Writing, Travel and Empire: Colonial Narratives of Other Cultures

Writing, Travel, and Empire

Writing, Travel, and Empire In the Margins of Anthropology

Edited by PETER HULME AND RUSSELL McDOUGALL

Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan a division of St Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Copyright © selection and editorial matter Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall, 2007 Copyright © individual chapters with contributors The right of the editors and contributors to be identified as the authors of their respective contributions has been asserted by the authors in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of Colonial History 10 ISBN 978 1 84511 304 9 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow From camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the authors

Contents List of Illustrations 1. Introduction: In the Margins of Anthropology Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall

vii 1

2. George Grey in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa Leigh Dale

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3. Henry Ling Roth in Tasmania Russell McDougall

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4. Flora Annie Steel in the Punjab Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston

71

5. Everard im Thurn in British Guiana and the Western Pacific Rosamund Dalziell

97

6. Gertrude Lowthian Bell in Mesopotamia Julia Emberley

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7. Hugh Clifford in Malaya Robert Hampson

147

8. Roger Casement in the Amazon, the Congo, and Ireland Helen Carr

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9. Tom Harrisson in the New Hebrides and Bolton Rod Edmond

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10. Afterword: Writing in the Margins of a Marginal Discipline Peter Pels

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List of Contributors

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Index

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List of Illustrations ‘George Grey in 1854’, from a painting by George Richmond, of London, in William Lee Rees and Lily Rees, The Life and Times of Sir George Grey, K.C.B. (Auckland: H. Brett, 1892), p. 161.

18

‘Supposed native tombs discovered on the N.W. coast of New Holland. 7th April 1838’, in George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-west and Western Australia during the Years 1837, 38 and 39 [1841], 2 vols. (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1964), vol. 1, facing p. 227.

26

Photograph of Henry Ling Roth in later life (by permission of Michael Bennett).

42

‘Mrs. Fanny Cochrane Smith, of Irishtown, Port Cygnet, Tasmania, from photographs taken specially for me’, in H. L. Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1890), Appendix G.

55

‘Trugannini from photographs by Woolley in the possession of Mr. J.W. Beattie, Hobart’, in H. L. Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1890), Appendix G.

55

Flora Annie Steel in later life, in Violet Powell, Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India (London: Heinemann, 1981), Ill. No. 16, pp. 84-5. With kind permission of Heinemann.

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Illustration by J. Lockwood Kipling for the story, ‘Sir Buzz’, in Flora Annie Steel, Tales of the Punjab: Folklore of India [1894] (New York: Greenwich House, 1983), p. 8.

80

Portrait of Everard im Thurn by John Henry Lorimer. Reproduced as frontispiece to Everard im Thurn, Thoughts, Talks and Tramps: A Collection of Papers, ed. R. R. Marett (London: Oxford University Press 1934).

96

‘A Macusi Indian in full dancing dress’, from Everard im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co, 1883, frontispiece).

100

Gertrude Bell in Babylon, Iraq, in April 1909. Robinson Library Special Collections, University of Newcastle upon Tyne [K218], by permission of the Special Collections Librarian, Robinson Library, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

118

From a map of Syria showing Bell’s route. Inside back cover of Gertrude Bell, Desert and the Sown (London: Heinemann, 1907).

129

Lady Elizabeth Lydia Rosabelle Clifford (Mrs Henry de la Pasture) (née Bonham) and Sir Hugh Charles Clifford. Photograph by Bassano (22 March 1917). NPGx33004. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

146

Roger David Casement by Sir William Rothenstein. Copyright Estate of Sir William Rothenstein/National Portrait Gallery, London.

168

Two men and two boys from the Putumayo region of Peru/Colombia. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

185

‘The emaciated author is initiated (1933) into Saku manhood by a chief’s wife, who cicatrices a permanent pattern across his chest’, in Tom Harrisson, Savage Civilisation (London: Victor Gollancz, Left Book Club edition, 1937).

196

Map of Vanuatu (New Hebrides), from William F. S. Miles, Bridging Mental Boundaries in a Postcolonial Microcosm: Identity and Development in Vanuatu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998).

205

Bronislaw Malinowski in his tent, at his typewriter, watched from the entrance by Trobriand islanders. By permission of Helena Wayne Malinowska and the London School of Economics.

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1. INTRODUCTION: IN THE MARGINS OF ANTHROPOLOGY Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall

The conceit of history used to be that it just recounted what had happened. There is now a broader recognition that all histories are teleological, actually written backwards from the present, wittingly or unwittingly organised by current concerns. If that is generally true, then it must be especially the case with histories of entities – literatures, nation states, disciplines – where so much tends to be invested in present configurations. One particular complication facing histories of disciplines is that they need to respond to two absolutely conflicting imperatives. In order to establish intellectual credibility disciplines have had to claim venerable ancestors – Thucydides for history, Strabo for geography, Aristotle for literary criticism. But in order to be as fully modern and scientific as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demanded, they have had at the same time to stress the novelty of their protocols and vocabulary. A further complication then arises from the fact that most disciplinary histories are written from the inside: senior figures recasting a disciplinary tradition. Even the more capacious histories will work to bring more material and figures into the disciplinary tent, while paying little attention to what lies outside it. But, as we are increasingly aware, what lies just outside provides exactly the material against which all disciplines had to define themselves in the first place. For that reason, the margins of a discipline can offer particular insight into both its history and its future. Anthropology has as complicated a history as any discipline. It is sometimes seen as existing in classical times and the early modern period.1 Or the rise of anthropological theory is traced to the century between John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and the French Revolution.2 But most major accounts begin with the late nineteenth-century collection of anthropological material in what is regarded as a scientific

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manner,3 with the central disciplinary protocols of fieldwork and participant observation only taking shape early in the twentieth century with the work of the two great figures of Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski.4 There are also quite separate national traditions – British, US, Franco-German – with the key vocabulary – anthropology, ethnography, ethnology – crossing and connecting those national traditions in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Henrika Kuklick takes 1885 as the effective beginning of the British tradition, the one most relevant for the present volume.5 * In a series of wonderfully rich studies – especially Victorian Anthropology, After Tylor, and the edited volumes in the History of Anthropology series published by the University of Wisconsin Press – George Stocking has told the history of anglophone anthropology from the perspective of the discipline itself, offering in the process a resolutely historicist ‘thick description’ of the contexts from which anthropology might be said to have emerged.6 In contrast, and perhaps challenge, a new University of Nebraska series, Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology, seems set to offer a deliberately presentist approach, which stresses (not quite in these terms) that the history of the discipline is written to discipline the members of the discipline: ‘Anthropologists read the history of anthropology as part of a professional socialization that consists in good part of constructing unique, individual genealogies for disciplinary practice. Like kinship relations, such genealogies are embodied, inalienably constructed relative to a particular ego’.7 The genealogical model no doubt has its disciplinary uses, but its procedures are defiantly narrow: Darnell was a student of De Laguna and Hallowell, De Laguna was a student of Boas and Benedict, etcetera, until the thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents are in place. It’s perhaps appropriate that anthropology should show such obeisance towards its ancestors. The only problem comes from confusing such obeisance with a proper history of the discipline. The other recent contribution in this area – in the Wisconsin series which Richard Handler has now taken over from Stocking – is Handler’s Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: Essays Toward a More Inclusive History of Anthropology (2000). This work seeks to broaden the history of anthropology by focusing on little-known scholars who contributed to the anthropological work of their time, but its aim in doing so – to invigorate contemporary anthropological practice – is again quite narrowly disciplinary, and the

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language of ‘ancestors’ suggests that it is still in thrall to the genealogical model. According to Handler, Stocking believed that the relation of history to anthropology was conceptually close and necessary, since their object of study is essentially the same and only their methods differ, and that history offers ‘a valuable resource for anthropological self-critique’.8 But Handler, himself located in the post-modern moment of self-reflexive anthropology, is forced briefly to consider an alternative view of the discipline’s selfconsciousness, where the discipline finds itself intellectually exhausted. With its ‘real-world’ object of study (‘culture’, exotic others) now ‘having vanished or been declared to have been inappropriately objectified in the first place’, anthropology can only ‘cannibalise’ itself, taking its own history, methods, and epistemology as its principal subject matter.9 What drives Handler’s attempt to establish alternative anthropological pasts is a desire to re-draw the boundaries of the canon in order to shift the contemporary theoretical orientation of the discipline. Focusing on processes of inclusion and exclusion in canon-formation, now thoroughly familiar to most writing disciplines in the humanities, this attempt to reinvigorate anthropology by drawing in marginalised ancestors and eclipsed traditions can seem romantically antiquarian. Attempting to avoid the perils of Weberian routinisation, it confuses (as Nietzsche might argue) the causes of anthropology’s origins with the contemporary uses and purposes of the discipline.10 As its subtitle suggests, the present volume – with no anthropological authors except for the Afterword – situates itself in the margins of the discipline, very much in the spirit of James Clifford’s inquiries: ‘Never accept, never take as a beginning or ending point, what the discipline says it is. Ask instead: What do anthropologists, for all their disagreements, say they are not? Then focus on the historical relationship that is being policed, or negotiated – the process of “disciplining” that goes on at the edge.’11 In its beginning moment, anthropology – like most other disciplines – was particularly concerned to discount the contributions of any possible precursors who were non-professionals in the formal sense of not holding paid positions as anthropologists. As a result, Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink argue, ‘ethnographic practices by nonprofessionals are measured against anachronistic standards, insufficiently set within their historical contexts, or written out of the discipline’s history altogether.’12 The effect of this, Nicholas Thomas argues, was ‘to discredit a whole generation of writers, to

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suggest that disentangling their usage is an unprofitable exercise, that their works are better set aside, and attention focused on the proper research which was only just beginning’.13 Clifford identifies three particular disciplinary ‘edges’ to anthropology formed by the three non-identifications of ‘proper’ anthropologists as missionary, colonial officer, or travel writer, non-identifications based on the discipline’s initial determination as a profession to seek out a place of innocence and objectivity.14 In this way, Pels and Salemink suggest, the disciplinary history has obscured the manner in which ‘academic anthropology was linked to the construction of colonial and neo-colonial societies through ethnographic practice’.15 They propose that there is a need for an essential methodological shift in the study of anthropology: ‘the dialectical one of accounting for the extra-academic and extra-disciplinary influences on the constitution of the discipline’.16 Paying particular attention to those non-identifications, this volume looks specifically at the entanglements out of which the discipline emerged, in an attempt both to complicate the history of anthropology and to investigate the particular interconnections between ethnography, travel writing, and the British Empire in the period 1850 to 1940.17 The eight chapters that follow each focus on one individual who worked in some broad sense under the aegis of the British Empire and whose writing contributed to the special place which ethnography occupied between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: from the 1837 expedition under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society which took the young George Grey to Australia to the book on the Mass-Observation project which Tom Harrisson published in 1937. It is a period that moves us from evolutionism through to the re-thinking of key categories of anthropological thought like ‘race’ and ‘culture’, and from focusing exclusively on non-European peoples through to European societies, previously the preserve of sociology. In some senses Grey and Harrisson mark the edges of the project. Grey went on dangerous journeys through Western Australia and later became an important figure in imperial administration, while Harrisson worked in Bolton and was never taken entirely seriously by the academic establishment. But that contrast is also misleading: behind Harrisson’s involvement in Mass-Observation lay his formative experiences in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and, for all his power and influence, Grey has often been seen as a malevolent figure. Here Leigh Dale offers an assessment of the intellectual traditions within which Grey worked, while Rod Edmond both analyses the modernist achievement of

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Harrisson’s Savage Civilisation and relates the two very different sites of his ethnographic practice. Our other six figures are equally difficult to place, which is why they tend not to feature in disciplinary accounts, anthropological or otherwise. Of the eight, Roger Casement and Gertrude Bell are perhaps the best-known, Casement because of his notorious diaries and execution as a traitor, Bell because of her unusually prominent role in the imperial politics of the Middle East. Here, Helen Carr and Julia Emberley, respectively, focus on the writings of these two figures. Carr unpicks the relationship between Casement’s reports on colonial abuses and his Irish cultural nationalism, while Emberley interrogates the racial assumptions behind Bell’s travel accounts, noting the influence of her early experience of her mother’s philanthropic ethnography in the working-class areas of north-east England. All eight figures travelled to parts of the Empire, but some travelled much more extensively than others. Henry Ling Roth had early experience in Australia but he represents the spirit of compilation which was so important to Victorian ethnology, however unlikely a research centre Halifax might have been for his astounding productivity. Here Russell McDougall focuses on Roth’s ‘definitive’ work on Aboriginal Tasmania, itself an example of how scholarship from the supposed ‘pre-history’ of anthropology can continue to play a crucial role in contemporary debates. Everard im Thurn shares with Roth a continental European background (Hungarian in Roth’s case, Swiss in im Thurn’s) which, perhaps surprisingly, proved no obvious hindrance to advancement in imperial service. Unlike Roth, im Thurn served long terms in two very different imperial theatres, British Guiana and Fiji. As Rosamund Dalziell’s chapter shows (and Dale’s on Grey), ethnographic work was often more easily undertaken when serving in a more junior capacity. Better still, in some ways, was to travel as a spouse, even though Flora Annie Steel occupied a number of official and semi-official positions once she had reached India as the wife of a civil servant. Like Hugh Clifford in Malaya, Steel travelled and experienced and learned, and then drew later on that knowledge for settings and themes in fictional work which forms part of the tapestry of the literature of Empire. Here Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston focus on Steel’s collection of Indian folk tales while Robert Hampson attends to Clifford’s collections of short stories. As is clear from this brief sketch, the eight writers worked in a wide variety of forms and, as literary scholars rather than trained anthropologists,

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the authors here pay particular attention to the textual richness offered by those writers. Journals, diaries, official reports, travel accounts, poetry, short stories, novels, and autobiographies all feature as the source of ethnographic information and attitudes alongside the more formal ethnographic sources, such as the collections of material made by Grey and the armchair synthesis of Roth. The one ethnography based on participant-observation in anything like the modern sense – Harrisson’s Savage Civilisation – is an entirely heterodox and atypical example of the genre, which, of course, is what makes it so interesting to a study of the ‘margins’ of the discipline. An Afterword by the anthropologist, Peter Pels, discusses the significance of these writers for the continuing reassessment of the connections between the Empire, ethnography, and travel writing. Anthropology’s connection to travel writing has been distinctly underhistoricised. The book that James Clifford edited with George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), was pioneering in its attempt to connect ethnography to social history, travel writing, and literary criticism, and in its insistence on the point that ethnography has never been as distant from travel writing as it would like to imagine; but Clifford’s own hugely important work has been largely twentieth-century in its orientation.18 The impulse for much of the new scholarship on travel writing comes from the context of postcolonial studies, which over recent years has been rewriting the history of Western imperial and colonial contact with other cultures.19 The present volume, while taking a generally postcolonial approach, attends to the historical contexts of its period in an attempt to better place and understand some of the very particular kinds of travel writing that had a high ethnographic content. The focus on postcolonial subjectivities in literary and cultural studies has helped to rejuvenate scholarly interest in biography as a significant dimension of historical study, especially important in dealing with the history of the British Empire. In exploring something of the deeper life-histories of our subjects and their connections to the texts they produce, Writing, Travel, and Empire seeks to position biography at the intersection of cultural history, anthropology, and literary studies. In particular, biography provides a way of getting at the sense of trajectory among the personnel of Empire, and of the transference of colonial experience and practice from one setting to another. Grey governed in Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony; im Thurn served in British Guiana and Fiji; Clifford succeeded Frederick Lugard in Nigeria, but served also in Malaya and in the West Indies; Casement

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reported on colonial abuses in the Amazon and in the Congo. The personnel of imperialism in their travels provide a wonderfully rich criss-cross patterning over the crucial issues and themes of the period. Of particular interest is the flow of information and experience not just from and to the Colonial Office, but from one colony to another via colonial officers and semi-official travellers. The men and women who are the subjects of the chapters that follow all saw themselves very much as writers, and the intricate relationships between their sense of self and career and the genres of cultural representation in which they chose to write are different in every case. But travel writing and anthropology are alike in their openness to the textual problematic of identity, with its constant displacements, disjunctures, and continuities: as Clifford Geertz noted, it is possible for anthropologists to think of their indigenous subjects as in fact writing the life of the anthropologist (an observation that might also imply the complexity of the life of a travel writer or colonial official).20 * In terms of institutions and personnel – as well as, to some extent, intellectual interests – British anthropology developed out of the Aborigines Protection Society (APS), a movement which had its roots in the 1830s, when humanitarianism had made its greatest impact on colonial policies. The protection of aboriginal peoples was the next great humanitarian issue after the success of the campaign to abolish slavery, and the relationship with a wide variety of indigenous populations was both a constant concern of imperial administration and a constant theme of ethnographic travel writing throughout our period. In 1839 the leading British ethnologist of the day, James Cowles Prichard, publicised the work of the APS in a forceful address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Birmingham. In particular, Prichard lamented the lack of attention to ‘ethnography, or the natural history of the human races, while opportunities for pursuing the investigation … are every day failing and disappearing for ever’.21 Prichard thus struck early another dominant theme, which would cast its shadow over more than a century’s ethnography: that information needed to be collected and preserved before native cultures disappeared for ever under the inexorable wheels of progress. The British Association then drew up and circulated ‘a Series of Questions and Suggestions for the use of travellers and others with a view to procure Information respecting the different races of

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Men, and more especially of those which are in an uncivilised state’.22 These questions were in turn the prototype for the version issued between 1870 and 1920 under the joint auspices of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Anthropological Institute, entitled Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands. The APS and those interested in what was still referred to as ‘the natural history of the human race’ had a common interest in gathering information, and travellers and colonial officials were seen as excellent sources, if properly guided. The supposed impending disappearance of indigenous cultures around the world forms the backdrop to all eight writers considered here, despite their very different approaches and interests. The early- and mid-Victorian periods were largely concerned with the gathering of information: the compendium was a key form for several of the authors studied here. In professional retrospect these compendia were often seen as arbitrary and merely antiquarian, stressing the curious over the meaningful. Indigenous survival has indeed tended to make such compendia look redundant, although in some cases indigenous revival has itself drawn on these compendia for information about earlier lifeways and traditions.23 The concern expressed by the APS to smooth the dying pillow of the ‘disappearing’ races found different inflection in different colonial circumstances and in accordance with authors’ self-understandings. In this volume Leigh Dale demonstrates how Grey’s aesthetic appreciation of Māori culture builds not only on his Romantic preferences for the ‘wild and terrible’ but also on his belief in the inevitability of Māori extinction. Russell McDougall speaks of Ling Roth’s relations to a range of scientific institutions that produced in him a certain kind of ‘ideological stance’, an intellectual preference for subjects of alleged extinction. Robert Hampson draws attention to Clifford’s fiction of the rebel Englishman, whose untamed imagination facilitates his projection into a community so far beyond the borders of modernity that his journey ends inevitably with his sense of being ‘de-nationalised’, even as that community is fading into oblivion in part through the contaminating influence of his own presence. The dissatisfactions with modernity and the trope of primitive authenticity run through Steel’s and Harrison’s writings as well. But Bell’s sense of domestic economy propels a different argument, that nomadism in Arabia is anti-democratic and hence must be stamped out. Neither the development of anthropology as a scientific discipline nor the humanitarian activities of the APS necessarily indicated a more promising

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long-term outlook for indigenous cultures. Indeed, underlying both developments was very much the same belief as that held by those who were happy to exploit indigenous peoples in any way they could: that those peoples designated as ‘primitive’ were in the process of disappearing rapidly off the face of the earth. The Social Darwinist might assume that the disappearance was evidence that these peoples were not well adapted for survival, the APS might want to ease their passage into oblivion, and the anthropologist might want to study them before they went; but nobody doubted that they were vanishing. Putting the APS case in the 1850s, R. Montgomery Martin found no ‘line of policy likely to prove eventually successful in preserving these wild races, whose extinction – from some inscrutable law of their Creator and ours – seems inevitable; but’, he continued, ‘if it be so, is it not the more incumbent on those who are, however regretfully, in some measure the instruments of their fate, to do all in their power to ameliorate it, to evince towards them all possible forbearance, and to make every attempt to dwell peaceably with them in the land from which they are passing rapidly away’.24 His ‘inscrutable law’ is a fine example of what Patrick Brantlinger calls ‘rationalizing genocide’.25 In this period discussion was directed at American and Canadian Indians, Australian Aborigines, Māori and Pacific islanders, but above all at the Tasmanians, as Russell McDougall’s chapter explains. * The institutional and intellectual development of anthropology in Britain was a fraught process, marked by much bitterness and considerable disagreement over terminology: an Anthropological Society and an Ethnological Society co-existed for several years, with supposedly similar objectives and overlapping membership, yet with deep personal and intellectual differences, often turning on matters of race.26 By around 1875, however, some kind of consensus between various factions had been reached, the founding of the Anthropological Institute marking the beginning of what Stocking sees as a period of, in the Kuhnian term, ‘normal science’ – establishing British anthropology on a solid empirical, theoretical, and institutional footing. Even so, the collection and analysis of data would for many years largely be in separate pairs of hands; it would not be possible to train as an anthropologist in anything like the modern sense until the beginning of the twentieth century; and the first recognised body of

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fieldwork did not appear until after the return of the Cambridge Torres Strait expedition of 1898.27 Before fieldwork became the defining trait of professional anthropology, the watchword of science made the otherwise individual and idiosyncratic observer into a source of credible and possibly profitable information. If in the early stages of ‘discovery’, cartography and navigation had been the key sciences related to imperial expansion, by the nineteenth century botany and ethnology went alongside the development and expansion of colonial possessions, botany producing much economically important information while ethnology was crucial for the native administration which would produce peaceful conditions in the Empire and, where necessary, a compliant workforce. Botany and ethnology were both seen as ‘natural’ sciences, and the same individuals often pursued both.28 Among the biographical subjects in this volume, for example, Everard im Thurn is more often considered as a botanist than as an ethnographer.29 A colonial administrator in British Guiana, he published works on the religious practices and amusements of the Indians as well as botanical travelogues of his plant-collecting journeys through the interior. From the plant specimens that he collected on his ascent of Roraima in 1884 scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew identified fifty-three new species and three new genera.30 Henry Ling Roth published on a wide range of natural history subjects in journals such as the Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society as well as in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. He also published (on sugar) in Timehri, the journal issued from the Museum of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society in Georgetown, which im Thurn edited. Stocking’s attempt to delimit anthropology speaks of ‘the boundaries of “boundless discipline”’.31 In the margins of early anthropology are the other disciplines from which anthropologists moved, and from which they brought their approaches and vocabulary: Friedrich Max Müller was a classical scholar and philologist, Joseph Campbell a literary critic, John Lubbock an astronomer, mathematician, and entomologist, Alfred Haddon a marine biologist, Baldwin Spencer a biologist, Tom Harrisson an ornithologist. Medicine was a common pathway. Thomas Hodgkin and Joseph Prichard, founders of the Aborigines Protection Society, both were doctors. So was Richard Owen, who with them drafted the questionnaire for the study of ‘dying races’. Eugene Dubois, Hermann Klaatsch, Sir Grafton Elliott Smith: all were medical men. Charles Seligman, who accompanied

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Haddon to the Torres Strait in 1898, was a doctor who discovered his interest in anthropology on that expedition. George Bird Grinnell was a naturalist, who discovered his on George Armstrong Custer’s expedition into the Black Hills of Dakota in 1874. Professional retrospect could reject its armchair predecessors’ writing as what A.R. Radcliffe Brown dismissively called ‘conjectural history’, composed in the study, the dominant form of which had been the evolutionists’, tracing the putative unilineal stages of the development of human society from savagery through barbarism to civilisation.32 What would soon become the norm was the ethnographic description of particular cultural groups, in theory, at any rate, as they were in the present, based on first-hand fieldwork, and, once more at any rate in theory, approached from the perspective of cultural relativism, and therefore not immediately seen as inadequate and inferior. In the years after the First World War, with Malinowski’s functionalism dominating British anthropology, anthropologists became experts on particular peoples: Malinowski himself on the Trobriand Islanders, Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer, Radcliffe-Brown on the Andaman Islanders. The evolutionary model had offered a justification for colonisation’s civilising mission, though the evolutionists also believed, according to Kuklick, that their analysis of the primitive mind could be of great value to colonial administrators.33 Those in the colonies, however, found knowledge of the particular cultures with which they had to deal rather more useful, and among the British anthropologists there were ironically closer ties between colonialists and the cultural relativist functionalists than their predecessors. * The figures discussed in this book had a variety of different relationships with the professional discipline of anthropology as it began to develop. At one end of the spectrum, Everard im Thurn became president of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1919, having been an acknowledged member of the community of anthropologists in the previous era, described by Kuklick as ‘neither leisured gentlemen nor academics but men of affairs … [who] expected their scholarship to inform the decisions of their daily lives’.34 If, as Kuklick argues, it was not until the late 1930s that most of the members of the RAI were professional in the sense of earning their living as anthropologists,35 then im Thurn was representative of the earlier amateur membership rather than marginal to it, even though he finds no place in

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most histories of the discipline. At the other end of the spectrum, Harrisson was criticised by professional anthropologists for not knowing the native language and Casement was far too involved in the investigation of abuses to adhere to any notion of professional ‘objectivity’. Public service in Britain was often a family tradition, extending into colonial administration in the British Empire and enabling the reinvention and legitimation of subjectivities according to new orders of authority. Robert Hampson makes the point in this volume regarding Hugh Clifford, but the same might be said for Henry Ling Roth and a number of others. Clifford was well connected. His grandfather was the seventh Baron of Chudleigh; his father a Colonel awarded the VC; his father’s cousin the governor of the Straits Settlement, for whom Clifford first went to Malaya as interpreter. While the sons of prominent families were commonly groomed for a career in the Civil Service, the Empire also provided a host of destinations for escaping disgrace or responsibility. Among Empire families the Kingsleys provide the obvious example: Charles, the social reformer, political activist, novelist, historian, chaplain to the Queen and canon of Westminster; Henry, his brother, also a novelist, who joined the mounted police in Australia and later served as a war correspondent during the Franco-German War; and the third brother, George, a travel writer and physician to the 13th Earl of Pembroke, whose daughter was the famed African explorer and travel writer, Mary Kingsley. The Roth family is less well known, but equally remarkable. Matthias Roth was a Hungarian refugee and medical doctor who pioneered the Movement Cure (‘rational medical gymnastics’), physical education, and physical therapy in Britain. He published the first English book (1851) on the prevention and cure of disease through movement and founded an Institute in London to teach Medical Gymnastics. Matthias and Anna Roth had two daughters and five sons, including Henry Ling Roth. Of the other sons, Felix Norman Roth was a ship’s engineer who traded for tortoise-shell and other exotic items up and down the Queensland coast and around New Guinea. He served in the medical service of the Niger Coast Protectorate in West Africa from 1892 to 1898, and accompanied the British troops that sacked Benin City.36 After a distinguished military career Reuter Emerich Roth worked as an educator in Sydney, helping establish the medical gymnastics department at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, the St John Ambulance Association, the Royal Life Saving Society, and the New South Wales division of the British Red Cross Society. But Walter is probably the best known. He served as a

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medical officer in north-west Queensland before being appointed as the first northern Protector of Aborigines in that state (1898-1904), and then as its Chief Protector. His reports to the Police Commissioner concerning Aboriginal welfare, and his published bulletins on northern Queensland ethnography (1901-1906), laid the foundation for ethnography in northern Queensland. Departing Australia in 1906, Walter served for twenty-three years in the British Colonial Service in Guiana, first as government medical officer, magistrate and Protector of Indians in the Pomeroon district, then as stipendiary magistrate of the Demerara River district. In his retirement he succeeded im Thurn as curator of the Museum that now bears his name. Walter published voluminously on the indigenous peoples of North Queensland and Guiana, including detailed descriptions of plants and their preparation for food, drinks, and medicine. He is an important precursor for the history of ethnobotany and there are plant species in both countries named after him.37 Family tradition has sometimes assisted but also often obscured the work of the second generation. Henry Ling Roth’s son, George Kingsley Roth (named in honour of Mary Kingsley), became Governor of Fiji and did important ethnographic work there. Walter Roth’s son, Vincent, continued his father’s work in Guiana. Neither is as well known as his father. Many daughters of British government officials and administrators found their colonial mission through their fathers’ financial mismanagement or ill-timed death. Flora Annie Steel was one of these, travelling to India after her parents went bankrupt and marrying a man in the Indian civil service. Women of course often did valuable work that received insufficient attention. Thus, while T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) is lionised as a war hero Gertrude Bell’s role in bringing about the Arab revolt of 1916-1918 is often overlooked, even though it was she, at the conclusion of the war, who drew the borders for the new nation of Iraq. Many of the pioneering women at the margins of anthropology were involved in public service, as Steel was with women’s education in India. A husband’s or a father’s professional position as a colonial administrator or an anthropologist might facilitate a woman’s entry into the field, but her contributions were often overshadowed by his. Theodora Kroeber, wife of Alfred Kroeber, was a talented children’s author and interpreter of the oral traditions of the native cultures of California. Franziska Boas, the daughter of Franz Boas, pioneered the anthropology of dance among the Kwakiutl in British Columbia and founded the Boas School of Dance in New York.

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In terms of what biography can tell us about our subject, it is worth noting that the pre-eminent historian of anthropology, Stocking, when jointly appointed to Anthropology and History at the University of Chicago in 1968, experienced what he calls ‘a double dose of marginality’. Domiciled in exile from colleagues with whom he might have shared an intellectual predisposition, he was welcomed by others whose modes of thought seemed quite different from his own, but who joked about his bypassing the ‘initiatory ritual of fieldwork’. The effect, he says, was to heighten his sense of disciplinary boundaries and of ‘the problem of discipline formation’.38 And Boas, who did more than anyone to institutionalise the discipline of anthropology in the US academy, was supremely aware not only of its ‘multifarious’ origins but also of its potential therefore to fragment and collapse. As Stocking paraphrases him, Boas’s idea of the discipline was as ‘an historically (rather than logically) constituted domain’ of knowledge, purporting to deal with all humankind yet finding its true subject in the marginalised and ‘vanishing’ peoples of the world, those who are themselves allegedly devoid of history.39 The focus of Writing, Travel, and Empire on figures variously marginal to histories of British anthropology goes to the core issue of how the discipline’s professionalisation in terms of fieldwork has been achieved by tactical exclusions and dislocations, in particular the exclusion of administrators and travel writers, and the dislocation of ethnographic practice from its colonial contexts. It is our contention that these people have something to say still – about writing, travel, and Empire – not only to anthropologists, but also to the postcolonial worlds whose continuing political controversies they often helped shape, and to the homeland which helped form the sense of self, tradition, and value that they projected into those worlds. * For assistance with this project, we would like to thank the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, which provided financial support for an early meeting of contributors, the Faculty of Arts at the University of New England (Australia), and Susan Forsyth, who produced the camera-ready copy and made the index. John L. Myres, ‘The influence of anthropology on the course of political science,’ University of California Publications in History, 4 (1916); Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). 1

INTRODUCTION

15

2 Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of the Theories of Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 15501800 (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995); Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, Histoires de l’anthropologie: XVI-XIX siècles (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984). 3 George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987); Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 4 Stocking, Race, Culture, Evolution. Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 5 Kuklick: The Savage Within. 6 Stocking: Victorian Anthropology; After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951 (London: Athlone, 1996); and the first eight edited volumes in the History of Anthropology series published by the University of Wisconsin Press. 7 Regna Darnell, Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. xx-xxi. 8 Richard Handler, Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: Essays Toward a More Inclusive History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2000), p. 4. See also Stocking, ‘The history of anthropology: where, whence, whither?’ Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 26, 1 (1966), pp. 281-290. 9 Handler: Excluded Ancestors, p. 4. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956) p. 201. 11 James Clifford, On the Edges of Anthropology (Interviews) (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 8. 12 Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, ‘Introduction: Locating the colonial subjects of anthropology,’ in Pels and Salemink (eds), Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 1. 13 Nicholas Thomas, Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 24. 14 Clifford: On the Edges, pp. 9-12. As Mary Louise Pratt writes: ‘To the extent that it legitimates itself by opposition to other kinds of writing, ethnography blinds itself to the fact that its own discursive practices were often inherited from these other genres and are still shared with them today’ (‘Fieldwork in common places,’ in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986], p. 33). 15 Pels and Salemink, ‘Introduction: Five theses on ethnography as colonial practice,’ in Pels and Salemink (eds), Colonial Ethnographies (History and Anthropology, 8, nos 1-4 [1994]), p. 1. 16 Pels and Salemink: ‘Introduction: Five theses,’ p. 3. 17 For the idea of entanglement, see Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 18 Clifford and Marcus (eds): Writing Culture; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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See Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 20 Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). See also the additional twelve cases studied in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 21 Amalie M. Kass and Edward H. Kass, Perfecting the World: The Life and Times of Dr Thomas Hodgkin, 1798-1866 (Boston: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 390. 22 Quoted in Kass and Kass: Perfecting the World, p. 391. 23 See, for one example, Maximilian C. Forte (ed), Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). 24 R. Montgomery Martin, The British Colonies; Their History, Extent, Condition, and Resources, 6 vols. (London: The London Printing and Publishing Co., 1852-57), vol. 3, p. 13. 25 Patrick Brantlinger, ‘“Dying races’: Rationalizing genocide in the nineteenth century,’ in Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (eds), The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power (London: Zed Books, 1995), pp. 43-56. 26 George W. Stocking, Jr., “What’s in a name? The origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1837-1871”, Man, 6 (1971), pp. 369-90. 27 Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse (eds), Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 28 Neil Whitehead, ‘W.E. Roth and the ethnology of British Guiana,’ in Russell McDougall and Iain Davidson (eds), The Roth Family, Anthropology, and Colonial Administration (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, forthcoming 2007). 29 See, for instance, Ray Desmond’s biography of Everard im Thurn in the Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturists (London: Taylor & Francis, 1977), p. 612. 30 R. J. Dalziell, ‘The curious case of Sir Everard im Thurn and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Exploration and the imperial adventure novel, The Lost World,’ English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 45/2 (2002), p. 131. See also Everard im Thurn, ‘The botany of the Roraima expedition of 1884,’ Transactions of the Linnaean Society, Second Series-Botany, 2 (1886), pp. 294300. 31 Stocking, ‘Delimiting anthropology,’ in Delimiting Anthropology. Occasional Essays and Reflections (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), p. 303. 32 Radcliffe Brown is quoted by Adam Kuper in Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 65. 33 Kuklick: The Savage Within, pp. 94-118. 34 Kuklick: The Savage Within, p. 7 35 Kuklick: The Savage Within, p. 62 36 See Russell McDougall, ‘The making of Great Benin: Felix and Henry Ling Roth,’ in McDougall and Davidson (eds): The Roth Family. 37 See, for example, J. Pearn, ‘Floriade, acacias and aesculapias: W.E. Roth,’ Medical Journal of Australia, 161 (1994), p. 216. 38 Stocking: ‘Delimiting anthropology,’ p. 304. 39 Stocking: ‘Delimiting anthropology,’ p. 311. 19

Sir George Grey in 1854

2. GEORGE GREY IN AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, AND SOUTH AFRICA Leigh Dale

Sir George Grey (1812-98) was a renowned British colonial governor who engaged in various studies of indigenous peoples and their cultures, particularly their language and spoken poetry. Two key questions will be considered here: within what intellectual traditions did Grey work, and how do we now read his work ‘in the margins of anthropology’? These questions are important because Grey’s reputation and legacy in each of the three colonies with which he is associated are complicated and controversial: many see him as a loyal and brilliant servant of Empire, others (in his own time and later) as duplicitous and malevolent. Controversy has been fuelled rather than assuaged by the seven biographies, the first published in 1892, the most recent in 1998.1 The most authoritative of these, by James Rutherford, describes Grey as perhaps the greatest liar the British Empire ever spawned; on the other hand George Stocking, whilst noting Rutherford’s views, calls Grey ‘one of the more perceptive ethnographers of his day, and author of some of the most influential ethnographic work of the century’.2 These views are not necessarily contradictory, but they demonstrate the debate that surrounds Grey and his life. Grey’s father was a senior member of the military, dying in the battle of Badajoz in Spain only days before his son was born in Lisbon. Grey’s mother, whose family was Irish, remarried several years later. Biographical sources on Grey’s early life are thin, and possibly apocryphal: his claim to have received very little formal schooling until entering Sandhurst military academy in his early teens are not commensurate with the breadth and depth of scholarship in languages and natural sciences that Grey demonstrated during his career, which hint instead at a solid grounding in subject areas such as Latin. Upon his initial graduation from Sandhurst Grey entered the 83rd regiment, with which he served in Scotland and Ireland before returning to Sandhurst for advanced

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training in the mid-1830s. (His rapid promotions upon entering the military – contingent upon purchase – hint at not inconsiderable family resources, although the precise nature of his relationship to the aristocratic Grey family – distant relatives of his father – is, again, somewhat unclear.) During his second period of study at Sandhurst he seems to have formulated the plan for a journey of exploration that would help to make his reputation as a scholar and adventurer, and in 1837 he led (with a colleague of equal rank) an expedition to the Australian colonies which carried the imprimatur of the Royal Geographical Society. After several journeys through the north-western part of Western Australia, Grey returned to England and was appointed Governor of South Australia: it is said that Archbishop Whately, again a distant relative, recommended him for an appointment, although it was perhaps at least as decisive that James Stephen, then Colonial Secretary, had been captivated by Grey’s energy and vision when they had met during the planning stages for the journeys to Western Australia. After five years in Adelaide he was directed to New Zealand, where he was Governor-in-Chief until the end of 1853. His next posting was to the Cape Colony, after which he returned to New Zealand. While Grey was regarded highly for his success in promoting colonial and imperial interests – suppressing indigenous resistance, and extending the reach of colonisation – he was reviled by some for duplicity and self-interest in his treatment of all parties. His basic modus operandi was to use his dispatches to exaggerate his difficulties and thereby increase the resources of money and military manpower allowed to him, whilst at the same time carefully attending to self-promotion. His highly sophisticated rhetoric lost its power as Colonial Office staff became increasingly sceptical of his accounts, and he was twice recalled for disobedience, the final recall ending his career. However, he undoubtedly did much to establish industrial and civic institutions in each of the three colonies he governed, and was renowned for the breadth of his intellectual interests. In accordance with the emphasis given to linguistic evidence in attempting to answer the major intellectual questions of his time, Grey continued and expanded the collecting of vocabularies that he had begun on his first voyage. The first edition of this Aboriginal vocabulary was published in Perth in 1839, with a revised and expanded edition appearing in London the following year.3 And after becoming Governor of South Australia in 1840 Grey continued to engage in philological scholarship, compiling a lengthy but unpublished ethnography of the indigenous peoples of the region.4 He

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encouraged and underwrote the publication of vocabularies and dictionaries compiled by German missionaries, and thus ‘three more dictionaries of South Australian languages were published’.5 It was in New Zealand that Grey’s reputation as a governor and a scholar reached their height. In addition to learning the language, Grey set himself the task of compiling information about the ‘customs, mythology, language, and traditions of the Māori and their cognate races in the South Pacific’, transcribing an enormous number of oral stories.6 When the manuscripts were lost in a fire the work recommenced, and a string of publications ensued.7 There is some debate as to how much of the work was actually done by Grey, and how much by his interpreters, just as there is debate over the level of his proficiency in Māori, questions that it is difficult to answer definitively.8 On official business he always worked with an interpreter – a point that Rutherford is at pains to make – but the printers’ copies of texts in Māori held in the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town show detailed corrections in Grey’s handwriting, including occasional additions of paragraphs or verses;9 Grey occasionally corresponded in the language. * What earned Grey a reputation for humanitarian views was his distinctive vision of the ways in which colonised peoples should be managed. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Grey dreamed of the absorption of indigenous peoples into British political institutions and a capitalist economy. It is a policy that was, decades later, formally adopted by governments in Australia, being known there as ‘assimilation’. It certainly stands in opposition to the policy of extermination which had been pursued, and was to be pursued, in other Australian colonies; nevertheless it partakes of the belief in the inevitable erasure of indigenous peoples and their cultures. Grey saw assimilation as the most efficient way of bringing indigenous peoples and their land under imperial control. Put simply, he believed that if they could be seduced by wealth and consumer goods, and protected by British law, indigenous peoples would lose their motivation to resist invasion. This vision was first expressed in Grey’s boldly titled ‘Report on the Best Means of Promoting the Civilisation of the Aborigines’, published as an appendix to his Journals in 1841, along with the claim that the plan had been so well received in the Colonial Office that it had been forwarded to each of the several governors in the Australian colonies.10 An early Grey biographer summarises the ‘Report’ this way: ‘emphasis was laid on two points in the

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management and control of natives: the recognition of their rights as British subjects, and the possibility of their improvement by means of educational institutions and regular industry’, especially the latter.11 The fundamentals of his programme were still in evidence two decades later when, on taking up his second appointment to New Zealand, Grey proffered material success to Māori peoples: ‘The Europeans in New Zealand, with the help of the Governor, make laws for themselves, and have their own Magistrates; and, because they obey those laws, they are rich, they have large houses, great ships, horses, sheep, cattle, corn, and all other good things for the body’.12 Such a prescription can certainly be read by Empire enthusiasts as humanitarian, in that it presumes and advocates a universal humanity, but Grey’s position is a highly coercive one, for it also presumes that indigenous systems of political and economic organisation must be given up. And Grey’s argument about the benefits of colonisation rationalised both dispossession – so that the land could be put to ‘better’ use – and the benevolent works, the building of schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions that are so closely associated with his name, particularly in New Zealand and South Africa. Grey’s emphasis on economic integration and the erasure of indigenous culture seems at odds with his academic interest in those cultures. But Ronald Meek, in Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, argues that basic precepts of political economy are important in understanding the concepts of cultural difference that underwrote nineteenth-century inquiries into culture and language.13 Meek argues in particular for the influence of authors like Adam Smith on the earliest generation of writers, calling themselves ethnologists, whose work might be seen as prefiguring the discipline of anthropology.14 Although best-known for his study The Wealth of Nations, Smith laid out the enormously influential four-stage classification of hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial societies, a theory that was underpinned by his belief that all human beings aspired towards wealth regardless of time or place. It was in the light of similar assumptions about the predominance of economic instinct over cultural difference that Grey claimed that indigenous cultures were inadequate because individuals could not accumulate material wealth, nor properly exploit the land’s resources. Whether it was a sincerely held belief or merely an alibi for imperialism, it is significant that Grey seems to have presumed a sympathetic audience when he averred in his Journals that the inhabitation of ‘fertile’ country by non-British was ‘anomalous’: ‘I wondered that so fair a land should only be the abode of savage men … and

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wondered how long these things were to be’.15 Likewise Māori peoples must desire ‘good things for the body’ in order to enjoy wealth and political order. In his Journals Grey devoted a chapter to the commercial prospects of the region he had travelled through, including sections on ‘Productions suited for Cultivation’, ‘Commercial Prospects’, and ‘Trade with the Asiatic Archipelago’, and concluded his discussion with the claim that ‘there is yet a vast field open to the speculator, which must ever promise ample recompense for his confidence and outlay’.16 He was aware that his reputation as an ‘explorer’ would in part hinge on the economic value of what he had found and it must have been galling that his claims were contested. In a pamphlet by ‘A Naval Officer’, entitled ‘Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle on a Survey of the Coast of Australia’, Grey was criticised for claiming that the region he had traversed was a fertile and well-watered one, eminently appropriate for colonisation.17 The incident, read alongside his ‘Report’, demonstrates the importance Grey accorded economic questions in reputation-making in the colonial arena. And while Grey himself claimed that his ‘Report’ played a significant part in his appointment to South Australia, it is worth noting that that colony’s main difficulty in 1840 was not frontier violence but its dire financial straits. Grey’s brief in his first major position in colonial administration was not to diminish the wars of invasion, as it was to be in New Zealand and the Cape Colony, but to bring South Australia’s overdrawn budget back into balance. * To some extent, as I have said, this portrait of a ‘pragmatic’ Grey seems at odds with his interest in the languages and literatures of the indigenous peoples among whom he travelled, and over whom he governed, and with his considerable reputation as a scholar. Certainly the sheer range of his pursuits seems daunting, even implausible, to the modern reader: his Journals, for example, contain detailed descriptions of gathering information about geology, geography, and climate, as well as information about animal, bird, fish, and reptile species. The Journals and other publications imply familiarity with several modern and classical European languages, in addition to languages spoken in each of Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. This seems irrefutable evidence of Grey’s intellect and precocity: that he was indeed a ‘prodigy of a governor’, as one contemporary termed it.18 Some brief conjectures about the intellectual influences on Grey can help to give greater coherence to his intellectual interests and published writing than might be

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immediately evident, for it is certain that no current disciplinary term encompasses Grey’s interests, nor explains what Grey saw himself as doing. The term that Grey’s contemporaries might most readily have used to describe his interests is ‘philology’ – although it was a term he himself, on at least one occasion, specifically rejected. Philology is now generally understood as historical and comparative linguistics, but in early nineteenthcentury Europe it carried a much wider brief. Advocates in Britain who understood the term in its ‘German sense as the historical knowledge of human nature’ saw the discipline as encompassing ‘literature, language, ancient law, history, and archaeology’.19 In other words, philology had been so reshaped during the early decades of the nineteenth century that in its loosest formulation it comes under the general heading of Romanticism and can be associated with the intellectual reform taking place in German universities at that time. That Grey was aware of this movement, as manifested both in its intellectual forms and in shifts in literary aesthetics, seems hardly in doubt. His Journals frequently evince stereotypically Romantic sentiments, as when he describes his first experiences: ‘I took a night walk in the country this evening, and experienced those wild and undescribable feelings, which accompany the first entrance into a rich tropical country.’ He had just arrived at the end of the rainy season: The luxuriant foliage expanding in magnificent variety, the brightness of the stars above, the dazzling brilliancy of the fireflies around me, the breeze laden with balmy smells, and the buzy [sic] hum of insectlife making the deep woods vocal, at first, oppress the senses with a feeling of novelty and strangeness, til the mind appears to hover between the realms of truth and falsehood.20 Meanwhile, the scrupulously empirical mode through which he describes his academic inquiries – his Journals are full of precise measurements of botanical, avian, and animal specimens, for example – hints at his familiarity with German precepts about philological scholarship. What is distinctive about the Romantic formulation of philology is its disciplinary scope or, perhaps more precisely, its bringing together of ‘scientific method’ with evidence drawn from description that we might call ethnographic, and from comparative linguistics. Thus Baron de Bunsen, German author of Egypt’s Place in Universal History (and one-time ambassador to London) brought the study of science, ethnology, and philology together

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in his claim that ‘if man is at once the mystery and the key of natural science; if that is the only view of natural science worthy of our age, then ethnologic philology, once established on principles as clear as the physiological are, is the highest branch of that science for the advancement of which [the British Association for the Advancement of Science] is instituted’.21 In this vein we can see as part of the same intellectual enterprise Grey’s collection of fragments of languages and of human skeletons he undertook on the first stopover of his journey to the colonies, at Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. This purpose, outlined in his letter to Sir Richard Owen – ‘the foremost natural scientist of his generation’22 – was that the human skull and list of words ‘from the language of the Guanches’ ‘may perhaps someday prove useful in any inquiry into the origin and dissemination of the different races of men’.23 (A much fainter residue of this conjunction of science and culture was my primary-school curriculum for ‘Social Studies’, in which our attention was given in turn to ‘flora, fauna, and Aborigines’ before we moved on to the history of Australia: the journeys of explorers and the breeding of sheep.) Hans Aarsleff remarks that ‘two of the most popular and respected [British] writers on philological matters also wrote extensively on ethnography, which seems to have been the chief end of their studies: J.C. Prichard, and R.G. Latham’.24 James Cowles Prichard was the first English scholar to write a monograph on comparative philology and one of the few British writers in the first decades of the century to embrace Romantic methods and influences.25 It is Prichard’s work to which Grey’s own inquiries demonstrate the greatest affinity, an influence primarily discernible in the subjects and methods of their study, and in their shared and lifelong commitment to the view that human beings were descended from a single race. This theory, known as ‘monogenism’, is closely associated with Christianity; thus Prichard’s biographer, Hannah Augstein, contends that ‘From his M. D. dissertation in 1808 until his death, [Prichard] strove to prove that the Scriptures gave the correct account of what he termed “the natural history of man”.’26 Prichard, and the Ethnological Society which he helped to establish in the 1840s, are characterised by Nancy Stepan as ‘humanitarian, monogenist and Christian’, committed to the view that all humans were of the same essence.27 To some extent Prichard and monogenism fell out of fashion in Britain after mid century,28 but that Grey was and remained a follower of Prichard’s is hinted at not only by his oft-expressed personal piety, but more

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tangibly by the fact that we find him in 1868 addressing the Ethnological Society.29 While his biographers see this as evidence of recognition in academic circles, Stepan’s account of the Ethnological Society’s decline seems to make it more likely that it was Grey who was enhancing the Society’s prestige with his presence, in delivering an address on Pacific cultures and literature. Grey’s Journals, although they contain various descriptions of indigenous peoples, are also a travelogue: they record responses to new landscapes and emphasise strangeness, as well as delight in rare moments of recognition of things seeming to resemble English prototypes.30 But in his descriptions of various peoples encountered in his travels, Grey reproduces the methods of Prichard’s Researches in the History of Mankind in giving systematic attention to language, appearance, and temperament, with further references to religion, social organisation, geography, dwellings, and art.31 There is of course a difference of perspective, but perhaps less than we might expect. The scholar imperialist, Grey describes himself as ‘a calm and unconcerned spectator’, aiming to Supposed native tombs discovered in 1838 maintain a ‘cool and determined 32 bearing’. There is a repellant sense of superiority and distance in evidence here, perhaps generated as much by Grey’s desire to establish his imperial persona as by any demands of genre and scholarship. But Grey himself did not mention Prichard as an influence, something that is noteworthy in the context of the number of leading scholars and writers named as mentors and influences on his thinking in the reminiscences transcribed by Milne. This might have a simple explanation: Prichard died in 1848, well before Grey’s periods of time in England in the

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1860s, when his reputation as a governor had been made and when the web of his personal and intellectual connections seemed to have been considerably strengthened – or perhaps Grey, in late old age when interviewed by Milne, did not know that Prichard was now being given recognition as the ‘founder’ of anthropology in England. But another explanation is possible. A posthumous fourth edition of Prichard’s The Natural History of Man was published in 1855; the book is held in the Auckland City Library, a collection to which Grey made a substantial personal contribution of books.33 This edition included some mention of indigenous cultures in Australia (without differentiating between them). In his discussion Prichard, as was his wont, quoted extensively from travellers, whose first-hand accounts of ‘native cultures’ and peoples were the essential raw materials of his scholarship. One of the two works he relied on for information about Australian Aboriginal peoples and cultures was John Lort Stokes’s Discoveries in Australia, published in 1846.34 It might have been disappointing to Grey that an account which covered almost literally the same territory that he had in his journeys and Journals was cited by Britain’s most venerated ethnologist, while his own extensive accounts of indigenous cultures and his scholarship on linguistics were ignored. But what could have added piquancy to that disappointment was that John Lort Stokes was none other than the ‘Naval Officer’, the author of the pamphlet which had so sharply attacked him. It would be one thing to be overlooked, but to be supplanted by one’s enemy in the work of ethnology’s most influential British writer just might have been more than Grey could bear. * Although there is an implicitly recuperative impulse in some modern scholarship on writers like Grey and Prichard who held to monogenist theories, they were by no means free of racism. Prichard ‘concedes’ that it would seem almost inconceivable to a visitor to earth that human kind could be related: let him first witness some brilliant spectacle in one of the highly civilised countries of Europe … [then] let the same person be … placed near the solitary den of the Bushman, where the lean and hungry savage crouches in silence like a beast of prey, watching with fixed eyes the birds which enter his pitfall, or the insects and reptiles which chance brings within his grasp, – let the traveller be carried

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into the midst of an Australian forest, where the squalid companions of kangaroos may be seen crawling in procession in imitation of quadrupeds, – can it be supposed that such a person would conclude the various groups of beings whom he had surveyed to be of one nature, one tribe, or the offspring of the same original stock?35 Grey, too, was capable of strong expressions of faith in a common humanity as well as nakedly racist comments like those of Prichard’s. His Journals, in particular, were highly regarded for their sympathetic portrait of Aboriginal peoples, one appreciative reviewer writing that ‘Mr Grey gives us a picture of a degree of civilization as existing in some parts of Australia of which we had no previous idea, and of notions on the subject of rights of property and moral obligation for which the aborigines have never hitherto had just credit’.36 However Grey’s superiority to his subjects is always maintained. In particular, his capacity for tricking the naive indigene is a recurring theme that has become a staple for critics and hagiographers, albeit one that has been taken up in a rather different way by indigenous peoples. As a Māori leader lay dying, ‘Grey sent him many presents, which he gratefully acknowledged. A lingering remembrance of past suspicions haunted him, and, taking a sovereign from a number, he turned it over and said with a grim smile: “As it comes from Governor Grey I am looking whether there is any hook in it”.’37 More famously John Gorst reported what he claimed were Wi Kingi’s words that ‘Governor Browne was an eagle that came swooping down upon them from the clear sky, while Governor Grey was a rat that burrowed underground out of sight, and would come up in their midst where and when they least expected.’38 * In his Journals, Grey remarks in passing that at one point he ‘set about collecting some of the native stories’ pertaining to a cave near the town of York, west of Perth.39 These kinds of activities were to dramatically expand in scope when he took up his position in New Zealand in 1845 and did the work on Māori oral literature that was to form the basis of his reputation as a scholar. If Grey has a poor or at least ambiguous reputation among indigenous peoples and some modern scholars, what is less at issue is the impact of his scholarship. One New Zealand textbook of imperial history, published in the early twentieth century, noted that that ‘Sir George Grey took pains to understand the Maori ideas. He moved about among the

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natives, and learned their language; and, as time went on, they trusted him, and called him “father”.’40 By volume six in the same series, pupils could learn that Grey ‘set himself to learn the Maori language, studied Maori customs and traditions, and thus gained an insight into the workings of the Maori mind unequalled by any other pakeha’.41 Student readers of a textbook of history and geography could learn that, having restored peace, ‘Sir George Grey at once set to work to make the very best use of it. In order to properly understand the Maoris, he at once learnt their language, and from the very outset was a close student of their manners and customs’.42 Thus, ‘they loved him as they never loved a white man since’.43 His least sympathetic early biographer, James Collier, offers a peculiar logic by which admiration of Grey is grounded in utter contempt for indigenous peoples, when he writes that Grey gave them himself. With none of the repugnances which makes wholesome contact with lower races impossible to most Englishmen, he moved among them as one of themselves … When the good and evil of his life comes to be balanced in the eternal scales, his noble work among the Maoris, and afterwards among the more degraded races of South Africa, will weigh down all else. It will be his passport to Walhalla.44 The most recent biography of Grey, also published in New Zealand, to some extent aims to recuperate this version of Grey as an ultimately benevolent despot, defending him (as it does) from anti-colonial historians. The biography is particularly troubling for the ways in which it subtly but relentlessly validates colonisation by way of giving moral weight to the individual life, and thence to the dispossession and destruction which the ‘settler’ colonies in which Grey spent his life and work presumed and legitimated. If Grey is to be thought sincere in his study of indigenous languages and cultures – for in a sense, that is what is at stake in this case, not the protocols but the integrity of his scholarship – then an argument for his sincerity might be derived from a consideration of the circumstances in which his publications were received. In putting his name to these collections of Māori mythology, there was no guarantee that they would not simply be derided. There was another risk too: for much of the nineteenth century, publications of this kind were rigorously examined for the orthodoxy of their theology,

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and seeming to question the authority of the Bible could be a severe blow to the author.45 Grey avoided these perils with a brilliant strategy: in his preface to his first book, the main text of which is in Māori, he spent many pages asserting the positive influence of Christianity before announcing that, in this context, ‘It … appeared desirable that in New Zealand a monument should be raised to shew in such measure what the country was before its natives were converted to the Christian faith’.46 This task is urgent because ‘men are too apt’ to lose ‘sight of what the world was without Christianity, altogether to misconstrue the advantages that Christianity has secured to the human race’.47 The aim is to allow ‘the people themselves to testify of their former state, by collecting their traditional poetry, and their heathen prayers and incantations, composed and sung for centuries before the light of Christianity had broken upon their country’.48 In his position as administrator and ethnographer Grey is both the scribe of a ‘vanishing’ culture and, although this must be deduced by the reader who knows his position, the instrument of deliverance from that culture. He does not rule out the possibility that to ‘those persons who study the history of the human race as developed in the history, customs, and languages of different nations, such work would possess a high degree of interest’, but his work is primarily a demonstration of Prichard’s method: to place ethnographic study at the service of Christianity. Yet there is something for the more ‘literary’ reader. Grey suggests that ‘there would be many persons who would study with pleasure the poetry of a savage race, whose songs and chaunts, whilst they contain so much that is wild and terrible, yet at the same time present many passages of the most singularly original poetic beauty’.49 He directs these readers to two particularly ‘striking’ and ‘beautiful romances’ in the volume, and expresses the hope ‘that it may hereafter be practicable to publish a separate work containing the most interesting romances’; interestingly, his directives presume at least a reading ability in Māori.50 Only in passing does Grey acknowledge the power and complexity of oral narrative in Māori cultures. He suggests that the best time to collect stories was ‘at the great meetings of public affairs’, where the art of the orator was shewn by his selecting a quotation from an ancient poem which figuratively but dimly shadowed forth his intentions and opinions; as he spoke the people were pleased at the beauty of the poetry, and at his knowledge of their ancient poets,

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whilst their ingenuity was excited to endeavour to detect from his figurative language what were his intentions and designs, quotation after quotation as they were rapidly and forcibly chaunted forth made his meaning clearer and clearer … and if his sentiments were in unison with the great mass of the assembly … as each succeeding quotation gradually removed the doubts which hung upon the minds of the attentive group …, murmur of applause rose after murmur of applause, until at some closing quotation which left no doubt as to his real meaning, the whole assembly gave way to tumults of delight, and applauded equally the determination which he had formed, his poetic knowledge, and his oratorical art.51 The account implies a highly sophisticated knowledge of poetics among ‘the most eloquent orators’ and their audience. This extraordinary description, showing as it does a literary culture of astonishing theatrical power, political influence, and allusive richness seems, momentarily at least, to demonstrate a genuine admiration for Māori culture. If Grey’s aesthetics fit with Romantic preferences for what is ‘wild and terrible’, not to mention the flurry of publications of Anglo-Saxon epics in this period, his view on the inevitability of indigenous cultures being ‘superseded’ also meshes with his investment in extinction. It is a theme demonstrated in the preface just discussed, through the claim that the ancient poems are ‘fast passing out of use’,52 and is repeated in Grey’s preface to the English translations, published as Polynesian Mythology. The main reasons given for the publication of this work pertain to the efficiency and efficacy of imperial administration. In addition to needing to study the mythology so as to grasp the full meaning of those allusions that structured political discourses, Grey cites as a reason for the publication of the volume the fact that ‘probably, to no other person but myself would many of their ancient rhythmical prayers and traditions have been imparted by their priests; and it is less likely that any one could now acquire them, as I regret to say that most of their old chiefs, and even some of the middle-aged ones who aided me in my researches, have already passed to the tomb.’53 This ‘passing to the tomb’ was to become the keynote of Grey’s government in southern Africa, and seems to have been an important element of his dealings with the ama-Xhosa peoples of the eastern Cape. In the Cape Colony a series of wars dating from the end of the eighteenth century had seen constant re-arrangements of frontier alliances among and

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between the ama-Xhosa and other groups, with and against the British. The fighting had cost all sides dearly in both human and monetary terms – indeed Grey’s ‘success’ in the New Zealand wars, based as it seemed to be on his distinctive combination of ethnographic knowledge and military daring,54 was significant in the decision to appoint him to South Africa where he was not only Governor of the Cape Colony but High Commissioner for the eastern Cape, a region then called ‘British Kaffraria’. During Grey’s rule this area saw the rise of an apocalyptic religious movement whose adherents demanded the killing of cattle and the destruction of crops, actions which produced catastrophic food shortages and social breakdown.55 The years 1856-57 saw an estimated 40,000 deaths from a population estimated at around three times that; as one writer put it (in 1970), ‘Kaffraria was populated with staggering, crawling men, women and children pitifully crying for food. Some of the whites never recovered from the sight’.56 Sturdier souls among the invaders – chief among them George Grey – realised that the devastation presented an unequalled opportunity to invade and hold Xhosa lands, after decades of military defiance. As Grey’s amanuensis/biographer James Milne so memorably put it, ‘Civilisation drove forward in a mortuary cart. But it was civilisation’.57 It was in the worst period of the crisis, which built during 1856 into a crescendo in the first months of 1857, that the tempo of the collecting of publications in and about southern African languages increased to a significant degree. This work was done by Wilhelm Bleek, a German philologist Grey had earlier employed to catalogue his library, but whose main work seems to have been his own philological researches. Many or even most of the letters to Bleek written during this period, mainly by missionaries, make no mention of the humanitarian crisis. Instead they report enthusiastically on publications dispatched for Grey’s collection.58 Civil Servant Charles Brownlee, whom Jeff Peires credits (perhaps problematically) with being the most sympathetic white observer of events, wrote to Cape Town in mid-March 1857 that he had sent ‘for His Excellency all the Kafir books which I have been able to collect’ including translations of ‘the Psalms, Corinthians 1st & 2nd, Galatians, & Ephesians’, along with various extracts, a hymn book, and ‘old Testament Extracts for children by the Rev. Mr Boratj of the Moravian Missions’.59 Brownlee then gave information as to where other materials might be obtained, including a suggestion that application be made to his (missionary) father to retrieve copies from his congregation! Likewise the Rev. Appleyard, himself a noted

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ethnographer, linguist, and historian, wrote – again, in the midst of the crisis – that ‘at present my whole time is taken up with translation, and matters connected therewith, my object being to give the Kafirs the whole Bible in their own language as soon as possible’.60 Clearly he felt it would be needed, but all he has to say is that he fears ‘there will be a great amount of stealing, especially at reaping time’, adding sanctimoniously that ‘I hope, when the present crisis is past, that the Kafirs may be induced to turn their attention to better things, and work for an honest living’.61 I see the work done by Bleek as continuous with Grey’s publications of Māori narratives in the sense that it is impelled by a desire to memorialise disappearing cultures, whilst the turn from mythology to bibliography represents a shift from the ‘ethnographic’ to the ‘linguistic’ end of the spectrum of activities legitimated by the term ‘philology’. Bleek had, unlike Grey, done extensive study and his doctoral thesis was a comparative analysis of European and southern African languages, so in that sense the shift from collection in the field to bibliography also represents a different kind of expertise among Grey’s collaborators and, notably, a radical distancing from the indigenous cultures under study. This greater distance is symbolised by the fact that Grey’s efforts to learn the Xhosa language seem to have been less successful than his studies in Māori. Precisely this point is evidenced in a revealing letter written by Maqoma, ‘by all allowed to be the greatest politician, and best warrior in Kaffraria’:62 At a certain time when you were here on your [visit?] coming to us, when we wished to talk to you, you perplexed us by saying we were to write. We have often written that is to say – we have often asked to be written for, but we were never answered, we complain of the writers, we say they do not write for us – for we also know that if they wrote we should receive an answer from you according to your promise. To day we see new officers appointed with regulations regarding money that we are to receive from them – there still remain subjects that we should talk on if we met you. … one thing we want is a Native Interpreter … we are tired of white Interpreters – Sir we pray you mix them – of Kafirs also let there be Interpreters that we too may be gladdened.

