EXPEDITIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY Methodology and History in Anthropology Series Editors: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford David Gellner, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford Just as anthropology has had a significant influence on many other disciplines in recent years, so too have its methods been challenged by new intellectual and technical developments. This series is designed to offer a forum for debate on the interrelationship between anthropology and other academic fields but also on the challenge to anthropological methods of new intellectual and technological developments, and the role of anthropological thought in a general history of concepts. For a full volume listing, please see back matter EXPEDITIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY

Teamwork, Travel and the ‘Science of Man’

Edited by Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris

berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2018 Martin (Edward) Thomas and Amanda Harris

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ORCID: Martin (Edward) Thomas: 0000-0002-2261-5888 Amanda Harris: 0000-0002-9858-2568

978-1-78533-772-7 ISBN hardback 978-1-78533-773-4 ISBN ebook CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii Anthropology and the Expeditionary Imaginary: An Introduction to the Volume 1 Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris

Part I. Anthropology and the Field: Intermediaries and Exchange Chapter 1. Assembling the Ethnographic Field: The 1901–02 Expedition of Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen 37 Philip Batty Chapter 2. Receiving Guests: The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits 1898 64 Jude Philp Chapter 3. Donald Thomson’s Hybrid Expeditions: Anthropology, Biology and Narrative in Northern Australia and England 95 Saskia Beudel

Part II. Exploration, Archaeology, Race and Emergent Anthropology Chapter 4. Looking at Culture through an Artist’s Eyes: William Henry Holmes and the Exploration of Native American Archaeology 127 Pamela M. Henson Chapter 5. The Anomalous Blonds of the Maghreb: Carleton Coon Invents the African Nordics 150 Warwick Anderson Chapter 6. Medium, Genre, Indigenous Presence: Spanish Expeditionary Encounters in the Mar del Sur, 1606 175 Bronwen Douglas vi Contents

Chapter 7. Ethnographic Inquiry on Phillip Parker King’s Hydrographic Survey 205 Tiffany Shellam

Part III. The Question of Gender Chapter 8. Gender and the Expedition: Feminist Anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons and the Politics of Fieldwork in the Americas in the 1920s and 1930s 235 Desley Deacon Chapter 9. What Has Been Forgotten? The Discourses of Margaret Mead and the American Museum of Natural History Sepik Expedition 263 Diane Losche Chapter 10. Gender, Science and Imperial Drive: Margaret McArthur on Two Expeditions in the 1940s 290 Amanda Harris

Index 313 Illustrations

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1 Senior Arrernte men overseeing the Engwura ceremony, Alice Springs. Photograph by Baldwin Spencer, 1896. 44 Figure 1.2 Members of the 1901–02 expedition, Alice Springs. Unknown photographer, 1901. 47 Figure 1.3 An Atninga (‘revenge’) party of Arrernte men, Alice Springs. Photograph by Baldwin Spencer, 1901. 50 Figure 1.4 Women crawl through the legs of decorated men towards the end of a Warumungu burial ritual, Tennant Creek. Photograph by Baldwin Spencer, 1901. 52 Figure 2.1 William Rivers, Charles Seligman, Sidney Ray, Anthony Wilkin, Alfred Haddon. Mabuyag, 1898. 65 Figure 2.2 Waria, Papi, Noboa, Gizu. Mabuyag Island, 1898. 66 Figure 2.3 Jimmy Rice, Debe Wali, Alfred Haddon, Charlie Ongtong, Anthony Wilkin, William Rivers, Sidney Ray, William McDougall, Charles Myers, Charles Seligman, at Mer, 1898. 71 Figure 2.4 ‘Singing at Las’, Gasu, Enoka, Ulai and Wano. Gadodo standing at centre with John Bruce, William Rivers, Sidney Ray, 1898. 76 Figure 2.5 Mai, worn only by giri-giri le (bird clan men) at the conclusion of the Malu ceremonies. 77 Figure 3.1 Photograph published in Donald F. Thomson, ‘The Story of Arnhem Land’, Walkabout, 1 August 1946. 99 Figure 3.2 Herald and Weekly Times, ‘Prof. [Professor] Donald Thomson’ with family, 1936. 101 Figure 3.3 ‘Portrait of Dr. Donald Thomson’. Unknown photographer, circa 1937. 110 Figure 4.1 Sketch of participants in the Hayden Survey (United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, 1871–77), 1874. 130 Figure 4.2 ‘Panorama from Point Sublime’, illustration by William H. Holmes, 1882. 131 viii Illustrations

