labouring poor, while in the colonies, they are the savages. When the need arises - and Leclerc suggests that it is in times of perceived crisis that this comes about - these peripheral figures come into contact with centralizing agents, such as Chadwick, or Booth, who, in a manner of speaking, unpack the stored information. The story of the partnership between Baldwin Spencer, professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne, and Frank Gillen, telegraph station head at Alice Springs, will here illustrate and add nuance to that model.

Frank Gillen's sojourned among the Arunta because he was posted into the central desert of Australia by his employers to work on the newly opened overland telegraph line. It was in his capacity first as operator and then as repeater station master that he came into contact with the Aborigines, and it was his employment by the Post and Telegraph office that kept him among them for over twenty years, between 1875 and 1899.

Gillen seems to have been interested in the language and the beliefs of the inhabitants of Central Australia almost from the beginning. In the diary that he kept during his first visit to Alice Springs in 1875, he records names and items of vocabulary, that he acquired while spending time talking to the Aborigines. This early interest deepened, and became more than curiosity ; he supplied some vocabulary items to E.M. Curr, who published them in his 'The Australian Race' of 1886. In 1891, he met Professor Edward Stirling whom he was to go on to provide with hospitality and information at the time of the Horn Expedition which reached Alice Springs in 1894. This was the occasion of his meeting with Baldwin Spencer, with whom he was to write two of the most influential tomes in the history of ethnography¹⁶.

Curr, Stirling and Spencer gradually drew Frank Gillen into a scientific community - a community dedicated to a collective endeavour to draw up and elaborate upon a model of human relationships founded upon a shared observational and theoretical paradigm. The paradigm, advanced by the Victorian armchair theorists, based upon the works of Darwin and of Spencer, placed humanity within the animal realm, and looked forward to writing a Natural History of Mankind. This History would need to be written from observations in the field ; although Tylor did little more, and Frazer nothing more, than collate the reports of travelers, missionaries, explorers and colonial officials, both men believed that the only way forward for the science of anthropology was to get trained observers out to where the primary evidence was to be found. A man such as Gillen, under the guidance of a scientific mentor, was a most precious asset.

The 'unpacking' of Gillen does not seem to have been motivated by any feeling of social crisis; such dangers as might have been posed by the Aborigines had, by that time, largely faded, and while there was some concern in official circles as to their well-being, it was widely perceived that they would simply, in the course of time, and in the natural order of things, die out, culturally if not biologically. Gillen's mentors were not to process his information as philanthropists, as social reformers or 'moral entrepreneurs¹⁷', but as scientists.

It was this that transformed Gillen from an agent of the state, in which capacity he had intervened regularly in the lives of the Arunta, into an anthropological field-worker. As he repeatedly affirms in his letters to Spencer, it was only under the latter's scientific guidance that he was able to undertake his investigations. Spencer's role was, in part, to bring order - and grammar - to Gillen's notes. But it was also to direct his research, to point him in the right direction, to furnish him with questions the meaning of which derived from the theoretical position of which he was the academic guarantor¹⁸.

Gillen expressed a need for guidance ; in a letter to Spencer, dated 25^th April, 1896, he wrote :

thanks very much for your long and encouraging letter, if I feel atal inclined to halt your letters always spur me on. I cannot, like you, trace the development of life from the proto-plasm through monera, unfusoira, mollusca, vertebrata, fish, reptile and mammal up to man but I believe that I can and will get to the bottom of this Nigger question so far as these tribes are concerned. Your steady encouragement and scientific guidance from the start has done more than all else to fill me with enthusiasm for the work, and without enthusiasm one could accomplish very little ... I have undertaken this work seriously, at your instigation, I fully recognize that without your assistance and guidance I could not have accomplished half of what has been done¹⁹.

He indicates that without Spencer's questions to channel his observations, he is nothing more than a dabbler :

The ordeal by fire in the Kurdaitcha appears to have astonished you and you ask why on earth it was not discovered before. I have known of it for a long time, I went into the Kurdaitcha business thoroughly some years ago but out of mere curiosity but did not make any notes at the time other than mental²⁰.

Spencer, in his turn, reported back to Frazer and to Tylor in matters anthropological. These men saw themselves as part of a community of scholars, working together to further scientific knowledge²¹.

Gillen's Fieldwork

Gillen's value to science derived from the fact that he was the man on the spot, the primary observer. By the time Spencer found him, he had spent some ten years in daily contact with the Arunta, intervening in their daily affairs for good and ill. It was only when he became Spencer's co-worker, however, that the field came to Alice Springs²². Under Spencer's direction he came to spend more and more time with the old men of the Arunta - possibly to the irritation of his employers, from whom he was to receive no further promotion.

It needs to be recalled that Gillen's status among the Aborigines, like that of his counterparts in the metropolis, the doctors and local magistrates who contributed to the Blue Books of England, was one that gave him considerable power over the lives of those whose culture he investigated. He was Sub-protector of Aborigines, a title which gave him some control over the distribution of European goods to the men and women who found that their traditional sources of food and comfort had been disrupted - primarily by the forces of colonialism, but also, at the time of Gillen's fullest observations, by intense drought²³. He was also the local magistrate, which meant that he could have them sent to prison, or whipped. He was the employer of those who worked on the station, either as menial workers or as domestic servants. Moreover, he was responsible for the introduction of the most up-to-date information technology : it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that among the Arrernte today one finds a group which makes much use of video to capture their ritual moments or to campaign for better health care²⁴.