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The new Resident we have nothing to say of (against) and the money we say nothing of – – but / where then? (i.e. Where is the land we can live together on?) It is not with our consent – we take it this compulsion – for if we refused it, you would think we wished to fight with you Sir! But now Sir we cry to you much, from a desire to meet you, that we may state to you our complaints. The Resident with me and Botman knows what we say of him, but the Interpreter we do not want at all, but him to, we do not want him. Sir gladden us also.63 Maqoma’s letter gives some suggestion that Grey may have been panicked, on his arrival in South Africa, by sophisticated and antagonistic leaders whose language he was unable to comprehend, and that he responded to his fears by maintaining a literal and linguistic distance from them. Delegating his researches to Bleek demonstrates and surely exacerbated this distance. In the light of this kind of evidence, indigenous peoples and those who concur with their views are likely to make negative judgements about George Grey’s reputation as an ethnographer, and late in the twentieth century there were calls for Prince Charles to apologise for Grey’s actions during the crisis.64 More successfully in New Zealand the Ngati Awa have received an apology from the Crown and ‘cultural’ and ‘financial and commercial redress’ for 245,000 acres of land confiscated when Grey was governor in 1866.65 At the same time there is some evidence that the colonist component of these communities are keen to recuperate Grey as a genuinely benevolent political leader. For scholars the situation is a little more complex, as his work leaves a rich archive of sources collected in generally repugnant circumstances. * In very obvious ways Grey’s scholarship reflects imperial relations of power: his collection of information about indigenous peoples, and his dissemination of that material to a white, scholarly audience presumed and nourished Grey’s political and cultural authority. But notwithstanding the information on other cultures and other environments that poured from the colonies to Europe to fuel academic theorising, those on the front line of research clearly felt themselves isolated. Thus in a letter to renowned ornithologist John Gould, Grey pleads to be kept informed of ‘what is new’,

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for ‘all of which [I collect] is at the service of those I know in Europe, if they will only keep me au fait at [sic] what is going on in the scientific world’.66 It is hard to believe that so energetic an observer and writer as Grey should presume that the ‘scientific world’ was somewhere other than where he lived. But in some significant, material ways Grey re-oriented himself to the southern hemisphere, for while he began his career by collecting and ‘submitting’ material to scholars in Europe, his later efforts in collecting and publishing works in indigenous languages, in addition to the founding of libraries in Cape Town and Auckland (in terms of both the buildings and their contents), implies a commitment to scholarship being conducted in the antipodes. Unmitigated condemnation or recuperation of Grey carry different risks. In this context, answering the question of Grey’s relationship to ‘the margins of anthropology’ is troubling and difficult, for his position at the edge of Empire while simultaneously being its literal embodiment (as governor) was central to his development of a reputation as an expert on ‘native peoples’. Grey’s relationship to the formal academic structures of ethnography shows him arterially connected to the metropolis through his position in imperial administration and his rich personal network. Yet his geographical isolation and even the length of his life mean that Grey is in some senses on the temporal margin of the developing discipline.67 Considering Grey’s scholarly activities in conjunction with his political ones demonstrates that we must be wary of assuming that ‘the margin’, whether of Empire or discipline, is a place where, inherently, we might find ethical purchase.68 Likewise we cannot assume that scholarly distance from, or affinity with, one’s subject constitutes an inherently ethical position. These remarks might seem merely to equivocate on Grey, but they are in fact intended to contest precisely those narratives of progress to which Grey himself adhered. For by opening up the unexpected contradictions in and unexpected coherence of Grey’s career as an ethnographer, we can begin to question the assumption that there is an inevitable trajectory in the decline of racism, a view that implicitly presumes a centre gradually imposing its ‘civilised’ values on an unruly periphery. No less than a temporality, there is a geography that underpinned Grey’s assimilationism, a sense that the world was moving or being moved towards ‘civilisation’ as capitalist modes of organisation were spread. As John Stuart Mill expressed it in his Principles of Political Economy:

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The people of every country in Europe … are, in each generation, better protected against the violence and rapacity of one another … Wars, and the destruction they cause, are now usually confined, in almost every country, to those distant and outlying possessions at [those points] which it comes into contact with savages.69 This kind of orthodoxy, which was built into the rationale of George Grey’s ethnography as it was built into his administrative agendas, presumes a trajectory of ‘progress’ from centre to margin, and from past to future. In other words, there was nothing contradictory between Grey’s intellectual sympathy for indigenous people, expressed through his ethnography, and his political manoeuvrings, which hastened their dispossession. But by refusing to see the ‘common sense’ of Mill’s claim – problematising not only the notion of ‘civilisation’ but that of ‘progress’ by acknowledging the value of indigenous cultures – we can better see the coercive and destructive effects of these kinds of beliefs, and the insidiousness of the coalition between the gathering of ethnographic knowledge and imperial politics. Grey’s reputation as a man of science and an ethnographer of skill underpinned his reputation as a colonial administrator, while his leading role in the colonies in turn helped him to support those activities that we can see as contributing to the nascent science of ethnography. The crux and the irony of this reputation is that it was made through his careful management – and management of perceptions – of his relationship to some of the most despised human beings on the planet. For while Grey was certainly praised for his fiscal responsibility and his foresight in managing major public works, his greatness is repeatedly said to derive from his relationships with, and knowledge of, indigenous peoples. This is in part demonstrated by the extent to which Grey himself appropriated and deployed ‘the native voice’, which we can read in his attention to detail in publishing ‘speeches’ of farewell and welcome that were printed for his departure from and return to New Zealand,70 in recording tokens and speeches of thanks from individuals and groups, particularly in New Zealand, but also in South Africa and Australia. Even Bohan, his modern champion, notes that on leaving New Zealand the first time, Grey scrupulously recorded every gift and transcribed every waiata, speech and tribute, and posted copies to London. The tributes and the various well-organised settler farewells, at which he received

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illuminated addresses, were fully (and fulsomely) reported in the newspapers, but McLintock has shrewdly shown that Domett drew up many of these, and stylistic evidence suggests he also probably wrote some of the newspaper reports and several of the addresses.71 A set of diffuse and even competing intellectual and political influences, and Grey’s fluctuating and contested reputation in different disciplines, different colonies, and different times presents a patchwork of contradictions. Nevertheless, restoring the intellectual context in which he worked allows us to reconsider the apparent paradox of Grey’s passionate academic interest in indigenous cultures and his unbridled contempt for indigenous peoples, along with his ruthless promotion of colonial and imperial interests at their expense. Grey’s vision of a common humanity made it logical to be interested in poetry as well as property, to value language as well as labour. His efforts to appropriate and reshape indigenous cultures had the effect of serving both a pietistic account of his own career, and a narrative about ‘raising up’ indigenous peoples that does not simply rationalise, but gives a moral imperative, to the replacement of indigenous forms of cultural value and social organisation. William Lee Rees and Lily Rees, The Life and Times of Sir George Grey, K.C.B. (Auckland: H. Brett, 1892); James Milne, The Romance of a Pro-consul: Being the Personal Life and Memoirs of the Right Hon. Sir George Grey, K.C.B (London: Chatto & Windus, 1899); G. C. Henderson, Sir George Grey: Pioneer of Empire in Southern Lands (London: Dent, 1907); James Collier, Sir George Grey, Governor, High Commissioner, and Premier: An Historical Biography (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1909); James Rutherford, Episodes in the Life of Sir George Grey, K.C.B. New Zealand, 1845-1853: Six lectures (Auckland: Auckland University College, 1956) and Sir George Grey, K.C.B., 1812-1898: A Study in Colonial Government (London: Cassell, 1961); Edmund Bohan, To Be a Hero: Sir George Grey, 1812-1898 (Auckland: HarperCollins, 1998). 2 George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 81. 3 G. Grey, esq, Lieut. 83rd Regiment, Vocabulary of the dialects spoken by the Aboriginal races of S.W. Australia (To the President and Members of the Royal Geographical Society. Perth: Printed by C. Macfaull, 1839) and A Vocabulary of the dialects of South Western Australia, 2nd ed. (London: T. & W. Boone, 1840). Grey’s use of the term ‘Aboriginal’ is problematic, as many discrete languages were spoken in Australia in this period. 4 Sir George Grey, MS, Physical description of the people of the country & intellectual [?] (Adelaide, 1842-1843. G.12.c.6(2) G.572.994.GRE, NLSA Cape Town). 5 Jane Simpson, ‘Making Dictionaries,’ in Michael Walsh and Colin Yallop (eds), Language and Culture in Aboriginal Australia, eds. (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1993), p. 132. 1

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Rees and Rees: The Life and Times of Sir George Grey, p. 105. Sir George Grey, Ko nga moteatea, me nga hakirara o nga Maori [half title Poems, traditions, and chaunts of the Maories (Wellington: Robert Stokes, 1853); Ko nga mahinga a nga tupuna Maori [half title Mythology and traditions of the New Zealanders] (London: George Willis, 1854); Ko nga whakapepeha me nga whakaahuareka a nga tipuna o aotea-roa. Proverbial and popular sayings of the ancestors of the New Zealand Race (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1857); Ko nga waiata Maori he mea kohikohi mai (Cape Town: Pike’s Machine Printing Office, 1857); and Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race as Furnished by their Priests and Chiefs (London: John Murray, 1855). The fire is at Grey: ‘Preface’ to Polynesian Mythology, p. viii. 8 Rutherford claims that Grey’s role in these publications was as ‘patron and editor’, rather than translator and compiler: Sir George Grey, p. 278. 9 See for example the copy of Ko nga Mahinga a nga Tupuna Maori he mea kohikohi mai, na Sir George Grey, K.C.B., interleaved copy with MS notes and corrections, signed by Grey (G.13.a.2. G.398.0993.GRE). 10 George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-west and Western Australian during the Years 1837, 38 and 39 ... with Observations on the Moral and Physical Condition of the Aboriginal Inhabitants [1841], 2 vols. (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1964), vol. 2, p. 372. 11 Henderson: Pioneer of Empire, p. 38. 12 Sir George Grey, These are Some of the Thoughts of the Governor, Sir George Grey, towards the Maories at this Time (Printed sheet, n.d., Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington), p. 1. 13 Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). For these arguments I am also indebted to Nancy M. Williams, The Yolngu and their Land: A System of Land Tenure and the Fight for its Recognition (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1986), a book which was drawn to my attention by the scholarship of the late Minoru Hokari. 14 Hannah Augstein, citing Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 1550-1800, suggests that what she calls the ‘éthnos’ terms were being used in English and French around from 1820, with James Cowles Prichard using them from the 1830s: H.F. Augstein, James Cowles Prichard’s Anthropology: Remaking the Science of Man in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), p. xviii. 15 Grey: Journals, vol. 1, p. 207. 16 Grey: Journals, vol. 1, pp. 265-88, p. 288. 17 At G.13.1.17. NLSA Cape Town. This blow to Grey’s credibility was rebutted by a writer in the Western Australian Inquirer nearly a decade later: see ‘The new country to the northward,’ from the Western Australian Inquirer, 26 September, 3 October and 10 October 1849 (G.39.d.28, NLSA Cape Town). 18 John Miller, Early Victorian New Zealand: A Study of Racial Tension and Social Attitudes 18391852 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 93; the quotation, unreferenced, comes from the then recently-published Dillon letters: see Constantine Dillon, The Dillon Letters: The Letters of the Hon. Constantine Dillon 1842-1853, ed. C. A. Sharp (Wellington: A. & H. Reed, 1954), p. 47. 19 Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 180, p. 194. 20 Grey: Journals, vol. 1, p. 25. 6 7

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This claim is in the Report of the Seventeenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Oxford, in June, 1847, as Bunsen and others argued for the inclusion of ethnology: see review of the Report, British Quarterly Review, 10 (1949), p. 408. 22 Jacob W. Gruber, ‘Owen, Sir Richard (1804-1892), comparative anatomist and paleontologist,’ Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21026, accessed 28 July 2005). 23 George Grey, Letter to Owen, 22 July 1837, quoted in Robert Thornton, Capture by Description: Writing Ethnography in Southern Africa, 1845-1900 (Cape Town: The Author, 1988; University of Cape Town Library), p. 105. For the word lists see Grey: Journals, vol. 1., pp 17-20. 24 Aarsleff: The Study of Language, p. 208. 25 H.F. Augstein, ‘Prichard, James Cowles,’ Dictionary of National Biography at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22776, accessed 2 August 2005. His major work was Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, first published in 1813, with its third edition (1837-47) reaching five volumes. 26 Augstein: James Cowles Prichard’s Anthropology, p. xi. 27 Nancy Stepan: The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982), p. 3. 28 Stepan: The Idea of Race, pp. 44-45. 29 Sir George Grey, On the Social Life of the Ancient Inhabitants of New Zealand, and on the National Character it was likely to Form (London: Ethnological Society of London, 1869). The Auckland City Library holds copies of the 1837-47, 1843, and 1855 editions of Prichard’s main work; it also seems possible that in assembling his Polynesian Mythology, Grey was inspired in part by Prichard’s study of Egyptian mythology. 30 See for example his response to a plant that he likens to jasmine: Journals, vol. 1, p. 110. 31 Grey: Journals, vol. 1., p. 251-64. Grey also follows Prichard, in this section, in citing in detail complementary information from previous travellers. 32 Grey: Journals, vol. 1., p. 28, p. 94. 33 James Cowles Prichard, The Natural History of Man; Comprising inquiries into the modifying influence of physical and moral agencies on the different tribes of the human family, 4th edition, edited and enlarged by Edwin Norris, 2 vols. (London: H. Baillière, 1855). 34 John Lort Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, with an account of the coasts and rivers explored and surveyed during the voyage of the Beagle, 1837–1843, 2 vols. (London: Boone, 1846). Stokes is referred to at p. 487 and pp. 489-90 in Prichard. 35 Prichard: The Natural History of Man, pp. 657-58. 36 ‘Voyages and Travels,’ review of Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery … , [unnamed journal] 37/1, pp. 263-64, at George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery: reviews from periodicals (G.13.1.17., NLSA Cape Town). 37 George Clarke, Notes on Early Life in New Zealand (Hobart: J. Walch, 1903), p. 92. 38 Sir John Gorst, New Zealand Revisited: Recollections of the Days of My Youth (London: Pitman, 1908), p. 163. 39 Grey: Journals, vol. 1, p. 261. 21

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William Gillies, Historical Reader for Standard V. The Story of the British Empire: From the Beginnings of the Stuart Period to the Reign of Queen Victoria (Public School Series. Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, [1909]), p. 250. 41 Historical Reader for Standard VI: The History of the British Colonial Empire, 4th ed. (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1911), p. 255. 42 The New Zealand Colony: Its Geography and History (London: Edward Arnold, [1903], p. 63). 43 The New Zealand Colony, p. 64. 44 Collier: Sir George Grey, p. 64. 45 Assessing a volume of Ethnographical Researches in 1854, one irate reviewer was driven to remark that ‘The settled and resolute determination of its authors to have Moses proved wrong and the Bible a fabrication betrays them into the most preposterous assumptions, the most arrogant assertions, … the most laughable contradictions’ (review of Ethnological Researches, based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures and Crania of Races, and upon their Natural, Geographical, Philosophical, and Bibliographical History, illustrated by selections from the unedited papers of Samuel George Morton, British Quarterly Review, 1 July 1855, p. 10). 46 Sir George Grey, ‘Preface’ to Ko Nga Moteata, me ngah hakirara o Nga Maori (Wellington: Robert Stokes, 1853), p. vii. 47 Grey: ‘Preface’ to Ko Nga Moteata, p. vii. 48 Grey: ‘Preface’ to Ko Nga Moteata, p. vii; pp. vii-viii. 49 Grey: ‘Preface’ to Ko Nga Moteata, p. viii. His appreciative view was endorsed by a commentator nearly half a century later: see Reginald Hodder, ‘The Poetry of the Maoris,’ The Gentleman’s Magazine (October 1899), pp. 382-97. An anonymous reviewer of the initial publication of the English translation offers a similar mix of panegyric to Grey and condescending appreciation of the poetry: see ‘Polynesia,’ review of Polynesian Mythology by Sir George Grey, Dublin University Magazine, 271 (July 1855), pp. 18-37. 50 Grey: ‘Preface’ to Ko Nga Moteata, p. xi. 51 Grey: ‘Preface’ to Ko Nga Moteata, pp. ix-x. 52 Grey: ‘Preface’ to Ko Nga Moteata, p. viii. 53 Grey: ‘Preface’ to Polynesian Mythology, p. x. 54 For a critical account of Grey’s role and his military reputation see James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict [1986] (Auckland: Penguin, 1998). 55 The events are recounted in Jeff Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856-7 [1989], 2nd ed. (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2003), which eviscerates Grey for his exploitation of the devastation. See especially chapter 8, ‘Kaffir Relief,’ pp. 262-91. 56 Gutsche: The Bishop’s Lady, p. 164. 57 Milne: Romance of a Proconsul, p. 198. 58 MSB 223 Sir George Grey (Auckland) Correspondence. 59 Charles Brownlee, Letter, 8 March 1857 from Dohne (MSB 223 [1]: Sir George Grey [Auckland] Correspondence A-C, Files 1-39; File no. 28, NLSA Cape Town). 60 J.W. Appleyard, Letter to Sir George Grey, 7 January 1857, Mount Coke (MSB 223 [1], File no. 3, NLSA Cape Town), p. 4. This letter also makes reference to Grey learning Xhosa, Appleyard wishing him well in his studies (p. 3). 61 Appleyard: Letter, p. 3. 40

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Charles Brownlee, ‘Chiefs of British Kaffraria’ (G.968.67.BRO; G.10.c.14 [bound between items 14 and 15], 12 pp, NLSA Cape Town). This item follows the document ‘Native Laws and Customs,’ being written upside down, at the back of that item, which itself is uncatalogued. I attribute it to Brownlee on the basis of the similarity of handwriting in ‘Native Laws and Customs,’ although of course it is possible that these are copies. 63 Makoma and Botman, Letter to Sir George Grey, 27 April 1856, Kwa Macoma (In Xhosa. Translation. April 27th 1856, At Makoma’s, In English, [Catalogued as] Letters from Kafir Chiefs to Sir George Grey, 1856-1857. G.10.c.13[16]; G.968.76 GRE, NLSA Cape Town). 64 See http://www.dispatch.co.za/1999/10/25/features/LP1.HTM, accessed 4 November 2005. 65 See http://www.beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=16344, accessed 4 November 2005. 66 George Grey, Letter to John Gould, 21 October 1842 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington [ATL], MS Papers 705/1; Photocopies of originals, A173 Gould Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney). 67 Augstein: James Cowles Prichard, p. xv. 68 In this section of the argument I draw on Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2004), particularly the Conclusion (pp. 148-53). 69 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, ed. Sir William Ashley [1848] (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), p. 697. The editor notes that Mill added the ‘usually’ to a later edition. 70 Native Addresses of Welcome to Sir George Grey. Auckland: [s.n.], 1861; Charles Oliver B. Davis, Maori Mementos: Being a series of addresses, presented by the native people to His Excellency Sir George Grey, K.C.B., F.R.S. Governor and High Commissioner of the Cape of Good Hope, and late Governor of New Zealand: with introductory remarks and explanatory notes, to which is added a small collection of laments (Auckland: Printed by Williamson and Wilson, 1855). 71 Bohan: To Be a Hero, p. 139. The reference for the first sentence of this is ‘See enclosures to Newcastle, especially 26 September and 12, 23 and 27 December 1853. GBPP 1860/2719’; the second A.H. McLintock, Crown Colony Government in New Zealand (Wellington: Goverment Printer, 1958), p. 385. 62

Henry Ling Roth

3. HENRY LING ROTH IN TASMANIA Russell McDougall

Familiar now mainly to antiquarian booksellers, the name of Henry Ling Roth (1855-1925) was widely known in his own time, for he was highly regarded by all of the establishment figures of anthropology. The Henry Ling Roth Research Fund at the University of Cambridge now offers an occasional scholarship in aid of anthropological research but his intellectual reputation today is for the most part dispersed among a small group of scholars and amateur historians. The disconnectedness of their special interests – in Malay silverwork, Māori tattoo, Yorkshire coining, or the history of weaving, spinning, and hand-made textiles – has hardly assisted recognition of his larger achievement. Much of his work was proto-Boasian, what might now be regarded as salvage anthropology, the three key works in this regard being The Aborigines of Tasmania (1890), The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo (1896), and Great Benin: Its Customs, Arts and Horrors (1903). In these he recorded in as much detail as possible the supposedly vanishing races and their cultures. Modern anthropologists are generally suspicious of those whose emphasis was on gathering information, rather than on assisting the cultural survival of the peoples they studied, yet all three books have been republished in modern times.1 Similarly, his book on antique Malay and Peranakan silver, Oriental Silverwork: Malay and Chinese, A Handbook for Connoisseurs, Collectors, Students and Silversmiths (1910), remains a standard reference for scholars and collectors. Roth’s writings about Pacific cultures were also extensive,2 although he was not able to complete before his death the major work on tattoo and the decorative arts that he planned. His final work, The Maori Mantle (1923), was said by Sir Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) to contain ‘the most intensive work that has so far been published on any Polynesian craft’.3 My interest in this chapter is in Ling Roth’s contribution to late Victorian and early Edwardian British and European understandings of the history and

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culture of the Tasmanians, and in how his work is being mobilised in the contemporary history wars over Australia’s past. The publication of The Aborigines of Tasmania in 1890 and of the revised edition of 1899 were key moments in the translation of the indigenous peoples of Tasmania for European and Australian settler consumption, with lasting but changing implications.4 * Henry Ling Roth was the third child of Matthias and Anna Maria Roth (née Collins). Matthias, an Hungarian Jewish émigré and London doctor much influenced by the ‘movement cure’ theory of Swedish gymnast, Peter Ling, is generally credited with the introduction into England of physical education, as a means to the prevention and cure of various diseases. He appears to have relinquished Judaism in 1852 when he married a Christian English woman. But the values he bequeathed to his children descended from the Jewish Enlightenment nonetheless, with its stress on freedom of belief and the benefits of trans-cultural learning. In fact, Matthias’s relinquishing of his Jewish identity is entirely consistent with the main intellectual trend of the Jewish Enlightenment, which was toward an emancipation premised upon the sacrificing of nationality to the greater good of social integration. The potential for applying this idea to the subject of the indigenous cultures of colonialism must have been hard to ignore. Ling Roth travelled widely on business – to British Guiana, Eastern Russia, and Europe – and in 1878 was commissioned by English businessmen to investigate the Queensland sugar industry. One of these was probably the agricultural scientist, Sir J.B. Lawes, founder of Rothamsted Experimental Station, for Henry stayed six years as his private secretary on Fairleigh plantation, near Mackay. He was Honorary Secretary of the Mackay Planters’ and Farmers’ Association (Q.) from 1881 to 1884, and he wrote the first history of Mackay, including chapters on the ‘discovery’ and exploration of the east coast of Australia, on early north Queensland shipping, and on the local Aboriginal population. His attitude to the labour question – specifically, to the South Seas labour trade, and to planters’ petitioning of the British government for a supply of ‘coolie’ labour from India – provides an important background for his developing anthropological curiosity. He was critical in his Report on the Sugar Industry of Queensland (1880) of the selfishness of white workers. Not surprisingly, the report attracted a good number of

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mostly hostile reviews. He fell out with Francis Amhurst, co-owner with Lawes of the Fairleigh sugar plantation, and returned to England. Ling Roth seems to have begun his career essentially as an accountant, but was transformed by his experience of travel into an author: first a geographical writer, then graduating to the full-scale cultural translations of anthropology. An important context in which to consider his first major ethnographic work, The Aborigines of Tasmania (1890),5 is that of his oeuvre leading up to it, which includes writings on Eastern Russian peasantry, the origins of agriculture, on Australian meteorology, wasps, ants, and bees, on sugar, continental irrigation, Franco-Swiss peasant proprietorship and dairy farming, and a geographical bibliography and cartography of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic).6 Some of these pieces had elements of science writing, while others were more geographical and social studies, with an interest in other cultures gradually emerging as the predominant concern. Henry Ling Roth gives us a distinctive construction of the intellectual, albeit one not uncommon in the Victorian period, outside the emergent disciplinary formations of the universities. In the pattern of the early career we note the connection between writing on agriculture and writing on ethnography, the science of nature and the ‘science of man’. Civilisation in the late nineteenth century, as so often still, was conceived as a triumph of human ingenuity over the natural world – hence the importance of technology as a measure of human progress. The hierarchy of culture over nature that earlier had propelled Europe’s narrative of discovery now helped to legitimate European invasion and occupation, particularly in Australia, where the land was assumed to be terra nullius (‘no man’s land’). As Kay Anderson says, the master narrative of evolution plots the cultivation of nature (social progress) in parallel with the acquiring of human consciousness (biological progress): ‘Cultivation is scripted as the turning point that launched humanity on its diverse “civilizing” paths.’7 Historically, then, agricultural science has an integral relation to anthropology; and it is not hard to see how Ling Roth made the move from writing nature to writing culture. We witness him preparing for this move in his 1887 piece ‘On the Origin of Agriculture’, where he writes: ‘a savage mind is not likely to grasp the real position which would arise from cultivation of the soil.’8 The career, as I have implied, provides a context for the writing, and serves also as a guide to its meaning. The work that early anthropology performed, writing the colonial narrative of other cultures, is suggestive of the relationship that existed then as now between particular genres of

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cultural representation and the lives of particular authors writing in those genres. There is no single way to understand such relationships, no underlying form or easy theoretical solution to text and context relations, or text and identity. Ling Roth applied for the position of Librarian with the Geographical Society, and did not get it. He was recommended for the position of Secretary to the Committee of the London Hospital by John Bright, the radical Quaker and Free Trade Reformist, to whom he was related by his brother Bernard’s marriage to Bright’s daughter. But he failed to obtain that also. Then, in 1888, he joined a firm in Halifax (Yorkshire) as an accountant, and began his nocturnal research to understand and explain the Aborigines of Tasmania. * The invasion of Van Diemen’s Land began in 1803. The indigenous inhabitants put up a spirited but ultimately futile resistance,9 and in 1833 the missionary and protector George Augustus Robinson moved the remnants of the original population onto a reserve on Flinders Island, just north of the Tasmanian mainland. After fourteen desperate years, the remaining fortyseven, mostly ill and dying, were moved back to the main island, at Oyster Cove. Charles Dilke, in his influential study of the British Empire midcentury, reported: ‘Fifty years ago, our colonists found in Tasmania a powerful and numerous though degraded native race. At this moment, three old women and a lad dwell on Gun-carriage Rock, in Bass Straits, all who remain of the aboriginal population of the island.’10 The small and rapidly vanishing community at Oyster Cove told the Victorian world a story it was keen to absorb: it provided Darwin with his central example of race extinction; and it caused R. Montgomery Martin, on behalf of the Aborigines Protection Society, sadly to bemoan that no policy could succeed in preserving the ‘wild races’ of the world, since their extinction apparently was inevitable.11 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Tasmanians became the indigenous cause célèbre, providing (as Peter Hulme says) a kind of template for reading many other indigenous situations.12 When Truganini died her skeleton was placed in a glass case at the entrance of the Aboriginal exhibition room in the Tasmanian Museum as a final symbol of closure to the histories of the so-called primitive societies. Thus Ling Roth, turning his gaze to the Tasmanians, might safely have assumed that he would be dealing with a subject of limited scope, on which it should be possible with due

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diligence and scholarship to establish complete authority. Importantly, too, if there were no more Aboriginals in Tasmania, there was no need to travel there. Ling Roth was, indeed, primarily a synthesiser. Alfred Cort Haddon described him as ‘a master of the art of collating information and of presenting scattered records in a readable form’.13 Edward Tylor praised The Aborigines of Tasmania for bringing together, with ‘an approach to absolute completeness’, information ‘scattered through voyages, histories, colonial documents, and other sources from which first-hand information, however fragmentary, could be obtained’.14 The book’s encyclopaedic scope and form confirm Tylor’s own understanding of culture as a compendium of artefacts and behaviours operating within a bounded space. The genre is commodious, allowing Ling Roth to survey the geography and history of the island, then the physiology and psychology of its inhabitants, their knowledge of fire, their methods of hunting and fishing, their scientific and artistic achievements, their manufacture of weapons and other artefacts, their trade habits, customs, language and finally their origins. The Tasmanians were already textually over-determined, widely regarded as the missing link between human and ape. But the distinctiveness of the problematic of cultural translation in Ling Roth’s case stems from the particular inflection given to text/context relations by armchair anthropology: Ling Roth was writing about a colonial domain which he had never visited, and about a people he had never met. On the face of it, one might expect the complete disentanglement of cultural production from colonial work. But that was very far from the case. * It is hard to reconstruct the horizons of expectation for The Aborigines of Tasmania at the time of its publication in 1890, the primary and secondary readership that its author must originally have imagined. But the reviews suggest at least three different possibilities of readership. The first horizon was scientific. Friedrich Max Müller, reviewing the book in Nature, called it ‘honest, unpretentious, and therefore most useful’ – indeed, ‘no serious student of human palaeontology’ could afford to be without it. Thus, in his view, its small print run (two hundred copies, sold by subscription only) spoke adversely of the state of anthropology at the time. But this, of course, was a political point. Müller was a pioneer of comparative mythology and comparative religion in Britain, fighting a

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rearguard battle against the rising science of anthropology, which threatened much of his own scholarship with obsolescence. The second horizon of expectations was cultural. ‘Not many years ago’, the review of Ling Roth’s book in the Colonies and India observed, ‘even a person of what might be called “superior culture” would look askance at a book of this nature; but … we now possess a distinct line of study in relation to the early life and work of mankind.’15 What did ‘superior culture’ mean in this context? In 1869, in Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold famously argued that ‘contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world’ is the crucial component of a healthy democratic state. Two years later, Edward Tylor produced the equation: ‘culture’ equals ‘civilisation’.16 By 1890, to be civilised one needed to be in contact with the best that had been thought and said not only about art and philosophy but also about the savage and the primitive. We should keep in mind that the etymological root of the word ‘culture’ is ‘colo’ (to live in), from which also derive the words ‘colonise’ and ‘cultivate’. In late Victorian England culture and cultivation relied profoundly upon translating and absorbing the colonial narrative, a point Edward Said makes in Culture and Imperialism.17 But here the question of genre arises: was Ling Roth’s writing of the colonial narrative regarded exclusively as scientific, or did its cultural power have a literary source as well? Here we are on the third horizon of expectations. Not all reviewers judged anthropology a label sufficient to express the ‘very curious and interesting’ subject matter of the book. As one review of the second edition in The Field noted, this was a book not only for anthropologists, but for the entertainment of all ‘those who take delight in works of travel’.18 The wider circle, then, was the large readership that existed for travel writing. And it was in that context that reviewers hoped that detailed descriptions of the manners and customs of ‘strange’ races might generally pique the interest of the mythic ‘common’ reader. We need to see these social and conceptual frames of readership within the historical circumstances that produced them. Late nineteenth-century reviewers of early anthropological texts, before the professionalisation of the discipline, were in effect ‘giving to their own readers a “master” set of interpretive conventions’, which they exemplified by the reading performance they gave in their reviews.19 At the high-water mark of Empire, in the late Victorian era, the reading strategies of the new science were still relatively uncharted. The reviews can be seen as proposing ways of reading

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to the potential audience that the reviewers identified for Ling Roth’s book. For the general (or common) reader, the recommended way to translate the science of otherness into the experience of culture was to read the colonial narrative through the literary lens of travel writing. It was irrelevant whether or not the writer was a traveller. In the case of ethnographic writing, the reader was the traveller. Another useful strategy, the anthropologist and classicist Andrew Lang advised, was to activate the trope of simile. Ling Roth had selected the Tasmanians as the last of the Paleolithics. Lang, reviewing his book in the Daily News, asked: what kind of life did the men have who manufactured the rude un-hafted and un-ground stone implements found in the gravel beds of England? For these were not the polished and finely shaped implements of the Neolithic period; they too were Palaeolithic. Read Ling Roth, Lang advised, to see how the very last people lived who ‘tooled’, like Britain’s early ancestors, with rudely cripple flints: We cannot conclude that the English and the Tasmanian were similar in their ways and their ideas just because they were on the same level of culture in weapons. Probably our own predecessors, so illequipped for the struggle of life, may have belonged to a white race, with all its superior endurance, and intelligence, or capacity of becoming intelligent. It is only certain that, in such respects as their relics testify to, the inhabitants of Britain were not more civilized than the black Tasmanians.20 This accumulation of the book’s findings is both its strength and weakness. For as Robert Hampson says: ‘One of the problems with armchair anthropology is the difficulty of reconciling or even negotiating between contradictory accounts. [Ling] Roth’s solution … [was] simply to provide the contradictory accounts and to display the contesting interpretations.’21 This played into the hands of anthropology’s opponents, like Müller, who delighted in mocking Lang and Tylor by praising Ling Roth: Perhaps not the least important lesson which anthropologists might learn from this book is the extremely uncertain character of the accounts which visitors of Tasmania, and even persons long settled in the island, have given us of its inhabitants. This is a sore point with

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the students of sociology, but it is high time that it should be thoroughly probed. 22 Müller confined his example, and, with the help of Ling Roth, set about showing that there was not ‘one essential point in the religion of the Tasmanians on which different authorities have not made assertions diametrically opposed’. The Tasmanians, being reputed the lowest of savages, were represented as the children of nature, and whatever the children of nature were supposed to have been, when emerging from a purely animal into a more or less human state, the Tasmanians and other savages were called up as witnesses to confirm every kind of psychological speculation: We saw that there is hardly any religion which could not be proved to have been the original religion of the Tasmanians. How then can we wish for more pliant witnesses in support of any theory as to what the primordial religion of mankind must have been? If it were desired to prove that, prior to the advent of Europeans, they were atheists, without any religious ideas or ceremonial usages, we have several excellent witnesses to prove it. We could prove equally well that they believed in a devil only, that they were Dualists, believing in a good and an evil spirit, that they had deified the powers of Nature, that they had arrived at a belief in one God, that they were polytheists, that they believed in ghosts, in the return of the spirits of their friends, in the immortality of the soul, and in the efficacy of prayers and charms. Nay, if it were desired to produce perfectly unprejudiced evidence in favour of the descent of man from some higher animal, Lord Monboddo might have appealed to the Tasmanians. For, according to Mr. Horton they believed “that they were formed with tails and without knee-joints, by a benevolent being, and that another descended from heaven, and compassionating the sufferers, cut off their tails, and with grease softened their knees.” Ling Roth had collected his evidence carefully and conscientiously, and it was ‘full of contradictions’. Nothing could be ‘more doubtful, more perplexing’, said Müller. ‘Yet with such materials our best anthropologists and socialists have built up their systems.’ 23

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But most of the book’s reviewers ignored or failed to notice the contradictions in Ling Roth’s composite image of the Tasmanians. It is the image of an extinct race, but one that had possessed ‘the marked characteristics of pristine simplicity’. With ‘little or no knowledge of agriculture’, the Tasmanians’ staple food was shell-fish. They followed ‘the earliest of all human pursuits – hunting and fishing’. They were largely nomadic, yet trade did not exist. They had knowledge of fire, but in general they lacked curiosity and ‘intellectual strength’.24 Ling Roth’s Tasmanian reminded one reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald of Goldsmith’s epitaph for the Grub-Street hack: Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed, Who long was a bookseller’s hack; He led such a damnable life in this world, I don’t think he’ll wish to come back. The Tasmanians too, it seemed, had ‘led such a terrible life in this world’, that the settlers ‘didn’t think they’d wish to come back’.25 * The second edition of Ling Roth’s The Aborigines of Tasmania was published in 1899, so heavily revised and expanded that it was virtually a new text. The chief source of information for the revisions and additions was James Backhouse Walker, a liberal-minded Hobart barrister, solicitor, and member of the new University of Tasmania’s first council. His father, George Washington Walker, had come with his friend James Backhouse from England to Van Diemen’s Land in 1832 on the first Quaker mission to the colonies.26 Backhouse Walker took a vital interest in the history of Tasmanian exploration, early settlement, and associated Aboriginal matters. He was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London, he appeared regularly in the proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania, and many of his writings were tabled in the Tasmanian parliament. Backhouse Walker’s first piece of advice to Ling Roth was that he needed to provide ‘a more accurate account of the history of the relations between the Aborigines and colonists’ than had been given in the first edition.27 Backhouse Walker favoured the authority of those who had lived in Tasmania, who knew the settler experience and had first-hand contact with

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Aboriginals. Of these, the ‘best and most impartial’ authority, in his view, was J.E. Calder. Calder’s The Native Tribes of Tasmania: Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, &c. (1875) is largely compiled from Tasmanian government archives, including Robinson’s dispatches and other official reports.28 But Calder was not by any means a puppet apologist for colonialism, stating bluntly: ‘I don’t believe that justice, or anything like it, was always done here.’ He is critical of Aboriginal hangings, for instance, as merely escalating frontier violence, and neither does he shirk from condemnation of the kidnapping and enslaving of Aboriginal women by the Bass Strait sealers.29 This is the historical perspective that Backhouse Walker points Ling Roth toward. Then, proceeding to discuss a whole host of other early authors, he pushes Ling Roth not simply to recognise the differences between their various accounts, but to weigh their value, and to make allowance for the degree of personal prejudice that might be involved.30 The Quaker connection is important. Not only John Bright but also Edward Tylor, two of Ling Roth’s most powerful referees, were Quakers. Bright had connections to the Quakers at York, where Backhouse Walker’s father had retired after his missionary work. Bright’s brother-in-law, Samuel Lucas, was the editor of the Quaker newspaper The Morning Star, which Edward Backhouse supported financially as a voice for the Peace Society during the Crimean War (1854-56).31 The Roths also had associations with Joseph Sturge, the Birmingham Quaker activist of the Anti-Slavery campaign. There is no direct proof that these connections to the Society of Friends assisted Ling Roth’s cause with Backhouse Walker in Tasmania, but they cannot have hurt. Backhouse Walker, in his correspondence, models piety and propriety, yet questions history boldly enough to suggest the transgressive quality of his background in evangelical dissent. Ling Roth’s style shows something of the Quaker spirit too perhaps, in the underplaying of system and the organisational simplicity of his writing, as well as the egalitarian manner in which he treated his sources. Ling Roth was convinced that the most valuable addition to the new edition would be its several appendices of Aboriginal vocabularies, compiled from the narratives of European explorers and early settlers. Knowing nothing of Robinson’s unpublished vocabularies, Ling Roth wrongly imagined these appendices to include all known Tasmanian Aboriginal words. Yet certainly there had been no serious examination of Tasmanian languages; and a number of the vocabularies in Ling Roth’s appendices,

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especially those of the French navigators, were either obscure and difficult to access or had been forgotten entirely. Tasmania was one of the first locales of language extinction in Australia. It is thought that at least eight and possibly as many as sixteen indigenous Aboriginal languages had been spoken there. Salvaging what was left of them was important. Ling Roth went through all the vocabularies carefully, and Tylor’s wife, Anna, collated all of these with an eye to making a single phonetically correct word list along the lines laid down by the Royal Geographical Society. Privately, Ling Roth doubted that it could ever be accurate.32 He did simplify the spellings and he did provide a consolidated Tasmanian-English vocabulary as the final linguistic appendix to the volume. But his anxieties are important, as we shall see. The other significant addition to the second edition was the map at the end. This was Backhouse Walker’s idea, and he supplied it. Its significance was fourfold: first, it identified sites where Aboriginals had been ‘seen at any time’; second, it divided these into the localities where they had been encountered by early navigators and those where they had been found since the first European settlements; third, wherever possible, it identified indigenous Aboriginal place names; fourth, it complemented Ling Roth’s discussion of demography. For example, both the information on the southern and western ‘tribes’ which we see marked on the map and the discussion of their demography earlier, rely substantially upon the vocabulary collected by Joseph Milligan, which is given as one of the appendices. Hugh Munro Hull had published the Aboriginal population numbers in his Van Diemen’s Land Statistical Summary 1816-1865,33 and Ling Roth had included these in his first edition. But now he had access to Backhouse Walker’s father’s unpublished journals, as well as other sources supplied by his informant, including James Kelly’s narrative of a voyage around Tasmania in 1815-16 (published serially in the Hobart Town Courier in 1854).34 The estimates varied wildly. Robinson suggests that, at the time of the European invasion, the island’s indigenous population had been between 6,000 and 8,000. Yet Henry Melville, writing at about the same time as Robinson, in the early 1830s, places the figure as high as 20,000. Milligan’s upper limit is 2,000, while Backhouse Walker writes that there were ‘probably never more than 700 to 1000’. While Ling Roth acknowledged that it was ‘quite useless’ to try to estimate the numbers retrospectively, he

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favoured Milligan’s figure; and privately he considered that even 2,000 was perhaps too high.35 Backhouse Walker worked over several months to place the ‘tribal’ divisions accurately on the map, knowing that he could never achieve anything more than ‘some general indications’.36 In November 1897 he lectured the Royal Society of Tasmania on his findings. The lecture, which he duly published in the Society’s Papers and Proceedings, was in its own author’s view too speculative to be satisfactory.37 Records, of course, were scanty. Backhouse Walker’s method was as follows: first, he noted the ‘places where blacks were seen or where they were known to resort’; next he considered the nature of the country, ‘whether favorable for hunting or so heavily encumbered with timber and scrub as to be practically impenetrable’; and then he placed his markings on the map accordingly.38 He sent the finished map to Ling Roth with a warning: ‘It is of course largely conjectural.’ And he asked that this caveat be placed with the map in the book, but it was not. The failure to include this warning is a clear instance of the way in which armchair anthropology generally preferred its own authority to any colonial anxiety. The wrinkle in the map was a local concern. The synthetic studies of armchair anthropology were grand mapping exercises. Exported for settler consumption, they drove colonial agendas, justified the actions of colonial administrations, and helped eliminate opposition. The other task Ling Roth gave to Backhouse Walker was far more difficult. He had seen a brief report in the prestigious British science journal, Nature, of a paper read by James Barnard before the Royal Society in Hobart in September 1889, entitled ‘Notes on the Last Living Aboriginal of Tasmania.’ It claimed that an elderly resident of Irishtown, near Port Cygnet, named Fanny Cochrane Smith, was ‘a pure blood Tasmanian aborigine and hence the sole survivor of her race’.39 Seemingly, the Tasmanian government had accepted the claim, for it had twice voted grants to Smith on account of her unique position, first in 1882 and again in 1884. Ling Roth got hold of the Hobart Mercury’s report of the Royal Society’s meeting and, on the basis of its admittedly ‘meagre account’ of Barnard’s paper, he wrote up his objections to Smith’s claim and published them in Nature. Even then, he could not let the question rest. ‘We desire to know further about Fanny Smith,’ he wrote to Backhouse Walker:

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What we want is a fairly large portrait (negatives) of her in full face & profile (without any headgear) and specimens of her hair. The hair should be from her head, from the armpits (if it grow there) and from the pubes – a medical man in whom reliance can be placed might be deputed to obtain it. If you can send us a good concise scientific description of the physical characteristics of this woman so much the better.40

Mrs. Fanny Cochrane Smith

Truganini

A major theme of Ling Roth’s correspondence with Backhouse Walker is his impatience to receive the hair of Fanny Cochrane Smith.41 The only museum in Europe that possessed any Tasmanian Aboriginal hair was the Musée

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d’Ecole d’Anthropologie, Jardin des Plantes, in Paris. Some few locks had been in Ling Roth’s possession at the time of his preparing the first edition, and he had examined and reported on them there. But he had since given them to the Pitt Rivers Museum, and they had been lost. In 1896 the race scientist, A.H. Keane, published a paper in which he accepted the argument that Smith was the last living Tasmanian.42 Tired of waiting on Backhouse Walker, Ling Roth impatiently dispatched a photographer to Irishtown, and so obtained three photographs of Smith, and at last a lock of her hair (though from what portion of her head, he did not know). He also had descriptions of her from two correspondents, both of whom were of the same opinion as she was herself – that she was indeed Aboriginal. Since its invention, as Paul Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves remind us, photography had ‘played a key part in the processes by which Empire was explored, surveyed, mapped, and brought back to the metropolitan centre, to be visualized and popularized as an idea’.43 Anthropological photography performed a vital service to colonialism, assisting it to control subject populations by means of a visual classification of racial ‘types’. Ling Roth compared the photographs of Smith with those of Truganini and other deceased Tasmanian Aboriginals whose ‘full-blood’ identity he judged beyond doubt. Then he sketched the profiles of all of these and superimposed them. From this he concluded that Smith was ‘altogether an Europeanised type of countenance’.44 Professor S.J. Hickson, President of the Manchester Microscopical Society, to whom Ling Roth took the lock of hair, told him that its owner might be ‘either Tasmanian or Andamese’.45 Further pressed, however, Hickson allowed that it was common in ‘halfcastes’ for the hair of the aboriginal parent to predominate. On the basis of this very flimsy evidence, Ling Roth ended his report to the Journal of the Anthropological Institute: ‘we cannot consider she is a true Tasmanian aboriginal, and must conclude that with the death of Truganini we have lost for ever a living representative of the Tasmanian race.’46 Then, hurriedly, just before the book went to press, he appended this report to his second edition. * As Hulme points out, one of the reasons why the Tasmanians had such an impact on Victorian scientists and readers generally was the fact that they were the first indigenous group to be serially photographed. Their changing

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image – as the group at Oyster Cove got smaller and the survivors grew older – seemed to offer ‘a dramatic representation of the decline of the weaker races’.47 A number of reviews of Ling Roth’s first edition had commented enthusiastically on the beautiful autotype plates of his sister’s drawings from authentic sources. But Ling Roth was well aware that interest in and therefore sales of his second edition would depend not only on the amount of new information it contained, but on his expanding of the visual record as well. He familiarised himself with the collection of portraits in the British Museum. He looked up the portraits by Glover and Duterreau. He considered the convict engraver, Thomas Bock’s drawings for Lady Jane Franklin.48 He had in his possession Bishop Nixon’s photographs from Oyster Cove. These would have been much more interesting, Backhouse Walker said, if the Bishop had persuaded his subjects to remove ‘at least some of their clothing’.49 But Charles Woolley’s photographs were the best. Woolley, a professional photographer in Hobart in the 1850s and 1860s, had produced in 1866 a number of portraits of the five Aboriginal survivors then remaining at Oyster Cove.50 James Beattie, a friend of Backhouse Walker and himself a professional photographer, had Woolley’s original negatives, and he copied them for Ling Roth. Thus the second edition of The Aborigines of Tasmania opens dramatically with Woolley’s images of two famously extinct ‘primitives’, William Lanney (‘King Billy’) and Patty (Cooneana).51 But why not Truganini? The 1935 Encyclopaedia of Tasmania is indicative of what, even then, was still the logical pairing: Lanney and Truganini. But Ling Roth saved Woolley’s photographs of Truganini (full-frontal, angled sideways, and full side-profile) for the next-to-last pages, facing opposite the three photographs of Smith, ‘taken specially’ according to his instructions, and disposed in exactly the same way as Truganini, to force the comparison.52 The strategy worked. Lang wrote in his review of the second edition: The portraits of Truganini and Mrs Smith … are conclusive, and instantaneous, evidence that the latter lady was a half-caste. Nothing can be plainer than the European traits in the profile and full-face portraits of Mrs. Smith, that are printed side by side with Truganini’s at the end of this volume. As pictured here, Mrs. Fanny Cochrane Smith might pass for a true blue, jolly, British landlady of a Cockney ‘pub,’ or lodging-house. But to make any mistake about Truganini is

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impossible. That black, hideous face, with the curiously-fixed, yet vague, wild animal stare of the eyes, is the face of a pure Tasmanian savage. Its owner was the last of a people who, in the first years of this century, still lived, with scarcely any discoverable change, or improvement, of any kind, the life of their half-brute ancestors in the palaeolithic age – the mammoth period of Europe.53 Again Ling Roth had trouble publishing, again he had to raise money by subscription to see the work into print. The print run was only 225, twentyfive more than the first edition. The artwork exists for a third edition, but this never eventuated. And with the sacking of Benin taking place just as the book was going to press, Ling Roth moved his focus to West Africa, never to return. The image that he gave us of the Tasmanians, however, entered deeply into the Australian consciousness, and also into British and European understandings of Australian colonial history. There were no more Aboriginals on Tasmania; colonialism had killed them all. What more could be said? Ling Roth’s second edition had said all that could be said. And it remained the standard reference on Tasmanian Aboriginals for almost 70 years, until N.J.B. Plomley’s monumental edition of the Tasmanian journals and papers of Robinson, Friendly Mission (1966), swept Ling Roth into oblivion and re-opened the whole question of Tasmanian history. * The social revolution of the 1960s swept a great deal of earlier scholarly tradition away. All the important scholarship of the 1970s to the 1990s that laid the ground of cross-disciplinary Aboriginal Studies either ignored or rejected Ling Roth: Henry Reynolds, Vivienne Rae-Ellis, Cassandra Pybus – everyone, ironically, except Plomley himself, who in a footnote to his Prelude to Robinson’s journals wrote that Ling Roth’s was the more comprehensive cultural account.54 In his Bibliography of the Tasmanian Aborigines, too, Plomley recommended Ling Roth as ‘essential … for all students of the Tasmanians’. The quality of the praise is interesting – Ling Roth’s work, he says, ‘is uncritical, if indeed that is a fault’55 – because by this time, of course, the idea of objectivism in the human sciences had been all but eclipsed by new understandings of knowledge production: objectivity as the creation of certain knowledge practices and preferences, equating with political neutrality, and as a rhetorical mask for conservatism.56

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Then, in 1981, Lyndall Ryan’s book, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, finally and effectively dispelled the idea of the Tasmanians’ extinction. It revealed the survival of an ‘islander’ community in the eastern Bass Strait, descended from Aboriginal Tasmanian women and European sealers, who provided the foundation for a still existing Aboriginal Tasmanian community. The timing of Ryan’s publication is important. It coincides precisely with a Department of Aboriginal Affairs’ proposal to abandon ‘blood’ as a determinant of Aboriginal identity, expressed in the Report on a Review of the Administration of the Working Definition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (1981). Tasmania had been the last of the Australian states to enter ‘blood’ into legislation as a means of classifying Aborigines in 1912. Thereafter, as John GardinerGarden summarises in his research note for the Australian Parliamentary Library on the definition of Aboriginality, the states regularly legislated ‘all forms of inclusion and exclusion (to and from benefits, rights, places etc.) by reference to degrees of Aboriginal blood’.57 While the Federal Parliament was constitutionally unable to legislate with regard to Aboriginal people prior to the 1967 referendum, it accepted and broadly endorsed the states’ ‘blood’ criteria for defining Aboriginality. In the 1940s, anthropology began its move away from essentialising visions of race, and by the 1960s was ready to abandon taxonomy as a means of understanding human variation. Federal legislation in the 1970s echoed anthropology’s move away from blood definitions, but retained the use of ‘race’ as a category until 1981, when the new definition was proposed: ‘An Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he (she) lives.’58 As Gardiner-Garden notes, ‘This three-part definition (descent, self-identification and community recognition) was soon adopted by Federal Government departments as their “working definition” for determining eligibility to some services and benefits.’59 It found its way subsequently into State legislation, was legitimated by both the Federal and the High Court, and is now widely accepted, despite failing to find a place in Federal legislation. These shifts in definition, with the decline of pure or ‘full’ blood as a category of meaning, dramatically altered the sense of what survival and extinction also might mean. The language term, ‘palawah’, recorded by early observers as meaning ‘native’, is today increasingly used by many Aboriginal Tasmanians to indicate their identity. And the Tasmanian government has accepted the Palawah’s identity claim, based on lines of descent from the

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sealers and the daughters of Manalaganna (headman of the Plangermaireener people), from Manalaganna’s alleged granddaughter, Dolly Dalrymple,60 and from Fanny Cochrane Smith. These two women are now the recognised matriarchs of the Palawah, and it is through them that the Palawah claim the Bass Strait Island heritage that Ryan explored in her comprehensive 1981 account of Aboriginal survival.61 Then came the ‘history wars’, opening in 2002 with the publication of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume I. Van Diemen’s Land and, not coincidentally, the return of Henry Ling Roth’s The Aborigines of Tasmania as a living text, though a very different one from what it once seemed. For Windschuttle now employs Ling Roth to counter the alleged Leftist conspiracies and ‘black arm-band’ mythologies of the established historians of indigenous Australia such as Reynolds and Ryan. After decades of neglect, Ling Roth suddenly provides an important (though controversial) gloss to contemporary debates about the nation’s past. Windschuttle sets out to prove that the number of Aboriginal deaths in Australia through frontier violence has been severely exaggerated by the systematic distortions of modern historical scholarship. Ling Roth’s population estimates from early sources, and his attempt to map the indigenous sites of habitation, are important – because the scale of the European killing of Aboriginals in Tasmania depends to a large degree upon some agreed demographic at the time of invasion. Windschuttle produces the same pre-invasion base population estimate as that favoured by Ling Roth – that is Milligan’s estimate of less than 2,000. He then proceeds to collect and count the Aboriginal dead from the various reports of the killing, subtracting the total killed from the base population figure, in order to visualise a new and much less violent version of Australian frontier history.62 He spends sixty pages poking holes in the scholarship of Ryan’s history of the killing, which she built from an initial population base of 4,000 (a figure agreed upon by Plomley, and also by the archaeologist, Rhys Jones).63 Ryan’s purpose was to emphasise a remarkable tale of survival, with a modern Aboriginal population now twice that of the original. Windschuttle’s purpose is to prove that historians have exaggerated the pre-contact population in order to emphasise the colonial catastrophe. For him, Tasmania is again the test case, and already he has begun to contest Reynolds’s estimate of 20,000 Aboriginal deaths through frontier violence across Australia.64 The High Court found in 1992, in the case of Mabo v. the Commonwealth, that indigenous land title had not been extinguished by European invasion,

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and the passing of the Native Title Act the following year recognised this in law. The Wik decision, three years later, found that native title could coexist with other land interests on pastoral leases. The stakes of the history wars are high. As Geoffrey Bolton says, ‘the challenge to Reynolds and his school has only emerged since the Mabo and Wik decisions made knowledge of the past a key factor in determining Aboriginal land rights.’65 When Windschuttle writes that ‘none of the four vocabularies of Tasmanian Aboriginal language compiled in the nineteenth century, nor any of the lists of their phrases, sentences or songs, contained the word “land”’, he does so in a wrong-headed attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Aboriginal land claims. And it is to Ling Roth’s word lists that he looks.66 But Ling Roth, while desirous of providing the most complete overview possible of Aboriginal culture in Tasmania, made no claim to capture its linguistic totality. The unfairness of this use of Ling Roth’s linguistic appendices – to demonstrate that the concept of property was ‘not part of Aboriginal culture’, and thus to reinstate the case for terra nullius – becomes clearer when Reynolds, responding to Windschuttle, writes: ‘We have no idea at all what percentage of total Aboriginal vocabularies were ever recorded – particularly by the informants whose work is reprinted in Ling Roth.’67 As Reynolds rightly says, Ling Roth did not draw the conclusion from the vocabularies that Windschuttle does. Indeed, in Ling Roth’s discussion of ‘nomadic life’ he cites a number of early testimonials to the fact that, for all their much vaunted nomadism, the Tasmanians confined themselves within the boundaries of specific territories – until the pressing presence of the coloniser forced them to trespass and so to make war upon each other. * But it is not only Windschuttle who now is making use of Ling Roth to revise the alleged biases of Tasmanian history. Aboriginal community disputes are also re-focusing attention on his anthropology. In 1977 the Tasmanian Aboriginal Information Service (now the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, or TAC) successfully petitioned for land rights that returned twelve parcels of land to the Aboriginal community. In 1992 the Government made the TAC the main body for representing the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, providing legal, health, and counselling services to that community. But in 1996, the TAC produced a policy whereby the determination of Tasmanian Aboriginality would depend henceforth on being able to produce a family tree showing line of descent

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from a known family from the Bass Strait. At this point, the Aboriginal community in Tasmania split, with one marginal group, the Lia Pootah, charging that the TAC was dominated by the Palawah and hence unable to represent the Aboriginal community as a whole. The Lia Pootah claim descent, not from the Bass Strait, but (to quote from their web site) from ‘unrecorded Aboriginal women, who partnered with convicts, sawyers, soldiers, free settlers and farmers’ on the mainland.68 Their ancestors, they claim, escaped Robinson’s round-ups and removals to Oyster Cove and Flinders Island. They were never removed from the land of their birth called Trowerner, now Tasmania. But the Palawah, linked to the Bass Strait heritage, and the hard-line TAC, which is the Government-sanctioned voice of Aboriginal Tasmania, refuses to accept the identity claims of the Lia Pootah, indeed refuses to recognise them as Aboriginal at all. Now the Lia Pootah are rejecting Plomley, Pybus, Ryan, Reynolds – all of those who built the case for Aboriginal survival that tied it to the Bass Strait. They find comfort in Windschuttle, precisely because of his discrediting of the dominant scholarship on Tasmanian history. And they find comfort in Ling Roth, since he relies on historical sources that largely exclude and pre-date Robinson, and because of his questioning of the legitimacy of Fanny Cochrane Smith’s identity claim.69 Windschuttle says that Ling Roth provides the most useful overview of Aboriginal culture in Tasmania (and Plomley agrees with that). But as Stuart Macintyre says in The History Wars, Windschuttle rejects completely ‘the interpretative framework’ employed by most historians over the past three or four decades. Premised on acknowledgement of the relationship between colonialism and interracial violence, that framework’s key terms – opposing a prior narrative of ‘discovery and exploration’, ‘settlement and nationbuilding’, and ‘terra nullius’ – have been ‘invasion’, ’dispossession’, and ‘Aboriginal survival’.70 Atkinson says that Windschuttle’s ‘fundamental mistake’, re-counting the Aboriginal dead in an effort to reveal the ‘fabrications’ of earlier historians, lies ‘in the way he confuses intellectual and moral detachment’.71 In this regard, the resonances of the controversy into which Ling Roth was drawn a century earlier by his effort to disprove Fanny Cochrane Smith’s claim to be Aboriginal are highly symbolic. They place the cause of objective truth and science as separate and above any ethical issue, for he was well aware that he risked her being deprived of her annuity from the Tasmanian government. Windschuttle’s ‘error’, his moral detachment, marks a return to an earlier emphasis of the social sciences: the cultural

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translation of indigenous subject into object. The Lia Pootah, however, are not detached. They are desperately involved, and Ling Roth (in his opposition to Fanny Cochrane Smith) is in a sense now their ally, though of course this is something he could never have envisaged. The recently revealed work of Raphaël Lempkin on genocide and colonialism points toward ‘the possibility of subtle, intricate, and multifaceted analyses of settler-colonial histories in relation to genocide as an extended process’.72 Certainly, the question of genocide in relation to Australian history is more urgently relevant now than ever before, since the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Bringing Them Home report of 1997, which argued that the removal of Aboriginal children throughout the previous two centuries constitutes an act of genocide as defined by the 1948 UN Genocide convention. This remains a controversial proposition.73 Bain Atwood implies that Ling Roth, being influenced by Tylor’s evolutionist theory and having never set foot in Tasmania, is best ignored.74 But it is imperative that we not ignore writers like Ling Roth if we are to understand how scholarship has invested (and continues to invest) in extinction as a means to create and preserve the scientific and objective authority of its own stance. The Tasmanian book was republished in a facsimile edition by Fullers Bookshop Pty Ltd (Hobart) in 1969. The Sarawak book was based chiefly on the papers of Hugh Brooke Low (1849-87), son of Sir Hugh Low, secretary to the Governor of Labuan and later Resident in Perak. The University of Malaya Press in Kuala Lumpur produced a facsimile edition of it in 1980. And the Benin book, based in part on the first-hand accounts of Ling Roth’s brother Felix, who had been present at the sacking of Benin in 1897, was republished in the USA by Barnes and Noble in 1968. 2 See Russell McDougall and Julian Croft, ‘Henry Ling Roth’s and George Kingsley Roth’s pacific anthropology,’ The Journal of Pacific History, 2/40 (September 2005), pp. 149-70. 3 Sir Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa), Review of Ling Roth, The Maori Mantle (Halifax, 1923), Journal of Polynesian Society, 33 (1924), p. 77. The book was reprinted in England by Ruth Bean in 1979. 4 I use the word ‘translation’ throughout this chapter to indicate the process by which one culture explains and absorbs another for its own purposes and according to its own knowledge practices. Translation in this sense remains a key variable in both anthropological and travel writing, and it reminds us that one of the central but frequently unexamined assumptions of colonialism has been the representational authority of the colonising power. 5 Henry Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1890). 1

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Roth, A Sketch of the Agriculture and Peasantry of Eastern Russia (London: Bailliere, Tindall & Cox, 1878); On the Origin of Agriculture (London: Harrison & Sons, 1886); A Report on the Sugar Industry of Queensland (Brisbane: Gordon & Gotch, 1880); Notes on Continental Irrigation (London: Trübner & Co., 1882); Franco-Swiss Dairy-Farming (London: W. Clowes & Sons, 1885); ‘Arbère. A short contribution to the study of peasant proprietorship,’ Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 23 (1885), pp. 81-91; The Aborigines of Hispaniola (London: Harrison & Sons, 1887). 7 Kay Anderson, ‘White natures: Sydney’s Royal Agricultural Show in post-humanist perspective,’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28/4 (2003), p. 423. 8 Roth, ‘On the origin of agriculture,’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 16 (1997), p. 118. 9 ‘From 1804 to 1830, the Tasmanian aborigines were harrassed and killed with a haphazard but predictable ruthlessness that makes their extinction both unmysterious and unspecial in the history of genocides’ (Patrick Brantlinger, ‘“Dying races”: Rationalizing genocide in the nineteenth century,’ in Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (eds), The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power (London: Zed Books, 1995), p. 49. See also C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Canberra: ANU Press, 1970), p. 52. The fullest study is Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981). See also Nancy Cato and Vivienne Rae-Ellis, Queen Trucanini (London: Heinemann, 1976); Cassandra Pybus, Community of Thieves (Port Melbourne: Heinemann Australia, 1991); Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People (Ringwood: Penguin, 1995); Judy Birmingham, Wybalenna: The Archaeology of Cultural Accommodation in Nineteenth Century Tasmania ([Sydney]: Australian Society for Historical Archaeology, 1992); Shayne Breen, Contested Places: Tasmania's Northern Districts from Ancient Times to 1900 (Hobart: Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, 2001). 10 Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867 (London: Macmillan, 1868), vol. 2, p. 95. 11 R. Montgomery Martin, The British Colonies; Their History, Extent, Condition, and Resources (London: London Printing and Publishing and Co, 1852-57), vol. 2, p. 13. 12 Peter Hulme, Remnants of Conquest. The Island Caribs and their Visitors 1877-1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 136. 13 Alfred Cort Haddon, ‘Obituary: Henry Ling Roth,’ Man, 25 (July 1925), p. 97. 14 Edward Tylor, ‘Preface,’ to Henry Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania, 2nd ed. (Halifax: F. King & Sons, 1899), pp. v, vii. 15 Review (unsigned, untitled) in Colonies and India, 9 July 1890, n.p. 16 Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom (London: John Murray, 1873). 17 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). 18 J. Coles, ‘Tasmania,’ The Field, 7 October, 1899, n.p. 19 I am indebted here to James L. Machor’s thinking on the relation of reading and identity formation in the emergent mass culture of public discourse: ‘Fiction and informed reading in early nineteenth-century America,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature, 47/3 (December 1992), p. 335. 20 Andrew Lang, ‘The last palaeolithics,’ The Daily News (London) 2 July 1890, n.p.

