Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) is now remembered as an approximation of the anthropological method that would soon be conventional: a comprehensive study of a delimited area, based on sustained fieldwork, portraying a population's distinctive character. In 1913, however, Bronislaw Malinowski said of Spencer and Gillen's studies that `half the total production in anthropological theory ha[d] been based upon their work, and nine-tenths affected or modified by it'. Native Tribes inspired an intense international debate, orchestrated by J. G. Frazer, broker of the book's publication, predicated on the assumption that indigenous Australians were the most primitive of living peoples, whose totemism was somehow at the base of civilization's highest achievements -- monogamous marriage and truly spiritual religion. But the debate proved irresolvable in Frazer's terms. Pondering conflicting interpretations of totemism, anthropologists rejected unilinear models of social evolution like Frazer's. Nationally differentiated populations of professional anthropologists emerged in the early twentieth century, developing distinctive theoretical schemes. Nevertheless, some issues central to the debate remained vital. For example, how were magical, scientific and religious modes of thought and action to be distinguished? And in Australia, analyses of indigenes were distinctively construed. White settlers, concerned to legitimate colonial rule, asked specific questions: did Aborigines have established ties to specific lands? Were Aborigines capable of civilization? Biogeographical theory underpinned Spencer's relatively liberal conclusions, which had precursors and successors in Australian anthropology: Aborigines had defined criteria of land ownership, their habits were suitable adaptations to their circumstances, and observed cultural diversity among Aborigines denoted their `nascent possibilities of development along many varied lines'.
...More
Article
Nicholls, Angus;
(2007)
Anglo-German Mythologics: The Australian Aborigines and Modern Theories of Myth in the Work of Baldwin Spencer and Carl Strehlow
(/isis/citation/CBB000773662/)
Book
Jeater, Diana;
(2007)
Law, Language, and Science: The Invention of the “Native Mind” in Southern Rhodesia, 1890--1930
(/isis/citation/CBB000850490/)
Article
Batty, Philip;
(2014)
The Tywerrenge as an Artefact of Rule: The (Post) Colonial Life of a Secret/Sacred Aboriginal Object
(/isis/citation/CBB001201590/)
Book
Mills, David;
(2008)
Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB000774892/)
Article
Graulund, Rune;
(2009)
From (B)edouin to (A)borigine: The Myth of the Desert Noble Savage
(/isis/citation/CBB000953748/)
Article
Gray, Geoffrey;
(2003)
“There are many difficult problems”: Ernest William Pearson Chinnery, Government Anthropologist
(/isis/citation/CBB000411168/)
Book
Young, Michael W.;
(2004)
Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884-1920
(/isis/citation/CBB000470706/)
Article
Gillen, Francis J.;
(1995)
Gillen's scientific correspondence: Selected letters from F.J. Gillen to W. Baldwin Spencer. Edited by Morphy, Howard, Mulvaney, John, and Petch, Alison
(/isis/citation/CBB000072138/)
Article
Bruce Kapferer;
(2014)
A Note on Gluckman’s 1930s Fieldwork in Natal
(/isis/citation/CBB094071066/)
Thesis
Hoffman, Joann L.;
(2008)
A. C. Haddon's Original Vision: An Ethnography of Resistance in a Colonial Archive
(/isis/citation/CBB001561180/)
Book
Buschmann, Rainer F.;
(2009)
Anthropology's Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870--1935
(/isis/citation/CBB000952073/)
Article
Segalla, Spencer D.;
(2003)
Georges Hardy and Educational Ethnology in French Morocco, 1920--26
(/isis/citation/CBB000660570/)
Article
Biehn, Kersten Jacobson;
(2009)
“Monkeys, Babies, Idiots” and “Primitives”: Nature-Nurture Debates and Philanthropic Foundation Support for American Anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s
(/isis/citation/CBB000932851/)
Article
Johnston, Ewan;
(2005)
Reinventing Fiji at 19th-Century and Early 20th-Century Exhibitions
(/isis/citation/CBB000660212/)
Chapter
Nock, David A.;
(2007)
Stephen Leacock: The Not-So-Funny Story of His Evolutionary Ethnology and Canada's First Peoples
(/isis/citation/CBB000760280/)
Article
Kronfeldner, Maria E.;
(2009)
“If there is nothing beyond the organic...” Heredity and Culture at the Boundaries of Anthropology in the Work of Alfred L. Kroeber
(/isis/citation/CBB000933298/)
Chapter
Bruckner, Sierra A.;
(2003)
Spectacles of (Human) Nature: Commercial Ethnography between Leisure, Learning, and Schaulust
(/isis/citation/CBB000501090/)
Book
O'Hanlon, Michael;
Welsch, Robert Louis;
(2000)
Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s-1930s
(/isis/citation/CBB000101821/)
Article
Zimmerman, Andrew;
(2006)
“What Do You Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?” Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania
(/isis/citation/CBB000660425/)
Thesis
Applegarth, Risa;
(2009)
Other Grounds: Popular Genres and the Rhetoric of Anthropology, 1900--1940
(/isis/citation/CBB001561059/)
Be the first to comment!