But the daily impact that Gillen, his colleagues and his family had on the Arunta does not appear to any great extent in the canonical texts. Just as Spencer and Gillen took great care to ensure that the trappings of civilization would not appear in the photos that they took to illustrate their books, so the texts were, for the most part, purged of any indication that these 'naked, howling savages', as Spencer termed them, had already been thrust into the modern world - and in particular of any trace of the major role that Gillen himself had played in their modernization.

The 'field', then, was not coterminous with Alice Springs itself, or with the full range of Gillen's encounters with the Aborigines. The anthropological work was, for the most part, set in two specific scenes. Let us look at these :

My Dear Spencer

Once again I am addressing you from the old familiar den which reeks more than ever of things anthropological. In addition to the old smell (in an earlier letter, Gillen refers to the smell of ochre as characteristic of the den) an odour peculiar to my Royal brother, the Alaartunja of the Udnirringeeta, pervades the place, he and a few of his Chosen disciples have visited and collogued with me here daily much to the disgust of my wife who declares that I am courting another attack of typhoid²⁵

Gillen's den is the major stage upon which are set his anthropological interviews : it may be compared to the veranda upon which Seligman is seen interviewing informants during the Torres Straits Expedition of 1898, or Malinowski's tent²⁶. Unlike either of the professional anthropologists, Gillen is firmly upon his own territory, surrounded by the objects that he has collected and the books which he reads and consults. The den is within a permanent dwelling upon which he believes himself to have a solid claim. Obviously, he occults the fact that the land upon which the building stands had been stolen from the very men who subjected themselves to his interrogations, but that is seen as an inevitable corollary of the evolutionary process.

In this place he interviewed both the voluntary visitors, such as the Alaartunja, and others who were coerced ; in his capacity as magistrate, he might sentence a man to jail for six months, and then, in his zeal for fact-gathering, subject his victim to intensive grilling over his place in the kinship structure.

Cowle (a local police officer) arrived this morning and with a pang, which I feel still, I was obliged to commit the prisoner 'Friday' to gaol for six months hard - After the court proceedings were finished, I took him to my den where for three quarters of an hour I questioned him closely ...²⁷

The other scene was the wurley or rough hut which he and Spencer used as a base when they observed and photographed the Engwura ceremonies which form the centre-piece of their ethnographical research. Unlike the building in which the den was to be found, the wurley was a traditional Aboriginal construction, and the two men were now very much on Arunta ground²⁸. In order to gain access to the ceremonies, the two men had to be accepted as worthy of the honour. Here is Spencer, writing to Fison :

However Gillen persuaded them to let me in I cant imagine but the first night I got here the old head man came up to me and of his own accord said "you Bultharra Udnirringeta" which meant that I was a Bultharra man of the Udnirringita or large grub totem the same as himself and then he called me "Weteey-aitcha" which means my younger brother. After that I went in and out amongst them and they took no more notice of me than if I were one of themselves which in fact I now am ... they seem really anxious to let us know all about them²⁹.

Gillen moves - with, it would seem, little difficulty - between two roles, in one of which he derives power from the status bestowed upon him by the colonial authority, and in the other from the status conferred upon him by the defeated natives who are the objects of his anthropological inquiries. It is of note that the Arunta gave him a position of some authority³⁰ ; one of the factors that has changed the practice of ethnography quite radically is that the modern fieldworker is very unlikely to be accorded such high status.

The structuring of these observational scenes owes much to the relations of power and authority of the colonial situation. This also gives shape to much of the exchange that takes place within them. However, this is not the only set of factors at play : as we have seen, the interviews and the observations were continually informed by questions derived from Darwinian theory as it was then understood to apply to humanity. The questions Gillen asks in the den are designed to elicit information on kinship and rules of marriage, in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the group marriage that was supposed to have marked an earlier stage of evolution. The observations of the Engwura ceremonies addressed the vexed question of totemism, to which Frazer devoted a multi-volume work.

In the ethnology of Gillen and Spencer, the place of the field-worker - and of participant observation - is modest, largely unsung. Fieldwork and participant observation permit the anthropologist to submit his theories to the test of the real - but they are not the source from which anthropology as a science takes its impetus, and in the published works, the references to the conditions under which the observations were made is little developed or dwelt upon.

C : The Project Abandoned

Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski - the art of forgetting

Spencer and Gillen were to leave no direct academic heirs, although their books are still read today by professional anthropologists³¹. Why was Spencer, who, after all, was one of the leading intellectual lights in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia, unable to provide for his succession?

Of course he held a chair in biology, rather than anthropology ; his graduate students were to be placed in his main discipline. But one must also take into account the fact that the two men who might have recognized their influence were not inclined to do so. Neither Malinowski nor Radcliffe-Brown were given to acknowledging their debts - which was in itself a departure from normal scientific practice³².

Radcliffe-Brown was to take the first Australian chair in anthropology. In setting it up, he made, as we have seen, an explicit contract which bound anthropology to be the handmaiden of power ³³. Malinowski, however, was in a different situation when he began his fieldwork. Viewed as an enemy alien, he could not hope for the direct backing of the state - and it may be that the exposed position in which he thus found himself informs the famous passage from 'Argonauts' which describes his lonely arrival in the land of the Savages³⁴.

His status among the Trobrianders was always less secure than was Gillen's among the Arunta. Although he obviously expected to be taken as of equal rank to the chiefs, and although this seems to have been accorded him to at least some extent, he could be treated quite dismissively when his presence became bothersome³⁵. To what extent the status he did acquire was personal - Stocking attributes it at least partially to his coming from the Polish nobility, where, one may suppose, he had taken on the habitus of the aristocracy - is an open question. Needless to say, it depended to a great extent on the whiteness of his skin and upon his generous supplies of tobacco. But these were put to one side in the ethnographies themselves, and left the reader with the impression that, on the one hand, for the author himself the task of entering into contact with the people who were the objects of his study was a quite straightforward affair, and on the other, that this was in no small measure due to the personal qualities of the ethnographer himself.

