Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents, and Agency in Melanesia 1870s-1930s 9780857456915

Citation preview

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page i

HUNTING THE GATHERERS

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page ii

Methodology and History in Anthropology General Editor: David Parkin, Director of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford Volume 1 Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute. Edited by Wendy James and N.J. Allen Volume 2 Franz Baerman Steiner: Selected Writings. Volume I: Taboo, Truth and Religion. Franz B. Steiner. Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 3 Franz Baerman Steiner. Selected Writings. Volume II: Orientalism, Value, and Civilisation. Franz B. Steiner. Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 4 The Problem of Context: Perspectives from Social Anthropology and Elsewhere. Edited by Roy Dilley Volume 5 Religion in English Everyday Life. By Timothy Jenkins Volume 6 Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s. Edited by Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch Volume 7 Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research. Edited by Paul Dresch, Wendy James and David Parkin Volume 8 Categories and Classifications: Maussian Reflections on the Social. By N.J. Allen

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page iii

HUNTING THE GATHERERS ETHNOGRAPHIC COLLECTORS, AGENTS AND AGENCY IN MELANESIA, 1870s–1930s

Edited by Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page iv

First published in 2000 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2000 Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berghahn Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hunting the gatherers : ethnographic collectors, agents and agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s / edited by Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch p. cm. -- (Methodology and history in anthropology ; v. 6) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57181-811-1 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Ethnological museums and collections--History. 2. Museums--Acquisitions--Melanesia--History. 3. Ethnology-Melanesia--Field work. 4. Material culture--Melanesia. 5. Collectors and collecting--Melanesia--History. 6. Melanesia-Antiquities--Collection and preservation. I. O’Hanlon, Michael. II. Welsch, Robert Louis, 1950- III. Series. GN35.H86 2000 069'.5'0995--dc21 00-045484 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN-1-57181-811-1 hardback

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page v

For Linda, Miriam and Sarah

Canoes, Kaiserin Augusta River, German New Guinea, 1908.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page vi

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page vii

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Notes on contributors

xiii

Preface

xvii

1.

Introduction Michael O’Hanlon

2.

Gathering for God: George Brown and the Christian Economy in the Collection of Artefacts Helen Gardner

35

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture: Commercialising Ethnography in German New Guinea, 1870–1904 Rainer Buschmann

55

3.

4.

5.

‘Before it has Become too Late’: The Making and Repatriation of Sir William MacGregor’s Official Collection from British New Guinea Michael Quinnell Surveying Culture: Photography, Collecting and Material Culture in British New Guinea, 1898 Elizabeth Edwards

1

81

103

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page viii

viii

Contents

6.

Collecting Pygmies: the ‘Tapiro’ and the British Ornithologists’ Union Expedition to Dutch New Guinea, 1910–1911 127 Chris Ballard

7.

One Time, One Place, Three Collections: Colonial Processes and the Shaping of Some Museum Collections from German New Guinea Robert L. Welsch

8.

The Careless Collector: Malinowski and the Antiquarians Michael W. Young

9.

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow: A Paradigm Shift from Physical Anthropology to Art Styles Christian Kaufmann

10.

On His Todd: Material Culture and Colonialism Chris Gosden

11.

Reverse Trajectories: Beatrice Blackwood as Collector and Anthropologist Chantal Knowles

12.

Index

Epilogue Nicholas Thomas

155

181

203

227

251

273

279

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page ix

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures Frontispiece

1.1

2.1

2.2 3.1 4.1

4.2

Canoes, Kaiserin Augusta River, German New Guinea, Dorsey Collection, 1908. Negative no. CSA27828c. © The Field Museum, Chicago. Artefacts (eel trap, storage containers, shields) lined up for sale outside gateway to fieldworker’s house, Wahgi Valley, Papua New Guinea, 1990. © M. O’Hanlon. The sample of shell money (Divara/Diwarra) sent by Brown to Tylor (1977.4.1). (It was not entered into the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum until 1977 when it was found among Tylor’s correspondence.) © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Waruwarum, three wives and a son, photographed by George Brown. ©George Brown/Nature Focus. Artefacts from ‘Matty’. In von Luschan (1895a). ‘Fishing Kite used by Natives of Dobu’. Illustration from MacGregor’s final annual report for British New Guinea (1897–98) Plates I–II. Senator the Hon. Bob McMullan, Australian Minister for the Arts, and the Hon. Bernard Narakobi MP, Chairman of the Papua New Guinea Museum Board of Trustees, at the official handover of the MacGregor collection, 29 October 1993. Jeff Wright/Queensland Museum. © Queensland Museum.

v

17

36 40 68

92

98

O'Hanlon/Welsh

x

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page x

List of Illustrations

5.1

Making the shell armlet, Port Moresby. From a dry gelatin plate negative by Wilkin and/or Haddon, 1898. CUMAAPC Pap.C.D.81. © Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. 5.2 Houses at Zaria, Yule Island. From a dry gelatin plate negative by Wilkin and/or Haddon, 1898. CUMAAPC Pap.C.D. 33. © Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. 5.3–5.4 Demonstrating pottery making, Ballantine’s compound, Port Moresby. From a dry gelatin plate negative by Wilkin and/or Haddon, 1898. CUMAAPC Pap.C.D. 101 and 102. © Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. 5.5 The dance at Babaka. From a dry gelatin plate negative by Wilkin and/or Haddon, 1898. CUMAAPC Pap.C.D. 205. © Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. 5.6 Demonstrating raising a pile, Hula. From a dry gelatin plate negative by Wilkin and/or Haddon, 1898. CUMAAPC Pap.C.D. 216. © Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. 6.1

6.2 7.1

7.2

7.3

8.1

‘A group of Tapiro pygmies standing in front of the tallest of their houses’. Source: Rawling 1913: facing p.250. ‘Plainsmen and Pygmies’. Source: Rawling 1913: facing p.268. Landing from a boat, German New Guinea, Dorsey Collection, 1908. Negative no. CSA27810c. © The Field Museum, Chicago. Magem men with skull and steel axe, Dorsey Collection, 1908. Negative no. CSA27210c. © The Field Museum, Chicago. Magem men, Kaiserin Augusta River, German New Guinea, Dorsey Collection, 1908. Negative no. CSA27795c. © The Field Museum, Chicago. Trobriand dancers with kaidebu (dance shields), photographed by B. Malinowski 1915. Ref. No. 233/13. © H.Wayne.

107

108

109

111

114

144 144

166

174

174

189

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page xi

List of Illustrations

8.2

10.1

11.1

11.2

xi

Hancock, Malinowski (centre) and Toguguwa with betel-chewing utensils. Malinowski holds kula valuable with Pandanus streamers over his left arm. Possibly photographed at Gusaweta, 2 January 1918. Ref. No. B XVIII 1. © H.Wayne. 193 Advertisement for imported tinned and other foods from Australia, from the Official Handbook of the Territory of New Guinea, 1937 (p. xxiii). 242 Examiners and students for the Oxford Diploma in Anthropology, 1910. Left to right (back row): Wilson D. Wallis, Diamond Jenness, and Maurice Barbeau; (front row) Henry Balfour (Curator, Pitt Rivers Museum), Arthur Thomson (Professor of Anatomy), and R. R. Marett (Reader in Social Anthropology). © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. 254 ‘Things to get if possible’: part of Blackwood’s ‘shopping list’ from Balfour, which was entered at the back of her diary. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. 257

Tables 7.1

7.2 7.3 9.1 9.2

10.1

Number of catalogue numbers from each locality in the Dorsey, Voogdt, and Umlauff collections (The Field Museum, Chicago). Catalogue numbers with uncertain provenances. Catalogue numbers with vague or general provenances. Speiser’s selecting and grouping of object types. Speiser’s matrix of cultural elements from the New Hebrides, the Banks and Torres Islands. From Speiser 1991[1923]: 403–4. What Todd took from New Guinea, in comparison to other collectors.

168 170 171 216

218 237

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page xii

xii

List of Illustrations

Maps 1

Melanesia 1870s –1930s

7

2

British New Guinea (Papua)

14

3

German New Guinea (Mandated Territory of New Guinea)

62

4

BOU expedition to Dutch New Guinea, 1910–1911

138

5

New Hebrides, Banks and Torres Islands (early twentieth century)

209

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page xiii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

CHRIS BALLARD is Research Fellow in the interdisciplinary project on Resource Management in Asia-Pacific, part of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, at the Australian National University, Canberra. His current research addresses issues of land rights and human rights in eastern Indonesia, and he has previously published articles and edited collections on archaeology, history, mining and anthropology in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. RAINER BUSCHMANN is Assistant Professor of History at Hawai’i Pacific University where he has recently completed a thesis on ‘The German Ethnographic Frontier in New Guinea, 1885–1914’. He is also the editor of a special issue of the Journal of the Pacific Arts Association on early German ethnography in the Pacific. ELIZABETH EDWARDS is Curator of Photographs at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, where she teaches the history and theory of still photography in anthropology. Her primary research interests are in the relation between anthropology and photography, including the history of photographic collections and the historiographical theory of photography. She was editor of Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1960 (1992) and has written extensively on photography in the Pacific. HELEN GARDNER’s research interests include the relationship between Pacific colonisation and Christian missions, and the links between nineteenth-century anthropologists and Christian missions. Her Ph.D thesis, ‘Cultures, Christians and Colonial Subjects: George Brown’s Representations of Islanders from Samoa and the Bismarck Archipelago’, has recently been accepted.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

xiv

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page xiv

Notes on Contributors

CHRIS GOSDEN is Lecturer-Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. He has held teaching positions in both the UK and Australia, and has research interests in Papua New Guinea, Oxfordshire and Turkmenistan. His recent works include Anthropology and Archaeology: A Changing Relationship (1999), and The Prehistory of Food, co-edited with J. Hather (1999). CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN is Curator of Oceanic Collections at the Museum der Kulturen, Basel. He did his Ph.D (1969) under Alfred Bühler, combining museum anthropology with field ethnography (fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu). His exhibitions include the major Arts of Vanuatu, which was shown in Port Vila and in Basel, and his publications include the catalogue of that exhibition, and also Oceanic Art (co-authored with A.L. Kaeppler and D. Newton, 1997). CHANTAL KNOWLES is a Research Assistant at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, where – with Chris Gosden – she is currently working on a major project on material culture and colonialism in German New Guinea, and has recently embarked upon doctoral research on Melanesian cultural centres. MICHAEL O’HANLON is Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. He has carried out extensive fieldwork with the Wahgi people in Highland New Guinea. His books include Paradise: Portraying the New Guinea Highlands (1993) and The Anthropology of Landscape, co-edited with Eric Hirsch (1995). MICHAEL QUINNELL is a Senior Curator at the Queensland Museum, Brisbane. His collection and research focus is now on the kastom and material culture of Queensland’s Torres Strait Islander and Australian South Sea Islander communities. Other interests include repatriation and the social history of Queensland’s colonial and postcolonial interaction with its Melanesian neighbours. NICHOLAS THOMAS has written extensively on art, history and anthropology in the Pacific. His recent publications include Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (1999) and a collaboration with the New Zealand photographer, Mark Adams, entitled Cook’s Sites: Revisiting History (1999). Nicholas Thomas is Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. ROBERT L. WELSCH is Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire and Adjunct Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum, Chicago. A specialist on the art

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Notes on Contributors

Page xv

xv

and material culture of Melanesia and Indonesia, he has conducted fieldwork among the Ningerum of Papua New Guinea, the Mandar of South Sulawesi, and along the Sepik coast of Papua New Guinea. He is the author of An American Anthropologist in Melanesia: A.B. Lewis and the Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition, 1909–1913 (1998). MICHAEL W. YOUNG is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, in the Australian National University, Canberra. His latest book is Malinowski’s Kiriwina: Fieldwork and Photography, 1915–18 (1998), and he is currently working on a definitive biography of Malinowski.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page xvi

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page xvii

PREFACE

For an edited collection, this book has been produced with reasonable despatch. We hope that this has been done without showing too many signs of speed, but the process has undoubtedly accrued at least the usual number of debts. The volume was originally conceived in mid-1998, at a supper party given by Jane and Chris Gosden and attended by a number of the contributors, where sufficient alcohol was on offer to make one of the editors forget his vow never again to edit a collection. That autumn, the editors circulated to the contributors an orienting document which raised the range of issues that their papers might address, and in April 1999 a Colloquium was held in Oxford at which initial drafts of the papers were presented. That Colloquium was a joint initiative of the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research in Canberra, to whose then Director, Nicholas Thomas, both the editors are grateful for support and encouragement. Like all such events, the Colloquium lent heavily for both intellectual and practical assistance on many whose help is reflected only indirectly in the resulting volume. Ian Coates, Clare Harris, John Mack, Laura Peers, and Helena Wayne generously gave their time and insights as formal discussants, and the invited audience more generally constituted an unusually coherent and knowledgeable body. Bodies need marshalling and provisioning, and the editors would like to thank Vicky Barnecutt, Ina Barnes, Sue Brooks and Fran Knight for their help making the event work as well as it did. The editors also wish especially to acknowledge the support of first the British Academy in funding two of the overseas participants to the Colloquium; and second Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, whose head – David Parkin – did the considerable fur-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

xviii

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page xviii

Preface

ther service of putting the editors in touch with Berghahn Books and suggesting that the papers would be an appropriate addition to the series he edits. Much of the subsequent work in the preparation of the papers was done via email attachment, and the editors are grateful here to Haas Ezzet of the Pitt Rivers Museum, who provided swift and effective aid whenever technical problems were encountered. The entire effort of ensuring that the papers were standardised in a common format fell to Linda Frankland, from whose anthropological expertise and rigour the volume has also greatly benefited, and to Alison Hodge, to whose light but meticulous copy-editing we are all grateful. Finally, we would like to thank David Sansom for drawing the maps, and Mark Daniels for seeing the whole thing through in record time. Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch Oxford, April 2000

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 1

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION Michael O’Hanlon

The Ethnography of Collecting: from Obscurity to Obloquy In a brave estimate, subsequently much cited, Sturtevant (1969: 640) hazarded that there might be four and a half million ethnographic artefacts in the world’s museums. This figure, which now seems to beg the definition of ‘ethnographic’ (though Sturtevant actually used the term ‘ethnological’) was probably an underestimate in 1969, and is certainly so more than thirty years later.1 But Sturtevant’s estimate does have the merit of highlighting the disparity between its order of magnitude and what remains our very uneven knowledge of the detailed processes and transactions through which so many artefacts came to be in museums, and of the subsequent museum careers of those collections.2 The reflexive attention which has recently been devoted to fieldwork on the one hand, and to the making of ethnographic exhibitions on the other, has only fitfully illuminated the process of making ethnographic collections themselves. To suggest that the ethnography of field collecting remains relatively unscrutinised is not to minimise the exhaustive attention recently devoted to collecting more generally as a practice characteristic of Western modernity, if not pathology. As such, collecting has been viewed variously as the outcome of processes of metropolitan identity formation, of a compulsion to classify, or as an aspect of material consumption (see, e.g., Clifford 1988: 220; Penny 1998; Elsner and Cardinal 1994; Belk 1995). Nor, of course, is it to deny the significance of material culture in anthropology’s own history. For reasons

O'Hanlon/Welsh

2

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 2

Michael O’Hanlon

which Stocking (1985: 114) has cogently summarised, artefacts originally occupied a key place there. Indeed, as Gardner observes in this book, the lack of attention which has been paid to the process of field collecting is partly a consequence of an earlier anthropology’s view of artefacts as self-sufficient scientific specimens, which required no commentary as to the political and economic circumstances in which they had been gathered. With the ascendancy of functionalism in anthropology, artefacts lost the privileged place which they had once occupied in the discipline’s theorising (though as Young shows in his chapter, Malinowski – functionalism’s most noted exponent – himself made extensive collections of material culture, even if he also tended subsequently to mislay them). The intellectual eclipse of artefacts,3 and hence of any great curiosity about how they were collected, lasted half a century. By the 1980s, however, a sea change within the discipline once more turned artefacts into objects of anthropological interest. One reason for this was the discipline’s renewed concern with its own history, and thus with the period in which artefacts had occupied a position of preeminence; a second lay in the extension of anthropological interest to Western institutions, and hence to ethnographic museums and their contents. Intersecting with both of these, even if it drew initially on intellectual movements beyond anthropology, was the discipline’s growing interest in representation, especially in issues of power and equity. A series of analyses, of which Price’s (1989) is perhaps the best known and most trenchant, did now focus upon the processes of ethnographic collecting, but if collecting had emerged from obscurity, its primary identity became one of obloquy (see, e.g., Torgovnick 1990: 125; Lawson 1994: x; Jones 1996). At its starkest, museum collections came to be viewed as the last colonial captives, and field collecting purely as their abduction. And in some cases, this is brutally apt. In this book, Buschmann provides the bleakest account, analysing as he does the years at the close of the nineteenth century when commercial companies turned to collecting as a source of income, and the devastating consequences for the islanders of Wuvulu and Aua in German New Guinea. But even as the image of collecting as obloquy was consolidated, there were also indications – sometimes from the same writers (see, e.g., Price 1992) – that field collecting at other times and in other places was more diverse an activity and more fertile a topic than was allowed by equating it with dispossession alone. While acknowledging the encompassing power of colonial processes more generally, Thomas (1991: Chapter 3), for example, demonstrated that the terms on which ethnographic artefacts were acquired did not always and everywhere reflect colonial agendas alone. In certain ‘sacrificial’ Melanesian economies, the sale

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 3

3

of artefacts appears to have been an intentional feat of ‘riddance’, an alternative to rendering them absent through casting them into the bush to rot as the culmination to the ritual process (Kuchler 1997: 39). Consequently, collections held in museums may incorporate aspects of local agency which are overlooked if the sole identity allowed to such collections is that of artefactual abductees (O’Hanlon 1993: 60). The making of collections can also precipitate illuminating reenactments of local culture, as Myers observed a century ago (Herle 1998: 95); indeed, far more of the ethnographic material in the world’s museums than was previously suspected may have been made specifically for sale to them (Torrence 1993: 468). The ethnography of collecting is also a fruitful topic in ways which extend beyond merely counterposing it to a unidimensional popular stereotype of dispossession and cultural obliteration. Ethnographic collecting was diversely implicated in colonial processes more generally, and consequently has the capacity to illuminate both overt and unconsidered features of colonialism. Quinnell’s account (this book) of the ‘official’ collecting personally undertaken by Sir William MacGregor, the Lieutenant-Governor of British New Guinea, is one instance, but there were less direct examples. Schildkrout and Keim (1998: 5), for instance, have observed how in the Congolese case: ‘The exchange of objects between Africans and Europeans... created an arena in which material objects could be used to define African ethnicity and culture... It is in the search for labels for artefacts that much of the contemporary map of Central Africa was created’. Ethnographic collecting was also implicated in colonial processes to the extent that colonial society provided the framework through which collectors (whether officials, missionaries, traders or museum curators) necessarily operated. As Lawson (1994: x) has noted, the colonial context in which ethnographic collecting was conducted is a source of potential richness, not weakness, insofar as it ‘reveals the historically contingent, intercultural relations that made collecting possible’ (a point developed most originally in this book in Gosden’s examination of the artefacts which the anthropologist-collector Todd took to the field). Scrutiny of the ethnography of collecting also allows the intellectual agendas of collectors to be related to the content of the collections they made. Jones (1995), for example, has shown how the zeal with which Whites came to collect tjurunga reflected their growing belief that these objects were the key necessary to unlock the inner secrets of Aboriginal religion. As Jones (1995: 67) points out, there were two corollaries to this: the definition of Aboriginal culture as timeless and unchanging by reference to these artefacts and, later, the supposition that Aboriginal attachment to tjurunga was necessarily so strong that any European acquisition of these objects can only have been a form of

O'Hanlon/Welsh

4

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 4

Michael O’Hanlon

theft. Mack (1990: 66, 75) furnishes an example of a different kind of selectivity in his account of the Kuba collection which Torday made in the Congo for the British Museum. Mack shows how Torday’s enchantment with Kuba kingship, and his belief that the Kuba were the highest and most ancient civilisation in this part of Africa, inflected the Hungarian’s collecting, leading him to downplay traditions such as mask-making which he considered to be recent innovations. If the ethnography of collecting has the potential to throw light upon unconsidered aspects of local agency, without losing sight of either broader colonial processes or the effect of collectors’ own agendas, it can also illuminate the ethnography of the metropolitan museums where the collections are so often held. In his account of the development of natural history museums during the nineteenth century, and their influence on American anthropology, Jenkins (1994: 253–5) has noted how little attention has been devoted to what he calls the ‘impulse for archival control’ over collections. The corollary to the massive ethnographic collections made in the decades that bracketed the turn of that century was the creation of elaborate museum procedures to classify, draw and otherwise produce paper counterparts to each object (see also Bouquet and Branco 1988). An ethnography of collecting that traces artefacts from field to museum provokes the question of the extent to which indigenous categories on the one hand, and collectors’ classifications on the other hand, are expunged by such archival systems, dedicated as they are to producing the uniform ‘paper objects’ (today, virtual objects) whose manipulation makes up much museum work. The counterpart to uncovering indigenous agency frozen in museum collections is the delineation of how such agency has also been overwritten by museum documentary culture, the subject of Welsch’s chapter. Equally, the terms on which ethnographic collecting was originally done have emerged as a focal issue in debates surrounding the question of returning artefacts to the peoples (or, more often, the countries) from which they originally derived. As earlier suggested, after half a century during which they were shunned as an academic resource – and were not always of greater interest to the modernising agendas of newly independent nations – ethnographic collections have since come to be seen as incarcerated sources of indigenous identity. Here a focus on the ethnography of collecting has the potential for historicising present debates, both through depicting the three-cornered contest between the claims of indigenous communities, ‘salvage’ anthropology and commerce, and in raising the issue of where such collections belong. The chapters by Gardner and by Quinnell set two high-profile recent debates over restitution in the context of the longue durée of earlier collecting by Brown and MacGregor respectively.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 5

Introduction

5

But suggestive though they are individually, the published examples of the potential of collecting as a topic are in the main culled from diverse sources. They are also difficult to cross-relate, because they are not developed systematically in relation to a specific region. The intention of the papers in this book is to retrieve ethnographic collecting from what has become a selective identification with dispossession, and to reinvest it with its potential to illuminate a variety of processes over a particular time frame, within a delimited ethnographic area and through the lens of specific collectors.

Period, Place and People Why select the period from the 1870s to the 1930s as the focus for a study of ethnographic collecting? These years represented, of course, the apogee of imperial expansion, with the concomitant opportunity to collect directly from new colonial territories. But more than that, the period was one for much of which ‘knowledge itself was thought of as embodied in objects’ (Stocking 1985: 114). Both evolutionism and diffusionism, the two main anthropological theories which preceded the functionalist revolution of the 1920s, allocated a central role to artefacts as data – all the more so since anthropology then took as its subject matter peoples who lacked other material evidence of their past such as written histories. Whether a particular culture possessed a given category of artefact was thought to be of considerable significance in determining the evolutionary stage which that society had reached; or, conversely, in tracing the linkages through which a given technology had historically diffused to it. The pivotal role of artefacts in anthropological theory of the time did not go entirely unchallenged. It was in part Boas’s growing dissatisfaction with the capacity of artefacts to represent culture as a whole which led him to quit his post in the American Museum of Natural History in 1905 (Jacknis 1985); again, in 1911, Rivers had contrasted what he argued to be the unreliability of artefacts as indices of the past with what he held to be the enduring nature of social structure (Stocking 1995: 203ff.). In this book, Ballard – who examines the ‘collection’ of Tapiro ‘pygmies’ – shows how material culture played a subordinate role to height in the constitution by Whites of ‘pygmyhood’; more generally, Ballard also cautions that ‘if artefact collections provided a useful tool in the production of knowledge about colonial subjects, they did so within a broader context supplied by loosely formulated but nevertheless powerful narratives of racial difference’. Artefacts nevertheless still retained a position, albeit a swiftly waning one, in diffusionist work of the 1920s (Stocking 1985: 8).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

6

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 6

Michael O’Hanlon

If the salience of artefacts to anthropological theory over this period lends an especial interest to ethnographic collecting, it is also important to emphasise that collecting itself did not, of course, cease thereafter: it merely changed its significance. Anthropologists engaged on the single-culture studies ordained by the new functionalism continued to make artefact collections, but these were now circumscribed in theoretical terms. Where formerly artefacts had spoken to the broader (if misconceived) comparative schemes of evolutionists and diffusionists, they now tended to be regarded as relevant largely to the anthropologist’s specifically local findings. Ethnographic collections became, in a sense, privatised. There is a close parallel to be drawn here with field photography. In her rich chapter, Edwards observes how, around the same time, photographs too ‘entered what one might describe as the private domain and became specific to individual fieldwork’. More general parallels between the making of collections of ethnographic artefacts and the practice of photography struck others, including some of the collectors. Young records Malinowski’s bracketing of the two as ‘secondary occupations’. Both photography and collecting came to be regarded as subordinate modes of documentation, discussion of which was generally limited to the essentially technical problems they were seen to pose (the kind of camera to use, or appropriate modes of labelling and packing artefacts). If a combination of imperial circumstance and intellectual currents lends to the period 1870s to 1930s a natural unity for a study of ethnographic collecting, can an equivalent case be made for restricting such a study to Melanesia? In one respect, it might seem perverse to limit discussion to any single region, when massive ethnographic collecting was so obviously concurrently taking place throughout the world, and the intellectual issues raised in one part of the globe were immediately applied elsewhere. For example, Ballard shows how the existence of ‘pygmies’ in New Guinea was essentially pre-scripted by an enduring fascination with short-statured peoples in the literature on African exploration. A focus upon Melanesia might seem doubly odd when the legitimacy of distinguishing such a region in the first place has been sharply called into question (Thomas 1989). Indeed, the chapters in this book shows how material culture, and the making of collections, were themselves implicated in attempts to define the region. It was precisely the fact that the first artefacts brought back from the islands of Wuvulu and Aua yet seemed atypical for Melanesia that sparked interest in the islands by traders and collectors, with the terrible consequences for the inhabitants described by Buschmann. But while acknowledging that ethnographic collecting was a worldwide phenomenon, and that ‘Melanesia’ itself is a problematic construct, there are also strengths in taking a regional focus. Knauft

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Map 1: Melanesia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

O'Hanlon/Welsh Page 7

7

O'Hanlon/Welsh

8

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 8

Michael O’Hanlon

(1999: 6–7) has recently made this point at a general level, in observing that regional studies can supply a combination of breadth and depth offered by neither of the polar opposites of ‘global’ or ‘local’ perspectives. We might also suggest that there is likely to be an added resonance to studying ethnographic collecting in an area such as Melanesia, in that social life there is renowned for being constituted through material transactions. This last point emerges in its richest form in Gardner’s chapter, dealing as it does with the collection made by George Brown in a part of Melanesia in which competition for local prestige revolves around the acquisition and deployment of shell money. The artefacts that Brown collected were partly accumulated in transactions designed to demonstrate the missionary’s goodwill to local people. But Brown found himself drawn into other kinds of material transaction, making compensation payments in a distinctly Melanesian style. Brown’s Christian faith was a further complexity. On the one hand, local people treated it as an item of trade like any other cult practice, selling on hymns and prayers in return for shell money. On the other hand, Brown himself viewed transactions through Christian spectacles which laid great stress on the ideal of the freely given gift. It was in these terms that he chose to interpret the artefacts and food offered him by local people on his departure, as a testament to the success of his mission. Period, place: what of the people, the collectors themselves? In one respect, of course, it misrepresents the facts to speak of them as ‘collectors’, for few of the individuals involved regarded themselves primarily as such, despite Dorsey’s observation in 1908 that ‘Every man’s house here is a Museum’ (Welsch’s chapter). But a biographical focus does have the advantage of bringing into the same frame of reference both the peoples among whom the collecting was originally done, and the metropolitan institutions in which the collections were subsequently lodged. The individuals focused upon have also been selected so as to represent both a range of types of collector and as wide a regional coverage as possible. Missionaries and museum officials, anthropologists and administrators, naturalist-explorers and ships’ captains are all included, and the areas in which they were active range from the then Dutch New Guinea to the New Hebrides, and from the Papuan Gulf to the Bismarck Archipelago. A further coherence arises from the way in which the lives of the collectors under consideration also intersected with each other. So, for example, Gardner records how George Brown travels to southeast Papua with the subject of Quinnell’s chapter, Sir William MacGregor, whom Brown observed was ‘an indefatigable collector... and all who sail with him are expected to do their best to pick up something’. Later, as Quinnell relates, the Director of the Queensland Museum, where

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 9

Introduction

9

MacGregor’s own collection has been stored, hopes to secure the services in cataloguing it of Malinowski, on whom Young focuses. As Young chronicles, Malinowski had earlier expressed his private fury at being visited in the field by Haddon, the subject of Edwards’ chapter. Equally, Haddon’s view that ‘pygmies’ constituted New Guinea’s primordial population both draws upon and shapes the work of Wollaston, upon whom Ballard concentrates. Again, Blackwood (the subject of Knowles’s chapter) meets Speiser (on whom Kaufmann concentrates) on Buka, and arranges an artefact exchange with him; later, on her second fieldtrip to Melanesia, she feels it necessary to apologise to Todd (whose collecting Gosden details) for ‘poaching’ on ‘his’ preserve. In thinking about the sets of questions posed by an attempt to recover collecting as a topic, it is useful organisationally to distinguish broadly between what might be called its ‘before’ (the theoretical baggage which collectors took with them, and their institutional arrangements), the ‘scene of collecting’ (the processes of making collections, their content, and issues of local agency and impact) and the ‘after’ of collecting (the fate of collections once made, and their museum lives). I make loose use of this framework in what follows, in which I consider the questions raised and look at the extent to which they are interrelated, modified and answered by the contributors’ chapters.