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21 Robert Hampson, ‘Henry Ling Roth: The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo,’ in Russell McDougall and Iain Davidson (eds), The Roth Family, Anthropology, and Colonial Administration (Walnut Creek CA: Left Coast Press, forthcoming 2007). 22 F. Max Müller, untitled review in Nature, 18 September 1890, p. 489. 23 Müller, untitled review, pp. 490-491. 24 Review (unsigned, untitled) in Colonies and India, 9 July 1890, n.p. 25 Sydney Morning Herald, 20 August 1890, n.p. 26 See James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1843). 27 James Backhouse Walker, to Roth, 20 February 1898, Walker Collection, W9/C1.9, University of Tasmania Archives. All further references to correspondence between Roth and Walker are to this collection. 28 See George Arthur, Van Diemen's Land: Copies of All Correspondence Between LieutenantGovernor Arthur and His Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies. On the Subject of the Military Operations Lately Carried Against the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1971). This is the report of the Committee that sat on the Aboriginal question in Hobart in 1831, published that year in Tasmania and included as Enclosure 259 in the Report of the Aboriginal Committee on Colonies and Slaves to the British House of Commons, 14 June to 20 October 1831. 29 J.E. Calder, The Native Tribes of Tasmania: Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, &c. (Hobart, 1875), pp. 13, 54, 16, and 15. 30 Walker, to Roth, 20 February 1898; also Roth, to Walker, 15 February 1892. 31 Elizabeth Isichei, Victorian Quakers (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 224. 32 Roth, to Walker, May 1897. 33 Hugh Munro Hull, Van Diemen’s Land Statistical Summary from the year 1816 to 1865 (Hobart: Government Printer, 1866), shows the steady decrease in the Aboriginal population. 34 James Kelly, The log of the circumnavigation of Van Diemen's Land by Captain James Kelly 18141815: and other accounts of early exploration of the West and North West coast of Tasmania taken from Tasmanian Parliamentary Papers (Hobart: A.B. Caudell, Government Printer, 1986). Facsimile reproduction of papers tabled in parliament. 35 J.E. Calder, ‘Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits, &c. of the native tribes of Tasmania,’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 (1874), p. 13; Henry Melville, Van Diemen’s Land, comprehending a variety of statistical and other information likely to be of interest to the emigrant, as well as to the general reader (Hobart Town: Henry Melville; London: Smith, Elder, 1833), p. 345; Joseph Milligan, ‘On the dialects and language of the aboriginal tribes of Tasmania, and on their manners and customs,’ Papers & Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania, iii [1858], pp. 275-276; Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, p. 79. Roth, to Walker, 15 August 1897. 36 Walker, to Roth, 27 March 1897. 37 James Backhouse Walker, ‘Some notes on the tribal divisions of the Aborigines of Tasmania,’ Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania, 1897 (1898), pp. 176-187; Walker, to Roth, 20 November 1897. 38 Walker, to Roth, 20 February 1898.

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James Barnard, ‘Notes on the last living Aboriginal of Tasmania,’ reported in Nature, 14 November 1889, p. 43. 40 Roth, to Walker, 18 October 1891. 41 For an overview of the now discredited science responsible for the importance of hair in Victorian anthropology, see Franz Ignace Pruner-Bey, ‘On human hair as a race character, examined by the aid of the microscope,’ Anthropological Review, 2 (February 1864), pp. 1-23; also J. Barnard Davis, ‘A few notes upon the hair and some other peculiarities of oceanic races,’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 2 (1873), pp. 95-101. Alice Gorman discusses the role of hair in Ling Roth’s anthropology in ‘The primitive body and colonial administration: Henry Ling Roth’s approach to body modification,’ in McDougall and Davidson (eds): The Roth Family. 42 In the reprint of the second edition of his Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), p. 294, Keane changed his mind, quoting a letter from Ling Roth dated 10 January 1896 concluding that Smith ‘is not a full-blood Tasmanian’. The first edition was published in 1895, and the second edition reprinted in 1901 and 1909. 43 Paul Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2001), p. 86. 44 Roth, ‘Is Mrs. F.C. Smith a “last living Aboriginal of Tasmania?”’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 27 (1898), p. 452. 45 S.J. Hickson, quoted by Roth: ‘Is Mrs. F.C. Smith?,’ p. 453. 46 Roth: ‘Is Mrs. F.C. Smith?’ p. 454. 47 See Roth: The Aborigines of Tasmania, 2nd ed., Appendix G, pp. lxxxiv-lxxxvii; Hulme, Remnants of Conquest, p. 136. 48 Roth, to Walker, 21 September, 1997. See also Thomas Bock: convict engraver, society portraitist: exhibition and catalogue (Launceston: Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, [1991]). 49 Walker also cautioned Roth against the portraits in James Fenton’s A history of Tasmania: from its discovery in 1642 to the present time (Hobart: J. Walch, 1884), which were spoiled in his view by ‘absurd colour’. In any case, Fenton’s chromo-lithographs were from Bock’s original portraits. Walker approved of the portraits in P.E. de Strzelecki’s Physical description of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845). But these too were from Bock. Walker, to Roth, 30 September 1893. 50 Joan Kerr (ed), Dictionary of Australian Artists: painters, sketchers etc. to 1870 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 882. 51 See PIC Album 21/68: Charles Henry Kerry (1858-1928); John Watt Beattie (1859-1930) [Tasmanian, New South Wales and Queensland Aborigines] 1866-c.1891. Also P19.2: John Watt Beattie (1859-1930); Francis Russell Nixon (1803-1879); Charles Woolley (1834-1922) Aborigines of Tasmania c.1880. National Library of Australia. 52 Roth: The Aborigines of Tasmania, 2nd ed., Appendix G, n.p. As Hamilton and Hargreaves point out, Woolley’s original commission, ‘to make full-face, three-quarter-face and profile portraits’ for display at the Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne in 1862, was in keeping with an ‘emergent model’ (derived from physiognomic illustration) of how such images might figure within a system of anthropometric evaluation’ (The Beautiful and the Damned, p. 87). 53 Andrew Lang, ‘The Tasmanians. Memorials of a dead race,’ Daily News, 17 August 1899. 39

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N. J. B. Plomley (ed), Friendly Mission. The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-1834 (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966), p. 35, n. 15. 55 Plomley: An Annotated Bibliography of the Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 109. 56 See for example Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972). 57 John Gardiner-Garden, The Definition of Aboriginality, Research Note 18 2000-01. Parliamentary Library, Canberra, 2000: http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rn/200001/01RN18.htm, accessed 11 January 2005. 58 Report on a Review of the Administration of the Working Definition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Canberra: Government Printer, 1981). 59 Gardiner-Garden: The Definition of Aboriginality. 60 See Heather Felton, Worrete-moete-yenner and Dolly Dalrymple (Hobart: Education Dept., 1984); and Diana Wyllie, Dolly Dalrymple (Childers: Diana Wyllie, 2004). 61 The author revised the book in 1996, adding a new Introduction and two new concluding chapters to bring the story up to date – including, for example, the 1991 Census finding that there were 8,948 Aborigines in Tasmania (p. 288) – but otherwise the text of the first edition remained substantially intact. Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996). 62 Even accepting Windschuttle’s figures (both the population base and the numbers killed), Mark Finnane finds that they fail to justify his downplaying of colonial violence, since they ‘suggest a ratio of Aboriginal to settler mortality rates of at least 17:1 during the years 1824 to 1831’. See ‘Counting the cost of the “nun’s picnic”?’ in Robert Manne (ed), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003), p. 306. Or, to put it in even starker perspective, the Aboriginal mortality risk at this time was more than three times that of the Australian population in the First World War, when over 60,000 soldiers died. See Finnane, ‘Just like a “nun’s picnic”?’ Journal of Indigenous Issues, 6/1 (March 2003), pp. 28-29. 63 The upper limit set by Robinson (according to Calder: ‘Some account,’ p. 13, and reported by Roth: The Aborigines of Tasmania, p. 163) for the original population base at the time of invasion was 8,000. 64 See Keith Windschuttle, ‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian history, part III: Massacre stories and the policy of separatism,’ Quadrant, 44/12 (2000), pp. 6-20. 65 Geoffrey Bolton, ‘Black lives lost ... and found,’ Review of Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Vol I, in Sydney Morning Herald, 14 December 2002. See also Geoffrey Blainey’s review, ‘Native Fiction,’ in The New Criterion, 21, 8 (April 2003), http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/apr03/blainey.htm, accessed 14 June 2004. 66 Windschuttle: The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol 1., p. 110. 67 Reynolds, ‘Terra nullius reborn,’ in Manne (ed), Whitewash, p. 110. 68 ‘The Lia Pootah People,’ http://www.tasmanianaboriginal.com.au/liapootah/elders.htm, accessed 1 December 2005. 69 I am not seeking to arbitrate the identity debate reported in this paper, nor to validate any of the claims made by those involved. My intention is simply to indicate the revived centrality of Ling Roth’s work. 54

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For a useful overview of the culturally specific nature of Australian history and its interpretative frameworks, see Julie Finlayson and Ann Curthoys, ‘The proof of continuity of native title,’ Issue Paper No. 18, (June 1997), Native Titles Research Unit, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra. 71 Alan Atkinson, ‘Honey and wax,’ Review of Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1, in Journal of Australian Colonial History, 4/2 (2002), pp. 20-34. 72 John Docker, ‘Raphael Lemkin’s history of genocide and colonialism,’ Paper for US Holocaust Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Washington DC, 26 February 2004, reproduced at Vital Voices on Genocide Prevention, http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/analysis/details/2004-02-26/docker.pdf, accessed 1 December 2005. 73 See John Docker and Ann Curthoys, ‘Introduction – Genocide: definitions, questions, settler-colonies,’ Aboriginal History, 25 (2001), pp. 1-15. 74 Bain Atwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005), p. 142. 70

Flora Annie Steel in later life

4. FLORA ANNIE STEEL IN THE PUNJAB Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston

Flora Annie Webster (1847-1929) was born at Sudbury Priory, Harrow, on 2 April 1847, the sixth child and second daughter, one of eleven ‘healthy, strong Scottish children, half Lowland, half Highland’,1 of George Webster, the Scottish Parliamentary Agent, and Isabella MacCallum, heiress to a Jamaican plantation.2 Financial exigency – brought about by the failure of the Australasian Bank and her father’s subsequent bankruptcy, which, due to an inadequate marriage settlement, included the loss of his wife’s substantial fortune – forced the family to vacate the Priory for a small villa overlooking the Harrow School cricket pitch when Flora was three years old; they remained there until 1856 when they moved to Scotland where her father, whose reputation appears to have survived undamaged, took up an appointment as Sheriff-Clerk of Forfarshire, a Government office that he would hold until his death. By then the young Flora had already met her future husband when, as a three-year-old in a white frock and blue sash, she attended the same children’s party as Henry William Steel, a young boy in his first Eton jacket, who failed to make much impression on her.3 The family moved north to Scotland by rail, a form of transport still in its infancy at that time, and took up residence in Burnside, just outside Forfar, where Flora would live until she married.4 Apart from six months at a school in Brussels, she was educated informally at home,5 where her mother encouraged her interests in amateur theatricals, reading, painting, singing, music, sewing, and other handicrafts. Meanwhile, Britain’s Empire in India, which occupied a special place in the affections of the young Queen Victoria, was fast reaching its apogee. During the first twenty years of her reign the size of British India increased considerably, from about half the area of the subcontinent in 1837 to almost two-thirds by the time of the Mutiny in 1857.6 During the early years of

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Steel’s life, under the initiative of Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General from 1848 to 1856, many technological changes took place in India, including the building of railways, the establishment of the postal and telegraphic services, the improvement of roads, and the development of major irrigation schemes.7 Also under Dalhousie, Britain continued to acquire new territory through conquest and annexation, including, notably, the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab in 1849 and the Muslim kingdom of Oudh (Awdh) in 1856. The annexation of Oudh, which at the time provided the Bengal Army with the majority of its sepoys, was particularly unpopular, and is widely regarded, along with the debacle over the greased cartridges, as one of the principal causes of unrest that led to the sepoy revolt, or Indian Mutiny, of 1857-58.8 The ‘Great Mutiny’ provided the ten-year-old girl with vivid memories, notably of burning, hanging, and torturing effigies of Nana Sahib, no doubt like thousands of other children throughout Britain. Indeed such was the loathing for Nana Sahib in Britain that in the years following the Mutiny he replaced Napoleon Bonaparte as the hate-figure of the nation. Yet, though as a child she joined her fellow Britons in the vilification of Nana Sahib and as an adult still believed him a scoundrel, Steel was moved to write in her autobiography, The Garden of Fidelity, that ‘nothing is more remarkable, nothing more sad, than to look through the newspapers of that time and note the bloodthirsty tone of the letters to the editor, especially those of many Christian clergymen.’9 Even more poignantly she adds, referring to her 1896 novel On the Face of the Waters, ‘if I am glad of anything in my life, I am glad that I have been enabled to write a book which shows conclusively how very partial the Indian Mutiny was; a book which made one perfect stranger write to me thus: “I lost a wife in the Mutiny; but after forty years you have enabled me to forgive India”. It is something to have done.’10 On 31 December 1867 Flora Annie Webster married Henry Steel, whom she had met again while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and who was then home on leave from the Indian Civil Service. Within twenty-four hours of the nuptials they set sail for India, where two of her brothers were already serving as civilians – her eldest brother in Madras, and another, George, in Calcutta – and where Steel was to spend the next twenty-two years of her life, chiefly in the Punjab,11 including lengthy periods of residence in Ludhiana, Dalhousie, and Kasur, near Lahore. Within months of arriving in India Steel had her first experience of Punjab fever, which would periodically incapacitate her throughout her years in the country. Following a posting in Ludhiana and a bout of sickness that

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may have been the result of seven months in a climate to which she was not accustomed, and a particularly debilitating dose of fever suffered by her husband, the couple were posted to the hill station of Dalhousie where Steel gave birth to a still-born daughter.12 She gave birth to a second daughter, Mabel, on 10 December 1870, by which time she was actively involved in station life. Somewhat ironically, it was through her involvement in the station’s theatrical productions that Steel came to appreciate the importance of learning the vernacular languages when she discovered that, if she only knew how to ask, almost anything she needed could be obtained from the Indian bazaars.13 And, indeed, Steel learnt to speak, read, and write Punjabi and made a point of learning the language of the local villagers wherever she and her husband were posted. This engagement with the language and dialects of the Punjab would prove crucial when Steel began to collect the folk tales that would appear in Wide-Awake Stories (1884). As A.K. Ramanujan reminds us, ‘authentic folklore cannot be collected secondhand without a knowledge of the many speech varieties of [the] region.’14 From this point on Steel convincingly played the role of burra memsahib to her rapidly-promoted husband, tirelessly organising community activities – theatricals and musical events – whenever they were posted to larger stations where there was a lively Anglo-Indian community. But at other times Steel was posted to remote stations where there were no other Europeans, as she explains in The Garden of Fidelity: ‘at Kasur there was literally no one but the natives … Therefore I had no choice. I had to observe – or die.’15 Consequently, her activities were not confined to (or by) the Anglo-Indian (Raj) community, nor was her fate that of many colonial wives who were condemned to idle domesticity, like Olivia Rivers in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975). Instead she dedicated herself to improving the lives of native women, albeit within a strict code of racial superiority. During her years in India she accompanied her husband on his tours of the district that came under his charge; acted as a (self-taught) doctor to the local women and children, which gained her entry to a world hidden to most Europeans; instituted her own reading classes at the local boys’ school in Kasur, where she was later invited by the Indians to help establish a school for girls, the first of many schools she started; worked on various health and education committees; designed the town hall in Kasur; and assisted in the revival of traditional handicrafts, which even then were being threatened by western commercialism, notably producing an illustrated monograph on phulkari embroidery which was published by the India Office.16 In 1884 she was

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appointed Inspectress of Schools, with responsibility for girls’ schools in an area of over 140,000 square miles that stretched from Peshawar to Delhi, and between 1885 and 1888 she served on the Provincial Education Board. During this time she was an active member of the Board, introducing reforms and rewriting school primers, which were illustrated by another Board member, John Lockwood Kipling, the father of the celebrated AngloIndian author Rudyard Kipling. She shocked the Anglo-Indian community by living apart from her husband for a year in order to complete the term of her own public appointment as Inspectress of Schools after he was deliberately transferred to the other end of the Punjab in response to his wife’s becoming embroiled in a scandal at the Panjab University. She was also for a time Vice-President of the Victoria Female Orphan Asylum in the Punjab. As the novelist Maud Diver observes in The Englishwoman in India (1909), Steel ‘stands alone in this respect; for she has left behind her such a legacy of good works as has not been bequeathed to India by any other Englishwoman in her sphere of life’.17 In many ways Steel can be seen as an outsider with unusual insight into the lives of Indians, and consequently it is tempting to privilege her portrayal of India and Indians, to be seduced by what Jonah Raskin, writing about Kipling’s Kim in The Mythology of Imperialism, calls ‘the illusion of intimacy’.18 Certainly in theory, the unusual nature of her life in India gave Steel a special insight into Indian women and their culture in particular and into native life in general. But, as Jenny Sharpe puts it, ‘Flora Annie Steel, perhaps more than anyone else, embodies the memsahib in all of her contradictions.’19 On the one hand she was an ardent supporter of British rule in India, while on the other she made a genuine attempt, in all her Indian writing, both fiction and non-fiction, to interpret the country and its culture using Indocentric rather than Eurocentric measures. Ultimately, though, it is difficult to escape the sense that in all her writing, her knowledge of India is used to control the natives, to support British rule of a subject race. Aided by her knowledge of Punjabi, Steel began to collect folk tales from villagers, including children, as she travelled around the Punjab province. Initially, she tried her hand at translating these tales into ballads; most appear to have been discarded, though one, ‘Shurfu the Zaildar’, is reproduced in The Garden of Fidelity.20 Then, in 1884, she published Wide-Awake Stories: A Collection of Tales Told by Little Children, Between Sunset and Sunrise in the Punjab and Kashmir – the only book she published before leaving India in 1889, when her husband retired from the ICS – a volume of Punjabi folk tales she

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had collected, with a few notes by Captain R.C. Temple, a colonial administrator, distinguished folklorist, and editor of the journal Panjab Notes and Queries from 1883 to 1887. Wide-Awake Stories, which was written expressly for children, was republished in England ten years later as Tales of the Punjab, with additional, copious annotations by (the now promoted Major) Temple, and illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling. Steel’s first original work to be published was the short story ‘Lâl’, which appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1890. In this enigmatic story the male narrator looks back on his first tour of inspection and describes the uncertainty that surrounds Lâl, an inhabitant of the district whom he never actually meets, but who in some manner appears to be connected to the annual harvest cycle. In many ways this story illuminates Steel’s attempt to see Indian culture on its own terms, and her acceptance that her knowledge of India, though great on a practical level, remains limited on a spiritual one: Who was Lâl? What was he? This was a question I asked many times; and though it was duly answered, Lâl remained, and remains still, an unknown quantity – an abstraction, a name, and nothing more. L. A. L. The same backwards and forwards, self-contained, self-sufficing.21 Alternatively, though, her apparent sympathy for India and Indians is always tempered by what can be interpreted as a failure to understand the country and its people. As she writes in On the Face of the Waters, ‘In India … it is foolish to try to settle which comes first, the owl or the egg. You can’t differentiate cause and effect when both are incomprehensible.’22 Yet as Allen J. Greenberger notes, of the early Raj writers, those writing in what he calls the ‘Era of Confidence’ (1880-1910), she is the only author ‘to write about the Indian people as fully developed characters’.23 She stands apart from the lady-romancers, according to Benita Parry, ‘because she was earnestly concerned with verisimilitude in her portrayals of India and because she had considerably more insight into the Anglo-Indian dilemma’.24 Steel wrote over thirty books. Of the many novels and short stories she penned, over half were concerned with Indian or Anglo-Indian life, and most were written with what might usefully be described as an educative rather than a political purpose – to educate the British about Indian culture. The first of her five collections of stories, From the Five Rivers, was published in 1893. Like Wide Awake Stories, it is grounded in her experience of the Punjab, and attests to her considerable knowledge of peasant life. In later

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collections Steel continued to write knowledgably about village life, as well as life in the towns, and about the British in India. Steel returned to India in 1894 to gather information for her novel on the Mutiny, and was given leave by the Panjab Government to inspect confidential boxes of papers in the Delhi offices – ‘tiny notes in quills, one in a chupatti, and confidential reports from all quarters’.25 On the Face of the Waters was rejected by her publisher, Macmillan, but accepted by Heinemann and published in 1896 to great acclaim; indeed, such was the success of this novel that for a time her popularity and celebrity status were equal to those of Rudyard Kipling. The educative purpose of her fiction, always on display in the stories, is particularly evident in On the Face of the Waters, which depicts the siege of Delhi. Patrick Brantlinger suggests the novel ‘offers a portrayal of the Mutiny richer, more complex than any nineteenth-century novel except Seeta’.26 No doubt his view is due in part, at least, to the fact that unlike many Mutiny novelists of the late nineteenth century, whose emotive fictions fed anti-Indian sentiments, Steel attempted to explain the events of the Mutiny to her readers. Steel made one further visit to India, in 1898, during which she spent time in Lucknow conducting the research for her novel Voices of the Night (1900). In this novel – whose central character, the London-educated Brahmin Chris Dravenant/Krish Devanund, marries an English girl – Steel explores what Rosemary Cargill Raza calls ‘the dislocation caused by the westernisation of young Indians’,27 which is also the subject of The Law of the Threshold (1924). Her other novels include The Potter’s Thumb (1894), The Host of the Lord (1900), and four romantic historical novels about the lives of the four great Moghul Emperors: A Prince of Dreamers (1908), King Errant (1912), Mistress of Men (1917), and The Builder (1928). Flora Annie Steel’s autobiography, The Garden of Fidelity, was left unfinished when she died in Talgarth, Wales, on 12 April 1929, ten days after her eighty-second birthday. A short final chapter was added by her daughter. In all her fiction dealing with colonial life in India during the Raj, Steel displayed her knowledge of the country and its customs. But what sort of knowledge did she display, and in what ways did she use that knowledge? Anne Fernihough is of the view that the ‘so-called “knowledge” of India’ displayed in Steel’s fiction ‘does not so much involve an open-minded responsiveness towards the country as the seeking of a practical kind of knowledge, a way of dealing with Indian life and people, and, by extension, of facilitating British rule’.28 The publication of The Complete Indian

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Housekeeper and Cook (1899), jointly written with her friend Grace Gardiner, certainly attests to the gathering of practical ways of dealing with the country, while also, as Jenny Sharpe observes, implicating household duties in the government of Empire.29 And even her best-known novel, On the Face of the Waters, has been criticised for not understanding the causes behind the events she describes. Brantlinger, while regarding the novel highly, also recognises that ‘Steel often renders judgment against both Indians and British, thus maintaining the appearance of impartiality,’ adding that ‘Steel at least understood how the violence of 1857-58 has helped make violence inevitable in later relations between Britain and India.’30 But like Fernihough, his praise is qualified, and through a series of carefully chosen quotations he convincingly shows how Steel’s ‘apparently balanced view leaves untouched the pervasive impression of the Mutineers’ barbarism, cruelty, and irrationality’, while ‘Whenever the narrator appears to criticize the British, the text always contains at least implicit exoneration.’31 In the light of these charges, it is important to recall that Steel was a woman of her time, whose thinking was inevitably influenced, or restricted by, Victorian certainties about the superiority of the British race, and an absolute belief in the British Empire in general and the British Raj in India in particular. And Steel was not unaware of this; as she wrote in The Garden of Fidelity, the Mutiny was a subject ‘to touch all hearts, to rouse every Britisher’s pride and enthusiasm. The Indian Mutiny was the Epic of the Race. It held all possible emotion, all possible triumph.’32 But to judge Steel, or any of her compatriots, by early twenty-first century mores is problematic: it is also evident that, though she was a woman of her age, she was not adverse to questioning the way Britain ruled in India, which set her apart from the majority of memsahibs in the late nineteenth century. Nothing can take away from the fact that she did not shut herself off from India like so many of her countrywomen, but instead tried to meet Indians, even if her relationship to them was invariably paternalistic. It is also indisputable that she sometimes nettled the British authorities in India with her criticisms, and that she was greatly admired by Indian women and girls in the areas where she worked. In her autobiography she describes a brooch given to her by the women of Kasur: ‘the round, gem-set brooch they gave me was given with the simple explanation that it was indeed a token, since every jewel in it had been taken from those worn by their womenkind’, and other similar gestures were made later.33

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* The remainder of this essay will focus on Steel’s collection of stories for young readers, Tales of the Punjab (originally published as Wide-Awake Stories), which provides an interesting case study for the exploration of both the folklore movement in relation to anthropology, and the importance of Empire writing for younger audiences. It also raises salient questions about a focus on ‘traditional’ Indian tales, and how that interest is used to reinforce the authority of the civilising Empire. First, though, it is necessary to consider the history of colonial (British rather than Indian) folkloric collection in India. In 1868 Mary Frere, daughter of the Governor of the Bombay Presidency, published Old Deccan Days, or Hindoo Fairy Legends Current in Southern India, which was, according to the distinguished Indian scholar-poet A.K. Ramanujan, the ‘first considerable collection of a region’s oral tales’.34 Numerous other collections – by British missionaries, civil and military officers, and their wives or daughters – followed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. As Sadhana Naithani notes, these colonial collectors were not professional folklorists, but many had studied at prestigious British universities ‘and with the publication of these collections became recognized as scholars of Things Indian, to cite William Crooke’s title from 1906’.35 Through a careful reading of Crooke’s scathing review of Alice Dracott’s Simla Village Tales in the 1906 issue of the journal Folk-lore, Kirin Narayan reveals Crooke’s views of the direction acceptable folklore scholarship in India should take: First it should be scholarly, part of a ‘fellowship of discourse’ (Foucault 1972) that – despite the presence of collectors like Mary Frere, Maive Stokes, Alice Dracott, Flora Annie Steel, and Georgina Kingscote – became increasingly dominated, especially in its theoretical aspects, by men. Second, it should present hitherto unrecorded materials, adding to the existing pool of knowledge about the ‘natives.’ Third, it should not be tainted by ‘foreign’ or ‘literary’ influences.36 Our interest in Steel is in part due to the fact that in her role as collector of folklore, as in other areas of her life, she resisted this gendering. In analysing her Tales of the Punjab, described by Ramanujan as ‘a landmark, for it also surveyed and classified incidents found in most of the tales published up to

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that time’,37 we will examine Steel’s contribution to colonial folklore scholarship in India, particularly her role in collecting and translating the stories, as well as the part that scholarship played in furthering Britain’s imperial agenda. We will also consider how Steel’s position as the wife of a colonial administrator (her husband was a Chief Magistrate) affected her relationship with the imperial enterprise. British Orientalist writing about India was not, of course, new in 1868; but the shift from ‘classical’ stories – the Vedas, the great epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, and other mythological stories of Hindu gods – which were already becoming familiar to European readers, to the ‘folk’ tales – which had their origins in the hundreds of regional languages and dialects of the subcontinent, and were more domestic in their focus, magic rather than divine, and frequently comic38 – introduced readers to another India. According to the collectors these were the tales of ‘the real India – the India of the villages’,39 presumably the same India that Adela Quested in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and others of her ilk desired to encounter. In his introduction to Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days, the collector’s father, Sir Bartle Frere, ‘stated that it was important for “Government servants, … missionaries, and others residing in the country,” to undertake such collections as a means of understanding “the popular, non-Brahminical superstitions of the lower orders.”’40 And the fact that these folk tales were gathered from the lower classes, from villagers and peasants, rather than from Brahmin pandits versed in Sanskrit, who had been the primary source of Orientalist scholarship, reinforced the notion of ‘authenticity’. Moreover, as Naithani points out, the collectors (often District Collectors) were conscious that their work ‘would produce images which could affect the deliberations of the government and the people back in Britain, especially those leaving for India’.41 Most of these collections, like Steel’s, comprised tales gathered from a particular district and were distinctly regional in nature. It is important to note that while folk tales from around India may share common motifs and types, they also reflect specific regional traditions and different connections with other parts of the world. Thus while the folk tales of the northeast regions share features with those of the Tibeto-Chinese Buddhist countries, the northwest regions (including the Punjab) have more in common with those of the Middle East.42 And most, again like Steel’s, ‘bowdlerize, “Victorianize,” and sentimentalize the earthy, often bawdy, Indian tales and render them fit for middle-class English nurseries’,43 though, as Kirin

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Narayan notes, ‘there is an alluring charm to most of these translations: they make easy reading as English stories and so allow for a sympathetic entry into fictional Indian worlds.’44 Thus Steel, whose Tales of the Punjab was written for children, gives the tales Anglicised titles like ‘Sir Buzz’ and ‘Prince Lionheart and his Three Friends’ and introduces non-Indian words and concepts such as ‘shillings’ and ‘honeymoon’. Ramanujan gives an example from ‘The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal’, but the opening from ‘Sir Buzz’, the first story in the collection, serves just as well: Once upon a time a soldier died, leaving a widow and one son. They were dreadfully poor, and at last matters became so bad that they had nothing left in the house to eat. ‘Mother,’ said the son, ‘give me four shillings, and I will go seek my fortune in the wide world.’45

Illustration for Steel’s story, ‘Sir Buzz’

The folk tale mise-en-scène is here rendered universal, as the Indian tale is varnished with an European façade. As if anticipating the criticisms of Ramanujan, Narayan, and others, Steel defends her decision to ‘render [the stories] fit for middleclass English nurseries’ in the ‘Preface’. Many of the tales, she explains, had earlier appeared as literal translations in periodicals such as the Indian Antiquary, the Calcutta Review, or the Legends of the Punjab, and were thus ‘uncouth or even unpresentable to ears polite’.46 However, Steel is adamant that in Anglicising the tales she has not ‘doctored’ them in any way; rather, she has attempted ‘to translate one colloquialism by another’ without altering the style.47 She must have

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succeeded to a certain extent. The novelist Mulk Raj Anand, author of Untouchable (1933) and Coolie (1936), acknowledges his debt to Steel in the Preparatory Note to his own collection of Folk Tales of Punjab (1974): ‘I have collected some of the tales with the renderings by Flora Annie Stella [sic], who published hers at the end of the 19th century. And I have benefitted [sic] from the learned commentaries on world folk tales of the great English antiquarian, Sir Richard Temple.’48 The role of folklore collection in India during the Victorian and Edwardian periods particularly was not lost on the men who ruled India, who saw it as an opportunity to further the coloniser’s knowledge of, and control over, its colonised subjects. Thus Narayan observes, ‘[i]t is not surprising that colonial administrators like Sir Bartle Frere … were interested in collecting unadulterated cultural materials that bequeathed knowledge and power even as they demonstrated the collectors’ difference from the “natives”.’49 And as Naithani notes, ‘This expansion of knowledge boundaries corresponded with the expansion of British political, administrative, and military influence in the physical interior of the subcontinent.’50 That correspondence is not coincidental. Folklore, by recounting the tales of villagers, often of women or even occasionally children, and emphasising the unchanging traditions of the ‘real’ India, demonstrated the ‘backwardness’ of the country and the need for British rule. Folklore collections, together with journals like the Indian Antiquary and Northern Indian Notes and Queries, allowed the British administrators ‘to pool their knowledge of the natives, derived both from their travels during the winter (“the camping season”) and from the vantage points of their settlements’,51 and, of course, to use that knowledge to further colonial interests. Folklore collection, then, joined the larger imperial tradition of Orientalist writing about India. Like other Orientalist modes, folkloristics is a key site at which Foucault’s dictum about knowledge as power manifests itself materially. The expansion of knowledge about non-elite Indian cultures and communities enabled at the least the fantasy of domination to be actualised. Thomas Richards compellingly identifies the late Victorian fascination with the accumulation of information about colonised cultures, arguing that information collection and management shored up imperial anxieties about the impossibility of truly controlling territory the size of the British Empire. The Victorian archive, he suggests, appears to us now ‘as a prototype for a global system of domination through circulation, an apparatus for

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controlling territory by producing, distributing, and consuming information about it’.52 The Victorian collection of Indian folklore is implicated in other mechanisms of state ethnography, which ‘territorialize a domain not only by mapping it but by producing all manner of “thick” description about it’.53 Like the proliferation of photography in India in the late nineteenth century, the collection of folk tales sought to map and codify Indians and their diverse cultures. Like ethnographic surveys of the period, folk tale collection worked as a form of ethnographic surveillance which strove to produce the space of British India in order to control it. Amassing knowledge in this way, as Richards reminds us, presupposes connections between different forms of knowledge, but it also argues for a cultural cohesiveness among communities of knowers. Comprehensive knowledge was taken to be a nationalist project, initiated within national institutions (such as the British Museum or its counterpart in Kipling, the Lahore Museum), pursued by state functionaries (such as Kipling’s Captain Creighton), and like state sovereignty itself, presumed to be equally operative over a legally demarcated territory (such as British India).54 It is, perhaps, this illusion of a homogenous and neatly demarcated India – unified through ethnographically conceived knowledges and cultures – that has most attracted postcolonial critique. * The paradigmatic text of imperial knowledge collection and its fallibilities is the story collection popularly known as the Arabian Nights or A Thousand and One Nights. The Alf laila wa laila stories were never, Rana Kabbani notes, the kind of cohesive ur-text in Arabic literature that Western readers commonly assume. Instead, they drew on oral folklore traditions, narrated by itinerant conteurs or hakawatieh, who improvised on their content, elaborated their plots, and augmented them with anecdotes and additions that testified to their individual skills and tastes.55 They were vernacular literature: entertaining and sometimes vulgar tales which grew from the oral folkstories of India, Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and which were gradually and variously written down for preservation purposes.56 But it was not until Europeans translated and transcribed the stories that a single definitive text emerged, and it was not until the early eighteenth century that they ‘became

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institutionalised in the way they are known to the West’.57 Antoine Galland was attached to the French diplomatic mission in Constantinople and his fascination with the manuscripts he found there ensures his enduring image as the quintessential Orientalist scholar. His 1704 volume Les Mille et une nuits became, ironically, the translation that made his popular reputation in Europe. (Kabbani notes that, of all his prolific translations, this was ‘the least significant product … the least accurate as translation, and the least representative example of the literature he had studied, and with which he wished to familiarize his readers’.58) The phenomenal success of this volume, which became known in England as the Arabian Nights, ensured a wide and enthusiastic audience for ‘Oriental tales’. Edward William Lane’s 1838 edition, adorned with scholarly annotations and illustrations, solidified the place of this text in the European imagination. Later editors ensured the longevity of the Arabian Nights – most notably, in the nineteenth century, John Payne’s 1882-84 edition and Richard Burton’s eroticised 1885-86 translation – and Lane’s translation became the standard text aimed directly at a mass readership.59 Postcolonial critiques of the Arabian Nights phenomenon have focused mostly on the misrepresentations of European translators and editors, their institutionalisation and fetishisation of texts that, although claiming to provide authentic information about Arabic cultures, reveal only the decadent, sensualist East central to Orientalist fantasies and Romantic sensibilities.60 Yet more subtle arguments trouble these obvious readings: that Lane’s translation sought to ground the Arabian Nights through its apparatus of scholarly footnotes and annotation does reveal its implication in broader imperial projects which sought to understand the Orient by ‘turning it into assimilable information’,61 but it also reveals what we might see now as a serious (if flawed) effort to situate these texts back in their originary culture and to curb frivolous European fantasies about Arabs through a self-conscious attempt to place stories within their historical and cultural contexts.62 Burton’s edition may well have provided him with a vehicle to exercise his misogyny and fascination with diverse sexual practices (‘His was a language of enumeration of perversions, deviations, excesses’63), yet his notes to the Arabian Nights also reveal the development of Victorian anthropology64 which, in the long run, provided some correction to the hard-line imperial racism that sought only to ‘Exterminate the brutes’, in Joseph Conrad’s infamous phrase. Jennifer Schacker-Mill’s reassessment of Lane’s ethnographic treatment of the Arabian Nights allows for a more

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complex reading of the imperial projects of folkloristics and popular Orientalism. Schacker-Mill situates Lane’s edition carefully within English scholarship in the decade immediately preceding the development of folklore studies as a discrete scholarly discipline and in the tradition of the eighteenth-century biblical scholarship of Bishop Robert Lowth. She suggests we re-examine Lane’s edition not for its provision of (or failure to provide) authentic ethnographic information but for what it reveals about conventions of textual presentation and development of popular folkloristics.65 Lane situated his Arabian Nights quite precisely for the mass British readership. With a reputation for scholarship on Egypt – his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) was considered the ‘definitive text on how Muslims lived and behaved’66 – Lane was uniquely positioned to correct some of the dubious veracity and doubtful textual provenance of Galland’s edition in accordance with the growing scientific positivism of the nineteenth century. Commissioned by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Lane’s edition ‘offered his English audience an illustrated translation guided by cultural expertise, as well as running ethnographic commentary’.67 Yet paradoxically Lane constructs himself as the ultimate authority, the ideal guide, to the new translation and explanatory annotation of Arabian Nights, not because of his scholarly expertise in literary translation and Arab history but because of his first-hand experience with Egypt. More particularly, as Schacker-Mill describes, he claims to have experienced Egypt as an Egyptian: ‘I consider myself possessed of the chief qualifications of the proper accomplishment of my present undertaking’, he writes, ‘from my having lived several years in Cairo, associating almost exclusively with Arabs, speaking their language, conforming to their general habits with the most scrupulous exactitude, and [having been] received into their society on terms of perfect equality’. Lane thus situates himself between two cultures, fluent in not only the languages but also the customs of both.68 It is this compelling claim for authentic engagement with Egyptian culture – a fantasy of cultural cross-dressing, of course – that authorises Lane’s place in the Arabian Nights phenomenon. His experience in Egypt (which surely can never be divorced from his reputation as a reliable scholar) licenses his

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intervention into debates about Arabic otherness in Europe: he believed the central purpose of his annotations to be ‘the explication of differences between Arab and English mentalities’, particularly in regard to Arab notions of credibility.69 Lived colonial experience forms the foundational plank of the Arabian Nights edition that would influence generations of English readers. Lane yoked together Orientalist scholarship and his Egyptian experience with these fabulous tales. He worked – as Kabbani argues – as ‘the Empire’s scholar, surveying its dominions, portraying its subjects, recounting their culture in the unemotive and urbane manner’.70 But Lane’s multivalent engagement with Arabic texts engendered equivalent kinds of cross-cultural fascination in his readers. Lane’s edition made coterminous fantastic Oriental tales and everyday ethnographic information about Egypt – two fields which, as Schacker-Mill suggests, may seem to be quite distinct – and in doing so his Arabian Nights enabled the broad-based British readership to engage in the kind of wonder that Stephen Greenblatt ascribes to another, later text of cross-cultural encounter, the National Geographic magazine. Like National Geographic, exotic folk tales were presented to European audiences through mechanisms tainted by imperial discourses and ideologies, but at the same time they enabled a ‘rich, complex, and potentially vital’ imagining of other cultures in relation to one’s own.71 If we can allow Lane’s Arabian Nights to oscillate between the more obvious oppositions of European fantasies of otherness and personal, deeply felt engagements with other cultures/peoples, between the imperial authority of Orientalist scholarship and the genuine curiosity of readers and researchers, then perhaps the truly complex and contradictory nature of the folkloristic project – of which Steel was an integral part – becomes evident. Steel and Temple’s ‘Preface’ carefully situates the folk tales of their collection. Most of these tales, they advise the reader, have been published in a variety of sources of information about India – the Indian Antiquary, the Calcutta Review, and the Legends of the Punjab – yet the earlier versions were literal translations, often ‘scarcely intelligible to the untravelled English reader’.72 The authenticity and authority of the mode of folklore collection is emphasised: all but three have been ‘collected by Mrs F.A. Steel during winter tours through the various districts of which her husband has been Chief Magistrate’.73 The British reader is imaginatively enticed into Steel’s encounters with villagers by a rich account of the collector’s entry into a village – ‘A carpet is set under a tree … far enough away from bureaucracy

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[the Magistrate’s darbâr] to let the village idlers approach it should they feel so inclined’74 – and, like Steel, we watch as various villagers diffidently engage in conversation. After a series of digressive manoeuvres, we meet the story-teller – ‘for there is always a story-teller par excellence in every village – generally a boy’75 – and the second person address of the ‘Preface’ continues the affiliation of reader and folklore collector. Patience is essential, Steel and Temple tell us, ‘since in all probability the first story is one you have heard a hundred times, or else some pointless and disconnected jumble’. The disappointment of hearing ‘some feeble variant of a well-known legend, or, what is worse, a compilation of oddments which have lingered in a faulty memory from half a dozen distinct stories’ is eventually assuaged, they reassure us, but only for the patient, attentive collector who can discern ‘a coherent whole … growing up in his or her mind out of the shreds and patches heard here and there’.76 The agency of the collector here is paramount: ‘it is delight indeed when your own dim suspicion that this part of the puzzle fits into that is confirmed by finding the two incidents preserved side by side in the mouth of some perfectly unconscious witness.’77 Steel and Temple’s ‘Preface’ seeks to draw the British reader into the ‘wonder’ of the far-away Indian village, through a sympathetic alliance. Like Steel, this account suggests, the reader can encounter the authentic, exotic other through these stories. At this point, the ‘Preface’ constructs curiously agent-less sentences which allow an unalloyed occupation of the subject position of folklore collector. Yet the claim for authenticity is undermined by their emphasis of the agency of the collector, for it is only in the mind of the collector that the genuinely authentic version of a folk tale can be realised. It is only the European intellect that can discern the pure folk tale from the variant, and it is only through experience, patience, and careful attention that such a collector can hope to succeed. Some tales, they note, ‘have thus been a year or more on the stocks before they had been heard sufficiently often to make their form conclusive’.78 It is here that the contradictions of colonial folkloristic projects become increasingly complex. Folklorists, as David Blamires suggests, ‘like to have such tales straight from the teller’s mouth with as little interference as possible from those who transfer them to print’79: the editorial and aesthetic practices of the Grimms or Charles Perrault are censured by the discipline. Yet as Narayan argues, ‘To deride foreign influence on a text yet simultaneously ignore the foreign collector’s own role in eliciting, translating, editing, and popularising

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indicates a blind spot in the paradigm of scientific objectivity.’80 This conflictual tension between the unsullied voices of native informants and the scholarly apparatus which make those voices available to a broader audience constantly troubles folklore research, just as similar debates plague anthropology and ethnography, the broader disciplinary discourses in which folklore is often situated. For our purposes here, Steel and Temple’s rehearsal of this conflict is most interesting because it reveals the broader ‘tensions of empire’81 which contextualise Steel and Tales of the Punjab. The ‘Preface’ simultaneously adheres to the centrality of the ‘native informant’ in colonial folklore collection whilst undermining that ‘perfectly unconscious witness’. Sadhana Naithani’s analysis of folklore collection in India suggests that British collectors neglected colonial folk narratives which focused on colonial rule and rulers. She argues that these kinds of narratives were elided because they contradicted the claims of British folklorists that Indian folklore was timeless, traditional, and spiritual, unsullied by European influence, and transmitted in a pure form by narrators who were innocent of any literary pretension or political motivation. In political and self-reflexive colonial folkstories about the British in India, Naithani suggests, we see narrators who are ‘self-conscious subjects whose narratives performed multiple traditions in social communication’.82 Steel and Temple’s village narrators are not only unselfconscious; they are barely capable of apprehending the meaning of what passes through them. And yet, the affect and engagement of the collector is undeniable in the ‘Preface’. Patience, politeness (‘the teller must be profusely complimented, in the hopes of eliciting something more valuable’83), suspicion, deduction, and delight characterise the folklorist and their ‘reward’. These are not the emotions of imperial disdain and detachment, and they are much warmer than Kabbani’s characterisation of Lane as ‘the Empire’s scholar, surveying its dominions, portraying its subjects, recounting their culture in the unemotive and urbane manner that he assumed befitted his status’.84 That these tales might have been ‘a year or more on the stocks’ brings into doubt their authenticity, but the timeframe certainly suggests that Temple and Steel considered these tales worthy of serious scholarship. Temple’s scholarly three-volume The Legends of the Panjâb (1884-1900) provides more of a gloss on the nature of folkloric collection than his collaboration with Steel. He distinguishes between the ‘folk-poems’ of bardic tradition and the ‘old wives’ tales’ of folk tale: the latter, inevitably, display the ‘poverty of the rustic imagination’ in ‘breaking down’ the former in a

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kind of debased derivation. Interestingly, Temple does acknowledge the reciprocal effect of the folk tale on the folk poem instead of simply reifying a long-lost classical tradition.85 Temple’s tongue-in-cheek description of the relative ease of collecting folk poems vis-à-vis folk tales is revealing: ‘having caught your bard, all you have to do is take down what he says, whereas it is only from the lips of many witnesses, and after the exercise of infinite patience, that you get your folk tale. But it is not nearly so much interesting work.’86 For Temple, collecting folk poems is the key priority for folkloristics, not least because he understands it as a form of salvage ethnography: ‘the folk-poem is still very far from being dead, but that the wandering bard is beginning to die out is becoming clear in many ways.’87 Steel and Temple’s emphasis on the spatiality of folk tale collection is revealing. The carpet delineates the space of collection and, arguably, sets up a distinct set of cross-cultural power relations. The carpet is set up, we are told, ‘in the vicinity of the spot which the Magistrate has chosen for his darbâr’ but quite deliberately separate from that site. Steel’s role as reluctant memsahib is here nicely dramatised in her negotiated spatial relationship to her imperial administrator husband. The gendering of the collection space is also important: first, Steel and Temple explain, ‘village idlers’ – small boys – turn up, though they threaten to flee at the rumoured approach of a chuprâsî (‘the “corrupt lictor” of India, who attends at every darbâr’); eventually women come by and real social exchange can gradually be established.88 Temple’s geography of folklore is similar: ‘In the Panjâb the folk tale is abundant everywhere. It lives in every village and hamlet, in every nursery and zenana, and wherever women and children congregate.’89 Yet the different representation of Temple’s folklore collection for Legends of the Panjâb is revealing. Temple discloses how his role as ‘a busy Indian official’90 has enabled the coercion of folk stories: not only has his mobility ensured that through extensive travel he has met itinerant folk performers and ‘in due time made them divulge all they knew’91 but he has also had official cause ‘to receive and converse with the agents and emissaries of native chiefs and nobles – a class of persons always ready to do anything to ingratiate themselves, – and a hint to that effect has produced more than one legend for me’.92 Temple – then a Captain in the Bengal Staff Corps and, on the report of the title page of Legends of the Panjâb, fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; Member of the Royal Asiatic, Philological, and Folklore Societies, The Anthropological Institute, The Asiatic Society of Bengal; corresponding member of the Numismatic Society of Philadelphia;

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Associate of the Victoria Institute – occupies an unambiguous position within an imperial network linking military power to the production and circulation of knowledge. At the centre of these intersecting webs of colonising power/knowledge, Temple neatly embodies Naithani’s view of British collectors of Indian folklore as administrators, where ‘their narrators were their colonial subjects: their folklore collections had intentional, incidental and potential administrative implications.’93 Yet Steel’s position on the carpet, apart from her husband, reminds us that the ‘varied crew’ of colonial folklore collectors that Narayan identifies – ‘administrators, missionaries, and the women attached through their husbands or fathers to the colonial enterprise’94 – seriously compromises attempts to see the power relations of this cross-cultural exchange in any simple and singular way. Each of those kinds of collectors do, of course, have a position within the overarching structure of the British Raj, but to assume that each of those positions is coterminous with an identical and hegemonic imperial power is misleading. Even more problematically, it assumes that Indian folk narrators were unable to realise the difference in the social status of each of those collectors: that they were the passive dupes of imperial ethnographic surveillance. William Crooke edited North Indian Notes and Customs in the 1890s, intending that the journal would provide ‘a place for British administrators to pool their knowledge of the natives’.95 Instead, Narayan notes, it was mostly Indians who contributed material. Within the local dynamics of power, knowledge, and authority, the British interest in folklore tapped into pre-existing elite Indian cultural practices. Like the British folklorist, elite Indians collected, codified, and co-opted folk traditions for high cultural purposes; like the British, such Indian collectors carefully distinguished themselves from ‘the folk’ who were ‘enmeshed in traditions and untouched by change’.96 The Christian Bengali novelist Lal Behari Day published Folktales of Bengal in 1883, carefully constructing himself as a collector, promising tales unmediated by English influence. Narayan notes that Rabindranath Tagore used folklore collection and publication as a crucial tool of the nationalist movement, even though, ironically, his knowledge of broader regional traditions was acquired through British publications.97 Neither ‘folk’ nor elite Indians were innocent of the uses to which cultural material could be put, for British colonial folkloristics was only the most recent instance of the circulation and production of knowledge in India.