Without anything like the power over the subjects of his observations that Gillen had had, his base being a fragile tent where he might write up his notes and his letters to his fiancée, his other scene, as he wandered around the village, sometimes rather disconsolately, was wherever the islanders would allow him to observe and participate. From this multiplicity of viewpoints, Malinowski wrought a series of books that were powerful in the rich image they seemed to draw of the daily lives of the Trobrianders³⁶. But it also drew him away from the central series of hypotheses that had, until then, given a seemingly firm footing to the discipline.

The Trobriand Islanders themselves proved more difficult to fit into the Darwinian paradigm than had the Arunta. Not foragers, but horticulturalists, they had a complex social system and an elaborate set of mechanisms designed to justify and maintain a seemingly rigid social hierarchy³⁷. Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were to reject the evolutionary vision of the founding fathers of their discipline. One can see why : the traces of primitive man were difficult to discern in the Melanesians that Malinowski studied, and the Aborigines that Brown was able to interview had all been so long in contact with civilization that it was difficult to imagine that their present mores or social structure would still bear traces of our pre-historic past. Moreover, the radical break that the rejection of evolutionism was to bring about comforted them in their dismissal of the older generation, and allowed them to present themselves, each one in his own way - and with no little rivalry - as the true progenitors of a new discipline. So we find Radcliffe-Brown writing :

With regard to the institutions of patrilineal and matrilineal succession the question is frequently asked as to what is their origin. The term 'origin' is ambiguous. In one sense we may talk of the 'historical origin'. The historical origin of the Nayar system, or that of the Zulu-Kaffirs, or of any other system, is a series of unique events extending often over a long period of gradual growth. The determination of the origin in this sense of any social system is the task of a historian. For the simpler peoples these histories are unknown and are the subject only of pure speculation, to my mind largely unprofitable. But the term 'origin' may be used in another sense, and very frequently it is used ambiguously with a confusion of the two meanings. Any social system, to survive, must conform to certain conditions. If we can define adequately one of these universal conditions, i.e. one to which all human societies must conform, we have a sociological law. Thereupon if it can be shown that a particular institution in a particular society is the means by which that society conforms to the law, i.e. to the necessary condition, we may speak of this as the' sociological origin' of the institution. Thus an institution may be said to have its general raison d'être (historical origin). The first is for the sociologist or social anthropologist to discover by the comparative method. The second is for the historian to discover by examination of records or for the ethnologist, in the absence of records, to speculate about. ³⁸

Malinowski advances virtually the same argument ;

The fact is that I have ceased to be a fundamentalist of evolutionary method, and I would rather discountenance any speculations about the "origins" of marriage or anything else than contribute to them even indirectly ... I have grown more and more indifferent to the problems of origins - origins that is conceived in the naïve way in which I treated them in my previous utterances ...³⁹

Each of them laid claims to advancing a new theoretical paradigm. Both produced answers that were, in the long run, to prove even more unsatisfactory than Tylor and Frazer's conceptions.

Malinowski's grand theory was a form of psychological functionalism ; the regularities in human life stem from the basic characteristics of human nature. All men are fundamentally the same, and all societies must satisfy the psychological needs of their members or perish. However, each society does so in its own way, forming a self-consistent totality. It is something to wonder at that a man as intellectually brilliant as Malinowski undoubtedly was, and as gifted an observer, could produce as sorry an apology for a theory of sociality as he did. It is, in any case, treated by later anthropologists - even those who were his direct inheritors - as of secondary importance. What Malinowski gave to the discipline was the idea of fieldwork as the centre without which anthropology would not hold. The conception of the self-consistent totality was also to linger on, spinning gaily coloured small worlds into the anthropological air, sufficient unto themselves both in time and space.

Radcliffe-Brown, for his part, advanced a structural functionalism in which one or two aspects of culture were identified as 'structural', and were seen as fitting into each other so as to form a regular totality. Thus 'kinship' was torn loose from its multifaceted implications in sociality and raised to a thing in itself. How far this can be related to his particular style of fieldwork, we shall see later.

Back into the Desert

Despite his stance as neutral scientific observer, Malinowski was not averse to giving advice as to how to best deal with the problems of control and welfare arising out of the colonial system. However, he never seems to have seen the field as offering an opportunity for immediate intervention and activism. One ethnologist who did is Daisy Bates ; in her work among the Australian Aborigines, she was, by her own account, moved by her desire to ameliorate the lot of the original Australians - although she saw them as a dwindling, lost race of men and women, for whom there would be no place in the modern world.

Bates is, in many ways, a rather sinister figure. Convinced that the Aborigines were a dying race, she took it upon herself to ease them into their graves ; her popular autobiographical book, "The Passing of the Aborigines" depicts her time and again seeing one or another of her informants through their last hours. A typical story goes thus :

One day the cart came to take Joobaitch to hospital. "Don't let them take me!" he pleaded. I said, "It is all right, Joobaitch. You will die before you pass the kaanya tree at Karragullen, and your soul will rest there before it goes to the sea." Joobaitch died as the cart crossed the little creek near Maamba, as he had wished it, still on his own ground, close to the kaanya tree⁴⁰.