The ‘Before’ of Collecting While the intellectual currents – evolutionism, diffusionism, later on functionalism – sketched above were variously espoused, repudiated and ignored by the collectors represented in this volume, what united many of the earlier among them was a scientific education. MacGregor and Wollaston were both trained as medical doctors, and Speiser had completed a doctorate in chemistry: indeed, as Kaufmann shows, Speiser drew on molecular chemistry for his notion of ‘cultural complexes’ which he saw as compounds of specific cultural – and material cultural – elements. Speiser was also influenced by his maternal uncle, a zoologist, and others too had a background in natural history. This is, of course, most evident in the case of Haddon who was trained as a zoologist, and who explicitly applied the notion of ‘life histories’ to the designs on artefacts, but George Brown, too, devoted considerable time during his earlier missionary years in Samoa to the study of ornithology. Consequently, such individuals saw natural history and ethnography as part of a continuum, and it is important to recall that their collections of the former were often as large, if not larger, than those of the latter. It was alleged of Brown (albeit by a rival collector keen to discredit him) that he ‘cared more about his name being given to a new

O'Hanlon/Welsh

10

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 10

Michael O’Hanlon

snake, bird, or insect than he did for all the souls of the New Britain people put together’ (Gardner’s chapter); equally, MacGregor’s ire when he found that Joe Fiji (his private collector) had eaten the first example of a new species of lark discovered on Mt. Victoria became a much-told story among residents of British New Guinea (Quinnell’s chapter). The notion that natural and sociocultural data should be considered within a common frame of reference is one of the underpinning ideas of evolutionism. But while many of the earlier collectors featured in this book broadly accepted evolutionary ideas (which were themselves evolving), they seldom did so in any very simple sense. Gardner’s chapter nicely encapsulates some of the complexities. While Brown was a missionary, the Unitarianism in which he was raised saw science as complementary to faith rather than as a threat, and the same was true to a lesser extent of the Methodism to which Brown later converted. Evolutionism was debated in the evangelical journals to which Brown subscribed, but he found that the distribution of such artefacts as pottery, bows and arrows and shell money did not conform to the orthodoxy that Polynesia was at a higher evolutionary level than Melanesia. At one point, Brown was prompted to send the Oxford anthropologist E.B. Tylor an example of divara, shell money from New Britain, something which in evolutionary terms ought not to be found there, since the Samoans of Polynesia – with whom Brown had earlier resided – had no medium of exchange which could easily be glossed as ‘money’. As Gardner records, Tylor thanks Brown for his gift which contrasted ‘remarkably with the general rude condition of these islanders’ and asks ‘whether there was any evidence of their having learned currency and interest from Malay traders’. Equally, it would be wrong to think of the later collectors represented in this volume as unambiguously repudiating evolutionary beliefs. Long after his Trobriand fieldwork was over, Malinowski wrote that while he was ‘indifferent to the problems of origins’, ‘I still believe in evolution’ (cited in Kuper 1983: 9). He did not see his functionalism as the antithesis of evolutionism, so much as providing a sound basis for reconstructing evolutionary processes for anyone interested in doing so. And even if material culture no longer occupied the same central evidential role as it had earlier done, a ‘salvage’ paradigm – the notion that artefacts had to be collected ‘before it has become too late’ – underlay much of the later as well as the earlier collecting described in the chapters that follow. This is most tragically ironic in the case documented by Buschmann, in which it is precisely the desire to save for posterity the material culture of Wuvulu and Aua that leads ultimately to its disappearance. By the 1920s, F.E. Williams, the Government Anthropologist in Papua, was offering a more complex perspective on the issue of ‘sal-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 11

11

vage’, in an official report on ethnographic collecting. On the one hand, Williams (1923: 7) warns collectors against removing the template artefacts from which future copies can be made; on the other hand, he observes that ‘To provide a market for his work... is assuredly one of the best turns we could do [the native]. The thing is to keep his art going; not to collect his art-treasures on the assumption that the art will soon be lost’. This issue of ‘salvage’ is one to which Edwards gives an extra twist in her chapter, which focuses on the relationship between collecting material culture and the photography which proceeded in parallel with it. ‘Underlying all the photographic inscription related to collecting was a strong idea of authenticity, of the past, and the urgent need for salvage’, she notes, reminding us that photography itself is intrinsically the ‘salvage tool par excellence’. As part of thinking about the ‘before’ of collecting, it is useful to consider the issue of how collectors were funded, or funded themselves, even if their variety makes generalisation difficult. As suggested, one of the reasons why the topic of ethnographic collecting has not received more detailed anthropological attention is that collectors seldom reflected on the process in their notebooks or in print, treating it rather as a self-evident activity. Consequently, the way in which collecting was funded is interesting partly because it is one aspect of the making of collections about which at least something tends to be recorded. We may have lost Todd’s fieldnotes, but we have his receipts, and we know that his project budget for the Australian National Research Council included ‘£30 for specimens’. Gosden, who draws on these receipts in his novel analysis of what Todd took to New Guinea, considers that such a sum would not unduly have restricted Todd’s collecting in New Britain. Malinowski, in contrast, declared that the £30 allowed him by the Museum of Victoria to make a collection in the Trobriands did not permit him to acquire ‘rare and expensive things as, e.g. specimens of large stone axes or “shell money”’ (Young’s chapter). Others had more substantial sums at their disposal. In making his ‘official’ collection, MacGregor was able to draw on government funds – as well as on government power, as when he sequestered a major collection of artefacts from a ‘Tugeri’ raiding party, whom he pursued back towards the Dutch New Guinea border. Time rather than money appears to have been the limiting factor in the lightning seven-week raid which Field Museum curator George Dorsey made on Melanesia, during which he collected some 3,500 artefacts (Welsch’s chapter). Not all curators were well funded: as Knowles notes, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum expected Blackwood to bear most of the costs of her Anga fieldwork from her museum salary. In other cases, of course, the collecting was itself intended to be profitable – not only the kind of substantial commercial enterprises detailed in Buschmann’s chapter,

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 12

12

Michael O’Hanlon

but also the smaller-scale activities of ships’ captains such as Voogdt, described by Welsch. Finally, it is worth noting in passing how, in the 1930s, the drying up of Rockefeller funding for anthropology more generally reverberated in the lives of some of the collectors. At the London School of Economics (LSE), the now celebrated Professor Malinowski – obliged to seek alternative sources of funds for his staff and for a trip to Africa – appropriates the money hitherto used by the LSE to buy-in lectures on ‘technology’ from the British Museum curator Joyce, who is sacked. Ten thousand miles away in Sydney, it is the withdrawal of Rockefeller funding which deprives Todd of a realistic chance to write up his fieldnotes and helps condemn him to anthropological obscurity (Gosden’s chapter).

The Scene of Collecting Varieties of Collecting Some of those who collected in Melanesia made limited attempts to distinguish different types of ethnographic collecting. Writing to his museum superior Dorsey, A.B. Lewis contrasted ‘systematic’ collections, which would include examples of the full range of variation in each artefact, with narrower ‘type’ collections (Welsch 1998 vol. 1: 33). F.E. Williams (1923: 6) separated ‘casual collecting’ (which could be done by government officers and would include ‘antiquities’, ‘“vanishing” culture’ specimens and ‘art-objects’) from ‘systematic collecting in cultural areas’, whose essence was ‘continual duplication’, and might be done by anthropologists. In this book, both Quinnell and Buschmann bring out the tensions between ‘private collecting’ and ‘official’ or ‘company’ collecting. Taken as a whole, however, the chapters that follow suggest two broader axes of differentiation. The first is a distinction between ‘primary’, ‘secondary’ and ‘concomitant’ collecting. ‘Primary’ collecting refers to those collections made by explicit, intellectual design. Of those described here, the collection made by the curator Beatrice Blackwood among the Anga in 1936 is perhaps the most overtly ‘primary’. As Knowles recounts, Blackwood’s brief was to ‘study the technique of a modern Stone-age people before it follows that of our own Neolithic forefathers into the realm of archaeology’. Had she been permitted to do so, she would have located herself among the Central Highlanders, contact with whom was even more recent than with the Anga and whose technology might therefore be expected to be even more pristine. Blackwood also moved between three Anga villages in order to record the stone tool assemblages exemplified by each. This was a delimited project, oriented to making a collection illustrating a specific point.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 13

13

As the term suggests, ‘secondary’ collections, in partial contrast, are those made when collecting was a goal, but one subordinate to some other, primary, purpose. Instances of ‘secondary’ collections are those made by German commercial companies when their main goal of recruiting plantation labourers was frustrated. Following an unsuccessful recruiting trip up the Sepik River, a ship’s captain might decide to collect artefacts on the voyage downstream, something he had calculatedly resisted doing on the upriver leg to avoid prematurely satisfying the demand for trade goods (Welsch’s chapter; see also chapter by Buschmann). A further example of ‘secondary’ collections is those made by anthropologists, after the discipline had shifted away from allocating a central role to artefacts. The term is explicitly used: as earlier noted, Malinowski described his collecting as a ‘secondary occupation’, while Gosden concludes that, for Todd, collecting was a ‘secondary consideration’. ‘Concomitant’ collections are those that arise in a sense incidentally, as a by-product from other activities. Quinnell provides one example. As he makes clear, for Sir William MacGregor, trading for artefacts (and for food) was a pragmatic technique adopted by the formidable Governor for managing first encounters with newly contacted Papuans: it was his ‘methodology for the spread of Pax Britannica’. If the collection made by MacGregor was ‘concomitant’ in being in part the by-product of a larger political process, much of the collection made by George Brown was ‘concomitant’ to religious purposes. As Gardner relates, the missionary acquired many artefacts to demonstrate impartiality and friendship, intentionally purchasing them unselectively, ‘as I wished both natives and traders to understand that we were not there for trading purposes’. At the same time, the distinctions suggested between ‘primary’, ‘secondary’ and ‘concomitant’ collections should not be forced: they are best regarded as ideal types, of which real-world collections are likely to be compounds. There are ‘primary’ aspects to both MacGregor and Brown’s collecting, and the same collector may also make successive collections which differ in type. Thus while Blackwood’s 1936 Anga collection was substantially a ‘primary’ one, that made on her earlier trip to Melanesia was far more heterogeneous, and reflected a variety of personal, career-tactical and intellectual agendas. Indeed, one of the major points of interest of Knowles’ chapter is in detailing Blackwood’s unusual reverse trajectory, in which her earlier flirting with a developing social anthropology was abandoned in favour of a focused concern with artefacts and technology at a time when most professionals were moving in the opposite direction. Again, even where the initial making of collections has a ‘concomitant’ aspect to them, they may retrospectively be endowed with a kind of primacy by the collector. MacGregor, for example, fought so obstinately

14

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 14

Michael O’Hanlon

Map 2: British New Guinea (Papua)

O'Hanlon/Welsh

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 15

15

to retain the integrity of his ‘official’ collection, as to make one wonder whether for him it had not come to stand for the diversely administered entity of British New Guinea itself. Again, Brown specified in his will that the artefacts he had accumulated should be known as the ‘George Brown collection’, and stored and displayed as a single entity. As Gardner shows, this issue was reprised when – a century after the collection had been made – the possibility arose of returning the artefacts to the different groups from whom they had originally been gathered. The second axis (which cross-cuts the distinction between ‘primary’, ‘secondary’ and ‘concomitant’ collections) is the distinction between ‘stationary’ and ‘mobile’ collecting. As the term suggests, ‘stationary collecting’ refers simply to collecting which is done within a relatively limited area, and from a settled base (cf. Fabian 1998: 97). ‘Mobile collecting’, on the other hand, refers to collecting done in transit, whether from a ship or while on an expedition or on a patrol of reconnaissance or pacification. Once again, the two are ideal types: collectors mainly based in one spot, such as George Brown and Malinowski, nevertheless also made excursions on which artefacts were collected; ships’ captains who returned regularly to the same ports where they picked up artefacts each time were arguably engaged in ‘stationary’ collecting. Such indeterminate cases aside, ‘stationary’ collecting and ‘mobile’ collecting each has its own practical implications which potentially influence the kinds of artefacts that may be acquired, their level of documentation, the degree to which the collector relies on intermediaries, the kinds of anthropological understandings engendered and the nature of the relationships with local communities. Examples of these will be picked up in subsequent sections. Issues of Agency In his chapter, Quinnell refers in passing to the collecting practices of D’Albertis and Loria, both of whom removed artefacts from villages after they had frightened off the inhabitants with gun or rocket fire, while Buschmann describes how Wahlen’s traders turned to ransacking graves for shell ornaments, once artefact production declined. There is little sign of indigenous agency in either of these cases. But, as suggested at the outset, we nevertheless need to accept that collections and their contents are not everywhere the product of the unalloyed will and buying power of White collectors (Schindlbeck 1993: 59). To suppose that they are threatens a fresh subjugation in over-writing local capacities to influence the terms of interaction and the content of collections. ‘Local’ is, of course, a relative term. One of the points that emerges from the chapters that follow is the dependence of many of the collectors upon a miscellany of intermediaries, including White residents, who were situationally ‘local’ in relation to the more transient among the col-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

16

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 16

Michael O’Hanlon

lectors. Young records the use Malinowski made of the trader and pearler Billy Hancock in collecting artefacts on his behalf; Welsch suggests that ship’s captain Voogdt subtly shaped the collection made by his passenger Dorsey; Knowles describes how F.E. Williams paternally oversaw Beatrice Blackwood’s collecting foray up the Purari. Predictably, the record left of the activities of non-white intermediaries is generally more shadowy. We know from Quinnell’s chapter that MacGregor employed dedicated local assistants (such as lark-eating Joe Fiji) to assist him in making natural history collections, but not whether MacGregor also hired equivalents to help with making ethnographic collections. Gardner records a telling lament from Kleinschmidt to his employers back in Hamburg’s Godeffroy Museum as to the superior resources for making collections allegedly enjoyed by his rival George Brown who ‘has plenty of people, teachers and black boys... to have the area thoroughly searched (which no white man is able to do like Blacks) [while] I now don’t have any more foreign labourers’. One can read in this aside an unwritten history of how intermediaries such as interpreters, porters, local policemen and other indigenous colonial employees both enabled and shaped what we know as the ‘MacGregor collection’, the ‘Brown collection’, etc.4 One way of thinking about the agency of indigenous communities themselves is to return to the distinction made earlier between ‘stationary’ and ‘mobile’ collecting, and to suggest that each carries its own potential both for affecting the collection made and for the expression of indigenous agency. Thus it would seem likely that when a collector is ‘stationary’, he or she will have a higher chance of collecting a full range of local material culture than when merely stopping off from a river boat for a few hours. But the same longer residence also potentially increases the influence of the local community upon the collector, and the collection. For example, Gardner records the reliance of George Brown on the Duke of York big-man To Pulu, in particular. To Pulu sold Brown land for the mission site, used Brown and his vessel to make visits to his own trading partners, and endeavoured to prevent Brown from developing contacts outside To Pulu’s own trading network. While the sparseness of the records kept by Brown of his collecting means that much has to be deduced, Gardner thinks it possible that To Pulu was himself trading for artefacts at a distance, in order to sell them on to Brown. In this case, in fact, it seems that the very control exercised by To Pulu meant that opportunistic trade was the best available means for establishing contact with the missionary for those Islanders excluded from To Pulu’s network. It was through such exchanges that Brown collected many of the artefacts gathered during his first year. Here, then, to the extent that Brown’s collecting was ‘stationary’ it doubly affected the collection he made, in both cases leading to Brown apparently acquiring rather few artefacts from the Duke of York Islands themselves.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 17

17

One general point is that collectors possessed trade goods, and trade goods constituted a resource to which locally dominant factions are always likely to wish to control access. Their attempts to do so (which have more chance of being successful when the collector is ‘stationary’) will exert an influence on the collection that is made. Sometimes that influence may affect something as unobvious as the order in which artefacts are purchased. Perhaps I might cite a recent Melanesian case study of my own to illustrate the potential of collections made in ‘stationary’ circumstances to incorporate such frozen local agency. I have described this more fully elsewhere (O’Hanlon 1993); briefly, however, I returned in 1990 to the community in the Wahgi Valley with whom I had earlier worked as an anthropologist, but now to make a museum collection. It was quite clear to me – and made clear to me – that the community with whom I worked would demand priority in offering artefacts for sale: they did not wish the money offered in exchange for artefacts to go elsewhere. The big-man in the community who sponsored me declared that people in the immediate local settlement should have first rights to offer artefacts for sale, followed by the remainder of the subclans making up the local clan; next, members of the paired clan must have priority, and after that members of the other two clans comprising the larger tribal group, followed in

Figure 1.1: Artefacts (eel trap, storage containers, shields) lined up for sale outside gateway to fieldworker’s house, Wahgi Valley, Papua New Guinea, 1990.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

18

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 18

Michael O’Hanlon

turn by the paired tribe across the river. Only then should more distant groups be permitted to offer artefacts for purchase. In the event, this directive (which reflected one folk model of local social structure) was not strictly applied, but it undoubtedly affected the order in which I purchased artefacts, if only because my sponsor in the society played a major gatekeeping role in the process. One of the many reasons why his directive was not strictly adhered to related to another factor inherent in the local situation: the tension which Wahgi men experience between their commitment to fellow clansmen on the one hand and, on the other hand, loyalties owed to maternal kin beyond the clan, who are credited with the power to curse their sisters’ children. On one occasion a man from a structurally distant group, but who was also mother’s brother to individuals within the settlement in which I was based, threatened that if I did not buy from him, his sisters’ children in the settlement would not thrive. One can sense from this example the capacity of local structures to inflect in different ways aspects of the collecting process when the collector is ‘stationary’. We do not have the detail but it seems unlikely that someone like Magnin, recorded as acting as a local broker to Blackwood while she resided at Kandrian, would not have moulded Blackwood’s collection according to characteristic local pressures (Knowles’ chapter). If a ‘stationary’ collector is open to such pressures, the more fleeting visits of a ‘mobile’ collector are locally constrained in other ways. In such circumstances it is particularly likely that collections will be constituted from artefacts ferried to the collector. As Schindlbeck (1993: 63) observed of collectors in the Sepik: ‘only in a few cases did the collectors enter private dwelling houses. The natives brought objects by canoe or carried them to the collectors. This... implies that the first selection was made by the natives themselves’. Ballard furnishes another example of local regulation, this time when what was being collected was principally the measurements of the Tapiro ‘pygmies’. He records how the expedition members were compelled to observe a regular ritual of announcing their presence when approaching the Tapiro settlement, giving women (after whose measurements the expedition lusted but never obtained) time to hide. At the same time, Ballard’s chapter also embodies a necessary caution against conceiving of local communities as solidary blocks who corporately either acquiesced in collecting or opposed it. Ballard cites the distinction made by one expedition member between an ‘obstructionist party’ – made up of older Tapiro men – and a younger man, Peau, who became a crucial go-between over the brief encounter. The Impact of Collecting If local people moulded collections in ways unrecognised by accounts which attribute exclusive agency to collectors, the impact of collecting

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 19

19

was similarly diverse. In some cases, White encroachment led to artefacts disappearing. As early as 1888, MacGregor was noting (with untypical inelegance) that ‘It is not easy even already to get specimens of stone axes’ (Quinnell’s chapter). By 1908 Dorsey recorded that ‘There are whole regions in New Guinea where everything has been swept away by missionaries, traders, collectors and investigators’ (Welsch’s chapter). In some instances, such as the case of the Wuvulu and Aua islanders described by Buschmann, artefacts became scarce because the producers had themselves been greatly depleted as a direct result of the broader colonial impact. At the same time, it is also clear that one response (in certain respects, a further manifestation of local agency) was the production of greater numbers of artefacts for sale. Indeed, in the case discussed by Buschmann this was exactly what had happened before the onset of the catastrophic population decline he documents. The islanders had begun to manufacture, in almost industrial quantities, examples of the weaponry originally purchased from them by the first ships to visit the islands. The artefacts produced for sale in such situations also register characteristic changes. Functionality may decline, and the artefact become more ornamental. Torrence’s (1993) analysis of changes in obsidian-tipped weaponry from the Admiralty Islands shows how, once the weapons started to be collected in bulk around 1910, the proportion of obsidian used in making them was progressively reduced while haft decoration was elaborated. Observing the malanggan sculpture on sale in the houses of Herbertshöhe merchants in 1900, Biró considered that the artists had gone beyond mere decoration and now ‘give free play to their phantasy, especially when they see that the more bizarre their products the better they sell’ (cited in Schindlbeck 1993: 66). Those other locals, the White residents, also on occasion gave rein to ‘phantasy’, as Buschmann records. Annoyed by the New Guinea Company’s injunction that collections made by its employees were company property, one employee spent his time fabricating a collection of insects. The resultant specimens – some had thirteen legs, others shells made from fragments of glass – were rushed off to Berlin’s Natural History Museum before the hoax was discovered. If one characteristic of artefacts produced for sale was an increase in the extent of decoration, a feature of others was a reduction in size. Museum collections of Melanesian material include considerable numbers of model artefacts. Of course, some of these were made regularly for local purposes. Others, however, were specifically commissioned by collectors as small-scale versions of artefacts too bulky otherwise to be readily transported, or as replicas of things, the originals of which had fallen out of use in the face of missionary activity.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

20

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 20

Michael O’Hanlon

Herle (1998: 87ff.), for example, has discussed the cardboard masks which Haddon commissioned in the Torres Strait; more broadly, she notes: ‘Modelling and replication are two crucial features associated with the scientific method’. Watercraft are among the more common artefacts thus modelled, being both awkwardly large to collect in full scale, and perhaps also embodying technology with which Whites could empathise (see chapters by Knowles and Young). To make a model artefact is to produce a second-order version of a limited part of the cultural repertoire. The process of making a whole collection can provoke correspondingly broader cultural reenactments by the people among whom the collection is being made. It can stimulate self-reflective dramatisations of discontinued cultural practices or serve as an arena within which people are motivated to demonstrate rituals otherwise restricted to limited audiences and seasons (O’Hanlon 1993: 73ff.). Anita Herle (1998: 95) cites Myers’s observation that Haddon’s collecting produced a ‘religious revival’ among the old islanders; as Herle notes,5 while this may be an overstatement on Myers’s part, the process of making a collection, along with the collectors’ constant enquiries about past practices, must have opened a space which encouraged cultural reenactments. In this book, Young records an incident of a kind not untypically precipitated by making a collection: an event in which the collector’s actions produce an incorporative local response, which in turn reencompasses the collector. It began, as Young relates, with Malinowski making a collection of Trobriand dance shields; this stimulated Trobriand youths to deploy the shields in an impromptu dance. However, the dance had not been ceremonially inaugurated and to this breach of custom were attributed various subsequent misfortunes, for which Malinowski was then blamed. It is also worth reflecting that Malinowski’s well-known photograph of dance shields in use at Omarakana (see Figure 8.1 below) is not the canonical example of their use which one might easily take it to be, but was actually triggered by the making of a collection (see also Young 1999: 93). On what aspects of the local impact of collecting are the chapters that follow silent? The topic of collecting is so unevenly documented that there are inevitable gaps. The papers say little about the effect on local polities which producing artefacts for sale might have had. Depending upon the scale of production the effects might be ramifying, and would vary according to whether the artefacts were made by men or by women, on whether this changed in the new conditions of manufacturing for sale, and on who monopolised whatever was received in exchange for the artefacts sold. Did, for example, importsubstitution mean that men had less need for certain categories of artefact than previously? And if the artefacts sold to collectors were traded in, rather than produced locally, their sale on any scale would

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 21

21

have consequences for intercommunity relations, in addition to internal effects. Can we see in the determination of Tapiro men to prevent women from interacting with the White intruders an attempt to isolate local structures of artefact-ownership from the axes, knives, beads and cloth offered by the Whites (Ballard’s chapter)? A final caution in considering the impact of collecting must be against the temptation to reduce a culture to a particular set of artefacts whose continued production is taken to be the condition of that culture’s survival. Handler (1985: 215) has offered an early and cogent analysis of this Western proclivity whereby ‘culture has come to be represented as and by “things”’. So when collectors log the disappearance of particular artefact types as a result of colonial contact, it is important not to make an absolute equation with cultural impoverishment. This is, of course, especially so for a region such as Melanesia, whose cultures are characterised by the import and export of novel rituals, dance forms and cults, with a rapidity which has proved especially problematic for any simple notion of cultural continuity. As Harrison (1993: 147) points out, what is crucial for many Melanesian cultures is not a specific content (this ritual, that cult, those objects) but maintaining a gradient or differential with respect to neighbouring cultures: ‘cultural forms were not conceptualised as “traditions”, as possessions intrinsic to some particular group’s identity, to be handed down by each generation to the next within the group forever... Rather, they were treated as luxury goods and were produced or acquired in the first place to move along lines of communication between groups’. At the same time, of course, it is precisely in terms of inalienable ‘cultural property’ that local people may now elect to represent their artefacts. Keesing (1989: 23) drew attention to what he termed such ‘fetishization’ of culture in his analysis of contemporary cultural revivals in the Pacific; related insights are captured in Thomas’s (1992: 64–5) notion of ‘substantivization’, and Ernst’s (1999: 89) of ‘entification’: ‘the process of making “entities” or things from what have been contingent categories’. This returns us once more to the resonant example of New Britain shell money which George Brown forwarded to Tylor. Gewertz and Errington (1995) have recently analysed how the people of East New Britain have come to essentialise their culture specifically in terms of the possession and use of such shell money, which is viewed locally as socially cohesive in contrast to introduced Western currency, seen as corrosive of moral bonds. The Content of Collections The collections discussed in this book are often of formidable complexity, numbering many thousand artefacts, split between museums on different continents, sometimes dispersed or lost. While this is not

O'Hanlon/Welsh

22

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 22

Michael O’Hanlon

the place to attempt even an outline of their contents, some passing observations are in order. The first has to do with what Lawson (1994: 8) refers to as ‘the problem of representative collecting’. Quite early on, the importance had been registered of making collections that were ‘representative’. As Young notes in this book, Bastian was already emphasising by 1885 that collectors must not be seduced by ‘dazzling’ artefacts but should acquire the ‘normal and average’, a point that was also stressed in the fourth edition of the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s primer Notes and Queries on Anthropology (BAAS 1912). Lawson goes on to list the host of factors whose intervention nevertheless means that ethnographic collections can rarely be taken to be unproblematically ‘representative’ of local circumstances – factors that must be discounted if the goal of the enterprise is to get back to some unpolluted ethnographic pristinity, but actually constitute the data if the aim is to analyse the collectors’ agendas and broader colonial processes. One way to think about the variables that will influence the content of collections is to return to the distinction made earlier between different types of collections. In one respect, ‘concomitant collections’, those made as the by-product of other processes, are likely to be the least ‘representative’, insofar as they reflect the very particular circumstances of their making. Thus, as Quinnell notes, MacGregor’s utilisation of collecting as a strategy for managing situations of ‘first contact’ means that ‘male’ artefacts, and weaponry in particular, form a disproportionate percentage of the total, while the fact that MacGregor was a ‘mobile’ rather than a ‘stationary’ collector explains the absence in his collections of certain ceremonial masks produced only at particular moments during a ritual cycle. ‘Primary’ and ‘secondary’ collections, in contrast, would seem more likely to be ‘representative’ – except when a collector excludes certain categories of artefacts on the grounds that they are somehow not truly representative. In this regard, of course, one issue is the attitude of the collectors towards artefacts manifesting signs of ‘culture contact’. As Buschmann records, while Bastian might have been in favour of collecting ‘average’ artefacts, he wished to exclude those showing Western influence, as these would undermine his goal of constructing a ‘Thesaurus of Mankind’. Young cites Malinowski’s observation, made in a letter to Seligman, that ‘the villages [around Port Moresby] are beastly corrupted and polluted’, but it is not clear to what extent this early general remark trammels Malinowski’s collecting. Blackwood, whose 1936 collection was the most ‘primary’ of those considered here, certainly dismissed the prospect of a trip to the north coast of New Britain as ‘good for a study of culture contact, but probably disappointing from the standpoint of museum collecting’ (Knowles’ chapter).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 23