Figure 4.3 Topographic sketch of the Mayan city at Copan, Honduras. Drawing by William H. Holmes, 1916. 137 Figure 5.1 Carleton S. Coon with others in Morocco, late 1920s. 154 Figure 5.2 Warrior on horseback. Photograph by Carleton S. Coon, late 1920s. 156 Figure 5.3 Hunting in the Rif. Photograph by Carleton S. Coon, late 1920s. 162 Figure 6.1 Spanish–Chamorro encounter, Guam, Anon., c. 1590. 179 Figure 6.2 La gran baya d. S. Philippe y S. Santiago, Diego de Prado y Tovar, 1606. 182 Figure 6.3 Esta xente es d’esta baia st felipe y st tiago . . ., Diego de Prado y Tovar, 1607. 183 Figure 6.4 Puertos i bayas de Tiera de San Buenaventura, Diego de Prado y Tovar, 1606. 184 Figure 6.5 Esta xente es desta baya de san millan . . ., Diego de Prado y Tovar, 1607. 185 Figure 6.6 La gran baya d. S. Lorenço y puerto d. Monterei, Diego de Prado y Tovar, 1606. 186 Figure 6.7 Esta xente delas yslas questan alaparte del sur de la Nueva Guinea . . ., Diego de Prado y Tovar, 1607. 187 Figure 6.8 Baya de Sanct Pedro de Arlança, Tiera de S. Santiago de los Papuas, Diego de Prado y Tovar, 1606. 188 Figure 6.9 Esta xente es del rremate dela nueva guinea . . ., Diego de Prado y Tovar, 1607. 189 Figure 7.1 Sketch of the spear in Phillip Parker King’s Remark Book, April 1818. 207 Figure 7.2 Sketch of the basket with ironhoop handles, by Allan Cunningham. 217 Figure 7.3 Sketch of a spearhead by John Septimus Roe, September 1821. 218 Figure 7.4 ‘Weapons & c., of the Natives of Hanover Bay’. Drawing by Francis Chantrey. 219 Figure 7.5 Title page of Phillip Parker King, Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia, Performed between the Years 1818 and 1822, 1826. 220 Figure 8.1 Elsie Clews Parsons in the Southwest, 1920. 236 Figure 8.2 Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn shares his package of ‘Pirates’ cigarettes with man on camel, Mongolia, 1923. Photograph by Roy Chapman Andrews. 240 Illustrations ix

Figure 8.3 Alfred Kidder in his hairy-chinned period in 1912. Photograph by Jesse Nusbaum. 249 Figure 9.1 Conducting Public Flutes, Alitoa Village, Arapesh. Photograph by Reo Fortune, 1932. 269 Figure 9.2 Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, captioned as ‘Group of Anthropologists Who Arrived on Macdhui’. Unknown photographer, July 1933. 275 Figure 10.1 David Cameron, Margaret McArthur and Doreen Langley with an unidentified group in New Guinea. Photograph by James (Jim) Fitzpatrick, 1947. 293 Figure 10.2 The American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land at Oenpelli. Photograph by Howell Walker, 1948. 301