On numerous occasions, Bates depicts herself as an Angel of Death, bringing a much-desired final repose to her Aboriginal friends. Her embracing of the doctrine that the Aborigines were to die out seems to have stemmed as much from some inner drive as from any intellectual conviction and her book is more a romanced autobiography than an ethnographic account⁴¹. Bates' sojourn in the desert, which she conceived of as both field-work and charitable mission was also, if not mostly, an attempt to realize her ideal self.

It is no easy matter to come to terms with Bates's mode of observation ; Malinowski had castigated those who believed that they could offer a meaningful account of another society on the basis of a visit lasting a few weeks and spent mainly in the habitations of one or another agent of the state. The ethnologist must immerse himself in the culture of the other, must participate in his life, his games and his festivities. But "participant observation" can only add to scientific knowledge if the boundaries between observer and observed are recognized and maintained ; Malinowski is as scornful of those who 'go native' as he is of the day-tripper. What is it that distinguishes the observer from the observed? The simple answer is that it is the notebook.

To the notebook is consigned a series of promissory notes that the field-worker makes out to him or herself. The projected reader is not the anthropological community at large, but the ethnologist herself, at a later date, back in her study : the most fundamental promise is that of a return - a return to civilization, libraries, the leisure to take distance and reflect. By the very nature of the game, the ethnologist can never loosen grip upon the world from which she comes on pain of ceasing to be an ethnologist.

Bates took notes ; she filled notebook upon notebook. In the end, though, she never wrote them up, although they were to be used - or, by some accounts, abused - by other agents. But, in the end, she never came back home long enough to use them and to produce the ethnography which would have placed her firmly within the scientific community. The reasons for this are obscure, for Bates was extremely avaricious with the truth, and it is difficult to ascertain more than the bare outlines of her career - her most recent biographer, Julia Blackburn can do little more than offer a twisted stream of consciousness, the eddies and whirlpools of which do little to make the waters clearer⁴². The one book she published in her lifetime is made up of a series of dream-like narrations⁴³, in which there is little to cast light on methodological issues, and what there is remains off-hand. Thus she writes :

Riding and roaming in the pindan, always accompanied by the boys and women of the station, and any nomad visitors that came along, I would camp out sometimes for days, sharing my food, nursing the babies, gathering vegetable food with the women, and making friends with the old men. Thus I expanded and verified my knowledge by gradual degrees until I gained a unique insight into the whole northern aboriginal social system, and its life-story from babyhood to age. Every moment of my spare time was given to this self-imposed and fascinating study. Not a word nor a gesture passed me by without opening up an avenue of inquiry, tactfully, methodically pursued⁴⁴.

As Blackburn notes, Bates was continually telling and retelling her own story, the one constant being that she placed herself as a central character in a world full of kings, queens, dances and romance. In the passage I have quoted, we see this impulse at work, for she not only places herself at the centre of the action, surrounded by grateful Aborigines, but also lays claim to knowledge of a very special kind. Her 'unique insight' is, she will insist, superior to the overly academic observations of the university-bound anthropologist :

The abstruse "matronymics" and "patronymics" of native marriage laws as expounded in the hieroglyphics of the anthropologists, through which I have vainly floundered many times before and since with no clear conception of their exact meaning, the natives could simplify for me⁴⁵.

By the time she wrote this, Bates must have long abandoned any hope that she would be recognized by the anthropological establishment. She even believed - or pretended to - that Radcliffe-Brown had stolen her findings. Although she had some reputation among the great and the good, and was awarded a CBE in 1934, she was unable to obtain funding either for her charitable work or for her ethnology.

But this did not stop her from continuing in what she regarded as her mission, which was not simply to study the Aborigines, but to accompany them, to soothe them in their dying moments and to record their last breath :

By this time I was a confirmed wanderer, a nomad even as the aborigines. So close had I been in contact with them that it was now impossible for me to relinquish my work. I realized that they were passing from us. I must make their passing easier. Moreover, all that I knew was little in comparison with what there was yet to learn. I made the decision to dedicate the rest of my life to this fascinating study⁴⁶.

As time went on, the study receded into the background, and the easing came to the fore. So much so that by the end of her sojourn, she sees little sense in her continuing to gather data :

Amongst these decadents of to-day no intricate anthropological study of social laws is necessary, only the administration of British rule, founded on our highest and best traditions. Anthropology can be given its due place, though in the breakdown of all their old tribal laws through contact with civilization it is scarcely necessary. What they need most is the governance and fatherhood of the Empire-makers, men of the sterling British type that brought India and Africa into our Commonwealth of Nations - a Havelock, a Raffles, a Lugard, a Nicholson, a Lawrence of Arabia⁴⁷.

If Bates distanced herself from the discipline which had given her what may have been her first settled sense of self, it may have been that it was her attempted collaboration with that most professional and avowedly scientific of the second generation, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, that made clear to her the gap that lay between her own conception of her task and that of the new establishment. She worked for a short spell with him on the islands of Dorré and Bernier. The story of what was done on those islands in the years immediately preceding World War I is an unsavoury one. On the advice of W.E. Roth, the Queensland anthropologist and Protector of the Aborigines, those Aborigines who were found to be diseased were rounded up, force-marched across country, and shipped off to one or the other of the islands - the women on Dorré and the men on Bernier. There, Bates tells us, the diseased died of their diseases, far from their families, in an unfamiliar and hostile environment. Bates and Radcliffe-Brown came to the islands to carry out anthropological inquiries. Radcliffe-Brown recorded the Aborigines' songs, and tried to interest them in the music of Grieg and Wagner. They listened, Bates tells us, politely⁴⁸.