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The internal contradictions of Steel and Temple’s ‘Preface’ make evident the colonial dynamics of folk tale collection, but further complications frame Tales of the Punjab. The book’s production is carefully described – Steel responsible for the text, and Temple for the annotations – and figured as ‘work’. But the division of labour also speaks to the ‘double intention’ of this book: ‘namely, that the text should interest children, and at the same time the notes should render it valuable to those who study Folklore on its scientific side’.98 The second paratext to Tales of the Punjab addresses that first audience. Entitled ‘To the Little Reader’, this is the start of Steel’s narrative. It cajoles the British child reader into the imaginative world of the Indian village: ‘Would you like to know how these stories are told? Come with me, and you shall see. There! take my hand and do not be afraid, for Prince Hassan’s carpet is beneath your feet. So now! – “Hey presto! Abracadabra!” Here we are in a Punjabi village.’99 Steel leads the child reader into the village. She stresses the differences of the Indian landscape and culture (‘the day has been so hard and toilful even for the children’100), but the British child joins the villagers as night falls, for this is ‘story-telling time’: even if the child had asked for a story earlier, none would have been forthcoming because such ‘idle amusement[s]’ are forbidden during the day. But at night, the British child can join the ‘bairns’ as they find a place around a communal space, and ‘from one crowded nest after another rises a childish voice telling some tale, old yet ever new, – tales that were told in the sunrise of the world, and will be told in its sunset.’101 Here, child readers across the Empire join together listening to the ‘authentic’ tales of the ‘authentic’ Indian folk culture; an imaginative linkage on which the sun will never set. * In 2001 Louise Lamphere delivered the presidential address for the American Anthropological Association’s 100th annual meeting. Her address focused on the contributions of women and minority group members to the discipline of anthropology, specifically tying their work into current efforts to reshape anthropological fieldwork and ethnographic writing through new modes of cultural critique and activism. Lamphere looks at a range of individuals, primarily interested amateurs, who contributed to the development of anthropology from the late nineteenth century onwards. Prominent women from the early twentieth century (such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict), minority group

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members who were loosely connected to anthropology (such as Zora Neale Hurston and Native American ethnographers George Hunt and Ella Deloria), and post-1960s women and minority anthropologists (such as Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Delmos Jones) all remained on the periphery of anthropological institutions, yet Lamphere suggests that their contributions were crucial. These writers often worked on folklore and/or folk tales; they were marginal to the discipline but involved in ‘activist professionalism’, ‘following a kind of dedicated social service model prevalent among women in the late nineteenth century’102; and they frequently pioneered innovative writing styles, incorporating feminist critique with ‘cross-cultural ethnographic analysis’ and in so doing ‘extending new forms of ethnographic text making’.103 Lamphere argues that paying attention to these other anthropological voices is crucial to what she describes as the ‘everchanging definition of what anthropology is. Mindful that we need to continue to recuperate a different view of our past, these unofficial histories offer a reading of anthropology’s greatest strengths.’104 Lamphere does not include Flora Annie Steel in her address, but she could. Like the privileged women anthropologists of the early twentieth century, who were able to leverage the advantages of their class and gender in a period of social change in order to project themselves into the centre of anthropological debates, Steel too mobilised the potential freedoms of British India in order to explore her interests, ambition, and literary talents. Finding herself in India within a ‘Victorian, imperialist milieux [sic] that was designed to restrict her participation in public life’,105 through sheer strength of personality Steel managed to find the interstitial spaces in the imperial regime that provided her with ‘room to manoeuvre’.106 Her time in India coincided with increased pressure for female education and the need for female officials to oversee this; the social and geographic mobility she was allowed as the wife of a colonial administrator enabled her to meet a wide range of Indians and Britons across the Raj; and her intellectual curiosity and privileged position ensured that she could explore a number of the most interesting projects to arise out of this cross-cultural contact zone. That these projects were unavoidably tied in with those who ‘had an interest in keeping Empire going, in perpetuating the relationship between colonizer and colonized’107 is clear across the range of her writings: her household manual explicitly constructed an hierarchical relationship between naive Anglo-Indian wives and their childish Indian servants108; her Mutiny

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fiction sought to understand but never equalise Indian motivations in the 1857 Revolt; her school inspection reports consolidated what Gauri Viswanathan calls the ‘imperial mission of educating and civilizing colonial subjects in the literature and thought of England’109; her folklore collection obviously colluded with the imperial acquisition of colonial ‘raw material’ for Orientalist study. Yet to view her writings only through the condemnatory lens of postcolonial critique is unsatisfactory. Steel is, Rebecca Saunders argues, ‘the kind of memsahib who never appears in the fiction of AngloIndia’.110 Her life and her writing sit uncomfortably on the boundaries of Empire, revealing the complex personal and textual negotiations that occur at the margins of anthropology. Flora Annie Steel, The Garden of Fidelity [1929] (Gurgaon: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 1. Violet Powell, Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 1. 3 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, p. 9. 4 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, p. 16. 5 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, p. 23. 6 David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London: John Murray, 2005), pp. 7-8. 7 Gilmour: The Ruling Caste, p. 9. 8 In 1857 the British issued sepoys in the Bengal Army with the new Enfield rifle. In order to load this new rifle it was necessary to bite or tear a greased cartridge which was widely believed, justifiably, to be greased with a mixture of cow and pig fat that would be polluting to both Hindus and Muslims. The rumour was that this was an initial step towards converting them to Christianity. 9 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, p. 15. 10 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, p. 15. 11 Punjab is the current spelling; earlier spellings (Panjab and Panjâb) have been used as appropriate. 12 Powell: Flora Annie Steel, p. 17. 13 Powell: Flora Annie Steel, p. 17. 14 A.K. Ramanujan, ‘Foreword,’ to Brenda E.F. Beck, Peter J. Claus, Praphulladatta Goswami, and Jawaharlal Handoo (eds), Folktales of India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. xi. 15 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, p. 104. 16 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, pp. 115-16. 17 Maud Diver, The Englishwoman in India (London: Blackwood, 1909), p. 154. 18 Jonah Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 103. 19 Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 93. 20 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, pp. 66-70. 1 2

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Flora Annie Steel, ‘Lal,’ in Saros Cowasjee (ed), The Oxford Anthology of Raj Stories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 13. 22 Flora Annie Steel, On the Face of the Waters [1896] (London: Heinemann, 1897), p. 272. 23 Allen J. Greenberger, The British Image of India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 115. 24 Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India and the British Imagination 1880-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 6. 25 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, p. 214. 26 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 220; Meadows Taylor, Seeta, 3 vols (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1872). 27 Rosemary Cargill Raza, ‘Steel, Flora Annie,’ in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 52, p. 351. 28 Anne Fernihough, ‘Steel, Flora Annie,’ in Janet Todd (ed), Dictionary of British Women Writers (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 643. 29 Sharpe: Allegories of Empire, p. 93. 30 Brantlinger: Rule of Darkness, pp. 221-22. 31 Brantlinger: Rule of Darkness, p. 221. 32 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, p. 226. 33 Steel: The Garden of Fidelity, p. 111. 34 Ramanujan: Folktales of India, p. xii. 35 Sadhana Naithani, ‘Prefaced space: tales of the colonial British collectors of Indian folklore,’ in Luisa Del Giudice and Gerald Porter (eds), Imagined States: Nationalism, Utopia and Longing in Oral Cultures (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001), p. 64. 36 Kirin Narayan, ‘Banana republics and V.I. degrees: rethinking Indian folklore in a postcolonial world,’ Asian Folklore Studies, 52/1 (1993), p. 183. The reference is to Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972). 37 Ramanujan: Folktales of India, p. xii. 38 See Ramanujan: Folktales of India, pp. xvi-xix. 39 E.M. Gordon, Indian Folk Tales. Being Side-Lights on Village Life in Bilaspore, Central Provinces (London: Elliot Stock, 1909), p. v; quoted in Naithani: ‘Prefaced space,’ p. 65. 40 Quoted in Narayan: ‘Banana republics,’ p. 182. 41 Naithani: ‘Prefaced space,’ p. 65. 42 Ramanujan: Folktales of India, p. xx. 43 Ramanujan: Folktales of India, p. xiii. 44 Narayan: ‘Banana republics,’ p. 184. 45 Flora Annie Steel, Tales of the Punjab: Folklore of India [1894] (New York: Greenwich House, 1983), p. 1. 46 Flora Annie Steel and R.C. Temple, ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xiii. 47 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xvi. 48 Mulk Raj Anand, Folk Tales of Punjab (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1974), no pagination. 49 Narayan: ‘Banana republics,’ p. 184. 50 Naithani: ‘Prefaced space,’ p. 65. 51 Narayan: ‘Banana republics,’ p. 185. 21

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Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), p. 17. 53 Richards: The Imperial Archive, p. 21. 54 Richards: The Imperial Archive, p. 111. 55 Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient (London: Pandora, 1994), p. 23. 56 As Schacker-Mill observes, the Alf Layla wa- Layla has an intensely complex textual history (existing as a manuscript, a printed text, a translation, and a text with connections to oral narratives): it is, she notes, ‘a complex narrative phenomenon’ with a daunting scholarship contextualising it. Husain Haddawy’s 1990 Norton edition traces these interlinked traditions. See Jennifer Schacker-Mill, ‘Otherness and otherworldliness: Edward W. Lane’s ethnographic treatment of The Arabian Nights,’ Journal of American Folklore, 113 (2000), p. 181, n. 5. 57 Kabbani: Imperial Fictions, p. 23. 58 Kabbani: Imperial Fictions, p. 27. 59 See Schacker-Mill: ‘Otherness and otherworldliness,’ p. 164. 60 See Kabbani: Imperial Fictions. 61 Kabbani: Imperial Fictions, p. 39. 62 Kabbani: Imperial Fictions, p. 37. 63 Kabbani: Imperial Fictions, p. 54. 64 Kabbani notes that Burton was a member of the Anthropological Society (Imperial Fictions, p. 62). 65 Kabbani: Imperial Fictions, pp. 165-66. 66 Kabbani: Imperial Fictions, p. 38. 67 Schacker-Mill: ‘Otherness and otherworldliness,’ p. 170. 68 Schacker-Mill: ‘Otherness and otherworldliness,’ p. 172. 69 Schacker-Mill: ‘Otherness and otherworldliness,’ p. 177. 70 Kabbani: Imperial Fictions, p. 44. 71 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Kindly visions,’ New Yorker, 59/33 (1999), p. 120. 72 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xiii. 73 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xiv. 74 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xiv. 75 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xv. 76 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xv. 77 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xv. 78 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xv. 79 David Blamires, ‘The challenge of fairytales to literary studies,’ Critical Quarterly, 21/3 (1979), p. 34. 80 Narayan: ‘Banana republics,’ p. 184. 81 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Culture in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 82 Sadhana Naithani, ‘An axis jump: British colonialism in the oral folk narratives of nineteenth-century India,’ Folklore, cxii/2 (2001), p. 187. 83 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xv. 84 Kabbani: Imperial Fictions, p. 44. 52

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R.C. Temple, The Legends of the Panjâb, 3 vols (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 18841900), v. 1, p. v. 86 Temple: Legends of the Panjâb, v. 1, p. vi. 87 Temple: Legends of the Panjâb, v. 1, p. vii. 88 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xiv. 89 Temple: Legends of the Panjâb, v. 1, p. vii. 90 Temple: Legends of the Panjâb, v. 1, p. xi. 91 Temple: Legends of the Panjâb, v. 1, p. ix. 92 Temple: Legends of the Panjâb, v. 1, p. ix. 93 Naithani: ‘An axis jump,’ p. 184. 94 Naithani: ‘An axis jump,’ p. 182. 95 Narayan: ‘Banana republics,’ p. 185. 96 Narayan: ‘Banana republics,’ p. 185. 97 Narayan: ‘Banana republics,’ p. 187. 98 Steel and Temple: ‘Preface,’ in Tales of the Punjab, pp. xvi-xvii. 99 Steel: ‘To the Little Reader,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xix. 100 Steel: ‘To the Little Reader,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xx. 101 Steel: ‘To the Little Reader,’ in Tales of the Punjab, p. xxi. 102 Louise Lamphere, ‘Unofficial histories: A vision of anthropology from the margins,’ American Anthropologist, 106/1 (2004), p. 128. 103 Lamphere: ‘Unofficial histories,’ p. 132. 104 Lamphere: ‘Unofficial histories,’ p. 137. 105 Rebecca J. Sutcliffe, ‘Feminizing the professional: The government reports of Flora Annie Steel,’ Technical Communications Quarterly, 7/2 (1998), p. 157. 106 See Ross Chambers, Room to Manoeuvre: Reading the Oppositional in Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 107 Rebecca Saunders, ‘Gender, colonialism, and exile: Flora Annie Steel and Sara Jeanette Duncan in India,’ in Mary Lyn Brae and Angela Ingram (eds), Women’s Writing in Exile (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 1989), p. 321. 108 See Nancy Paxton, ‘Feminism under the raj: complicity and resistance in the writings of Flora Annie Steel and Annie Besant,’ Women’s Studies International Forum, 23/4 (1990), p. 336. 109 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London: Faber, 1990), p. 2. 110 Saunders: ‘Gender, colonialism, and exile,’ p. 307. 85

Sir Everard im Thurn

5. EVERARD IM THURN IN BRITISH GUIANA AND THE WESTERN PACIFIC Rosamund Dalziell

The headquarters of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, now in Glasgow, resembles an Edwardian enclave in a 1960s office block. Dominating the panelled foyer is a portrait of Sir Everard im Thurn, Governor of Fiji and High Commissioner for the Western Pacific from 1904-1910. He is wearing the white uniform of a British governor, a little strained at the buttons, displaying the badge of a Knight Commander of St Michael and St George. His hand rests on an historic globe and his large form almost completely obscures the islands of the Pacific on the map that serves as a backdrop to the portrait. The imperial dignity of the portrait is undermined by the inclusion of im Thurn’s pet cockatoo with a banana hooked over its perch, the beak of the bird mirroring the beaky nose of the governor. The hint of whimsicality in im Thurn’s expression suggests that neither he nor the artist – his brother-in-law John Henry Lorimer – took the formalities too seriously. * Everard im Thurn was born in London in 1852, the fifth child in a large Victorian family. His father, Johann Conrad im Thurn, was a Swiss émigré businessman who maintained connections with his home town of Schaffhausen, and his British-born mother was a descendant of another branch of the same family. His maternal grandmother was a Campbell, from Fife, and Everard’s Scottish as well as his Swiss heritage were significant in providing him with an awareness of cultural distinctiveness that contrasted with the economically and socially dominant British middle and upper classes. This cross-cultural perspective contributed to his life-long anthropological interests.

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Im Thurn characterises himself from childhood as having an ‘insatiable curiosity’.1 As a school student he demonstrated a passionate interest in natural history and folklore, as well as an enthusiasm for extended walking tours in Wiltshire, Scotland, and the Tyrol that foreshadowed his later journeys of colonial exploration. Seeing himself also as an individual lacking ‘the art of taking things quietly’,2 he combined colonial administration with anthropological fieldwork and pioneering photography, expeditions of exploration, botanical collecting and experimental gardening, ornithology, and historical research. Foundational to Everard im Thurn’s formation as a colonial anthropologist and administrator was his privileged if incomplete British education at Marlborough College: he left before the sixth form and was tutored privately for Oxford entrance. Although he excelled at school in natural history, this was not a formal school subject, but taught through an innovative extra-curricular Natural History Society, with activities embracing ornithology, botany, anthropology, and other branches of science and their interrelations. Despite being tall and athletic, im Thurn much preferred these activities to organised sport. Through this Society im Thurn came to the attention of Sir Joseph Hooker, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, even though his own headmaster, the distinguished classicist Dr G. G. Bradley, took little interest in the Society or its schoolboy members. However, shortly after leaving school Everard im Thurn did come to Dr Bradley’s attention through the publication of a short book, dedicated to his former headmaster. The Birds of Marlborough, well-informed and often charming, is a remarkable achievement for a young man still in his teens. Based on his school fieldwork, the book identifies and describes a wide range of the birds of Wiltshire as well as demonstrating a mature capacity to organise younger boys in teams for data collection. The book also indicates im Thurn’s developing interest in ethnography and the relationships between birds and humans, being threaded through with folklore concerning birds that he learnt in talking with rural Wiltshire people.3 Im Thurn studied science and classics at Exeter College, subsequently the centre for the introduction of anthropology as a formal academic discipline at Oxford University. His abilities were highly regarded by his tutors but his father’s bankruptcy prevented him from proceeding to honours and a possible academic career.4 Then, in 1877, aged 25, im Thurn was appointed director of the colonial museum in Georgetown, capital of British Guiana, on Hooker’s recommendation. Hooker had a gift for creating networks of

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capable botanic collectors for Kew throughout the British Empire. In Everard im Thurn he cultivated a lifelong botanical and ethno-botanical collector. The museum appointment required that im Thurn commit fifty percent of his time to expeditions in anthropological, botanical, and other scientific fieldwork. In this he was convincingly successful, proving to be a capable leader with the physical resilience to adapt to the challenging terrain and an ability to create rapport with the Amerindians on whom he relied as guides and members of his team. At Oxford im Thurn had also excelled in rowing, which proved a useful skill on the waterways of British Guiana, the main inland thoroughfares. Through long associations with Amerindian employees whom he came to regard as friends he developed his anthropological interests with familiarity and respect for the Amerindian cultures of British Guiana. Im Thurn’s knowledge of German also gave him access to Richard Schomburgk’s records of extensive travel in British Guiana with his brother Robert in the 1840s. These works provided valuable information on the Amerindian peoples, and the terrain, wildlife, and botany of the colony, as well as conferring on his projects the authority of earlier well-known explorers. In 1883 im Thurn published his major anthropological work, Among the Indians of Guiana, and the following year justified Hooker’s confidence by mounting an expedition to the remote plateau of Roraima on the border of British Guiana and Venezuela. This enterprise aroused speculation in the British press that ‘primitive life forms’ – zoological or even anthropoid – from an earlier stage of evolution might have survived on this isolated tepui. In raising funds for this expedition im Thurn himself did nothing to discourage this speculation, commenting that ‘very possibly animal forms of a primitive type exist which have undergone no modification under the influence of new-coming forms since the plain (sic) was first isolated’.5 Im Thurn succeeded in scaling the sheer cliffs of Roraima in December 1884, along with British surveyor Harry Perkins, Gabriel (a Pomeroon Amerindian), and five other unnamed Amerindians. The concept of an isolated ‘lost world’ where distant ancestors of Homo sapiens survived together with other life forms long since extinct in the settled regions of the earth fascinated the Victorians, and continues to grip the Western popular imagination in the twenty-first century. Everard im Thurn’s contribution to the trope of a ‘lost world’ is not widely known, although in his lifetime it was difficult to escape.6 Ironically, im Thurn’s scientific and geographical achievement was eclipsed by the widely popular

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work of fiction that his expedition inspired, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). Conan Doyle had heard im Thurn lecture to British learned societies about his expedition, and in fictionalising and sensationalising this account, the novelist imagines the anthropological discoveries that the public craved, pandering to crude conceptions of cultural difference that contrast with im Thurn’s measured observations. In Conan Doyle’s novel a team of British adventurers climb a remote South American plateau where they encounter a population of aggressive human-like creatures representing an evolutionary ‘missing link’ between apes and human beings. Dinosaurs also survive on the plateau.7 The novel has inspired a succession of popular films, from the earliest in 1925 (clearly based on images of Roraima),8 to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World (1997). The ‘primitive’ life forms that im Thurn did discover on the summit were not anthropoid but mainly botanical. The discovery of unknown Heliamphora or pitcher plants and other rarities delighted im Thurn and his patrons at Kew, although reported fairly briefly in the British papers.9 It took David Attenborough, in The Private Life of Plants, to draw the attention of a viewing public of armchair naturalists to the rare plant-life of Roraima.10 In 1891 im Thurn became Government Agent for the NorthWest District and the following year was awarded a CMG.11 However, in 1899 he left British Guiana for good, having been chosen to assist with the presentation of the British case to the international arbitration commission looking into the long-running border controversy between British Guiana and Venezuela, an issue which had created a diplomatic rift between Britain and the United States.12 Having himself worked as a magistrate in the Pomeroon River District, where he had ‘gradually established civilisation and the gold A Macusi Indian in full dancing dress industry, and expelled Venezuelan influence’ from the disputed border regions, im Thurn knew the territory

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better than any other British official.13 Im Thurn attended the Paris meetings as expert advisor, and wrote up the proceedings for The Times. After serving time in the Colonial Office in London for two years, im Thurn was appointed Colonial Secretary and subsequently Lieutenant Governor in Ceylon in 1902, but soon afterwards cross-posted to Fiji as Governor of Fiji and High Commissioner of the Western Pacific, where he served from 1904 to 1910. Retiring from the governorship due to ill health, im Thurn took an active part in the London-based learned societies, being appointed as president of the Anthropological Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1914. In alliance with R.R. Marett (the first permanently appointed anthropologist at Oxford), im Thurn supported initiatives to make the study of anthropology at university level compulsory for the training of British colonial civil servants.14 Im Thurn’s public career was on hold during the war years, possibly because he retained his Swiss-German surname during a period of welldocumented anti-German feeling.15 He served as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1919 to 1921, resigning to retire to Edinburgh with his Scottish-born wife, Hannah Lorimer, but maintaining his connection with Exeter College, where he was appointed honorary fellow in 1925. Im Thurn continued to research, write, and publish on anthropological subjects, participated in the activities of the Scottish Anthropological and Folklore Society (his contribution commemorated by the establishment of an im Thurn lecture), chaired the council of the Scottish Geographical Society from 1926 to 1930, and worked on the Committee for the Preservation of Rural Scotland (forerunner of the National Parks Association), although his planned work on Amerindian religion remained incomplete at his death in 1932. His obituary in the Times captures his versatile career, describing him as ‘Colonial governor, explorer, anthropologist and naturalist’.16 * Scholarly assessment of Everard im Thurn’s life and scientific contribution has been fragmentary. To mountaineers he is the ‘conqueror’ of Mt Roraima. To visual anthropologists he is a sensitive and innovative photographer, who disapproved of anthropological studio photography and photographed his Amerindian subjects in the field. To later anthropologists working in British Guiana – and present-day Guyana – Among the Indians of

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Guiana is a major source. To the first academic anthropologists at Oxford University, E.B. Tylor and R.R. Marett, he was a friend and non-professional colleague. To three successive directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew he was a skilled collector of rare plants and ethno-botanical objects. To historians of the Pacific he is the author of controversial land reforms in Fiji in the early twentieth century. In assessing im Thurn’s contribution to anthropology, it should be borne in mind that he was a representative of that community of intellectually versatile and physically resilient British colonial administrators who turned their attention to the interconnections between the disciplines of ethnography, geography, botany, ornithology, administration, and economic and cultural development. As collectors, lecturers, and writers their output was extraordinarily extensive. As residents in often geographically remote British colonies they developed attachments and loyalties to the lands of their posting that often created tensions with their personal and professional ambitions and commitments to the imperial centre. By the early 1880s im Thurn was well known at the Anthropological Institute in London as an ‘authority’ on the Amerindian cultures of British Guiana, as the editor of the Guiana-based scholarly journal Timehri, and as an anthropological photographer. His articles on Amerindian religion and on stone implements had already appeared in the Institute’s journal prior to inclusion in Among the Indians of Guiana in 1883. Illustrated with engravings taken from photographs and woodcuts based on im Thurn’s own sketches, this book was well received by the British learned societies. Im Thurn had consulted with E.B. Tylor, then president of the Anthropological Institute, whose Oxford lectures he attended and who became a major mentor. The book’s success gave im Thurn the profile to plan the ascent of Roraima the following year. In Timehri and in British-based journals im Thurn published vivid and extended accounts of the ascent of Roraima; essays on Amerindian practices of taming animals and on Amerindian children’s and adult games; as well as several lively narratives of expeditions to various regions of British Guiana.17 Im Thurn also took an interest in Amerindian pre-history, studied petroglyphs and compiled a collection of Guianan stone tools which now form an important element of the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown.18 The remainder of his substantial collections for the colonial museum was lost when the building was destroyed in a fire in the 1940s. Thus his contribution as a collector of Amerindian material culture is

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represented mainly by his donations to British institutions such as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the National Museum of Scotland. Im Thurn published ethnographic articles throughout his career although, as he rose in the colonial service, the demands on his time were too great for extended scholarly writing. During his Ceylon appointment, im Thurn was president of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and secured the appointment of a ‘first-class man for the Colombo Museum’.19 Little evidence survives of other anthropological activity, either in Ceylon or Fiji, although he continued as an ethnographic collector. During his extensive travels throughout the Pacific during the five years of his administration, to Tonga, the Gilbert and Ellis Islands, Ocean Island, the Solomon Islands, New Hebrides and Norfolk Island, im Thurn collected a number of objects of material culture, including important items such as New Hebridean memorial posts, reflecting the resources and negotiating power of his official position. Most were presented to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1909, with a second donation in 1923, and a later donation to the National Museum of Scotland. The majority are from Fiji, including kava bowls, food dishes, wooden headrests, bone needles for stitching canoe sails, tambuas (ceremonial gifts consisting of a sperm whale tooth on a cord), a nose flute, and an elaborate wig constructed of grass stems. Also, as Governor of Fiji, im Thurn read extensively on the history of European contact in the Pacific, and worked hard to develop an understanding of Fijian and other Pacific cultures, although in his official position he lacked the close contact of his earlier associations with Amerindian individuals and communities in British Guiana. As president of the Anthropological Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, im Thurn travelled to Australia for the Association’s international meetings in 1914, together with anthropologists R.R. Marett, W.H.R. Rivers, and the young Malinowski.20 In his presidential address, ‘A Study of Primitive Character’, im Thurn reflects on his ‘personal experience, now closed, as an anthropological administrator in tropical places where Eastern and Western folk have met, and where the inevitable clash between the two has occurred’.21 His address, not tightly argued, is underpinned by the assumptions of evolutionary anthropology, but his interrogation of the terms ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ indicates his discomfort with such terminology.

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* On im Thurn’s arrival in Suva in 1904, an introductory article in the Red Funnel magazine quoted from the new governor’s writings on the Amerindians of Guiana and acclaimed ‘the ethnological acumen and the character and training of the mind that was soon to be exercised in the interests of the Fijian people.’22 However im Thurn’s published writings on the Pacific suggest a change of focus from anthropology to the history of European contact. It would clearly have been difficult for a British governor to photograph indigenous people with the same freedom as a middleranking, isolated colonial official in a remote province of British Guiana. Only one badly damaged photograph and a reference to lantern slides indicate the possibility of a lost archive of Pacific ethnographic photographs. Im Thurn’s Pacific writings show less of the warmth and sympathy evident in his writings on the Amerindians of Guiana. Only two of the five papers on Pacific topics published in Thoughts, Talks and Tramps are on anthropology: presidential addresses to the Anthropological Section of the BAAS in 1914, and to the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1921, the latter entitled ‘On the Thoughts of South Sea Islanders’. The major publication of his retirement was an edition of an early nineteenth-century sandalwood trader’s journal for the Hakluyt Society. Im Thurn’s anthropological interests are reflected in the footnotes to this document of European observation of Fijian culture of the period.23 Im Thurn also wrote a substantial introduction to Agnes Gardner King’s illustrated travel book of the Pacific, Islands Far Away, having assisted the author on various anthropological aspects.24 The land reforms im Thurn instituted in Fiji remain controversial. Senator A. Ali forthrightly stated in Senate debate in the Parliament of Fiji on 30 August 2004: A colonial Governor, Sir Everard im Thurn, in the first decade of the 20th century held that the Fijians were a dying race about to become extinct and he changed the land laws to allow the sale and alienation of Fijian land. Thus around 104,000 acres of fertile Fijian land, through dubious legality, were sold into freehold in addition to what have been lost for guns, knives and trinkets before 1874. 25 Im Thurn summarised his views in a lecture on ‘Native Land and Labour in the South Seas’, delivered after his retirement and quoted here from his obituary:

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Sir Everard expressed the view that if Fijian land was to be developed, the largely unused native lands must be opened for use, and either the natives must be persuaded to work or more and more coloured labour must be brought from outside. Only a part of the necessary manual labour could be done by men born in temperate regions.26 Im Thurn’s predecessor, Sir Arthur Gordon, Fiji’s first resident governor, established a system that ‘prevented Fijians from working outside their village-based economies and social structure’.27 As Steven Ratuva has argued, Gordon was responsible for a land codification process by which the complex Fijian notion of vanua relating to Fijians’ sense of ‘communal being, cultural identity and socio-cultural expression … came to be formally identified with a defined geographic boundary and ordered social grouping rather than a generalized grouping as before. Im Thurn … argued that Fijians had no primordial claim to land and that the state should take over lands and privatise them.’28 Im Thurn held the conventional colonising view that the consequences of European contact could not be reversed, and that the only way forward was to develop the colonised countries’ resources for the good of all residents, indigenous people and colonisers alike, with an emphasis on opportunity for individual enterprise rather than conservation of customary land.29 This of course served the interests of European settlers who were keen to access more land. It was im Thurn’s understanding that the first Europeans to settle in the South Pacific were mainly fugitive convicts, sailors, and white traders, often men of violent, drunken, and debauched character who illtreated the ‘natives’, subjected them to ‘evil influences’ and incited inter-clan conflict for personal gain.30 In his view British administration replaced this lawlessness with order and security. Convinced of the benefits of British colonial government and of his own good will, and under pressure from local European settlers, like many others he did not come to grips with the complexities of traditional Fijian land tenure and the economic exploitation inherent in colonial development. Im Thurn was also influenced by the work of W.H.R. Rivers on the rapid decline of the Fijian indigenous population after colonisation: he contributed the preface to Rivers’ Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia (1922). His address to the BAAS goes so far as to suggest that he did not anticipate the

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ultimate survival of Pacific indigenous peoples in the face of European ‘civilisation’. ‘Where Eastern and Western folk have met, and where the inevitable clash between the two has occurred’, he writes, ‘this dying out of the weaker folk has happened even when the stronger people have done their best to avoid this extirpation.’ 31 This address is coloured by a partially acknowledged consciousness of administrative failure and loss. During the years of World War I, im Thurn devoted himself to supporting the Fijian troops posted to Britain, including the young Fijian leader Ratu Sukuna, who later visited him in Scotland.32 Marett records that ‘over 100 [Fijian soldiers] survived to present him with an illuminated address of thanks in 1921’.33 Ironically, immediately after the war, in recognition of his command of German, his Pacific experience, and his anthropological knowledge, im Thurn was persuaded to work on a committee with anthropologist Henry Seligman seeking to locate German anthropological records in the conquered territory of New Guinea.34 * Earlier, in British Guiana, Everard im Thurn had had considerable freedom to pursue his anthropological interests, despite tensions between his official role as representative of the colonial administration, his scientific interests as an individual, and his sympathy for the traditional cultures of the Amerindian people whose lives would be altered by the economic development he was required to promote, particularly the gold industry. He also glosses over the imperial and strategic purposes of his journeys into inland British Guiana – to investigate territorial boundary issues – to create the false impression of a more autonomous scientific expedition, commenting for example that ‘the object of this particular journey … is entirely unimportant for the present purpose.’35 On the other hand, this frustrated man of science made use of the opportunities that a colonial posting provided to pursue his anthropological and other interests in conjunction with his administrative responsibilities. He was part of a network of colonial scientific investigators who, while they served the interests of the imperial decision-makers who employed them, also took the opportunity to pursue wider scientific goals. As a creator and manipulator of these networks, im Thurn’s patron Sir Joseph Hooker was masterly in his promotion of botanical and ethno-botanical research for its own sake alongside that of economic botany at the service of imperial development.

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Among the Indians of Guiana is im Thurn’s major contribution to the field of ethnography. The three opening chapters are essentially travel narratives of journeys ‘from the interior’ of British Guiana, incorporating extensive ethnological observations. Much of this writing is descriptive ethnography. As Joan Pau Rubiés suggests in his essay on the relationship between travel writing and ethnography, ‘the ethnographic impulse’ preceded the development of ‘scientific ethnology’ and the latter could in fact be interpreted as ‘the consequence of an intense and sustained interaction between … two kinds of ethnographic practitioners, popular and erudite’.36 Im Thurn’s writings contain this kind of interaction within a single text, illustrating his location on the boundary between amateur and professional anthropology. The two scientific chapters on plants and animals merge with the ethnographic in a discussion of their function in traditional Amerindian daily life. He notes for example that the leaves of the Ischnosiphon ‘serve the Indians in place of wrapping paper, for many purposes, and the stems are woven by the same people into baskets.’37 Amerindian names for plants and animals are sometimes included in addition to European common and Latin names. In one case, for a popular readership, he translates the Indian name for a spider of scorpion-like appearance, ‘mother-in-law of scorpions’.38 He respects indigenous knowledge of symbiosis, illustrated by the Amerindians’ advice, when they saw him and his party trying to wash a species of ant from an orchid growing in an ants’ nest, that the plant could not grow without the ant.39 Consistent with this blend of erudite and popular, scientific discussion is interspersed with personal observation and anecdote. ‘It is hardly possible to find an Indian house where there are not teeth or portions of the skin of one of these species [puma, jaguar or ocelot] … Indians have a great dread of jaguars’, he comments, recounting ‘I have known these Indians, in places where they supposed jaguars to be, sling their hammocks high up in some tree, having first made a fire round its roots, and sleep aloft, leaving incredulous me to my fate below’.40 Cultural relationships between Amerindian communities and birds interest him greatly,41 and he records indigenous names for birds (although he is proud that one, Agaleus imthurni, was scientifically named after himself). He frequently writes of birds that the Amerindians tame, including ‘the brilliantly coloured and crested cock-of-the-rock’ that featured in im Thurn’s own cabinet.42 His detailed paper in Timehri, ‘Tame Animals Among the Red Men’, gives a fuller account of Amerindian practices in taming and rearing

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animals, particularly birds as a source of feathers for ceremonial ornaments and also for the European market.43 His reference to the Buprestis beetle ‘with purple and green shot wings, much valued by the Indians as body ornaments’,44 is corroborated by a shimmering beetle-wing necklace donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum. More formal academic chapters discuss tribal groupings and aspects of Amerindian life and culture, family and marriage systems, appearance and dress, houses and settlements, social life, hunting and fishing, agriculture, food preparation and feasts, manufactures, ‘kenaimas’ (shamans bearing ill will)45 and ‘peaimen’ (religious practitioners and healers), religion, folklore, and ‘antiquities’ (pre-history). Although im Thurn read widely in anthropology, these topics correspond fairly closely to Tylorian categories widely disseminated in successive editions of the British Association’s Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilised Lands and the Royal Geographical Society’s Hints to Travellers. But when adopting a scientific rather than anecdotal approach his prose, as the author admits, can be rather dry. With respect to cultural practices, cleanliness signifies degree of civilisation (he classifies the Warraus as the lowest, although commending their canoe-building skills). The Arawaks are designated the most competent in English, without analysis of, for example, missionary contact. Differences between groups are noted as to staple foods, methods of hammock-making, warlike attitudes and inter-group hostilities, and theories of migration and settlement, demonstrating in some instances a scholarly approach, at others the kind of ‘rule-of-thumb’, stereotyping guide to indigenous, colonised peoples that might be provided to a newly arrived administrator. His chapter on ‘Indian Tribes’ analyses language resemblances between groups, uncertain population size, and the different names recorded for the Amerindian groups in the colony, taking into account physical and cultural differences. He notes the gaps in his own knowledge and reviews evidence provided by earlier travellers such as Sir Robert Schomburgk and C.F.P. von Martius. European biases emerge in his descriptions of the physical characteristics of various Amerindian groups. The facial expressions of the Warraus, for example, are ‘strikingly dull, unintelligent, and gloomy’. The Arawaks are ‘better proportioned’ than the Warraus, their faces ‘far brighter and more intelligent’. The Wapianas have ‘finer features’; the socalled ‘True Caribs’ greater strength, although ‘their features are coarser’; the Ackawoi are ‘somewhat miserable in appearance’. Degrees of darkness of skin are compared.46

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‘Origins of Families’ exemplifies im Thurn as academic ethnographer. The chapter demonstrates a variety of research tools, sifting evidence based on a list of families published by William Hillhouse, a European traveller in 1830, and the views of local European authorities. Im Thurn records his research method in sending out a list of Arawak family names to missionaries and magistrates working among Arawak people. He also records problems that arose as a result of the research, as when two Arawak respondents from the same settlement differed in their interpretations and hostility ensued. Im Thurn also seeks information directly from Arawak informants, and records alternative explanations.47 Ethnographic discussion of appearance and dress also combines valuable observation with Eurocentric prejudice. Im Thurn argues that Amerindians are ‘decently naked’, a view opposed to that of many European missionaries. But in stating that ‘the Indian, man or woman, whatever the tribe, is not a fine animal in appearance’ due to short stature and lack of muscle tone, he employs the offensive colloquial term ‘animal’, with an implied contrast to im Thurn’s own tall and muscular physique. He describes Amerindians as having the physical endurance for long walking or canoeing expeditions, but not strength or speed, and lacking immunity from disease: he also comments on the ‘enervating effects’ of European influence. In a stereotypical crosscultural comparison, he notes that ‘as a rule the faces of neither men nor women appear to the European handsome or beautiful: but in rare cases one sees both men and women with features so regular and well-formed that they would anywhere be considered pleasing’.48 Another conventional category for colonial ethnographic observations is that of body modification. Examples that he records include the almost obsolete use of a board tied to the head to flatten the skulls of children, body piercing, and female leg bands which distort the calf muscles. Body painting, clothing, and ornaments are described in detail, with some careful illustrations. Im Thurn is particularly interested in ornaments, necklaces of animal teeth, cotton armlets incorporating bone, shell, or metal, strings of coloured seeds, and feathered ornaments – crowns of feathers, ear decorations with humming bird feathers, ruffs of macaw feathers, collars of white heron feathers or black from the curassow bird. Many of these he collected for the Pitt Rivers Museum. On attitudes to dress he counters European readers’ perceptions of difference:

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A young Indian in the prime of his life, conscious of a fine figure and good looks, often takes infinite pains with his person, and manages to put on his oils, paints, feathers, and teeth so delicately and becomingly that, despite his nakedness, he gives himself exactly that neat and well-dressed appearance which one is accustomed to associate with a young, well-bred civilised gentleman, very careful in the matter of clothing.49 Im Thurn carefully describes a number of Amerindian practices which would appear particularly strange or repellent to European readers. One of these is the ‘couvade’ or male childbed: I had often read and wondered at it; but it was not until I saw it practiced around me, and found that I was often suddenly deprived of the services of my best hunters or boat-hands by the necessity which they felt, and which nothing could persuade them to disregard, of observing couvades, that I realised its full strangeness.50 He records this practice whereby the father of a new-born child takes to his hammock and is nursed and cared for by the women of his community while the wife who has given birth gets up almost immediately. Reflecting on the reasons for the custom with some objectivity, he nevertheless displays conventional and persistent European ignorance of peri-natal injury, asserting that the woman who gives birth in a ‘very unartificial condition, suffers but little, and resumes her ordinary work’.51 Another Amerindian practice that he instinctively finds strange or repellent are the ‘beenas’, or hunters’ customs of inflicting severe pain on themselves, or worse from the point of view of im Thurn, an animal-lover, on their dogs. He endeavours to trace the line of thought whereby ‘the hunter mentally connects success in the acquisition of game with pain previously inflicted on himself or his dogs’, concluding that it must be a method of training for enduring pain or danger during the hunt.52 Among the hunting and fishing methods described are those that fascinated Europeans – the preparation of the traditional Amerindian poison ourali for fish-poisoning, poisoned arrows, and the blow pipe. Im Thurn’s technical information about the preparation of various barks to create a deadly syrup is supplemented by anecdotes of occasions when he accidentally pricked his fingers on poison darts – fortunately no longer

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potent. A further Amerindian skill he records is the ability to decoy birds by mimicking their calls. With a light touch he tells of two Amerindians from his camp who set out from different directions to hunt a maam bird, neither knowing the other was going: ‘Each, thinking he was just about to see his bird, found the other had mimicked the cry of the maam all too well. They came back to camp in very bad temper.’53 Im Thurn’s curiosity and practical skills make him an attentive observer of both male and female tasks. His interpretation of Amerindian social patterns of energetic activity and inactivity counters Eurocentric assumptions about the supposed laziness of colonised peoples. He reports on how Amerindians cultivate and harvest cassava; prepare cassava bread, the alcoholic drink paiwari, and various kinds of eggs; how fire is produced without matches. He records turtle and iguana egg-hunting, basket-making, spinning and weaving, pottery, weapon-making, boat-making, and the production of household utensils and musical instruments. Recreational activities observed include paiwari feasts, the Arawak Whip-game, and the Warrau Shield-game. The theoretical discussion of religion in the final chapters is of less interest than im Thurn’s dramatic first person account of an extended healing session with a ‘peaiman’ or Amerindian healer.54 Curious to understand the traditional healer’s approach, he submits to a healing session when suffering from a headache, and sustains his powers of observation while deeply disturbed by the intensity of the experience.55 Apart from im Thurn’s ethnographic work in British Guiana and his Amerindian and Pacific collections in the Pitt Rivers Museum, his anthropological reputation would stand alone on his archive of photographs of Amerindian people taken in the field in the 1880s. Since the inclusion of im Thurn’s ethnographic photographs in the Royal Anthropological Institute’s exhibition, ‘Observers of Man’ (1980), curated by Roslyn Poignant, his contribution to visual anthropology has become more widely known. A decade later, Donald Tayler published a study of im Thurn’s photographs, ‘“Very loveable human beings”: The photography of Everard im Thurn’, in which he observes that Im Thurn created a ‘positive image’ of the ‘native’ which was not merely a reiteration of the romantic purity of the noble savage stereotype. It argued for a realism, a cultural relativity, an acceptance which, while much of his writing was in the traditional nineteenth

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century descriptive mode, was in line with the move away from the established anthropological categorization of that time.56 Im Thurn himself presented a pioneering paper, ‘Anthropological Uses of the Camera’, at the Royal Anthropological Institute, illustrated by his own photographs, and published in the Institute’s journal in 1893. He considered that the practice of recording the mere physiological characteristics of ‘primitive folk’ in the studio was to treat them as if they were dead. He writes: ‘My special concern … is as to the use of the camera for the accurate record … of these folk regarded as living beings. This latter is indeed a far more difficult proceeding, one much more seldom practised by anthropologists.’57 All his photographs were taken in the field, a significant achievement given the available technology and the challenging environmental conditions of inland British Guiana in the 1880s. Im Thurn’s subjects include individuals, families and children in their villages, and his own Amerindian employees in the field. His images are often supplemented by his published essays or objects collected: for example men demonstrating ceremonial games, children playing games, and young men wearing ceremonial feathered headdresses and other ornaments. * Everard im Thurn contributed significantly to the intellectual and institutional development of British anthropology as an academic discipline worthy of study not only by future professionals but also by British colonial administrators as part of their training. His own career in British Guiana impressed colonial authorities with the benefits of appointing administrators with an understanding and respect for the cultures of colonised peoples. However, the Colonial Office and im Thurn himself may have overestimated his ability to transfer his cross-cultural expertise to the unfamiliar cultures of the South Pacific, and in particular to appreciate the complexities of customary land in Fiji. In his retirement im Thurn provided significant leadership in anthropology in London and Oxford for a decade, and for a second decade in Scotland. There are complex reasons for his descent into obscurity after his death in 1932. The era of the amateur anthropologist was passing, and his undoubted ethnographic gifts had preceded opportunities for academic training. While his appointments in British Guiana gave him a rare opportunity for fieldwork avant la lettre, this remote location also took him

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out of the mainstream of metropolitan intellectual life for most of those two decades. By the time im Thurn became president of the RAI in 1919, he was in his late sixties, his health and energy depleted by years in the tropics. His retirement to Scotland in 1921 took him away from influential scholarly circles in London and Oxford, and was regretted by his colleagues, although he had almost ten more years of active participation in Scottish learned societies and the Hakluyt Society. Despite a significant contribution to anthropology, botany, ornithology, and geography, and an appreciation of their interconnections, im Thurn never became a fellow of the Royal Society. Everard im Thurn travelled light. His papers are dispersed among British archives, his library sold, and his ethnographic collections donated to museums. His collection of orchid specimens from the Pacific, together with paintings by Hannah, was donated to Kew Gardens, where the collection was dismantled for cataloguing. ‘Sir Everard im Thurn,’ entry in Cyclopedia of Fiji (Sydney: Cyclopedia Company of Fiji, 1907), p. 193 (the source was certainly im Thurn himself, as the Cyclopedia was published under the Governor’s patronage). 2 E.F. im Thurn, Letter to David Prain, 26 June 1907, Government House, Suva (Letter no. 190, vol. 177 [New Zealand, New Guinea and Pacific Islands, Letters 1892-1914], Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Archives). 3 E.F. im Thurn, The Birds of Marlborough, being a contribution to the ornithology of the district (London: Marlborough, 1870). 4 Im Thurn maintained life-long contact with his tutor Henry Pelham, later President of Trinity College. Pelham wrote: ‘I in common with my colleagues had formed high expectations of his success in the Schools, which only his domestic reverses prevented from being fulfilled.’ In his testimonial Pelham adds: ‘He showed then and since very considerable literary capacity. He is a thoroughly thoughtful, cultivated man’ (in R.R. Marett, introductory memoir to E.F. im Thurn, Thoughts, Talks and Tramps [London: Oxford University Press, 1934], p. xiii). In a corner of the Pitt Rivers Museum is a model of an Arawak house from British Guiana, complete with miniature hammocks, cooking pots, cassava grater, and canoe, a gift from im Thurn to Pelham’s daughter Alice. 5 E.F. im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana, being sketches chiefly anthropologic from the interior of British Guiana [1883] (New York: Dover, 1967), p. 82. 6 See R.R. Marett: introductory memoir to Thoughts, Talks and Tramps, p. xvii. 7 For a detailed analysis of the connection between im Thurn’s travel narrative and Doyle’s novel, see R.J. Dalziell, ‘The Curious Case of Sir Everard im Thurn and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Exploration and the Imperial Adventure Novel, The Lost World,’ English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 45/2 (2002), pp. 131-57. 8 The original 1925 film directed by Harry O. Hoyt has been restored and produced on video as The Lost World (Golden Press Video, 1995). 9 For example, The Times, 6 March 1885, p. 11. 1

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David Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, DVD Video (BBC Worldwide Ltd, 2003). Attenborough has described the summit of Roraima in wording so similar to im Thurn’s account that one can only assume that he was familiar with the 1884 narrative: Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (London: BBC Books, 2002), pp. 351-5. 11 CMG. stands for Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. 12 This unresolved dispute has been documented by Odeen Ishmael, ‘The trail of diplomacy: A documentary history of the Guyana-Venezuela border issue,’ 1998 (revised Dec 2004) [http://www.guyana.org/features/trail_diplomacy.html, accessed 1 February 2006]. For the early history of border disputes in the region see Peter Rivière, Absent-Minded Imperialism: Britain and the Expansion of Empire in Nineteenth Century Brazil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995). 13 ‘Sir Everard im Thurn,’ entry in Cyclopedia of Fiji, p. 193. 14 In 1914 for example, im Thurn attended a major conference to consider the recommendations of a joint BAAS/RAI committee set up to encourage the teaching of anthropology to ‘persons either about to proceed to or actually working in those parts of the British Empire which contain populations alien to the British people’. Im Thurn seconded a resolution put by Sir Henry Craik supporting the extending of university instruction in anthropology ‘so that those “about to spend their lives” overseas might acquire an “accurate knowledge of the habits, customs, social and religious ideals and ideals of the Eastern and non-European races subject to his Majesty the King Emperor”’ (George W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951 [London: Athlone, 1995], p. 379). 15 The British royal family changed their name to Windsor in 1917; Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That [1929] recounts the difficulties he experienced at school at Charterhouse due to his German middle name (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1960), pp. 38-9. 16 Obituary, Sir Everard im Thurn, The Times, 12 October 1932. 17 After im Thurn’s death in Edinburgh in 1932, R.R. Marett, together with im Thurn’s widow, Hannah im Thurn, compiled a collection of his essays and papers with an introductory memoir by Marett, published by Oxford University Press in 1934. They chose a remarkably uninformative title, Thoughts, Talks and Tramps, which gives no indication of the content or interest of the collection. 18 Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology [http://www.sdnp.org.gy/wrma/about.htm,accessed 1 February 2006]. 19 E.F. im Thurn, Letter to Thiselton-Dyer, 30 October 1901, Colonial Office, Colombo (Letter no. 197, vol. 164 [Ceylon, Aden and Persian Letters 1901-1914], Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Archives). 20 Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 12. 21 Im Thurn: Thoughts, Talks and Tramps, p. 268. 22 J. Davidson, The Red Funnel, 2/1, 1st Feb 1906, p. 9. 23 The Journal of William Lockerby, Sandalwood Trader in the Fijian Islands during the Years 18081809 [1925], ed. Everard im Thurn, Nendeln: Klaus Reprint, 1967. 24 Agnes Gardner King, Islands Far Away (London: Sifton, Praed & Co, 1920). 10

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Daily Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, Parliament of Fiji, The Senate, 30 Aug 2004 [http://parliament.gov.fj/hansard/viewhansard.aspx?hansardID=247&viewtype=full, accessed 1 February 2006]. 26 Quotation from obituary, Sir Everard im Thurn, The Times, 12 October 1932. 27 See R. Wolfgramm, ‘Why Labour has failed’ [http://www.tongahighschool.com/vol_2_issue_7_robert.htm, accessed 1 February 2006]. 28 Steven Ratuva, ‘Anatomising the Vanua complex: Intra-communal land disputes and implications on the Fijian community,’ ‘Transforming Land Conflict’: South Pacific Land Tenure Conflict Symposium, April 2003 [http://www.usp.ac.fj/landmgmt/pdf/webpapers/paper83ratuva.pdf, p. 3, accessed 1 February 2006]. 29 For a detailed discussion see John Overton, Land and Differentiation in Rural Fiji (Canberra: National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University, 1989). 30 Im Thurn: Thoughts, Talks and Tramps, p. 226. 31 E.F. im Thurn, ‘A study of primitive character,’ Presidential Address to the Anthropological Section of the BAAS, 1914, reprinted in Thoughts, Talks and Tramps, p. 268. 32 Deryck Scarr, Ratu Sukuna: Soldier, Statesman, Man of Two Worlds (London: Macmillan, 1980). 33 Im Thurn: Thoughts, Talks and Tramps, p. xxii. 34 This enterprise did not get very far and the records ended up in Australia: see German New Guinea – Annual Reports 1886-1913, ed. and trans. Peter Sack and Dymphna Clark (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979). 35 Im Thurn: Thoughts, Talks and Tramps, p. 60. 36 Joan Pau Rubiés, ‘Travel-Writing and ethnography’ in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel-Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 246. 37 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 93. 38 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 155. 39 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 131, 149. 40 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 111. 41 Im Thurn’s ethno-ornithological interests foreshadow ethnographers investigating the relationship between birds and cultural practices, notably Stephen Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). 42 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 122, 128. 43 Im Thurn: Thoughts, Talks and Tramps, pp. 153-65. 44 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 146. 45 See Neil L. Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaimá and the Poetics of Violent Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 46 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 167-8. 47 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 184-5 48 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 189 49 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 199-200. 50 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 218-9 51 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 218. 25

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Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 230 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 248 54 George W. Stocking comments that ‘Although Everhard [sic] Im Thurn’s book about his travels Among the Indians of Guiana was written before he attended Tylor’s early Oxford lectures, Tylorian assumption was clearly evident in his discussion of their religious beliefs’ (Victorian Anthropology, New York: Free Press, 1987, p. 96). 55 Im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 335-8. 56 Donald Tayler, ‘“Very loveable human beings”: The photography of Everard im Thurn,’ in Elizabeth Edwards (ed), Anthropology and Photography: 1860-1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 192. 57 E.F. im Thurn, ‘Anthropological uses of the camera,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 22 (1893), pp. 184-203. 52 53

Gertrude Bell in Iraq

6. GERTRUDE LOWTHIAN BELL IN MESOPOTAMIA Julia Emberley

It is obvious that elementary judicial processes are suited only to a society which is yet in an elementary stage of development, but no less obvious is the converse proposition, though it is perhaps more difficult to bear in mind. Men living in tents, or in reed huts almost as nomadic as the tent itself, men who have never known any control but the empty fiction of Turkish authority … men who have the tradition of a personal independence, which was limited only by their customs, entirely ignorant of a world which lay outside their swamps and pasturages, and as entirely indifferent to its interests and to the opportunities it offers, will not in a day fall into step with European ambitions, nor welcome European methods. Nor can they be hastened. Whether that which we have to teach them will add to the sum of their happiness, or whether the learning of inevitable lessons will bring them the proverbial attitude of wisdom, the schooling must, if it is to be valuable, be long and slow. In our own history, from the Moot court through Magna Charta to the Imperial Parliament was the work of centuries, yet the first contained the germ of all that came after. The tribes of the Iraq have advanced but little beyond the Moot court, and should the shaping of their destinies become our care in the future, we shall be wise to eschew any experiments tending to rush them into highly specialized institutions – a policy which could commend itself only to those who are never wearied by words that signify nothing.1 These words, taken from the conclusion to Gertrude Bell’s article ‘The basis of government in Turkish Arabia’ (1918), represented her political opinion on how Britain should best govern the area known as Mesopotamia, or

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modern day Iraq, during the early twentieth century. Bell’s position was entirely in keeping with prevailing colonial ideas of indirect rule with its governing strategy of granting only partial autonomy to the newly forming Arab nations while maintaining British political and economic control by proxy. Bell’s description of the underdeveloped, if not infantile, tribal politics of Arabia also conformed to the colonial ideologies in which peoples or tribes were racially classified as inferior, essentially violent, uncivilised, engaged in ‘the tortuous arts of Oriental commerce’ and, thus, in need of an education in the superiority of British political and economic institutions.2 Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) articulated her imperial politics through this ideology of racial difference. Moreover, she sought to discipline the tribes by subjecting them to a pedagogical imperative normally invested in the British domestic sphere for the governance of children. For Bell, the Orient was like an unruly child whose maturity depended upon the enlightened education offered by British civil institutions. In another article related to establishing the British Mandate in Iraq, Bell wrote: ‘An advisory position is no easy task. It calls for a constant exercise of tact, forbearance, and self-denial, to say nothing of a capacity for realizing that infant states will insist on running before they can walk, and that every adage to the contrary notwithstanding, they must within limits of safety be allowed to do so. The eager advance may entail many a tumble and many an ostentatious resetting of tottering feet.’3 The metaphorical slippage between the infantilised Arab and infantile statecraft has prompted at least one critic, the historian Elie Kedourie, to disparage Bell’s patronising use of ‘metaphors taken from the nursery’.4 Bell’s infantilising discourse, however, coupled with her belief in the importance of education, was not just symptomatic of British Orientalism but the combined result of her class, gender, race, and national location in British society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifically, Bell’s governing strategies in Iraq were influenced by the kinds of pedagogical practices she experienced and gained knowledge of during her own childhood and youth, both in the formal educational institutions she attended in London and at Oxford, and also in her travels, which were part of a more informal, but no less relevant, educational experience. In her important study of British women travellers and their invention of ‘the Orient’ from 1718 to 1918, Billie Melman astutely observes ‘that women’s travel, travel as such, is a social phenomenon as well as a cultural one and that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, this phenomenon was integrated in the bourgeois Bildung and bourgeois life-style,

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methods of livelihood and gender-ideology’.5 The complex relationship between Bell’s Orientalism and her gendered and racial subjectivity was formed by as well as informed her knowledge and experience both of the bourgeois family and British imperial governance in the colonies. My discussion of Gertrude Bell’s imperial politics focuses on her two major works of travel literature, The Desert and the Sown (1907) and Amurath to Amurath (1911).6 In these books, she recounts her travels through Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia on two separate journeys in 1906 and 1909. Her approach weaves together the archaeological significance of the areas with their contemporary political importance to Britain. Bell’s archaeological knowledge was used to justify colonial rule, just as the informal knowledge she acquired from the domestic politics of the Christian British bourgeois family was used to further an infantilised and racialised representation of the Orient. Her racial rhetoric of Arab nomads, with its references to primitive and infantile forms of tribal governance, served British imperial policy in the Middle East, leading up to and beyond World War I. While the popular British imagination today is well acquainted with T.E. Lawrence and his role in curbing Arab dissent for the purposes of establishing Britain’s neo-colonial hold over Iraq, by comparison Gertrude Bell remains relatively unknown, although the substantial number of positive reviews of her travel books in leading newspapers and journals of the time confirms her popularity as a writer. Even though she was a woman in a man’s political world, her masculine-identified mode of self-representation meant that she was also recognised and accepted as a key player in British Middle Eastern politics. Her political diplomacy was instrumental in achieving Britain’s mandate in Iraq. In 1916, she was made Oriental Secretary by the High Commissioner for Iraq, Sir Percy Cox. In addition to her contributions to colonial governance from 1916 until her death in 1926, she also created an institute of archaeology in Iraq and wrote an important document regulating archaeological findings in order to protect them from the greed and plundering of Western nations.7 Bell’s archaeological fieldwork made it possible for her to gather information for Britain’s Colonial Office. More than that, however, her archaeological nostalgia for a settled land populated by Christians provided a historical justification for British imperial governance. Specifically, Bell made use of the idea of vanishing Bedouin tribes in order to re-imagine a newly formed state peopled by settled and Christian, as opposed to nomadic and

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Islamic, subjects. I will return to the question of Bell’s archaeological nostalgia. For the moment it is important to underline how Bell strategically used the science of archaeology as a mode of historical writing in the political formation of the British colony. Archaeology is a privileged science in Bell’s travel writings to the extent that it becomes a way of knowing the land. European travellers to the Middle East were often able to establish a connection to the land through their familiarity with Biblical knowledge. Archaeology provided a secular route to achieving similar ends, a sense of familiarity for British nationals, and a way of reducing the feeling of alienation for the colony’s potential new settlers. Bell’s domestic politics also provided a means to establish a connection to the land and its inhabitants. It was largely on the basis of an ethnographic representation of tribal life, and especially of the rituals of hospitality, that Bell was able to draw this connection. Both archaeology and ethnography were major scientific levers allowing Bell to acquire information for the purposes of pursuing Britain’s political and economic domination of Iraq. While Bell has been marginalised – if not excluded – from the history of anthropology, her work demonstrates the intertwined histories of the sciences of archaeology and ethnography, themselves embedded in ideologies of racial and sexual difference, and serving to underpin British imperialism in the Middle East. * To school a colonial subject in the ways of civilisation was also to create an object of colonial desire, a savage other upon which the civilised subject consolidated her sense of self. However, that bourgeois sense of a unified subjectivity was complicated for Bell to the extent that as a woman she was not necessarily included in the fiction of Civilised Man. Nevertheless she refused to be excluded from this public domain of power and knowledge. By disavowing the other within, as determined by the gender politics of her patriarchal imperialist society, Bell re-invented an Other subject, an oriental child in need of the governing rationality of the imperial mother, the surrogate mother of imperial benevolence, whose education in the governing practices of the bourgeois family would provide the basis on which to further her own sense of bourgeois entitlement in the British Empire. The governing apparatus of infantilisation – the division of public and domestic spheres – emerged alongside bourgeois power in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One way to render visible the complicities between these separate spheres is through an examination

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of how the micropolitics of infantilisation created various pedagogical subjects to be governed, in the home and the factory, in the school, the nation, and the colony. Infantilisation was, as Uday Mehta has noted, a foundational aspect of the liberal ideology underlying British imperial practices in colonial governance during the early twentieth century. In his critique of the purported universality and inclusionary character of nineteenth-century European liberalism, Mehta argues that among the many subjects who were in fact excluded from that characterisation were ‘colonial peoples, slaves, women’, and, he adds, ‘those without sufficient property to exercise either suffrage or real political power’.8 This exclusion was accomplished through the deployment of a philosophical anthropology, defined as follows: What is meant by this is that the universal claims can be made because they derive from certain characteristics that are common to all human beings. Central among these anthropological characteristics or foundations for liberal theory are the claims that everyone is naturally free, that they are in the relevant moral respects equal, and finally that they are rational. One might therefore say that the starting point for the political and institutional prescriptions of liberal theory is an anthropological minimum or an anthropological common denominator.9 Mehta argues, however, that this anthropological minimum became the means through which liberal ideology could ‘configurate the boundary between the politically included and politically excluded’.10 It was particularly the codes of ‘inscrutability’ and ‘civilisational infantilism’ that policed such a boundary.11 These codes of exclusion were also inflected, I would argue, by prevailing notions of ‘feminisation’ and ‘domestication’. Such complex codes became part of a subtle, and yet foundational colonial strategy of legitimation with which to justify imperial rule over the colonies. The force of their exclusionary power lay in the fact that they were constitutive of the political ideology underlying the most distinctive feature of European governance during the nineteenth century, namely the division between domestic and public spheres. Nowhere, perhaps, was that boundary of ‘the politically included and politically excluded’ policed more sharply than in this form of divided rule, a division which was exported to the colonies.12