Anthropology and the Expeditionary Imaginary: An Introduction to the Volume

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE EXPEDITIONARY IMAGINARY

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE VOLUME

Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris

Anthropologists as Explorers

Felix Driver opens Geography Militant (2001), his foundational study of exploration and empire, by quoting Claude Lévi-Strauss on the hubris of explorers. For the doyen of structural anthropology, explo- ration had by the twentieth century degenerated into ‘a trade’ where the object was not to discover unknown facts but to cover as much distance as possible and assemble ‘lantern-slides or motion pictures, preferably in colour, so as to fill a hall with an audience for several days in succession’.1 Driver observes that for Lévi-Strauss, ‘the calling of the anthropologist was something altogether more noble’ than that of the explorer. The former pursued a course of disciplined observa- tion while the latter disseminated ‘superficial stories’.2 The scientifi- cally trained Lévi-Strauss felt duty-bound to differentiate himself from these commercial travellers. The proposition that anthropology is antithetical to the ethos of adventurism raises questions that are investigated in the pages ahead. Why this insistence upon a dichotomy so flimsy? Why dis- count the call of adventure when it acted as a siren for countless anthropologists? To understand the concerns voiced by Lévi-Strauss, we need to acknowledge that they are more than an assertion of aca- demic superiority. The anxieties from which they stem reveal much about anthropology’s formation as a discipline; they are the residue of a complex and at times quarrelsome nexus between exploration, 2 Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris imperial expansion and the ‘science of man’. Anthropology in its early life was enabled by the systemized observation and reporting that a codified practice of exploration had first projected into putatively uncharted spaces. The expeditions of Cook and other Enlightenment voyagers are paradigmatic in this regard, but they had important pro- genitors (see Douglas, this volume, for a discussion of some Iberian precedents). Anthropology and ethnology, as defined in the guides and rulebooks of the specialist societies created for their promotion in the nineteenth century, absorbed many of the codes and procedures that explorers were expected to follow.3 Anthropology developed in tandem with the blossoming of exploration, which it ultimately out- lived, for exploration came to be thought of as an imperial conceit, while anthropology became institutionally entrenched in universities and museums. By 1948, Evelyn Waugh was having great fun with the vanities of exploration in his novel A Handful of Dust. Nine years later, Patrick White in Voss would render the explorer’s mission an existential folly. In Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), it is something decidedly more ludicrous. Bathos is a trait of many depictions of expeditionary jour- neys from the postwar period. The extent to which explorers became objects of mirth and parody in twentieth-century culture is an indica- tion of how their stocks fell as the world began to decolonize. The once hallowed figure of the explorer could now be safely laughed at, even if, as Simon Naylor and James R. Ryan have pointed out in an illumi- nating volume of essays, exploration did enjoy an afterlife through the twentieth century and beyond, albeit in modified and often derivative forms.4 Space travel was the most paradigm-shifting manifestation of twentieth-century exploration, yet the cost, the connectedness with the Cold War, and a plethora of other military associations made it anything but unproblematic. The progressivist mythology that legiti- mized nineteenth-century exploration had by this time worn thin. That exploration survived at all in the latter part of the twentieth century is due, on one hand, to the plasticity of the concept, and, on the other, to the continuing power of the tropes around race, gender and nation that had always underlain it.5 Various sorts of re-versioning of the exploratory impulse continue in the twenty-first century, with re-en- actments of explorers’ routes or voyages being quite common.6 Here is evidence that despite being the butt of jokes, explorers have not entirely lost their place in the pantheon of Western nations. To former imperial powers, they embody the global spread of European values; in settler societies, they are often foundational figures. In narrative, if no longer in person, they continue to straddle the divide between Anthropology and the Expeditionary Imaginary: An Introduction to the Volume 3

‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. They bridge the ‘new’ world and the ‘old’. That role of bridging helps explain why so much cultural processing, in cinema, television, literature and especially on the internet, goes about the work of keeping alive the expeditionary imaginary. In this book, we demonstrate that anthropology’s association with exploration has been far more enduring than is usually acknowl- edged. We do this by providing a survey – a historical journey – through a range of expeditions that collected data that were in some way anthropological. The period covered begins in the seventeenth century and extends through to the twentieth. In choosing this start- ing date, we acknowledge that the recorded observation of manners, customs and traditions has an older provenance, extending back to at least the Middle Ages.7 But that is more than we can deal with here. Our earliest case study is Douglas’s chapter on the Quirós and Torres voyage to Vanuatu, New Guinea and the Torres Strait Islands. That journey occurred in 1606, less than fifteen years after the astrolo- ger and polemicist Richard Harvey made the first recorded use of the word ‘anthropology’ in his book Philadelphus, or a Defence of Brutes and the Brutans History (1593).8 By this time, many of the arguments and developments that we now know as the Scientific Revolution were having impact. In an unprecedented way, nature had become an object of formal inquiry. This prompted new forms of travel and data collection, as is evident in the many exploratory ventures dating from the 1600s. Naval and commercial seafaring established pro- tocols that would culminate in the famed scientific voyages of the Enlightenment. Throughout the period of imperial expansion, oppor- tunities for observing and describing the panorama of humanity were steadily increasing. This ultimately resulted in the more rigorously theorized notion of anthropology that took root in the second half of the nineteenth century. We consider it timely to excavate this history because anthropol- ogy’s connection with exploration has been rendered peripheral in many accounts of the discipline. The reasons why the long and for- mative tradition of expeditionary anthropology has been eclipsed are perhaps obvious. The preference for immersive fieldwork by a sole investigator had, by the mid twentieth century, become the dominant mode of cross-cultural observation, especially for social anthropolo- gists. Our argument is that anthropology never entirely disconnected itself from its genealogy in scientific voyaging and formalized geo- graphic travel. On the contrary, it drew from expeditionary models, replicating them on some occasions and channelling them in new directions on others. 4 Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris

George W. Stocking, the best-known historian of anthropology, was alert to the pervasive effects of exploration upon the anthropolog- ical enterprise. He too was convinced that fieldwork by an individual researcher retained vestiges of discovery into the ‘unknown’. He found evidence of this in – of all places – the Trobriand diary of Bronisław Malinowski, which notes: ‘This island, though not “discovered” by me, is for the first time experienced artistically and mastered intellec- tually’.9 For Malinowski to be quoted as evidence of anthropology’s indebtedness to exploratory expeditions is curious, given his catalytic role in encouraging the departure from group expeditions such as the one led by his mentor, A.C. Haddon, to the Torres Strait (see Batty and Philp, this volume).10 As Malinowski’s model of cultural ‘immersion’ became prevalent in social anthropology, large-scale expeditions were increasingly regarded as archaic and inauthentic (see Deacon, this volume). Yet in spite of their diminishing reputation, grand ethnolog- ical expeditions did continue. We will shortly cast a spotlight on one that was both influential and controversial. Firstly, however, we need to emphasize that the desire to travel, discover and convey information about exotic locales to an audience back home – the fundamental driver for geographical exploration – was by no means at odds with anthropological inquiry. The two had a symbiotic relationship, with metropolitan anthropologists often revelling in the role of veteran adventurer. Consequently, it is not surprising that the authors of a recent study of Frederick Rose, who was based for many years at Humboldt University, tell us that his stu- dents ‘responded with a sense of wonderment to Rose’s accounts of a universe they could never witness themselves. For them he was not just the dedicated, groundbreaking scientist but the intrepid explorer . . .’.11 Comments such as this appear often in biographies of ethnog- raphers, many of whom actively cultivated the persona of explorer-­ scientist. In her essay ‘Science as Adventure’ (2015), Henrika Kuklick argued that the mantle of explorer lent credibility to anthropologists who, like other field scientists, considered it imperative to consolidate their authority as observers. In this tradition of scientific inquiry, the veracity of the investigator’s subjective impressions was open to question in a way that was never the case for the experimenter in the lab. Naturalists and anthropologists, according to Kuklick, ‘used their heroism in the field as proof that they were persons of fine character, mobilizing agreement that their judgements were sound’.12 We should bear in mind that by the time Fred Rose was wowing his students in East Berlin, the concept of geographic exploration was essentially obsolete. Yet this did surprisingly little to derail the Anthropology and the Expeditionary Imaginary: An Introduction to the Volume 5 anthropological project. The residual power of exploratory narratives, and the ease with which they could be transferred to an anthropo- logical context, is especially apparent in the discipline’s more popular guises. National Geographic, in both its articles and film productions, provides innumerable examples;13 time-honoured tropes, such as the search for ‘unknown tribes’, are a regular refrain. Ignoring or even eschewing narratives of geographical conquest, popular anthropol- ogy was nonetheless infused with motifs of expeditionary heroism and romance. Anthropology could enact the urge to discover, even if it openly disavowed it. Humanity in its bewildering diversity became surrogate geography for anthropologists. Among the host of connections between anthropology and geo- graphical exploration, the role of expeditionary practices in cultivat- ing a public audience was highly formative. Professorial pooh-poohing of the popular lecture circuit ignores the reality that anthropology is itself hardly innocent of entertaining the masses. Largely banished from the discipline’s corporate memory is a long and remarkable – if sometimes decidedly problematic – tradition of anthropology finding a broad public for its ideas. Admittedly, some of this was shamelessly opportunistic. P.T. Barnum infamously claimed an interest in the dis- cipline, to the extent that his circus of the 1880s, billed ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’, boasted an ‘Ethnological Congress of Strange and Savage Tribes’ where ensembles of ‘cannibals’ and ‘primitives’, some abducted from their homelands, were savagely paraded.14 Of course, not all attempts to gratify the public appetite for anthropological content were so lacking in sobriety. As Diane Losche points out in this volume, during her many years of being the world’s best-known anthropologist, Margaret Mead was based in a museum. Producing gallery displays, magazine articles, documentary films and other ‘non-academic’ outputs was part of her job description, as it was for so many of her contemporaries. Lévi-Strauss bemoaned the banality of explorers, yet forgot to acknowledge the long and rich tradition of anthropologists giving public lectures that were often illustrated by lantern slides or films. To ignore these and other ‘low-brow’ outputs is to overlook their role in the shaping of anthropology, both as a public spectacle that anticipated what we now call ‘infotainment’, and as a disciplinary formation. Of course, popular anthropology generated excitement in a way that learned articles could not. Yet as the public face of the discipline, it was a prime vehicle for the recruitment of ­students. Just as importantly, it brought access to money. In its popular and in many of its academic manifestations, anthro- pology was enabled by an intricate circuitry that connected ‘the field’,