One may picture Radcliffe-Brown at work ; he is surrounded by the sick and dying, men and women torn out of their social milieu and set down upon a rock far from their families, terrified by their surroundings - many had never seen the sea, let alone found themselves upon a small island, wracked by storms - and, suggests Bates, by strangers whom they could put no trust in. There the anthropologist quizzes them upon their social relationships, upon their marriage classes, upon the taboos and interdictions that surround them. Radcliffe-Brown's interest in the abstractions of social structure did not, it appears, blind him to the full context within which he found himself - Bates says that the Aborigines remarked upon his reluctance to spend much time with them, and he left quite quickly - but the fact that he (and Bates) were able to gather evidence from the islands so as to further their hypotheses concerning the marriage classes, opens questions about anthropological method which need answering⁴⁹.

Whatever the effects of this episode on Bates's conception of her calling, it seems to be the case that her implication in the field, in the lives of the people she was studying, was such that her initial project faded in importance, and she came to place more and more importance on her role as social worker and witness. But even when she no longer had the resources to continue providing her people, as she thought of them, with the comforts which were to help them pass away, she continued to live among them, and indeed put up considerable resistance when, deciding that they could no longer assure her safety, the police came to take her away⁵⁰. For what she found among the Aborigines was an identity which had always eluded her among whites. Her tall tales came true out in the desert, where she could be a fairy queen :

My healing and my Kabbarli wisdom were the source of all my power. My sympathy and magnetism as I drew the evil out of their bodies, carefully placing it on the fire when my hands had closed upon it, and throwing the smoke of its passing away from the sufferer; my clairvoyance, practiced on malingerers now and then; my thunder - and rain - and fire-magic - the knowledge and intuition supernatural in their eyes, helped me through the years in ministering to their ailments and in administering a code of laws that was my own and theirs⁵¹.

Gillen too had been a magician, as had Malinowski, both using the European first-aid kit to cure and to impress. But they had done so as a ruse, to cajole and persuade their informants to cooperate. For Bates, her Aboriginal identity is of far more personal importance. Blackburn reports that on one occasion, while she was in Adelaide, after leaving Ooldea, she asked a shop assistant if she knew who she was :

"Oh yes, madam, you are Mrs. Daisy Bates."

"That is quite right, but do you know that I am also Kabbarli, the spirit of the dead come back to the land of the living. You have no idea, no one has any idea, how much I loved my cannibals. I loved them more than I ever loved my family, and that's a fact.⁵²"

It was, probably, one of the few facts about Daisy Bates of which we can be sure. At the end of her venture into the field, Bates had found herself, as she had imagined herself to be. And among the Aborigines, she found those who were ready, for whatever reason, to accept her as she felt she was. We will hear echoes of her in other voices. For the moment, though, we shall look more closely at the magician.

D : Men of High Degree

The Magician's Gaze

The magician or doctor has always been a character of some importance in the history of anthropology ; his presence was felt, of course, throughout Frazer's great work. Spencer and Gillen devoted a chapter to him in "The Native Tribes of Central Australia', we meet him often in Howitt's account of the peoples of South-east Australia⁵³. The earlier workers tended to see the magician as an intelligent fake, preying on his fellows - although, with that lack of coherence that typifies the Savage Mind, prone to submit himself to the ministrations of his peers whenever his own health failed. Here, for example, is Spencer and Gillen's description of how the Arunta medicine man learns his trade :

(After the initiatory ordeal) he dwells upon his experiences, doubtless persuading himself that he has passed through those which are recognized as accompanying the making of a medicine man ..., and at the same time he cultivates the acquaintance of other medicine men, and learns from them the secrets of the craft, which consist principally in the ability to hide about his person and to produce at will small quartz pebbles or bits of stick ; and, of hardly less importance than this sleight of hand, the power of looking preternaturally solemn, as if he were the possessor of knowledge quite hidden from ordinary men.⁵⁴

As Frazer fell from favour, so the magician seems to have faded from the ethnographic record in Australia, and A.P. Elkin reported that 'very little attention' had been paid to him⁵⁵.

If Bates was a peripheral figure to the main anthropological enterprise, A.P. Elkin was most decidedly in the main-stream. The publication of his "Aboriginal Men of High Degree ; Initiation and Sorcery in the World's Oldest Tradition" in 1945 is a moment of some importance in the unfolding of my story. His book was to permanently alter the image of the magician from that of seedy crook to that of 'man of power'. Elkin writes :

Beneath the unkempt hair, above a naked body or one clothed in the white man's cast-offs, and in an immobile face shine shrewd, penetrating eyes - eyes that look you all the way through - the lenses of a mind that is photographing your very character and intentions. I have seen those eyes and felt that mind at work when I have sought knowledge that only the man of high degree could impart. I have known white people who almost feared the eyes of a karadji, so all-seeing, deep, and quiet did they seem. This clever man was definitely an outstanding person, a clear thinker, a man of decision, one who believed, and acted on the belief, that he possessed psychic power, the power to will others to have faith in themselves.⁵⁶

From Spencer and Gillen's external, objectivising vision to Elkin's meeting of eyes, there is a step of some consequence. The late Victorians looked upon the Arunta as cultural survivals, witness to an earlier stage in the evolution of mankind. But not only were their cultures less sophisticated ; their minds, their ways of thought, were similarly primitive. Elkin, in his recognition of the 'Man of High Degree' as at the very least an equal - although we note the qualification 'almost' when he raises the possibility that a white person might fear the karadji's eyes - no longer represents the savage as mentally primitive, whatever one may deem of the culture.