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The domestic and public domains can be viewed as distinct yet mutually interrelated sites of British imperial power and nation-building. For British bourgeois women such as Gertrude Bell, travelling and living in the Middle East during the early twentieth century, the overlapping streams of historical and personal experience in the family and the nation shaped attitudes toward notions of liberty and justice embodied in British governing authorities at home and elsewhere.13 Central to the making of the female national subject via the bourgeois family was education and schooling. Although Gertrude Bell and her step-mother eschewed suffragism, Bell’s education at a leading girls’ school, Queen’s College, Harley Street, London, and then at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, fulfilled the liberal dream of the middle-class educated woman, whose political strength was to be found as a governing authority in the family.14 Prevailing attitudes towards higher education for women at the turn of the twentieth century were ambivalent. Although Bell was allowed to go to Oxford she was not allowed to study the ‘manly’ subjects such as classical languages and mathematics. Instead, she read modern history.15 At this time, Oxford did not grant degrees to women even though they were allowed to attend the women’s colleges. In her work of critical fiction, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf conjures forth the memorable image of ‘Arthur’s Education Fund’, that ‘voracious receptacle’ which included not merely book-learning but ‘games [that] educated your body; friends [that] taught you more than books or games … In the holidays you travelled; acquired a taste for art; a knowledge of foreign politics.’16 As if in challenge to Woolf’s image of female exclusion, Bell not only attended university but also embarked on numerous expeditions through Europe and the colonies, precisely in order to expand her education, knowledge, and experience. Bell began serious Middle Eastern language, cultural, and archaeological studies in 1899. She travelled to Jerusalem to study Arabic and Orientalism under Dr Friedrich Rosen and made a few short desert excursions. Her first independent trip to the Syrian Desert was in 1900, after which she returned to England and made a brief trip around the world in 1902-03, travelling to Canada to climb the Rockies. From 1903 to 1905 she studied archaeology in Paris under Saloman Reinach, a well-known French scholar, and upon her return to the East in 1905 engaged in fieldwork in Syria and Asia Minor on Romano-Christian civilisation. There she met the archaeologist Sir William Ramsey, with whom she would co-publish a scholarly monograph, The Thousand and One Churches (1909). Her travels in 1906 and 1909 led to her

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two major works of travel literature and in 1914 she mounted another major excursion from Damascus to Hayyil. She recorded this journey in a diary addressed to Charles Hotham Montagu Doughty-Wylie, a British army officer with whom she was in love.17 In addition to Bell’s formal educational experience, her travels and fieldwork in archaeology provided other opportunities to learn about and to teach the presumed benefits of ‘British civilisation’, including its scientific, political, and religious superiority over the supposed primitivism and barbarity of the tribes of Mesopotamia. For example, Bell supported Mary Ward’s Local Government Advancement Committee, founded in 1912 to promote women’s public service at the level of local government. The expertise that women were supposed to possess in the areas of health, education, and welfare, based on their familial location and philanthropic enterprises, was thought to be most effectively utilised in the colonies. British women’s journals such as The Imperial Colonialist were created precisely to extend and advertise the work done by bourgeois and elite women whose job it was to send female working-class domestic and factory labourers to New Zealand, Palestine, and Canada in the early twentieth century. In general, the philanthropic work of British women gave them skills in domestic management, child-rearing, and local governance that might be transposed to colonial spaces. The conflation of infantilism with tribalism became the specific mechanism by which Bell transposed her knowledge of domestic governance onto the Orient. For Bell, as generally for the women and men of her class, the superiority of the British nation was due to the rise of the bourgeoisie as its governing authority during the nineteenth century. Her grandfather, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell (1816-1904), was an exemplary figure of the bourgeois class, embodying its political outlook and liberal values. A wealthy industrialist who made his money as an ironmaster and coal-mine owner, Lowthian Bell also held numerous political offices including that of Liberal MP for Hartlepool (1875-1880), as well as receiving a peerage in 1885.18 The dual structure of bourgeois rule opened up the semi-autonomous realm of a patriarchal, and yet liberal, domestic power, one that could take imperial power into the home by entrusting bourgeois women with philanthropic and cultural enterprises. After the death of Gertrude Bell’s mother, giving birth to her younger brother Maurice, her father, Hugo, married a woman of highly enterprising intellectual, cultural, and philanthropic industry, Florence Eveleen Bell (née Olliffe). A prolific writer, Florence Bell published over

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forty works in a range of genres from children’s stories to novels, plays, and political allegories. One of her more notable ventures was the co-authored play, Alan’s Wife (1893), written with the American-born actress and writer, Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952), which was performed anonymously on the London stage. Set in northern England, the controversial play was based on a story by the Swedish writer Elin Ameen about working-class infanticide. Perhaps less controversial, but entirely in keeping with Florence Bell’s interest in working-class domestic life, was her publication of At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town (1907).19 Eschewing the statistical approaches that usually dominated such works, she focused on the home life of more than a thousand working-class families. In her words, Florence Bell pursued this method because, ‘one emaciated little child wasting away because it has not enough to eat … will make more impression on us than many lists of infant mortality.’20 Florence Bell called attention to the preponderance of suffering among the iron workers, but insisted that such moments were rare. Her perspective foregrounded the philanthropic dilemma that must acknowledge suffering to secure the interests of philanthropy but then circumscribe it as exceptional. To acknowledge it as an everyday reality would mean that women like Florence Bell would also have to acknowledge their class complicity in creating such deplorable conditions. In describing her methodology, Florence Bell writes in the ‘Introductory’ that during ‘this time [nearly thirty years] more than a thousand working-men’s homes have been visited, many of them on terms of friendly and continuous intercourse, by several female visitors … Wherever the word “visitor” is used in the following pages it refers to one of this small group of eye-witnesses. The facts recorded can be vouched for.’21 Gertrude Bell participated in gathering information for her step-mother’s study. And Florence Bell’s dedication to domestic governance in both her sociological and literary productions was to have a profound impact on Gertrude’s methods of gaining information to construct knowledge of the Arab tribes.22 The philanthropic practices of bourgeois women were the foundation of the bourgeois family’s domestic politics and exercised great influence on the gender formation of bourgeois children.23 Circumscribed by ‘sexual’ and ‘racial’ divisions of public and domestic spheres, the bourgeois female body was determined by an imperial and, I would add, maternal consciousness that involved taking on the duties and responsibilities for inculcating working-class women into their reproductive role. In addition, working-class mothers were not simply expected to produce labouring bodies for industrial

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capitalism, but to reproduce strong and healthy working bodies as examples of the racial superiority of the British nation. The loss of healthy workingclass bodies, Florence Bell argued, would lead to ‘the deterioration of our race’, thus having potentially adverse consequences for the development of the labour force and ‘our national industries’.24 Anna Davin notes the subtle change in the relationship between family and state taking place in the early twentieth century when child rearing became a ‘national duty’. As she says, ‘A powerful ideology of motherhood emerged in relation to these problems of the early twentieth century, though it was firmly rooted, of course, in nineteenth-century assumptions about women, domesticity, and individualism. Motherhood was to be given new dignity: it was the duty and destiny of women to be the “mothers of the race,” but also their great reward.’25 For bourgeois women, the formation of a maternal consciousness was created specifically through the professionalisation of child care and mothering. This included the philanthropic and moralising mission of a Christian bourgeois society that subjugated labouring women through such professional strategies. Creating and maintaining a maternal consciousness was carried out through a range of strategies from the socialist support for imperialism (by the Fabians) to the scientific racism of eugenics. Davin notes that Motherhood was so powerful a symbol that often class differences disappeared, along with the realities of working-class life. All the individual real mothers were subsumed into one ideal figure, the Queen Bee, protected and fertile, producing the next generation for the good of the hive. The home was ‘the cradle of the race’ … Empire’s first line of defense, not a cramped cottage in Merthyr Tydfil or a squalid slum room. The family was such an accepted symbol for the state that its actual disparate identities were forgotten.26 The blurring of class and family/state distinctions through the use of the rhetoric of racial motherhood meant that disparate identities (for example working-class and middle-class) were not so much forgotten as shifted elsewhere, to the colonies, where a racist imperialist ideology often helped create a false sense of class unity among women within the British women of the Empire, and justify colonial rule. The racialised rhetoric of motherhood ideologically re-positioned the class subordination of working women vis-à-

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vis bourgeois women and created a nationally unified figure of Woman that displaced the class and imperial realities of Britain’s economic and political occupation of the colonies. What is remarkable about Bell is that her political education in the sphere of domesticity and philanthropy provided the bedrock of her access to domestic imperial power. She became an active participant in imperial governance, working in an official capacity as a political officer with the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in 1916. Much of the scholarship on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British women travellers to the Middle East argues that they were motivated to escape the confines of domesticity and to live a life of adventure and romance in keeping with their brothers or husbands-to-be. Liora Lukitz writes: during the 1890s, contemporaries saw [Bell] as ‘an accomplished young lady of good family and brilliant intellectual gifts’. But dissatisfied with the conventional role of domesticity and philanthropy assigned to well-to-do, unmarried women, she turned to independent travel, first in the Alps, then in the Middle East, with the intellectual dimensions of archaeological discovery and political observation.27 Bell begins The Desert and the Sown with the invocation: ‘To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel’ (DaS, 1). The mythmaking associated with the Orient, combined with a Rousseau-ian idealisation of Nature, anticipated the notion of ‘wild travel’ that shaped Bell’s freedom narrative about her ‘adventures’ in Syria.28 This is one way that Bell’s text produces its narrative of romantic flight from domestic containment. The trope of the domestic escapee is more the effect of the discursive production of these texts themselves than a sufficient explanation as to why women of wealth and power achieved personal and professional success through their travels. The idea that bourgeois women generally lacked political agency in the domestic sphere belies the reality of both Bell’s life and her stepmother’s. It does more to obscure than explain the complicated dimensions of bourgeois women’s class, race, and national formation, not to mention the reasons why they engaged in travel ventures at all. While it may appear that Gertrude Bell embraced the role of domestic escapee by travelling to the Middle East and eventually leaving England

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altogether, my contention is that Bell took her knowledge and experience of domestic governance with her to the colony. She did not abandon the domestic sphere, as it were, but engaged in a process of political transposition from the ethnographic method of home visits in Middlesborough to the use of Bedouin hospitality as a site of the ‘friendly and continuous intercourse’ that became one of her information-gathering techniques in the Middle East. The connections between philanthropic ‘home visits’ and ethnography not only underscore the uneven class relations between bourgeois and working-class women, they also allow us to see how knowledge was produced by the divided form of bourgeois governance to secure its power over both working classes and indigenous societies. The family was woven into the complex web of imperial power, the classifications of ‘race’, demography, and tribalism providing Bell with the language to translate her practical knowledge of governance from the Christian bourgeois family to the emerging nation of Iraq.

From a map of Syria showing Bell’s route

* Bell classified Middle Eastern people according to race, sect, caste, population, and tribe. References to ‘noble stock’ (DaS, 81), ‘intelligent and industrious race’ (DaS, 23), a ‘virile population’ (ATA, 3) and ‘a base-born tribe’ (ATA, 81) were part of the racial rhetoric that made up her taxonomic classifications. This semiotic apparatus subscribed an array of discriminations and distinctions to bodies in order to map, as Bell saw it, the Darwinian social evolutionary landscape. In The Desert and the Sown the characterisation of people is never simply a mode of description but rather conforms to a racial rhetoric of physiognomic attributes and their implications for scanning the intelligence or reproductive possibilities of the ‘tribes’:

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They were thick-set, broad-shouldered men, with features of marked irregularity and projecting teeth … the Sherarat, though they are one of the largest and the most powerful of the tribes and the most famous breeders of camels, are of bad blood, and no Arab of the Belka would intermarry with them … a negro of Sukhur, a powerful man with an intelligent face, was very anxious to come with me as guide to the Druze mountains, but he admitted that as soon as he reached the territory of those valiant hillmen he would have to turn and flee, there is always feud between the Druzes and Beni Sakher. The negro slaves of Sukhur are well used by their masters who know their worth, and they have a position of their own in the desert, a glory reflected from the great tribe they serve. (DaS 38) In Bell’s travelogue tribalism is re-coded through racial stereotyping into a sign of the inferiority of a nomadic form of political governance. It is circumscribed by ‘blood feuds’ and savage injustices supposedly rooted in the essential racial inferiority of its people: ‘all over Syria and even in the desert, whenever a man is ground down by injustice or mastered by his own incompetence, he wishes that he were under the rule that has given wealth to Egypt, and our occupation of that country, which did so much at first to alienate from us the sympathies of Mohammedans, has proved the finest advertisement of English methods of government’ (DaS, 58). Implicit in Bell’s semiotics of race was the assumption that the British nation, as distinct from the tribes, was a homogeneous collectivity defined by its racially superior forms of governance and justice. The prefaces to her travelogues raise the question of British governance in the East, with the preface to Amurath to Amurath openly addressed to Lord Cromer, British agent and consul-general in Egypt until 1907. Both are intended to demonstrate the infancy of Arab statecraft at a time of rising Arab nationalism, a significant moment in which Bell’s travel writing intervenes to represent that political reality as doomed to fail without British intervention: The Oriental is like a very old child. He is unacquainted with many branches of knowledge which we have come to regard as of elementary necessity; frequently, but not always, his mind is little preoccupied with the need of acquiring them, and he concerns himself scarcely at all with what we call practical utility. He is not

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practical in our acceptation of the word, any more than a child is practical, and his utility is not ours. On the other hand, his action is guided by traditions of conduct and morality that go back to the beginnings of civilizations, traditions unmodified as yet by any important change in the manner of life to which they apply and out of which they arose. These things apart, he is as we are; human nature does not undergo a complete change east of Suez, nor is it impossible to be on terms of friendship and sympathy with the dwellers in those regions. (DaS, xxi-xxii) Bell’s likening of the Oriental to ‘a very old child’ recalls the developmental logic underlying the European notion of a progressive civilisation that emerged from and shared its infancy with the so-called primitive tribes. With reference to the East, however, the teleological narrative of European civilisation is complicated by the trope of the ancient civilisation, notably the birthplace of the Judeo-Christian religion (what Bell refers to as ‘the childhood of the world’ [ATA, 269]). Bell interweaves the infantilisation of Arab modes of governance in the desert with a nostalgic image of a traditional past, eliding the contemporary moment and erasing the political struggles of Arab nationalism. Also significant in this passage is her interpellation of her readership to include nationalists, enlightened men and women, politicians, and Christians. The use of pronouns – ‘he is as we are’ – creates a readerly-writerly alliance between West and East. The potentially insurmountable difference between West and East exists for Bell in the latter’s lack of elementary knowledge or ‘practical utility’. Or, put differently, it is the absence of the reason that is essential to an enlightened consciousness and that is the basis for demonstrating an ability to govern. Presumably the enlightened reader is endowed with this all-important faculty of reason. Bell continues in her preface to outline other differences such as the Oriental’s lack of a proper judicial system: ‘Society is divided by caste and sect and tribe into an infinite number of groups, each one of which is following a law of its own, and however fantastic, to our thinking, that law may be, to the Oriental it is an ample and a satisfactory explanation of all peculiarities’ (DaS, x). The rule of law is best demonstrated by Bell with reference to gender differences: ‘A man may go about in public veiled up to the eyes, or clad if he please only in a girdle: he will excite no remark. Why should he? Like every one else he is merely obeying his own law.’ And for

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women, the rules are no different: ‘For a woman this rule is of the first importance, since a woman can never disguise herself effectually. That she should be known to come of a great and honoured stock, whose customs are inviolable, is her best claim to consideration’ (DaS, x). Ironically, what Bell finds inspirational about the Orient is that it is ‘less fettered by artificial chains’ and has ‘a wider tolerance born of greater diversity’ (DaS, xxii). The artifice generally associated with bourgeois women and the commodity culture of the bourgeoisie in England is both established and disavowed by Bell’s gendered comparisons. Aside from Bell’s professional identification as an archaeologist, it is on nationalist terms that she makes her final claim to an alliance with her British public. Appealing to their judgement, she writes, ‘Being English, I am persuaded that we are the people who could best have taken Syria in hand with the prospect of a success greater than that which might be attained by a moderately reasonable Sultan’ (DaS, xi). Here Bell is making a political case against Iraqi resistance to British intervention, and, of course, also against the Ottoman rulers of the region. Of emerging anti-British sentiment, she argues: ‘reluctant to accept the responsibility of official interference, we have permitted the irresponsible protests, vehemently expressed, of a sentimentality that I make bold to qualify as ignorant’ (DaS, xii). Bell’s closing remark shifts the reader’s attention from its comfortable imperial bourgeois home to the Oriental writer: ‘But these are matters outside the scope of the present book, and my apologia had best end where every Oriental writer would have begun: “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!”’ (DaS, xii). The pressing issues of foreign diplomacy that exist ‘outside the scope of the present book’ are re-situated for the reader within the homely truths of a monotheistic universal. The figure of ‘God’ or ‘Allah’ is a rhetorical gesture that in Bell’s writing interpellates the subject-toauthority for a ‘higher power’, be it the State, the Law, or the Family. This authoritative mode of governance was as much in need of mystification as the monotheistic version of absolute or divine power. By all accounts Bell was an atheist.29 * In the post-Enlightenment era, European Orientalism sought to contain the East, as Edward Said has argued, in a discursive field dominated by an epistemology of realism and representation.30 The photographic images of archaeological ruins strewn throughout Bell’s travel texts, haphazardly in The

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Desert and the Sown and in a more integrated way in Amaruth to Amaruth, show the strategic use of this new representational technology to create reality effects. The referential power of photography and archaeology lent epistemic and representational force to Bell’s political observations. They also, however, contributed to Bell’s nostalgia, which provided another rhetorical strategy for legitimating her views on colonisation, Christianity, and the Middle East. What is relevant here is not Bell’s archaeological scholarship per se but her rhetorical use of archaeology to obliterate Arab history and its contemporary realities through reference to an archaic Orient.31 This process of epistemic and semiotic violence is not simply about making the history of the Middle East disappear but about supplanting it with another one, and thus justifying a potential British colonisation, whether full or indirect. Bell imagines a Christian (re)population of the desert based on what was once there; hence a colonial nostalgia for ‘repatriating’ the Orient with, if not Christian British subjects themselves, then, at the very least, colonised Christian subjects fit to rule the East by proxy. Here is a particularly resonant example of this nostalgia: Most of us who have had opportunity to become familiar with some site that has once been the theatre of a vanished civilization have passed through hours of vain imaginings during which the thoughts labour to recapture the aspect of street and market, church or temple enclosure, of which the evidences lie strewn over the surface of the earth. And even as a thousand unanswerable problems surge up against the realization of that empty hope, I have found myself longing for an hour out of a remote century, wherein I might look my fill upon the walls that have fallen and stamp the image of a dead world indelibly upon my mind. The dream seemed to have reached fulfilment at Ukheidir. (ATA, 143) The site of the palace of Ukheidir provides Bell with the archaeological evidence she requires to recall ‘the theatre of a vanished civilization’ (ATA, 143). A whole chapter is constructed around the spectre of a pre-Islamic – and predominantly Christian – past. Her own research is intended to provide the ‘data’ that she claims is lacking to explain the Islamic invasion. Her objective is ‘to search through regions now desolate for evidences of a past that has left little historic record, calling upon the shades to take form again

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upon the very ground whereon, substantial, they had played their part’ (ATA, 116). This uncanny process of temporal and representational displacement in Bell’s archaeological nostalgia aided the creation of political proxies by establishing a historical connection that was both real and unreal, seemingly known and unknown. Essential to the temporal displacement of Arab society is Bell’s mythic construction of vanishing Bedouin: [The Bedouin] are hard pressed by encroaching civilization … The truth is that the days of the Belka Arabs are numbered. To judge by the ruins, it will be possible, as it was possible in past centuries to establish a fixed population all over their territory, and they will have to choose between themselves building villages and cultivating the ground or retreating to the east where water is almost unobtainable in the summer, and the heat far greater than they care to face. (DaS, 56-57) Phantasmatic images appear when, encountering an ‘archaeological site’, Bell writes: ‘every stone was like the ghost of a hearth in which the warmth of Arab life was hardly cold, though the fire might have been extinguished this hundred years. It was a city of shadowy outlines visible one under the other … as old as Time, the new indistinguishable from the old and the old from the new’ (DaS, 60). This description of ruins in the desert speaks for Bell of a pre-Islamic era known as the Age of Ignorance, in which poets such as Imr ul Kais and Kutaila railed against the Islamic domination of their land. Bell glosses a passage from Kutaila: The agony of the captive, the imagined vision of the heart’s desire which no prison bars could exclude, then the fine protest lest his foes should dream that his spirit faltered, and the strong man’s fearless memory of the passion that had shaken his life and left his soul still ready to vanquish death – there are few such epitomes of noble emotion. Born and bred on the soil of the desert, the singers of the Age of Ignorance have left behind them a record of their race that richer and wiser nations will find hard to equal. (DaS, 63) For Bell the image of an ancient pre-Islamic Arab past represents a strategic moment to school the reader in the romance of the Noble Oriental.

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The image of the shadowy city in the desert is the crux of this travelogue, revealing Bell’s desire to return the glory of a past pre-Islamic civilisation, one that has fallen from grace but can be restored by the British nation. It is a dream, however, that depends on the almost complete erasure of contemporary Arab politics – let alone twelve centuries of Arab-Islamic civilisation. What we discover in Bell’s archaeological nostalgia is a revisionist attempt to displace the rich palimpsest of Mesopotamia and its multiple histories – Byzantine, Roman, Crusader, Muslim – and reduce it to a manichean conflict between Christian and Muslim, Arab and British, over national subjecthood. Connecting her practice of archaeology to a project of colonisation in the Middle East, Bell contributed to the larger national and economic programme of possessing the land and its natural resources, much of it given archaeological justification despite the existence of Arab tribes and traces of other civilisations. Bell’s discursive representation of scattered remnants of masonry and archaeological ruins also epistemologically prepared the way for the formation of a spatial biography for British national identity based on Christians re-claiming the land as a transplanted national homeland. Essential to this British colonial-national identity was its sense of entitlement to govern over the savage Bedouin engaged in tribal blood feuds, constant raiding, and unrelenting thievery and murder. In order to represent the lawless Arab, Bell enlists figures of sexual immorality such as polygamy. Bell pretends respect and tolerance for religious differences, yet she uses the figure of polygamy to prove the point that the Bedouin can never comprehend the meaning of ‘liberty’ and, therefore, are unfit to rule. In response to the question of liberty one sheikh says ‘“How can there be liberty under Islam … Shall I take a wife contrary to the laws of Islam, and call it liberty? God forbid.” And we recognized in his words the oldest of the restrictions to which the human race has submitted. “God forbid,” we murmured, and bowed our heads before the authority of the social code’ (ATA, 52). Although Bell obliquely acknowledges the authority of the Islamic Sharia (the Islamic law), the figure of polygamy ensures its representation as morally bankrupt.32 Elsewhere Bell records another conversation in which the zaptieh (local guide), Hussein, remarks: ‘“Twenty children I have had, and seven wives; three of these died and one left me and returned to her own people. But I shall take another bride this year, please God” … “We will find you a bride in Kebeisah,” said I’ (ATA, 116). Notwithstanding Bell’s complicated relationship to Arab women, what is significant about her discourse on polygamy is that the issue

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is not the woman question per se (of equality before the law), but the question of morality in relation to an imperial civilisation in which sexuality and reproductive relations must be regulated in order to maintain racial purity and control over male lines of descent. Such were the moral levers with which the British Empire re-mapped the Middle East. However, in seeming contrast to this trope of the savage tribesman is that of the hospitable native. Hospitality is a major theme in Bell’s travel writing, one which repeatedly recalls the significance of domesticity to Bell’s conception of political power. Just as Florence Bell used home visits for her ethnographic study of working-class domestic life, so Bell used the domain of hospitality to gather information that she could then use to construct a representation of herself as an authority on tribal politics. In one particular hospitable encounter in which Bell was invited to ‘a bountiful Persian dinner, where we feasted on lamb stuffed with pistachios, and drank sherbet out of deep wooden spoon’, she hears ‘some talk of politics’ and goes on to refer to ‘one of my informants’ (ATA, 161). Contradicting her image of Arab lawlessness, Bell notes that ‘The desert is governed by old and well-defined laws, and the first of these is the law of hospitality’ (ATA, 125). Hospitality ensures the traveller’s protection from ‘the attack of raiders and of thieves’ (ATA, 125). It is on the basis of hospitality that Bell rests her hopes for the possibility of schooling the Arabs in ‘civilisation’, since a society which dined so well and with such grace clearly possessed high domestic standards. The importance of domesticity as a mark of civility is evidenced by such remarkable passages as the following found in the notable late nineteenth-century work on British etiquette, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management: It is equally true that some races of men do not dine any more than the tiger or the vulture. It is not a dinner at which sits the aboriginal Australian, who gnaws his bone half bare and then flings it behind to his squaw. And the native of Terra-del-Fuego does not dine when he gets his morsel of red clay. Dining is the privilege of civilization. The rank which a people occupy in the grand scale may be measured by their way of taking their meals, as well as by their way of treating their women. The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lesson of progress. It implies both the will and the skill to reduce to order, and surround the idealisms and graces, the more

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material conditions of human experience; and wherever that will and that skill exist, life cannot be wholly ignoble.33 * The intertwining of domestic modes of governance and colonial rule produced a different kind of political space. One way to characterise this newly formed colonial politics is through the emergence of a racialised biological imperative or biopolitics, especially in Bell’s discourses on law and justice. Bell recirculates her metaphors from the nursery when she writes that ‘the childish and exasperating restrictions with which the Sultan had fettered his Christian subjects had fallen away’ (ATA, 4), but soon after she writes: ‘Many a time have I searched for some trace of the Anglo-Saxon acceptance of a common responsibility in the problems that beset the State; a sense the germs of which exist in the Turkish village community and in the tribal system of the Arab and the Kurd; it never went beyond an embryonic application to small local matters’ (ATA, 5). The shift from domestic metaphors to those of biology (‘an embryonic application’) hints at the transition that had occurred from the divided rule of separate spheres to the biopolitical management of colonial ‘populations’ or ‘tribes’ during this time. The separate spheres of political rule in the British nation were reconfigured by women such as Bell whose relationship to imperialism and the imperatives of colonial rule made for a constantly shifting emphasis from the disparities of sexual difference to those of racial difference. Whereas sexual difference circumscribed the divided rule of bourgeois politics, racial difference was incorporated into discourses of population control, demographics, and the spectre of miscegenation. Thus, Bell’s anti-suffragism was consistent with her colonial bourgeois familial politics and the power invested in bourgeois women as both real and imaginary ‘mothers of the race’. The justification for the intervention of British governance was produced by Bell and others on the basis of an image of savagery and primitivism that denied the realities of already existing societies and their modes of governance and economic exchange. Her use of archaeological nostalgia as a form of semiotic violence in which the referent is made to disappear from historical veracity and re-appear as a simulacrum, helped Bell to construct a past and future imaginary world with which to populate or ‘re-populate’ the East. The images of the lawless Arab, the Vanishing Bedouin, the Noble Oriental, and the morally questionable polygamist signify the rhetorical

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scope and power of colonial semiosis. Furthermore, they constitute a set of tropes through which Bell repeatedly affirmed her originary narrative of an empty place waiting to be settled – and governed – by the British. The desert, viewed as a desolate landscape, conformed to other notions of an empty land, such as the terra nullius doctrine that promoted the idea, principally in Australia, that the land belonged to no one, on the grounds that no system of law and property ownership existed. The basis for this doctrine is usually traced to the liberal philosophy of John Locke, who, in his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), argued that property rights over the land belonged to the individual who laboured to cultivate and settle it. His denial of such property ownership to the indigenous peoples of America was advanced by such comments as the following: There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several Nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life; whom Nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of Plenty, i.e. a fruitful Soil, apt to produce in abundance, what might serve for food, raiment, and delight; yet for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the Conveniences we enjoy: and a King of a large and fruitful Territory there, feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England.34 This economic and legal fiction of the spatial inscription of the earth has provided the political legitimisation for the settlement of indigenous territories by European nations at least since the eighteenth century. Since the land was perceived to be uncultivated and, therefore, not being put to good use, it could be rightfully settled and claimed by those who wished to cultivate and ‘own’ it. This denial of the territorial rights of an existing indigenous population was not unlike Bell’s denial of the existence of contemporary Arab tribes who, because of their nomadic and apparently lawless existence, could exercise no claim to ownership of the land and to the rights to govern it and its people. The specific case of a purportedly empty land in Mesopotamia was complicated for Bell by its historical significance to the Judeo-Christian tradition, leading to her archaeological invocation of phantoms and shadowy cities and to the ‘atmospheric distortion’ in which she re-imagines an ancient history and land (re)populated by Christians.

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In Amurath to Amurath Bell interposes Socratic dialogues between herself and various supplicants including her servants, zaptiehs, hospitable tribal chiefs, and the odd stranger or fellow traveller, with detailed accounts of archaeological sites, including ground plans, comparative tables, measurements and other topographical specifics, including references to relevant scholarly geographical literature. In these mock pedagogical encounters, which occur repeatedly thoughout the text, Bell poses the question ‘What is liberty?’ Each question-and-answer is designed as an exercise in educating the ignorant subject about British governance and the principles of justice that inform it. Her scholarly position as archaeologist lends further support to her political knowledge, which is explicated in the text in a subtle fashion through a series of everyday encounters and anecdotal conversations where Bell’s talent as a political rhetorician also becomes evident. In a typical encounter, Bell, admitting the didactic nature of her question, asks her servant Murawwah ‘whether he had heard of liberty?’ (ATA, 90). Of course he does not understand what it means and Bell explains that ‘It means to obey a just law’ (ATA, 90). A dispute erupts between Murawwah, a Bedouin, and Abdullah, a local guide from a nearby town. Abdullah disputes the possibility of achieving liberty because of the existence of Arab raiders, whom he compares to dogs. Murawwah responds: ‘How can you compare the Arab with dogs? We will not bow our heads to any government. To the Arabs belongs command.’ Bell follows with a description of Murawwah ‘slash[ing] the air defiantly with his tamarisk switch as he proclaimed the liberties of the wilderness, the right of feud, the right of raid, the right of revenge – the only liberty the desert knows’ (ATA, 90). Further examples of ‘lawless Arab raiders’ are recalled by Abdullah and the central problem of the protection of property is outlined: ‘We lay out our capital and you take the interest; we sow and you gather the harvest, yes, without reaping, and we may starve that you and your accursed brothers may fatten’ (ATA, 91). Bell observes that Murawwah is not alarmed by the accusations because he is ‘a free child of the desert … under my protection’ (ATA, 91). This scene is one of many little allegorical tales Bell includes in her text to underscore the liberal argument between nomads and the State: ‘The truth is that nomad life and civilization are incompatible terms: the peaceful cultivator and the merchant cannot exist side by side with the sheikh, and either the settled population must drive the Bedouin from out their borders, or the Bedouin will put progress and the accumulation of

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wealth beyond the power of the most industrious’ (ATA, 93). By using her guides, servants, and Arab chiefs, Bell filters the anecdotal aspects of this ‘public opinion’ through her own particular politics to demonstrate that nomadism is ‘lawless’ and antithetical to democracy, and that the Bedouin lack both government and a secure (non-violent) economy. Bell’s approach to the denial of the contemporary political realities creates an interesting aporia in her text, where the question ‘What is Liberty?’ opens up a gap between her pronounced liberal principles and the imposition of ‘liberty’ on the emerging Arab nationalists who should deny their own struggle and opt for British governing authority. The ‘just law’ Bell cites as the condition of liberty is expressed elsewhere in her text as the need for peace and order: ‘the insecurity of the desert forbids all permanent occupation’ (ATA, 128). Settlement, cultivation, the accumulation of wealth, the instigation of separate spheres accountable to civil society and not the church or religious law: these are the terms of the ‘liberty’ Bell extols for the desert nomads. Archaeology functioned as part of an imperial economy as well as a historical code or origin story with which to justify imperial rule and colonial settlement. Bell’s definition of liberty is a self-serving disguise for imposing imperial power in order to create the economic conditions necessary to exploit Iraq’s resources, both natural and archaeological. Bell’s travel writing could not contain the reality of Iraq’s multiple forms of governance. She could not reduce its heterogeneity to a single paradigmatic perception of the inability of the Arabs to rule themselves in Iraq. Her writing inevitably deconstructs under the weight of its own commitment to the imperial schooling of the region. It gives way to its own problematic: what liberty, fraternity, and justice might mean in relation to British imperialism in the Middle East, and not as Bell would have it, whether the new Turkish constitution is capable of governing the Arab tribes. Through her various Socratic dialogues, Bell’s text questions itself and, at times, opens up a window onto the limits of colonial liberalism: A party of dyers, who were engaged in spreading their striped cotton cloths upon the sward, did me the honours of their drying-ground – merry fellows they were, the typical sturdy Christians of Aleppo, who hold their own with their Moslem brothers and reckon little of distinctions of creed.

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‘Christians and Moslem,’ said one, ‘see how we labour! If the constitution were worth anything, the poor would not work for such small rewards’ … ‘A strong hand we need here in Aleppo, that the poor may enjoy the fruits of their toil.’ (ATA, 9) For Bell the key message here is the protest voiced against the new Turkish constitutional government, but the question of poverty is clearly of greater significance for the labourers than, say, that of religious identity. The point may be lost on Bell, but not necessarily on the reader. Bell was invested with and in the philanthropic power of her class; she did not see ‘local governance’ as an option in the colonial context, where she argued against a domestic or kinship political economy in favour of the state governance of Britain, and against the Young Turks and Arab nationalists. In fact, Bell wished to destroy localised politics completely, because they disrupted her understanding of civil governance and civility. However, by the end of Bell’s career at the Colonial Office, she supported indirect rule as opposed to the direct imperial methods of the India Office. The ruling elite of England had settled for indirect rule, more or less as a political compromise to settlement, so as not to interfere with its economic programme for control over cultivation and oil resources.35 Bell’s travel writing made a significant contribution to colonial governance, especially in the later stages of her career as a member of the colonial foreign office in Basrah and Baghdad, and at the Conference in Versailles (1919) which authorised the British mandate in Iraq. Through an ethnographic approach based on personal and everyday encounters with individuals in the city and the desert, much like that used by her step-mother in At the Works, Bell gathered information in order to produce a particular representation of Arab life under Ottoman Rule and later the Turkish constitution. It conveys that life as lacking in the proper governance, economic practices, and educational and juridical institutions essential to her notion of civilisation. Her archaeological nostalgia played a key role in creating an originary time for the Middle East, populated by ghosts, shadows, and phantoms – but not by people. In her writing Bell created an imaginary Middle East through an origin story in which she overrode, ignored, and denied the multiple histories and political economies already in existence. Such imaginary histories, of empty places and absent populations, were the substance of a semiotics of subjugation in a number of colonial contexts. They were maintained, supplemented, or reinforced by domestic

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and familial narratives of descent and by racial genealogies in the construction of the geo-politics of the colonial space. Domestic and national origin stories were the narrative bases of Bell’s travel writings and they were instrumental in persuading her fellow British nationalists of the justifiable role of England in the preservation and conservation of ‘civilisation’, whether to save antiquities or bring liberty, freedom, and democracy to the Middle East. The distinct, yet mutually related, domains of the domestic and the archaeological site, while dispelling the alienation of the Christian and female British national subject in Iraq, created, through a process of transposition, the textual and ideological conditions for an imperial justification to rule, economically and politically, over the land. During the current US war in Iraq, the question of ‘stolen antiquities’ has re-emerged, this time in the context of the plundering of the Iraqi Museum of Archaeology in Baghdad. The role of antiquities in the colonial and contemporary domination of the Middle East points to the continuing importance of archaeology and to the place it occupies as an alibi for occupied rule. Now, as then, archaeological materials are part of an economy of militarised violence. Gertrude Bell understood the importance of these materials and her writings helped to establish the value of archaeology as a vital and constitutive component of imperial governance in Iraq. 1 Gertrude Bell, ‘The basis of government in Turkish Arabia,’ in Kinahan Cornwallis (ed), The Arab War: Confidential Information For General Headquarters From Gertrude Bell (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1940), pp. 14-15; also published in Arab Bulletin, 5 October 1916. This article was reproduced in a longer work titled ‘The Arab of Mesopotamia,’ which, according to Paul Rich, was probably printed in 1918 as an ‘instructional manual for neophyte British officers being funnelled through Basra as the contest against the Turks brought more and more men to the Middle East’ (Paul Rich, ‘Introduction,’ Arab War Lords and Iraqi Star Gazers: Gertrude Bell’s The Arab of Mesopotamia (New York: Authors Choice Press, 2001), p. iv; see also pp. 10-22, especially pp. 20-21). 2 Gertrude Bell, Amurath to Amurath: A Journey Along the Banks of the Euphrates [1909] (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2002), p. 1. All further references are in the text by means of ATA and page number(s). 3 Gertrude Bell, ‘Great Britain and Iraq: An experiment in Anglo-Asiatic relations,’ The Round Table (1924), p. 68. For evidence of the article’s authorship see Gertrude Bell, The Letters of Gertrude Bell, 2 vols. (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1927), p. 673 (letter of 13 October 1923). 4 Elie Kedourie, England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1921 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1955), p. 202.

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Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women in the Middle East 1718-1930: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 26. 6 Gertrude Bell, Syria: The Desert and the Sown [1907], rpt. as The Desert and the Sown: The Syrian Adventures of the Female Lawrence of Arabia, intro. Rosemary O’Brien (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001). All further references are in the text by means of DaS and page number(s). 7 See Brian Fagan, ‘Bell of Baghdad,’ Archaeology, 44/4 (July/August 1991), pp. 12-16. 8 Uday S. Mehta, ‘Liberal strategies of exclusion,’ in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 79-80. 9 Mehta: ‘Liberal strategies of exclusion,’ p. 63. 10 Mehta: ‘Liberal strategies of exclusion,’ p. 67. 11 Mehta: ‘Liberal strategies of exclusion,’ p. 60. 12 Further to this point see my ‘The “bourgeois family,” aboriginal women, and colonial governance in Canada: A sudy in feminist historical and cultural materialisms,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27/1 (Autumn 2001), pp. 59-85. 13 In examining the relations and strategies of hegemonic mediating public and domestic spheres at home and in the colonies, I am indebted to Edward Said’s call for ‘the contestatory force of a historical method whose material is made up of disparate, but intertwined and interdependent, and above all, overlapping streams of historical experience’ (Edward Said, ‘Figures, configurations, transfigurations,’ Race & Class, 32/1 [1990], p. 12). 14 Bell’s commitment to the anti-suffrage cause was demonstrated by her founding membership and later presidency of the northern section of the Women’s National AntiSuffrage League. The organisation was launched in July 1908 and by 1910 amalgamated with the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage under the presidency of Lord Cromer, British agent and consul-general in Egypt until 1907. This connection between British Orientalism and anti-suffragism has been noted by Antoinnette Burton, who observes that: ‘With Lords Cromer and Curzon both eventually at its head, the anti-suffrage arguments were bound up in these mentalities. In addition to insisting on separate spheres as divinely ordained and sanctioned by nature, the Antis predicted that suffrage would destroy the family and endanger the progress of the race. This had been a longstanding objection to female emancipation which took on apocalyptic significance in the wake of the Boer War and, in the 1910s, as Germany threatened to overtake Britain as an imperial and industrial superpower.’ See Antoinette Burton, ‘The feminist quest for identity: British imperial suffragism and “global sisterhood”, 1900-1915,’ Journal of Women’s History, 3/2 (1991), p. 57. 15 Rosemary O’Brien (ed), Gertrude Bell: The Arabian Diaries, 1913-1914 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 7. 16 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own / Three Guineas [1938], ed. Michèle Barrett (Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 119. 17 See O’Brien (ed): Gertrude Bell: The Arabian Diaries, pp. 43-243. 18 For further information see Geoffrey Tweedale, ‘Bell, Isaac Lowthian,’ in Dictionary of National Biography, CD-ROM, ed. H.C.G. Matthew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 19 Lady Bell, At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town (Middlesbrough), rpt. with Introduction by Frederick Alderson (Newton Abbot: David & Charles Publishers, 1969). 5

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Lady Bell: At the Works, p. ix. Lady Bell: At the Works, p. vii. 22 Another way in which to view Florence Bell’s influence on Gertrude Bell’s understanding of bourgeois governance and the role of women at home and in the colonies is noted by Rosemary O’Brien, who speculates that ‘Bell’s interest in education for Iraqi women in the 1920s stemmed from the period when, as a young woman, she accompanied her stepmother on rounds of ironworkers’ houses to interview the wives. Recognising the difficulties under which they toiled, Florence Bell organised lectures for them on health, household management, and other topics’ (O’Brien [ed]: Gertrude Bell: The Arabian Diaries, p. 6). 23 Bell’s biographer, H.V.F. Winstone (Gertrude Bell [London: Jonathan Cape, 1978]), notes that she was ‘gifted at hob-nobbing with the elite,’ the implication being that her social position created the conditions of access to information that she was to use later on to establish her position with the colonial administration in Iraq. This is in part true, but Bell did not simply hob-nob with social intent in her hospitable encounters with the Arab leadership, she instrumentally set out to use such occasions, as her step-mother did, to blur the boundary between ‘hospitality’ and ‘information gathering’, so as to further her literary and political ambitions. To point this out is to insist upon a materialist reading of Bell’s writings and actions in which we can provide a history and evidence of her subject and social formation based on how she used the circumstances at her disposal to act upon the world. 24 Lady Bell: At The Works, p. ix. 25 Anna Davin, ‘Motherhood and imperialism,’ in Cooper and Stoler (eds): Tensions of Empire, pp. 91-2. On the question of ‘mothers of the race’, see also Mariana Valverde, ‘“When the mother of the race is free”: Race, reproduction, and sexuality in first-wave feminism,’ in Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde (eds), Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 3-26. 26 Davin: ‘Motherhood and imperialism,’ p. 135. 27 Liora Lukitz, ‘Bell, Gertrude Lowthian,’ in Dictionary of National Biography, CD-ROM. Similarly, Rosemary O’Brien in her introduction to Bell’s The Desert and the Sown, writes that Bell ‘saw exploration as an escape from the routines of the familiar’ (O’Brien, ‘Introduction,’ The Desert and the Sown, p. 9). 28 The Orient was also called into existence for the European imagination through powers of mythmaking and storytelling of which Arabian Nights provided an exemplary model. Judy Mabro argues that Western travellers attempted to demonstrate Western superiority through their travel writings. In their eagerness to prove Western superiority, writers would hypocritically ignore similarities between the Orient and Occident. Many female writers, for example ‘were apt to give glowing descriptions of the equality enjoyed by themselves, ignoring the boredom, frustration and misery which many of them suffered in their own society – and which was often their reason for traveling’. According to Mabro, Bell’s own romanticisation of Persia was based on her readings of the Arabian Nights. See Judy Mabro, Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travellers’ Perceptions of Middle Eastern Women: Selected and Introduced by Judy Mabro (London: I.B. Tauris, 1991), p. 11. 29 Lukitz, ‘Bell, Gertude Lowthian,’ in Dictionary of National Biography, CD-ROM. 30 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 20 21

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Not the least of Bell’s strategic uses of archaeology was to further her scholarly ambition to join the Royal Geographical Society, which accepted women after 1912. Although Bell was not a suffragist nor did she believe in woman’s equality to man, she was ambitious and, however contradictory it may seem, did see herself as heir to a gender-neutral and universal realm of truth to which she was determined to contribute and have her contribution recognised. 32 When Bell does acknowledge Sharia law it is depicted as barbaric and sadistic, as in her description of a thief’s hand being cut off and a ‘just governor of Basrah’ who kept the peace by putting a ‘man to death in prison by means of a hot iron which he drove into his stomach through a tube’ (ATA, 163). 33 Isabella Mary Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London: S.O. Beeton, 1861), p. 905. 34 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Mentor Books, 1965), pp. 338-9. 35 The last Acting Civil Commissioner of Mesopotamia, Sir Arnold Wilson, who succeeded Sir Percy Cox in 1918, resigned his post under pressure from the Iraqi insurrection in 1920 to take up the position of British Petroleum Company representative in the Gulf. See Rich: Arab War Lords and Iraqi Star Gazers, p. xii. 31

Lady Clifford and Sir Hugh Clifford

7. HUGH CLIFFORD IN MALAYA Robert Hampson

In his ‘Preface’ to In Court and Kampong (1897), Hugh Clifford refers to ‘the many weary years’ that he had spent ‘in the wilder parts of the Malay Peninsula’.1 Clifford’s father died of cancer in April 1883, leaving eight children, and Clifford arrived in Malaya later that year at the age of seventeen to become a junior cadet in the Perak Civil Service. He served as private secretary to Hugh Low, Resident in Perak, and later (from March 1885) as Collector of the Land Revenue in Kuala Kangsar. In his ‘Autobiographical Preface’ to the 1927 edition of In Court and Kampong, he notes that Hugh Low had ‘learned his trade and the art of dealing with Malays during thirty years’ service in Borneo’, where he had started out as secretary to James Brooke, ‘an ardent student of the methods of that great Englishman, Sir James Raffles’.2 Indeed, Clifford goes so far as to suggest that Low had ‘re-imported into the Peninsula the Raffles tradition’.3 Through Low, Clifford had links back to the two major figures in the British colonisation of the Malay archipelago, Raffles and Brooke, but Clifford had come to Malaya at the suggestion of his father’s cousin, Sir Frederick Weld, then Governor of the Straits Settlement, and, when he first went to Pahang in 1886, it was as interpreter for Weld. Clifford’s father was Colonel Henry Clifford VC, himself the son of Lord Chudleigh.4 There are similarities here with Anne McClintock’s account of Rider Haggard’s arrival at the Cape in 1875: ‘Through affiliation with the colonial administration, he was quite explicitly compensated for his loss of place in the landed, patriarchal family and was, moreover, provided with a surrogate father in the form of Theophilus Shepstone, Natal’s Administrator of Native Affairs.’ McClintock concludes: ‘Haggard was in this respect representative of a specific moment in imperial culture, in which the nearly anachronistic authority of the vanishing feudal family … was displaced onto the colonies and re-invented within the new order of the colonial administration.’5

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This can be seen as a ‘family tradition of public service’.6 It can also be seen in terms of what David Cannadine calls ‘domestically originated perceptions of the social order’ projected onto the colonised society.7 The European feudal model mapped easily onto the Malay model of Kerajaan (the condition of having a Raja).8 If going to Malaya involved an encounter with otherness, it also involved a ‘construction of affinities’.9 Notions of racial hierarchy combined readily with a form of ‘freemasonry based on the shared recognition of high social rank’.10 Clifford returned to Pahang in 1887. This was the third of a series of missions aimed at persuading the Sultan to accept the appointment of a British Agent with consular powers. The first, led by Frank Swettenham, then Resident of Perak, had taken place in May 1885. The second, already mentioned, was led by Weld with Clifford as his interpreter, and had taken place in 1886. The third was Clifford’s own. As in all good folk tales, it was this third attempt that was successful, and its success was due, in part, precisely to Clifford’s very junior status. In ‘A Personal Incident’, Swettenham describes a visit to Sultan Ismail of Perak: I waited half the day hoping to see Ismail, but failed. They said he was asleep and meant to remain asleep a long time. That is a common form of Malay diplomacy, and, as I could not afford to delay longer, I … said I would call on Ismail on my way back …11 Clifford’s mission encountered, as anticipated, the same tactics: it lasted from 15 January to 11 April. On 23 March, he was finally granted a private audience with the Sultan to make his case. He resisted attempts to persuade him to return to Singapore and waited at the Court to receive the Sultan’s response. At 3am on 10 April, the Sultan came to him to agree to a treaty; by 4am Clifford was on a ship back to Singapore. Clifford could afford to delay and was too junior to be slighted. He was subsequently appointed the first British Consular Agent in Pahang, a post he held until October 1888, when he had to return to England as a result of illness. He was back in Malaya in February 1890 as Superintendent of Ulu Pahang, and was Acting Resident for 1890-91 during what was euphemistically called the ‘Pahang Disturbances’. In 1895 he led a punitive mission against the ‘Pahang rebels’, pursuing them into Kelantan. He became Resident, after several years acting in that capacity, in 1896, at the very early age of thirty. He remained in

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Pahang, apart from a year as Governor of British Borneo and Labuan (where he followed in Brooke’s footsteps), until 1902.12 Clifford had been writing since 1895, when Arnot Reid, the editor of the Straits Times, had invited him to contribute a series of sketches about life on the East Coast (following the example of Swettenham, who had provided him with sketches and stories about the Malays of the West Coast). Clifford published a collection of sketches, East Coast Etchings, in 1896; his first novel, Since the Beginning, in 1898; a second collection of his sketches, Studies in Brown Humanity, in 1898; a third collection, In A Corner of Asia, in 1899; and a fourth collection, Bushwhacking and Other Sketches, in 1901. Under the pseudonym ‘The Worm’, he had also written regular book-reviews for the Singapore Free Press between March 1898 and May 1899. Clifford subsequently had a very successful career in the colonial service. Later in 1903 he was posted to Trinidad, moving in 1907 to Ceylon as colonial secretary (and later governor), and in 1912 to the Gold Coast and Nigeria, as governor, where he remained until 1925. Through these varied postings, his heart remained in Malaya (as his 1913 story ‘Our Trusty and Well-Beloved’ suggests), and he returned to Malaya as Governor of the Straits Settlements and High Commissioner of the Malay States in June 1927. However, as a result of his failing mental health, he retired to England in October 1929 and was admitted to a nursing home. He died in December 1941. Clifford’s writing covers a range of genres. There are private diaries; official journals and reports relating to his colonial work; sketches and stories; book reviews; novels; and the first volume of a Malay dictionary he worked on with Swettenham. He continued to publish fiction and nonfiction until 1926. Almost all his writing related to the Malay States. His work was well-received in Britain and North America as well as in the Malay States. Studies in Brown Humanity was reviewed by Joseph Conrad, who became a lifelong friend, while Clifford’s stories appeared regularly in Blackwood’s Magazine.13 The number of reprints of his books bears witness to the reputation – and the size of the readership – he gained in his lifetime. Some of his work is still in print in Malaya, where, together with Swettenham, he remains an important literary representative of the early period of British colonial rule. *

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For Clifford, Frank Swettenham was precursor, mentor, and collaborator. To understand Clifford’s approach to both governing Malays and writing about Malays, it is necessary first to consider Swettenham’s career and writings. In his practice and his writing, Swettenham established the basic principles that Clifford was to follow. In particular, Swettenham’s emphasis on the need to learn Malay, his attitude towards Malays and Malay culture, and his attempt to record Malay customs had a powerful impact on Clifford. J.W. Birch, about whom Swettenham wrote, was an equally important counter-example for both men. Swettenham arrived in Singapore in January 1871 to take up a cadetship in the Straits Settlement Colony. As he observes in his essay, ‘Getting into Harness’, a survey of his early career in Malaya, his first task was ‘to learn something of the Malay language’.14 He also quickly developed an interest in ‘Malays and things Malayan’.15 In 1872 he was sent to Penang to take charge of the Land Office, which brought him into contact with ‘working-class Malays’ – ‘cultivators’ and ‘fisherfolk’.16 He had already had experience of a Malay State through the 1872 trip to Selangor with his friend, J.G. Davidson, which is described in ‘Getting into Harness’. Swettenham notes there that Selangor ‘had been for years the war playground of a number of Malay Rajas, whose pastime was fighting and intriguing to gain control of rich districts … where Chinese, and a few others, were mining tin’.17 Selangor and Perak were both regarded as turbulent with competing Malay and Chinese factions, rival Rajas contending for power, and rival groups competing for tin. In January 1874, Swettenham was called upon, because of his proficiency in Malay, to assist with the discussions that led to the Pangkor Engagement with the Perak Malay chiefs and heads of Chinese society, marking the beginning of the British Residents system. Swettenham subsequently spent a year at the court of Bandar Temasha at Langat as Assistant Resident of the state of Selangor. As William Roff notes, Swettenham spent this time exploring Selangor, ‘examining the resources of the land, its villages and people, its rivers, plantations and mines’.18 In 1875, he was sent to help the Resident of Perak, J.W. Birch, and, after Birch’s assassination in November 1875, Swettenham played an active role in the punitive expedition that followed. From 1876 to 1882, he was Secretary for Malay Affairs in the Singapore Secretariat, and, in September 1882, he was appointed Resident of Selangor. In 1889, he succeeded Sir Hugh Low as Resident of Perak and was instrumental in the development of the Federated Malay States. He was Resident General of the Federated

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Malay States until 1901, when he was promoted to Governor of the Straits Settlements and High Commissioner for the Malay States. Swettenham’s best-known work is his essay, ‘The Real Malay’, which was included in his first major collection of stories, Malay Sketches, of 1895.19 ‘The Real Malay’ begins with a statement with much of which anthropologists would readily agree: To begin to understand the Malay you must live in his country, speak his language, respect his faith, be interested in his interests, humour his prejudices, sympathise with and help him in trouble, and share his pleasures and possibly his risks. Only thus can you hope to win his confidence. Only through that confidence can you hope to understand the inner man …20 There then follows an account of the Malay man – his physical characteristics, his disposition, his manners, his manner of talking, his religion, his interests. Swettenham emphasises the Malay’s conservatism, his concern for courtesy and his concern for honour: ‘A Malay is intolerant of insult or slight; it is something that to him should be wiped out in blood. He will brood over a real or fancied stain on his honour until he is possessed by the desire for revenge.’21 Swettenham’s story, ‘The Passing of Penglima Prang Semaun’, hinges on such a fancied slight, when a piece of advice ‘meant in good part’ is interpreted as ‘a taunt’.22 The story also explores the complex working out of issues of honour after the sexual infidelity of Megat Raja’s wife, Meriam: the dishonouring of Megat Raja by this infidelity and the dishonour to his wife’s family when he divorces her. ‘The Real Malay’ also emphasises the importance of the clan and the claims of the hereditary chief: ‘He acknowledges the necessity of carrying out, even blindly, the orders of his hereditary chief, while he will protect his own relatives at all costs and make their quarrel his own’.23 Swettenham also discusses Malay women. He observes that ‘Until marriage, it is considered unmaidenly for them to raise their eyes or take any part or interest in their surroundings when men are present’, but he also notes that ‘this affectation of modesty … deceives nobody’.24 After marriage, ‘a woman gets a considerable amount of freedom which she naturally values’.25 Women ‘of gentle birth’ display ‘powers of intelligent conversation, quickness in repartee, a strong sense of humour’,26 while women generally have more

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freedom than their English counterparts. If the Malay man can have four wives, the wives can also divorce the husband. Marriage settlements ‘are common with people in the upper classes’, while, in the lower classes, there are ‘no drunken husbands, no hobnail boots, and no screaming viragoes – because a word would get rid of them’.27 Swettenham concludes that, in relation to marriage and the management of sexuality, ‘the people lead lives that are almost natural’.28 However, another sketch, ‘A Silver-Point’, which recounts a stay at Bandar Termasa in Selangor, presents (as one might expect) a different picture. Swettenham begins by noting that ‘the fashion of its lovemaking’ would ‘have caused surprise in any other part of Malaya’.29 He notes: ‘The girls made assignations with their swains, and met them, but never alone, in the dead of night, in the darkest and most inaccessible spots, where a few minutes’ conversation, a stolen caress, would elsewhere have been thought a poor reward for the risks run’.30 The risks are manifest. Not only does ‘the stroller by night’ carry a weapon – ‘and, if he met another man, was apt to strike first, and then seek for explanations’, but ‘the younger women resorted to weapons for the settlement of their quarrels’ and ‘would stab a rival, or a faithless lover, as soon as not’.31 However, although Swettenham sums up his memory of Bandar Termasa as ‘mud, mosquitoes, and immorality’, it is not clear from his account of the fashion of lovemaking whether the difference from other parts of Malaya is the fact of assignations or the ‘poor reward’. What is clear, however, although not perhaps to Swettenham himself, is that the notion of ‘the real Malay’ has to be inflected by gender, class, and region. ‘A Silver-Point’ tells the story of a bribe that was offered to Swettenham and also shows how he used his knowledge of Malay culture (and the importance of honour in that culture) to handle the situation. He tells the old man ‘You don’t know our culture’, and then explains that offering a bribe ‘is an insult to a white man’.32 In contrast to Swettenham’s performance in these sketches is the figure of his former colleague, J.W. Birch. In his sketch, ‘James Wheeler Woodford Birch’, Swettenham begins by describing the Malay Peninsula in 1874 as ‘a terra incognita to white men’ where ‘the characteristics, customs, peculiarities and prejudices of the Malay had yet to be learnt’.33 Birch, who was appointed the first British Resident of Perak in 1874, had spent ‘the best years of his life’ in the Colonial Service in Ceylon, but ‘knew very little of Malays and almost nothing of their language’.34 He showed ‘extraordinary energy in travelling about the country “spying out the land”’, but ‘his persistence in attempting to redress

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grievances, to save lives, to bring the guilty to punishment, and to induce the then Sultan, Abdullah and his immediate following to mend their ways, earned him the determined opposition of all those who disliked interference’.35 Swettenham’s account of the incident which ended in Birch’s murder foregrounds the situation of the Englishman who doesn’t speak the language and can’t read the cultural signs. For example, when the armed crowd that had gathered ‘began to abuse the Resident, calling him an “infidel”, and asking what he meant by coming there asking questions and speaking like one in authority’, Swettenham observes: ‘Probably the Resident did not understand these ominous signs, but his boatmen heard and realised that trouble was brewing’.36 Again, when the Resident retired to bathe, Swettenham describes a scene where ‘the Resident was composedly bathing in the river, while his people were some of them cooking on the bank, others sleeping in the boats’ and only the few Malays in his entourage were ‘anxiously expectant, fearing the signs boded a catastrophe’.37 Swettenham’s account of Birch’s death is thus a mirror to the implications of ‘The Real Malay’: that the European administrator needs to know the language and learn the culture. The Birch sketch ends with the punishment of his killers. Swettenham focuses on Siputum, the man who ‘slashed the Resident over the head with a sword’, after which Birch ‘sank and was not seen again’. He records: ‘He volunteered the statement that Mr Birch was a good man, who had been kind to him, and that what he did was by order of his Chief, whom he was bound to obey. The responsibility of the individual for his own actions was a doctrine that was strange to him, and he learnt it too late to profit by it.’38 Here Swettenham shows clearly the encounter between two different systems: the feudal obligations of Malay society and the very different assumptions of the English legal system being imposed upon it. It is an instance of what Lyotard terms ‘the differend’, except that the powerstructure of the encounter imposes the English legal concept of individual responsibility on the other culture.39 * As mentioned above, the mission to Pahang was designed to gain British control over Pahang’s foreign relations and to gain the Sultan’s acceptance of the appointment of a British Agent with consular powers. Clifford’s Journal of a Mission to Pahang, January 15 to April 11, 1887 shows the kind of mapping and information gathering that was part of (or prelude to) the