23

From this perspective, ‘concomitant’ collections, while they may be skewed towards male items or weaponry by the circumstances of their making, have less of an investment in pristinity. As Gardner notes, while Brown did seek ‘untainted’ artefacts, he also collected ‘lesson books in Duke of York language’ and ‘samples of native printing on bark’, as well as commissioning artists to copy illustrations from the Sydney Mail on to lengths of bamboo to illustrate native capacity to produce representational images. Quinnell records MacGregor’s diary entry: ‘I gave a tomahawk for one a man carried containing a piece of brass bolt’. Unshackled by a mandate to collect only the untainted, concomitant collections have the potential for comprising more authentic a record of the complexities of the moment at which they were made. A particular twist to this emerges in Speiser’s interpretation of the situation on the ground in southern Melanesia, which he saw as the outcome of successive ‘cultural complexes’, each comprising a particular compound of cultural elements. From this perspective, many locallyoccurring artefacts were historically intrusive and the result of culturecontact. Indeed, as Kaufmann describes in this book, Speiser formulated the notion that while elements from older, and lower-order, cultural complexes could always be integrated into more advanced ones, the reverse was not the case. This explained, for him, the destructive effects on local society of the introduction of firearms and alcohol: like the later release of a word-processor which cannot be read by its more primitive predecessors, these elements from the West resisted reverse-integration. As indicated, this cannot approach an exhaustive survey of the content of the diverse collections assembled by the individuals whose activities are documented in the chapters that follow. But some apparent absences from the collections are worth highlighting. For example, the collections do not appear to include specific objects which originally stood purely for local relationships but which were later creatively extended to incorporate the intruding Whites. In eastern North America, for example, the indigenous practice of presenting peacepipes in the process of negotiating alliances was generalised to embrace Europeans (White 1982: 65). It is hard to think of parallels in Melanesia for this, or for another North American practice: that of lodging with Whites objects perceived to be at risk in turbulent times. The Colonial Context to Collecting By definition, all the collecting described in this book took place in a colonial or quasi-colonial context; nevertheless specific aspects emerge from the chapters which merit flagging here. The necessity of recognising the organic nature of the broader colonial context is a major drive of Gosden’s chapter. But he argues that the structural ties which bound together indigene and non-indigene

O'Hanlon/Welsh

24

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 24

Michael O’Hanlon

lacked an adequate language in which their interdependence could be expressed; each side thought about the other only in terms of difference. The want of other ways of representing inherent mutuality lent a particular weight to what Gosden refers to as ‘performativity’, especially in material terms. Colonial culture was ‘profoundly material’: Whites went there to extract mineral or agricultural products, the flow of material goods was part of what held colonial society together and it was a society preoccupied with the material marking of roles and statuses. The corollary to accepting an integrated vision of colonialism is an equally even-handed approach to material culture, one which devotes as much analytical attention to the material culture of the colonists as to that of indigenes. Other writers have, of course, commented on the local impact of specific Western technologies: in this book, Edwards dwells on the role of lantern slides and other Western imagery in the constitution of early colonial encounters in Papua. Where Gosden’s chapter differs is in explicitly counterpointing the material culture which the mysterious Todd collected from New Guinea, with the (much larger) collection of material culture which Todd took to New Guinea. From the very comprehensiveness of the latter (Todd’s imports to his field site ranged from umbrella hooks to the delivery of 150 lbs [sixty-eight kilograms] of Australian potatoes every two months), Gosden also builds up a picture of a troubled man, concerned about his future employability, deploying a panoply of imported goods in a material performance perhaps designed to secure himself a job in New Guinea. It might be noted in passing that if the originality of Gosden’s chapter is in his analysis of the material culture which Todd took to New Guinea, that of Knowles lies in her account of Blackwood’s tactical deployment of her ethnographic collection on her return from her first field trip to New Guinea. As Knowles observes, we are used to contrasting gift exchange in the Pacific with commodity exchange in the West. What Knowles brings to life is a minor politics of artefactexchange in the West, with a hierarchy of recipients and instances of immediate and delayed return. There was also a specifically colonial context to collecting in the sense that it – like other colonial endeavours – partook of the political rivalry between states, or future states. For example, as Quinnell makes clear, there is a proto-nationalist aspect to the collection that MacGregor made in British New Guinea. MacGregor intended the collection to ‘illustrate [the colony’s] past and present position in the future’; and though the lack of appropriate local facilities meant that he arranged for it to be housed in the Queensland Museum, MacGregor ferociously opposed that museum’s understanding that it therefore had the right to deploy artefacts from the collection in inter-museum exchanges. Else-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 25

Introduction

25

where, Craig (1997) has described a fascinating sequel of a sort, though this time it features Australian authorities asserting their autonomy from Britain through the agency of a New Guinea collection, rather than British New Guinea from Queensland. The case described by Craig revolves around the struggle over one component of the ethnographic collection made by the German, Thurnwald. On the outbreak of the First World War, Thurnwald’s camp on the Sepik was raided by an Australian expeditionary force and the artefacts he had stored there were sent to the Australian Museum in Sydney. There followed a decade of wrangling as to whether the collection had been legitimately expropriated as enemy property, or whether it had a scholarly or privately-financed character which should have exempted it. Despite figures as senior as Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, weighing in on behalf of Thurnwald, there was extended resistance to the collection being sent to Europe: resistance which Craig suggests registered an Australian assertion of independence from Britain. Again, the national stereotypes which emerge in collectors’ accounts of each other in the Congo (Fabian 1998: 84ff.) appear in Melanesia too. Haddon implies that the looting carried out by both D’Albertis and Loria in New Guinea relates to the fact that they were both Italians (Quinnell’s chapter). Tailoring his account of his collecting for the American newspaper audience for whom he was writing, Dorsey described his trade goods as including ‘stick tobacco (Virginia), knives, big and little hatchets and USA axes (the natives won’t have a German made ax)’ (Welsch’s chapter). Later, Dorsey warned his fellow American colleague Lewis – who was planning to visit the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum – that ‘They are a pretty mean lot there, at least so I found them last month, and will want to keep you from seeing much’ (Welsch 1998 vol. 1: 540). Of course, this is not to suggest that rivalry was located exclusively at the national level: collectors competed vigorously against each other as individuals; and, as Penny (1998) shows, there was also intense civic rivalry in Germany for the best collections, with medals and Orders offered as bait to their collectors (Rosman and Rubel 1998: 42). Nevertheless, in its very minor way, early collecting also unquestionably reflected national tensions that in 1914 took their cataclysmic form.

The ‘Afterwards’ of Collecting In this section I consider what happens to the collections after they have been made – as they are acquired by museums, digested by their documentation systems and, variously, treasured, neglected, exchanged, sold, reconceived as indigenous or national heritage and repatriated.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

26

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 26

Michael O’Hanlon

But it is important to begin by noting the initial contingency of all this. It is not simply that individual objects from what later become fossilised as collections are subtracted and turned to personal use by collectors (as Knowles describes), but that the passage of collections to institutions reflects the vagaries of chance and personal idiosyncrasy, as well as the pull exerted by metropolitan centres. Thus Young relates how Malinowski’s first collection, made during his earlier fieldwork in Mailu, was lost, and all efforts to trace it have proved unsuccessful. But then Malinowski’s attachment to collections was anyway light for – as Young also records – he failed to formalise his intention that the residue of his Trobriand collection was to go to Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum; so after the first tranche of Trobriand material was transferred to the Pitt Rivers by museum curator Blackwood, it was angrily retrieved at the behest of his widow who required it to be sent to her in Mexico (‘I hope it costs colossal sums to send [it there]’, is Blackwood’s caustic comment for the file). Brown’s collection similarly failed to find an immediate home on his death, and when a home eventually was found, the collection was never fully unpacked. Or, as MacGregor’s did, collections may end up in institutions where their status is particularly anomalous and contested. The Dynamics of Documentation Once they do arrive in museums, collections are conscripted into documentation systems which may submerge the artefacts’ previous identities: whether those given them by their original users, or the full transactional histories which brought them to museums. Of course, the primacy often thus assumed by artefacts’ new museological identities reflects not only the appropriative power of museum culture but also the sparseness of much original documentation – frequently collectors recorded rather little about the local significance of the artefacts they were gathering. This was not for lack of urging: as Buschmann notes in his chapter, for someone like curator von Luschan in Berlin, proper documentation was what distinguished respectable scientific specimens from mere plunder. However, as earlier noted, artefacts were regarded as possessing inherent evidential qualities which absolved collectors from the necessity to record very much about them from their makers. The sheer speed with which many artefacts were collected also militated against thorough documentation: Dorsey – working on the north coast of New Guinea – collected two thousand artefacts between 8 and 31 August 1908; in one two-hour session, he made ‘288 distinct trades’ (Welsch’s chapter). Acquiring objects at the rate of one every twenty-five seconds across a language barrier was not conducive to recording the finer shades of local meaning. Welsch’s chapter provides the most cogent example of the capacity of a museum’s classificatory procedures – in tandem with sparse orig-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 27

27

inal documentation – to annex ethnographic collections. As he notes, although we tend to think of collections as having only two identities – that of the original makers and users of the artefacts on the one hand, and that of the collector and his social world on the other – ‘quite often the culture of museum administrators has also shaped the character and contents of a collection, distorting the role of both collector and villager’. Welsch’s forensic work reveals that what the Field Museum has tended to treat as three quite separate collections from New Guinea’s north coast were in fact probably made at the same time, in the same villages, by the same people. Indeed, the constituent artefacts from all three collections once shared cabin space on the same tiny New Guinea steamer, before embarking on separate careers whose distinctiveness was enshrined as the primary identity of each collection when the artefacts all later arrived at the Field Museum. Of course, the other side of the coin to this individuating capacity of museum classificatory procedures is their power to represent a diverse assemblage as a single, indivisible collection: this was the point at issue in the debate over the potential disaggregation of the ‘George Brown Collection’, described by Gardner. Museum documentation systems, then, are not second order mechanisms which merely express transparently what is known about artefacts’ indigenous significance and the history of their passage to museums; they are, rather, themselves constitutive. At another level, this is very much the point being made by Edwards, in her chapter on the relationship between photography, collecting and material culture. For much of the twentieth century, field photography was treated as a ‘visual notebook’, unproblematically documenting ‘context’. However, Edwards argues in her study of the photography done on the coast of British New Guinea by the 1898 Torres Strait Expedition that photographs played a genuinely constitutive role. As she puts it in her chapter, photographs did not merely document but ‘authenticated, collected substitute objects, provided a site of social interaction [and] set an affective tone through which the representation of a culture and its material culture was mediated’. The Question of ‘Duplicates’ One aspect of museum documentation which has drawn little commentary is the notion of the ‘duplicate’. Well known to museumists, the category is at one level straightforward. Collectors often collected multiple ‘examples’ of artefacts in order to sell them to other museums (Kaufmann, this book); equally, museums acquired multiple examples with a view to exchanging the surplus artefacts with other institutions, often to fill ‘gaps’ in the collections. In his chapter, for example, Buschmann records that between 1864 and 1881 the Godeffroy

O'Hanlon/Welsh

28

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 28

Michael O’Hanlon

Museum – admittedly itself something of a commercial enterprise – issued no less than eight ‘directories’ listing ‘duplicates’ for sale. However, the category of the ‘duplicate’ is more interesting than it might appear at first sight, and is revealing in the way that other interstitial museum spaces – such as their basements (Clifford 1997: 169) – can be. To categorise an artefact as a ‘duplicate’ is to turn it into something which is at one level inauthentic, merely a version of what becomes the ‘original’ retained in a museum’s main collection (in this respect, there are parallels to be drawn with the cultural reenactments which making the collections in the first place sometimes provoked among local people). The deceptiveness of the concept is that, while the term suggests that it is an absolute status, artefacts are generally only ‘duplicates’ of each other with respect to selective attributes. Few artefacts of great commercial value are treated as ‘duplicates’ and, as time passes, artefacts which were once classified by museums as ‘duplicates’, and therefore disposable, can come to be seen as too important to be exchanged or discarded. (The same thing can happen with artefacts once classified by a museum as fit only for a ‘handling series’ or ‘teaching collection’: time can convert them, too, into specimens whose newly perceived importance prompts their integration into the museum’s main collections.) What the classification of ‘duplicate’ tends to privilege, in particular, is an artefact’s typological and formal qualities: in short, very much traditional, museum-centred attributes. Categorising an artefact as a ‘duplicate’ on this basis is certainly contrary to the drive of much recent scholarship which focuses upon the biographical distinctiveness of otherwise formally similar objects (e.g., Hoskins 1998). The flexibility of the category of the ‘duplicate’ may also be the means of mediating the tension between a curatorial emphasis upon the integrity of a collection, and other pressures. The point emerges most clearly in this book in Quinnell’s account of MacGregor’s struggle to keep intact the ‘official’ New Guinea collection he had deposited in Queensland Museum. ‘The Ethics of Collecting’ At the start, I suggested that over the course of the twentieth century the topic of ethnographic collecting passed from obscurity to obloquy. Recently, moral issues have certainly posed themselves most sharply in terms of questioning the equity of the transactions which brought ethnographic artefacts to metropolitan countries and, in some cases, as passionate calls for their repatriation. However, as this book shows, moral issues did surface earlier, though not always in quite these terms. Gardner, for example, records how George Brown was determined not to pander to what he feared was the propensity of natives to be

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 29

29

careless of material things and to rely on the missionary as an endless source of goods. Consequently, he refused in principle to make outright gifts and insisted that anything he gave be reciprocated; he must have acquired some of the artefacts in his collection in this way. Buschmann illustrates another moral dilemma which ethnographic collecting provoked for Whites. He repeatedly brings out the tensions felt between the claims of science, which required that collected artefacts be properly documented, and the heedless commercial forces upon which curators nevertheless depended for their supply of artefacts. This tension emerged particularly sharply in the opposition of curator von Luschan to those who wished to establish a ‘colonial museum’ in Berlin, whom von Luschan accused of using undocumented artefacts as exotic bait for attracting settlers. The general issue of money and its convertibility repeatedly raises itself in contributors’ chapters: in von Luschan’s objections to the proposed colonial museum, in Brown sending a specimen of shell money to Tylor, and in Haddon’s disturbed fascination at seeing Papuans using ‘coin of the realm’ to buy the indigenous shell necklaces sold in stores in Papua (Edwards’ chapter). The question of the equity of the terms on which artefacts were originally collected also occasionally surfaces. MacGregor, when Lieutenant-Governor, condemned as plunder the collecting done by D’Albertis, and impounded for restitution the collection made by Loria; though, as Quinnell also notes, MacGregor added to the official collections the artefacts he seized from the ‘Tugeri raiders’. By the 1920s, there was a more subtle appreciation of the colonial pressures that might lie behind apparently freely entered transactions. In a sub-section (entitled ‘the ethics of collecting’) of his official report, Williams (1923: 19) cautioned: ‘If you covet something that [a native] is unwilling to give up, ask several times, and he will finally let you have it because he thinks he must’. Knowles describes Blackwood’s equivocal response on one occasion when a doctor shaved the head of an unwilling local patient, thus removing his ritual upi hat. Blackwood recorded her distress at the doctor’s actions, but went on to buy the hat from the doctor (‘as the mischief was done I agreed to buy it – but not for worlds would I have him cut it off for me!’). But if questions of the morality of making and retaining ethnographic collections are not in themselves new, in recent years the specific form in which moral issues have been addressed revolves around repatriation; and here the chapters by Gardner and Quinnell delineate parallel complexities in the later histories of the collections they describe. Both cases raised definitional issues to do with the distinction between ‘collections’ and ‘accumulations’. In the murky case of the sale of the George Brown material, one of the many points of contention was whether Brown’s was a collection in the sense of possessing some attrib-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

30

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 30

Michael O’Hanlon

utes above and beyond its individual parts; or whether it was merely an aggregation whose breaking up might put its component parts within the financial range of museums in the Pacific nations from which the constituent artefacts originally derived. Equally, the case described by Quinnell relates both back to the slippery category of ‘the duplicate’, which mediated disputes between MacGregor and the Queensland Museum, and forward to the eventual division of the MacGregor collection, and the return of the majority of it to Papua New Guinea. The conclusion in the case of the MacGregor collection – that it would ‘have two homes’ – represented an acknowledgement (albeit a very partial one) that there are potentially many who see themselves as stakeholders in relation to collections and their constituent parts. The same point emerged even more sharply with respect to the fate of Brown’s collection. The news in the mid-1980s that Newcastle University was proposing to sell it to the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka precipitated multiple claims, whose variousness illustrates the number of different grounds on which a sense of ownership can be invoked. Letters to the newspaper from George Brown’s descendants suggested that the sale was a loss both to the northeast of England, to which Brown was said to have had a particular attachment, and indirectly of their own personal heritage. Retentionists also invoked the fact that the collection had been catalogued and conserved with the aid of British public money, with the implication that this qualified any autochthonous claims. Some curators urged its retention as an intact collection on scholarly grounds; others disputed that it was a collection in any meaningful sense and, as earlier noted, suggested that splitting it would permit Pacific nations to acquire components relevant to them. Ancestral connections, regional linkages, the demands of scholarship or emergent national heritage: claims were advanced on all these grounds. The notion that the original makers of the artefacts might have much say in their disposal, except in their role as peripheral citizens of the state of Papua New Guinea, did not figure largely in the debate. The twist that Gardner introduces at the end of her account is that its original makers would almost certainly have valued the missionary’s collection not as a record of suppressed indigenous creativity, but for its association with the Christian history of their region. Perhaps what most distinguishes the status of ethnographic collections such as those described in this book is a measure of irony. As argued at the outset, the dominant perception of such collections in recent years has been as sequestered cultural property, as incarcerated sources of indigenous identity. It is this that has been one of the main factors driving current research on ethnographic collections, after the many decades during which they were ignored. This research has indeed illustrated the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 31

Introduction

31

heinous and unequal way in which some collections were originally made; but it has also shown the diversity of terms on which other collections were acquired: including the extent to which artefacts were, from earliest contact, being produced specifically for sale, and indeed in some cases (such as some of the profusion of models in museum collections) had no indigenous precedent, but were called into existence purely by the conditions of the original encounter. Viewed as alienated cultural property, ethnographic collections are an effective language – sometimes the only language available – through which indigenous communities can draw attention to broader extant injustices; at the same time, in being expressed as ‘cultural property’, fundamentally a Western construct, violence may be being done to indigenous notions. If the objects that make them up are ‘entangled’ (Thomas 1991), the word to describe the collections themselves is surely ‘equivocal’; nor is it yet obvious what kind of resolution the twenty-first century will bring either to them, or to the practice of making ethnographic collections itself.

Notes In producing this Introduction, I have depended greatly on the advice not only of my coeditor but of all the contributors, especially my colleagues at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Much of the basic work on the Introduction was done during a fortnight in mid-1999 while I was a guest of the invited interdisciplinary reading party held at Casa Howri, where I benefited from the stimulus of specialists from fields distant from anthropology and museology. At various points Jim Clifford, David Lipset, Andrea Schmidt and Don Tuzin provided helpful initial advice, while the Introduction has benefited separately from the comments of John Barker, Josh Bell, Lissant Bolton, Ian Coates, Linda Frankland, Clare Harris, Terry Hays, Anita Herle, Philip Jones, David Parkin, Laura Peers, Glenn Penny, Stanley Ulijaszek and Deborah Waite. None of these, of course, bears any responsibility for remaining inaccuracies or defects. 1. See Lawson 1994: 4. 2. See, e.g., Vansina (1992: 334–5) and Schindlbeck (1993: 57). Cole (1985) makes the same point, his own study being a major exception. More recently, the studies by Herle and Rouse (1998) and Schildkrout and Keim (1998) – both deployed in this Introduction – contribute to redressing the imbalance, while still leaving a major gross deficit. 3. This thumbnail sketch privileges Anglo-American anthropology; artefacts retained much more of a focal place within some continental traditions. 4. A most useful summary of the scattered sources on some of these intermediaries (including Joe Fiji) is given in Appendix C to Dutton’s excellent Police Motu: its story (1985), a book which ranges far more widely than its title suggests. 5. Personal communication 17 February 2000.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 32

32

Michael O’Hanlon

Bibliography BAAS (British Association for the Advancement of Science) Notes and queries on anthropology, 4th edn. London, 1912. Belk, R.W. Collecting in a consumer society. Routledge, London, 1995. Bouquet, M.R. and J.F. Branco, eds Melanesian artefacts: postmodernist reflections. Museu de Ethnologia, Lisbon, 1988. Clifford, J. The Predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1988. ———. Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997. Cole, D. Captured heritage: the scramble for northwest coast artifacts. Vancouver/Toronto, Douglas and McIntyre, 1985. Craig, B. ‘The fate of Thurnwald’s Sepik ethnographic collections, BaesslerArchiv (N.F.) vol. XLV (1997): 387–408. Dutton, T. Police Motu: iena sivarai (its story). University of Papua New Guinea Press, 1985. Elsner, J. and R. Cardinal, eds The cultures of collecting. Reaktion Books, London, 1994. Ernst, T.M. ‘Land, stories, and resources: discourse and entification in Onabasulu modernity’, American Anthropologist vol. 101 no. 1 (1999): 88–97. Fabian, J. ‘Curios and curiosity’ in The scramble for art in Central Africa eds E. Schildkrout and C. A. Keim. University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 79–108. Gewertz, D.B. and F.K. Errington ‘Duelling currencies in East New Britain: the construction of shell money as national cultural property’ in Occidentalism: images of the west ed. J.G. Carrier. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995, 161–91. Handler, R. ‘On having a culture: nationalism and the preservation of Quebec’s Patrimoine’ in Objects and others: essays on museums and material culture ed. G. W. Stocking. Wisconsin University Press, Madison, 1985, 192–217. Harrison, S. ‘The commerce of cultures in Melanesia’, MAN vol. 28 no. 1 (1993): 139–58. Herle, A. ‘The life-histories of objects: collections of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait’ in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 expedition eds A. Herle and S. Rouse. University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 77–105. Herle, A. and S. Rouse, eds Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 expedition. University Press, Cambridge, 1998. Hoskins, J. Biographical objects: how things tell the stories of people’s lives. Routledge, London, 1998. Jacknis, I. ‘Franz Boas and exhibits: on the limitations of the museum method in anthropology’ in Objects and others: essays on museums and material culture ed. G. W. Stocking. Wisconsin University Press, Madison, 1985, 75–111. Jenkins, D. ‘Object lessons and ethnographic displays: museum exhibitions and the making of American anthropology’, Comparative Studies in Society and History vol. 36 (1994): 242–70.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Introduction

7:13 pm

Page 33

33

Jones, P. ‘Objects of mystery and concealment: a history of Tjurunga collecting’ in Politics of the Secret ed. C. Anderson. Oceania Monographs, no. 45, University of Sydney, 1995. Jones, P.G. ‘“A Box of Native Things”: ethnographic collectors and the South Australian Museum, 1830s–1930s’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Adelaide, 1996. Keesing, R.M. ‘Creating the past: custom and identity in the contemporary Pacific’, Contemporary Pacific vol. 1 (1989): 19–42. Knauft, B.M. From primitive to postcolonial in Melanesia and anthropology. Michigan University Press, Ann Arbor, 1999. Kuchler, S. ‘Sacrificial economy and its objects: rethinking colonial collecting in Oceania’, Material Culture vol. 2 no. 1 (1997): 39–60. Kuper, A. Anthropology and anthropologists: the modern British school. Routledge, London, 1983. Lawson, B. Collected curios: missionary tales from the South Seas. McGill University Libraries, Montreal, 1994. Mack, B.J. Emil Torday and the art of the Congo, 1900–1909. British Museum Publications, London, 1990. O’Hanlon, M.D.P. Paradise: portraying the New Guinea Highlands. British Museum Press, London, 1993. Peers, L. and K. Pettipas ‘Reverend John West’s Collection: Red River, 1820–1823’, American Indian Art Magazine (Summer 1996): 62–73. Penny, G. ‘Municipal displays. Civic self-promotion and the development of German ethnographic museums 1870–1914’, Social Anthropology vol. 6, no. 2 (1998): 157–68. Price, R. and S. Price Equatoria. Routledge, New York and London, 1992. Price, S. Primitive art in civilized places. University Press, Chicago, 1989. Rosman, A. and P.G. Rubel ‘Why they collected: the history of artifact collecting in New Ireland’, Museum Anthropology vol. 22, no. 2 (1998): 35–49. Schildkrout, E. and C.A. Keim, eds The scramble for art in Central Africa. University Press, Cambridge, 1998. Schindlbeck, M. ‘The art of collecting: interactions between collectors and the people they visit’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie vol. 118 (1993): 57–67. Stocking, G.W. Objects and others: essays on museums and material culture. Wisconsin University Press, Madison, 1985. ———. After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951. Wisconsin University Press, Madison, 1995. Sturtevant, W.C. ‘Does anthropology need museums?’, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington no. 82 (1969): 619–50. Thomas, N. ‘The force of ethnology: origins and significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia division’, Current Anthropology vol. 30 (1989): 27–34. ———. Entangled objects: exchange, material culture, and colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991. ———. ‘Substantivization and anthropological discourse: the transformation of practices into institutions in neotraditional Pacific societies’ in History and tradition in Melanesian anthropology ed. J.M. Carrier. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

34

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 34

Michael O’Hanlon

Torgovnick, M. Gone primitive: savage intellects, modern lives. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1990. Torrence, R. ‘Ethnoarchaeology, museum collections and prehistoric exchange: obsidian-tipped artifacts from the Admiralty Islands’, World Archaeology vol. 24 no. 3 (1993): 467–81. Vansina, J. ‘Collectors and collections’, Journal of African History vol. 33 no. 2 (1992): 334–5. Welsch, R., ed. An American anthropologist in Melanesia: A.B. Lewis and the Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition 1909–1913, 2 vols. Hawai’i University Press, Honolulu, 1998. White, B.M. ‘Give us a little milk’, Minnesota History vol. 48 no. 2 (1982): 60–65. Williams, F.E. The Collection of curios and the preservation of native culture. Anthropology Report no.3, Government Printer, Port Moresby, 1923. Young, M.W. Malinowski’s Kiriwina: fieldwork photography 1915–1918. University Press, Chicago, 1999.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 35

Chapter 2

GATHERING FOR GOD: George Brown and the Christian Economy in the Collection of Artefacts

Helen Gardner

Introduction Ethnographic artefacts are collected at the intersection of differing ideas about the use of objects in the mediation of relationships. Missionaries found that the Christian ideal of the gift – offered freely to God in return for the original gift to the world of his only son – proved difficult to convey in the Pacific where many cultures mediated their social relationships through direct material reciprocity. In consequence, missionaries sought to reshape the economic order of their congregations and held that converts proved their sincere adherence to the Christian faith through their gifts to the church. This chapter examines the collecting of Methodist missionary George Brown in Melanesia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and explores the role that the Christian ideal of the gift played in assembling his collection. While Brown’s motives for accruing material culture were complex, the scientific ideas served by his collection were less so. Once gathered, Brown viewed artefacts primarily as evidence to be used in metropolitan discussions about race and development. A second goal of this chapter is to outline Brown’s use of material culture to question the orthodox view that Polynesians were unproblematically more advanced in evolutionary terms than were Melanesians. In an explicit claim for the intelligence of his congregations, Brown sent specimens

O'Hanlon/Welsh

36

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 36

Helen Gardner

of Melanesian shell money from the Bismarck Archipelago to E. B. Tylor, drawing the Oxford anthropologist’s attention to this anomalously ‘advanced’ aspect of their culture. Subsequently, throughout the twentieth century, collections of material culture have been used to express changing ideas about the relationships between peoples, races and – since the decolonisation of the Pacific – nations. In recent years the George Brown collection has become something of a cause célèbre in this respect. The collection was sold three times in the twentieth century. The last sale – amid significant controversy and some secrecy – was in 1985 from the Hancock Museum at Newcastle University in England to the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan. The third goal of this chapter is to sketch how, a century after the collection was first made, similar issues of the morality of material transactions reemerged in this different context. Linked to a now contested colonial past, the sale of the George Brown collection stimulated debate over where ethnographic artefacts rightly belong and the proper valuation of items of cultural heritage. Pivotal to the debate was the question of whether the collection was an entity which should not be dispersed.

Figure 2.1: The sample of shell money (Divara/Diwarra) sent by Brown to Tylor (1977.4.1). (It was not entered into the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum until 1977 when it was found among Tylor’s correspondence.)

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 37

Gathering for God

37

Science and Evangelical Christianity: Establishing the New Field During his career Brown combined his scientific interests with his Christian duties and was one of a number of missionaries to the Pacific with links to anthropological theorists as well as to colonial and metropolitan museums. In his first posting as a missionary from 1860 to 1874 on Samoa, Brown focused on ornithology, using the Linnaean taxonomy learned from his Unitarian father, who had been a keen amateur botanist in the north of England. The intellectual milieu of Brown’s childhood was a synthesis of religious and scientific enthusiasm. Safe in their belief in the harmony and perfection of the universe, and themselves within it, Unitarians were free to examine God’s creation as an expression of his purpose. Science, far from being a threat to the Unitarian faith, tended rather to strengthen it, for the discoveries of man merely indicated the purposes of God (Holt 1952: 276–7). The young Brown converted to Methodism while staying with his missionary uncle in Auckland. While this Evangelical faith was more conservative in its allegiance to Biblical literalism than Unitarianism, Methodist missionaries were also expected to maintain an interest in the physical worlds in which they laboured. Celebrating the presentation of Brown’s collection of natural history specimens to the Royal Zoological Society in London, the Melbourne Spectator (a Methodist weekly) offered Brown ‘the heartiest support if for no better reason than the tendency of such efforts to increase the sum of human knowledge. The chief object of the missionary is to spread the gospel, but he does not forget the claims of science’ (Spectator, 26 May 1877). After fourteen years in Samoa, Brown successfully agitated to establish a new Methodist mission in the Bismarck Archipelago, the large islands off the northeast coast of New Guinea. While fundraising for this project in the colonial cities of southeastern Australia and New Zealand, he made contact with botanists such as von Mueller in Melbourne, as well as with the curators of colonial museums, all of whom were keen to receive specimens from this little-known region. Brown embarked from Sydney on the John Wesley, bound for the Bismarck Archipelago via Fiji and Samoa where teachers were chosen from Methodist congregations to help establish the new field. Also on board was Brown’s fellow missionary, Lorimer Fison, who was returning to Fiji after a long furlough spent in Melbourne collecting data for Kamilaroi and Kurnai, one of the first sociocultural ethnologies of Australian Aborigines. Brown was also accompanied by members of a small scientific party who planned to collect specimens from the Bismarck Archipelago. Among them was Anatole von Hügel who later made a comprehensive collection of artefacts from Fiji (Roth and Hooper 1989).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 38

38

Helen Gardner

Of the many scientific expeditions planned for the New Guinea mainland and islands in 1875 (Frodin 1988: 101), this was undoubtedly the least successful. Von Hügel left the John Wesley in Fiji, after quarrelling with Fison.1 The others in the party were probably frightened by reports of the unhealthy climate. Only Cockerell, a professional collector, travelled to the Duke of York Islands where the mission was sited. Cockerell’s contract to collect specimens for Brown was later terminated when the missionary received reports of the young collector’s sexual indiscretions.