Teachers

At this juncture, the possibility arises that, rather than learning about the Aborigine, the modern might learn something from him. By the 1977 edition, Elkin was able to write an account of how an Aboriginal medical aid had helped cure a university lecturer :

A linguist at Yuendumu has kindly given me the following information ... about her own experience towards the end of 1975. Two carbuncles between the third and fourth fingers of one hand, and the consequent swelling of the hand and forearm, caused a week of agony, which antibiotics and painkillers failed to relieve. On the entreaty of Aboriginal friends, she agreed to let the doctor-man look at it. He did so in a very professional manner. She then agreed to his request to suck the hand, hoping at least for relief of the intense pain ... At the third sucking, he produced a yarda; it looked like a small piece of pointed quartz ...⁵⁷

After further interventions, the linguist was cured. Elkins concludes :

This white person benefited from the knowledge and skills of two culture, on the one hand taking antibiotics from the hospital sister and on the other hand receiving indigenous treatment from a doctor-man, almost in parallel fashion⁵⁸

Bates had used the psychological space provided her by the Aborigine Dreamtime to bring to fruition her deeper desires. But she had never seen them as anything more than representatives of the childhood of humanity, and they remained for her children, a naked crowd of Lost Boys who killed and ate each other with no more compunction than a child will feel on breaking apart a doll. Such innocent cannibals could well be the objects of her grandmotherly love. This being so, all a woman needed - at least, a woman of her calibre - was the intuitions that maternity provided; the dry intellectualisms of the academy could be set aside, and the anthropologist could become the full-time fairy queen. Elkin, on the other hand, remained an academic anthropologist, addressing questions of theoretical import. However, his book on the doctors or medicine men opened up a new possibility for the anthropologist. The cultures of the conquered could now be seen as holding out their own truths and their own opportunities. The fieldworker's journey might well now be one of spiritual discovery, an encounter with tutors who might have a deeper understanding of the ethnologist than she can ever have of them. Let us listen to Barbara Glowczewski :

I have sometimes believed that my attachment to the Warlpiri was a fantasy. A thousand times I have asked myself whether I had given them anything in return for all that they had taught me. It turned out that things were really very simple : as I had been with them at the time of some of the episodes of their recent history, my presence was embedded in the memories that certain of them had. "She traveled with us, squeezed into a lorry with the Yapa. And when there were conflicts, she would cry. Once she ran away into the bush, and we had to go and get her back. We looked after her. She was young, and we brought her up," added Vera proudly. In fa ct, some of the Warlpiri had seen me more clearly than I saw myself : looking for an identity.⁵⁹.

Glowczewski remains an anthropologist, referring to the tradition, and seeking to test its hypotheses. But where Bates saw herself as the mothering figure, taking care of her ageing children in their last days, Glowczewski is herself the child, and the Warlpiri women are her surrogate mothers.

To some extent these differences in approach can be seen as psychologically shaped; Gillen was a man who was already raising his own family when he joined up with Spencer to write his ethnographies. Bates was into her forties when she embarked upon her mission, and even Malinowski had some knowledge of a wider world. Many of the people who find themselves in the field nowadays are, indeed, young and untried. Youth may be adaptable, but it is asking much to expect the fresh graduate student, who may have known little apart from the family home and, perhaps, student digs, before finding him or herself hanging on to a bucking land-rover as it grinds out into the bush, where she or he must come to terms with a new language, a new set of cultural rules, among people who may or may not feel inclined to offer much of a welcome. It may be that one of the measures of the evolution in ethnological practice is the difference in experience that Howitt, for example, brought to the field compared to that of the modern career anthropologist.

Be that as it may, the other differences remain, and, as I have argued, one of the most crucial of them is the collective understanding of the underlying project. Gillen, sitting in his den writing his reports to Spencer, ever bore in mind the conception of his work as a contribution to the Natural History of our species, founded on the rock of evolution. Even as it began to dawn on him that they were not going to find the direct traces of the primeval state of mankind among the Arunta, he remained convinced that an evolutionary perspective was the necessary underpinning to ethnological work⁶⁰. In 1902, he was trying to persuade his local library to purchase 'The Golden Bough'⁶¹ and 'The Mystic Rose', and reading Lang and Lubbock with excitement⁶². It was the evolutionary project that gave a solid kernel to the anthropological enterprise.

It occasionally appears that this project, to which Frazer, Tylor or the early ethnologists all subscribed, has now transmuted into a personal quest on the part of the student. This is not confined to the Australian field - witness the Africanist, Nigel Barley's, tongue in cheek view of the anthropological field-worker :

Frankly, it seemed then, and seems now, that the justification for fieldwork, as for all academic endeavour, lies not in one's contribution to the collectivity, but rather in some selfish development. Like monastic life, academic research is really all about the perfection of one's own soul⁶³.

Barley himself came late to fieldwork, having managed to avoid this academic rite of passage when preparing his doctoral dissertation. He remains skeptical of the value of time spent in the brush. Looking back upon his decision to plunge into field-work, he remembers weighing up the pros and cons :

To be fair, there was the possibility to be considered - slight though it might be - that fieldwork would make some great contribution to human knowledge. On the face of it this seemed rather unlikely. Fact-gathering in itself has few charms. Anthropology is not short of facts but simply of anything intelligent to do with them. The notion of 'butterfly-collecting' is familiar within the discipline and serves to characterize the endeavors of many ethnographers and failed interpreters, who simply amass neat examples of the curious customs arranged by area, or alphabetically, or by evolutionary order, whatever the current style may be.⁶⁴

This is, of course, unfair ; although anthropology, like any other academic discipline, has produced its fair share of duds, nonetheless, the best fieldwork has given rise to publications that have proved good to think with for many years. Nonetheless, it is the case that the greater the emphasis the discipline of anthropology has put upon fieldwork as the central moment in the postulant's career, the further it has strayed from those canons which underly any scientific endeavour, and that while much was gained by the method of participant observation, there was also loss - loss that, in the end, may condemn the discipline to irrelevance as anything more than a highbrow source of travelers' tales.