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imperial administrative process. It also repeats a common imperial pattern of dislike for an oppressive and inefficient ruler combined with a capacity for intimacy with other members of the Malay elite. Brooke is an obvious precursor here. One part of the Brooke tradition that Low imbibed was the belief ‘that no Asiatic is fitted to govern a country: under European guidance, yes – but alone, no’.40 At the same time, as Spenser St John observed: ‘Malays of high rank are generally very gentleman-like companions, whose manners never offend’.41 Clifford’s official record of his mission to the Sultan of Pahang begins with a detailed account of his journey to the capital, Pekan. This provides a mapping of the territory and of the character and loyalties of the ruling-class Malays he encounters. Clifford was travelling with the Raja Muda, Wan Mansur, the brother of the Sultan, who had quarrelled with the Sultan about the succession and then taken refuge in Singapore. The delicate politics of this return is the occasion for a very subtle and nuanced analysis of allegiances and strategies that provides useful information for any incoming British Resident, but also a complex picture of the workings of the State’s political structure and institutions. From a casual conversation with an ordinary Malay, Clifford presents an outline of the system of taxation and the heavy duties imposed on tin-miners. Clifford repeatedly expresses concern for the rights of the common people, both Chinese and Malay, and repeatedly emphasises the need for ‘respect for Malay laws and customs’ and sensitivity to cross-cultural misunderstandings. His critical attitude towards the European mining concessionaries needs to be seen in this context. He is surprised to discover that none of the Company’s agents ‘can speak a single word of Malay’.42 He also notes that the misunderstandings that arise between them and the local people are not just a product of linguistic failures; some of them arise from cross-cultural mis-interpretations: I think Mr Stuart somewhat mistakes To’ Kaya’s position, when he says that, as he takes money from the Company, he is merely one of the Company’s servants. I take it on the contrary, that the Company pays the above-mentioned $30 per month to To’ Kaya as tribute to the chief of the district in which their mine happens to be situated.43 By contrast, Clifford shows his own understanding both of the cultural conventions of the Malay ruling-class and of the Chinese miners, whose grievances spring from their prior investment of time, labour and money in

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the mine-workings which the Pengum Company has simply taken over. As a result, he not only gains the treaty with the Sultan but also solves the problem between the Chinese miners and the European company. Clifford’s private diary for 1888, when he returned to Pahang as Consular Agent, again shows his ability to form close relationships with Malays of various classes. In the six months he was there, when he wasn’t reading books by Rider Haggard, he was spending long nights in conversation with his sixteen-year-old scribe, Allang Ahmed, playing billiards regularly with Tungku Mahmud, and conducting an affair with Minah, a Malay woman attached to the Court. By comparison, his personal diary for 1893 shows a daily routine of regular hours in his office, playing tennis with other Europeans, and working on the Malay dictionary he was writing with Swettenham.44 The Residential system had clearly established itself firmly in Pahang, and relations with Malays had become more routinised. As part of their duty, administrators were required to maintain journals of their daily working activities and to explore the territory under their control through extensive tours.45 In his Preface’ to the 1927 edition of In Court and Kampong, Clifford describes how he threw himself into this activity: I devoted the bulk of my time during the remainder of 1890 to a very thorough exploration of my large district. I felt sure that a first-hand knowledge of every detail of its topography – actual, political, and social – of which rivers, for example, were fordable and where, which navigable, of every footpath and short-cut in the country, of the character of each Chief and Headman, and of his relations with his people and with each one of his fellows, was information of a kind that would be priceless …46 He also notes one of the by-products of the 1895 punitive mission against the ‘Pahang rebels’: ‘we brought back with us field-books, the results of our time-and-compass surveys, which filled in at last the big bald patch on the map of the East Coast.’47 At the same time, that punitive mission against the ‘Pahang rebels’ and Clifford’s report, ‘Expedition: Trengganu and Kelantan’, that deals with this expedition make clear the relations between the colonial administrator’s opportunities for participant-observation and the colonial violence that supported these opportunities.48 Clifford’s detailed description of the route the expedition took; his account of the taxation, administrative, and legal systems in Trengganu; his sketch of agriculture and manufacturing

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(Trengganu is ‘the Birmingham of the Peninsula’); and his brief characterisation of the peoples of Kelantan and Trengganu, all derive from an expeditionary force of 252 men and the readiness to ‘bring pressure to bear’ on individuals believed to possess knowledge of the ‘rebels’. Clifford notes that ‘it was necessary, on two occasions, to force men to give me the information, which I knew they possessed, by inflicting slight corporal punishment upon them’.49 As James Clifford (no relation) observes: underlying the safety of the European anthropologist was ‘a prior history of violent conflict … “natives” learned, the hard way, not to kill whites’.50 * Clifford’s experience in Pahang can be compared with twentieth-century anthropological fieldwork and the stance of participant-observer. However, Clifford’s first book, In Court and Kampong is framed like contemporary works of anthropology such as Henry Ling Roth’s The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo.51 It begins with accounts of ‘The East Coast’ and ‘The People of the East Coast’ and it ends with an essay ‘Up Country’. This last essay vividly conveys the ‘loneliness of soul’ of the European living alone among another people: ‘He is Frankenstein’s monster, yearning for love and fellowship with his kind’, while knowing ‘that he is indescribably repulsive to the people among whom he lives’. Clifford counsels learning the language, but also learning ‘every native custom, every native conventionality’, so that ‘He never offends their susceptibilities, never wounds their self-respect, never sins against their numerous conventionalities.’ This is ‘the whole secret of governing natives’,52 but it also provides the basis of a functionalist analysis of culture. Inside this frame, Clifford offers not a systematic exploration of the culture of Pahang, but a series of stories. Interestingly, Clifford is aware of other approaches. The essay on ‘The People of the East Coast’ ends apologetically with the observation that ‘no real study of the people can be attempted in a work written on such unscientific lines as the present’.53 According to Andrew Lang, the ‘scientific’ approach to anthropological matters had been ‘in the air’ since the 1860s, and the celebrated anthropologist E.B. Tylor had been instrumental in developing this approach through his training of students and through the ‘catechisms for field anthropologists’ he had prepared to introduce scientific rigour into fieldwork.54 Nevertheless, the stories that follow, though not scientific, maintain an anthropological dimension. The first story, ‘The Experiences of

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Raja Haji Hamid’, begins with an account of gambling in the King’s Balai in an Independent Malay State, that fills out Clifford’s reference to the chief interests of the Pahang Malay as ‘deeds of arms, illicit love-intrigues, and the sports which his religion holds to be sinful’.55 Other stories provide thick descriptions of the conduct of cock-fights, of the Malay bull-ring, and of Malay weddings; methods of fishing and the ‘beliefs and superstitions of the Fisher Folk’; belief in Were-Tigers and ‘the Penangal, that horrible wraith of a woman who has died in childbirth’; the rice harvest among the ‘Sakai’ and their responses to a death; and amok as a substitute for suicide.56 Clifford also asserts his concern for the truthfulness of the tales. He ends the ‘Preface’ by noting that ‘many of them have been told to me by natives’ and ‘some of the incidents related have come under my personal observation, and for the truth of these I can vouch’.57 * In ‘Up-Country’ Clifford describes how the colonial administrator ‘must be able to place himself in imagination in all manner of unlikely places, and thence to instinctively feel the native Point of View’.58 This strategy, however, involves the danger of what he termed ‘denationalisation’: the threat of seduction by the other. Clifford’s first two novels show that he was acutely conscious of this problem. Since the Beginning engages with sexual desire between Europeans and Malays; A Freelance of Today explores ‘denationalisation’ through political commitment on the part of a young Englishman in the Achinese war against the Dutch. In both novels, Clifford not only attempts to represent Malay culture, but also repeatedly approaches boundaries and allows various constitutive ‘outsides’ to threaten where the boundaries have been drawn. Since the Beginning takes place in Karu, the capital of Pelesu, Clifford’s fictionalised version of Pahang.59 Like his stories, the novel offers detailed accounts of a range of customs and practices. The focus is on the life of the court, and there are descriptions of court sports such as cock-fighting, bullfighting, hunting, and gambling as well as a lengthy set-piece describing the annual fishing of the river.60 Clifford also provides a very detailed account of wedding ceremonies at court including the various formal processions, the formal banquet, and ‘the Custom of the Evening of the Sembor Ayer’.61 There is an account of the use of a fishing-net to protect the new-born baby from the Pen-anggal, and another of an amok, where a Malay would work himself into a rage and then attack others until he is finally killed.62 In the context of

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the short stories, there is a sense of Clifford’s rather limited repertoire of observations. What is new is the critical picture of the court: the King’s Youths descend on the villages to collect women for the royal harem; the princess tortures her handmaiden; and the palace inhabitants are summed up as ‘all slaves or slave-drivers’.63 However picturesque its customs, the court is presented from the start as calling out for European intervention. At the centre of the novel is a narrative of seduction. Frank Austin, who is on a mission to persuade the Raja to accept a British Resident, has a ‘love of adventure, and of the unconventional life of a primitive people’. He has an imaginative sympathy and is keen to try ‘to form some idea of the lives lived by these strange folk’.64 His ‘natural taste for the study of natives, and of native customs and characteristics’ motivates the narrative’s attention to Malay customs and practices.65 However, despite his best efforts to resist temptation, he becomes involved with Maimunah, a hand-maiden from the court.66 In introducing Frank, the narrator had observed that it is difficult ‘to draw the line at which savagery and barbarism may be said to begin, and civilisation to end’.67 Frank’s involvement in Malay life takes him across that line, and he soon becomes aware of ‘sufficient latent savagery in his composition’.68 In A Freelance of Today, Clifford presents Maurice Curzon, a maverick Englishman, who has been ‘prosecuting inquiries into the mysteries of native life on his own account, which is a dangerous pastime’.69 His two years as an interpreter in ‘one of the least-known native states of the Malay Peninsula’ and his ‘strong imagination’, which has enabled him to ‘live into the life of the strange folk’ around him, have combined ‘to well-nigh denationalise him’.70 He is disenchanted with other Europeans and has ‘cut himself adrift from his own people’.71 He is now fascinated by ‘that wild life beyond the barrier of modernity and civilisation’.72 The context for the novel is the Dutch war against the Achinese. Curzon decides to throw in his lot with the Achinese. He sees Aceh as ‘the one place left upon the face of the earth in which he might find a Malayan race unspoiled by European progress and vulgarity, untainted by the degeneracy which civilisation seems fated to bring with it’.73 In short, he hopes to see in Aceh ‘the native in his natural state’, ‘the real native’.74 The quest is doomed to disappointment. The Raja is given over to ‘women and play’, and closer familiarity with the Achinese nobles and people reveals only ‘misrule, oppression, ignoble tragedies and squalid, selfish vice’.75 The novel has none of the thick description of Since the Beginning and the stories of Peninsular Malaya. Rather it is a parable, in which

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the sympathetic Curzon’s hopeful quest for the ‘real Malay’ produces only ‘the conviction of the hopeless limitations of the brown peoples’: ‘Their moral and mental inferiority revealed itself at every turn – in the ineptitude and inefficiency of their systems, in their lack of self-mastery, in their inability to resist sordid temptations, in their complete want of discipline’.76 The novel registers the abstract attraction of ‘the hidden life of the East’,77 but, in the absence of cultural specificities, it firmly asserts against it an ideology of racial supremacy. * Swettenham’s quest for ‘the real Malay’ is also an element in Clifford’s work. It emerges, as we have seen, in A Freelance of Today as the protagonist’s search for ‘a Malay race unspoiled by European progress’.78 From the start, Clifford was conscious that he was trying to record a culture whose passing his own presence was bringing about, and he was ambivalent about this process. However, whatever sympathetic fascination he might have with Malay culture and society was always controlled by a consciousness of cultural and racial superiority. In Sally, A Study (1904), the ‘denationalisation’ he explores is that of the European-educated Malay.79 Though this is a comparatively late work, written after Clifford had left Malaya, there is still anthropological material such as the thick description of the reception of the new-born prince at court and of preparations for a royal marriage, both of which he had described before. In the former case, Clifford carefully marks the combination of folk-belief, animistic magic, and Islam in the use of the fishing-net as a barrier to protect the child from the Pen-anggal, the use of the cat as a scapegoat to take away the spirits, and the Islamic prayer. The narrative is articulated by encounters between Saleh and Jack Norris, who had appeared in an earlier story about the court at Pelesu.80 The first part opens with Norris watching the young teenager swimming in the Thames; the second part concludes with Norris gazing at Saleh’s dead body. Philip Holden reads this repeated focus on Saleh’s body in terms of homoeroticism.81 However, it might also be seen as an attempt to read Saleh’s body in terms of ‘race’. Holden notes the novel’s clear demarcation of British and Malay. In the first part, which is set in England, where the young Raja Muhammad Saleh has been sent for his education, the narrative traces his growing awareness of the badge of colour and his discovery of the barrier set between him and his English hosts through a series of humiliating

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encounters. His encounter with the Indian Princess Marie forces on to his consciousness both his own ethnicity and the issue of colonisation. Marie attacks the British as ‘robbers’, invokes memories of the 1857 uprising, and affirms the struggle for independence: ‘Some day we shall drive them out of India, and my people will go back and reign as before in their own land’.82 Saleh ‘desired above everything to be treated as an Englishman’, but he realises that she speaks to him as she does because he is ‘Asiatic’ like her. If this meeting makes him aware of his identity as a mimic man, his encounter with Alice, to whom he considers proposing marriage, makes him realise ‘the gulf that divides the white man from the brown’, leaving him with ‘the elusive vision of himself as a being innately inferior’.83 The second part, which follows his life after his return to his father’s court, shows how his European education has alienated him from Malay culture. He realises that he is ‘unsuited by training to be a Malay Raja, unfitted by nature to be an Englishman’.84 The war-cry which he utters in the swimming games in the Thames at the start of the novel is proleptic of Saleh’s end. As Holden points out, the narrative is constructed around the possibility of amok: the repeated references to this possible outcome are fulfilled in the conclusion. The consequences of the amok, which are written on Saleh’s dead body, finally fix his identity as Malay. As Holden puts it, the climactic scene represents ‘a violent reinscription of racial division’85: Saleh stands revealed as the ‘real Malay’ – in the novel’s terms, the racially inferior being – that education cannot change. It is revealing that Clifford does not use Saleh as a participant-observer in relation to European culture. Wells, for example, in The Wonderful Visit, had used his visiting angel as an estranging device to question aspects of Victorian culture.86 Clifford, by contrast, presents English culture as an ideal to be achieved rather than as a culture to be explored and evaluated through comparison: he affirms ‘the kindness, the sanctity, and the exquisite purity of English family life’.87 Racial and cultural hierarchies remain intact and unchallenged. Jack Norris is an interesting figure in this context. He is a familiar Clifford hero – indeed, he is another fictional version of Clifford himself. Norris prides himself on his understanding of Malays. After many years as Resident of Pelesu, he has become ‘half-Malay’. There is an entirely gratuitous account of him spending an hour before breakfast in Malay dress.88 This offers an asymmetrical parallel with Saleh: where Saleh suffers as a result of his exposure to English culture, Norris benefits from his immersion in Malay culture. Saleh’s hybrid state is disastrous for him: he can

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never be English – because of the colour of his body and the structural inferiority of Malay to English within the novel – and he has been disabled from being a Malay. Norris, on the other hand, dips into alterity as an escape from administrative monotony. As the novel suggests, Clifford was opposed to providing European education for the Malays. Tony Stockwell describes Saleh as Clifford’s ‘polemic … against the Macaulay tradition’,89 seeing Britain’s role rather as, in Tidrick’s words, ‘the purification and protection of the Malay way of life’.90 As Stockwell notes, Swettenham similarly recoiled against ‘the brown Englishman’.91 In ‘British Rule in Malaya’, Swettenham wrote: I think it should be our object to maintain or revive his interest in the best of his traditions, rather than encourage him to assume habits of life that are not really suited to his character, constitution, climate, or the circumstances in which he lives – which are, in fact, unnatural to him, and will lead him to trouble and disappointment, if not to absolute disaster.92 Saleh acts out Swettenham’s warning. As this suggests, the ‘real Malay’ sought out by Swettenham and Clifford was very much an ideological and administrative construct. Stockwell suggests that, for both men, the ‘real Malay’ was ‘a rural dweller and a man of the sea and rivers, whose life was determined by natural rhythms, customary practices and ingrained religious belief’. At the same time, in pursuing a policy of preserving traditional Malay society, the British administration operated through the Malay courts of local Rajas. Malay custom (adat Melayu) was tempered by Western concepts of justice and European models of kingship, feudalism, and land-ownership, but also by the encouragement of a stricter observance of Islamic law.93 * James Clifford has written in recent years about fieldwork as ‘a central feature of disciplinary self-definition’ for anthropology.94 Anthropological research is traditionally ‘oriented toward the production of deep, cultural knowledge’ through ‘travel, physical displacement, and temporary dwelling away from home’, and anthropological fieldwork has involved ‘an especially deep, extended, and interactive research encounter’.95 Hugh Clifford’s extended engagement with Malay culture clearly corresponds to this central importance of fieldwork in the emergence of anthropology as a discipline,

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even as the ‘positivist and colonialist historical associations’ of fieldwork render it a problematic legacy for James Clifford.96 As James Clifford observes, when ‘intensive fieldwork began to be championed … an effort was required to distinguish the kind of knowledge produced by this method from that acquired by other long-term residents’ such as ‘the missionary, the colonial officer, and the travel writer’. The colonial officer was ultimately not concerned with knowledge for its own sake, even if the asserted apolitical nature of anthropology also proved difficult to sustain.97 Nevertheless, as Stockwell observes: ‘The conduct of native administration necessitated knowledge and understanding of the native mind and way of life, and cadets of the MCS were supposed to be trained in these mysteries. No passing traveller could pick up such expertise.’98 Indeed, he suggests, the political officers of the Malay Civil Service saw themselves as ‘pioneering ethnologists’: ‘they devised ethnic categories’ and ‘set to work to discover the essential features of each human group they ruled’.99 Clifford prided himself on his knowledge of Malays and Malay life. His fictional avatars, Frank Austin, Jack Norris, and others, perform an imaginative closeness to Malay life. Indeed, in his sketch ‘In the half-light’, recalling an overnight stay in a Malay kampong, Clifford considers how ‘circumstances had made me once again a Malay among Malays’.100 But, as Stockwell asks, how well did he really understand Malay life, given that his perception was inevitably distorted ‘by prejudice, sentiment and pragmatism’?101 In ‘Our Trusty and Well-Beloved’, published in 1913, the protagonist, Sir Philip Hanbury-Erskine, returning to Malaya (like Clifford himself over ten years later), has reached ‘the Mecca of his pilgrimage, the goal of his ambitions’ when he enters Government House. Recalling ‘memories of a half-forgotten youth’ and chafing against ‘the ordered present with its conventions, its formalities, its duties, its burdens, its petty responsibilities’, he slips into Malay dress. However, he encounters not ‘the smoke of the woodfire within the native hut’, but rather a group of Malay conspirators plotting against British rule.102 If the story enacts Clifford’s belief that he could pass as a Malay, and ends with his triumph over the conspirators, it also suggests an awareness of the limits of his own knowledge – or, at least, an awareness of a Malay vision beyond the bureaucratic control of the European observer.

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Hugh Clifford, In Court and Kampong (London: Grant Richards, 1897), p. viii. Hugh Clifford, In Court and Kampong (London: The Richards Press, 1927), p. 13. Subsequent references are to this edition. 3 Clifford: In Court and Kampong, p. 13. 4 Sir Thomas Clifford, Lord Treasurer to Charles I, had been the first Lord Chudleigh. 5 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 239. 6 Peter Wicks, ‘Introduction,’ to Hugh Clifford, Journal of a Mission to Pahang: January 15 to April 11, 1887, Southeast Asian Studies Working Paper, No. 10 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 1978). I am indebted to this introduction for much of the biographical material in this paragraph. 7 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2001), p. 8. 8 For this concept, see A.C. Milner, Kerajaan: Malay Political Culture on the Eve of Colonial Rule (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982). 9 Cannadine: Ornamentalism, p. xix. 10 Cannadine: Ornamentalism, p. 8. 11 Frank Swettenham, A Nocturne and Other Malayan Stories and Sketches, ed. William R. Roff (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 90. 12 James Brooke had been made Governor of Labuan in 1847. 13 See Joseph Conrad, ‘An observer in Malaya,’ in his Notes on Life and Letters (London: J.M. Dent, 1924), pp. 58-65. The review first appeared in the Academy (April, 1898). 14 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 1. 15 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 7. 16 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 11. 17 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 8. 18 In Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. xiv. 19 F. A. Swettenham, Malay Sketches (London: John Lane, 1895). 20 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 16. 21 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 17. 22 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 54. 23 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 18. 24 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 20. 25 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 20. 26 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 20. 27 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 21. 28 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 21. 29 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 34. 30 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 34. 31 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 34. 32 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 39. 33 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 74. 34 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 75. 35 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 75. 36 Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 82. 1 2

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Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 83. Swettenham: A Nocturne, p. 86. 39 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1988). 40 Spenser St John, The Life of Sir James Brooke: Rajah of Sarawak [1879] (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 7. 41 St John: The Life of Sir James Brooke, p. 19. 42 Hugh Clifford, Journal of a Mission to Pahang: January 15 to April 11, 1887, Working Paper no. 10 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, SEAS, 1978), p. 16. 43 Clifford: Journal of a Mission, p. 17. 44 Hugh Clifford and Frank Swettenham, A Dictionary of the Malay Language, Part 1: A-G (Taiping, Perak: Government Printing Office, 1894-1902). 45 J.M. Gullick, Malay Society in the late Nineteenth Century (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 8. 46 Clifford: In Court and Kampong, p. 37. 47 Clifford: In Court and Kampong, p. 42. 48 ‘Expedition: Trengganu and Kelantan’ was read at the Royal Geographical Society on 27 April 1896 and published in the Royal Geographical Journal, IX/1 (January 1897), pp. 1-37. 49 Hugh Clifford, Report: Expedition to Trengganu and Kelantan (Kuala Lumpur: Federation of Malay States Government Press, 1938), p. 30. 50 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 40. 51 East Coast Etchings (Singapore: Straits Times, 1896) collected together essays and sketches he had published in the newspaper. It was published, in a revised and extended version, in Britain as In Court and Kampong in 1897. 52 Clifford: In Court and Kampong, pp. 249, 252, 254, and 253. 53 Clifford: In Court and Kampong, p. 29. 54 See Andrew Lang’s essay in the volume Anthropological Essays Presented to E.B. Tylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), Preface, p. 1, p. 3. 55 Clifford: In Court and Kampong, p. 17. 56 Clifford: In Court and Kampong, pp. 48-52, 54-60, 126-30, 134-50, 62-77, 231, 98, 235, and 78-80. 57 Clifford: In Court and Kampong, p. ix. 58 Clifford: In Court and Kampong, p. 252-3. 59 Hugh Clifford, Since the Beginning (London: Grant Richards, 1898). 60 Clifford: Since the Beginning, pp. 94-101. 61 Clifford: Since the Beginning, pp. 138-47 and 151. 62 Clifford: Since the Beginning, pp. 197 and 107-111. 63 Clifford: Since the Beginning, pp. 9, 12, and 13. 64 Clifford: Since the Beginning, pp. 21 and 23. 65 Clifford: Since the Beginning, p. 24. 66 One of the traditions which Low had experienced in Borneo was the custom for young European officers to take local women as their mistresses (nonya). Spenser St John established a relationship with Dayang Kamariah, a Malay woman of aristocratic ancestry; Hugh Low with her sister. 37 38

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Clifford: Since the Beginning, p. 19. Clifford: Since the Beginning, p. 114. 69 Hugh Clifford, A Freelance of Today (London: Methuen, 1903), p. 10. 70 Clifford: A Freelance, pp. 11, 10, 9 71 Clifford: A Freelance, p. 32. 72 Clifford: A Freelance, p. 41. 73 Clifford: A Freelance, p. 83. 74 Clifford: A Freelance, pp. 83 and 105. 75 Clifford: A Freelance, pp. 111 and 141. 76 Clifford: A Freelance, p. 163. 77 Clifford: A Freelance, p. 32. 78 Clifford: A Freelance, p. 83. 79 The novel was published in two parts, Sally: A Study (1904) and Saleh: A Sequel (1908). The two parts were published together as A Prince of Malaya (1926). All references are to the reprint of this edition, Saleh: A Prince of Malaya (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989). 80 ‘At the court of Pelesu,’ in Hugh Clifford, In A Corner of Asia (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899). 81 Philip Holden, Modern Subjects/Colonial Texts: Hugh Clifford and the Discipline of English Literature in the Straits Settlements and Malaya 1895-1907 (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2000), pp. 111-12. 82 Clifford: Saleh, pp. 53 and 54. 83 Clifford: Saleh, pp. 58 and 68. 84 Clifford: Saleh, p. 242. Saleh was based on the Raja Alang Iskander, son of Sultan Idris of Perak, who stayed with Clifford in England in 1902. Unlike Saleh, he had a very successful career when he returned home as Sultan of Perak (1918-38) and as a leading advocate of ‘Malay rights’. 85 Holden: Modern Subjects, p. 105. 86 H.G. Wells, The Wonderful Visit (London: Dent, 1895). See Robert Hampson, ‘Travellers, dreamers and visitors: Ford and fantasy,’ in Robert Hampson and Tony Davenport (eds), Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 31-58. 87 Clifford: Saleh, p. 39. 88 Kathryn Tidrick, in Empire and the English Character (London: I.B. Tauris, 1990), describes one aspect of Clifford’s complete collapse of health in 1928 as follows: ‘He remained at large for some time, being in the habit, it is said, of putting on Malay dress and going to sit on the steps of the Colonial Office’ (p. 130). However, she provides no source for this account. 89 A.J. Stockwell, ‘The white man’s burden and brown humanity: Colonialism and ethnicity in British Malaya,’ Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 10/1 (1982), p. 57. 90 Tidrick: Empire and the English Character, p. 129. 91 Stockwell: ‘The white man’s burden,’ p. 55. 92 F.A. Swettenham, ‘British rule in Malaya’ (1895-6), cited in Rex Stevenson, Cultivators and Administrators (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 67. 93 Stockwell: ‘The white man’s burden,’ pp. 54 and 62-3. Stockwell notes how Islam was used against the prevalent practices of debt-slavery, gambling, and opium-smoking. 94 Clifford: Routes, p. 53. James Clifford, of course, questions this norm. 67 68

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Clifford: Routes, pp. 53 and 54. Clifford, Routes, p. 63. 97 Clifford: Routes, pp. 64 and 65. 98 Stockwell: ‘The white man’s burden,’ p. 53 99 Stockwell: ‘The white man’s burden,’ p. 56. 100 In Hugh Clifford, Malayan Monochromes (London: John Murray, 1913), pp. 279-80. 101 Stockwell: ‘The white man’s burden,’ p. 53. 102 In Clifford: Malayan Monochromes, pp. 211-12. 95 96

Roger Casement

8. ROGER CASEMENT IN THE AMAZON, THE CONGO, AND IRELAND Helen Carr

Roger Casement, whether thought of as misguided idealist or Irish martyr, British traitor or gay saint, is nowadays most often remembered for the circumstances surrounding his death: he was hanged for treason in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916, in the wake of the Easter Rising, worldwide pleas for clemency having been silenced by the circulation of pages from his diary detailing homosexual acts. The authenticity of the diary entries has in the past been questioned, though by now the majority of Casement scholars – and there are a remarkable number – accept they were probably genuine. Whether they believe the entries were forged or not, most agree it was a disreputable way of securing the death of a man who in his lifetime was internationally renowned as a campaigner against human rights abuses, most particularly for his reports into the barbaric treatment of indigenous workers in the Congo and the Amazon. Outrage at the sentence of death had been particularly strong in the United States, where Irish American feeling ran high. One of those shown the offending pages by the British ambassador was John Quinn, lawyer and patron of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and other modernists. Quinn, an Irish American himself, who would two years later defend the Little Review against charges of obscenity for publishing part of Ulysses, reacted angrily to the circulation of papers implying Casement’s ‘degeneracy’, and threatened to remind the public of the Piggott forgeries that the British government had used in an attempt to discredit Parnell. The ambassador desisted, but by then the damage had been done. Casement’s treasonable act had been to visit Germany to try to persuade Irish prisoners of war held there to join in a rebellion against the British. Though he managed to organise gun-running from Germany to Ireland, he was unsuccessful in recruiting the prisoners of war to join the planned 1916

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uprising, and on Good Friday that year had been brought back to Ireland by a German U-boat; he disembarked in County Kerry, intending to warn the rebels not to go ahead. He was, however, immediately arrested, the boat with the guns sunk, and the by then doomed rising took place on the Monday. Casement’s career in the service of the British government and the knighthood that he had received in 1911 made his crime appear all the more heinous: the establishment had been betrayed by one of its own. The trial took place in July, against the background of staggering losses in the Battle of the Somme. Morale was low; the war was now a lethal stalemate; the government felt a bullish approach was the only one they could risk in dealing with this colonial servant who had turned against the Empire. How could such a thing happen? It is that evolution from imperialist to rebel that I want to look at here, and in particular how Casement’s Irish nationalism and his concerns about the abuse of non-European peoples grew together. It has sometimes been suggested – particularly by the British authorities at his trial – that Casement only became a nationalist after leaving the consular service because of ill-health in 1913, though his relations insisted he had been a fierce supporter of Ireland since boyhood. Neither of these versions appears quite to fit the facts; he had clearly a romantic interest in the Irish past in his youth, but that appears to have lain fairly dormant until 1904, when he began to take a keen interest in the Irish literary revival, particularly the Ulster branch. The terms in which the Irish constructed themselves in that movement, as poetic, imaginative, and humane, in contrast to England’s commercialism, materialism, and mechanisation, were very much those in which he would later see the Amazonian Indians in contrast to their employers. * I want to situate Casement in the margins of anthropology in two different ways. On the one hand, like other figures in this book, his professional work brought him into contact with people characterised by the nineteenth and early twentieth century as primitive or savage. Casement’s writings, both his reports to Parliamentary Select Committees and his diaries, contain many ethnographic observations, and in 1912 he wrote an article on the Putumayo Indians for the Contemporary Review, which, as I will argue later, has many of the characteristics of ethnographic accounts of the time. Casement belonged to a category of travellers and colonialists whose responses to these so-called ‘natives’ helped to form both the popular and professional view of their

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cultures, the leading figures in the emerging discipline still being what are now dismissively described as ‘armchair’ anthropologists, who were dependent for their information on overseas observers such as Casement. Yet in his interest in the Celtic Revival, Casement can be seen to be in the margins of anthropology in a quite different way. As is well known, in the years with which I am concerned here, the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, the discipline of anthropology was changing radically, as described in the Introduction to this volume, from an emphasis on evolutionary development to the study of particular cultures. One might suggest the change was from a model represented by Hegel to one represented by Herder. The Hegelian model, as put forward in his Philosophy of History, was an evolutionary one, with the dark barbaric races left behind as white civilisation advanced to the realms of the Spirit. Nineteenth-century anthropologists, figures like Henry Maine, E.B. Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and James Frazer, were all preoccupied with tracing the development from savagery to civilisation.1 Tylor’s famous doctrine of survivals, examples of early evolutionary stages still extant in the present, meant that present day groups could all be allocated to their appropriate place on the ladder, and the accounts of travellers and colonial servants would be searched, not so much for ethnographic accounts of particular groups, as for examples of certain evolutionary stages. On the other hand, the Herderian model, as it appears in his Outline of History, was one in which the focus was on the diversity of the cultural characteristics of different groups. He does have a developmental narrative but it is a very different one. The national spirit was already present in early folk traditions and in a nation’s language; folk literature was ‘the original and spontaneous expression of the national soul’. So for Herder, the ‘primitive’ stages of a group share the essence of its civilised development, indeed feed and nurture its growth. His work was enormously influential in the nineteenth century, but not so much in the first instance on the emerging discipline of anthropology as on the growth of cultural nationalism. Herder, of course, was not alone among the Romantics in his emphasis on the role of folk traditions, and he was himself influenced by earlier work on primitive poetry, particularly from Scotland, but he undoubtedly was one of the most significant of those who fuelled a drive to rediscover national folk literatures and myths, and indeed in some cases to invent them. Franz Boas acknowledged the debt that his form of cultural anthropology owed to Herder, a debt which is clear in the emphasis he places on the collection of myths, rituals, and cultural artefacts, and on the

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language of a people in establishing what Herder had called ‘the whole heart and soul’ of a human group. I should want to argue that the construction of a notion of the Celtic Irish in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, with its collection of Gaelic songs, myths, and customs, was in itself an ethnographic enterprise. Herder’s stress on the importance of a national language (‘Has a nation,’ he asked, ‘anything more precious than the language of its fathers?’) lies behind the dispute over whether Irish literature could be written in English, and led to the development of what has been called Hiberno-English.2 Others may feel I am using too wide a definition of ethnography here, but I would stress that Herderian nationalism puts as much emphasis on the primitive as the object of study as the evolutionists. Whilst James Frazer, for example, quotes contemporary Scottish superstitions as examples of savage ignorance remaining in the present day, people like Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge saw Irish peasant beliefs as poetic and imaginative traditions which revealed the true nature of the Irish soul; a classic example of the ignoble versus the noble savage. Casement would use the ethnographic model he had come to understand though the Celtic literary revival to explain the nature of the Putumayo. * Casement’s biographers have made much of the fact that, as he grew up, he found himself on an ambiguous middle line in the divisions in Irish life. Born in 1864, the year before W.B. Yeats, Casement had a Catholic mother and a Protestant father; he was brought up in the Church of Ireland, though his mother secretly had him baptised a Catholic on a visit to Wales when he was four, and he would turn to the Catholic faith in Pentonville Prison at the end of his life. Although a Catholic, his mother was related to an important Ascendancy family, most of whom were Protestant landed gentry. His father also came from a good family but he himself was not well off and, when Casement was orphaned at the age of twelve, his father left almost no funds, and he and his three siblings were made wards of Chancery. His father had been in the Indian army, so the tradition of colonial service was already there, but that was not what Casement in later years would stress. His father, whom, he insisted in 1905, the year after he had first become involved with the Celtic Revival, had ‘an Irishman’s innate sympathy with the oppressed and enmity towards the oppressor’ and had given up his commission in the Indian army to go to fight for the Hungarians in 1848, the ‘year of

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revolutions’, because of what his son described as his ‘overmastering love of freedom born of a close perception of the evils of Irish misrule’.3 Yet Casement had been educated in fiercely Unionist Ballymena, as a boarder at what was then the Church of Ireland Diocesan School, later Ballymena Academy. Although Casement had been born in Dublin, his family came from Ulster, and he spent much of his boyhood in predominantly Presbyterian Antrim, mixing little with the Catholic peasantry, but becoming deeply attached to its beautiful Glens. After he was orphaned, he was provided for by relatives, and was able to remain at his school, spending his holidays in England, with his mother’s sister’s family in Liverpool, moving to live with them full time when he left school at sixteen. Casement’s aunt’s husband, Edward Bannister, looked after the West African trading interests of a big Liverpool company, and perhaps it is not surprising that West Africa was where Casement would soon head. Six feet two, strikingly good looking, from a well-connected family, educated but penniless, Casement – like many of his contemporaries in the 1880s – must have seen the colonies as the obvious answer for an impoverished but personable and ambitious young man. After his death Casement’s sister Nina and his cousin Gertrude would claim that he had sympathised as an adolescent with the cause of Irish freedom, but such sympathy certainly did not yet transform itself into a wider critique of imperialism. After a year working as a purser on a ship on the West African route, Casement joined the Congo International Association, working for Leopold II of Belgium, along with Henry Morton Stanley: two of those he would most condemn twenty years later. At the time, however, he appears to have embraced their published civilising mission as genuine. The Association’s official aims were ‘to work for the improvement of the Congo natives’ moral and material conditions, and to suppress slavery’.4 Henry Morton Stanley’s reputation was at that period very great, a fearless adventurer bringing light to a dark continent, and he did a fine line in rhetorical moralising, which in those early days Casement appears to have believed. ‘We travelled through the Congo,’ Stanley asserted, ‘making roads and stations, negotiating for privileges, surveying the vast area, teaching and preparing the natives for the near advent of a bright and happy future for them, winning them by gentleness, appeasing their passions, inculcating commercial principles, showing them the nature of the produce that would be marketable when the white man should

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come; and everywhere, we were accepted as their friends and benefactors.’5 The only part of this version of his dealings with the natives likely to be true is his insistence on commercial principles, and, as it happens, Stanley’s ruthless treatment of the indigenous Africans on his earlier expeditions had already been the subject of criticism, and a vote of censure was mooted at the Royal Geographical Society in the late 1870s; but the twenty-year-old Casement probably knew nothing of that. Stanley was in fact soon to part company with Leopold, as the French would only allow the Belgians to bring the Congo Free State into being in 1885 on condition that Stanley was sacked, and he went off in 1886 to lead the ill-fated Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, whose story he would recount in his best-selling In Darkest Africa in 1890. Casement remained, and joined the well-financed Sanford Expedition to open up communications in the Congo. He threw himself into the life of the colonial adventurer with panache. Joseph Conrad, whom he met in the Congo, later described him admiringly as start[ing] off into an unspeakable wilderness swinging a crookhandled stick for all weapons, with two bulldogs, Paddy (white) and Biddy (brindle) at his heels, and a Loanda boy carrying a bundle for all company. A few months afterwards it so happened that I saw him come out again, a little leaner, a little browner, with his stick, dogs and Loanda boy, and quietly serene as though he had been for a stroll in the park.6 Casement, however, did not always travel so light. In contrast to Stanley’s style of exploration, which glorified hardship and deprivation, Casement preferred to take civilisation with him into the wilderness. A. Mountjoy Jephson (incidentally a distant relative of Casement’s mother), who accompanied Stanley on his search for Emin Pasha, recalled meeting Casement in the jungle in 1887. Stanley, who himself appeared to go without food for days without difficulty, never paid much attention to the food supplies of those on his expeditions, and the death toll was high among both the whites and Africans who accompanied him. Casement’s style was very different, as Jephson recounts:

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Casement of the Sanford Expedition came up and camped by me. We bathed and he gave me a very good dinner – he is travelling most comfortably and has a large tent and plenty of servants. It was delightful sitting down to a real dinner at a real table with a table cloth and dinner napkins and plenty to eat with Burgundy to drink and cocoa and cigarettes after dinner – and this in the middle of the wilds – it will be a long time before I pass such a pleasant evening again.7 That is the kind of colonial adventuring that reminds one that the French for the ‘life of Reilly’ is ‘la vie de Pasha’. Casement, looking back at this period later, described himself as on the ‘high road to becoming a regular Imperialist Jingo’.8 He wrote to Sanford making the standard imperialist complaint that the ‘people do not work’, though he certainly did not advocate force to make them do so, but suggested the answer lay in ‘quickening their good instincts (and they have many) and repressing their bad’.9 Indeed, Casement’s gentleness and horror at any kind of cruelty were qualities that had already been commented on by his colleagues. A local missionary commended him for being ‘very good and patient with the natives’, though disapproving of his generosity when buying food from the Congolese: ‘If he sold a fathom of cloth he would wish to give six inches more than a fathom. There is far too much of this throwing money away out here, on the part of State men, and we in the missions have great difficulty in keeping prices down.’ But after this striking manifestation of Christian charity, he did add, ‘I only mention this to show how fair, generous and good-hearted he is.’10 Casement left the Congo in the early 1890s, commenting that he had enjoyed ‘making friends with the natives: I liked them, poor souls – and they me’.11 Benign paternalism appears to have been his attitude at this stage, and he would not entirely shift from that. Like many liberals of the period, he believed in the importance of bringing progress and instruction to the backward, but he was insistent it should be done humanely. Casement would spend most of the next nineteen years of his life working for the British government overseas: first as Director-General of customs in Nigeria (1892-95), and then as British consul in Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique (1895-98), in Portuguese West Africa, now Angola (18981900), in the Congo Free State (1901-04), and finally in Brazil (1906-11). In 1900, during the Boer War, he was dispatched to make sure there was no gun-running from the Portuguese to the Boers; fourteen years later he would

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be gun-running himself. Yet his disillusion with the British Empire only grew gradually. Roger Sawyer points out that towards the end of his life, he talked of his time in Nigeria in the first half of the 1890s as the period when he saw ‘the protecting power ultimately bec[o]me the annexing power’, but whether he perceived it so clearly at the time is open to doubt.12 By the time he carried out his investigations in the Congo, his awareness of European oppression imposing itself on native cultures had become clear. In a remarkable letter that he wrote in late 1903 to a friend whom he had met in Portuguese East Africa, he explained that he had wanted to understand the Congolese native way of life ‘underlying the veneer of European officialdom which had imposed itself upon them’. He believed, he said, that he who goes to a foreign country to see the people of it and form a just conclusion of their mode of life does not confine his investigations to museums, picture galleries and public buildings, or the barracks and reviews of soldiers or State conducted enterprises: he goes also into the villages of the people, he speaks with the peasant and the shopkeeper and enters sometimes the dwellings of the very poor: he watches the growth of crops and how the fields are tilled and seeks from the country producer to understand how his agricultural industry rewards him. He does not confine himself, for all the information he desires, to the statistics published in official bulletins – or seek the main springs of national economy in the routine statistics of Government offices. If he wants to see how a people lives and how they are affected by the laws they must obey and the taxes they must pay he goes, if he goes for truth, to the homes of the people themselves. This is what I have, very inadequately, been striving to do on the Upper Congo during the last few months.13 It is a letter that suggests Michael Taussig is right when he says Casement would have made a ‘marvellous ethnographer’, and for an early twentiethcentury European it is striking that the terms in which he understands the Africans could equally well be applied to a western country, and indeed map perfectly on to the Ireland that nationalists were trying to find under the ‘veneer’ that English ‘officialdom had imposed upon them’, the Ireland that they believed belonged to the peasant and the poor.14 Casement saw the Congolese as people first and foremost, not simply as examples of a savage stage of development; indeed, he implies, though he does not say it as

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overtly as he would in the Amazon, less savage than their European oppressors. His experience of making the report on the Congo atrocities, where indigenous workers were ruthlessly exploited in slave-like conditions, and mutilated, generally by having hands or feet lopped off if they failed to produce enough rubber, had a profound effect on him, perhaps as much because of the response to the report, which he produced in late 1903, as the actual making of it. The Belgians fought back vigorously, representing themselves as models of humanitarianism. The British government, which had dragged its feet for years over reports of atrocities and which was deeply embarrassed by Casement’s findings, appeared reluctant to make a stand. Casement was idealistic, almost naively so, and the experience shocked him into the realisation that much of colonialism was about capitalist profit, not about improving the conditions of the indigenous people; the colonialists, he began to realise, were in fact only too ready to use these so-called primitive races as subhuman instruments for accumulating European wealth. In 1907, he summed up his changed attitude: I had accepted Imperialism – British rule was to be extended at all costs, because that was best for everyone under the sun, and those who opposed that extension ought rightly to be ‘smashed’ … Well the [Boer] War gave me qualms at the end – the concentration camps bigger ones – and finally when up in those lonely forests where I found Leopold I found also myself – the incorrigible Irishman … I realised then that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race – of a people once hunted themselves, whose hearts were based on affection as the root principle of contact with their fellow men and whose estimate of life was not of some thing eternally to be appraised at its market ‘price’. And I said to myself, then, far up the Lulongo River that I would do my part as an Irishman, wherever it might lead me to personally.15 Politically, his experience with the Congo report changed him; actions needed to be taken and he could no longer sit on the sidelines. But the narrative that would dictate those actions, and the fundamental dichotomy between the heart’s ‘affection’ and ‘market price’, he found in the Glens of Antrim in 1904. *

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So it happened that, in 1904, he found himself back in Ireland wondering whether his report would ever be accepted, deeply depressed, and it was in this state of mind that he became involved with the Ulster branch of the Celtic Revival. Casement’s early life, losing his mother at nine, his father at twelve, and leaving Ireland at sixteen, appears to have made him susceptible to melancholy, and his astonishing energy and industry in his colonial work may have been fuelled by the need to keep this sense of loss at bay. Now his crusading work looked in danger of failure, his usual protective strategy was gone, and instead he turned to the associations of his childhood. One of his biographers, Brian Inglis, goes so far as to conjecture that he had become by this stage something of a manic depressive; whether that would be the clinical diagnosis or not, those two sides of his personality are certainly there. Someone who met him shortly after his return commented on ‘the contrast between his normally gentle and melancholy manner, and the fury which made his dark eyes blaze almost with madness when he talked of the Congo, in particular, and of oppression in general.’16 Inglis suggests that one of his modes of relief from that melancholy, other than impassioned and arduous work, was his writing of poetry. He had in fact unsuccessfully tried to have a collection published in 1901; after his death, his devoted cousin Gertrude Bannister, by then Parry, to whom he was more like a brother, would publish a slim volume in 1918, though even she did not try to argue for its literary worth.17 Yet one thing the poems show is that in spite of his devoted colonial service, Casement had never entirely lost his fascination with the Irish past, or indeed, forgotten its present troubles. Like the young James Joyce, he had been profoundly moved by Parnell’s death, and wrote a poem, dated 6 October 1891, in which he asserts that ‘Through and beyond the breach he living made/Shall Erin pass to freedom’; a surprising conviction for a model colonial servant.18 As Andrew Gibson points out, the myth of Parnell that circulated among his supporters emphasised his tactics of ‘silence, cunning, the pose of calculated indifference’, which, as he says, ‘resemble the tactics adopted or recommended by Stephen Dedalus and the young James Joyce’.19 They might perhaps also be said to be the tactics Casement adopted when he returned to the consular service two years after his conversion to Irish nationalism in 1904. Seamus Deane has written a book aptly called The Celtic Revivals: the Celtic Revival was a movement that took many forms and served many purposes.20 The late eighteenth century had seen a keen interest in primitive poetry and the bardic tradition, and in Scotland James Macpherson had obligingly

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invented the Ossian cycle to make up for the deficiencies in available texts. In Ireland at that period there was a similar antiquarian interest, led mainly by Catholic scholars, but it had nothing like the public impact made by the invention of a Highland Scottish tradition, so ably assisted by Sir Walter Scott (even though he was one of the first to question the authenticity of the Ossian material). The Celtic Revival that would be deeply influential around the world, from Harlem to India, as a model of cultural self-discovery and anti-colonial resistance, was the one that emerged in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. As Ben Levitas has tellingly observed, it was an example ‘both of (almost) post-colonial liberation and of (semi) successful European nationalism’.21 It followed the pattern of Herderian cultural nationalism, deeply romantic, locating the origins of the national spirit in the peasant folk, particularly in their poetry and song, and celebrating the legends and mythology of the past, though, as in other European folklorist gatherings in the nineteenth century, presenting not just selective but often bowdlerised versions.22 Yet this search for the origin of the Irish spirit in the past was, as in later postcolonial movements, part of a political strategy for the present; the English might routinely denigrate the Irish, a point to which I shall return, but the Celtic Revival, as Declan Kiberd suggests, ‘invented’ an Ireland and an Irish identity of which they could be proud, and which gave them a model of resistance to English rule.23 There was however a complication; the Ireland that this late nineteenthcentury revival construed needed to serve the interests of very diverse groups; indeed, a united Ireland has not been invented to this day. Many of the leaders of this Celtic Revival were Anglo-Irish, and came from the part of the society that had been actively engaged in the oppression of the native Irish, and their identification with the Irish cause could be problematic, contested, and contradictory. As the Americans had found in the first half of the nineteenth century, embracing a Herderian model of cultural nationalism with its emphasis on the language could only be deeply troubling. There were tensions and disputes between some of the Anglo-Irish and the Catholic nationalists involved (or as F.S.L. Lyons has put it, between Irish Ireland and Anglo-Ireland), one of the most famous or infamous of which was the riot that greeted the first staging of Playboy of the Western World. Yet in spite of those fissures within the Celtic movement (and there were also tensions between Catholic conservatives and Catholic progressives) it did not divide neatly into separate schools. The two most significant figures in the Gaelic League were the Protestant Douglas Hyde and the Antrim

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Catholic Eoin MacNeill; Catholics like George Moore and Edward Martyn, among others, worked with the Protestant Yeats and Lady Gregory for the Irish Literary Theatre. The Anglo-Irish involved in the movement, it is worth noting, were rarely from the land-owning class, but were rather, as Lyons points out, ‘a small minority drawn from the middle-class rather than from the gentry’.24 Most of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy took no interest in the revival, certainly only a few of those who lived in the great houses, and those who did were strikingly often women, in the main dissatisfied wives or rebellious daughters; Lady Gregory is the best known example, but Casement would find support in the Antrim area from Rose Young of Galgorm Castle, Ballymena, Ada MacNeill of Cushendun House, and Margaret Dobbs of Castle Dobbs. The Anglo-Irish landlord class on the whole continued to remain Unionists, to send their children to English public schools, and to be happily confident of their superiority to the Irish peasants. The Celtic Revival was, in any case, a literary and cultural movement, even if a highly politicised one, and, as with the English aristocracy, only a strictly limited number of the landlords could be described as intellectuals; as Lyons again points out: ‘Books, unless they were on angling or the turf, were not widely read in their households.’25 In Ulster, where the literary revival had begun to flourish later than in Dublin, stimulated by the 1898 centenary celebrations there of Wolfe Tone and his United Irishmen’s uprising, the Presbyterians, almost as hostile to the Church of Ireland Ascendancy as they were to the Catholics, appear to have played little part. The figures in the movement Casement met when he returned to Ireland in early 1904 included the High Anglican solicitor and antiquarian, Francis Bigger; the Quaker playwright, founder of the Ulster Literary Theatre and later reviver of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Bulmer Hobson; the Methodist poet and editor of the separatist magazine Shan Van Vocht, Alice Milligan; the Catholic poet and railway clerk, Padraic Colum, visiting from Dublin; and the Catholic Campbell brothers, who grew up as Belfast working class. (John Campbell, an artist, and Joseph, a poet, would later be, along with Ezra Pound and the future rebel and Irish politician Desmond FitzGerald, members of the Tour Eiffel group of protomodernists.) That first summer all appears to have been harmony in the Glens of Antrim (Dublin just then was another story), perhaps one more reason why Casement felt so entranced by the movement: the United Irishmen had been born again.

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One of those who most influenced Casement, and became a close friend, was Alice Stopford Green, an Anglo-Irish woman from County Meath living in London, the widow of the distinguished English historian John Richard Green, and by now an historian in her own right. Her book, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, argued that before the Viking and Anglo-Norman invasion Ireland had been a highly civilised country, but since then had been broken by its oppressors; the Irish, she believed, needed to take their destiny in their own hands again, drive out the English and recreate their true culture. It was a view that chimed entirely with Casement’s fascination with a romantic Irish past, with his growing anti-colonialism and with what would soon become an accelerating Anglophobia. It may also have appealed to him for more personal reasons: in many ways Casement found his work as a consul, closely supervised by what he regarded as the incompetents of the Foreign Office, deeply frustrating. He would much rather have joined the more prestigious and independent diplomatic service, but that was impossible without a private income. In his own life as in his country’s, he could see this pattern, identified by Green, of talent and promise kept back by morally and intellectually inferior Englishmen, to whom money was all. Casement had first contacted Alice Green, fourteen years older than himself, to get support for a Congo Reform Association, which he was setting up with Edmund Morel, a crusading journalist much concerned about the Congo abuses, as a pressure group to alert public attention to the hideous treatment of the Congolese. Yet even in his first letter to her he had written, ‘we must have so much in common in our love for Ireland that I need not go to Africa to seek an introduction to you.’26 Casement and Alice Green shared the same mixed claim to Irishness, and in defending her right he defended his own. (Typical of his class, Casement had scarcely any Irish accent, not something which Irish makers of drama-documentaries about him like to take into account.) ‘You are a descendant of a Cromwellian invader’, he told her, ‘but your heart has gone to Ireland – just as Parnell’s went’; and, he might have added, his own.27 As some other Anglo-Irish nationalists would do, he made place rather than descent the defining characteristic. Every country has a soul, he said, which is ‘more than Race; more than Nationality … There is something in the soil, in the air, in the inherited mind of a country that is real, nay more real, than the rocks the hills and the streams.’28 He would occasionally betray uncertainty – ‘We implacable Celts (or whatever we are)’, he wrote to Green on another occasion – but on the whole he appears to have repressed such doubts; as

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one jaundiced observer suggested, he was one of those Ulster Protestant Irish nationalists who were ‘more fanatically Irish than the Irish’.29 His friendship with Green, who would become something both of a mentor and a mother figure to him, blossomed after they got to know each other at the first Feis na nGleann, a festival in the Glens of Antrim put on in June 1904 under the auspices of the Gaelic League. The Gaelic League had promoted the idea of a Feis for some time, insisting that the Irish needed an annual gathering like the Welsh Eisteddfod (itself a re-invention), and a Feis, largely devoted to Irish music, had been established by the Dublin Gaelic League in 1897. The Antrim Feis, which Casement helped to organise, certainly included music and poetry but, interestingly enough, given Casement’s broad interest in culture as a way of life, also traditional crafts, described in the programme as Cottage and Peasant Industries. There were a series of prizes, given for the best Gaelic short story, poem, play, and songs, for recitations, solo and choir singing, storytelling, harp and flute playing, but also for the best hank of Irish yarn, ball of home-spun Irish wool, piece of Irish lace, home-made tweed, butter, soda-bread, boat, bee-hive, and much else. Casement himself offered prizes for the best hand-knitted gloves in Irish wool, the best decorated and carved Irish wood, and for the best dressed boy and girl in locally made Irish material. Eoin MacNeill of the Gaelic League came to judge the Gaelic contributions; Casement was trying to learn Gaelic at the time, but with some difficulty, and was probably rather lost through much of the proceedings; he did, however, join in the Irish reels with verve. About 2,000 people attended, including many of the Catholic peasants who lived along the Antrim coast. According to Jeremy Dudgeon the whole event ‘was magnificently organised and visually memorable’.30 Casement had thrown himself into it, heart and soul, as he did into his colonial investigations; Ada McNeill recalled that in the months beforehand, Casement ‘strode about the roads, hatless, encouraging and working up interest in the movement’.31 From then on, Casement was committed to the cause. And the cause, as he saw it, was that of a poetic, peasant culture, under a foreign yoke, victims of a mercenary power, a gentle dreaming people, nobler and better than their oppressors. It was a pattern that fitted his humanitarian forays into colonial abuse abroad as well as at home. This view of the Irish can be described as a form of what Foucault calls ‘reverse discourse’, though as Vincent Cheng points out, it could also be called a ‘reverse racism’.32 There were two main strands of abuse applied to

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the Irish in the second half of the nineteenth century: on the one hand, negroidisation, which shaded increasingly into simianisation, and on the other, feminisation, closely related, as always at the period, to infantilisation; what linked these two strands, of course, was that these qualities placed the Irish firmly as the inferior other of the white, advanced, and adult Englishman. Racialised abuse, the depiction of Irish as ‘white negro’ or ‘Africanoid’, as ‘Bushmen’ or ‘Hottentots’, was common in the English popular press at the time, and following the Fenian uprising of 1867, they were increasingly depicted as sub-human, Calibans, Yahoos, Missing Links, or gorillas, terms often associated with black races at the time, who were similarly subjected to such simianisation.33 Such terms were rejected by the Irish nationalists, whose celebration of their ancient culture and long traditions was in defiance of this stereotyping; for them, the Irish peasant was not a savage, but the repository of an age-old folk culture which embodied the Irish soul. Yet the association of the Irish with the so-called savage races, a given in the pages of the late Victorian Punch, was continued, though transformed, by Casement, so that their shared suffering highlights the inhumanity of their profit-seeking oppressors. As far as the feminisation of the Irish was concerned, Declan Kiberd suggests that the founding of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1882, the revival of hurling, and the celebrations of the heroic legends of Cuchulain were all designed to counter the prevalent feminised depiction of the Irish as unmanly, emotional, undisciplined, immature, irresolute, and in need of leadership, qualities which, it was held, necessitated English rule for the good of the Irish themselves. But there were elements in that discourse, too, that could be reversed, especially the version put forward by Matthew Arnold, who, drawing on the work of Ernest Renan, had characterised the Celts as a feminised, poetic, imaginative but ineffectual people, in contrast to the vigorous, productive, masculine Anglo-Saxon; both elements, he insisted, were needed in Britain, so his view was an argument against Home Rule, as well as a way of simultaneously rebuking the English Philistines and patronising the Celts. Yet this depiction of the Irish was seized upon by the more literary Celtic movement. In 1904, the year of the Feis, W.B. Yeats returned to Ireland after a highly successful lecture tour of the States, on which he had been promoting ‘high claims for Celtic culture over English materialism’, somewhat ironically transforming his own financial situation by so persuasively insisting on the poetic and artistic Celt’s freedom from

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mercenary values.34 It was this view to which Casement was drawn in both his understanding of the Irish and the Putumayo, and if praise for their poetic, visionary, and imaginative nature is simultaneously constructing them as feminine to English masculine pragmatic mercantilism, that was something he in fact may have welcomed, as I hope to show. * By late 1905 it had become clear that Casement’s report on the Congo atrocities was vindicated and, though forcing the Belgians to act would still take time, by 1907 Leopold had to give up his personal fiefdom in the Congo, and reforms were instituted. It was a triumph against cruelty and greed, of which Casement was justly proud. He was given a CMG, a British honour that he was embarrassed to have, but reluctant to turn down.35 His Irish nationalism had been steadily growing. He had written a play on an Irish theme, continued to wrestle with Gaelic, and published articles (anonymously) in places like Arthur Griffith’s fiercely nationalist United Irishman. He had cancelled his subscription to his London club, and given the money instead to a training college for Gaelic-speaking school teachers, and to other Irish educational causes. He had even taken the first step towards more direct political involvement, helping to write and finance a leaflet in 1905 to dissuade Irishmen from joining the British army.36 Yet the award would, after all, draw attention to the situation in the Congo and to the Congo Reform Association, in whose work he continued to take a close interest. In the end he accepted the honour but claimed that he was too ill to attend the presentation at Buckingham Palace. When he returned the CMG in 1915, it was discovered he had never opened the package. Since his return from the Congo, apart from two abortive months spent in Lisbon, he had been seconded from the consular service, ostensively on health grounds, but in the second half of 1906 he was offered another posting, this time in Brazil. He accepted, apparently with some reluctance, but as he needed to earn some money, he had to submit to the frustrations and humiliations of working with the British Foreign Office once more. He chose the better paid of the two posts offered to him, on the grounds, he told Alice Green, that he would be able to send more money back to Ireland In 1910, during his time in Brazil, where he served in Santos, in Pará, and, finally, as consul-general, in Rio de Janeiro, Casement was sent by the British government to the Peruvian Amazon to investigate further allegations of atrocities in the rubber industry there, this time in British-owned businesses,

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operated, as it was put at the time, by ‘absentee capitalists’, the very phrase evoking the ‘absentee landlords’ of Ireland.37 The actual organisation on the ground was done by Peruvian and sometimes Colombian creoles, and the overseers of the Indians were Barbadians, who in their turn had been tricked into working there. The atrocities were even worse than in the Congo. Casement was appalled by the inhumanity of the Indians’ treatment, once more seeing them through the ‘eyes of another race’. There are three main ways in which Casement’s Irish nationalism appears to have shaped his understanding of other exploited peoples. One I have already mentioned, his sense that they too had a hidden culture, inhibited and oppressed by an alien veneer, a sense that would be even stronger with the Indians, to whom he was greatly drawn, than it had been with the Congolese. The second was very specific, the analogies that he made between land ownership in Ireland and that in the Congo and Amazon, and which he believed applied fairly widely to the imperialist project. Thirdly, as again I’ve suggested was particularly true of his view of the Putumayo, was the way in which he felt he could understand their culture in terms of the characteristics that the Celtic movement ascribed to the Irish. On the question of land, Casement had been strongly influenced by Michael Davitt, the founder in 1881 of the Land League, who had argued that until the Irish were restored to ownership of their land, rather than its being in the alien hands of the landlords, political freedom for the Irish was impossible; they would effectively remain enslaved. In the Congo, where Leopold had seized all the land for himself, and the Congolese were simply forced labourers, the same thing, Casement believed, was true: this is what he had in mind when he made the much quoted comment that, ‘It was only because I was an Irishman that I could understand fully I think their Putumayo Indians whole scheme of wrong doing at