The Duke of York Islands The John Wesley anchored off Port Hunter on the Duke of York Islands in August 1875. On the advice of his Duke of York crewman, Teem, Brown sought out the powerful brothers To Pulu, Waruwarum and Nerakua whom he described as the ‘chiefs’ of the Duke of York Islands. From 1870 the brothers had established trading coalitions throughout the region to supply wood, food, tortoiseshell and entertainment to crews of vessels seeking bêche de mer and pearl shell (Schütte 1989: 57; Hempenstall 1978: 119). Brown accepted the political expediency of siting the new mission on land purchased from To Pulu at Port Hunter, although he personally preferred the nearby region of Makada.2 To Pulu, also referred to as King Dick, was indispensable in the first days of the mission. Proficient in Pidgin, he interpreted for Brown and his party and entered into a contract to supply food to the John Wesley while the ship was moored at Port Hunter. Most of the foodstuffs were purchased from the Gazelle Peninsula on New Britain where To Pulu had established trading partners to supply tortoiseshell to European traders (Brown 1908: 92). Brown wrote to Benjamin Chapman, his superior in Sydney, that ‘We have certainly been led to the very best place for commencing our work as we can be in almost constant communication with both the large Islands of New Britain and New Ireland and by means of King Dick’s influence we can have a comparatively safe access to many villages on both of them’.3 During the three weeks that the John Wesley was moored at Port Hunter, Brown collected as much as possible. Though frequently ill, he spent hours preparing bird skins with Cockerell, and he purchased ‘many specimens’ as well as land, thatch and bamboo for the mission house.4 The vessel weighed anchor laden with a number of live birds for Dr Sclater, secretary of the Royal Zoological Society in London.5 Ramsay, curator at the Australian Museum in Sydney, received a crate of plants from the missionary.6 To Chapman, Brown sent a ‘lot of spears and clubs with a few curiosities for yourself and any member of

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 39

Gathering for God

39

the committee and friends’. To his wife, Sarah Lydia Brown in Auckland, Brown sent a ‘box of Sundries and a Bundle of Spears and Clubs’, with instructions to keep two Fijian clubs and ‘four or five of the best clubs and spears’. He noted contentedly that the new mission site ‘seems to be a splendid field for a Naturalist’.7 While Brown had planned initially to leave with the John Wesley, he felt that the mission demanded his presence and decided to stay on at Port Hunter.

Trading Networks and the Collection of Artefacts Through his affiliation with To Pulu and his brothers, Brown was drawn into local trading networks. The missionary was repeatedly urged by the brothers to confine his travel to specific villages on New Ireland and New Britain. When Brown went to New Ireland in October 1875, To Pulu directed him to visit his trading partner To Mum. Of this visit Brown recalled sardonically that the men were only using him to enable ‘some little peddling transactions of their own’ (Brown 1908: 110). When he sought to travel outside these networks, Brown met with great resistance from the Duke of York big-men: ‘I cannot give any correct idea of the great trouble we always had whenever I wished to leave home, the people professed to be very much afraid that I should be killed and that they would be held responsible for my death’ (Brown 1908: 107). Although Brown ignored these warnings and travelled where he wished, villagers consistently acknowledged his connections to Waruwarum and To Pulu. On the island of Matupit in Blanche Bay, at Metlik on the north coast of New Ireland and on the south coast of the Gazelle Peninsula, Brown was met in the first months with assurances in Pidgin that he was welcome, and that ‘Duke of York man he talk gammon [lies]’ regarding any threats to his welfare (Brown 1908: 122, 141, 145). Although eager to curtail Brown’s movement in the region, the big-men made use of Brown’s launch for their own trading purposes and Waruwarum frequently accompanied Brown on his numerous trips around the islands. Links between the big-men and the missionary were further strengthened when Kaplen, To Pulu’s son, became Brown’s frequent companion and trusted interpreter, particularly to New Ireland where the young man could speak some of the language (Brown 1908: 133). Kaplen was one of the first to be baptised as a Christian and his status was almost certainly enhanced by this action.8 As a result of Brown’s connections to the big-men, very few of the artefacts from the Bismarck Archipelago that he donated in 1876 to colonial museums were from the Duke of York Islands. To the Tasmanian Museum, Brown sent spears, shell money, armlets, necklaces,

O'Hanlon/Welsh

40

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 40

Helen Gardner

Figure 2.2: Waruwarum, three wives and a son, photographed by George Brown.

baskets, a ‘melanggan’ carving and a modelled skull; all were attributed to New Ireland and New Britain, none to the Duke of York Islands.9 Of the eighty-five objects Brown donated to the Auckland Museum, sixtyfive were from New Ireland and New Britain, along with a few objects from Samoa and New Zealand. From the Duke of York Islands Brown sent only a sling, a bag of stones, shell money, a club and an iron tomahawk with an ornamented wooden handle.10 The sparse assemblage from Brown’s home islands implies that the missionary traded for artefacts among those with whom he was least familiar. Indeed, Brown’s early journal entries suggest that his frequent voyages around the islands were marked by the constant exchange of all manner of goods. The missionary represented this trade as a rather onerous service that he performed simply for Christian purposes: ‘I bought everything they brought whether we wanted it or not, with the exception of tortoise shell [a common item sought by Europeans]… as I wished both natives and traders to understand that we were not there for trading purposes’ (Brown 1908: 118). The following is a typical account: At Keravia we had to sit in the launch while at anchor for about an hour until a very heavy rain squall passed over us from the land. Made a few presents of Beads etc. to the Chief, bought some yams just to please the people, talked to them for awhile invited them over to see me and then left them. As

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 41

Gathering for God

41

we steered along the coast Canoe after Canoe came out and we always stopped for a few minutes for them buying a little from each if we could simply from the desire to be friendly with them. From some we got Fish from others a few Yams, some useless shells from another Fishing nets Spears Bananas etc. from others. These only cost us a few strings of beads. (Brown 1908: 124)

For Islanders without connections to the big-men on the Duke of York Islands, these opportunistic exchanges were the best means of establishing contact with the missionary, an alliance that was desired by both parties. Brown claimed that the value of these exchanges was the contact made with Islanders rather than the objects gathered. While this was perhaps not the entire truth for Brown, it may well have been so for Islanders seeking access to him. In fact Islanders in the coastal regions would have quickly learned of Brown’s ready exchange of European goods for almost any object and may well have considered that they were taking advantage of the missionary, not necessarily for the beads that he offered, but for future trading opportunities. It is also possible that Brown was purchasing items gathered by Waruwarum and To Pulu from distant locations specifically for trade with the missionary.

Exchange, Gifts and the Christian Economy Early exchanges between Brown and Islanders were marked by the missionary’s preconceptions about ‘savage’ economies. Despite evidence that Islanders were involved in complex trade networks designed to increase their wealth in shell money (known as divara on the Duke of York Islands, and tambu or tabu on the Gazelle Peninsula),11 Brown feared that trade with him would encourage some of the emblematic characteristics of savagery: a careless attitude to material goods and an inappropriate reliance on the missionary as an endless source of them. In his early trips around the coastal regions of New Britain and New Ireland, Brown insisted on exchange rather than unreciprocated gift-giving: ‘These only cost us a few strings of beads and though many of the things bought were of no value I think it far better to use a few articles of barter in this way than to begin a system of indiscriminate present giving’.12 The distinction between commerce and mission was crucial to the Christian project. European traders wished to engage only in alienable trade – simple transactions without lasting indebtedness performed by independent parties – while Christian missionaries desired a lasting change based on the indebtedness of all humanity to God, expressed through the atonement of Jesus on the cross. Brown actively sought to

O'Hanlon/Welsh

42

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 42

Helen Gardner

situate himself in relationships politically useful for the establishment of Christianity on the Islands, and he achieved this through the exchange of material goods. Yet the sacrosanct nature of the relationship between man and God was based on God’s ‘gift’ of his only son to mankind, an economy that was difficult to explain to the Islanders of the Bismarck Archipelago for whom reciprocity formed the basis of all relationships, both in the material and spiritual world. Conveying the Christian relationship between man and God was complicated by the shell money economy. This currency mediated the movement and acquisition of knowledge, rituals and magic spells (Simet 1991: 135, 141), in addition to being the means through which everyday goods could be purchased. Benjamin Danks, who followed Brown to the Port Hunter mission, claimed that ‘the man who best understands the uses and power of Tambu, be he missionary or trader, will carry the greatest influence amongst the people, because in understanding that subject he will be led almost into the secrets of their very hearts’ (1888: 317). For Christian missionaries the economy of the Bismarck Archipelago lacked the ideal, so central to the Christian faith, of the freely offered gift, described by St Paul in various verses as the ‘gift of grace’ (Eph. 3:7), ‘the gift of the holy spirit’ (Acts. 2:38), and the ‘gift of eternal life’ (Roms 6:23). Despite Brown’s efforts to separate the Christian mission from European commerce, it would appear that the Christian faith itself became an item of trade among Islanders soon after Brown introduced it into the region. Modern recollections of the coming of Christianity to the Gazelle Peninsula trace the sale of the faith from village to village. Big-men attracted Samoan or Fijian teachers to their villages by building a house and providing a feast for them. Once the primary songs and prayers had been learned, the faith could be sold to other big-men for five fathoms of shell money (Neumann 1992: 81–2). In the annual reenactments of the coming of Christianity to the Duke of York Islands the master of ceremonies recounts how Brown was surrounded by big-men seeking to purchase the new faith. In refusing their offers Brown told them that the church was a ‘free gift from God’ (Errington and Gewertz 1995: 92). Brown’s vignettes of transactions in the Bismarck Archipelago demonstrate the missionary’s difficulty in applying his concepts of ‘gift’ and ‘trade’ to the local economy. In his autobiography Brown recalled that on entering a village in New Ireland ‘the chief (Sagnia), brought me a large live pig and a lot of food as a present, for which of course I paid with another present’ [italics in the original]. The italics suggest that ‘present’ was a clumsy translation for Sagnia’s offering and this deficiency was further demonstrated by subsequent events. During the night, Sagnia came to Brown with a party of men claiming he had not been properly reimbursed for his ‘present’ and demanding further pay-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Gathering for God

7:13 pm

Page 43

43

ment. After a near fight between Christians and villagers the parties decamped. Brown then sought out Sagnia and ‘gave him two strings of beads to “pay for his fright”’ (1908: 165). In February 1876 Brown ‘paid’ a party aggrieved by a murder, a tomahawk, prints, beads, tobacco and knives, as a means of bringing a settlement between two villages (1908: 166–7). On another occasion, the missionary used shell money to ‘pay’ for the life of one of Waruwarum’s wives, whom the bigman was intent on killing for an alleged infidelity (1908: 188–93). On taking and displaying a photograph of Le Bera, big-man at Kalil on New Ireland, Brown received a compliment from one villager in the form of a leaf placed carefully on his shoulder, but ‘my opinion of its disinterestedness was much diminished when I found that I was expected to pay for it by a return present, and that such a present would be preferred in the shape of beads or tobacco’ (1908: 136). Brown consistently urged Islanders to adopt Christian economic mores to show the correct relationship between God and mortal. He cajoled and coerced his fellow villagers at Port Hunter to build their own church without remuneration. While acknowledging that the task could have been done ‘by the expenditure of some beads and a few trifling articles’, his faith – that which was ‘beyond riches’– demanded that these nascent congregations should offer their labour gratis, as a demonstration of their Christian sincerity. Initial bewilderment at the idea – ‘they appeared to regard it as a pleasant joke on my part’ – was gradually overcome and the work was begun and completed a mere five months after the station was established.13 Over time, Brown recorded more examples of Islander displays of the correct relationship to God through Christian offering. The missionary noted with emotion the first church built at the Duke of York village of Urukuruk in 1878 under the guidance of Samoan teacher Misieli Loli. When the mission staff proposed that the accompanying feast should be provided free by individual villagers, Brown reported that ‘the old chief said it could not be done, that it was against the custom of the land and the people would not give but the teachers carried the point and one man gave taro, and another a few nuts, another bananas and so we had the first feast of that kind’. Perhaps of greater significance was the distribution of the food by the bigman: ‘the chief shared it out differently’, wrote Brown, ‘and instead of only giving a portion to each one present the teacher and myself got good presents and another one was put aside for the Fijian teachers who were not present’.14 The changing economic relationship between the church and the village established particularly fertile conditions for the gifting of artefacts. For Brown, the best evidence that his new congregations had properly internalised the correct relationship to the church and God

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 44

44

Helen Gardner

was the farewell feast held in his honour when he left the region in December 1880: Whilst busily engaged in packing and attending to the many wants of the teachers and the people, I often felt very sad at the prospect of leaving them all… I was especially pleased with the many little presents which they brought us, not because of any intrinsic value which they had, but because the very fact of their giving anything at all, without the slightest idea or desire of receiving a return present, showed such an utter change in their nature and was such a convincing proof of the sincerity of their love. (1908: 185)

Brown’s missionary colleague, Benjamin Danks, provided a more detailed description of the tributes offered to the departing missionary by ‘400 to 500 people assembled from all parts of the group’: I wish you could have been present with us during the past few days, and seen the natives as they trooped up to Mr Brown’s house, bringing pigs, fowls, spears, clubs and other things which they count valuable, and laying them at his feet, without seeking any return… Men from near and far have called upon Mr. Brown and shown their respect to him in this manner… Not a dozen weapons were to be seen except what were brought by them to Mr. Brown as presents. Chiefs and commoners have vied with each other in doing honour to our brother who has laboured so earnestly and well for their benefit. (Weekly Advocate, 26 February 1881)

Documenting the Collection While Brown was given a large number of artefacts as a tribute to his position in the Bismarck Archipelago, many other objects were specifically sought by the missionary as scientific evidence. Yet he rarely documented his acquisitions, a reticence that reflected both his scientific vision and his Christian mission. As the significance of objects was considered self-evident, irrespective of the political and economic circumstances in which they were gathered, a record of how each was acquired was superfluous. In Brown’s case this silence was exacerbated by ambivalence as to whether large-scale collecting was wholly compatible with work as a missionary, given Christianity’s equivocal attitude towards worldly goods. Such accounts as there are in Brown’s journal of collecting artefacts or specimens tend to be incidental and anecdotal and were retold largely as examples of his bravery or common sense. For example, during his first visit to New Ireland, Brown and Blohm [a local German trader], were surrounded on a beach by a large number of men, all well armed with spears. Brown recorded that he walked ‘quietly on right into the midst of the crowd… [and] began to barter for spears etc.’. The weapons offered were each tipped with a

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Gathering for God

7:13 pm

Page 45

45

human bone and, seeking to avoid offence, the missionary bought a great many. This was a particularly happy opportunity to satisfy multiple agendas. The spears were collectable simply on grounds of their novelty, but they also exemplified the immoral savage without reverence for human remains. Circumstances dictated that Brown acquire a great many in order to show his good will and avoid confrontation, so he also ended up with a representative sample. Yet in an ironic conclusion that illustrates the chancy nature of collecting, the artefacts were lost overboard that same night when the steamer took a heavy roll (Brown 1908: 125). This is one of the few records of Brown’s acquisition of artefacts. Yet Brown gathered nearly six hundred items from the Bismarck Archipelago for his private museum and sent many more artefacts to colleagues, anthropologists and colonial museums. From the earliest days at Port Hunter, Brown was competing with other Europeans for artefacts. While the John Wesley was still moored at Port Hunter in the first days of the mission, Brown returned to the ship to find the crew engaged with ‘much anxiety’ in securing curios, ‘wherein I spoke firmly to them about their rough treatment and unfair payment to local people’ (1908: 398). After a visit home in 1876–7, Brown returned to Port Hunter and found an influx of European copra traders for the German trading houses. In a letter to a colleague in Fiji, Brown remarked that he could not supply him with any ‘curios’ from the coastal regions of the Bismarck Archipelago, and that he himself did not have any for ‘the traders around here have made them scarce and we shall have to go further afield’.15 In the last year of Brown’s residence in the Bismarck Archipelago he faced a rival collector, Kleinschmidt, who was employed by Godeffroy’s Museum in Hamburg. The German could not compete with Brown’s status and opportunities for collecting and he complained to his superiors that: With the steam launch he and his man Kaplen, an excellent hunter, can go… now to far-off parts of New Britain, then again… to far-off parts of New Ireland… Meanwhile I hobble about with my boat, exposed to all weathers… While Brown who has plenty of people, teachers and black boys, has the opportunity to have the area thoroughly searched (which no white man is able to do like blacks), I now don’t have any more foreign labourers. (Quoted in Schütte 1991: 77)

Keen to discredit Brown, Kleinschmidt suggested to Danks that ‘among the people of Sydney, Cooktown and other places’, the mission had a bad name, ‘it being generally believed that we trade and use our teachers for the purposes of securing the best curios… it was commonly asserted that Mr Brown cared more about his name being given to a new snake, bird, or insect than he did for all the souls of the New

O'Hanlon/Welsh

46

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 46

Helen Gardner

Britain people put together’ (Danks 1933: 76). Fearful that German trading ships were spreading these rumours to the colonies, Brown protested to his superior, Benjamin Chapman, that ‘I have scarcely skinned a bird since my return’. So far as artefacts were concerned, the missionary admitted that, during a recent trip to New Ireland, he had ‘purchased a few curios not worth a shilling’.16 Here Brown was being particularly disingenuous, for less than two months earlier he had posted 149 bird skins and 116 artefacts to Sydney.17 Brown’s remarks to Chapman on this point are a telling example of his efforts to shroud his collecting activities. Following Kleinschmidt’s attack, Brown did not record any further collecting of material culture or natural history specimens in his journals; nevertheless, during the nineteen years that Brown was general secretary for the Australasian Mission he gathered or was given most of the items that make up the George Brown collection. In the 1890s Brown established a Methodist mission in the Trobriand and the D’Entrecasteaux Islands off New Guinea, travelling there on occasion with Sir William MacGregor. There are hundreds of items from this region in his collection but no record of how they were acquired. There are also many artefacts from Samoa that were almost certainly gathered by, or gifted to, Brown during his frequent visits to the islands. Later, in 1902, Brown established a Methodist station at Ruviana in the Solomon Islands and this region is also well represented in the collection.

Material Culture and the Melanesia/Polynesia Divide As indicated in the introduction, Brown deployed material culture in contemporary scientific debates about racial origins and divisions in the Pacific. During his first years at Port Hunter, Brown prepared a paper for the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. Here he foreshadowed his interest in a division between those he termed ‘MalayoPolynesian’ and ‘Papuan’ (Brown 1877: 137–50). 18 Brown’s paper was the first attempt to shift the terms of the debate, on what became known as the Melanesia/Polynesia division, from physical and mental characteristics to the terrain of cultural evolutionism. A subsequent publication in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, ‘Papuans and Polynesians’ (Brown 1887), was a specific attempt to direct the debate away from the findings of physical anthropology. The Melanesia/Polynesia question framed much of Brown’s anthropological writing and artefact collecting, and culminated in 1910 with the publication of Melanesians and Polynesians: Their Life Histories Described and Compared (Brown 1972 [1910]). The volume is based primarily on data collected by Brown using the first edition of E.B. Tylor’s Notes and Queries

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Gathering for God

7:13 pm

Page 47

47

on Anthropology For the use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilised Lands (1874). Brown’s most important informant on the Duke of York Islands was identified only by his baptised name, Peni, and may well have been Peni Lelei, one of the first converts on the islands; he later became a teacher and travelled to Sydney with Brown. In his account of the history of Duke of York Islanders, Peni claimed that his people had increased the size both of their canoes and of their population as a result of their successful search for the small cowrie shells used to make shell money.19 The correlation between the desire for divara (shell money), an improvement in technology and an increase in population, might have seemed a feasible explanation for cultural development to Brown, whose faith had prepared him to recognize money as a necessary evil. However, Brown’s observation of shell money among the Melanesians of the Bismarck Archipelago posed a challenge to the missionary’s evolutionary perspective, for the Samoans – among whom he had previously worked – had no medium of exchange easily glossed as ‘money’ even though, as Polynesians, they ought, according to evolutionist orthodoxy, to have been more advanced. It was this that prompted Brown in 1881 to send a gift of divara to E.B. Tylor (Figure 2.1). Tylor thanked Brown for his gift of ‘the curious specimens of shell money from New Britain’ and agreed that they contrasted ‘remarkably with the general rude condition of these islanders’. Diffusion might have caused this anomaly and Tylor enquired ‘whether there was any evidence of their having learnt currency and interest from Malay traders’.20 Brown’s reply further questioned the place of ‘Papuans’ on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. He assured Tylor that there had never been ‘the slightest intercourse with Malays’. Indeed, since their previous correspondence, Brown had discovered that the language of the ‘New Britain’ natives included words for depreciation and ‘sell at a sacrifice… All these wd not appear singular if used by Malays or any semi-barbarous tribes, but they do seem so when used by such savages as the New Britain natives, living in small isolated districts.’21 In his anthropological papers Brown remained committed to an evolutionist analysis of human differences, but struggled to contain the evidence from material culture which consistently destabilised the hierarchical placing of Polynesia over Melanesia. In his book, Melanesians and Polynesians, Brown made the then unpopular claim that Pacific peoples ‘were all descended from one common stock of which Melanesia is the oldest representative’. It was the evidence of artefacts that strained all attempts to provide a coherent narrative of racial trajectories in Oceania. For example, shell money, pottery and the bow and arrow could be found in use by some Melanesian peoples but not Polynesians. Brown pointed out that, while many claimed that the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

48

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 48

Helen Gardner

absence of pottery in Polynesia was the conclusive proof that ‘Melanesian and Polynesian races are separate and distinct’, pottery actually made only intermittent appearance in Melanesia: ‘any one can find a purely Melanesian people in New Ireland who are absolutely without pottery, and in a day’s sail may find amongst the Western Solomons in Bougainville Straits and the Shortlands a people who make and use the pottery in which they cook their food’ (Brown 1972 [1910]: 434–5). Brown sought specific artefacts for anthropologists and colonial museums. E.B. Tylor, keen to establish the numerical skills of Islanders, asked Brown for a sample of a ‘thong or string with knots tied on it to record days or months or other things’.22 The theorist also sought examples of ‘tabu symbols’ and any ‘kind of charm objects to cause death-disease etc.’, and even requested a ‘“surf-board” if they are not too enormous’.23 H. Gigholi, curator of the Florence Museum of Zoology, specialised in stone implements and asked Brown to collect ‘stone or shell implements from the New Hebrides, and especially one of those stone rings used as money and one of those stone throwing clubs called Kawass from Tanna’.24 Tylor and Gigholi sought only broad coordinates for the provenance of objects. Their focus was on the formal structure of artefacts and their analysis was limited to finding analogous examples of items from around the world. Tylor turned Dr Johnson’s quip that ‘one set of savages is like another’, into an argument for the gradual development of a single human species. Proof of the unity of mankind could be found in the ethnological museum where ‘hatchet, adze, chisel, knife, saw, scraper, awl, needle, spear and arrowhead… belong with only differences of detail to races the most various’ (Tylor 1974 [1871] vol. 1: 6).25 Thus Tylor’s analysis of a ‘bamboo Jew’s harp’, played by Brown before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, was based entirely on form and world distribution: ‘the bamboo Jew’s harp you showed us how to play are [sic] Melanesian and Himalayan. They are, I believe, known in Polynesia, but I suppose are scarce as we never could get one. Not Africa’.26 While objects deemed authentic and untainted by European contact were used by Brown in scientific discussions about the origins and migration of Pacific peoples, hybrid artefacts served a Christian narrative for they showed that Islanders were willing to incorporate European concepts into their lives. This point was emphasised to colonial congregations as an indication that Islanders were adaptable and intelligent. For a proposed missionary museum in Sydney, Brown sent ‘lesson books in Duke of York language’, and ‘samples of native printing on bark’. These items showed the advance of the church, the ability of Islanders and the desire to learn to read and write, even in the absence of the proper European medium of paper. In a similar spirit, Brown commissioned artists from the Solomon Islands to copy illus-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 49

Gathering for God

49

trations from the Sydney Mail on to lengths of bamboo as proof of their ability to reproduce realistic images. Brown’s biographer noted admiringly that these illustrations showed the fine detail of ‘watches with the milling upon their cover cases’, while ‘a caricature from Snap Shots shows an Irishman’s face exactly’ (Fletcher 1917: 111). One of the most prominent objects displayed at a recent exhibition of Brown’s collection at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka was a kula shell from the Trobriand region, decorated with lengths of trade beads and European cloth. Brown was certainly aware that this object would be considered less valuable by museums and anthropologists than an artefact that appeared to be pre-contact. However, he was probably offered this item – either as a gift or to purchase – by an important kula trader in the Methodist-dominated Trobriands, and knew that the status of the church would be threatened if he declined an object of such value to its owner.

The Collection in the Twentieth Century On his death in 1917, Brown’s personal collection contained over three thousand items. However, for the reasons discussed, the collection probably appeared to many museum curators to be the eclectic pickings of an amateur anthropologist. In accordance with his will it was valued and offered for sale to three institutions in turn: to the Bowes Museum in Brown’s home town of Barnard Castle in the north of England, to the state of New South Wales and to the New South Wales Conference of the Methodist Church. All, however, were daunted by Brown’s proviso that the artefacts be known and described as the ‘George Brown Collection’ and, as far as possible, be kept ‘separate and distinct’ in their place of storage and display.27 Correspondence between the executors of Brown’s will, the trustees of the Australian Museum and the Premier’s Department of New South Wales, reveals a number of failed attempts to circumvent this directive.28 Finally, the Bowes Museum agreed to pay £1,250 for the collection. It was delivered in seventy-four boxes in September 1920 and a permanent display of some of the items was formally opened in 1924 by Henry Balfour of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum.29 The Bowes Museum held the Brown collection for over thirty years, although many items remained in their cases for lack of exhibition space and some duplicated material was exchanged with other institutions in Britain (Rubel and Rosman 1996: 66). The collection was sold in the early 1950s to Durham University for the same price that had been paid for it over thirty years earlier. It arrived at Durham University’s Newcastle campus as a teaching aid for the Anthropology Department

O'Hanlon/Welsh

50

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 50

Helen Gardner

in 1953. In 1974 the collection was transferred to the Hancock Museum of the – by then autonomous – University of Newcastle. Over the next ten years it was conserved and catalogued with the assistance of the British Museum (Davis 1985: 4). In the same month that the catalogue was printed, March 1985, Newcastle University announced that it had received enquiries through the auctioneers, Sotheby’s, from the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka and that it intended to sell the collection to raise money (Benthall 1986: 1). The announcement galvanised museum and anthropology communities in England and the Pacific. The primary issue in the furore over the sale was whether or not the artefacts constituted a coherent collection which should be maintained as such. Most northern hemisphere commentators claimed that they did, and that the dispersal of the collection would be a disaster. English law proscribed the export of items of cultural significance valued at more than £16,000 unless they had first been offered to a British institution. Having been valued at over £600,000, the collection as a whole far exceeded the allowable limit. However, a loophole in the law allowed the University of Newcastle to have the items valued individually. Sixteen artefacts exceeded the limit and were separated from the collection to be offered for sale in Britain. The Guardian reported that the British Museum made a ‘reluctant’ purchase of four of these items while simultaneously regretting ‘that the collection has been broken up’ (Guardian, 1 July 1986). This regret had a rather hollow ring since those objects which did not find a buyer in Britain were then returned to Newcastle for sale to Osaka. Furious at what they saw as an ‘abuse of the system’, anthropologists and museum curators called for changes to the art export laws, insisting that the collection was an entity that must be sold or retained as such (Daily Telegraph 9 April 1986; Sunday Times 9 March 1986; Carrington 1986: 185). J. Specht from the Australian Museum in Sydney was most vocal in the call for the return of the collection to Sydney or to the museums that had been established in the new nation states of Melanesia. Specht was impatient with British antipathy to the break up of the collection. He pointed out that Brown did not collect with a set of specific objectives in mind which would lend the collection scientific or historical value as an entity. Moreover, had the collection been divided up by country of origin, Pacific island museums might then have been able to afford to repatriate items they felt to be culturally significant. Specht also argued that the items that had been retained in Britain were simply those which exceeded an arbitrary monetary value, and that cultural heritage significance could not be measured in crude financial terms. His most important moral argument concerned an issue faced by museums in colonised countries around the world: the holding and

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Gathering for God

7:13 pm

Page 51

51

display of items gathered from indigenous people under the unequal relationship of colonisation. Osaka’s gain, Specht argued, was another example of political inequity and a further separation of objects from their makers (Specht 1987: 1–3). In an unexpected echo of arguments more commonly heard from the descendants of the makers of objects, some of Brown’s relatives in Britain insisted that the sale of the collection to Osaka represented a loss of their cultural heritage. In a plea to retain the collection in the north of England his granddaughter listed Brown’s missionary work, his great love for England and his scientific activities, adding that ‘his name is still familiar’ in the Pacific (The Times, 24 July 1985; Observer, 17 November 1985). Indeed, while anthropologists argued over the scientific value of the Brown collection and the difficulties of establishing a monetary value for artefacts, citizens of the new Christian nations in the Pacific – particularly Papua New Guinea – probably viewed the issue quite differently. Perhaps the only place in the world where George Brown retains a public profile is in Papua New Guinea. Here the missionary is recalled with great affection as a founding father of the now United Church of Papua New Guinea. Each year the anniversary of Brown’s landing on the Bismarck Archipelago is celebrated with reenactments, services, choirs singing and large public gatherings (Errington and Gewertz 1995: 77–106). At the opening of the recent exhibition of Brown’s collection in Osaka, Soroi Eoe, Director of the Papua New Guinea Museum, made an eloquent plea for the material to tour his nation, citing Brown’s role in the religious history of his State. Considering the tensions surrounding the sale and the collection’s involved history with a number of museums, it was fitting that Professor Shuzo Ishimori, curator of the George Brown collection and key player in its purchase for the Osaka Museum of Ethnology, fed these stresses into the first display of the material since its arrival in Japan over ten years ago. As a result, the 1999 George Brown Exhibition was as much an essay on collections and museums as it was on the missionary. Professor Ishimori displayed over two thousand items in interconnected rooms, each one representing a single island group. While some of the exhibits, in particular the masks and larger carvings, were shown in glass cases, the rest were laid out on storage shelves with nothing to separate the viewer from the object. This reflexive display style recalled the storage spaces of museums and was a reminder that, throughout the twentieth century, this collection had largely been hidden from public view. As a reflection on the issue of museum cataloguing and classification, every item in Ishimori’s exhibition was displayed with its museum identification tag showing, and there was no attempt to hide the four other numbers painted on to each object by previous owners of the collection. As the exhibition focused on muse-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 52

52

Helen Gardner

ums and collections there was little effort to display the role of Islanders in shaping the assemblage, or the Christian relationship between Brown and his congregations that so facilitated the gifting of material culture.