The Guardians

But anthropology has lost not only a central and guiding research project; it has also been forced to abandon one of the basic tenets of the ideology of science. One of the values of the scientific method is that information should be allowed to circulate freely⁶⁵; work is of no value unless it is published. However, in many non-European societies, the highest forms of knowledge are ringed around with interdictions. Certain ceremonies can only be carried out by, or witnessed by those members of one sex or the other who have been initiated to such and such a degree. Similarly, certain stories may not be told in the presence of strangers, and, among some peoples, images of the dead may be taboo. The Australian anthropologist of today could not dream of publishing a book like Gillen and Spencer's "The Native Tribes of Central Australia", with its descriptions of restricted ceremonies, its retelling of the sacred myths, its photographs of those who, by the time it was published had already died, or who were to die shortly afterwards⁶⁶.

Other considerations may also enter into the decision to withhold certain data from publication ; in her comparison of her own ethnographical research with that of her forerunner, Phyllis Kaberry, Sandy Toussaint writes :

... my material is not presented as the whole ethnographic story. Apart from the fact that I no more than anyone else could ever claim to know the whole story, I have formed the judgment that some issues would best be kept within an Aboriginal domain⁶⁷

Although the author does not elaborate on this, she may feel that some of her observations could lead to the exacerbation of racist feeling among white Australians ; the high rates of heavy drinking, of violence, and of criminality among those groups identified as Aboriginal kindle the fires of ethnic hatred among a good number of 'whitefellas'.

The decision to hold back, either because the knowledge to which one is a party is socially restricted to the initiated, or because one has reason to believe that its revelation might, in one way or another, be damaging to those who have allowed one to garner it, may be justifiable; the social scientist should be subjected to some degree of control in his or her dealings with the subjects of investigation, and however much sociologists or psychologists may moan about the restrictions imposed upon them by ethics committees, it is difficult to fault the principle. Indeed, the reluctance on the part of the anthropological profession, particularly in the United States, to exercise some restraint over the behaviour of the young people it sends out into the field is, quite frankly, shocking. The resistance that has been opposed to the profession by many of those that it has, at least in the past, conceived of as offering its natural terrain is understandable.

The disregard for the integrity of the other is, it needs to be said, rooted in the belief in the intellectual and cultural superiority of the West that was underpinned by the specific vein of evolutionary thinking to which both Gillen and Spencer subscribed. One can read in Gillen's letters much evidence of the early ethnographer's casual assumption of rights drawn from this superiority. Gillen raids the sacred storehouses of the Arunta, bullies his informants, and deliberately misleads them. That today's Australian ethnographer would not dream of behaving in a like manner is to be applauded.

But there is a price to pay. Gillen and Spencer laid their findings upon the table. the whole scientific community could subject them to scrutiny, weigh them and make use of them to test their theoretical constructions or to elaborate new ones. Today's anthropologist can no longer do this. In particular, the innermost scenes of the sacred must lie beyond the domain of public discussion. To the extent that anthropologists have taken their places among the guardians of the temple, they have had to relinquish their full membership of a community of scholars.

What is more, the role is not without its internal ambiguities; as Knight has argued, and as Godelier has found, at the centre of the most secret rites, one may find the marks of a masculine conspiracy, an overturning or an undermining of the status and power of the female⁶⁸. As Knight puts it, in his discussion of the myth of the Wawilak sisters :

In the myth of the Two Wawilak Sisters - whose story line is familiar to both sexes - women are having flaunted in their faces information of vital importance to them. They are able to hear a narrative telling of their own immense culture-creating power. Yet all the time, they are kept as far as possible unaware of the significance of what they both see and hear. As the primordial potency of menstrual synchrony is both shown to women and yet made terrifying in their eyes, men set about alienating the value of Womankind's blood-making and child-bearing capacities - even to the point of claiming that the production of babies is in some sense valueless when performed by women, yet of immense culture-creating value when symbolically performed by men.

In this reading, the initiation ceremonies are a source of male oppression; the men gladly pay with their blood for the privileges that flow from their take-over of the woman's inherent magic. To keep these secrets, to guard this knowledge, is to collude with the oppressor.

Conclusion

From Tyler's conception of human culture as unitary and unifying, a product of evolution that had to be explained in evolutionary terms, we have moved to a conception of culture as multiple, and as divisive. The Other has become so different from ourselves as to be virtually unknowable. What is more, his practices have taken on an aura of the sacred, for culture defines him, makes him what he is and gives him his worth. To describe, analyse, explore and explain encroach upon his ineffable otherness. Understanding can only be achieved through empathy, identification, becoming the other. The temptation for the ethnologist is to renounce her clipboard and join the club.

I have followed this development from the time of the early ethnographers, who took their cues from Tyler, up to the present day. I have shown that Gillen was inducted into a scientific community centred upon the concept of evolution. I have argued that Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown repudiated evolutionism, distancing themselves from their forerunners both in academia and in the field. Malinowski inherited the evolutionist's conception of the societies he studied as relatively untouched by history, but made each of them sui generis, presaging in that the multi-culturalism of a later time.