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work in the Congo.’38 The identical pattern was played out in the Peruvian Amazon, where the dispossessed Indians were regarded as the property of whichever rubber collector had laid claim to them. Casement, like many others in the Irish Revival, had little faith in modern capitalism. Slavery, he wrote to a friend in 1910, was neither a thing of the past nor confined to the black races; on the contrary, it was spreading: ‘[t]he steamboat and steam engine and modern armaments & the whole scheme of modern government all aiding it – with the stock gambling & share markets as pillars of the scheme.’ The only way to change this was through the return to a smallholding peasant economy. He believed that: The people must fight for their lives and their freedom always – and to root them in the soil to exalt agriculture and debase landlordism must be their weapon. The land is at the bottom of all human progress and health of body and mind … Pick any land you like where the people own the soil and till it for themselves and their own family first, in comparison with any other land where the soil is owned by territorial magnates and people are (as in Ireland) ‘tenants at will’ or landless serfs or ‘labourers’, and add up the gains. Why, there is no comparison. Denmark, one of the smallest countries in Europe, is one of the healthiest, happiest and most prosperous. Why? Because she has no landlords – the people own the land themselves & till it, and use it in their own way for their own profit.39 Whether Casement envisaged himself as a tiller of soil must be doubtful, though there were others in the movement, like Joseph Campbell, who did attempt to re-invent themselves, not over-successfully, as peasant farmers. But the evil to which he is opposed is very clear. These Indians were mercilessly flogged, starved, and murdered in a bid to make maximum profits out of their land to send back to England, just as, he would argue in an article in 1912, the Irish had been left by the landlords to starve to death in the famine, while money and goods from their land flowed back to England. Yet the parallels with the Irish implied in Casement’s account of the Putumayo are not only in terms of exploitation; he also represents them as a similarly poetic and imaginative people. This is particularly the case in his article in the Contemporary Review, which is a highly polemical account, though

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it certainly also includes much ethnographical detail, historical information about the region, mainly about slave-raids on the Indians and their decimation, comments on their appearance (‘straight, clean-limbed, with often very pleasing features’) and details of their skilfully built communal houses and their way of life.40 These Indians, he claims, are the descendants of the Incas: they are ‘ready to sing and dance on the slightest provocation’, but ‘the music, songs and dances of the forest Indians are not based on their life of to-day, but are drawn from some far-off ancient fount of inspiration.’41 They are, he suggests, ‘old, old songs’. For the Putumayo Indian, his dances, his songs were a more important part of his life than the satisfaction of his material wants … it seemed as though the Indian was haunted by a memory of other circumstances than these which he dwells in, and the hope of escape, of restoration, of finding a way out of the regions into which he had strayed and wherein he had got lost came between him and sustained settled efforts to make a native land of this accidental forest. Everything but his music, his songs and his dance were temporary.42 The parallel is clear with the Celtic Revival’s view of the Irish, who cherish their traditional culture, music, and songs, and who, too, long for the ancient way of life from which they are exiled. The Indians, Casement also argues, care for ‘brightness’ and ‘beautiful things’, but again like the Irish, are economically poor in contrast to their oppressors, though much finer in spirit. These Indians, Casement argues, are not savages, save in terms of their lack of possessions: While [the Putumayo Indian] must be described as very primitive if we measure him by his material gains over his surroundings and the extent of his worldly possessions he is by no means a primitive man if we regard his mental faculties. He is an intelligent human being, even a singularly intelligent one in some respects … While naked in body, slim, beautifully shaped and proportioned, coloured like the very tree-trunks they flitted among like spirits of the woods – their minds were the minds of civilised men and women.43

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Yet Casement’s account also suggests that they are what would have been thought of at the time as effeminate: although ‘notably intelligent … [t]heir weakness lies not in lack of intelligence so much as in that prevailing docility of mind which leads the Indian … to submit to the white man and to render him an ever too ready obedience.’44 They are a ‘gentle, quiet race’, and it was this ‘submissive demeanour’ that enabled the Incas to build their ‘communistic empire’, and their lack of greed means that they remain ‘Socialist by temperament, habit, and possibly, age-old memory of Inca and pre-Inca temperament.’45 In his report, as well as in this article, Casement compares the Indians with children, making again a contrast between European drive and aggression and Indian gentleness: for example, he writes, ‘the Indian … may correctly be termed a “grown-up child” … the Amazon Indian is by nature docile and obedient. His weakness of character and docility of temperament are no match for the dominating ability of those with European blood in their veins.’46 He describes them as ‘innocent, friendly, childlike human beings’, presenting them very much as hapless victims of European greed.47 His report differs from the article in that it largely concerns the Indians’ present exploitation, not their traditional way of life. The article follows the convention that has become known as ‘the ethnographic present’, created as early as 1851 in Lewis Henry Morgan’s The League of the Iroquois, and dominant in the writing up of fieldwork in the first half of the twentieth century: Casement gives an account of what he assumes their way of life would have been if uninterrupted by a European presence in their area. He presumably obtained the information from those he met in the region, as well as from earlier accounts, some of which he quotes, as he does not appear to have had much chance to observe it at first hand. He did see a dance, his diaries reveal, but only one that the Indian rubber-collectors were summoned to perform for him at the behest of one of the ‘principal criminals’ among the abusive overseers that he was investigating; it was an attempt to persuade Casement that the allegations of ill-treatment were untrue, but he comments on the emaciated limbs, skeletal forms, and the scars from the floggings that he could see on so many bodies.48 He did find out that they loved to dance, but also that they were now rarely allowed to do so. ‘Poor Indians!’, he writes, ‘Everything they like, everything that to them means life, and such joy as this dim forest at the end of the world can furnish to a lost people, is not theirs, but belongs to this gang of cut-throat half-castes.’49 Of course, in one way his use of the ‘ethnographic present’

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differs from the usual way it is employed, when it implies a changeless existence outside history. In his interpretation of these Indians’ past, even the life they were living before outsiders had reached the Putumayo was one of exile; they had been driven to the forest when the first wave of Conquistadors destroyed the Incas’ way of life. Someone Casement does not explicitly mention in his article is the earlier defender of the Indians, Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose account of those first conquistadors’ treatment of indigenous people is so similar to Casement’s own that it appears undoubtedly one of his reference points. Las Casas had described the Indians in these terms: The simplest people in the world – unassuming, long-suffering, unassertive and submissive – they are without malice or guile, and are utterly faithful and obedient both to their own native lords and to the Spaniards in whose service they now find themselves. Never quarrelsome or belligerent or boisterous, they harbour no grudges and do not seek to settle old scores; indeed the notions of revenge, rancour, and hatred are quite foreign to them … It was upon these gentle lambs, imbued by the Creator with all the qualities we have mentioned, that from the very first day they clapped eyes on them the Spanish fell like ravening wolves upon the fold, or like tigers and savage lions who have not eaten meat for many days. The pattern established at the outset has remained unchanged to this day, and the Spaniards still do nothing save tear the natives to shreds, murder them and inflict upon them untold misery, suffering and distress, tormenting, harrying them and persecuting them mercilessly.50 Joseph Conrad, incidentally, had earlier said of Casement, ‘I always thought some part of Las Casas’ soul had found a refuge in his indomitable body’, though he also described him as something of a conquistador. It is to the very contradictory nature of Casement’s personality, and his own identification with these Indians, that I want finally to turn. * If Casement saw the Irish, like the Congolese and the Putumayo, as victims of European capitalist greed, he felt for many years before his death a certainty that he himself was destined to be a victim for the Irish cause. According to his cousin Gertrude, writing in 1918, he had said years before

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that he thought eventually he would be hanged for Ireland, and he wrote to her from prison, ‘I have felt this destiny on me since I was a little boy; it was inevitable; everything in my life had led up to it.’51 When W.B. Yeats met him shortly before the First World War, he was alarmed by Casement’s air of a ‘mystic victim’, and was fearful where it would lead. It is true that in the tales of the Irish patriots on which he had fed since his adolescence, death at the hands of the English was the most common outcome, but one wonders how much that sense of doom was connected with Casement’s knowledge that his homosexuality, if discovered, could ruin his public career. Parnell was of course a heterosexual, but in Casement’s poem about him, he was clearly deeply disturbed by the fact that, for Parnell, ‘slander’s knife/Gleaned ever bare to wound’, and he says, ‘fain would our hearts recall/Nought but proud memories of a noble life’.52 That his own life could be destroyed by scandal must always have been in his mind. By chance he had come home to Ireland on leave in June 1895, so the news of the guilty verdict on Wilde, passed in late May, his downfall owing much to the earlier ruthless crossexamination led by Edward Carson, later so active in Ulster Unionism, is something Casement could not have missed. There is no record, as far as I am aware, of his reaction to this, but his 1903 diary does record the suicide of Sir Hector Macdonald, a distinguished soldier who had been courtmartialled because of his homosexuality. Casement wrote, ‘The reasons given are pitiably sad. The most distressing case this surely of its kind and one that may awaken the national mind to saner methods of curing a terrible disease than by criminal legislation.’53 It is a comment that the proponents of the forgery theory have seized on as being unlikely to be made by one who was a homosexual himself, and perplexes others because the evidence in the diaries suggests Casement’s sexual forays carried no great weight of guilt, and indeed seem to have been another means of escape from the melancholy that could engulf him. What I find significant about the comment is that it shows that Casement was aware that sexologists of the period argued that homosexuality was a pathological condition, and it can be read simply as a way of saying that Macdonald was an innocent victim of prejudice against a facet of his character over which he had no more control than over a physical illness. Casement must surely also have been aware, and this may have been important to his self-understanding, of the sexologists’ view at the time that homosexuals were gender ‘inverts’, so the explanation of male homosexuality was that they were emotionally and mentally women trapped in men’s bodies. (Casement’s ‘degeneracy’, incidentally, was seen as

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particularly far developed, because, as Ernley Blackwell, legal advisor to the Home Office put it, he ‘from a pervert has become an invert – a woman, or pathic, who derives his satisfaction from attracting men and inducing them to use him’.54 Casement would have been well aware of such attitudes.) In Casement’s outer life, he did perform in what the period would have seen as a commendably masculine fashion; the conquistador, the fearless colonial adventurer, striding unconcernedly into the bush, the upright, honourable servant of the British Empire; that was his masculine, one might say, English exterior. But when he talks about his feelings, and indeed when others did, they are much more in terms of what was associated with the feminine; like Las Casas he was gentle, compassionate, moved by suffering, highly emotional, beauty-loving; he refused ever to hurt anyone, would never even carry a gun, he was a poet, full of imaginative dreams, completely unmercenary. In prison he wrote, ‘my hands so free from blood and my heart always so compassionate and pitiful that I cannot comprehend how anyone wants to hang me’.55 Emotionally he is one of the feminised Irish dreamers and victims of English oppression and cruelty; his powerful empathy for the tortured Indians, the mutilated Congolese, the poverty stricken ‘Irish Putumayo’, as he described the Connemara peasants during a typhus outbreak, all may be related to this sense of himself as the feminised victim of similar oppressors. This is not in any way to denigrate the value of his work. Casement was a romantic, even one might say at times sentimental, but he had the courage to insist that the values of humanitarian kindliness and compassion for all human beings, of whatever race, are not simply a luxury, to be indulged in by soft-hearted women while impractical for the male world of profit and success, but are values that are essential to the future of humankind. The third edition of Frazer’s Golden Bough did not appear until the early twentieth century, but still made use, in theory at any rate, of the nineteenth-century evolutionary model. 2 Herder, quoted in Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 165. 3 Roger Sawyer, Casement: The Flawed Hero (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 12 and 15. This comment appeared in an article published in Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman, following Griffith’s campaign to exhort the Irish to use the Hungarians as a model in their own struggle. 4 Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), p. 25. 5 Inglis: Roger Casement, pp. 26-7 1

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Quoted in Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 12-13. 7 Sawyer: Casement, pp. 21-2. 8 Sawyer: Casement, p. 24 (Inglis [Roger Casement, p. 152] has the same quotation, but with the word ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’). 9 Inglis: Roger Casement, p. 29. 10 Inglis: Roger Casement, p. 30 11 Inglis: Roger Casement, p. 31 12 Sawyer: Casement, p. 25. 13 (Casement’s emphasis.) Seamus Ó Siochán and Michael O’Sullivan (eds), The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement’s Congo Diary and 1903 Diary (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003), p. 13. This comment does, however, contrast with his Congo report, where in the opening he refers to his knowledge of the area in 1887, ‘when the natives lived their own savage lives in anarchic and disorderly communities, uncontrolled by Europeans’, when he seems to be suggesting European intervention is a good thing; whether this reveals a somewhat schizophrenic attitude, one his British colonial view, one his Irish, or whether it is a rhetorical device, to heighten the fact that the rest of the report will make abundantly clear how disastrous European intervention has been, is hard to say. See Ó Siochán & O’Sullivan: The Eyes of Another Race, p. 49. 14 Taussig: Shamanism, p. 15. 15 Ó Siochán & O’Sullivan: The Eyes of Another Race¸ p. vi. 16 Inglis: Roger Casement, p. 119. 17 Gertrude Parry (ed), Some Poems of Roger Casement (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1918). 18 Roger Casement, The Crime against Europe: The Writings and Poetry of Roger Casement, ed. Herbert O. Mackey (Dublin: Fallon, 1958), p. 171. 19 Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 5. 20 Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature (London: Faber, 1985). 21 Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890-1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 7. 22 The influence of Herderian nationalism is very clear in the comment by the midnineteenth-century Irish revivalist Thomas Davis, that ‘A people without a language of its own is only half a nation ... To lose your native tongue and learn that of an alien, is the worst badge of conquest – it is the chain on the soul. To have lost entirely the national language is death; the fetter has worn through’ (quoted in F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982], p. 32). 23 See Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). 24 Lyons: Culture and Anarchy, p. 21. 25 Lyons: Culture and Anarchy, p. 21. Most of the Anglo-Irish involved do seem to me to be in one way or another not really able to identify with the more aristocratic Ascendancy, déclassés in search of a spiritual home. In this I differ from the interpretation of the movement put forward by Len Platt in Joyce and the Anglo Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), and followed by Andrew Gibson in Joyce’s Revenge. 26 Sawyer: Casement, p. 47. 27 Inglis: Roger Casement, p. 152 6

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Inglis: Roger Casement, p. 152. Jeremy Dudgeon, Roger Casement: The Black Diaries: with a study of his background, sexuality, and Irish political life (Belfast: Belfast Press, 2002), pp. 168 and 178. 30 Dudgeon: Roger Casement, p. 169. 31 Dudgeon: Roger Casement, p. 169. 32 Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 49. 33 See Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 72-3 and Cheng: Joyce, Race, and Empire, Chapter 2, ‘Catching the Conscience of a Race,’ pp. 15-74, which includes several reproductions of Punch cartoons, one of which (p. 36) is Tenniel’s depiction after the Phoenix Park murders of ‘The Irish Frankenstein’ (meaning, of course, the monster), another of the sub-human representations of the Irish. 34 R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life. Volume I: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 306. 35 CMG. stands for Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. 36 Inglis: Roger Casement, p. 130 37 C. Reginald Enock in his ‘Introduction,’ to W.E. Hardenburg, The Putumayo: The Devil’s Paradise: Travels in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account of the Atrocities Committed upon the Indians Therein (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912) discusses ‘this system of absentee capitalism’ (p. 49). Enock’s essay is a strange combination of moral indignation against slavery in general and the treatment of the Putumayo Indians in particular, and an extraordinarily racist ascription of these crimes to the ‘sinister … Spanish and Portuguese character’, who drew on the Barbadians, knowing ‘the savage depth of the negro’, to help them in their cruelty (pp. 37-39). 38 Dudgeon: Roger Casement, p. 176. 39 Angus Mitchell (ed), Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness: The 1911 Documents (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2003), pp. 215-6. 40 Casement, ‘The Putumayo indians,’ Contemporary Review, CII (September 1912), p. 323. 41 Casement: ‘The Putumayo indians,’ pp. 326 and 324. 42 Casement: ‘The Putumayo indians,’ pp. 324 and 326. 43 Casement: ‘The Putumayo indians,’ pp. 326-7. Casement sets up a contrast between the Indians and the Africans: ‘Although savage in their surroundings they were not, in fact, savages as the word is understood – for example in Central Africa … these remote tribes have preserved a gentleness of mind and docility of temperament in singular contrast to the vigorous savagery of the far abler African’ (p. 320). The Indians, he says, are averse to bloodshed, while the Africans delight in it. These comments contrast with the tone of most of his Congo report, when he was writing with compassionate engagement about the Congolese Africans’ plight. 44 Casement: ‘The Putumayo indians,’ p. 323. 45 Casement: ‘The Putumayo indians,’ pp. 321, 323, 324, and 322. 46 Mitchell: Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness, p. 73 47 ‘The Putumayo indians,’ p. 325. 48 Angus Mitchell (ed), The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (Dublin: Anaconda Editions, 1997), pp. 141-2. 28 29

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Mitchell: The Amazon Journal, p. 144. His use of the term ‘half-caste’ points again to his contradictory and ambivalent relationship to the racist discourse of his day. 50 Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), ed. and trans. Nigel Griffen (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 9-11. 51 Parry: Some Poems of Roger Casement, p. xi. 52 Casement: The Crime against Europe, p. 171. 53 B.L. Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 39. 54 Inglis: Roger Casement, p. 360. 55 Father James McCarroll, Passages taken from the Manuscript written by Roger Casement in the Condemned cell at Pentonville Prison. A Memoir (Dublin: for private circulation only, 1950), no pagination (p. 5 of 8). 49

Tom Harrisson in the New Hebrides

9. TOM HARRISSON IN THE NEW HEBRIDES AND BOLTON Rod Edmond

From the start of my own field-work, it has been my deepest and strongest conviction that we must finish by studying ourselves through the same methods and with the same mental attitude with which we approach exotic tribes.1 (Bronislaw Malinowski) Tom Harrisson (1911-1976) was born in Argentina.2 The family came back to England in 1914 but when his parents returned to Argentina at the end of the war Harrisson and his younger brother were left behind at boarding school. Most of Harrisson’s subsequent childhood and adolescence were spent at Winchester preparatory school and then at Harrow, while his parents remained in Argentina where his father was General Manager of the Entre Rios and North-East Argentine Railways. While still at school Harrisson had worked on the first-ever British bird census, of the grey heron, and contributed a 40-page report on birds of the Harrow District to the London Naturalist. In 1931 he co-organised a national census of the great crested grebe, which involved recruiting and organising a team of 1,300 birdwatchers. By this time Harrisson had started a degree in natural sciences at Cambridge but after a riotous year he left. He travelled as an ornithologist on Oxford University expeditions to Norwegian Lapland in 1930, Sarawak in 1932, and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in 1933. Remaining in the New Hebrides after that expedition, he lived among the Big Nambas people on the island of Malekula, and was briefly acting British district agent on the island. Returning to England at the end of 1935 he helped found and direct Mass-Observation, the pioneering British social survey organisation. This chapter will concentrate on Savage Civilisation (1937), Harrisson’s ethnography of the peoples of Malekula and Espiritu Santo. This work went through three editions in its first year and was hailed by professional

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anthropologists and lay readers alike. Harrisson was invited to speak at the Royal Geographical Society where he was praised by the curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford for his ‘noteworthy success … in having led a purely native life and penetrated into the inner life of the people’.3 John Layard, the foremost anthropologist of the New Hebrides, told the same audience that Harrisson ‘went to the New Hebrides as an ornithologist, knowing nothing about anthropology, and has returned knowing more about the natives than most anthropologists’.4 As a result of this success Harrisson became a regular broadcaster on radio and the new medium of television, appearing half-a-dozen times in the year following his return from the New Hebrides. Harrisson was popularising anthropology at the very moment it was establishing its protocols as an academic discipline and this led to criticism as well as praise. Reviewing Savage Civilisation in Man, in August 1937, Layard expressed reservations about Harrisson’s method, pointing out that he was sometimes careless in locating the cultural practices he described, and that Harrisson’s medium of communication was limited to pidgin English. For his own fieldwork on Atchin Island, off the north-west coast of Malekula, Layard had learned the local language.5 From the point of view of a social anthropologist of the 1930s Harrisson was an amateur, the end-point of the tradition that this volume is exploring. Although he was an admirer of Malinowski (Harrisson had named a cottage where he lived ‘The Trobriands’),6 Harrisson had no formal training as an anthropologist and his approach to the research and writing of Savage Civilisation derived in the first place from his bird-watching habits. From another point of view, however, Savage Civilisation can be seen as a precursor of the ‘I-witnessing’ ethnography of recent years. Harrisson’s use of the first person, his reluctance to use a notebook when among the people he was observing, and the full account he takes of the wider history of colonialism in his ethnography of the New Hebrides makes Savage Civilisation more like a postmodern variant of anthropology than a clumsy example of the British functionalist tradition of Malinowski and Firth.7 Even before returning to England Harrisson was contemplating the idea of observing his home culture in the way he had the peoples of the New Hebrides. Back in England, ‘with the shock of clarity that absence and return can refresh’, he realised that the methods he had been using in the Pacific could equally well be turned on so-called ‘civilised society’ itself.8 And so late in 1936 he took himself off to Bolton where he worked first in a cotton mill,

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then as a lorry driver, an ice cream man, and a shop assistant. At the turn of 1937, to help launch the publication of Savage Civilisation, Harrisson published a poem from the book in the New Statesman. On the same page as his poem Harrisson saw a letter entitled ‘Anthropology at Home’, describing the work of a group attempting an ‘anthropology of our own people’, and asking for help from ‘voluntary observers’.9 Harrisson immediately contacted its author, the surrealist poet Charles Madge, and within a month a further letter appeared in the New Statesman, signed by Madge, Harrisson, and the documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings, announcing the MassObservation project.10 The later part of this chapter will consider the relation between Harrisson’s account of the New Hebrides and the methods of Mass-Observation. * The oxymoronic title of Harrisson’s text refers to both the indigenous culture Harrisson is describing and the colonising culture he derives from. It rests on ‘civilisation’ being simultaneously a neutral term synonymous with culture, and a term registering the superiority of European cultures. The latter usage is consistently rejected by Harrisson. Savage Civilisation is an eccentric text in layout with a number of forewords and afterwords. Two pages of epigraphs are titled ‘Seesaw’, the acknowledgements are titled ‘Jigsaw’, and both these preludes are woven into the text. For example, an epigraph from Aldous Huxley – ‘In every tropic land the poorest people are always the inhabitants’ – is explicitly refuted on page 290. An obscure reference in ‘Jigsaw’ to a millionaire who shot a peregrine falcon is explained on the final page of the book, where Harrisson, homeward-bound across the Pacific, describes the attempts of a ‘thick French millionaire’ with a ‘shiny, monogrammed revolver’, egged on by a group of compatriots, to shoot a stray peregrine falcon that has settled on the foremast. Appended to this concluding tableau of European blood sport is a drawing of a challenging Melanesian mask or face, labelled ‘Stop’ in the list of illustrations. And at the very end of the book, after the bibliography and index, are a few lines headed ‘Summary’, in which Harrisson refuses to summarise his book and ‘put civilization in a coconut shell’: ‘[T]oday I am twenty-five and maybe I don’t know quite enough, after all. I had better head for central somewhere and learn to cut down a tree with a stone-axe while there is yet time.’

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The contents page is headed ‘Pattern in Chaos’, a description no doubt of the ethnographer’s task, except that for Harrisson ‘chaos’ is a value in itself. One of the epigraphs is from Nietzsche – ‘You must have a chaos inside you to give rise to a dancing star’ – and other epigraphs from Donne and Jules Romains also thematise chaos. Savage Civilisation is then organised into seven large parts, each covering an historical period and arranged chronologically, except for the first, which is written in the ‘ethnographic present’, that atemporal space which Malinowski had employed in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). The final part, which relates Harrisson’s experiences with the cannibal Big Nambas, is explicitly autobiographical and has more the flavour of explorer or adventure writing. Formally speaking, therefore, the book appears to be a miscellany of ethnography, autobiography, history, travel writing, poetry, and anti-colonialist polemic, but these modes are threaded on a powerful historical narrative and held together by the character and voices of the author. The short opening section of Part 1, ‘View’, has the author on top of Mount Tabwemasana on the island of Espiritu Santo, 6,000 feet up, the highest point for several thousand miles. From this lofty perspective Harrisson can see ‘nearly a hundred islands in chaotic archipelago’.11 This view allows him historical as well as geographical privilege. He sees the galleons of Quiros ‘riding into anchorage … three hundred and thirty years ago’ (p. 18), and hears the voices of the islanders from that time. One in particular he listens to, speaking from the village of Matanavat in north Malekula. In the following section, ‘Persons’, which forms the bulk of the first part, Harrisson comes down from his mountain-top, and the narrative voice of the European observer modulates into a constructed native voice, that of a villager from Matanavat. This is also a descent of the racial ladder as conventionally understood. Melanesians are regarded as among the lowest people in the world, New Hebrideans as the lowest of Melanesians, and the natives of Malekula as the ‘lowest among these low’ (p. 18). ‘Persons’ is described in a prefatory note as ‘an outline of tribal life in north-west Malekula … the necessary foundation to the story’ (p. 15). Gareth Stanton notes that while the material of this section is typical of ‘“classic” functionalist monograph’, its presentation breaks sharply with functionalist forms.12 Harrisson simulates a native point of view for his first-person account of Matanavat lifeways, sometimes even adopting a mildly nativised voice. Carving with stone or shell is described as ‘a slowness’ (p. 24); Naleng dances ‘reflect the drama of our far-memory’ (p. 35). The handling of

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point of view is often complex. Passages of fairly conventional ethnography modulate into a different kind of explanation from a ventriloquised indigenous viewpoint. In a single paragraph we learn of yams – ‘There are three common sorts’ – and of how the coconut taught the banana to fruit without dying (p. 64). Both kinds of information – ethnographic and indigenous – are allowed equivalent authority within the narrative. ‘Persons’ is based on the fiction of a ‘pre-contact’ narrative, an indigenous version of the ‘ethnographic present’. Part 2, however, is time-bound, covering the period 1607 to 1827. The narrative voice reverts to that of a European, although there are moments when a native first-person voice infiltrates or interrupts the narrative. Most dramatically, the account of a violent confrontation on the island of Tanna during Cook’s visit switches abruptly into an account from the native point of view: The initiation of the native was now complete. A white man had been to all the main islands. He had fired off his stickshining and smoke after, with my brother crying out there on the sand shore as we took him and ran in our fear – this new unseeable spirit striking its death more quickly than Levuts, than Tisumbala – to the hut where the in him went out, went without meaning, with no hate or pigs, – he had made no preparation. (p. 121) This sudden view from the beach is startling and moving. A constructed native voice wrests the narrative from the European historian and the violence of encounter is rendered directly, without explanation or disclaimer. And although the narrative immediately returns to third-person omniscience, it no longer sounds quite the same: ‘Cook sailed on to find more lands’ (p. 121). Harrisson’s title, Savage Civilisation, is designed to complicate the standard opposition of these terms. His most frequent rhetorical strategy in doing this is the use of cultural comparison. Savage practices are juxtaposed with European ones in order to demonstrate equivalence or comparability. This recontextualising is intended to normalise lifeways that otherwise appear strange (that is savage), and invites us to consider our own culture as an outsider might, the first step in Harrisson’s subsequent project of ‘an anthropology of ourselves’. It has several different, even contradictory, results. Its most obvious effect is to convict ‘civilisation’ of being savage itself, indeed often more savage than the so-called primitive cultures it seeks

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to civilise. Less polemically, it implies that there are parallel or analogous deep structures of social organisation common to all cultures; in other words, that there are commonalities to be found across ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ worlds. Harrisson’s text oscillates between arguing that savage cultures resemble civilised ones and that they are superior to it. Many of these cultural comparisons are made en passant to refocus the way in which we see cultures different from our own. Cook is described as ‘seeking out the native aristocracy with the persistence of a gossip columnist’ (p. 116). Attempting to explain the lure of the Queensland sugar plantations for young Hebridean males, Harrisson remarks: ‘It would be much the same if you offered every English schoolboy an opportunity to go to the South Seas, not describing any of its numerous discomforts’ (p. 194). These are stock comparisons familiar in a great deal of travel writing then and now. Such comparisons deepen, however, when Harrisson confronts the idea, widespread among both missionaries and anthropologists alike at the time, that the island cultures of the New Hebrides are degenerate or decaying. According to this view, contemporary New Hebrideans are the remnant of a once superior people, and the depopulation that might seem to be a consequence of the arrival of Europeans is better explained as a process already far advanced and merely accelerated by contact with Europe. Tribal warfare, popularly regarded as particularly destructive in the New Hebrides, can then be presented as a symptom of degeneracy and a major cause of population decline. One of the main sources of these ideas, that Harrisson will challenge, is S.H. Roberts’ Population Problems of the Pacific (1927). Roberts’ argument that even before the nineteenth century ‘there was a general racial decline, an indefinable malaise of the stock itself,’ is then linked by Harrisson to another proponent of ‘decayist thinking’, W.H.R. Rivers and his ‘cultural’ theory of psychological death, which Harrisson quotes: This dying out of the native races depends in the main on loss of interest in life … the diseases and poisons to which the decline of population is usually ascribed are only the immediate agents and produce their dire effects only because they are acting on people with so little interest left in life that they succumb at the first breath. (p. 270) And again:

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In the minds of Melanesians and Polynesians alike, this psychological despair is found … the native, making up his mind to die, forces his body to keep pace with his mental pessimism and dies … This deathdisease, as potent as it is intangible, is the dramatic protest of the islander against civilisation. (p. 270) Rivers had first visited the Western Pacific as a doctor and psychologist on the famous Torres Straits expedition in 1898-99. He returned to Melanesia in 1908 on board the Southern Cross, a voyage that included the New Hebrides. It was during these two visits that the practice of fieldwork, later formalised by Malinowski and his successors, emerged.13 (I shall be returning to the subject of fieldwork later.) During the war Rivers read Freud and began to ponder the social implications of Freudian psychology.14 This led, in his post-war writing, to an exploration of the borders of psychology and ethnology. In Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia (1922) Rivers attributed the apparent dying out of native races to psychological factors, in particular the loss of interest in life when traditional customs were destroyed.15 The question of population was a major reason for Harrisson writing Savage Civilisation. Early in 1934 he had written to Naomi Mitchison: ‘I am now a CENSUSOLOGIST, not an “ornithologist”. Human statistics are my line … I’m on to big things, so look out’.16 Wherever he went he counted the native population and could find little evidence for Roberts’ and Rivers’ theories. By applying Roberts’ degeneration theory to other cultures, Harrisson argued, ‘Cairo … must be regarded as no more than a degenerate relic of Tutankhamenism; our Wiltshire as a mere Druid-detritus’ (p. 269). Against Rivers’ idea of psychological death, Harrisson cited the effects of malaria, 94 per cent hookworm infection, and other consequences of contact with European ‘material culture’ (p. 272). Harrisson’s own census of 20,000 natives concluded that population decline was not general. It was marked in the interior of the large islands where diseases, carried by coastal natives trading inland, had their worst effect. On the coast, however, Harrisson found that the native population was often increasing, especially where mission stations offered medical treatment. Harrisson did not entirely discount Rivers’ theory of morbid despair, but saw it as a minor element in the population question. Insofar as it was a factor, Harrisson suggested that missionaries provided some countervailing influence by offering the New Hebrideans a substitute for the decline or loss of their customs (p. 274). For

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all its inevitable imperfections Harrisson’s census work provided an objective basis upon which to contest the idea that the natives of the New Hebrides were a ‘vanishing race’. Derived from his practice as an ornithologist, where the counting of bird populations was fundamental, it enabled Harrisson to analyse the ideological imperatives of ‘decayist’ thinking, which he saw as a way of ‘taking the blame off ourselves, and … expressing our conviction of our own innate superiority’ (p. 269). Harrisson’s insistently comparative frame of mind allowed him to put the theory of psychological death back into its European context and explain it in terms of a contemporary ‘boom in psychology’ in which ‘anything with a Viennese explanation’ was all too readily accepted (p. 273). Harrisson’s head-counting and his refutation of population-decline theory was central to his wider project of dismantling the savage/civilised binary divide. It also helped him challenge the conventional picture of New Hebrideans as prone to particularly bloody wars. Malekulans, he contended, fought ‘cleaner wars’ than any people he knew: fatalities were extremely low, rules of engagement were adhered to, and women and children were never involved. However, the replacement of spear by gun, a direct consequence of trading with Europeans, had disturbed ‘the hygiene of war’ and increased the death rate (p. 265). Once more Harrisson furnishes a telling example of how European influences rather than indigenous characteristics and practices were the main causes of population decline, where in fact it was occurring. Indeed war was something Harrisson was especially keen to bring home by way of comparison. He noted that since 1914, ‘there is a curious absence of references to war among the factors adduced as proving native decay’ (p. 266), and the shadow of impending European war lies over the whole book. A vivid description of how the numbing and pacifying effects of drinking kava are used in peacemaking on the islands concludes: ‘It would change the face of Geneva’ (p. 277). At the end of Savage Civilisation Harrisson recuperates in Tahiti from the rigours of his sojourn in the New Hebrides. However, ‘After three months … I began to hanker for chaos, despair, dancing or savage death in the danger of war. So I took ship for Europe’ (pp. 430-1). War is Harrisson’s defining and most chastening cultural comparison. Cultural comparison is often brought most sharply into focus at the point of encounter. This is especially so in the Pacific where the beach provided a clear physical contact zone for the meeting of European and Islander. Harrisson’s account of Quiros’s visit in 1606 is decidedly anti-colonial. It

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highlights the violence of encounter and remarks of the Spanish that they ‘do not seem to have realized for one moment that they were dealing with ordinary human beings’ (p. 87). This first recorded visit by European voyagers inaugurated the history of killing, kidnapping, and exploitation that was to mark cultural encounters in the New Hebrides. Harrisson’s treatment of Bougainville and Cook is more nuanced. The humanity of the former and the acuity of the latter are acknowledged. Cook however, by popularising the Pacific and making the world aware of its potentialities, ‘let loose the mob’ (p. 121). The history of subsequent encounter is one of environmental, cultural, and human destruction. Sandalwood traders, missionaries, ‘blackbirders’, and planters do their worst, although Harrisson agrees with Robert Louis Stevenson that missionaries, for all that they hastened cultural dissolution, were ‘the best and most useful whites in the Pacific’ (p. 169). Savage Civilisation, however, also resists the simplifications of ‘fatal impact’ thinking, the idea that contact with Europeans inevitably resulted in indigenous decline and extinction. Harrisson insists there has never been stability in the New Hebrides, and that the period following Bougainville and Cook – ‘one hundred and fifty savage years’ – is only a small part of a much larger history, ‘another incident in a long series of incidents, a chaotic chain of events in a chaotic chain of islands’ (p. 110). This was no marooned archipelago waiting to be discovered by a dynamic European culture, but part of a larger oceanic world in which Melanesians and Polynesians had mixed and traded Map of Vanuatu (New Hebrides) freely. In the period between Quiros and Bougainville, ‘New Hebridean culture had moved on its own way, receiving many influences … far repercussions of Brahma or Buddha, Japan and America’ (p. 110).

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Harrisson is also alert to how external influences were received, transformed, and absorbed into the culture rather than always undermining and destroying it. Although his narrative highlights the imbalance and violence of encounter in the modern colonial period, the complex nature of cultural exchange is always kept in view. He acknowledges, for example, indigenous complicity in the removal of New Hebrideans for the cotton and sugar plantations of Queensland, seeing the voluntary aspects of this labour trade as ‘a revolt of youth’ (p. 194) against the more constraining aspects of their own culture. And he is particularly good on the difficulties facing the returning native labourer once his contract had expired. When he was away, a labourer’s plantations, huts, pigs, and fowls were likely to have been redistributed, while many of his contemporaries would have advanced in wealth and status. Retrieving his position in the social framework was arduous and costly (p. 201). The returning native fascinated Harrisson, who must have felt some affinity between this figure and his own position back in England at the time he was writing. He describes how these returned labourers ‘had the knowledge of both worlds, the fullness of neither’ (p. 249), but he also makes clear how their understanding of white material culture and values was useful to a native world experiencing increasingly regular contact with Europeans. And in finding a new place for themselves they were modifying their own culture. This is another issue where the differences between Harrisson and Rivers are instructive. For Rivers, the repatriation of labour from Queensland was ‘far more likely to produce disintegration of native institutions than the work of missionaries’. Many of these returnees ‘have quite forgotten all they ever knew of their native institutions, some even have had that contempt for these institutions that often accompanies a smattering of civilisation’ (quoted pp. 250-1). Rivers identifies, as he believes, yet another cause of decay internal to native culture. Rather than undergoing Harrisson’s complex experience of ‘inbetweeness’, Rivers’ natives have simply forgotten the world they derived from. The idea that a superficial acquaintance with civilisation is even more debasing than an uncontaminated aboriginal state has been common in Pacific colonial discourse. Rivers’ inert model of cross-cultural relations is very different from Harrisson’s understanding of the kinds of entanglement and exchange embodied in the figure of the returning native. And this figure, in turn, becomes a way of expressing Harrison’s general understanding of New Hebridean cultures:

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The culture of the islands is not at all stable. It has always been receptive to new accretions and interactions. Reciprocation, exchange and acquisition have built up the social structure … The drive from behind of tradition, the vigour of competition and prestige, the importance of keeping the village and individual … keep many bush tribes to-day mentally powerful and themselves, despite the white civilisation that has been milling around them for a century. (p. 347) These are the broadest terms in which Savage Civilisation sets its face against theories of decay and psychological death. Far from dying out, the New Hebrideans are resurgent: ‘Here, as in many parts of the world, the black is on the come-back. He is showing a tendency to think anew, independent of the white men to whom he is, nevertheless, tied through material need’ (p. 363). On the other hand, Harrisson contends, ‘the white way is spent of its first vigour’. Meanwhile the ‘yellow presence’ (Harrisson uses such terms unselfconsciously and neutrally) is growing in significance. The Japanese and Chinese work hard without complaint and get on with the New Hebrideans. For this period, his text is remarkably untainted by any fear of the ‘yellow peril’: the Asian presence ‘is the first bloodless contact in the New Hebrides … There has only been one peril in the Pacific, the white one’ (p. 331). Violent or bloodless, the New Hebridean has learnt from all these influxes, survived their worst consequences and is emerging strengthened. Harrisson had other fundamental disagreements with Rivers. He rejected the common acceptance of Rivers’ two-volume History of Melanesian Society (1914) as a great scientific work: ‘It is only great prose … a brilliant piece of circular subjective reasoning and creative literature … the result of a short study, mostly among mission natives on board a mission yacht’ (p. 339). Harrisson accused Rivers of insufficient first-hand experience of the cultures he was investigating. If only, he declared, ‘those who wrote about the “savage,” primitive mentality, had done more primitive living! If Levy-Bruhl had spent a fortnight among savage fleas, Rivers had gone ashore more often from the Southern Cross’ (pp. 343-4). Harrisson is implicitly contrasting his own fieldwork practice with that of Rivers. The term ‘fieldwork’ had been coined by the leader of the Torres Straits Expedition, the physical anthropologist Alfred Haddon, whose background was in zoology; it therefore derived from the work of the field naturalist.17 Originally fieldwork was based on the so-called ‘genealogical method’, an

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inquiry into the systems of relationships through which Rivers believed the ancient institutions of primitive peoples could be traced.18 Although this became known as the ‘intensive method’ after Rivers’ second visit to Melanesia, its practice was based primarily on short-term communication with mainly missionised natives, conducted through at least one intermediary language and outside of normative observational or behavioural contexts.19 It was also organised on the model of a team of investigators dividing the labour of their survey between them.20 Harrisson’s own fieldwork took much of its spirit from the theory and practice of Malinowski. In his 1923 Frazer lecture, Malinowski had appealed for ‘open-air anthropology’: the anthropologist should ‘relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station or planter’s bungalow’, instead staying in the village where his information would come ‘full-flavoured from his own observations of native life, and not be squeezed out of reluctant informants as a trickle of talk’.21 In the opening chapter of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski had described himself as waking ‘every morning to a day presenting itself more or less as it does to the native’. By living in this way, the fieldworker could ‘learn how to behave’, cease ‘to be a disturbing element’, and learn to ‘grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, and realize his vision of his world’.22 Rather than operating as part of a team and according to a division of labour, the fieldworker became a single investigator conducting a prolonged and interactive relation with the subjects of his study based on knowledge of their primary language. Malinowksi, however, unlike Harrisson, always regarded Rivers as his ‘patron-saint in field-work’,23 and there were significant aspects of Harrisson’s research that breached the protocols of fieldwork being established during the 1920s and 30s. For Malinowski the fieldworker as observer-participant needed to maintain a certain distance from the culture he studied. Harrisson, by instinct and conviction, stormed boundaries rather than observing them. The ‘ethnographer’s tent’, that validating image of the ethnographer’s authority, was for Harrisson what the veranda was for Malinowski. Harrisson believed that rather than detaching himself from the people among whom he was working, by eating his own food for example, the anthropologist ‘should not even wish to dream his own dreams, if he is to see past the notebooks full of intricate and interesting superficials, which he will take home for the benefit of his adolescent science’ (p. 343). Fieldwork, Harrisson insisted, should last at least four years: ‘The ordinary

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scientist or “explorer” leaves the explored country knowing absolutely nothing compared with the old R.C. pere who has been there 32 years, or the officer who has patrolled 30,000 miles of bush.’24 Harrisson almost never took notes while among the people he was studying. He advised the anthropologist to ‘keep his notebook out of the way until he can do (moderately well) at least two things peculiar to the people he is living among’ (p. 344). Elsewhere he wrote that the ideal instrument for anthropological fieldwork was a pair of earplugs: ‘See what people are doing. Afterwards, ask them what they think they are doing.’25 Malinowski, on the other hand, took extensive fieldnotes, often in the native language.26 Harrisson’s dependence on pidgin rather than indigenous languages for communication was a major weakness of his ethnography, as Layard had pointed out in his review of Savage Civilisation.

Bronislaw Malinowski in his tent, at his typewriter, watched from the entrance by Trobriand islanders

Savage Civilisation is presented as a justification of its own method. Throughout its length Harrisson mixes ethnography with autobiography in a manner designed to win confidence that he has seen and done what he describes. The authority of the text lies in Harrisson’s first-hand experience, his immersion in New Hebridean culture, his curiosity, and his daring. One such scene is typical. In a remote part of Espiritu Santo a leper hands

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Harrisson a wood grub to eat: ‘it would never do to give offence … I got it down, squeezing those squelchy purple insides through the holes of the grub’s big doped eyes. My host, watching, showed pleasure’ (p. 384). Harrisson’s self-presentation in Savage Civilisation combines the participantobserver with the adventurer-explorer and dramatises his attempt at closing the gap between the observer and the observed. This culminates in Harrisson’s experiences among the Big Nambas that form the concluding ethnographic section of Savage Civilisation. As he travelled among the islands Harrisson kept hearing of the Big Nambas tribe of north Malekula. Drawn by accounts of the constant fighting between their villages, their hatred of white men, and their cannibalism, Harrisson went to investigate. He was particularly intrigued by the proximity of this ‘untouched’ people to the intensively settled island of Aore, only a few miles across the Bougainville straits from Malekula. The contrast of ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ seemed more starkly juxtaposed here than anywhere else in the archipelago. Harrisson infiltrated the world of the Big Nambas ‘by looking and behaving as unlike a white man as possible’, by establishing himself ‘as a hunter, and above all as a kava booze-artist of first rank’ (p. 396). European eye-witness accounts of Harrisson at this time liken him to Jesus Christ or John the Baptist returned as a beachcomber: shoulder-length black hair, bearded, wearing lava-lava and singlet, often without shoes, sometimes carrying a staff.27 Harrisson’s distinctive appearance appears to have helped in gaining acceptance among the Big Nambas. Their women, who wore long artificial hair made from purple matting, were, according to Harrisson, intensely interested in his own flowing locks: ‘There are bits of my hair, yanked suddenly out of my scalp, all over the plateau, maybe still being worn by some romantic maidens, next their woolly, lousy heads’ (p. 399). Harrisson’s account of his time among the Big Nambas is more titillating and self-aggrandising than the earlier ethnographic sections of Savage Civilisation, and is carefully fashioned to draw upon a rich narrative tradition of ‘going native’ and ‘braving cannibals’. As with Melville’s Typee (a prototype if not the actual progenitor of Harrisson’s narrative) sex, war, and cannibalism combine to produce the necessary frisson of excitement and fear. Harrisson’s adoption of native lifeways reaches its apogee in his account of Big Nambas cannibalism. While making clear the ritual nature of the feasting he witnessed, he also leaves hanging the possibility that he took participantobservation rather further than fieldwork normally went:

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Every man must eat a portion. The taste is like that of tender pork, rather sweet. Some men are noted flesh-lovers and eat as much as a whole limb. The natives recognise, as I do myself, a peculiar greasy look about the eyes which characterises such men … In general a small helping is enough, for this is a very filling food. (p. 404) And while the communal aspect of the occasion is properly emphasised, Harrisson also plays on the idea common in European cannibal narratives that the taste of human flesh was liable to create an insatiable hunger and provoke unmitigated savagery. Harrisson’s departure from Malekula involved the strangest of all meetings between the two worlds that Savage Civilisation has been concerned to juxtapose and compare. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Lady Ashley sailed into Bushman Bay on the east coast of the island on their hundred-foot steam yacht the Caroline. Apparently Fairbanks had read about Harrisson in an Australian newspaper and sought him out. Fairbanks wanted to make a Hollywood feature about savage life, and Harrisson was attracted by the prospect of being able to film the coming wedding of the daughter of a Big Nambas chief, the arrangements for which he had been observing (pp. 42730). Fairbanks left him a production manager, Chuck Lewis, the equipment to make a film, and promised to return in a couple of months. Hollywood’s encounter with the Big Nambas broke down in mutual incomprehension. Lewis’s idea of cannibal culture bore no relation to the world of the Big Nambas. He could rarely get them to do what he wanted, and they would refuse to retake a scene. The footage was never made into a film, although it is said to have been shown on Australian television many years later.28 Harrisson himself dismissed the project – ‘I do not know what has happened to the film, or care’ (p. 430) – but managed to secure a berth to Tahiti on Fairbanks’ steam yacht. * Returning to England in 1936, Harrisson went to live in Bolton. Living in the New Hebrides he had become aware that, ‘while studiously tabulating the primitive, we had practically no objective anthropology of ourselves’, and so: ‘With this object in view, on my return I went to the industrial North of England (until then strange to me) and spent many months working in different jobs, trying to pick up the threads of mass life in Britain in much the same way as one does when visiting a little known country.’29

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What happened next has already been described. Harrisson saw Charles Madge’s letter in the New Statesman and within a month the formation of Mass-Observation was announced. Harrisson remained in Bolton, which in his Mass-Observation writing was fictionalised as Worktown (echoing Dickens’s Coketown), and set out to understand the city by ‘looking, listening, observing, without asking any questions’.30 As Harrisson and Madge described it: ‘The function of Mass-Observation is to get written down the unwritten laws and to make the invisible forces visible.’31 To this end, volunteers came to Bolton to observe and record, among them the painter William Coldstream and future politicians Richard Crossman, Tom Driberg, and Woodrow Wyatt.32 Mass-Observation was not an isolated movement. Left Review, founded in 1934, had established reportage as a necessary part of its broader theoretical critique.33 George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, the best-known example of 1930s reportage, was published in the same month as Mass-Observation was formed. Bill Brandt’s photographic book The English at Home (1936) anticipated the founding of Picture Post in 1938, and the same visualdocumentary impulse was represented in Mass-Observation by the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings and the photographer Humphrey Spender. Another example of these overlapping reportage projects was the journal Fact, begun in 1937 under the editorship of Raymond Postgate with other prominent socialists of the period such as Margaret Cole, Storm Jameson, and Stephen Spender among its contributing editors.34 There was a distinctively 1930s aesthetic in all this, captured by Christopher Isherwood’s phrase at the beginning of the decade: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’35 Reportage was often linked with anthropology. Raymond Mortimer compared Brandt’s The English at Home to the work of an anthropologist: ‘He seems to have wandered about England with the detached curiosity of a man investigating the customs of some remote and unfamiliar tribe.’36 The November 1937 issue of Fact announced its ‘attempt to survey typical corners of Britain as if our investigators had been inspecting an African Village’.37 Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent (1939) provides an interesting variant. Its Mass-Observation observer Mr Muckerji is normally taken as a satire on the figure of the social investigator, but in fact it is Mr Muckerji’s close and shrewd observation that leads to the identification of a murderer. The repainting of a hotel room straight after a murder arouses his curiosity, recalling for him the behaviour of tribes in West Africa which

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destroy all traces of someone after death, as if anxious to forget the event. This analysis would have delighted Harrisson, and the whole episode, in which a colonial subject interprets metropolitan culture by reference to a savage world, reverses the standard relation of the anthropologist to his raw material. Harrisson’s own ‘anthropology at home’ was similar to the distinctive version of participant-observation he had practiced in the New Hebrides. Interviews were discouraged, partly because the presence of the interviewer, a stranger, was bound to influence what was said, and also because Harrisson believed that ‘What people say is only one part – sometimes a not very important part – of the whole pattern of human thought and behaviour.’38 Hence the gathering of apparently random social detail that Mass-Observation valued so highly (Harrisson once sent William Empson to note the contents of sweet-shop windows in Bolton). When, in 1938, Harrisson and Madge published their first report it came with a long afterword by Malinowski. Although Malinowski was sympathetic to its aims, he felt that Mass-Observation lacked a method and a framework for deciding the relevance of the data it collected. He also believed it was not the role of the observer to submerge themselves in the culture they studied. The observer and the observed, he insisted, cannot be the same person: it wasn’t necessary to eat ‘missionary chop’ in order to understand cannibalism; Durkheim didn’t have to hang himself before writing his monograph on suicide; a white man having sex with a native woman was not an ethnographic experience.39 These criticisms echo those made of Savage Civilisation by other professional anthropologists and make clear the continuity between the method of Savage Civilisation and Harrisson’s observations in Bolton. Because method of a sort it was. Harrisson rejected Malinowski’s separation of participant-observation from autobiography as the basis of the anthropologist’s claim to authority. Although Savage Civilisation and the early publications of Mass-Observation lack the self-consciousness about the cultural positioning of the participant-observer that characterises postmodern forms of ethnography (Harrisson always thought he knew where he stood), both implicitly question the assumed authority of the fieldworker. Harrisson and Madge pointed out that a mass of observers allowed for cross-checking, whereas the ethnographer went into the field alone and could be misled, or mislead, unchecked.40 Indeed, in this respect Mass-Observation fieldwork harked back to the pre-Malinowskian team

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model developed on the Torres Straits expedition. And while MassObservation certainly was overwhelmed by the data it collected, the failure to sift and order all this material was as much a refusal to conform to Malinowskian expectations as an inability to do so. Jeremy MacClancy has described the first Mass-Observation survey, May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day – Surveys, 1937, as an ‘open text’, its variety of indexes allowing readers to unify the contents of the work as they chose.41 Laura Marcus, commenting on the same text, notes its use of cinematic techniques such as montage, collage, and fragmentation, and the manner in which it leaves the reader with partial perspectives rather than constructing a single overall view.42 Partly underlying this was a Jungian-influenced surrealist belief that the gathering and presentation of apparently haphazard lists of phenomena could provide access to mass wishes and fears, especially at moments of heightened collective expression such as the 1937 abdication crisis, the actual subject of May the Twelfth. This collective-surrealist aspect of Mass-Observation is commonly believed to be Madge’s particular contribution to the movement. Harrisson, on the other hand, with his background in ethnography is seen as locating himself in the field and merely gathering raw material. This apparent division of labour within MassObservation has been outlined most clearly by MacClancy, who describes Harrisson as a ‘resolutely naïve empiricist’, with no interest in surrealism or the poetry of vernacular discourse, who most enjoyed amassing facts. Indeed he goes further, arguing that Harrisson ‘forced’ Madge to compromise the surrealist potential of Mass-Observation and limit its scope to ‘more mundane and narrowly empirical work’.43 This is reductive because it ignores Harrisson’s writing practice in Savage Civilisation and thereby simplifies the relation of the surreal to the ethnographic in Mass-Observation. The text of Savage Civilisation uses many of the techniques of montage, fragmentation, lists, and so on, and anticipates many aspects of literary and anthropological postmodernism, that MacClancy associates entirely with Madge. These ‘open text’ qualities that he admires in May the Twelfth are also found in Savage Civilisation, from its multiple preludes to its final disclaimer. The surface of Harrisson’s text is irregularly disrupted by odd, surreal passages as, for example, when a chapter describing bloody European reprisals on the island of Omba in the 1880s concludes with a short section titled ‘The Machine Intervenes’. The machine is Harrisson’s typewriter, tapping away in a pub beside a river, against the background song of sedge warblers and the bleat of snipe. The pub wireless is on and Harrisson, lost in

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‘the bloodage of Omba’, slowly becomes aware of the voice of Reginald Coupland, Professor of Colonial History at Oxford, ending a lecture on the British Commonwealth of Nations, in which he describes ‘native peoples as fellow-members with ourselves in one great society’, enjoying ‘the shelter of a single framework of peace and law’. Harrisson concludes: ‘My typewriter’s soul went out from it with a little tinkle and bump; left ham and onion solitary there. I rode my bicycle into the evening over Leckford Abbess and Mottisfont’ (pp. 220-1). The irruption of the moment of writing into the text, and the juxtapositions between colonialist violence, the peaceful English scene, and the rhetoric of Empire are left without remark. If this is not exactly surreal, the opening to Part 6 (1902-1935) of Savage Civilisation certainly is: The wind filters through the coconut fronds as they wave their fineboned fingers against the sky. In Unilever House, costing just under a million pounds, endless chaos is reduced into one sense … The greeting palm fronds dance in time to this monstrous, magnificent white orchestra, crowned with its four-faced clock. Smooth running millions flow from such far-away flickers and uplift arms … An aeroplane writes Persil in the sky … (p. 301) There are scattered references to William Hesketh Lever throughout Savage Civilisation. We learn how this son of a Bolton grocer went into the soap business in the 1880s, founding ‘the organisation which came to dominate white hygiene, to elevate cleanliness above godliness’ (p. 235). With the company’s soap production based on vegetable oils rather than tallow, Lever acquired extensive plantations in the New Hebrides, controlling the market and price for copra and becoming the most important economic force in the life of the archipelago. Coconut palms, the ‘consols of the East’ (p. 235), sway to the sanitising tune of Unilever, whose brand is writ large across the sky. Harrisson’s choice of Bolton on his return was not an accident; as he said, it provided a direct link with his earlier fieldwork.44 MacClancy concludes that ‘Harrisson ensured that the format and aims of [May 12th, 1937] were not replicated in the later works of Mass-Observation’, and as a consequence the ‘promise of an ethnographic surreality was given up for the sake of a more mundane reality’.45 But it is precisely those surreal, poetic, disruptive, and open-ended qualities MacClancy values so highly that make Savage Civilisation such a distinctive text. MacClancy’s case against

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Harrisson is part of his challenge to James Clifford’s account of the close relation between ethnography and surrealism in French culture during the 1920s and 30s. Clifford describes surrealism as ‘ethnography’s secret sharer’; if the fieldworker strives to render the unfamiliar comprehensible, then the surrealist works to make the familiar strange. Both see culture as a contested reality in which the self, cut loose from its attachments, is obliged to discover meaning where it may. In so doing, the surrealist and the ethnographer come to value fragments, unexpected juxtapositions, dreams, and myths.46 Clifford’s particular focus is the Collège de Sociologie, formed in 1937, a loose grouping of avant-garde intellectuals who sought ‘to reintegrate scientific rigour with personal experience in the study of cultural processes’, and to free surrealism from its over-identification with art and literature. In L’Afrique Fantôme (1934), for example, Michel Leiris had questioned the distinction between subjective and objective practices in fieldwork in a manner that recalls Savage Civilisation.47 Members of the Collège were also preoccupied with ritual moments when individual experience found collective expression, precisely the significance of the abdication crisis for the first Mass-Observation survey. Clifford only acknowledges such similarities in passing, in a lengthy footnote that describes Harrisson as an ethnographer and ornithologist and makes the primary comparison with the surrealists Madge and Jennings.48 MacClancy contends there was a potentially more interesting relation between ethnology and surrealism in the early stages of Mass-Observation than in France. He finds little real dialogue between surrealists and ethnologists in the examples Clifford cites, and argues that Clifford really only deals with the influence of ethnography on surrealism rather than vice versa.49 It is ironic, therefore, that in arguing for a potentially more productive relation between surrealism and ethnography in England, MacClancy should systematically denigrate the English writer who provides the richest example of this relation. In failing to consider Savage Civilisation, he ignores a work that uses surrealist techniques in redefining the possibilities of the ethnographic text. The distinctive blend of ethnography and surrealism in Mass-Observation was as much a product of Harrisson’s fieldwork on Malekula and Espiritu Santo, and the writing of Savage Civilisation, as it was the work of Madge and Jennings.50 *

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Harrisson’s ethnography was marginal to British social anthropology between the wars in several ways. As Malinowski and his successors were establishing a common set of disciplinary conventions, the untrained, selftaught, unruly Harrisson challenged many of its protocols and procedures. One aspect of this ‘indiscipline’ was his readiness to draw on the practices of a marginal aesthetic such as surrealism. A more complete history of the encounter between ethnography and surrealism would need to consider how other strands of cultural modernism also drew upon non-European art forms and valorised so-called primitive structures of feeling. For the purposes of my argument, however, it is sufficient to note that the eccentricities of Harrisson’s text, as well as the irregularities of his fieldwork, meant that Harrisson remained in the margins of anthropology as its professional and cultural power expanded during the 1920s and 30s. However, the professional anthropologist Malinowski, the amateur ethnographer Harrisson, other practitioners of reportage, and surrealists in England and in France were united by one thing during the 1930s. They were all, in different ways, responding to the threat of Fascism in Europe and most were inspired by Popular Front ideals.51 Malinowski’s ‘Afterword’ to Mass-Observation’s First Year’s Work concluded with a powerful indictment of the ‘sickness’ of contemporary European culture and the inability of reason and free thought to withstand its new mysticisms and mythologies. Mass-Observation, he concluded, was ‘inconceivable in any of the totalitarian communities’; in countries where democracy still functioned, however, ‘it may not only be a useful instrument of scientific research, but it may become an extremely important practical contribution towards the maintenance of human civilization where it still survives.’52 Orwell made a similar point after the Second World War when reviewing ten years of MassObservation activities: knowing ‘what the masses want’, he wrote, was a precondition for democracy.53 The Road to Wigan Pier is also deeply preoccupied in its closing chapters with the failure of orthodox forms of socialism to provide effective resistance to Fascism in Europe. And as David Ayers has pointed out, its close sociological observations are also combined with touches of surrealist detail.54 Such examples demonstrate how a normally unexamined and selfaggrandising contrast between civilisation and savagery came under particular pressure during a decade that began with economic depression and ended with Fascism and war. This is the broadest context in which to understand the process whereby ethnography was developing new forms

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and modes of understanding and describing cultural difference. Or to cast this in more postcolonial terms, the case of Tom Harrisson offers a particular instance of the entanglement of colony and metropole. As a returning native, he was able to use his colonial experience to fashion new ways of exploring and narrating his home culture. Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘A nation-wide intelligence service,’ in Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson (eds), First Year’s Work, 1937-8, By Mass-Observation (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938), p. 103. 2 Biographical details of Harrisson come from Judith M. Heimann, The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), and from the same author’s entry on Harrisson in the Dictionary of National Biography, ed. C.M.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 25, pp. 544-6. 3 Heimann, The Most Offending Soul Alive, p. 118. 4 Heimann: The Most Offending Soul Alive, p. 119. 5 Heimann: The Most Offending Soul Alive, pp. 116, 121-2. 6 Heimann: The Most Offending Soul Alive, p. 146. 7 See Gareth Stanton, ‘Ethnography, anthropology and cultural studies: links and connections,’ in James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine (eds), Cultural Studies and Communications (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 334-358. An almost identical version of this essay appears as ‘In defence of Savage Civilisation: Tom Harrisson, cultural studies and anthropology,’ in Stephen Nugent and Chris Shore (eds), Anthropology and Cultural Studies (London: Pluto Press, 1997), pp. 11-33. 8 Heimann: The Most Offending Soul Alive, p. 124. 9 www.sussex.ac.uk/library/massobs/madlett.shtml, accessed 30 November 2005. 10 www.sussex.ac.uk/library/massobs/founlet.shtml, accessed 30 November 2005. 11 Tom Harrisson, Savage Civilisation (London: Victor Gollancz, Left Book Club edition, 1937), p. 17. Subsequent page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition. 12 Stanton: ‘Ethnography, anthropology and cultural studies,’ p. 343. 13 Goerge W. Stocking, Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 108-115. 14 Since the publication of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy Rivers has been best known for his treatment of shell shock during the First World War. This trilogy of novels, Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995) was published in a single volume as The Regeneration Trilogy (London: Viking, 1996). 15 Stocking: After Tylor, pp. 237-242. 16 Heimann: The Most Offending Soul Alive, p. 64. 17 Stocking: After Tylor, pp. 104-5, 114-15. 18 Stocking: After Tylor, p. 200. 19 Stocking: After Tylor, p. 204. 20 Stocking: After Tylor, pp. 122-3. (There is a scene in The Regeneration Trilogy where Rivers and Hocart, his co-fieldworker on Eddystone Island in the Western Solomons during the 1

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1908 expedition, confront the difficulties of such a division. Death, funerary rites, and skull houses belong to Hocart; ghosts, sex, marriage, and kinship to Rivers. Death and sex, they discover, are not so easily separated). 21 Quoted in Stocking: After Tylor, p. 234. 22 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 7, 8, 25. 23 Stocking: After Tylor, p. 235. 24 Quoted in Heimann: The Most Offending Soul Alive, p. 78. 25 Quoted in Heimann: The Most Offending Soul Alive, p. 130. 26 Stocking: After Tylor, p. 258. 27 Heimann: The Most Offending Soul Alive, pp. 63, 79. 28 Heimann: The Most Offending Soul Alive, p. 99n. 29 Mass-Observation, The Pub and the People: A Worktown Study (London: Gollancz, 1943), p. 7. 30 Tom Jeffery, Mass-Observation: A Short History (University of Sussex: Mass-Observation Archive Occasional Paper No. 10, 1999), p. 26. 31 Jeffery: Mass-Observation, p. 46. 32 Jeffery: Mass-Observation, pp. 26-7. 33 David Ayers, ‘Literary criticism and cultural politics,’ in Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (eds), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 389. 34 Ayers: ‘Literary criticism and cultural politics,’ p. 393. 35 Christopher Isherwood, ‘A Berlin diary (Autumn 1930),’ in Goodbye to Berlin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 7. 36 Jeffery: Mass-Observation, p. 19. 37 Ayers: ‘Literary criticism and cultural politics,’ p. 394. 38 Mass-Observation: The Pub and the People, pp. 10-11. 39 Malinowski, ‘A nation-wide intelligence service,’ pp. 99-100. 40 Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Mass-Observation (London: Frederick Muller, 1937), pp. 31-2. 41 Jeremy MacClancy, ‘Mass-Observation, surrealism, social anthropology: a present-day assessment,’ New Formations 44 (2001), p. 94. 42 Laura Marcus, ‘Introduction: the project of Mass-Observation,’ New Formations 44 (2001), pp. 10-11. 43 Jeremy MacClancy, ‘Brief encounter: the meeting in Mass-Observation of British surrealism and popular anthropology,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1/3 (1995), pp. 502-3. 44 Heimann: The Most Offending Soul Alive, p. 125. It was oddly appropriate, therefore, that when the ‘Tom Harrisson Mass-Observation Archive’ was established at the University of Sussex in the late 1960s initial funding was provided by the Leverhulme Foundation. 45 MacClancy: ‘Brief encounter,’ p. 509. 46 James Clifford, ‘On ethnographic surrealism,’ in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 118, 121-2.