Conclusion Sparse references in Brown’s writings suggest his broad motives for gathering and maintaining a collection. Some items were specifically sought by the missionary; others were given in exchange by Islanders who made their own choices about what they offered. Many more were gifts to Brown in recognition of his role in their Christian lives. Brown’s subsequent deployment of these artefacts, both in anthropological arguments on racial divisions and in Christian discussions on the nature of human difference, reflected his scientific interests as well as his Christian impulse to maintain human equivalence across racial boundaries and to claim the equal capability of all under a Christian God. The recent sale of the collection lured a range of arguments from interested commentators seeking either to maintain the collection in Britain or to disperse it to the museums of the new nation states of the Pacific. Moral claims over the ownership of the collection revolved around the ways in which it was gathered and nationalist arguments that the sale represented a loss to the people of Britain, or to Pacific Islanders. No one raised the point that was probably most pertinent to the descendants of those who gifted artefacts to Brown in the Bismarck Archipelago: citizens in the provinces of East New Britain and New Ireland would almost certainly value the collection for its relationship to the Christian history of their region.

Notes Abbreviations for archive sources: ML Mitchell Library, Sydney AJCP The Papers of Sir Edward Tylor, Australian Joint Copying Project, M2803. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Brown to Chapman 14 June 1875, ML A1686–2. Brown journal 18 August 1875, ML A1686–11. Brown undated letter 1875, ML A1686–2. Brown journal 9, 11, 13, 15 and 17 September 1875, ML A1686–11. Brown to Sclater 5 September 1875, ML A1686–2. Brown to Ramsay 3 September 1875, ML A1686–2. G. Brown to S.L. Brown 22 August 1875, ML A1686–2. In his investigation of the kinship links between To Pulu, his brothers, and his son, Kaplen, H. Schütte (1989:56 fn23) argued that the exogamous matrilineal moieties

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 53

Gathering for God

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

53

in the region prescribed a particular relationship between Kaplen and his father that lacked the competitive aspects of the relationship between To Pulu and his brothers, who were from the same moiety. As a member of the opposite moiety Kaplen could trade for his father and could expect to inherit his wealth if he proved an able big-man. Tasmanian Museum Archives. Auckland Museum Te Papa Whakahiku Archives. For a discussion on the considerable literature on shell money, see Errington and Gewertz 1995: 54–6. Brown journal 21 October 1875, ML A1686–11. Brown journal 28 January 1876, ML A1686–12. Brown journal 28 September 1876, ML A1686–12. Brown to Langham 9 September 1877, ML A1686–2. Brown to Chapman 23 August 1880, ML A1686–3. Brown to Clark 16 July 1880, ML A1686–3. Brown’s nomenclature of ‘Papuan’ and ‘Malayo-Polynesian’ indicates that theories about a division remained unstable despite many attempts to set differences in a definitive classification. See Douglas 1999 and also Thomas 1989. Brown papers 1880, ML MSS–952. Brown scientific and ethnological papers 23 September 1881, ML A1686–22. Brown to Tylor 28 April 1882, AJCP. Tylor to Brown 3 December 1886, ML A1686–22. Tylor to Brown 25 November 1886, ML A1686–22. Gigholi to Brown 1 March 1895, ML A1686–22. The psychic unity of mankind was a central tenet in Tylor’s ethnology made repeatedly against polygenist claims that different races had arisen from a separate origin. He held that differences in technology were merely indicators of stages of development along a single path (Stocking 1968: 72–8). Tylor to Brown 24 September 1888, ML A1686–22. George Brown Will 17 November 1915, Uniting Church Archives, Sydney. Correspondence Anthropology Department, Australian Museum Archives, Sydney. Bowes Museum Archives.

Bibliography Benthall, J. ‘The George Brown collection’, Anthropology Today vol. 2 (1986): 1–3. Brown, G. ‘Notes on the Duke of York Group, New Britain and New Ireland’, The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society vol. 47 (1877): 137–50. ———. ‘Papuans and Polynesians’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland vol. 16 (1887): 311–27. ———. George Brown D.D. pioneer-missionary and explorer, an autobiography. Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1908. ———. Melanesians and Polynesians: their life histories described and compared. Benjamin Blom, New York, 1972 (originally published 1910). Carrington, L. ‘The fate of George Brown’, Museums Bulletin vol. 35 (1986): 185. Danks, B. ‘On the shell money of New Britain’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland vol. 17 (1888): 305–17.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

54

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 54

Helen Gardner

———. In wild New Britain: the story of Benjamin Danks pioneer missionary. Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1933. Davis, P., ed. A catalogue of the George Brown ethnographical collection in the Hancock Museum, Newcastle Upon Tyne. Hancock Museum, Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1985. Douglas, B. ‘Science and the art of representing “savages”: reading “race” in text and image in South Seas voyage literature’, History and Anthropology vol. 11 (1999): 157–201. Errington, F. and D. Gewertz Articulating change in the ‘last unknown’. Westview Press, Boulder, 1995. Fletcher, C.B. The new Pacific: British policy and German aims. Macmillan, London, 1917. Frodin, G. ‘The natural world of New Guinea’ in Nature in its greatest extent: western science in the Pacific eds R. Macleod and P.F. Rehbock. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 1988, 89–138. Hempenstall, P. Pacific Islanders under German rule: a study in the meaning of colonial resistance. Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1978. Holt, R. V. The Unitarian contribution to social progress in England. The Lindsay Press, London, 1952. Neumann, K. Not the way it really was. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 1992. Roth, J. and S. Hooper, eds The Fiji journals of Baron Anatole von Hügel. Fiji Museum, Suva, 1989. Rubel, P.G. and A. Rosman ‘George Brown, pioneer missionary and collector’, Museum Anthropology vol. 20 (1996): 60–8. Schütte, H. ‘Topulu and his brothers: aspects of societal transition in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea during the 1870s and the 1880s’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes vol. 1 (1989): 53–68. ———. ‘“Stori bilong wanpela man nem bilong em Toboalilu.” The death of Godeffroy’s Kleinschmidt, and the perception of history’, Pacific Studies vol. 14 (1991): 69–96. Simet, J.L. ‘Tabu: analysis of a Tolai ritual object’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, 1991. Specht, J. ‘The George Brown affair again’, Anthropology Today vol. 3 (1987): 1–3. Stocking, G. Race, culture and evolution: essays in the history of anthropology. Macmillan, Chicago, 1968. Thomas, N. ‘The force of ethnology: origins of the Melanesia/Polynesia division’, Current Anthropology vol. 30 (1989): 27–42. Tylor, E.B. Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art and custom, 2 vols. Gordon Press, New York, 1974 (originally published 1871). Tylor, E.B., ed. Notes and queries on anthropology, for the use of travellers and residents in uncivilised lands. British Association for the Advancement of Science, London, 1874.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 55

Chapter 3

EXPLORING TENSIONS IN MATERIAL CULTURE: Commercialising Ethnography in German New Guinea, 1870–1904

Rainer Buschmann

Introduction In 1898 Richard Parkinson, a planter and budding ethnographer resident on New Britain, wrote an emotionally charged letter to Felix von Luschan, the curator of the African/Oceanic division at the Berlin Museum of Ethnography. In the letter, Parkinson took issue with von Luschan’s use of an article which Parkinson had published about an ethnographic collection made by a commercial company. Parkinson accused von Luschan of attempting to use his article to lower the overall price of this collection, by arguing that because the collection was now published, the artefacts themselves were thereby less valuable. Parkinson wholeheartedly disagreed with von Luschan: ‘I don’t see it that way. If anything, a publication should certainly increase the value [of a collection]. At any rate, museums should not be commercial enterprises.’1 Parkinson, of course, was right in that the original purpose of an ethnological museum was to preserve, store, exhibit, and ultimately publish indigenous material culture. Museums then operated within the ‘salvage paradigm’ (Clifford 1987) which sought to rescue the remnants of material culture prior to the postulated demise of the producer societies as a consequence of Western expansion. The ‘salvage’

O'Hanlon/Welsh

56

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 56

Rainer Buschmann

idea lent scientific status to indigenous artefacts which became known over the course of the nineteenth century as ‘ethnographica’. Museum curators employed this term to distinguish their activity from the collection of ‘curiosities’ or ‘curios’ undertaken by earlier generations of ethnographers. Yet despite Parkinson’s advice that museums should be ‘pure’ scientific institutions with little regard for the commercial realities surrounding them, museum officials could not ignore the fact that their collections were, in one form or another, valuables. Although ethnographic objects around the turn of the century hardly fetched the same amount of money as, say, Renaissance paintings, there was a demand for these artefacts which in turn created a market. Ironically, it was the very ‘salvage agenda’ that provided the impetus for the commercialisation of ‘ethnographica’. Where ethnologists argued that the disappearance of the last true, authentic, unadulterated ‘ethnographica’ was nigh, other, more commercially minded individuals attempted to cash in on the anticipated rarity of the artefacts in question. In other words, the very justification behind the ‘salvage paradigm’ could propel the scientific object (‘ethnographica’) into a commodity phase. Science could thus enhance the commercial status of indigenous material culture. There is now a large body of literature which suggests that artefacts migrate through a number of different conceptual stages. ‘Things’ – much like people – have biographies of their own during their physical existence (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986). Thomas (1991) has further highlighted the social, economic and cultural relationships which surround conceptualisations of material culture. This chapter is inspired by this literature which is used here to explore the tension between the scientific and the commercial aspects of indigenous objects. In particular, this chapter seeks to investigate the tension between German ethnological museums and their attempt to use German commercial companies to collect on their behalf. The union between ethnography and commercialism along the German colonial frontier in New Guinea brought this dilemma to the fore. The chapter begins by delineating German museum officials’ ethnographic interest in New Guinea. Commercial companies active in this region – of which the most prominent were Godeffroy and Son, Hernsheim & Co, and the New Guinea Company – all sought to capitalise on this interest. Although German ethnologists initially regarded such companies as potential donors of artefacts to museums, they opposed the commercialisation of material culture. Similarly, firms placed more emphasis on collecting artefacts in bulk than on focusing on proper documentation of the indigenous provenance, name and uses of artefacts. In short, in the commercial setting quantitative rather than qualitative concerns took centre stage in collecting ethno-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 57

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

57

graphic objects. Tensions between ‘ethnographica’ and ‘commodities’ came to a fatal culmination in the ethnographic investigation of the islands of Wuvulu and Aua in the western Bismarck Archipelago.

Artefacts as ‘Ethnographica’: The Berlin Museum and the Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea The opening of the Royal Museum of Ethnography in Berlin in 1886 fulfilled Adolf Bastian’s long-standing dream of establishing an independent institution dedicated entirely to the pursuit of this academic discipline. As Director of this new institution, Bastian believed in the psychic unity of mankind: the idea that all individuals shared a set of innate elementary ideas which – variously worked upon by local social and environmental influences – manifested themselves as ‘folk-ideas’ characteristic of the different societies around the globe.2 The primary aim of a museum, according to Bastian, was the categorisation and classification of these ‘folk-ideas’ as they manifested themselves in material culture. In Bastian’s scheme of things the indigenous artefact became a scientific object, while the museum housing such objects became a comparative, ethnological ‘Thesaurus of Mankind’. Bastian took great care to allow only ‘authentic’ specimens into his museum: that is, he was concerned with obtaining objects free from Western influence. Of special interest were those areas which had only recently experienced prolonged contact; they became final ethnographic frontiers demanding the immediate interest of the ethnological community. In the Pacific Ocean, New Guinea became one of these frontiers attracting Bastian’s ‘salvage’ efforts. Bastian (1883; 1885) liked to contrast the unadulterated ethnographic treasures to be found in New Guinea with the demise of indigenous culture in Polynesia, an area which he himself had visited. His imagination was sparked by the trickle of New Guinea artefacts brought home by the German Navy. German colonial expansion, both in Africa and in the Pacific Islands, heightened Bastian’s interest. The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was generally cautious about the possibility of colonial annexation, rightly suspecting that this would lead to conflicts with other European nations. However, the substantial German presence in Africa and the Pacific favoured imperial expansion. German expansion in Africa was marked by several waves of explorers and travellers as well as by commercial firms, while in the Pacific German commercial interest reigned supreme.3 For museums, the large German commercial presence in the Pacific opened up additional possibilities of exploring the ethnographic frontier in New Guinea. However, the transformation of commercial

O'Hanlon/Welsh

58

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 58

Rainer Buschmann

agents into ethnographic patrons was fraught with difficulty. On the one hand, these commercial companies were themselves clearly agents of drastic cultural change, a point which Bastian frequently made; on the other hand, Bastian needed them if he wanted to expand the ethnographic holdings of his museum.4

From ‘Firewood’ to ‘Commodities’: The Godeffroy Company’s Ethnographic Ventures Accepting commercial companies into the fold of ethnographic collectors was no easy matter, especially since most of the individuals associated with such companies had little regard for ethnography, and agents operating along the commercial frontier seldom shared Bastian’s sense of urgency. Thomas has recently suggested that settlers in Fiji, for instance, had a vested interest in denying the worth of indigenous cultures. It was thus in the interest of the newly arrived settlers to emphasise the ‘barbaric’ aspects of Fijian society. Cannibal forks, for instance, were indicative of Fijian ‘primitive practices’– an image that the settlers sought to perpetuate through their display and use of indigenous material culture (Thomas 1991: 162–7). In the German colonial realm in the Pacific, disregard for indigenous material culture was equally commonplace: indigenous artefacts were termed Feuerholz (firewood). Exactly how this term originated is unclear, but German ethnologists frequently cited it as characteristic of the attitude of colonial residents towards ethnography (see, e.g., Jacobi 1925: 27). ‘Ninety-nine percent of colonial residents’, ethnographer Emil Stephan reported, ‘are opportunists and when any have an interest beyond making money, it is usually not in exploring the life of the “dirty Kanak”’.5 Yet, as opportunists, colonial residents would be well aware of the commercial possibilities inherent in ethnographic objects. Such was the case with the Johann Caesar Godeffroy und Sohn Company in the Pacific. By 1857 the Godeffroy venture had established a secure base in the Samoan Islands from where it expanded into the northern and southern corners of the Pacific Ocean. By replacing coconut oil produced in the Pacific with copra, the dried coconut meat exported to Europe for production, the Godeffroy Company established a trading empire which dominated Pacific commerce for two decades from 1860.6 But, among the seemingly endless supplies of dried coconut meat arriving in Hamburg, there also appeared a steady supply of indigenous objects which attracted the inquisitive spirit of the company owner Johann Caesar Godeffroy. Initially, Godeffroy set aside one of the company’s buildings as a museum to house the artefacts properly. His next move

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 59

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

59

was to hire a trained curator, Johann Dietrich Eduard Schmeltz, who was to preserve, store, and organise the collection. Under Schmeltz’s supervision the museum’s holdings continued to expand; its renown grew, partially in connection with a scholarly publication series entitled Journal des Museum Godeffroy, which was dedicated entirely to the exploration of the natural history and ethnology of the Pacific Islands. The cooperation between Schmeltz, as scientific curator, and Godeffroy, as enterprising company leader, did not stop there. Rather than leaving the acquisition of artefacts to chance, Godeffroy drafted a directive to his employees encouraging them to support the museum’s efforts. This encouragement was soon followed by the arrival of a selected group of trained collectors sent out by Schmeltz and Godeffroy to operate in the Pacific. Individuals such as Johann Kubary, Theodor Kleinschmidt and Amalie Dietrich had few trading responsibilities: their task was to acquire, store and ship specimens for the company’s museum in Hamburg. This was the first documented case of active scientific support by a commercial company.7 The exploits of these collectors not only provided a rich source of information on the natural history and ethnology of the Pacific Islands, but also illustrated how commercial interest intersected with ethnographic research after 1860. The German scientific community, which had much to gain from such activities, showered Godeffroy with praise.8 But Caesar Godeffroy was not just a disinterested patron of ethnographic research. Nor was his Hamburg-based private museum merely a research institution: it stood in fact as a long-term investment (Fülleborn 1985:169–172). Godeffroy, after all, was well aware of the perceived effect of Bastian’s call for a ‘salvage anthropology’. He was also aware that there were other trading companies specialising in the purchase, handling and sale of ethnographic objects.9 Such rival companies, however, rarely invested much time in the proper arrangement and publication of objects they acquired. It is here that Godeffroy’s venture differed. In systematically documenting his acquisitions, storing them, and, above all, in publishing them, Godeffroy was – in museum terms – far in advance of his rivals. Godeffroy speculated that his artefacts must be worth a great deal more than those hastily assembled by other commercial companies. The intensive trade in ‘ethnographica’ and natural history specimens emanating from the Godeffroy museum served as a testing ground to explore the expanding demand for ethnographic objects in Germany. Between 1864 and 1881 curator Schmeltz issued no less than eight directories listing ethnographic duplicate objects which he forwarded to interested institutions.10 While this operation provided additional cash flow for the Godeffroy museum, it was still not enough to save the institution from its ultimate closure resulting from bad

O'Hanlon/Welsh

60

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 60

Rainer Buschmann

investments following German unification. It then fell to Schmeltz to market Godeffroy’s ethnographic investment. In 1879, Godeffroy required him to produce a survey of the museum’s holdings to expedite their sale. This was no easy task, since Schmeltz had to sort through three thousand objects, their accompanying collectors’ correspondence and scattered secondary literature. The result (Schmeltz and Krause 1880) was the most influential work ever to emerge out of Godeffroy’s private museum. In conjunction with the physician Rudolf Krause (who was responsible for the physical anthropology section of the volume), Schmeltz issued a sevenhundred page strong ethnological and anthropological survey of the Pacific Islands. Although largely descriptive in nature, the volume received positive reviews (see, e.g., Andree 1881). Its scientific reception notwithstanding, Schmeltz’s first comprehensive survey of Pacific artefacts amounted to little less than an annotated, extensive sales catalogue (Schmeltz 1904: XII). And, despite the large-scale marketing attempt by the Godeffroy Company, the collections housed in the private museum failed to fetch high prices. This was because the terms of their sale were no longer dictated by Godeffroy but rather by the growing demands of his creditors.11 Despite the financial failure of the Godeffroy experiment, it served as a potential model for other companies to follow. Encouraged by Bastian’s urging for a ‘salvage’ ethnology, both the New Guinea Company (NGC) and the Hernsheim Company contemplated engaging in the commercialisation of indigenous material culture.

From ‘Commodities’ to ‘Decorative Firewood’: The Ethnographic Ventures of the New Guinea Company The New Guinea Company (Neu Guinea Compagnie) was a consortium representing powerful German business and financial interests. Company director Adolph von Hansemann organised an expedition to New Guinea in an attempt to forge a German colony in the Pacific Islands. The expedition was led by naturalist/ethnographer Otto Finsch who brought back a rich ethnographic collection from the coastal areas of northern New Guinea. Von Hansemann’s engagement with ethnography started when he offered this collection, numbering 2,128 artefacts, to the Berlin Museum.12 Originally, von Hansemann had not planned to sell this collection for profit but to exploit it for company propaganda. He asked the Prussian administration to provide a separate gallery in the new ethnological museum. In this gallery, whose entrance was to bear the words ‘Property of the New Guinea Company’, von Hansemann envisaged

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 61

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

61

an exhibition merging both material culture and natural history specimens from the region.13 Thus displayed as colonial curiosities, the artefacts were to contribute to von Hansemann’s efforts to attract prospective German settlers to the distant shores of northeastern New Guinea, now christened Kaiser Wilhelmsland by company officials. Bastian vehemently rejected what he considered to be an abuse of ‘his’ scientific institution. In protracted negotiations between the NGC and the Prussian Museum Administration it was agreed, with some help from the German Kaiser, to purchase Finsch’s whole collection for 23,000 marks. The agreement also stipulated that the NGC had to offer any further ethnographic collections to the Berlin Museum before approaching other patrons.14 It was this potential income which prompted von Hansemann to invest in ethnographic collecting.15 Superficially the NGC and Godeffroy Company’s endeavours were similar. The Company supported a journal, Nachrichten aus Kaiser Wilhelmsland, which, although markedly less scientific than the Journal des Museum Godeffroy, did publish articles on the exploration, ethnography and natural history of northeastern New Guinea. Von Hansemann also hired two former collectors of the Godeffroy Company: Richard Parkinson and Johann Kubary. However, they soon left the NGC’s service, suggesting that there were indeed major differences between the Godeffroy and New Guinea companies. Richard Parkinson, for instance, joined the NGC expecting to enrich his ethnographic horizons through travels in the new German colony. But by 1892 he had left the company in disgust after personal differences with high ranking company officials and a virtual flood of restrictions made his life miserable. ‘It is a pity,’ Parkinson wrote to von Luschan, ‘that the [NG] company has no interest in ethnographic research. If only von Hansemann had had the same [ethnographic] interest as the late Godeffroy then there would have been some point to my whole venture. The [NGC], however, is solely guided by practical interests and is out to pull hard-earned money out of the poor settlers’ purses. Moreover, [the company officials] make our lives unbearable with their mile-long edicts while they refuse to contribute their share.’16 There was much truth to Parkinson’s complaint. The NGC had rules limiting the movement of its employees and the consumption of alcohol, about the treatment of indigenous people, and the collection of natural history specimens and ethnographic artefacts. Long supplements were added to the contracts of each employee; paragraph five of the common company contract stipulated that all natural history objects, specifically those of ethnographic nature, were regarded as the property of the NGC. The company vowed to reimburse its employees for any monetary amount invested in the collections they made, but the employees had no say in their final disposition.17

62

1/11/00 7:13 pm

Map 3: German New Guinea (Mandated Territory of New Guinea)

O'Hanlon/Welsh Page 62

Rainer Buschmann

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 63

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

63

Most company employees regarded this stipulation as just another useless directive emerging from the company’s ‘green table’ in Berlin. As Bernard Hagen, former NGC employee and later Director at the Frankfurt Ethnological Museum, wrote (1899: 79–80): ‘Rest assured that we could have secured dedicated people interested enough in the pursuit of natural science. Unfortunately their efforts were hindered by many ill-devised green-table decisions according to which each employee had to surrender his collection to the company. Taking this into account, who would spend his free time establishing collections?... Eventually the decree was dropped, but by then the young men’s enthusiasm and efforts were all but gone.’ Some took to hoaxing company officials in Berlin. Amateur entomologist Stephan von Kotze found relief from the boredom of company administration in collecting insects. Fearing official confiscation of his collection, he used his free time and ingenuity to fabricate a unique insect collection to satisfy the company’s demands. Among his remarkable collections were thirteen-legged specimens, multicoloured insects and beetles sporting shiny shells made up of tiny glass fragments. The company officials were deeply impressed, and rushed the collection off to the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. There, Kotze’s hoax was soon discovered but he claimed that it contributed to the ultimate abolition of the NGC’s policy governing collecting.18 Disagreements with company officials also reduced the impact of the few large-scale expeditions to Kaiser Wilhelmsland. In 1895 a number of scientific ventures to Kaiser Wilhelmsland were organised by the German Foreign Office, jointly funded by the German Foreign Office, the NGC and several other colonial organisations. The expeditions brought together naturalist Carl Lauterbach and part-time traveller and ethnographer Ernst Tappenbeck. Tappenbeck, the official chronicler of these ventures, soon clashed with NGC officials over the detailed scrutiny they wished to exercise. Von Hansemann, on the other hand, objected to Tappenbeck’s personal attacks on the NGC in official reports. Von Hansemann therefore withheld the reports, contrary to the agreement with the German Foreign Office, and relieved Tappenbeck of his duties. Such episodes naturally had an impact on the effectiveness of the expeditions.19 Although the expeditions did contribute to a survey of the Ramu River in New Guinea, Governor Hahl commented later that they were of little importance for the exploration of German New Guinea.20 The NGC venture into ethnography was also questioned in the German capital where von Luschan at the Berlin Museum was deeply dissatisfied with both the quality and the price of ethnographic objects coming from the NGC. While the original Finsch collection was certainly valuable, those arriving over the next decade did not contain any

O'Hanlon/Welsh

64

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 64

Rainer Buschmann

fresh categories of artefacts.21 Moreover, NGC officials had no qualms about over-charging the Berlin Museum for their ethnographic objects. Each artefact sent to Berlin carried an average price tag of about 25 to 30 marks, which von Luschan thought excessive. ‘The NGC remains above all a commercial enterprise,’ von Luschan complained, ‘so we can hardly reproach [their officials] for exploiting their monopoly in the most brutal manner [towards the Berlin Museum].’22 As negotiations between the Berlin Museum and the NGC were nearing a standstill, von Hansemann found another use for the artefacts collected by his firm. During the German Commercial Exposition of 1896, also known as the German Colonial Exhibition, von Hansemann and other NGC officials returned to their project of using artefacts to promote the colonisation of German New Guinea. From the very beginning the exhibition straddled a fine line between scientific inquiry and the commercial exploitation of the German colonies. The way in which ethnographic objects were displayed precisely illustrated this ambiguity. The scientific section of the colonial exhibition attempted to align the artefacts according to the latest insights of ethnological comparison, while the ‘colonial hall’ used ethnographic objects merely as decorative backdrop to more pressing issues associated with settlement and commerce. Many ethnographic collections were on display in the scientific part of the exhibition, including those of important traders in ‘ethnographica’ (such as J.F.G. Umlauff) who sought to give their commercial collections an air of scientific legitimacy. The colonial exhibition also included major ethnographic collections from Kaiser Wilhelmsland where, as colonial curiosities, they served as a ‘decorative’ backdrop (von Luschan 1897: 65) to the artificial landscape of the German colonies being promoted. The popular success of the exhibition led NGC officials to consider establishing a permanent museum exhibiting the commercial and ethnographic resources of the German colonies. A group of German colonial enthusiasts including C. von Beck, the Deputy Director of the New Guinea Company, launched a massive campaign to find a permanent home for the colonial exhibition’s contents. Their efforts culminated in the creation of a joint-stock company, which was to ensure the creation and maintenance of such a museum in Berlin in 1896. The self-proclaimed purpose of this ‘colonial’ museum was educational as well as promotional: it was to inform visitors of the agricultural and mineral products of the German colonies, and about the possibilities for emigration and financial investment. The indigenous population, serving as a labour pool for the development of German colonial interests, was represented through a multitude of artefacts and house models. The combination of artefacts, house models, and an artificial landscape communicated a sense of false harmony to the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 65

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

65

visitors. Colonial conflicts were erased, presenting the visitor with the image of an unspoiled paradise awaiting development by the German settler.23 The exhibits of the colonial museum, including indigenous artefacts as trophies and colonial curiosities could only trouble ethnologists at the Berlin Museum of Ethnography. Felix von Luschan attacked the misuse of what he regarded as valuable scientific specimens in an institution that was a museum in name only. He deeply regretted the proposed union of colonial vision and superficial ethnography on display in the colonial museum. The arrangement of the artefacts as colonial curiosities, following no particular order or taxonomy, was vehemently attacked. ‘[B]ehind the pompous name of “German Colonial Museum”,’ von Luschan wrote to one of his closest supporters, ‘some people attempt to establish a sort of panopticon for black odds-and-ends.24 Elsewhere, von Luschan wrote in a review (1897: i) of the German Colonial Exhibition: ‘how could ethnographic collections of high value end up in the colonial gallery rather than in the [more comparative] scientific exhibition? Their sole purpose here seems to be empty wall decoration. They carry no labels, lack appropriate protection against dust and insects, and are rendered scientifically invalid.’ Contacting many important people within colonial circles, von Luschan hoped to put an end to what he regarded as a ludicrous venture.25 Popular opinion, however, supported the establishment of such an institution and von Luschan was fighting an uphill battle. However, conceptual clashes over the nature of indigenous material culture in Germany as well as restrictions on ethnographic collecting in New Guinea prevented the NGC from reproducing Godeffroy’s relative success. By 1899 the investment in ethnography proved to be no longer a viable option and was largely abandoned.