Subsequently, I examined the case of Daisy Bates. Although she held to the platitudes of evolutionary theory, and in particular to the idea that the Aborigines were a doomed race, her life in the field became her raison d'être, until she identified herself much as she claimed the Aborigines did, as a character from the Dreamtime. Her absorption in and by the field represents in its most acute form the dangers that a discipline anchored in the one mode of data-collection may hold.

With Elkins' depiction of the Man of High Degree, we meet that other culture that holds its own truths - for it is not simply that Elkins recognizes the other as fully as human as himself (even Gillen does this, particularly in his letters), but that he sees him as possessed of time-hallowed knowledge that affords an inner power to which the scientist can but acquiesce.

Since Elkins' time, the anthropologist has become swept into a totally different relationship with her or his informants. And the moment of fieldwork has come to be seen as an intense experience offering unique opportunities for personal growth, during which the Other initiates the ethnologist, becomes her mentor, inducting her into another culture, another world.

The anthropologist becomes the ally of the dispossessed. This is no small matter ; the Australian Aborigines, like the peoples of North and South America, have been subjected to an immense injustice. Their land was taken from them on the pretext that they could make no proper use of it. We can now take it as established that the Aborigines had marked their landscape just as surely as any culture does, for good and for ill, and that those took it from them, and who today cling onto the coastal strip, can hardly point to a resounding success in their husbandry. Moreover, they still find it difficult to face up to the realities of colonization or to the debt they owe the original inhabitant. That some among them may have the courage to struggle alongside the peoples they have dispossessed, and aid them in their attempts to gain some degree of liberty in the enjoyment of their own property is no small thing.

But a practical anthropology, an anthropology that could properly arm the advocate, has to be founded on more than fieldwork. A field, to be fruitful, must be sown with good seed. If anthropology is to be a scientific discipline, then the anthropologist must go to his scene of discovery with a scientific project. That means a conception of human evolution ; Anthropology is either one of the Life Sciences or it is a form of cultural criticism - or perhaps poetastery. Fine enough in its way, but unlikely to stand up in court, or to offer much in the way of protection when the anthropologist finds out that he is seen as nothing more than another political actor with another political axe to grind.

The reticence of anthropologists such as Adam Kuper⁶⁹ concerning the term 'culture', and in particular its plural form as used by the multicultural movement, can be understood in the light of their commitment to an anthropology that aspires to science. Kuper, like Abu-Lughod, concludes by suggesting that the concept of culture itself may be dispensed with. Multiculturalism is, he indicates, little more than a friendly-faced form of racism ; those who find themselves impelled into using the conception in order to defend their ways of living are trapped in aspic, kept at arms' length from such goods as the present world might have to offer them.

Others, such as Maurice Bloch, have sought to anchor culture down, to delineate its determinants, or its shaping forces. In Bloch's case, this is to be discovered in a notion of a universal psychology, based upon cognitivist learning theory. Others have remained faithful to the evolutionary paradigm, albeit in a form that allows for far more variation, and does not place Paris, London or New York at the apex of our collective history. Kelley, for example, while stressing that today's foragers are as fully modern as ourselves, argues that their lifeways nevertheless hold lessons for archaeologists. Arguing against those who see hunter-gatherer societies as mainly parasitic and peripheral to more settled peoples, he states :

The concern with contact-induced change threatens to reduce analysis of variability among hunter-gatherers to a new stereotype, one that focuses on issues of power and control, that treats modern hunter-gatherers only as disenfranchised rural proletariat, and that ultimately denies the usefulness of the study of modern hunter-gatherers for understanding prehistory ... it is as much an overstatement to claim that modern ethnography is useless to prehistory as it is naïve to suppose that the effects of contact can be subtracted from living foragers⁷⁰.

While Malinowski put evolutionary questions to one side, arguing that it was impossible to resolve them, given the nature of the evidence, Kelley is not far from leaving to one side those questions that most interest the multi-culturalist. He writes :

There is no perfect match between culture and environment, and ecological perspectives cannot explain the particulars of Australian Dreamtime theology, Bushman kinship, or Kwakiutl mythology. We cannot sort behaviours into those that are 'ecological', and those that are 'social' or 'cultural', as Ingold has repeatedly pointed out. But we have to start someplace, as long as we recognize that beginning with the environment does not make an ontological statement about culture. While an understanding of human interaction with the environment will not come easily, it is in my opinion the most straightforward task before anthropology at present⁷¹.

In this one may recognize one of the hallmarks of science ; a certain modesty of ambition, which accepts that the researcher sets him or herself questions that are raised within the discipline itself, and which are, above all, open to answer with the means to hand. Of course, one may always be mistaken ; the armchair generation truly believed that, if their trained observers were only fast enough to catch them before they passed away, the savage tribes of the Australian desert would furnish material to settle their theoretical disputes. To a greater extent than many would admit, they were right, although the answers were not necessarily to anyone's full satisfaction⁷², but the enterprise failed in the end. What replaced it, whatever its value and utility, represented a slow turning of the back on science itself.

At the moment it is difficult to see how the field-worker in Australia could be fully scientific in his work. The Aborigine will no longer allow herself to be the unwilling object of the outsider's investigations. Anthropologists find themselves drawn into disputes over land and over mineral rights, into disputes over the ways the law is applied or not applied to one group of people or another. For some, like Bruce Rayburn, the response has been to drop all pretense to being an ethnologist. Others, like Sandy Toussaint, try to combine activism - or applied anthropology - with an academic career. Cobbling together their personal ideological and practical solutions, they offer little to surprise, but perhaps much to interest the anthropologist.

Bibliography

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Bloch, Maurice, "How We Think They Think ; Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy", Westview Press, Boulder, Col., & Oxford, 1998.

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