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Clifford: ‘On ethnographic surrealism,’ pp. 141-2. Clifford: ‘On ethnographic surrealism,’ pp. 142-3, n.14. 49 MacClancy: ‘Brief encounter,’ pp. 495-6. 50 Ayers: ‘Literary criticism and cultural politics,’ pp. 389-90, remarks that MassObservation’s preoccupation with collective consciousness could have been theoretically developed as a contribution to the Marxist cultivation of the proletariat as the revolutionary collective subject of history, citing Walter Benjamin’s study of collective fantasy and the everyday in the Arcades project. Benjamin was a frequenter of the Collège de Sociologie. The significant point is not whether the relation between ethnography and surrealism was managed better in France or England, but that the entanglement of these two apparently distinct fields was occurring in both countries at the same time. 51 In the case of France, see Clifford: ‘On ethnographic surrealism,’ p. 139. 52 Malinowski: ‘A nation-wide intelligence service,’ p. 121. 53 George Orwell, ‘As I please,’ Tribune, 28 March 1947, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), vol. 4, pp. 356-7. 54 Ayers: ‘Literary criticism and cultural politics,’ p. 392. 47 48

10. AFTERWORD: WRITING IN THE MARGINS OF A MARGINAL DISCIPLINE Peter Pels

In Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land the Earthly ‘water brothers’ of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by Martians, discuss the likelihood of Martians invading Earth.1 They decide against it: ‘Even Zuni culture would be called Dionysian on Mars’.2 This is a straightforward reference to Ruth Benedict’s distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian cultures and her assessment of the Zuni person as Apollonian, who, in her paraphrase of Nietzsche, ‘even in the exaltation of the dance … “remains what he is, and retains his civic name”’.3 Benedict’s assessment is challenged by Heinlein’s protagonists because the Martians who raised Mike Smith are so much more Apollonian than the Zuni that there is not even ‘any Martian word for “war”’.4 Valentine Michael Smith – whose Martian-derived mental powers far surpass any ordinary human capacity – is subsequently martyred when he is stoned by angry Californians while declaring his free love for all human beings. Heinlein’s book – probably beyond its intentions – became a charter for countercultural Flower Power and the ‘Summer of Love’ in the 1960s and thus stood at the inauguration of what later became known as the New Age movement.5 Is this anthropology? Did Heinlein write in the margins of anthropology? Or is it rather that some – perhaps the most influential – anthropology exists in the margins of a hegemonic popular culture? Many essays in this book reminded me of the fact that being ‘in the margins of anthropology’ often means being doubly marginal – at the fringe of a discipline that, in Michel Foucault’s words, ‘spans the whole field of that knowledge [about man in general] in a movement that tends to reach its boundaries’.6 The fictionalising of anthropological science by Heinlein – or, much earlier, of Everard im Thurn’s scaling of unknown Amazonian cliffs by Conan Doyle in his The Lost World (see Dalziell, this volume) – is one of the manifestations

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of this location of anthropology at the boundaries of the scientific disciplines. Being at the margins of anthropology therefore often implies moving at the boundary of boundary-making. Heinlein’s example – one among many, once we include New Age frauds like Carlos Castaneda, or the ideological forms that some anthropologists cultivate in the name of ‘development’ – suggests that there may rarely have been any ‘normal science’ to speak of in anthropology. Even more, it shows that, in the absence of normal science, the credibility of the ‘watchword of science’ that Hulme and McDougall mention in their Introduction is, when used by anthropologists, variable, volatile, and evanescent – since it is always a compromise formation between the attractions and anxieties of the strange and the comforts and certainties of the familiar, made even more complex by the inequalities of global power relationships. Literary criticism, together with the social critique of the anthropological profession, has made it possible for us to perceive this structural marginality of anthropology by recontextualising anthropological disciplinary claims – away from a disciplinary history of great ideas, great traditions, and great names – as part of broader global inequalities, essentialised in Orientalist imaginary geographies, global constructions of temporal inequality, and the politics of ‘writing culture’ in general.7 As such, the ‘literary turn’ in anthropology since the 1980s has helped to transform the discipline’s selfawareness, both in the sense of a wider conception of what anthropology is and might be, as well as a better sense of everything that might have to be included if we would want to live up to the demand of writing a social, rather than a disciplinary history of anthropology – as this book amply demonstrates. But what does it mean that some of the subjects of the preceding chapters (such as Gertrude Bell or Flora Annie Steel) were respected cogs in the imperial machinery, while others (such as Tom Harrisson or Roger Casement) tended to throw sand in its wheels? Are all of these marginalised by anthropology as an authoritative disciplinary practice? Or should we recognise that anthropology existed (and continues to exist) for, and in the margins of, Empire? Or even worse, that the history of anthropology shows that ‘Empire’ as such has little coherence and is riddled by tensions?8 What does it mean to ‘write culture’ in such a fractured field? Until recently, answers to such questions were rarely forthcoming because, on the one hand, most advocates of the authority of science presumed better knowledge was a prerequisite to improving both the lives of and the government over ‘other’ people, and on the other, their critics

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presumed that this authority of scientific knowledge was a mere pretext covering up the more selfish interests of those who control imperial politics and economy. Indeed, the conflict between instrumental and ideological conceptions of the representations of ‘others’ can be found from the emergence of the Aborigines Protection Society and the Ethnological Society of London in the early nineteenth century up to and including the present-day discussion around achieving the Millenium Development Goals.9 The chapters in this book provide much material to chart the terrain between instrumental and ideological conceptions of ‘writing culture’, and to focus on the social contradictions of the ways in which anthropological discourse arises from, intervenes in, mediates, and transforms the relationships between ‘moderns’ and their ‘others’ – whether this discourse is supported by an academic discipline or profession or not. But they also raise the question of the limits of an approach through works and careers, or texts and biographies of their authors. These two topics will occupy me in the remainder of this contribution, and lead – not surprisingly, given my professional background – to a reconceptualisation of what anthropology might mean to scholars and the people they study in the present and future. * The chapters of this volume can be read as an alternative history of anthropology between 1837 and 1937 and I think it is worthwhile to try and recapitulate what Hulme and McDougall’s proposal – that these margins of anthropology have been neglected in historical scholarship – might mean for our understanding of the development of anthropology in relation to Empire as well as to ‘home’: in this case, Great Britain and Ireland. Two insights are, I think, crucial for such understanding: firstly, that anthropology exists, for the most part of this period, less as a discipline (characterised by systematic training on the basis of authoritative theories and methods) or a profession (characterised by a sense of service and expertise towards certain clients) than as a discourse – or a regular tropology for the generation of representations of human difference – loosely organised in unofficial associations of learned (mostly middle-class) gentlemen. Secondly, and following from this: that the production of such anthropological representations was and is dependent on the transformation of the relationships with people regarded as different into essentialisations of what these people ‘really’ are: a movement from epistemology (or getting acquainted with ‘others’) to ontology (saying what this ‘otherness’ consists

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of), or from relating to others to essentialising them. The ethnographic occasions at which the transformations of a préterrain (or ‘fore-field’) of power relationships with people represented into the representations subsequently reproduced in certain ethnographic traditions take place may be few and far between.10 Their spatial and temporal spread – one stemming from a history of mercantile relations, the other from colonial rule, yet another from more academically informed occasions, and so on – indicate that anthropological discourse was and is derived from and directed at a diversity of audiences, one more marginal than the other. George Grey’s career and writings provide an excellent illustration. As a philologist, Grey was situated in the colonial emergence of a Romantic kind of empiricism that was very much tied to Orientalism as the study of texts11 – used, among other things, to solidify control of Indian legal systems, but also to relativise Christian hegemony among European intellectuals. Unlike his British Indian counterparts in the revenue establishment,12 however, Grey’s work among the Māori was tied to a very specific type of colonial relationship: the pacification campaign. Leigh Dale correctly identifies the ‘apparent paradox of Grey’s passionate academic interest in indigenous cultures and his unbridled contempt for indigenous peoples, along with his ruthless promotion of colonial and imperial interests at their expense’ ( p. 224)13 as the core issue to be explained and the point at which, in the margins of Empire, we may find ethical purchase (I will return to this issue below). However, pacification campaigns as such more often than not produced similar paradoxes, because the military men in charge of defeating the insurgent Aborigines were equally interested in incorporating and respecting their valiant opponents (the Māori not least among them) as ‘martial tribes’.14 The relationship established in the imperial margins, therefore, might be equally if not more important for understanding the writer’s text than his intellectual environment ‘in the margins of’ British ethnologists – since Grey’s interest in the work of Prichard and Latham, some of the founders of ethnology in Britain, was unlikely to include agreement with the latter’s abolitionist, protectionist, and humanitarian sentiments. Henry Ling Roth’s background as an accountant raises questions about another interesting colonial relationship, the study of which has been neglected. What were the economic models against which travel writers wrote their assessment of Aborigines? Ling Roth, writes Russell McDougall, looked at agricultural models predicated on who does or does not cultivate

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the soil to support his assessment of the Tasmanians as doomed to extinction, and the relationship has persisted to such an extent that the chapter can in fact discuss how Ling Roth’s works are used today to offset the related policy of terra nullius towards the Tasmanians’ descendants.15 Grey, however, seemed to believe more in the seduction of Aborigines ‘by wealth and consumer goods’ (p. 21) and these sentiments were echoed by Richard Burton when he contemplated how East Africans could shed the habit of slavery and develop into modern human beings.16 This suggests that trade and consumption were important alternative ways to classify otherness in the first six decades of the nineteenth century – a classification that may have been inherited from the mercantile period17 – yet we have hardly any studies of how early colonialism thought about the ‘other’ as a (potential) consumer and whether this tallied or not with anthropological discourse. It seems, however, that mercantile thinking lost out against the perspectives developed from the need to collect agricultural revenue and to establish pacific military and political relationships in the course of the Victorian era – to disappear from colonial ethnography altogether by the early twentieth century. Gertrude Bell and Flora Annie Steel remind us of another crucial but neglected relationship: the question of how women were positioned in relation to colonial anthropology. It is well known that early professional anthropology attracted many women, but even all the superior work of Audrey Richards, Hortense Powdermaker, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead suggests – like the work of Bell and Steel – an accommodation to rather than an outright critique of a predominantly masculine colonial and intellectual establishment. While Bell’s archaeology revolved around erecting the monuments of civilisation (and the neglect of Iraq’s present), Steel’s writing seems to compromise itself around the twin themes of the revulsion fed by the 1857 Mutiny and the sympathy required to collect Indian folklore – both themes long established in the traditions of colonial ethnography. But this identification of a relevant social relationship raises the question how representative these examples in fact are: how do they compare to the much more mercantile and certainly unconventional Mary Kingsley? Is it useful to discuss Bell and Steel in comparison with the leaders of the Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, and their form of Orientalist writing?18 Do we touch here on the limits of an approach through individual works and careers, in the sense that it requires contextualisation by a

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comparison of discourses and the social relationships in which these discourses are practised? (Again, more about that below.) Steel’s invocation of the need for sympathy for one’s informants brings us to a central point in this historical sequence: the transition towards professionalisation. ‘Sympathy’ was a core metaphor, used by William Crooke, Herbert Risley, Richard Carnac Temple (son of the Temple who worked with Steel), and their professional associates at Cambridge University, Alfred Haddon and William Rivers, to explain why new curricula in anthropology were needed at British universities from the late nineteenth century onwards.19 They thus started to amalgamate the highly diverse meanings of ‘anthropology’ into a discipline – meanings that ranged, as Grey, Ling Roth, Steel, and Bell show, from philology, archaeology, Orientalism, ethnological studies of ‘aborigines’, folklore, racial science, to prehistory, until the late nineteenth century only held together in a tenuous fashion by learned associations of (mostly) gentlemen scholars and an occasional handbook (the Notes and Queries on Anthropology). The careers of im Thurn, Clifford, Casement, and Harrisson must be seen in the context of this professionalisation movement – never complete, always contested – and especially of the relationship of the emerging field science of academic ethnography with the colonial establishment. Here is where my main point about the marginality of anthropology, as illustrated by its relationship to scientific fiction in the broadest sense, becomes particularly visible: not only are im Thurn and Harrisson marginal to emerging professional anthropology, the emerging profession is (in the new perspective on the history of anthropology that books such as this open up) marginal to both Empire and the hegemonic relationships existing at home. The careers of Hugh Clifford and Roger Casement, for example, provide reminders of how colonial ethnography was increasingly contextualised by the rise of the imaginative world of print capitalism and literature – Clifford reading Haggard, the era’s foremost ‘ethnographic’ bestselling writer, who transformed his relationships as a colonial official with the Zulu into some of the most widely read essentialisations of Africa (of hags as witches, and feathered warriors) to gain currency in the modern era. One clearly sees Haggard’s worries about the thin veneer of civilisation being rent by innate human savagery reflected in the evolutionist anthropology of contemporaries like Frazer and Tylor20 – and Clifford echoes such a Zeitgeist. Moreover, both Clifford and Casement befriended Joseph Conrad and informed and admired his writing. It is almost superfluous to recall that both

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Haggard and Conrad loomed large in Malinowski’s efforts to write an ethnography that was both appetising to the reader (in the ‘wind-blowingthrough-the-palm-trees’ sense) and clearly different from literature as ‘science’. Was literature here marginal to anthropology, or vice versa? To whom was ‘science’ a watchword in this context? Is Clifford here a marginal anthropologist or marginal writer – or, more accurately, an important colonial official drawing on literature and anthropology as marginal endeavours for his own central concern with imperial rule? Is Casement a failed anthropologist or poet, or someone who draws upon the hegemonic Herderian conception of nationality to inform his – admittedly marginal – statesmanship? These chapters (and Rod Edmond’s remarks about Tom Harrisson’s relation to surrealism in his chapter) indicate a field of research that has been insufficiently explored: that of the mutually influencing relationships of travelling writers, ethnographers, and the colonial locations in which they met. The chapters in this book often make important first attempts to bring such insights together. Hugh Clifford, Everard im Thurn, and Tom Harrisson show yet another fascinating aspect of the ‘marginal’ writing of otherness during the process of anthropological professionalisation. Clifford used the latest edition of the Notes and Queries – which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become the most important ‘disciplinary’ methodology of anthropology – for his researches. Throughout his career, im Thurn remained in close touch with the different generations of anthropological methodology, first adopting the Darwinian model (of the travelling collector and field biologist) from Hooker, then also associating with Tylor’s more museological approach, and finally chairing the Anthropological Section of the BAAS at the time that Rivers, Malinowski, and others were working out the ‘intensive study of limited areas’ that was to become the twentieth-century conception of ethnographic fieldwork after being canonised by Malinowski in 1922. As Dalziell indicates, im Thurn even pioneered (not unlike other administrative ethnographers, such as Edgar Thurston)21 the anthropological use of the camera. Given this pedigree, I wonder how appropriate it is to interpret im Thurn as ‘non-professional’ or even as a ‘frustrated man of science’: he is certainly a major – not marginal – figure in an anthropology, still characterised by a largely ‘amateur’ organisation, but moving – through conferences like those of the BAAS – towards a more professional status. Harrisson moved even more strongly on the boundary where anthropologists and others were experimenting with and canonising the

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methodologies that would come to define the expert, the anthropologist, and the margins from which anthropologists needed to extricate themselves in order to become seen as experts. As Edmond notes, the rising ‘professional’ Malinowski and the presumed ‘marginal’ Harrisson shared a common Leftist context: the world in which Harrisson placed his methodology of Mass-Observation was also the world of the Fabian Society, the London School of Economics, and their anthropological acquaintances from Cambridge, the Left-leaning Haddon, Rivers, and Seligman (who manoeuvred their pupil Malinowski into an LSE professorship), and the era in which (under Sydney Webb’s brief Colonial Ministry) these all came together in plans to support the rise of the British welfare state and ‘colonial development and welfare’ by objective social surveying. George Orwell’s or the New Left Review’s methods of reportage were not that different from Malinowski’s choice to canonise ethnographic fieldwork as the road to expert colonial knowledge. Harrisson’s emphasis on observation (at the expense of talk) is somewhat idiosyncratic; but what seems much more important is that the relative marginality of Mass-Observation was much more the marginality of qualitative research methods in general – admissible in the colonies (where the apparatus for mass surveys was thought to be far too expensive), but totally discredited in the metropoles because of the recent rise to hegemony of statistics as the royal road to the welfare state’s truths22 – as practised by, among others, the social scientists at the LSE. Thus, the chapters on im Thurn and Harrisson may remind us of the fact that writing in the margins of anthropology not only concerns how others are represented, but also how certain methodologies come to represent our (marginal) selves – to the extent that, after the 1930s, anthropology as such becomes progressively marginalised within a global social science in which a majority implicitly assumes that what cannot be counted does not exist. Ironically, at the end-point of the period described in this book – when Tom Harrisson, unlike the subjects of the other chapters, can truly be regarded as an amateur facing an anthropological profession – anthropologists themselves increasingly become like ‘amateurs’ facing their more ‘professionalised’ rival social sciences, by means of an ideology of method that is still on the rise today. * In their introduction to this volume, Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall argue that there is a renewed interest in biography as a significant dimension

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of historical study, and that the chapters in this book use the biographical trajectories they describe to negotiate ‘the transference of colonial experience and practice from one setting to another’ (p. 6). In his chapter, McDougall further clarifies this intention: ‘The career, as I have implied, provides a context for the work, and serves also as a guide to its meaning. The work that early anthropology performed, writing the colonial narrative of other cultures, is suggestive of the relationship that existed then as now between particular genres of cultural representation and the lives of particular authors writing in those genres’ (p. 46). To use biography as a kind of bridging device, especially where it can reconnect (the history of) metropolitan culture to its often underrepresented colonial sources, is an excellent idea.23 However, zooming in on lives or biographies also runs risks: as Leigh Dale notes, biography is a ‘powerful weapon in legitimating the imperial enterprise’, which may highlight and exonerate individual commitments and motivations at the expense of the structural contradictions within which, in this case, George Grey found himself. How do we use biography in such a way that we do not reproduce, for example, the history of the ‘great thinkers’ that many historians of anthropology use to Whiggishly canonise the profession? Even more profoundly, how do we avoid the ‘biographical illusion’ of seeing ‘the human career as an ordered progression of acts and events’ that conflates – on the basis of Western individualist ideologies – the subject with a (relatively) autonomous agent?24 In the previous section, I tried to indicate that a focus on colonial social relationships and the ways in which these are transformed into essentialisations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ – of subjectivity – is required to assess whether and how we can speak of anthropology’s margins. Here, I would like to argue that it is precisely the use of the notions of work, career, and biography against the essentialisations of subjectivity that allows us to write the history of representations of otherness without falling back on ideological canonisations of either anthropology as a discipline or the self as autonomous agent. This requires using an epistemology of colonial contact25 in which one tries to remain conscious of the (discursive as well as nondiscursive) ways that people got in touch with ‘others’ as a necessary prerequisite for judging the value of their works (the texts produced and genres adopted) as well as their lives (in terms of their sense of self). In assessing ethnographic texts and their writers, one of the most profound (and by now well-known) consequences of such an approach is to realise that, whereas most ethnographic encounters imply that representer and

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represented were once in touch with each other at a certain time and place, a majority of texts deny such coevalness and construct a temporal distance between representer and represented.26 It is against the background of such an epistemology of (post)colonial contact that, I think, we should interpret Leigh Dale’s profound remark that the margin (of either Empire or discipline) should be seen as a place ‘where, inherently, we might find ethical purchase’ (p. 35). The ethnographic occasion (of getting in touch with an other) can be defined as a situation in which the ethnographer, despite (or perhaps because of) vast differences in power and cultural make-up, is (partly) seduced to become the other – at least to such an extent that the ethnographer can regard him- or herself as someone capable of more or less faithfully reproducing the being of the other. Professional anthropology has tried to turn this seduction into methodology (although rarely realising to the full the radical ethical consequences of such a method).27 But professional anthropology developed against the background of the fears that such a potential seduction also generated – fears that, in Robert Hampson’s chapter on Hugh Clifford, are couched in the language of the ‘latent savagery’ of the European that Clifford saw emerging when excessive sympathy and fascination with ‘wild life’ threatened to ‘denationalise’ him; and that emerge in many an ethnographer’s fear of ‘going native’.28 These and many more examples show that, epistemologically speaking, the ethnographic occasion is one of profound and inescapable contradiction, where the assumption of otherness puts the ethnographer in an insurmountable dilemma, one perhaps most starkly represented by Claude Lévi-Strauss’ remarks upon meeting the Nambikwara, whose language he does not master: ‘I had only to succeed in guessing what they were like for them to be deprived of their strangeness; in which case, I might just as well have stayed in my village. Or if, as was the case here, they retained their strangeness, I could make no use of it, since I was incapable of even grasping what it consisted of.’29 The clue to this dilemma is, of course, the implicit assumption of power and appropriation (‘I could make no use of it’) that, once made explicit, allows us to ask the ethical question when, why, for whom, and with what consequences the assumption of otherness is, or is not, an adequate description of the experience of human difference on the occasion studied? This is, interestingly, an ethnographic question in its own right. The chapters in this book provide numerous interesting examples of how this essentially contradictory character of ethnography can be realised in

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different situations. I already remarked on the extent to which the contradictory desires of George Grey might be understood in terms of the social contradiction that colonial pacifiers established with the people they fought as well as described; another contradiction mentioned above was the fact that the colonial subject was so self-evidently and implicitly male that the definitions of otherness employed by Gertrude Bell and Flora Annie Steel provided very little ‘ethical purchase’ within which to realise their selfdefinition as women (although I also suggested that a comparison with other important ‘colonial women’ might provide some alternatives). One can continue along similar lines with other examples: Casement’s conceptions of otherness were caught between his work with ‘primitives’ or ‘savages’ on the one hand, and his move towards a Herderian model of understanding himself on the basis of his new Gaelic loyalties and the rising ethnography of the Irish nation; Clifford found himself on the side of power, but could also think of the expatriate’s status as a Frankenstein’s monster, ‘yearning for love and fellowship’ while being repulsed by the people among whom he lives. In the field of ethnographic methodology, similar examples appear – one of the most obvious being the contradiction that the ‘warmth’ and ‘practical interest’ displayed by Flora Annie Steel in her dealings with her informants’ folklore stood in a tradition in which her fellow-ethnographers such as Temple and Crooke regarded such ‘sympathy’ as the necessary precondition for preventing Indians from erupting again into a rebellion like the Great Mutiny – a precondition memorised by professionalising anthropologists up until Malinowski’s defense of the value of anthropology to colonial rule.30 However, this has brought us quite some way beyond the work and the career, for the essential precondition for identifying the core contradictions of ethnography is that we use biography to surpass it: to identify when, where, and with what consequences people get in touch with each other, in other words, the networks of social relationships that produce the works, careers, and representations of ethnography. This entails comparison (of, say, Bell and Steel with Blavatsky and/or Kingsley; or Grey’s pacification campaigns among Maori with those among the Ghurkas, the Moluccans, or other martial tribes) as much as biography; and more concerted deconstructions of generic distinctions (between, say, ‘marginal’ writers and ‘professional’ ethnographers, in order to see how literature fades into anthropology and vice versa) than we possess so far. The biographical method of representation is a useful one, but not unless we conceive of the

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(post)colonial subjects of our biographies as fragmented, incoherent ones, bobbing from wave to historical wave on a sea of social contradictions. * Thus, I feel we have reached a point at which reflections on the margins and marginality of anthropology indicate that the core business of anthropology – the description and interpretation of human difference – needs to be relocated within a broader social epistemology in which anthropologists, historians, and literary critics need to collaborate to uncover the preconditions, occasions, and consequences of the work of writing culture. Here, my opening example of Heinlein’s imaginary future – indicating, as it does, the intertwining of (science) fiction, fantasy, mystery writing, and anthropology, and the relationships that this suggests with the broader field of popular culture – is, I think, a crucial example. Heinlein’s book is but a mid-twentieth-century example of such intertwining of speculations about humanity and human difference – starting with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, so appropriately ‘anthropologised’ by Hugh Clifford;31 continuing with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘hollow-earth’ novel based on the anthropological work of Max Müller and Conan Doyle’s reinvention of im Thurn’s Amazon expedition;32 through to Heinlein’s and Ursula LeGuin’s (daughter of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber) use of anthropology, up to current mergers of modern witchcraft or wicca – derived, indirectly, from Frazer’s Golden Bough – with reinventions of the ethnography of shamanism. All these cases suggest the need for a more thorough investigation of the ways in which the ‘watchword of science’ (whether derived from anthropology or from other sciences) has been and is being deployed as ‘science fiction’ in the broadest sense – among other things, to shape and reinterpret our future(s). Taken in that sense, we may be able to derive much more ethical purchase from the study of the history of anthropology than we have done so far – especially by the kind of transgressive (‘cross-marginal’?) studies that this book epitomises among others. The realisation that, at the margins, anthropology has always fed, and fed into, a popular culture of imagining different futures suggests that Rod Edmond’s critique of MacClancy’s comparison of Tom Harrisson’s Mass-Observation with surrealism could be taken further, towards a point where it becomes apparent that literary critics, historians, and anthropologists can collaborate much more fruitfully – and with more social relevance – in thinking about writing culture than has hitherto been realised. The realisation that anthropology’s professional

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conceit of being fully and professionally ‘realist’ – of describing things ‘as they are’ – was always set off against alternative modes – whether ‘surrealist’ or ‘hyperrealist’ – should lead us to inquire further into the nature of the more popular forms of anthropology. These forms were quite often fantasies of a different future or of the different possibilities that human beings can realise. Such fantasies stretch from the evolutionists’ tenuous assumption that they were the actual realisation of every human being’s future – an assumption questioned by James Frazer’s, H. Rider Haggard’s, or Hugh Clifford’s ambiguous musings on the human potential for savagery – to the (admittedly more radical) science fiction of Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness,33 where the consequences of a society without a permanent division into two sexes are worked out. These two examples – many more are possible, but require to be explored jointly by anthropologists, historians, and literary critics – sufficiently indicate that the essential contradictions at the heart of the ethnographic occasion, even if they are inescapable, have also provided us, and continue to provide us, with critical alternatives to the ways of life with which we are familiar. This, I would argue, might help us to (re)invent anthropology in the widest sense of the word, away from the mere description of otherness (and all its contradictions) towards a continual realisation of the ethical purchase that ethnography as a social relationship promises. That would, I think, be a vision of the future that the essays in this book would underscore, and towards which they all in their own way try to work. ‘The most famous Science Fantasy Novel of all time’ says the blurb on the front cover of my copy: Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land [1961] (London: New English Library, 1980). 2 Heinlein: Stranger, p. 208. 3 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture [1934] (New York: Mentor Books, 1948), p. 72. 4 Heinlein: Stranger, p. 208. 5 See, among others, Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 6 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [1966] (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 378. 7 The loci classici referred to are Edward Said, Orientalism [1978] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), and James Clifford and George Marcus (eds), Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 8 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 9 For discussions of how to navigate between the instrumental and ideological conceptions of ethnographic knowledge among two different constituencies, see Peter Pels’ discussion 1

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of missionaries and anthropologists (A Politics of Presence: Contacts between Missionaries and Waluguru in Late Colonial Tanganyika [Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999], pp. 1-10) and David Mosse’s brilliant study of a late twentieth-century development project (Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice [London: Pluto, 2005]). 10 These arguments are worked out in much more detail in Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, ‘Introduction: Locating the colonial subjects of anthropology’, in Pels and Salemink (eds), Colonial Subjects (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 1-52. 11 David Ludden, ‘Orientalist empiricism: Transformations of colonial knowledge’, in Carol A.. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 250-278. 12 See Peter Pels, ‘The rise and fall of the Indian aborigines. Orientalism, Anglicism and the emergence of an ethnology of India, 1833-1869,’ in Pels and Salemink (eds): Colonial Subjects, pp. 82-116. 13 Page numbers in brackets refer to this volume. 14 See Pels and Salemink: ‘Introduction’, pp. 24-26, and Oscar Salemink, ‘Ethnography as martial art. Ethnicizing Vietnam’s Montagnards, 1930-1954’, in Pels and Salemink (eds): Colonial Subjects, pp. 282-325; for an overview, see Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 15 For related arguments, see especially Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999). 16 Richard Francis Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A Picture of Exploration (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), vol. II, p. 377. 17 See William Pietz, ‘The origin of the fetish, I,’ Res, 13 (1985): 23-45; and Pels and Salemink: ‘Introduction’, p. 12. 18 In the case of Blavatsky, I have tried to show that such comparisons of her work with other anthropological texts are, indeed, worthwhile (see ‘Occult truths: Race, conjecture and theosophy in Victorian anthropology’, in Richard Handler [ed], Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, pp. 11-41]). 19 Pels and Salemink: ‘Introduction’, p. 37. 20 See Peter Pels, ‘The magic of Africa. Reflections on a Western commonplace,’ African Studies Review, 41/3 (1998), pp. 193-209. 21 See Nicholas Dirks, ‘The crimes of colonialism. Anthropology and the textualization of India,’ in Pels and Salemink (eds): Colonial Subjects, pp. 153-179. 22 See Talal Asad, “Ethnographic representation, statistics, and modern power,” Social Research, 61 (1994), pp. 51-88. This context also applies to Julia Emberley’s remarks about Florence Bell, Gertrude’s stepmother. 23 I have experimented with a biographical format in several articles about the history of anthropology myself (see Pels: ‘The Rise and Fall…’; ‘Occult Truths’; and ‘Spirits of modernity: Alfred Wallace, Edward Tylor, and the visual politics of fact,’ in Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels [eds], Magic and Modernity [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], pp. 241-271). 24 See Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview, 1992), p. 26. 25 See Pels: A Politics of Presence, p. 20, and Pels and Salemink: ‘Introduction’. 26 Fabian: Time and the Other.

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I elaborated this argument in ‘Professions of duplexity. A prehistory of ethical codes in anthropology”, Current Anthropology, 40/2 (1999), pp. 101-136; see also Lynn Meskell and Peter Pels, ‘Introduction: Embedding ethics,’ in Meskell and Pels (eds), Embedding Ethics (New York: Berg, 2005), pp. 1-26. 28 Judging from Hampson’s chapter, Clifford also must have read Rider Haggard’s ambiguous glorifications of the berserker savagery of honest warriors – such as the axewielding Zulu Umslopogaas, or his ‘Danish’ and ‘white Zulu’ counterpart, Sir Henry Curtis, in novels like King Solomon’s Mines. 29 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [1955], trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), p. 376. 30 Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Practical anthropology’, Africa, 2 (1929), pp. 22-38. 31 It is, in this respect, interesting to note that Shelley framed Frankenstein’s story by another story of a thwarted scientist, occupied by the very ‘anthropological’ early nineteenth-century business of an Arctic voyage of discovery, where he meets Frankenstein as the latter pursues his monster. 32 Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Coming Race [1871] (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995); Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World [1912] (New York: Pyramid Books, 1960). 33 Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness [1969], St. Albans: Panther Books, 1973. 27

List of Contributors

Helen Carr is Emeritus Professor of English at Goldsmiths College. Her publications include Inventing the American Primitive; Politics, Gender and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions and a recently completed group biography of the Imagist poets. She is also joint-editor of Women: A Cultural Review. Ralph Crane is Head of the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania. His recent books include critical editions of Charles Pearce’s Love Besieged: A Romance of the Defence of Lucknow and Maud Diver’s Lilamani: A Study of Possibilities, both published by Oxford University Press India. Leigh Dale teaches Australian and post-colonial literatures in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. She is the author of The English Men: Professing Literature in Australian Universities and editor of the journal Australian Literary Studies. Rosamund Dalziell is a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the Australian National University and also works with economically and socially disadvantaged communities in the Australian Capital Territory. She is the author of Shameful Autobiographies: Shame in Contemporary Australian Autobiography and Culture, the editor of Selves Crossing Cultures: Autobiography and Globalisation, and co-editor of Shame and the Modern Self. Rod Edmond is Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History in the School of English at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His monographs include Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin and Leprosy and Empire: A Medical and Cultural History. He also co-edited, with Vanessa Smith, Islands in History and Representation.

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Julia Emberley is Associate Professor of English at The University of Western Ontario. Her books include Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women’s Writings, and Postcolonial Theory and The Cultural Politics of Fur. Robert Hampson is Professor of Modern Literature in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written extensively on Joseph Conrad. He published a monograph on Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction and is currently working on another monograph, Conrad’s Secrets. He has particular interests in Malaysia and in ethnography/anthropology. Peter Hulme is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. His recent publications include (ed. with Tim Youngs) Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing and (ed. with William H. Sherman) the Norton edition of William Shakespeare: The Tempest. He is currently working on the literary geography of the Caribbean. Anna Johnston is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Tasmania. She is the author of Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800-1860 and the co-editor (with Helen Gilbert) of In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire. Russell McDougall is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Communication and Theatre at the University of New England, Australia. He has recently edited (with Iain Davidson) The Roth Family, Anthropology and Colonial Administration and is completing a project called Letters From Khartoum. Peter Pels is Professor of African Anthropology at the University of Leiden. He has published on critical anthropological theory, the anthropology of colonialism, the history of anthropology, modern African politics and religion, and material culture. He recently co-edited and contributed chapters to Magic and Modernity (with Birgit Meyer), Embedding Ethics (with Lynn Meskell) and The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot (with Romain Bertrand and Jean Louis Briquet) and is currently interested in cyberculture and science fiction.

Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 25 Aboriginal Studies, 58–63 Aborigines Protection Society (APS), 7–9, 46 Amazon, the Putumayo Indians, 170, 184–9, 185 rubber industry, 184–5, 186 Anand, Mulk Raj, 81 Anthropological Institute see Royal Anthropological Institute Anthropological Society, 9 anthropology, 7-10, 222–3, 226-7, 231, 232 amateur (armchair), 11–14, 49, 54 and autobiography, 213 and biography, 14, 228–9 in Britain, 7–10 cultural, 171–2 evolutionary model of, 11, 103, 171–2 and folk traditions, 171–2 genealogical model of, 2–3, 207–8 methodologies of, 227–8 and minority group members, 90–1 philosophical, 123 and photography, 111–12, 227 and popular culture, 198, 221–3, 232–3 professionalisation of, 11, 14, 226– 8, 230 and reportage, 212, 228 salvage, 7–9, 43, 88 and sciences, 10–11, 197–8, 228 and women, 13, 90–1, 225–6, 231 see also ethnography; fieldwork

Arabian Nights or A Thousand and One Nights, 82–5, 87 archaeology, 124–5, 140, 142 and Gertrude Bell, 121–2, 124–5, 225–6 and ethnography, 121–2 and nostalgia, 132–5 and photography, 132–3 Arnold, Matthew, 183 Culture and Anarchy, 48 Atwood, Bain, 63 Augstein, Hannah, 25 Australia, 45 and the ‘history wars’, 60–3 Sir Everard im Thurn in, 103 see also Tasmanian Aboriginal population Australian Human Rights Commission Bringing Them Home, 63 autobiography and anthropology, 213 and ethnography, 209–11 Ayers, David, 217 Backhouse Walker, James, 51–2, 53–5, 57 Bannister, Edward, 173 Barnard, James ‘Notes on the Last Living Aboriginal of Tasmania’, 54 Beeton, Isabella Mary (Mrs) The Book of Household Management, 136–7 Bell, Florence Eveleen

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Alan’s Wife (with Elizabeth Robins), 125–6 Bell, Gertrude Lowthian, 5, 8, 118, 231 Amurath to Amurath, 121, 130–1, 139–41 and archaeology, 121–2, 124–5, 225-6 ‘The basis of government in Turkish Arabia’, 119–22 and biopolitics, 137 childhood and education of, 120, 124–5 The Desert and the Sown, 121, 128, 129–33 and domesticity, 126–9 and gender, 131–2 and infantilisation, 120–1, 122–3, 130–2 map of travels in Syria, 129 and Mesopotamia, 119–22, 125, 129–32, 137–42 and nostalgia, 132–5, 137–8, 141 and Orientalism, 121 and photography, 132–3 and taxonomy, 129–32 and travel, 128–9 Bell, Sir Isaac Lowthian, 125 biography, 231 and anthropology, 14, 228–9 and Empire, 6 biopolitics, 137 Birch, J.W., 150, 152–3 Blamires, David, 86 Bleek, Wilhelm, 32–3, 34 Boas, Franz, 14 Boas, Franziska, 13 Bohan, Edmund, 36–7 Bolton, Geoffrey, 61 Brandt, Bill The English at Home, 212 Brantlinger, Patrick, 9, 76, 77

Bright, John, 52 Bringing Them Home (Australian Human Rights Commission), 63 Britain Bolton, 198–9, 211–16 and the bourgeoisie, 125–9 see also Empire, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 7–9 British Guiana, 98–101 Amerindians of, 98–100, 100, 102– 3, 107–11 Roraima, 99–100 Brooke, James, 147, 154 Brownlee, Charles, 32–3 Burton, Richard Arabian Nights or A Thousand and One Nights, 83 Calder, J.E. The Native Tribes of Tasmania: Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, etc, 52 Cannadine, David, 148 cannibalism, 200, 210–11 Casement, Roger, 5, 12, 168, 226–7, 231 article in the Contemporary Review, 186–9 in Brazil, 184–5 career of, 170, 175–6 and the Celtic Revival, 171–2, 178– 80 and the CMG, 184 Congo atrocities, report on, 177–8, 184 and the Congo International Association, 173 and the Congo natives, 173–8, 184–5 family background and education of, 172–3

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and homosexuality, 169, 190–1 and Irish nationalism, 170, 176, 178–80, 184–5 melancholy and depression of, 178 poetry of, 178 in prison, 191 and the Putumayo Indians, 170, 184–9 and the Sanford Expedition, 174–5 treason: trial and death for, 169–70 writing of, 170 Celtic Revival, 170, 178–80, 184, 187 in Ulster, 180–2 Ceylon, 101, 103 Clifford, James, 3–4, 8, 156 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (with George E. Marcus), 6–7 on fieldwork, 161–2 and surrealism, 216 Clifford, Sir Hugh, 12, 146, 226–7, 230, 231 In Court and Kampong, 147, 155, 156–7 and ‘denationalisation’, 157–9 ‘Expedition: Trengganu and Kelantan’, 155–6 family background and career of, 147–9 and fieldwork, 156–7, 161–2 and Frank Swettenham, 150 A Freeland of Today, 157, 158–9 ‘In the half-light’, 162 Journal of a Mission to Pahang, January 15 to April 11, 1887, 153–6 and Lady Clifford, 146 and the Malays, 155–6, 159, 161–2 Pahang, mission to, 148–9, 153–6 ‘Our Trusty and Well-Beloved’, 162 and racial superiority, 159–61 Sally, A Study, 159–61 series of stories by, 156–7

Since the Beginning, 157–8 writing and publishing of, 149 Collège de Sociologie, 216 Collier, James, 29 Conan Doyle, Arthur The Lost World, 100 Congo International Association, 173 Congo Reform Association, 181, 184 Congo, the land ownership in, 185 natives of, 173–8, 184–5 Conrad, Joseph, 174, 189, 226–7 Crooke, William North Indian Notes and Customs (journal), 89 Davin, Anna, 127 Davitt, Michael, 185 Day, Lal Behari Folktales of Bengal, 89 de Bunsen, Christian Charles Josias, Baron Egypt’s Place in Universal History, 24–5 Deane, Seamus The Celtic Revivals, 179 ‘denationalisation’, 157–9, 230 Dilke, Charles, 46 Diver, Maud The Englishwoman in India, 74 ‘domestication’, 123–4 politics of, 122–9 domesticity, 126–9, 136 Dudgeon, Jeremy, 182 Empire, the, 4–7 and anthropology, 222–3, 231 and biography, 6 and colonial contact, 229–30 personnel of, 6–7 prominent families in, 12–13 and travel writing, 4–7

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and violence, 63, 155–6, 201, 205 essentialisation, 223–4, 229 ethnography, 4–7, 229–30 and archaeology, 121–2 and autobiography, 209–11 and ethnographic description, 11 and Mass-Observation, 4–5, 197, 199, 212–16, 217–18, 228, 232–3 and participant-observation, 6 and surrealism, 214, 215–17 and travel writing, 4–7, 107 Ethnological Society, 9, 25–6 Fascism, 217 ‘feminisation’, 123, 183–4, 188 fieldwork, 10, 14, 156–7, 161–2, 207–9, 216, 227–8 ‘genealogical method’ of, 2–3, 207–8 and language, 20–1, 33–4, 35, 73, 208–9 and Mass-Observation, 213–14 Fiji, 103 European settlers in, 105 indigenous population of, 104–6 land reform in, 104–5 troops in Britain, 106 folklore and anthropology, 171–2 collection of, 74–5, 78–82, 85–90, 92 and native informants, 86–7 oral traditions of, 82–3 Foucault, Michel, 221 Frere, Mary Old Deccan Days, 78, 79 Gaelic League, the, 179–80, 182 Galland, Antoine Les Mille et une nuits, 83, 84 Gardiner-Garden, John, 59 Gardiner, Grace

The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (with Flora Annie Steel), 76–7 Geertz, Clifford, 7 gender, 131–2 formation of, 126 politics of, 122–9 Gibson, Andrew, 178 Gordon, Sir Arthur, 105 Green, Alice Stopford The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, 181–2 Green, Graham The Confidential Agent, 212 Greenberger, Allen J., 75 Grey, Sir George, 4, 8, 18, 231 biographies of, 19, 29 and economics, 22–3 and ethnography, 35–6 family background and early career of, 19–21 as a humanitarian, 21–3 and indigenous people, 21–3, 36–7 Journals, 21–3, 24, 26, 26, 28 and languages, 20–1 and the Māori, 224 and Māori oral literature, 28–31 in New Zealand, 21, 22–3, 28–31 and politics, 35–6 Polynesian Mythology, 31 and racism, 27–8 ‘Report on the Best Means of Promoting the Civilisation of the Aborogines’, 21–3 scholarly interests, 23–8, 34–7 in South Africa, 31–4 and the Xhosa language, 33–4 Haggard, Henry Rider, 147–8, 226–7 Hampson, Robert, 49 Handler, Richard Excluded Ancestors, Inventible

INDEX

Traditions: Essays Toward a More Inclusive History of Anthropology, 2–3 Harrisson, Tom, 4–5, 8, 12, 196, 226, 227–8 and anthropology, 198 in Bolton, 198–9, 211–16 and cultural comparison, 201–5 family background, education, and early career of, 197 and fieldwork, 207–9, 213–14 ‘indiscipline’ of, 217 and Mass-Observation, 197, 212– 16, 217–18 in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), 197–211 New Hebridean (Vanuatu) population census, 203–4 and ornithology, 197–8 Savage Civilisation, 6, 197–8, 199– 211, 213, 214–16 self-presentation, 209–11 in Tahiti, 204 Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land, 221, 232 Hickson, S.J., 56 Holden, Philip, 159–60 homosexuality, 169, 190–1 Hooker, Sir Joseph, 98–101, 106 im Thurn, Sir Everard, 5, 10, 11, 96, 226, 227 and the Amerindians of British Guiana, 99, 100, 102–3, 107–11 Among the Indians of Guiana, 99, 107– 11 ‘Anthropological Uses of the Camera’, 112 in Australia, 103 The Birds of Marlborough, 98 in British Guiana, 98–101, 106–12 in Ceylon, 101, 103 as a cultural collector, 102–3

243

expedition to Roraima, 99 family background and education of, 97–8 in Fiji, 103, 104–6 ‘Native Land and Labour in the South Seas’, 104–5 ‘Observers of Man’ (photographic exhibition), 111 Pacific travels and writings, 103–5 public career, 98–101 in retirement, 101, 112–13 scholarship and publications, 101–3 ‘A Study of Primitive Character’, 103 ‘Tame Animals Among the Red Men’, 107–8 Thoughts, Talks and Tramps, 104 Timehri (journal), 102 India, 71–2 culture of, 75 elite Indians in, 89 folklore collections in, 74–5, 78–82, 85–90, 92 the ‘Great Mutiny’, 72, 76, 77 native women in, 73–4, 77 indigenous populations, 36–7 assimilation of, 21–3 and cannibalism, 200, 210–11 classification of, 56, 129–32, 225 determination of, 62–3 ‘disappearance’ of, 7–9, 14 essentialisation of, 223–4, 229 feminisation of, 183–4, 188 and genocide, 63 and hospitality, 136–7 infantilisation of, 183, 188 negroidisation of, 183 and nomadism, 8, 139–40 and pacification campaigns, 224 and polygamy, 135–6 simianisation of, 183–4 and stadial theory, 11, 22–3, 171

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theories of population decline, 202–7 and tribalism, 125, 130 see also individual countries infantilisation, 120–1, 122–3, 125, 130–2, 183, 188 Inglis, Brian, 178 Iraq see Mesopotamia Ireland, 176 Feis na nGleann, 182 and Irish nationalism, 170, 176, 178–80, 184–5 land ownership in, 185–6 racialisation of the population, 182–3 see also Celtic Revival Irish literary revival see Celtic Revival Jennings, Humphrey, 199 Jephson, A. Mountjoy, 174–5 Kabbani, Rana, 82–3, 85, 87 Keane, A.H., 56 Kiberd, Declan, 179, 183 Kingsley family, 12 Kroeber, Theodora, 13 Kuklick, Henrika, 11 Lamphere, Louise, 90 land ownership, 185–6 in the Congo, 185 in Fiji, 104–5 in Ireland, 185–6 in Mesopotamia, 138 in New Zealand, 22–3 and the Putumayo Indians, 185–6 and the Tasmanian Aboriginal population, 60–1 terra nullius, 138 Lane, Edward William

Arabian Nights or A Thousand and One Nights, 83–5, 87 Lang, Andrew, 49, 156 languages, 20–1, 29–31, 33–35, 52–3, 73, 208–9 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 189 Layard, John, 198 LeGuin, Ursula The Left Hand of Darkness, 232–3 Leiris, Michel L’Afrique Fantôme, 216 Lempkin, Raphaël, 63 Leopold II of Belgium, 173, 174, 177 Lever, William Hesketh, 215 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 230–1 Ling Roth, Henry, 5, 8, 10, 12–13, 42 Aboriginal vocabularies of, 52–3, 61 and Aboriginality, determination of, 62–3 and the Aborigines of Tasmania, 224–5 The Aborigines of Tasmania, 43–4, 45– 6, 47–51, 60–3 The Aborigines of Tasmania (second edition), 51–6, 57–8 family background and early career of, 44–5 map in The Aborigines of Tasmania, 53–4, 60 ‘On the Origin of Agriculture’, 45 readership and reviews, 47–51 Report on the Sugar Industry of Queensland, 44–5 writing and publications of, 43, 45–6 Locke, John Second Treatise of Civil Government, 138 Low, Hugh, 147 Lukitz, Liora, 128 Lyons, F.S.C., 180

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INDEX

Mabo v. the Commonwealth, 60–1 MacClancy, Jeremy, 214, 215–16 May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day – Surveys, 1937, 214 McClintock, Anne, 147–8 Macdonald, Sir Hector, 190 Macintyre, Stuart The History Wars, 62 McNeill, Ada, 182 Madge, Charles, 199, 212, 213–14 Malaya Aceh, 158 culture of, 151–3, 159, 161–2 elite of, 154–5, 159–61 European mining in, 154–5 Pahang, 147, 148–9, 153–6 Perak, 150 Selangor, 150 women in, 151–2 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 11, 209, 227–8 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 208–9 and Mass-Observation, 213–14, 217 Marcus, George E., 6–7 Martin, R. Montgomery, 9 Mass-Observation, 4–5, 197, 199, 212–16, 217–18, 228 and surrealism, 232–3 Meek, Ronald Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, 22 Mehta, Uday, 123 Melanesia, 200, 202–3, 207 see also New Hebrides (Vanuatu) Melman, Billie, 120–1 Mesopotamia Bedouins of, 121–2, 134–7 governance of, 119–22, 129–32, 137–42 land ownership in, 138 and lawlessness, 139–40 origin story of, 141–2

pre-Islamic era (Age of Ignorance), 134–5 Ukheidir, 133–4 war in present-day Iraq, 142 Mill, John Stuart Principles of Political Economy, 35–6 Milligan, Joseph, 53 Milne, James, 26–7, 32 Mortimer, Raymond, 212 Müller, Friedrich Max, 47–8, 49–50 Naithani, Sadhana, 81, 89 Narayan, Kirin, 78, 79–80, 81, 86–7, 89 negroidisation, 183 New Hebrides (Vanuatu), 197–211, 205 Big Nambas and cannibalism, 200, 210–11 culture of, 200–1, 205–6 depopulation of, 202–4 Espiritu Santo, 200 and the labour trade, 206–7 Matanavat, 200–1 Omba, 213–14 and Unilever, 215–16 warfare in, 204 ‘yellow presence’ in, 207 New Zealand land ownership in, 22–3 Māoris, 21–3, 28–31, 34 nomadism, 8, 139–40 Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands (British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Anthropologtical Institute), 8–9 Orientalism, 81, 83–6, 121, 132 Orwell, George The Road to Wigan Pier, 212, 217

246

WRITING, TRAVEL, AND EMPIRE

Parry, Benita, 75 Peires, Jeff, 32 Pels, Peter, 3–4 philology, 24–7, 33 see also languages photography, 56–8, 111–12, 227 and archaeology, 132–3 Plomley, N.J.B. Bibliography of the Tasmanian Aborigines, 58 postcolonial studies, 6 Prichard, James Cowles, 7–9, 25–8 The Natural History of Man, 27 and racism, 27–8 Researches in the History of Mankind, 26 Quinn, John, 169 racism, 27–8, 159–61 see also stadial theory; taxonomy Radcliffe Brown, A.R., 11 Ramanujan, A.K., 73, 78, 80 Ratuva, Steven, 105 religion Christianity, 30 monogenism, 25–6, 27–8 Society of Friends (Quakers), 51–2 of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population, 50 Reynolds, Henry, 60–1 Richards, Thomas, 81–2 Rivers, W.H.R., 206–7 Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia, 105–6, 202–3 and fieldwork, 207–8 History of Melanesian Society, 207 Roberts, S.H. Population Problems of the Pacific, 202–3 Robins, Elizabeth Alan’s Wife (with Florence Eveleen

Bell), 125–6 Robinson, George Augustus, 46 Roff, William, 150 Romanticism, 24 Roth family, the, 12–13 Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), 8–9, 11 Rubiés, Joan Pau, 107 Ryan, Lyndall The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 59 St John, Spenser, 154 Saunders, Rebecca, 91–2 Sawyer, Roger, 176 Schacker-Mill, Jennifer, 83–5 sciences, 10 botany, 10 ethnology, 10 medicine, 10–11 ornithology, 197–8 social, 228 Sharpe, Jenny, 77 simianisation, 183–4 Smith, Adam The Wealth of Nations, 22 South Africa, 31–4 Cape Colony wars, 31–4 language collection in, 32 Xhosa people, 31–4 stadial theory, 11, 22–3, 171 Stanley, Henry Morton, 173–4 Stanton, Gareth, 200 Steel, Flora Annie, 5, 8, 13, 70, 225–6, 231 The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (with Grace Gardiner), 76–7 criticism of, 77 family background and education of, 71 fiction of, 76–7 and folktale collecting, 73, 74–5, 78–80, 85–8, 90

247

INDEX

From the Five Rivers, 75–6 The Garden of Fidelity, 73, 74, 76, 77 illustration for ‘Sir Buzz’, 80 in India, 72–7 and Indian culture, 75 and Indian women, 73–4, 77 ‘Lâl’, 75 marriage and children, 72–3 and native languages, 73 On the Face of the Waters, 72, 75, 76, 77 publications of, 75–7, 91–2 Tales of the Punjab (Wide-Awake Stories), 73, 74–5, 78–82, 85–8, 90 Voices of the Night, 76 Steel, Henry William, 71 Stepan, Nancy, 25–6 Stocking, George, 9, 14 History of Anthropology (series), 2–3 Stockwell, Tony, 161, 162 Stokes, John Lort (‘A Naval Officer’) Discoveries in Australia, 27 ‘Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle on a Survey of the Coast of Australia’, 23 surrealism, 214–17, 227 and ethnography, 216, 217 and Mass-Observation, 232–3 Swettenham, Frank, 150–3 ‘British Rule in Malaya’, 161 ‘Getting into Harness’, 150 ‘James Wheeler Woodford Birch’, 152–3 ‘The Passing of Penglima Prang Semaun’, 151 ‘A Personal Incident’, 148 ‘The Real Malay’, 151, 153 ‘A Silver-Point’, 152 Tagore, Rabindranath, 89 Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC), 61–2

Tasmanian Aboriginal Information Service, 61–2 Tasmanian Aboriginal population, 46– 7, 49–51, 224–5 determination of Aboriginality, 59– 60, 61–3 land rights for, 60–1 languages of, 52–3 and photography, 56–8 population figures for, 53–4, 60 and religion, 50 Smith, Fanny Cochrane, 54–6, 55, 57–8, 62 survival of, 59–60 Truganini, 46, 55, 56, 57–8 Taussig, Michael, 176 Tayler, Donald ‘“Very loveable human beings”: The photography of Everard im Thurn’, 111–12 taxonomy, 56, 129–32, 225 Temple, R.C., 75, 85–7 The Legends of the Panjâb, 87–9 Thomas, Nicholas, 3–4 Thousand and One Nights, A (Arabian Nights), 82–5 travel writing, 4–7, 12–14, 48–9, 107 tribalism, 125, 130 Tylor, E.B., 156 Unilever, 215 United Irishmen, the, 180 United States of America indigenous peoples of, 138 and the war in Iraq, 142 Van Diemen’s Land see Tasmanian Aboriginal population Vanuatu see New Hebrides (Vanuatu) Venezuela (Roraima), 99–100

248

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Wik decision, 61 Windschuttle, Keith and determination of Aboriginality, 62–3 The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume I. Van Diemen’s Land, 60–1 women and anthropology, 13, 90–1, 225–6, 231

and motherhood, 127–8 and philanthropy, 125–9 and reproduction, 126 travellers, 120–1, 128 working-class, 125–7 Woolf, Virginia Three Guineas, 124 World War I, 106 Yeats, W.B., 183–4, 190