From Selling ‘Curios’ to the Large-Scale Commercialisation of artefacts: Max Thiel and the Hernsheim Company A third company engaged in the ‘ethnographica’ trade was the Hernsheim venture, which emerged as a strong commercial enterprise after the demise of the Godeffroy Company (Sack 1973: 65–6, 74–5). The company’s trade in artefacts developed slowly, and initially there was no money involved in such transactions. Max Buchner wrote to von Luschan: I acquired a complete collection, from a young man on Matupi. He had travelled extensively in the territory, and he was willing to surrender the whole lot after he and I had endured a horrible night of heavy drinking. When we

O'Hanlon/Welsh

66

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 66

Rainer Buschmann

finally brought our activity to an end in the early morning hours, the owner of the collection was so loaded that he was unable to provide me with concrete information about the artefacts. There was no time to wait around, because I had to leave on the next steamer. This is how one collects in this area!26

The young man who ‘sold’ Buchner the collection was probably none other than Max Thiel, nephew of company founder Eduard Hernsheim and later manager of the Pacific operations of the German enterprise. Thiel, realising that such collections would fetch more than a few pints of beer, soon started to peddle ethnographic collections to German travellers in the region. He stockpiled such objects at his station on Matupi, a small island (also known as Matupit) off the coast of the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain. His collecting may have lacked ethnographic direction, but the acquired artefacts did find buyers.27 In 1899, one of Thiel’s collections recently assembled in the far-flung stations of the Admiralty Islands, came under inspection by an expert ethnographer, Georg Thilenius, who later became Director of the Hamburg Museum. He noted that, while the collection contained old pieces, it had been hastily assembled and generally poorly labelled. The reasons for the poor state were obvious: Those places visited by governmental steamers are entirely depleted of artefacts. The only white person in close contact with the natives is the hopelessly isolated trader, who is visited at the most once or twice [a year] by a company schooner. Hailing from a rather low educational background, this poor soul has understandably very little interest in local ‘curiosities’, unless they are somewhat connected to commerce. Those occasional ethnographic acquisitions are usually sent as commodities to the main station from where they are eventually forwarded to a museum; sometimes they are intercepted by interested visitors before leaving the territory. One can thus hardly expect [these artefacts to bear] proper categorisation, places of origin, natives name, etc.28

Whether or not Thiel took such criticism to heart cannot be established from the written record. By 1902, however, Thiel hired Franz Hellwig, a former employee of the Deutsche Handels-und Plantagengesellschaft to assist him in his collecting. Hellwig was not unknown when it came to the ethnography of the Bismarck Archipelago. A veteran of several years residence in the territory, he had accumulated a large collection which he advertised for sale.29 When he returned to German New Guinea as an ethnographic collector, it was not in the service of one of the many ethnological museums, but for Max Thiel’s Hernsheim company. This large-scale commercial ethnographic undertaking was related to what is commonly referred to in the German ethnographic literature as the ‘Matty-Mystery’.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 67

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

67

The ‘Matty-Mystery’ and the Fatal Union of Ethnographic and Commercial Concerns Among Franz Hellwig’s main destinations was a set of islands located in the western corner of the Bismarck Archipelago which had recently come to the attention of the ethnological community. While the islands of Wuvulu and Aua entered into European consciousness through eighteenth-century maps as ‘Matty’ and ‘Durour’,30 their relative remoteness from major shipping lanes left the islands pretty much undisturbed until ‘Matty’ was visited by an NGC steamer in 1893. Unable to recruit inhabitants from this island, the expedition’s leader decided to take some thirty-seven artefacts with him. In accordance with the agreement between the Berlin Museum and the NGC, the collection ended up in Berlin’s Royal Museum of Ethnography where it came to von Luschan’s notice. He recognised that the artefacts forwarded by the NGC had little resemblance to those from the mainland of New Guinea (Hambruch 1908: 8). Based on the slender evidence of thirty-seven artefacts and some written information elicited from Ludwig Kärnbach,31 von Luschan highlighted the importance of ‘Matty’ Island. What initially dazzled von Luschan was that this island, located only about 150 kilometres from the coastal areas, yet displayed a completely unknown pattern of material culture. Similarly, according to Kärnbach’s first-hand observations, the inhabitants had a much lighter skin colour than their Melanesian neighbours. Their weapons, some spiked with shark’s teeth, seemed to suggest an affinity with some neighbouring islands, especially the Ninigo group, as well as some superficial connection to Micronesia. Although he was too careful a scholar to jump to conclusions, von Luschan highlighted the surprisingly non-Melanesian nature of the inhabitants’ physique and material culture. Citing Kärnbach’s assertion that the inhabitants knew neither iron nor tobacco, he maintained that ‘Matty’ had been isolated from other areas for perhaps ten generations, a total of 300 years. Von Luschan also considered that the island of ‘Matty’ could shed some light on the development of Micronesia which was essentially a geographic construct lacking concrete ethnographic or anthropometric evidence. Although he refused to place it within the geographical category of Micronesia,32 von Luschan hoped a closer study of the ‘Matty’ region would contribute to an understanding of settlement in the area. Above all, his article was a call for a careful analysis of the island’s material culture. Ideally this research should be based on a long-term intensive study among the people of the island. The most appropriate candidate for this venture was the NGC, whose officials, as colonial administrators of the territory, had a duty (Ehrenpflicht) to investigate the island’s heritage (von Luschan 1895a; 1895b).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 68

68

Rainer Buschmann

Figure 3.1. Artefacts from ‘Matty’.

To further his call for a systematic exploration of ‘Matty’, von Luschan sent a number of copies of his articles to German New Guinea. One of these copies quickly found itself, via Parkinson, in the enterprising hands of Max Thiel.33 Von Luschan’s article prompted Thiel into a venture he had been considering all along: the opening of a trading station in the western islands of the Bismarck Archipelago. In 1896 Thiel sent the schooner Welcome, under captain A.F.V. Andersen, to Wuvulu along with a Mr Schielkopf, who was designated the resident Hernsheim trader for the island. Accompanying Schielkopf were a number of labourers recruited from Buka. Thiel expected

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 69

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

69

Schielkopf and his indentured labourers to establish a thriving business on ‘Matty’ which was to include, among the usual commodities, a fair share of indigenous artefacts. Andersen approached the island in a small cutter flying both the German and the Hernsheim colours. On the beach he encountered an expectant crowd of 300 indigenes who welcomed him. After elaborate greeting ceremonies, Anderson selected about 200 square metres of land in the neighbourhood of his landfall as the future Hernsheim station. While his attempts to purchase the land were initially unsuccessful, he invited a number of what he regarded as chiefs to his schooner where he asked them to sign a piece of paper designated as the legal document for land purchase. To expedite the process, Andersen gave each ‘chief ’ an iron hatchet, satisfying himself that in this way he was obtaining legal title. The encounter between the inhabitants of ‘Matty’ and the Hernsheim party was relatively peaceful until Andersen’s departure.34 He left behind Schielkopf with three young labourers from Buka and a quickly constructed shack with a corrugated tin roof. When the island was visited by a ship in March 1896, only some weeks after the initial landfall, the station was found to be destroyed and Schielkopf and his Buka employees were missing. The naval survey vessel Möwe was dispatched immediately to Wuvulu to find out what had happened. The labourers from Buka were the first to be located; they claimed that the people from Wuvulu had murdered Schielkopf, forcing them to flee into the bush. The crew of the naval vessel, however, could find no hostility among the local inhabitants who continued their trade in ‘curiosities’ with the German sailors. Doubting the Buka version, the crew of the naval vessel took the labourers to Matupi for further interrogation. Ultimately the absence of other witnesses prevented a resolution of the case which ended in the colonial files (Hambruch 1908: 8–9; Firth 1982: 114; von Luschan 1900: 8). While the matter was considered closed by the colonial authorities, Max Thiel sought to profit from the ethnographic material which Andersen had brought back from the island. Arriving in Germany with von Luschan’s article under his arm and a shipload of artefacts from Wuvulu, Thiel arranged for an exhibition at the Hamburg Museum of Natural History. A number of prominent visitors came to inspect the 2,000 or so artefacts on display. One of them was von Luschan, the author of the very article which had caused the rush to the island. Thiel was sure he could make at least 20,000 marks for the lot and consequently rejected von Luschan’s attempts to negotiate a lower price.35 Although interested in acquiring the collection, von Luschan had reservations about its quality as, on first inspection, it seemed to comprise only further examples of the thirty-seven artefacts

O'Hanlon/Welsh

70

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 70

Rainer Buschmann

that had been the focus of his original article. Moreover, von Luschan claimed Thiel’s traders ‘had collected in the most abominable fashion. They deprived the poor [Wuvulu] people of thousands of weapons… enough to supply all museums in the world.’36 Von Luschan ultimately failed to secure Thiel’s ‘booty’ which was mainly purchased by Karl Hagen, interim Director of the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum, and a Mr Ohlendorf of Schwerin.37 Ironically, von Luschan had fallen prey to his own article. His emphasis on the need for careful collecting in New Guinea had the effect of increasing the value in Germany of ethnographic commodities from ‘Matty’. Upset by the turn of events, von Luschan (1897: 71) voiced his concern once more, differentiating clearly between ethnographic research and commercialisation of the same activity: My publication [on ‘Matty’] has influenced the representative of the [Hernsheim] company in Matupi, Mr. M. Thiel to instruct one of his captains to establish an ethnographic collection. Unfortunately this man did not fully understand his mission and has collected tremendous numbers of spears and clubs, all closely related to those appearing in my publication. Yet he has collected nothing which could in any way get us closer to the scientific questions surrounding the origin of the Matty islanders. In fact we still know very little about them; not a single hair of theirs has been analysed nor a single syllable of their language. The whole exercise amounts to a plundering action unique in the history of ethnography which has failed to yield any significant scientific results.

Von Luschan reiterated something which Caesar Godeffroy had known several decades earlier, that undocumented objects were mere ‘curiosities’. If the commercialisation of ethnographic artefacts was to be successful, then documentation had to be part of the process. Even Thiel had to agree to this point, but he took great offence at von Luschan’s characterisation of his collection as ‘plunder’. For several years their relationship was anything but cordial, since Thiel thought von Luschan to be out of touch with commercial realities governing the German territory. ‘Do you honestly think,’ Thiel asked one of von Luschan’s close associates, ‘that I can lecture my ships’ captains about the ethics of international law?’38 Obviously he could not, but he could hire professional collectors to augment the quality of his ethnographic collections. By doing so Thiel returned, for a short while at least, to Godeffroy’s extensive collection agenda. It was at this point, in 1902, that Thiel hired F.E. Hellwig’s services for the Hernsheim company. True connoisseurs in ethnology were rare among the colonial residents in the territory; Richard Parkinson aside, few individuals took an interest in the indigenous people. Hellwig, however, proved to be a further exception and the collection he

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 71

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

71

returned to Germany was generally well received by the ethnological community.39 For Thiel there was more than just money at stake, as he wished to restore his reputation, tarnished by von Luschan’s comments on the ‘plunder’ of Wuvulu. Thiel had not forgotten the ethnographic interest in the western islands of the Bismarck Archipelago in general and in Wuvulu and Aua in particular. He therefore asked Hellwig to pay particular attention to this area and Hellwig duly spent a great deal of time on both islands, amounting to a year in total.40 This figured as the first long-term ethnographic study in German New Guinea and was, ironically, a commercial enterprise. In many ways Hellwig’s stay on Wuvulu and Aua, among other places, was much more than Godeffroy could ever offer to his official collectors. Hellwig was to enjoy the absolute support of the Hernsheim trading empire throughout the Bismarck Archipelago. Where Hernsheim’s commercial reach could not be felt, Thiel negotiated deals with other trading companies. This was particularly true for Wuvulu and Aua which, by 1902, became part of the trading empire of Heinrich Rudolf Wahlen who started to dominate commerce in the western islands of the Bismarck Archipelago.41 The next step was the marketing of the collection among potentially interested parties in Germany, and Thiel used the travellers reaching the territory to spread the word to the German museological community. Rumour had it that Hellwig’s collection was to be the last complete assemblage of artefacts originating from the Bismarck Archipelago.42 The collection could have had no better advertisement, and many museums impatiently awaited its arrival in Germany. But what had happened, meanwhile, to the population on Wuvulu and Aua? Von Luschan’s assertion that the Hernsheim company had cleaned the islands of their ‘ethnographica’ in 1896 proved to be incorrect. When Richard Parkinson visited the islands in 1899 on the naval vessel Möwe he was greeted by the inhabitants of Durour (Aua) some six kilometres off the coast of that island. He counted about 110 canoes containing some six hundred people in total, all of them anxious to trade ethnographic objects (especially the weapons formerly collected by Hernsheim) for glass beads, knives, hatchets and other steel implements. There seems to have been an almost endless supply of these objects. On ‘Matty’ (Wuvulu) the same thing happened, leaving Parkinson wondering where all these artefacts came from. An answer to his query emerged when he was offered almost perfect wooden imitations of earlier traded steel hatchets (von Luschan 1900: 70–71, 73). Realising the bartering potential of their material culture, the inhabitants of Wuvulu and Aua were now almost mass-producing their artefacts. This industry might have continued for some years, but the increasing demand for ‘ethnographica’ also triggered a second wave of trading

O'Hanlon/Welsh

72

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 72

Rainer Buschmann

settlements in the area. A permanent trading station was established on Wuvulu in 1900 and the same process was repeated on Aua two years later. The biggest single impact on the islands was the arrival of Wahlen with seven European traders and 100 labourers hailing from the malaria-ridden Aitape region of coastal New Guinea (Hambruch 1908: 10–11; Dempwolff 1904: 387). Although the main carrier of this disease, the female Anopheles mosquito, seems to have been endemic to Wuvulu and Aua, the actual parasite provoking the disease was not. It was probably introduced in the bloodstream of infected labourers, despite Wahlen’s attempts to ensure that both labourers and traders took quinine regularly. Within a year Wuvulu experienced a massive drop in population. The original population – estimated to be between 2,000 and 2,500 people at the time of contact in 1893 – had declined by late 1902 to about 1,000 inhabitants. Most people on Wuvulu perished not from malaria itself, but from the ravages of the disease which left them unable to withstand other respiratory maladies also introduced into the island. The massive drop in population was still going on when Hellwig reached the island in late 1902. A medical officer arriving with Hellwig, Otto Dempwolff, predicted that the decline would continue (Hambruch 1908: 23–4; Dempwolff 1904: 411–13). Aua also felt the impact, although the population decline was less drastic than on Wuvulu. The ethnographic industry, which had been stimulated by the Western desire for both ‘ethnographica’ and a saleable commodity, ceased to exist. Dempwolff (1904: 408), for instance, was unable to purchase any artefacts on Aua and Wuvulu only a few years after Parkinson was overwhelmed by the extent of material culture there. The search for ethnographic artefacts continued because Wahlen was asked by several museum directors to provide more of them,43 and because Hellwig’s employer, Thiel, expected great returns on his ‘investment’. With a decline experienced in the actual production of artefacts, another source was targeted: grave-sites. As Wahlen’s traders busied themselves in finding shell ornaments and other ‘ethnographica’ among the deceased, their abuses triggered retribution.44 Shortly after Hellwig’s departure from Aua in December 1903, a group of armed warriors killed the trader Otto Reimers. Fearing swift governmental punishment, a great number of people boarded their canoes in an attempt to flee across the water to the Ninigo group. Poor weather conditions and overcrowded canoes caused several vessels to capsize. An estimated 370 people perished in the incident, almost two out of every five inhabitants on Aua (Firth 1977: 114–15; Hambruch 1908: 10–12). The Aua incident did to that island what malaria did to Wuvulu. By 1904 ethnographically aware travellers commented on the state of the island. ‘The Hernsheim Company,’ Richard Parkinson complained

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 73

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

73

to von Luschan, ‘has completely depleted Matty and Durour [of artefacts], it is an ethnographic raid with no equal’.45 Augustin Krämer, on a brief visit to Wuvulu in 1906, witnessed what he called the disintegration of the island’s social fabric. While approving of Hellwig’s research efforts, Krämer condemned the excesses on the island. ‘The trader,’ Krämer was told, ‘is now king of the island.’46 Dempwolff (1904: 413) put it more eloquently in 1904: ‘Eight years ago Luschan called upon [his fellow countrymen to explore the Island of Wuvulu]. His call was not answered. Now I am afraid that missionaries may arrive just in time to administer last rites to the dying few still remaining on Wuvulu.’ Dempwolff was not entirely right, because it was precisely the answer to von Luschan’s call that triggered the massive fatalities on Wuvulu and Aua. The much hailed ethnographic ‘salvage’ organised by Max Thiel and executed by Franz Hellwig had become somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophesy. But Hellwig’s collection could only benefit from the ‘fatal impact’ emerging from the combination of ethnography and commercialism. When the much anticipated collection arrived in Germany, a short struggle over its acquisition ensued, involving the major ethnological institutions located in Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg and Stuttgart.47 Eventually it was the city of Hamburg that acquired this collection for the local ethnological museum. Georg Thilenius, who had just been appointed as the museum’s director, managed to use his influence with the Hernsheim company to keep the collection in that city. The total cost of the 3,300 artefacts amounted to 20,000 marks, although some of this was defrayed by parting with duplicate artefacts and sending them to Berlin and Cologne.48 Compared to the Godeffroy collection, which was similar in size, the amount of money obtained by Thiel was rather low. Moreover, contemporary sources estimated that the collection had cost 20,000 marks to put together.49 This marked the end of the attempt to treat large-scale field collecting as a commercial proposition and, in some ways, Thiel’s project is better understood as an attempt to reestablish his reputation which had been tarnished by von Luschan.

Commercialism and Ethnography in German New Guinea German commercial company officials operating in the Pacific answered promptly Adolf Bastian’s call for ethnographic ‘salvage’. They did so less out of a need for a deeper understanding of the indigenous context surrounding their operations than for the commercial potential they could see in selling such products. Individual traders

O'Hanlon/Welsh

74

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 74

Rainer Buschmann

had often characterised indigenous material culture as ‘firewood’, indicating what they believed to be the proper use for the artefacts. This attitude changed, however, when the expanding museological landscape in Germany provided new opportunities to sell such indigenous products. The most successful model combining both ethnographic and commercial concerns was that of the Godeffroy Company. Its success was based on a large-scale investment in the collection of ethnographic material, including the hiring of trained personnel and the establishment of a museum. Until 1880 few individuals disputed the fact that the Godeffroy collection was the best ethnographic collection from the Pacific Islands in Germany. The financial crisis which befell the company, however, prevented a successful return on the long-term ethnographic investment. New Guinea Company officials also sought to capitalise from the ‘salvage paradigm’, yet their investment in ethnography was limited to a series of contacts with their employees and the potential buyers of the ‘commodity’. Their own inflexible company rules prevented them from successfully implementing the Godeffroy model and by the turn of the century most prospective ethnographic collectors had left the service of the company. Serious conceptual disagreements with Berlin Museum officials also placed the continuation of the commercial collection agenda in doubt. The initial collection policy of the Hernsheim company paralleled that of the New Guinea Company. Hernsheim manager Max Thiel, however, reconsidered his position after the ethnological community questioned his collecting. Responding to such criticism, Thiel ultimately commissioned a collector to work in the Bismarck Archipelago. This collector undertook long-term residence on two crucial islands along the ethnographic frontier: Wuvulu and Aua. His actions represented true ‘salvage’ collecting, since the union of ethnographic and commercial interests triggered a radical decrease in the islands’ populations. Ultimately, this incident in the western islands of the Bismarcks brought all large-scale commercial collecting to a halt. While individual colonial residents continued to collect, no major commercial company decided to invest in the development of ethnographic commodities. German museum officials drew their own lessons from the ‘Matty affair’. After 1904 many of them decided to send their own collectors and researchers to New Guinea. The museums’ earlier failure to establish a satisfactory relationship with German commercial firms is thus partially responsible for the arrival of the ‘expedition age’ in German New Guinea. But that is a different story altogether.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 75

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

75

Notes Abbreviations for manuscript sources: BArch Federal Archives, Lichterfelde (R1001: Imperial Colonial Office) HAStK Main Archive, City of Cologne LiMSt Linden Museum, Stuttgart (Acquisition Files) MfNderHUB Museum of Natural History, Berlin MfVD Museum of Ethnography, Dresden (Acquisition Files) MfVH Museum of Ethnography, Hamburg (SS 1: Objects from the South Seas) RJMfV Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum of Ethnography, Cologne SB-PK Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage (LuP: Luschan Papers) SMB-PK, MV Berlin Museum of Ethnography – State Museums of Berlin, Prussian Cultural Heritage 1. Parkinson to von Luschan 8 March 1898, SMB-PK, MV, IB Australien/E 224/98. Translations throughout are my own. 2. The literature on Adolf Bastian is vast. Some of the most prominent works include Bunzel (1996) and Koepping (1983). 3. There are a number of works on German colonialism. For a good overview, consult Smith (1978). For an overview of German commercial activity in the Pacific, consult Firth (1977). 4. Adolf Bastian’s publications often highlight the destructive nature of the commercial frontier. The correspondence files in the Berlin Museum (SMB-PK, MV, IB Australien), however, illustrate Bastian’s interest in the many commercial companies operating in the Pacific Ocean. 5. Stephan to von Luschan 14 November 1907, SB-PK, LuP, Stephan file. 6. There is a vast literature on the commercial activity of the Godeffroy Company. For its ethnographic activity, consult Fülleborn (1985) and Penny (forthcoming). 7. J. Kubary to A. Bastian 3 January 1884, SMB-PK, MV, IB 11/n.n. 8. Obituaries for Godeffroy are very telling indeed. 9. Perhaps the most prominent enterprise specialising in this trade was the Umlauff Company also located in the city of Hamburg. See Thode-Arora (1992). 10. The response was good, as illustrated by the many Godeffroy duplicates acquired by different museums in Germany. 11. Godeffroy envisaged getting about one million marks for the collection. The great majority of his ethnographic collection, however, went to Leipzig for 95,000 marks. The city of Hamburg acquired about 700 ethnological objects from the Godeffroy Museum along with all the natural history specimens for about 50,000 marks. See Zwernemann (1980: 18). 12. von Gossler (Prussian Cultural Ministry) to Richard Schöne (Director General of the Berlin Museums) 16 October 1885, SMB-PK, MV, IB Litt C/E 216/85. 13. von Hansemann to R. Schöne 3 January 1886, SMB-PK, MV, IB Litt C/E 13/86. 14. The negotiations between the Prussian Museum Administration and von Hansemann’s New Guinea Company are housed in the Berlin Museum of Ethnography, SMB-PK, MV, IB Litt C. The final agreement is filed under Agreement New Guinea Company and General Museum Administration 3 August 1886, SMB-PK, MV, IB Litt C/E 179/86. 15. The ethnographic collection’s price tag was almost 10 percent of the roughly 300,000 marks which the NGC had invested in Finsch’s collection. See Finsch (1899: 27–8). Finsch also remarked how the NGC entered the sale of the collection as ‘income’ in their business accounts. 16. Parkinson to von Luschan 25 April 1893, SB-PK, LuP, Parkinson file.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

76

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 76

Rainer Buschmann

17. General Regulations Concerning Civil Servant Statutes in the Protectorate of the New Guinea Company (Allgemeine Bestimmungen über die Satzung der Beamten im Schutzgebiet der Neu Guinea Compagnie), von Hansemann 10 May 1891, BArch, R 1001, file 2410. 18. A search of the New Guinea Company Files at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin (MfN der HUB, SII – Neu Guinea Compagnie) neither confirmed nor disproved the account supplied by von Kotze (1925: 22–6). There is some evidence to support von Kotze’s version in Hagen (1899: 80), as well as in Neuhauss (1911: 467), although the perpetrator is never mentioned by name. On a more personal note, I wonder if similar processes also occurred in the realm of ethnography. Besides numerous complaints against the company’s collection restrictions, my inquiry into German museum files did not reveal a comparable case of obvious forgery. 19. The planning of the Kaiser Wilhelmsland and Ramu expeditions is contained in BArch, R 1001, files 2367–69. 20. Hahl to Wilhelm Solf (Secretary for Colonial Affairs) 4 July 1913, BArch, R 1001, file 2369. 21. See file IB Litt C, vol. 2, in SMB-PK, MV. 22. von Luschan to Karl von Linden (ethnographic collector in Stuttgart) 18 April 1899, LiMSt, Luschan file. 23. See, e.g., Krieger 1899; BArch R 1001/6360. 24. von Luschan to Admiral Strauch 29 November 1897, SMB-PK, MV, IB 46/E 1427/97. 25. von Luschan to the Regent of Mecklenburg Duke Johann Albrecht 10 November 1897, SMB-PK, MV, IB 46/E 1340/97; J.F.G. Umlauff to von Luschan 17 August 1899, SB-PK, LuP, J.F.G. Umlauff file. 26. Buchner to von Luschan 29 November 1894, SB-PK, LuP, Buchner file. Max Buchner was the custodian of the ethnographic collections in Munich and had the reputation of being extremely ‘difficult’. 27. Arthur Baessler (1895: 45–106; 1900: 279–86, 358–62); Parkinson to A.B. Meyer 20 December 1897, MfVD, Accession File Richard Parkinson. 28. Thilenius to Karl von Linden 3 March 1899, LiMSt, Thilenius file. 29. Felix von Luschan wanted to select some artefacts from the collection for the Berlin Museum. However, a rich patron bought the whole collection and donated it to Hellwig’s native city of Halle. See the exchange between Luschan and Hellwig in SMB-PK, MV, IB Australien/E 202/99. 30. The British captain, Carteret, christened the islets Maty (Wuvulu) and Durour (Aua). Hawksworth, while compiling Carteret’s travels for the British Admiralty, misspelled one of them, named after the secretary of the Royal Society, as Matty. The early literature on these islands thus continued to carry this spelling until more detailed study of the eighteenth-century literature discovered the mistake. See Hambruch (1908: 7). In order to highlight the ethnographic interest, I have chosen to maintain the misspelling throughout this text by highlighting it with quotation marks. 31. Kärnbach was the official leader of the Ysabel expedition to Wuvulu. 32. Krämer (1908) argued for the term ‘Para-Micronesia’ to designate what he called Micronesian outliers in Melanesia. Another term seems to be the Western Islands (of the Bismarck Archipelago) which include, besides Wuvulu and Aua, the island of Manu, the Ninigo group, as well as the Kaniet, Sae, and Luf islands. The term Para-Micronesia is still very much in usage for these islands, although recent research suggests, much as von Luschan had done almost a hundred years earlier, that the Micronesian affinity was overemphasised in the literature. Henning Hohnschopp (1973) argues against the term Para-Micronesia, suggesting instead a ‘Wuvulu-Aua cultural complex’. 33. Parkinson to von Luschan 8 March 1898, SMB-PK, IB Australien/E 224/98.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 77

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

77

34. Andersen’s report as recorded by F.E. Hellwig can be found in Hambruch 1908: 9–10. 35. E. Hernsheim to von Luschan 26 August 1896, SMB-PK, MV, IB Australien/E 1018/96; von Luschan note to file 3 October 1896, SMB-PK, IB Australien/E 1131/96. 36. von Luschan to Naval Admiral Knorr 7 August 1897, SMB-PK, MV, IB 48/E 1009/97. 37. Umlauff to von Luschan 19 February 1897, SMB-PK, MV, IB Australien/E 181/97. 38. E. Stephan to von Luschan 14 November 1907, SB-PK, LuP, Stephan file. 39. On Hellwig’s collection see SMB-PK, MV, IB Australien/E 1056/98 and E 202/99. 40. Hellwig spent from November to December 1902 on Wuvulu, returning again for an extended stay in 1904. Between August and December 1903 he stayed on Aua. See Hambruch (1908: 10–11). Hellwig’s diaries are often mentioned in Hambruch’s publication but could not be located in the Hamburg Museum. 41. The deal between Thiel and Wahlen which guaranteed Hellwig unlimited access to Wuvulu and Aua, as well as all ethnographic objects collected by Wahlen’s traders, is recorded in an undated excerpt from a letter of Heinrich Richard Wahlen to Captain Jaspers (SMS Möwe) SMB-PK, MV, IB 48/E 1289/03. 42. Berlin, for instance, was notified by the Imperial Navy, SMB-PK, MV, IB 48/E 1534/02; Cologne received word through an important traveller, Küppers-Loosen, who collected for the local museum in German New Guinea, RJMfV, 1905/21; Governor Albert Hahl notified the Colonial Division within the German Foreign Office 2 January 1904, BArch R1001/2990; Hahl also communicated the importance of the collection to Karl von Linden in Stuttgart 23 June 1904, LiMSt, Hahl file. 43. See, for instance, the Wahlen file in the LiMSt. 44. Hahl 1980: 105; see also Wahlen to Karl von Linden 15 April 1904, LiMSt, Wahlen file; a different view is expressed in Hambruch 1908: 11–12. 45. Parkinson to von Luschan 6 February 1904, SB-PK, LuP, Parkinson file. 46. Krämer 1908: 254–5; Augustin Krämer Diary 14 September 1906, vol. 16, LiMSt; Wahlen to Karl von Linden 15 April 1904, LiMSt, Wahlen file. 47. See, for instance: RJMfV, 1905/21; HAStK, Bst. 614, Nr. 449; SMB-PK, MV, IB Australien/E 1536/04. 48. Thilenius to Parkinson 6 February 1906, MfVH, SS 1, vol. I; Thilenius claimed to have convinced the directors of the Hernsheim Company to sell this collection during an extensive dinner: see Thilenius to von Luschan 26 November 1904, SMB-PK, IB Australien/E 1724/04. On Hamburg’s financing of the purchase of Hellwig’s collection see Zwernemann (1980: 37–8). 49. Georg Küppers-Loosen to Willi Foy undated letter, RJMfV, 1904/27.

Bibliography Andree, R. ‘Zur Ethnographie der Südsee’, Globus vol. 39 (1881): 60–63. Appadurai, A. ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’ in The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective ed. A. Appadurai. University Press, Cambridge, 1986, 3–63. Baessler, A. Südsee-Bilder. A. Asher & Co, Berlin, 1895. ———. Neue Südsee-Bilder. Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 1900. Bastian, A. Inselgruppen in Oceanien. Reiseergebnisse und Studien. Dümmlers Verlag, Berlin, 1883. ———. Der Papua des dunklen Inselreiches im Lichte psychologischer Forschung. Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin, 1885.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

78

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 78

Rainer Buschmann

Bunzel, M. ‘Franz Boas and the Humboldian tradition. From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an anthropological concept of culture’ in Volksgeist as method and ethic. Essays on Boasian ethnography and the German anthropological tradition ed. G. Stocking. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1996, 17–78. Clifford, J. ‘Of other peoples: beyond the “salvage” paradigm’ in Discussions in contemporary culture ed. Hal Forster. Bay Press, Seattle, 1987, 121–30. Dempwolff, O. ‘Über aussterbende Völker. (Die Eingeborenen der “westlichen Inseln” in Deutsch-Neu-Guinea)’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie vol. 36 (1904): 384–415. Finsch, O. Systematische Uebersicht der Ergebnisse seiner Reisen und schriftstellersichen Thätigkeit (1859–1899). R. Friedländer & Sohn, Berlin, 1899. Firth, S. ‘German firms in the Pacific Islands’, in Germany in the Pacific and Far East eds J. Moses and P. Kennedy. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1977, 3–25. ———. New Guinea under the Germans. University Press, Melbourne, 1982. Fülleborn, S. ‘Die ethnographischen Unternehmungen des Hamburger Handelshauses Godeffroy’, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Hamburg, 1985. Hagen, B. Unter den Papua. Über Land und Leute, Thier und Pflanzenwelt in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. Kreidel Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1899. Hahl, A. Governor in New Guinea, ed. and trans. P. Sack and D. Clark. Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1980. Hambruch, P. ‘Wuvulu und Aua (Maty-und Durour-Inseln) auf Grund der Sammlung F.E. Hellwig aus dem Jahre 1902 bis 1904’, Mitteilungen aus dem Museum für Völkerkunde zu Hamburg vol. 2 (1908): 1–154. Hohnschopp, H. ‘Untersuchung zum Para-Mikronesien-Problem unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Wuvulu- und Aua-Kultur’, Arbeiten aus dem Institut für Völkerkunde der Universität zu Göttingen vol. 7 (1973): 1–170. Jacobi, A. Fünfzig Jahre Museum für Völkerkunde zu Dresden. Julius Bard, Berlin, 1925. Kopytoff, I. ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’ in The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective ed. A. Appadurai. University Press, Cambridge, 1986, 64–91. Koepping, K.-P. Adolf Bastian and the psychic unity of mankind. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1983. Kotze, S. von, Südseeerinnerungen. Dom Verlag, Berlin, 1925. Krämer, A. ‘Vuvulu und Aua (Maty und Durour Insel)’, Globus vol. 93 (1908): 254–7. Krieger, M. ‘Das Kolonial-Museum zu Berlin’, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung vol. 12 (1899): 390–91. Luschan, F. von, ‘Zur Ethnographie der Matty Insel’, Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie vol. 8 (1895a): 41–56. ———. ‘über die Matty-Insel’, Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin vol. 22 (1895b): 442–9. ———. Beiträge zur Ethnographie der deutschen Schutzgebiete. Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 1897.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 79

Exploring Tensions in Material Culture

79

———. ‘R. Parkinsons Beobachtungen auf Bóbolo und Hún (Matty und Durour)’, Globus vol. 78 (1900), 69–78. Neuhauss, R. Deutsch Neuguinea vol. 1. Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 1911. Penny, G. ‘Science and the marketplace: the creation and contentious sale of the Museum Godeffroy’, The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association (forthcoming). Sack, P. Land between two laws: early European land acquisition in New Guinea. Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1973. Schmeltz, J. ‘Rudolf Virchow, in Memoriam’, Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie vol. 16 (1904): VII–XIII. Schmeltz, J. and R. Krause Die ethnographisch-anthropologische Abteilung des Museum Godeffroy in Hamburg. Ein Beitrag zur Kunde der Südsee-Völker. Friedrichsen & Co, Hamburg, 1880. Smith, W. The German colonial empire. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1978. Thode-Arora, H. ‘Die Familie Umlauff und ihre Firmen – EthnographikaHändler in Hamburg’, Mitteilungen aus dem Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg (N.F.) vol. 22 (1992): 143–58. Thomas, N. Entangled objects: Exchange, material culture, and colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991. Zwernemann, J. Hundert Jahre Hamburgisches Museum für Völkerkunde. Museum für Völkerkunde, Hamburg, 1980.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 80

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 81

Chapter 4

‘BEFORE IT HAS BECOME TOO LATE’:1 The Making and Repatriation of Sir William MacGregor’s Official Collection from British New Guinea

Michael Quinnell

‘Sir William amongst other special qualifications for his office is an indefatigable collector and explorer and all who sail with him are expected to do their best to pick up something’2

‘The Collection belonging to this colony’: British New Guinea Sir William MacGregor’s British New Guinea collection is a nineteenth-century colonial construct, distinctively – if not uniquely – in the Anglophone world an ‘official collection’. Essential to the narrative is the collection’s political nature: not only in its creation and purpose but also in its Australasian peregrination, repatriation and latent reappropriation. The collection was ‘political’ in the sense that it was a crucial instrument through which MacGregor expanded Pax Britannica. It was ‘political’ again in the sense that it was positioned uneasily at the intersection between the colonies of British New Guinea and Queensland through which British New Guinea was administered. It was ‘political’ when its integrity and, indeed, its possession were challenged. This chapter explores the formation and voyage of MacGregor’s supremely political collection.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

82

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 82

Michael Quinnell

Proximity to the Australian colonies was undoubtedly one reason why southeastern New Guinea attracted a sprinkling of mostly British missionaries, traders and explorers from the 1870s. British imperial interest in New Guinea was, however, slower to gestate. The Royal Navy visited the coast intermittently, monitoring British interests and occasionally bombarding recalcitrant villages to show them how to keep the peace. A British official visited New Guinea in 1881 and by 1883 he was based in Port Moresby, but proved ineffective, lacking legal authority and reliable transport. Australian colonial interests, suspicious of German expansion in the Pacific, pressed for an extension of British control, prompting the annexation of New Guinea by Queensland in 1883, an action repudiated by Britain. The Colonial Office bowed to Australian indignation in 1884, agreeing with Germany to divide eastern New Guinea between them. The Protectorate of British New Guinea thus formed proved to be an interim measure. It lasted for four years, to be replaced by the Colony of British New Guinea. The administration of the new colony was unusual: responsibility was divided between London and the self-governing Australian colonies of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, each making financial contributions to its operation. All communication between the Administrator and the Colonial Office was sent through the Governor-in-Council in Queensland.

‘Timely warning’: Sir William MacGregor and ‘official collections’ MacGregor was ‘Goverman’ (ARBNG 1892–3: 23), he was ‘a great man; a man of vision’3 and ‘a very thoughtful man’4 and, despite his erudition, he was at times a stubborn and opinionated man. The son of a Scottish crofter, MacGregor had a distinguished but somewhat frustrating Colonial Office career as doctor, administrator and Governor, serving for forty-two years in the Seychelles, Mauritius, Fiji, British New Guinea, Lagos, Newfoundland and finally Queensland (Joyce 1971). One facet of his time in New Guinea was characterised by a thirst for exploration and the pursuit of scientific collections. The routine requirements of administration were for him tempered by the necessity for exploration, an essential tool to promote the extension of government control. MacGregor came to British New Guinea determined to make ethnological and natural history collections. He had initially entered the colonial service ‘willing to make himself useful in science’, influenced as he was by his Scottish scientific and medical education (Joyce 1971:

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

‘Before it has become too late’

Page 83

83

6–10) and the Scottish collecting tradition (Wright 1998: 4, 26–7). His experience in Fiji (von Hügel 1990: 105, 118, 137, 145; Thomas 1991: 162–77) had provided ‘timely warning’ against neglecting to make ethnographic collections before it was ‘too late’ (MacGregor 1897: 88). MacGregor intended to heed that warning. En route to British New Guinea, MacGregor visited Brisbane for briefing by the Queensland Governor, ministers and officials prior to assuming his appointment as Administrator at Port Moresby on 4 September 1888. During that time he consulted Charles de Vis, Curator of the Queensland Museum, who agreed to send a natural history collecting kit to Port Moresby for MacGregor’s use. MacGregor became aware that British New Guinea Protectorate officials had already made natural history and ethnographic collections of both a private5 and an official nature.6 MacGregor’s collecting kit was received in Port Moresby by the Government Secretary, Anthony Musgrave, and ‘forwarded to Dinner Island for the use of his Excellency – who is still cruising (and I believe collecting) in that division of the Possession’.7 MacGregor had lost no time; within a month of his arrival in New Guinea during his first official ‘visit of inspection’ he had begun making collections. But even then, there were signs that it was becoming ‘too late’, for he noted ‘it is not easy even already to get specimens of stone axes’ (Joyce 1971: 129). The collection made on MacGregor’s first journey was the foundation of the British New Guinea ‘official collection’ for which he had to find a suitable home. The political relationship, proximity and contact with de Vis made the Queensland Museum the logical choice. In August 1889 MacGregor approached the Governor of Queensland concerning ‘articles of natural history or ethnology collected by officers paid by the Government and therefore public property. . . They are an asset of the Government of British New Guinea, as they have been procured by its paid officers but it does not appear to me desirable that they should be kept in British New Guinea.’ He requested that provision be made ‘in the public museum in Brisbane, for the proper exhibition of New Guinea collections, as a separate and permanent branch of that establishment’. MacGregor wanted to build a collection ‘really representative of New Guinea’. He concluded, ‘should this proposal meet with Your Excellency’s sanction I would cause all official collections to be sent, when secured, to the public museum’.8 The Queensland Government agreed, and indicated that ‘a special portion of the proposed new Museum in Brisbane will be allocated for the exhibition of New Guinea collections, and that such specimens brought by Sir William MacGregor from the Possession as are now on hand will be placed on exhibition in the present Building’.9 MacGregor declined to support an

O'Hanlon/Welsh

84

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 84

Michael Quinnell

initiative on Musgrave’s part to build a museum in Port Moresby on the grounds of expense.10 While promoting official collecting, MacGregor did not actively discourage private collecting by his officials. Indeed, he noted with reference to natural history collections, ‘To encourage those that carried guns in collecting, I allowed them the same advantages as I gave to my two private collectors. Of each sort of bird I took the first specimen; the person shooting took the second; I the third and so on’ (ARBNG 1888–9: 48). Whether this procedure was applied to ethnographic collecting is not clear but Basil Thomson, MacGregor’s Private Secretary, did acquire collections on that first ‘visit of inspection’.11 The Revd George Brown, himself a renowned collector, acknowledged MacGregor’s expectation that all who accompanied him should do ‘their best to pick up something’.

‘We exhibited articles of iron & coloured cloth’: the Process of Collecting The British contribution to the colony, the SS Merrie England,12 gave MacGregor mobility in local waters and the ability to communicate with Queensland ports that his predecessors had lacked. Despite its shallow draft, the steamer was of limited use for exploration except as an impressive travelling base from which to launch ‘visits of inspection’. These were carried out by whaleboat and steam-launch or on foot. MacGregor’s field parties always included Papuan members of the Armed Native Constabulary as well as boats’ crews or carriers. Increasingly over the course of his administration it was the Constabulary who mediated the nature of contact between villagers and government (Waiko 1993: 29). MacGregor’s parties not only represented the government; they were, by their very composition, an expression of colonial and indigenous political relationships perfectly understood by the Papuan villager. MacGregor invariably collected ethnographic material at points of government first contact on ‘visits of inspection’. He was in fact ‘trading’ for food to supplement rations as well as for ‘ethnology’. The acquisition of both became an essential part of his mode of operation. Thus MacGregor landed at Aworra Village near the Bamu River on 31 March 1891: All at first held the bow & great bundles of arrows in their hands… At last some of them laid aside their bows & arrows & came down to meet us. We exhibited articles of iron & coloured cloth which they at once wished to obtain… Dida brought me a man whom he saw was the chief & we put a

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

‘Before it has become too late’

Page 85

85

shirt on him. I gave him also a small looking glass & a few beads… We gave plane irons, hoop iron & beads for girdles & c. I gave a tomahawk for one a man carried containing a piece of brass bolt. We bought some boughs [sic] & arrows. Their bows are made of palmwood… They carry also the head knife… When they want it to cut off a head they strip a piece off one side to give it an edge: & for every head they make a new edge. I bought one at Aworra which has cut off 7 heads and a new one not yet [use]d… One [man] called me ‘Aba’ & said they had no pigs; this was in reply to my request for a pig in exchange for a tomahawk… we have seen no women or children on this river… We purchased one unfinished net… We remained 1/2 hour & finally we steamed away leaving the Aworra on the bank looking after us & shouting out peace, the chief visible in his shirt, they really did not seem greatly relieved as is so often the case by our departure.13

The act of collecting (and the reciprocal relationship established) became a pragmatic procedure, part of his methodology for the spread of Pax Britannica at these first meetings between Goverman and villagers.14 Very little ‘official’ collecting took place in MacGregor’s absence, and that occurred only on expeditions sent out directly under his orders. Government ‘trade’ was available to Resident Magistrates to pay for collections, but was not often used. There were other actions and processes more useful to maintaining harmony at the local level. However, officials did collect privately while on duty. John Green’s diary entries for 1894 refer to collecting on nine occasions. He mentions face ornaments he collected at Domara, Cloudy Bay: ‘These curios have not been seen before, only these people make them. The Governor would like to get one I know but I intend to stick to them myself ’.15 We may ask whether the official ethnographic collections are any different from other contemporary collections. While collecting was part of MacGregor’s official policy, it was ultimately secondary to the prime aims of his ‘visits of inspection’ which were the spreading of government influence and exploration. The important features that distinguish the ‘official collection’ are its mass, breadth and scope, the decade over which it was made, the singularity of its direction, its purchase with Government ‘trade’, and fundamentally its ‘political’ nature and identification with MacGregor as Goverman. It is thus possible to differentiate and distinguish MacGregor – as both collector and Goverman – from the professional collector. But whether this distinction – blurred by the fact that MacGregor (Anon 1912) and some officials also made private collections – is reflected in the actual collections themselves has not been examined. The professionals were natural history collectors, the collection of ‘curios’ being part of a package in which new fauna or flora had primacy. Most ethnographic collecting was therefore subordinated to some other purpose. In the case of the ‘official collection’, ethno-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

86

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 86

Michael Quinnell

graphic collecting had been integrated into the process of political control, but intellectually it was subsidiary to MacGregor’s personal pursuit of bird species new to ‘science’.16 MacGregor was aware that ethical questions were involved in acquiring collections. He condemned the collection methods on the Fly River of D’Albertis in 1884 who ‘wantonly robbed and plundered’, and those of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia in 1885 ‘whose “curiosities” were taken away without the consent of the owners’. He remarked: Of course such acts cannot be committed in the Possession now, as the actors would be dealt with in the police court, but it will take some time of fair dealing and kind treatment to efface from the native mind the impression left by carrying off those so called curiosities, which are to their native owners neither more nor less than the family jewels and heirlooms, and which they can seldom be induced to part with even for the much-coveted steel axe or new shirt. (ARBNG 1889–90: 45–6)

In 1890 MacGregor impounded a collection acquired under unethical circumstances by Dr Lamberto Loria at Oro Bay. MacGregor noted that Loria ‘is an enthusiastic collector and attaches great value to these ethnological specimens. But it must be made perfectly plain to collectors that the claims of science are to this Government subsidiary and insignificant when compared with its great aim to gradually render life and property secure’. However, he let Loria off lightly: ‘Dr Loria being so straightforward in regard to it, and the articles having been carried off in excess of scientific zeal, it seemed it might be sufficient to put an end to such practices, if the articles were taken possession of by the Government for restoration to their native owners’.17 Parenthetically, subsequent comments by the English anthropologist, Haddon, on this incident reflect the tensions between collectors and national stereotyping of them. Following reference to the ‘collecting methods’ of the D’Albertis Expedition, he noted that: Dr Loria also an Italian… fired into the village to frighten the inhabitants away, then made a great collection… in the interests of science. Now, I am a man of science, and I have collected skulls and other objects in New Guinea; but I paid for everything I obtained… It is quite possible to collect without robbing, and I think we ought to repudiate this looting of natives. (Haddon in MacGregor 1897: 97)

MacGregor remained on good terms with Loria (MacGregor 1897: 24), publishing a contribution by him (ARBNG 1894–5: 39–43) and citing his opinion on the significance of the ‘official collection’.18 MacGregor normally acquired his collections by purchase with ‘trade’. On the Morehead River ‘A considerable quantity of beads, tape,

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 87

‘Before it has become too late’

87

cloth, plane irons, knives and tomahawks were exchanged for fish and native arms and ornaments’ (ARBNG 1889–90: 74) and in the Purari Delta ‘For a plane iron they offered a dagger of cassowary bone’ (ARBNG 1892–3: 32). On occasion he received artefacts as reciprocal gifts: ‘A small present was left at a suitable spot on a ridge near Port Hennessy for the natives seen there. It was soon removed, and a return gift of native ornaments left in its place’ (ARBNG 1890–91: 15). MacGregor seized a collection only once: from the Tugeri (Marindanim) whose large extra-territorial raiding party he routed during a skirmish on the Wassi Kussa River in 1896. The survivors fled back towards Dutch territory some 250 kilometres distant. MacGregor’s party collected ‘bows and arrows, water bottles, bundles of sago, cocoanuts, bundles of clay, hundreds of sheets of ti-tree bark, large numbers of handbags, and numerous other things.’ MacGregor noted that ‘Many of the articles captured from this people will be of much ethnological interest, well worthy of the attention they will no doubt receive when they reach the British New Guinea collection in the Queensland Museum’ (ARBNG 1895–6: 54–5). Thus, in one fell swoop, he added 1,563 items to the ‘official collection’. This was a conscious political decision on his part, to validate the substance of Pax Britannica and declare the inviolability of the colony’s borders. Otherwise, when taking punitive measures, MacGregor’s standard procedure to demonstrate political control was to destroy weapons, not to collect them.19

‘Representative of New Guinea’: the Nature of the Collection Once he had negotiated a home for the ‘official collection’, MacGregor began to collect in earnest. Five consignments of natural history specimens were sent to Brisbane between 1890 and 1892 before the first shipment of 2,876 ‘ethnological’ items that had been accumulating at Government House since 1888 was forwarded. Thereafter each year except for 1895 there were fourteen more consignments (sometimes in composite lots) of ethnology and natural history. For MacGregor ethnographic collecting was opportunistic; he could only collect what villagers were prepared to trade, although he does appear to have acquired a representative sample of all that was offered. Sometimes only food was available for exchange and, on occasions, people refused to trade artefacts (ARBNG 1889–90: 41), or circumstances prevented an exchange taking place (ARBNG 1889–90: 62). One consequence of first contact collecting is collection imbalance and gender bias. Forty-five percent of the collection comprises men’s tools and weapons. MacGregor often notes the absence of women and

O'Hanlon/Welsh

88

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 88

Michael Quinnell

children during such encounters although, when they were present, he did collect women’s material. The transitory nature of collection contact and the timing of visits on the basis of administrative necessity meant whole areas of material culture were often not available to MacGregor. This is undoubtedly the reason why the collection contains none of the Hevehe and Eharo barkcloth masks of the Elema people, masks made only in connection with intermittently performed ceremonial cycles. The collection comes from 178 localities in British New Guinea, ranging from the western border to the German boundary on the northeast coast and through the islands of the southeast. Regionally, the largest portion (20 percent) of the collection comes from the northeast coast (today’s Oro Province), 19 percent from the East End (Milne Bay Province), 10 percent from the southwest coast (Western Province), 6 percent from the southeast coast (Central Province) and 3 percent from the Gulf of Papua (Gulf Province). The remainder comprises the ‘Tugeri’ collection (18 percent) and artefacts to which no locality is attributed (24 percent). Documentation is minimal, at best a locality name and a date of collection though diary entries, published reports and vocabularies can be used to confirm or enhance this. The lower ratio of collecting in Central and Gulf provinces reflects a conscious bias on MacGregor’s part. These were the areas where villagers had had longest and closest contact with missionaries, traders and government, especially around Port Moresby and the nearby Mekeo and Rigo Agencies. There the ‘political’ rationale for collecting was not of prime consequence. They were the districts that had been targeted by private collectors since the 1870s and by the officials who were collectors from the mid 1880s. MacGregor is likely to have decided that it was already ‘too late’, not so much because of colonially-induced change but because the people of those regions were already well represented in collections. This view is reinforced by the relatively large size of the collection from the northeast coast 20 where MacGregor was often the first visitor and collector. Like collectors before him and since, MacGregor was captivated by the virtuosity and aesthetic appeal of Trobriand Islander and Massim artefacts. Unusually, he visited the Trobriands on ten occasions, the size of the collection reflecting his interest. He was able to note that implements and weapons were ‘disappearing fast’ (ARBNG 1892–3: 11) and that ‘Prices have risen some 300 per cent. since my first visit’ (ARBNG 1893–4: 19). The Massim collection is more focussed: he collected a series of painted shields21 and a range of betel-chewing equipment. But again the brief nature of his visits possibly militated against a fully representative coverage. There are no kula valuables in the collection. The ‘official collection’, made largely during these fleeting encounters at first contact, is itself a vehicle for those agencies of change

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 89

‘Before it has become too late’

89

which the Goverman represented. It was a means to an end that, at a personal as well as a national level, was soon transformed into an end in itself. Circumstances had prevented MacGregor from creating a colonial museum, but an ‘official collection’ served the same purpose, as an archive to codify ‘a degree of referred sovereignty’ (MacLeod 1998: 312). In his book, British New Guinea, MacGregor maps out the colony in terms of the artefacts he was collecting (MacGregor 1897: 48–66, plate 69): the country is classified by and thus becomes its objects. The appropriation, the totality and the classification (Stewart 1993: 153) of the collection can be seen as a metaphor for the physical reality of the British New Guinea that MacGregor was himself exploring (MacGregor 1895: 220) and the embodiment in the political sense of the British New Guinea he was governing.

‘Its formation and preservation I have watched with jealous care’: the Integrity of the Collection, 1894–1897 If relationships between museums and their donors can be difficult, there is potential for even greater friction when a museum acts solely as a repository for a third party; MacGregor zealously guarded the integrity of his ‘official collection’. During a visit to Brisbane in 1894 he learnt, in conversation with de Vis, that the Queensland Museum understood it had the right to exchange specimens from the British New Guinea collection.22 To this, MacGregor was strongly opposed and undoubtedly told de Vis so in the bluntest terms, for the Trustees later note that ‘since Sir W. MacGregor on his last visit made known his views on the subject his wishes have been respected by them’.23 While in London in February 1895 MacGregor publicly stated his thinking in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society: Timely warning has been taken of the omission by Fiji, Hawaii and some other places to secure collections of the arms, implements, and arts, etc., of the natives before it is too late… The Possession… already possesses an extensive and very valuable collection of things illustrating the present condition of the natives; its natural history, etc. This will be added to, and, I trust, may never be broken up and dispersed. It is the property of the Possession, and should never be alienated under any circumstances. (Quoted in MacGregor 1897: 88)

On his return MacGregor raised the matter of ‘the public collection belonging to this colony and now preserved in the Queensland Museum’ with the Queensland Governor, in a despatch in which he restated his standpoint concerning the Brisbane ‘conversation’ of over a year earlier:

O'Hanlon/Welsh

90

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 90

Michael Quinnell

I incidentally found that Mr De Vis, the Curator of the Museum, was under the impression that, with the approval of the Trustees of the Queensland Museum, he could exchange with other institutions specimens from the British New Guinea collection, for articles of a different kind, which would… form part of the Queensland collection. From this view I entirely dissented.

MacGregor gave his reason for making an ‘official collection’: ‘The collection belonging to this colony has been made with the object of its possessing as full a set of arms, utensils, products of different kinds, &c., as would illustrate its past and present position in the future.’ He went on to flag the future arrangement: The articles in that collection should not in my opinion be given away or removed on any pretence whatever, unless when by arrangement between the Government of Queensland and the Administrator duplicate specimens may be given out to the two other contributing colonies, or to the National collection in the British Museum. I respectfully state that I regard the Curator and Trustees of the Queensland Museum simply as custodians of the British New Guinea collection, and as possessing no power whatever to alienate any article in that collection.24

A copy of this despatch was forwarded to the museum and there ensued much correspondence between the museum curator, trustees and its controlling department, the Queensland Governor and MacGregor. De Vis informed the Secretary for Public Instruction ‘that the Trustees have carefully respected the wishes regarding his Ethnological collections expressed by Sir W. MacGregor in that despatch, although they had not heard until his last visit to Brisbane that he wished them to be regarded as the property of New Guinea only’. He went on to indicate that ‘It will be obviously inconvenient to allow the unlimited accumulation of duplicate exhibits over which the Trustees have no other control than that of caretakers’.25 A copy was forwarded to MacGregor.26 Further bureaucratic wrangling followed, alternately trenchant and the ‘I write more in sorrow than in anger’ variety. Meanwhile, MacGregor and de Vis continued to correspond in regard to the natural history and ethnographic collections. By October 1896, the prize of a possible new species to bear the clan name was almost too much for MacGregor. While ill, he sent de Vis a new bird of paradise for description, requesting that it be named Maria MacGregoria after his wife. He continued, ‘I shall have many new birds for you soon for description but I shall not send them to Brisbane unless the absolute proprietry [sic] of this colony to every feather of them is recognized by your Government & Trustees’.27 The final decision that the Queensland Government had ‘no desire to dispute the proprietary rights of

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

‘Before it has become too late’

Page 91

91

British New Guinea to these collections’ was however made at the highest political level.28 MacGregor modified his own stand while restating his position: The first and most important point is to make this official collection as complete as possible. To that I cannot but attach great importance, knowing as we do how seldom efforts are made to form a collection of that kind before it is too late. Its formation and preservation I have watched with jealous care, but purely as a public question and from the New Guinea point of view. I am now satisfied that it will be preserved intact and will not be broken up and dispersed… my only anxious care in this matter is to have the Collection of this Colony as complete as possible and its future preservation made sure.29

In his 1897 statement, MacGregor put forward more detailed suggestions for the disposal of ‘duplicates’. Unique specimens and the best examples of ‘the same article’ should be placed in the British New Guinea collection. Then duplicates ‘might be disposed of by the Trustees, first to fill up the vacancies in the national collections of the Contributing Colonies and in the British Museum, and the remainder might be used as exchanges for the Queensland Museum proper’. The latter would ‘be at the disposal of the Queensland Government as some acknowledgment for their cooperation in preparing and maintaining the British New Guinea Collection, without whose cooperation it could not exist’. De Vis wrote directly to MacGregor: ‘the Trustees… are in agreement with you on the main points of your proposal. To the principal of them, the conservation of the collection in chief, I for my part shall loyally adhere, simply because my desire that it should be made and therefore kept as complete as possible has never faltered.’30 Once the debate about ownership was settled, the issue became one of management: MacGregor’s omnivorous collecting habits provided the face-saving solution to the problem. Defining parts of large collections as duplicates was standard practice in the nineteenth century and could be done without impugning the integrity of the collection. In the case of the British New Guinea collection, the consequent transfer of duplicates to other ‘National’ museums within the imperial framework would be understood as a redistribution rather than an alienation. De Vis duly made a selection of the duplicate ethnographic material for distribution. In the latter part of 1897, 949 items were sent to the Australian Museum, Sydney, 833 items to the National Museum of Victoria and 775 to the British Museum. Concurrently 1,635 items were identified as the Queensland Museum selection. MacGregor continued collecting to the end of his administration. His last major ‘visit of inspection’ was to the East End and the north-

92

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 92

Michael Quinnell

Figure 4.1: ‘Fishing Kite used by Natives of Dobu’.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 93

‘Before it has become too late’

93

east coast from April to July 1898. He observed Dobu people kite-fishing and forwarded ‘Complete sets of this ingenious and singular apparatus… to the official collection in Brisbane’, illustrating them in his last Annual Report (1897–8: 46, Pl. I–II) (Figure 4.1). However, by this stage, he also had additional homes in mind for the collections: the pottery he collected during this last visit at Waututu and Gona Bay, also illustrated in that final report (ARBNG 1897–8: 49, Pl. 5, 13), was destined for the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

‘Absolutely Inviolable’: the Collection in Brisbane 1898–1969 The ‘official collection’ was initially stored separately in Brisbane, but a catalogue (the publication of which was close to MacGregor’s heart) was never produced. In 1908 Musgrave (still Government Secretary, in the renamed Territory of Papua under Australian administration) queried the ‘state of the anthropological collections, consigned in trust, by Sir William MacGregor, to your Museum…’.31 J.H.P. Murray, the Acting Administrator, was considering the establishment of a museum in Port Moresby. The Queensland Museum’s Acting Director indicated that: Typical specimens have been reserved for the Papuan authorities and are held in trust by this Museum until such time as they may be required by them for Museum purposes. The preparation of a catalogue, especially one in duplicate of several thousands of specimens, would be an arduous work and there is no one to whom I could entrust it. From these have been selected for the use of the Papuan Government 3000 specimens representing the various forms, from different localities. I am prepared to hand over the above mentioned collection to Mr Musgrave when required to do so.32

Musgrave was retired soon afterwards33 and the matter was not pursued by the Papuan administration. The Queensland Museum was in a state of decline, arrested only by the appointment of a new director in 1910 following a critical report commissioned by the Premier.34 In 1911 Murray, now Lieutenant-Governor of Papua, ordered ‘That all curios or specimens hereafter collected by Government Officers shall be regarded as the property of the Government’. He justified this decision in language reminiscent of MacGregor, and revived the idea of a museum, which would also house ‘a number of articles, the property of the Papuan Government which are at present kept in the Brisbane Museum’ (Craig 1996: 222). A building was erected but

O'Hanlon/Welsh

94

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 94

Michael Quinnell

proved inadequate and in 1915, following advice from Haddon (Craig 1996: 223), Murray’s official collection was progressively sent to the Australian Museum in Sydney for safekeeping. Meanwhile the Australian Commonwealth Government had become involved on Papua’s behalf. In 1913 Attlee Hunt, Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, wrote to the Queensland Museum concerning ‘curios belonging to the Papuan Government which are in the care of your Museum. I have the honour to inform you that it is pointed out by the Lieutenant-Governor of Papua that there appears to be a danger that some of these articles may be exchanged with other Museums… the Lieutenant-Governor is anxious that every care should be taken that the collection remains intact’.35 Dr Ronald Hamlyn-Harris, the Director, vigorously denied that any material had been exchanged or lost, stating that the collection had ‘been zealously guarded and since I have been in charge not one single specimen has left the building’.36 He agreed to have the collection registered at Commonwealth expense,37 and two copies of the Queensland Museum: Register of the ‘MacGregor’ Collection of New Guinea Ethnology were printed. The project was curtailed due to wartime exigencies and Hamlyn-Harris, now overzealous in his guardianship, refused to allow Bronislaw Malinowski permission to take MacGregor ‘duplicates’ with him to Papua, despite an authorisation from Hunt.38 MacGregor himself, having been appointed in the meantime Governor of Queensland, became Hamlyn-Harris’s resident expert on Papua (Hamlyn-Harris 1913: 7)and supported his programme to update the MacGregor collection displays.39 Hamlyn-Harris resigned in 1917, and the following year Hunt asked Longman, the new Director, whether he was prepared to pursue the projected catalogue.40 Longman agreed, noting in his reply that ‘this collection is now being safe-guarded and is looked upon as absolutely inviolable’.41 Registration was re-commenced on a part-time basis. Longman twice suggested that Malinowski be approached to prepare ‘a comprehensive catalogue’ of the collection,42 but was informed ‘that it is unlikely that this gentleman’s services would be available’.43 The idea of a catalogue was shelved and registration was completed in 1920.44 No distinction was made between the ‘official collection’, the Queensland Museum selection or the duplicates. This confusion was compounded by the inclusion of several hundred items acquired from other sources. Longman also completed the exhibition refurbishment, some 60 percent of the MacGregor collection remaining on display in Hamlyn-Harris’s format for fifty years. Murray was distrustful of the Queensland Museum, noting: ‘the Director… is under the impression that the exhibits, or some of them, are the property of the Museum. In this he is of course mistaken, for all are the property of the Papuan Government’.45 There was mutual mis-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 95

‘Before it has become too late’

95

interpretation on the part of Murray and Longman concerning each other’s understanding of the status of the ‘official collection’, the 1897 selection and the duplicates. This was to resurface in the 1970s. Murray visited the museum in 1921 and was ‘pleased with the excellent work done’.46 A duplicate copy of the MacGregor Register was completed in 1922 and sent to Port Moresby.47 Murray continued to assert ownership of the collection in correspondence with the Australian Commonwealth Government (Craig 1996: 221, 224), and in 1938 he suggested that the collection be transferred to Canberra (Craig 1996: 206). There is no record of the Australian Commonwealth Government ever communicating with the Queensland Museum on the subject. There the fate of the collection rested for another two decades. The Australian Prime Minister’s Department sought legal opinion from the Attorney-General in 1959 and 1961 which concluded that the collection was the property of the Queensland Government.48 Again the Queensland Museum was kept oblivious of these interdepartmental debates, and by that time knowledge of the status of the collection had long receded in the museum’s collective memory (Mack 1956: 107–24).

‘The MacGregor Collection would have two homes’: Repatriation 1970–1999 In 1969 the Australian Department of Territories and the Territory of Papua and New Guinea Administration revived interest in the MacGregor collection.49 They concluded that it was ‘the property of the Queensland Government but that the Territory which has now an established Museum would like the return of the collection’.50 The Papua New Guinea Museum then raised the matter at the 1970 Conference of Australian Museum Directors which ‘recommended that a fully representative selection of the MacGregor Collection be returned to the Papua New Guinea Museum’ (Craig 1996: 203). The Queensland Museum’s response was to upgrade a collection management project and undertake an archival examination of all records associated with the collection. The ensuing document observed that, with self-government and approaching independence in Papua New Guinea, ‘a formal request for the return of items’ was expected and that it was ‘desirable that the legal position with regard to ownership be resolved’. Further, it was noted that there was ‘sufficient duplication in the holdings to allow the return of some of the material’ and that ‘UNESCO has recommended the return of cultural property to countries of origin, and as a developing nation the question of ownership of the collection of Papua should be resolved with-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

96

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 96

Michael Quinnell

out international complications’. And finally ‘This Museum has assumed that total transfer would never eventuate and for this reason has not undertaken extensive collecting in Papua unlike other Australian museums. To lose the total or a major part of the collection at this time would be to create an irreplaceable gap in our coverage of the material culture of our closest neighbour’.51 In early 1973 the Chairman of the Board of Trustees wrote to the Queensland Premier seeking legal opinion on the status of the collection. He hinted at a possible political dimension, for he noted ‘I understand that Mr. Michael Somare is the chairman of the Papua New Guinea Museum and Art Gallery Board of Trustees’.52 The SolicitorGeneral’s opinion indicated that Papua New Guinea could have valid claim to the collection. The Queensland Museum therefore took the initiative to offer a selection of the collection to the Papua New Guinea Museum. The choice would be decided by mutual agreement at board of trustee level and MacGregor’s 1897 statement would form a starting point for discussion.53 On 16 September 197454 the Queensland Premier announced that the MacGregor collection would be returned to Papua New Guinea when the new National Museum building was completed in Port Moresby. In the meantime, both museums were to ‘confer on the selection and transfer’ of the collection.55 Informal discussions already initiated at curatorial level were formalised and extended to directorial level. The National Museum maintained that it had a legal as well as a moral claim to the entire collection, while the Queensland Museum took the position that its share of the 1897 distribution remained its property. Some Queensland Museum staff expressed reservations about the principle and precedent of the repatriation, but these soon evaporated.56 The correction of cataloguing errors made when the collection was accessioned into the MacGregor register during the period from 1915 to 1920 was the only point of contention between expatriate staff at the National Museum and the Queensland Museum. The Queensland Museum ceased to transfer items erroneously included in the MacGregor register to its general collections and created paper trails for all material that had already been so treated, to avoid any claim that MacGregor items were being hidden from scrutiny. Between 1973 and 1997, some 2,508 further items were identified and added to the MacGregor collection register. Considerable debate took place and close and cordial relations were established. Appropriately, the Director, Dr Alan Bartholomai, represented the Queensland Museum at the opening of the National Museum building in 1977. National staff and trustees were by then in control in Port Moresby57 and, in mid 1979, a typically Melanesian consensus was

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

‘Before it has become too late’

Page 97

97

achieved. This agreement was partly the result of a Queensland Museum decision to repatriate an early Gogodala drum from its own collection in conformity with its policy to repatriate significant items of Papua New Guinea cultural origin.58 In response, the National Museum Board of Trustees sent Geoffrey Mosuwadoga, the first indigenous Director, to Brisbane to convey their decision not to demand the return of the entire MacGregor collection. In turn, the Queensland Museum offered to include its share of the 1897 distribution in any allocation; the whole collection was now available for distribution. Agreement on selection procedures was reached and the first distribution took place in December 1979. A joint meeting of the two boards of trustees was held in Brisbane in February 1980 to conclude formally an agreement whereby a substantial portion of the collection would be returned to Papua New Guinea: ‘It was agreed that the MacGregor Collection would have two homes, the Papua New Guinea Museum and Art Gallery and the Queensland Museum.’59 That part of the collection retained in Queensland would, in keeping with MacGregor’s wish, continue to maintain a separate identity. The selection process was simple although time consuming. All items in the MacGregor Register were catalogued and photographed. As each category of objects was completed, catalogue sheets and photographs were sent to Port Moresby. Periodically the National Museum curator or director60 visited Brisbane to make the selection with the Queensland Museum curator. Unique items and ‘best’ examples were chosen for return and the remainder divided on a sliding ratio of between 70:30 and 50:50, depending on the respective holdings in each museum. Between 1979 and 1992 nine selections took place, 3,297 items being returned to Papua New Guinea while 2,675 were retained by Queensland. The documentation programme has been completed and the remaining 2,277 items comprising spears, bows and arrows await selection.

‘Illustrate its past and present position in the future’: Nineteenth-Century Collection, Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Fate To what extent have MacGregor’s wishes been maintained? The original collection has indeed, as MacGregor feared, been dispersed. Parts of the collection are now housed in ten institutions in five countries; several hundred items have passed from some of these to private collections. The core collection, however, has been retained; that part in the Queensland Museum maintains a separate identity, and its largest component is back in Port Moresby, a century after MacGregor sent it away in the Merrie England.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

98

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 98

Michael Quinnell

MacGregor’s collection has retrospectively become a foundation icon for the Papua New Guinea National Museum. The latter’s Director, Geoffrey Mosuwadoga, stressed the point that: ‘Papua New Guinea sees the MacGregor Collection first and foremost as the basis of the present Museum in Papua New Guinea. It was collected specifically to establish the Museum’.61 Bernard Narakobi, Chairman of the National Museum’s Trustees, noted that the ‘MacGregor Repatriation Program has special significance to the Papuan people’.62 The MacGregor collection has been transformed from an obscure antipodean provincial collection of the indigenous ‘other’ to a regional keystone for the National Museum and its role in the formation of a Papua New Guinea national identity. The process of repatriation has become a very Melanesian act of reciprocity but, as its creation was a political act, so too is its repatriation: it is political in both the Melanesian and the wider sense of the term. Responsibility for the collection’s inherited obligations, which have always been an implicit part of the collection’s baggage since its formation under MacGregor’s stewardship, has now transferred not only to the National Museum but also to government and politicians in Port Moresby. The completion of the repatriation from Queensland to Papua New Guinea early in the new millennium will merely close one chapter in the MacGregor collection’s narrative. The collection’s future in the

Figure 4.2: Senator the Hon. Bob McMullan, Australian Minister for the Arts, and the Hon. Bernard Narakobi MP, Chairman of the Papua New Guinea Museum Board of Trustees, at the official handover of the MacGregor collection, 29 October 1993.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 99

‘Before it has become too late’

99

twenty-first century merges with that of the National Museum and lies in the hands of indigenous Papua New Guineans, whose ancestral possession it has, in truth, always been. A quarter century has passed since that moment of independence when the purpose of the National Museum was seen by the political elite as a focus for cultural diversity, a vehicle for expressions of political unity and a formative icon for national identity (Kaeppler 1994: 35; Wright 1998: 143). Postcolonial opportunities to build upon those high ideals, to reassess responsiveness to provincial and local interests and to reaffirm or renegotiate the museum’s role need to be examined (Kaeppler 1994: 19–44; MacLeod 1998: 308–18). It can be argued that the location of the core of MacGregor’s collection in Port Moresby is now just as problematic – albeit with a different set of problems – as it was in Brisbane. Museum to museum repatriation places the collection and its content closer to the Papuan village, but not in it. Those possessions and obligations inherent within the collection, which lay dormant while in Queensland, will be revived and mediated and perhaps reappropriated. The National Museum can become a collecting site (Pannell 1994: 18–20) for those Papuan people who wish to revitalise the individual narratives that lie behind the collection (Stewart 1993: 153). The fundamental political nature of the MacGregor collection has permeated its narrative. The collection was a ‘political’ creation when made at first contact as a mode of engagement with indigenous people. It was ‘political’ in the sense that it embodied the New Guinea which MacGregor was trying to forge; it was ‘political’ when its ownership was in dispute at different stages in its journey; it is still ‘political’ during this extended moment of repatriation; and it will continue to be ‘political’ in diverse respects in both current ‘homes’. Museums are, after all, ‘politicized spaces’ (MacLeod 1998: 315).

Notes Barry Craig, Helen Gardner, Michael Young, Christina Wright, Michael O’Hanlon and Nicholas Thomas provided advice or stimulating comment and Soroi Marepo Eoe, wantok, made it all worthwhile. Abbreviations used for manuscript sources: AA Australian Archives, Canberra NLA National Library of Australia PMB Pacific Manuscripts Bureau QM Queensland Museum QSA Queensland State Archives 1. ARBNG 1895–6: xxxiii 2. Revd George Brown journal 1890, Mitchell Library, MLSA 1686–17.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

100

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 100

Michael Quinnell

3. Bernard Narakobi, Chairman, Papua New Guinea National Museum Board of Trustees 29 October 1993. 4. Weekend Nius, Port Moresby 21 February 1987. 5. De Vis to Musgrave 25 August 1888, QM correspondence. 6. For the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London and the 1888 Centennial Exhibition, Melbourne. 7. Musgrave to de Vis 11 December 1888, QM correspondence. 8. Despatch 53/1889 14 August 1889, QSA, COL/6. 9. Colonial Secretary to Under Secretary for Public Instruction 30 August 1889, QM Correspondence forwarded to MacGregor, Despatch 58/1889 2 September 1889, QSA, COL/6. 10. Despatch 104/1889 11 November 1889, QSA, COL/6. 11. 17 November 1888, NLA, MS7028. 12. 10,656 collection items were shipped to Brisbane aboard the Merrie England. 13. MacGregor diary, NLA, MS38. 14. Thomson: ‘We generally tried to overcome their distrust by playing upon their commercial instincts. In many places trade began at once in knives, tobacco, red cloth and looking glasses’ (MacGregor 1897: 95). 15. 14 August 1894, pp.20–21, Green Papers, PMB 420. 16. MacGregor lamented the loss to science of a new species of lark eaten by Joe Fiji, his private collector, on the Mt Victoria expedition (ARBNG 1888–89: 46). MacGregor’s reaction became a famous story amongst British New Guinea residents. Joe Fiji told John Green five years later that he had been very hungry (Green Papers PMB 420). 17. Despatch 36/1890 17 April 1890, AA, CRS: G32. 18. Despatch 2/1897 4 January 1897, QSA, GOV/A31. 19. Letter 25 August 1895, Green Papers, PMB 420. 20. Most of the unattributed collection is from the northeast coast. 21. MacGregor published the Revd S.B. Fellows’s ‘Kiriwina emblazoned shield’ (ARBNG 1897–98: Appendix JJ). 22. QM Trustees Minutes 3 August 1894. 23. QM Trustees Minutes 6 January 1896. 24. Despatch 55/1895 12 October 1895, QSA: GOV/A31. 25. QM correspondence 6 January 1896. 26. Despatch 14/1896 7 February 1896, AA, CRS A2261. 27. MacGregor to de Vis 18 October 1896, QM correspondence. 28. Premier to Governor 5 November 1896, QSA, GOV/A31. 29. Despatch 2/1897 4 January 1897, QSA, GOV/A31. 30. De Vis to MacGregor 22 March 1897, QM correspondence. 31. Musgrave to Under Secretary, Chief Secretary’s Office 29 January 1908, QSA. 32. Acting Director to Under Secretary, Chief Secretary’s Office 12 March 1908, QM correspondence. 33. Musgrave became Private Secretary to MacGregor 1909–11. 34. R. Etheridge, ‘Report to the Chief Secretary on the State of the Queensland Museum’, 1910, QSA, PRE/A337. 35. Hunt to Hamlyn-Harris 23 August 1913, QM correspondence. 36. Hamlyn-Harris to Hunt 18 September 1913,QM correspondence. 37. Hamlyn-Harris to Hunt 18 February 1914, QM correspondence. 38. Hunt to Malinowski 19 May 1915 and Malinowski to Hunt 21 May 1915. AA, CRS A1, 1914–1920, 21/866. 39. MacGregor to Hamlyn-Harris 13 July 1915, QM correspondence. 40. Hunt to Longman 20 June 1918, QM correspondence. 41. Longman to Hunt 27 June 1918, QM correspondence.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 101

‘Before it has become too late’ 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

101

Longman to Hunt 3 December 1918, 26 July 1919, QM correspondence. Hunt to Longman, 11 August 1919, QM correspondence. 2,700 weapons were counted but not registered. Murray to Minister, Home & Territories 9 October 1918, enclosed in Hunt to Longman 18 November 1918, QM correspondence. Annotation 30 March 1921, Official Secretary, Territory of Papua to Longman 15 March 1921, QM correspondence. Annotation 31 August 1922, Leonard Murray to Longman 1 August 1922, QM correspondence. Secretary, Department of Territories to the Administrator Territory of Papua New Guinea 11 February 1970. Secretary, Department of the Administrator to Acting President Papua New Guinea Museum 10 October 1969. Secretary, Department of Territories to Administrator Territory of Papua New Guinea 11 February 1970. Report to the Board of Trustees on Documents relating to the MacGregor Collection 1972: 1, 3; QM. Gill to Premier 8 March 1973, QM correspondence. Michael Somare was Chief Minister and later Prime Minister of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea. QM G71/9/47. One year before Papua New Guinea’s independence. News Release, Premier’s Department 16 September 1974. Return of MacGregor’s zoological collections was not requested. Geoffrey Mosuwadoga, Director from 1975; Michael Somare, President, Board of Trustees from1971. Bartholomai to Mosuwadoga 18 April 1979, QM correspondence. Minutes: QM Board of Trustees and Papua New Guinea National Museum Board of Trustees 19 February 1980. Geoffrey Mosuwadoga, Soroi Eoe, Barry Craig and Ombone Kaiku. Minutes: QM Board of Trustees and Papua New Guinea National Museum Board of Trustees 19 February 1980. Bernard Narakobi 29 October 1993.

Bibliography (ARBNG) Annual Reports on British New Guinea 1888–1889 to 1898–1899, Government Printer, Brisbane, 1890–1900. Anon. Catalogue of specimens deposited by Sir William MacGregor GCMG, MD (Aber.), etc. in the Anthropological Museum Marischal College University of Aberdeen 1899–1909. The University Press, Aberdeen, 1912. Craig, B. ‘Samting bilong tumbuna: the collection, documentation and preservation of the material cultural heritage of Papua New Guinea’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide, 1996. Hamlyn-Harris, R. ‘A Papuan mosquito net’, Memoirs of the Queensland Museum vol. 2 (1913): 7–8. Hügel, A.A.A. von, The Fiji journals of Baron Von Hügel, eds J. Roth and S. Hooper. Fiji Museum, Suva, 1990. Joyce, R.B. Sir William MacGregor. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1971.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

102

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 102

Michael Quinnell

Kaeppler, A.L. ‘Paradise regained: the role of Pacific museums in forging national identity’ in Museums and the making of ‘ourselves’: the role of objects in national identity ed. F.E.S. Kaplan. Leicester University Press, London, 1994. MacGregor, W. ‘British New Guinea: administration’, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute vol. 26 (1895): 193–239. ———. British New Guinea: country and people. Royal Geographical Society and John Murray, London, 1897. Mack, G. ‘The Queensland Museum 1855–1956’, Memoirs of the Queensland Museum vol.13, no. 2 (1956): 107–24. MacLeod, R. ‘Postcolonialism and museum knowledge: revisiting the museums of the Pacific’, Pacific Science vol. 52 (1998): 308–18. Pannell, S. ‘Mabo and museums: “the indigenous (re) appropriation of indigenous things”’, Oceania vol. 65 (1995): 18–39. Stewart, S. On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1993. Thomas, N. Entangled objects: exchange, material culture, and colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1991. Waiko, J. A short history of Papua New Guinea. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993. Wright, C. ‘Where the spirits meet: a history of the Papua New Guinea Museum and Art Gallery’, unpublished M.A. thesis, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, 1998.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 103

Chapter 5

SURVEYING CULTURE: Photography, Collecting and Material Culture in British New Guinea, 1898

Elizabeth Edwards

Introduction The relationship between material culture, collecting and photography has been implicit since the full integration of photography in anthropological practice in the second half of the nineteenth century. The relationship has been perceived largely in terms of an unproblematised intention to provide ‘context’ for the use of objects or description of technical processes. So naturalised has this function become that the relationship between material culture and photography has received remarkably little analytical consideration within anthropology. Rather, the focus of analysis has been on later stages of the relationship, on the interaction of objects and photographs in museum displays, as lodged within wider debates on the politics of representation (Porter 1989; Clifford 1995: 99–100). This chapter looks at an earlier stage: at the act of collecting both of photographs and of objects. It will be argued that the relationship is at once dense and nuanced and, more importantly, that it is central to the processes of collecting objects and to the way meanings are constructed around objects in the course of these processes. These concerns will be explored through a case study of the interrelated collecting and photographic activities of the 1898 Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition’s work in British New Guinea. In June and July

O'Hanlon/Welsh

104

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 104

Elizabeth Edwards

of that year Haddon, Ray, Seligmann and Wilkin undertook ‘survey’ ethnographic work in British New Guinea in order to provide comparative material for the regional survey in which the Torres Strait Islands themselves were the focus of ‘intensive’ study. This built on Haddon’s earlier work in the area in 1888–9 and on his resulting publications on decorative art in the mid-1890s. It was intended to ‘elucidate the broader aspects of distributions of physical types, material objects, customs and cults’ as well as to suggest ‘promising sites for more intensive investigation’: for ‘it is only by careful regional study that the real meaning of institutions and their metamorphosis can be understood’ (Haddon 1906: 157). The expedition members visited a substantial area of the south New Guinea coast from Hood Bay in the east to Cape Possession in the west, as well as the Fly River delta itself which had the most direct relation with islands in the Strait. The 250 or so photographs which resulted from this New Guinea work – the majority from the coastal regions of Central District – will be examined.1 How did these photographs relate to the activity of making collections and to the cross-cultural relationships in which collecting was embedded? This chapter is concerned with a series of related perspectives. The first is the precise way in which photography was deployed as part of the collection of material culture to provide evidence that was an active part of Haddon’s construal of ‘cultural region’. Second is the way that photography works within the interpretative subjectivities of the archaeological imagination. Third is the position of photography in the relationships between colonial officers, missionaries, the local population and anthropologists in British New Guinea at the time. These relationships were instrumental both in collecting material culture and in photography. Thus it is hoped to show that photography was integral to collecting in ways which extend beyond its use as a visual notebook and the merely illustrative. As in the expedition’s work in the Torres Strait Islands, the visualisation of culture in New Guinea was an important methodological element. However the photographs that emerged from the work in New Guinea are markedly different in their construction. The New Guinea photographs lack the intellectual incisiveness of the photographic output from the Torres Strait Islands themselves (Edwards 1998). Nevertheless they are clearer in their articulation of the relationships between photography and collecting material culture and its role in constructing holistic concepts of culture within the model of cultural regions. First it is necessary to position photographically the collecting done in New Guinea. These photographs are saturated by a pattern of photographic thinking which is linked to ‘salvage’ ethnography and the role of the latter in making meanings about southern New Guinea material culture. In certain aspects the photographs constitute a prac-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Surveying Culture

7:13 pm

Page 105

105

tical realisation of the strictures on photography which appeared in the third edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology (published in 1899, soon after the return of the expedition), with which Haddon was closely involved. But they also reflect, more generally, the debates of the 1890s on the nature of photography in anthropology. The Torres Strait Expedition was as much on the cusp of change in the relationship between anthropology and photography as it was for anthropological methodology itself. The links between collecting material culture and collecting with a camera in this period cannot be analysed without conceptualising photography itself as a changing practice within broader shifts in ideas of scientific truth, both within anthropology and more generally. Put briefly, two significant styles coexisted in the late nineteenth century. The first was a naturalistic, non-interventionist style of observational photography that was to become the dominant truth value in anthropological photography. The second was a more controlled, interventionist scientific photography designed to ‘show’ facts. At this time photography was still a process of fieldwork and collecting, an active and integrated element in the production of primary data in the unmediated style of raw information. By the mid-twentieth century, photography had collapsed into a secondary product of fieldwork: it functioned merely as a visual notebook, another tool in the fieldworkers’ arsenal of observational apparatuses, the most important being his or her own anthropological eye.2 The naturalistic school of anthropological photography was represented by im Thurn in his Anthropological Institute paper of 1893. He saw photography as the analogical tool of a naturalistic observer of the ‘real native’, not as producing the posed genre pieces which he likened to badly stuffed animals. He went so far as to argue that ‘a good series of photographs showing each of the possessions of primitive folk, and its use, would be far more instructive and far more interesting than any collection of the articles themselves’ (1893: 197). The alternative photographic approach was typified by Portman’s ‘Photography for the Anthropologist’ of 1896, which harked back to a direct positivist style of scientific intervention to produce ‘facts about which there can be no question’ (Read 1899: 87). As a precise visual response to the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s Notes and Queries, bodies and technologies were isolated for examination (Portman 1896). Both these photographic styles or visual dialects come together in the British New Guinea photographs of material culture. There is a carefully controlled demonstration of material culture and techniques for the camera, yet this is naturalised both stylistically and through the reality effects of the medium. Within this ambiguous stylistic discourse, the photographs function in the registers of both ‘objective’ observation and an affective tone which drew upon the val-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 106

106

Elizabeth Edwards

ues of naturalism. It is this photographic tension which characterises these British New Guinea photographs, and which will be explored here in order to attempt to elucidate their complex relationship with collecting material culture.

The Symbiosis of Photography and Collecting Material Culture In terms of subject matter, a sizeable percentage of the New Guinea photographs is of buildings, physical anthropology and material culture/technology. Of 256 photographs, 127 (about 50 percent) are of houses, collectable objects and associated technologies. Within this, the largest groups are of houses and settlements (57) and then of pottery (25). Another 30 percent (71) are images of physical anthropology. However, these are not scientifically rigorous, visually mathematicised bodies but rather serendipitous ‘types’ of scientific reference. This is especially so further away from the expedition’s Port Moresby base with its concentration of colonial infrastructure. The remaining 20 percent of the photographs show activities, mainly dance and children’s games, or relate to the work of the expedition itself. With the exception of photographs of houses (which both have a metonymic function, substituting for the collected object, as well as providing an analogical record), the shape of the photograph collection broadly mirrors – or is, perhaps, mirrored by – the shape of the object collection in Cambridge. Haddon actually described photography and collecting as integrated actions. On 4 July 1898, at Hanuabada, he collected a shell armlet, and commented that common objects often remained uncollected: [S]ome natives came to Ballantine3 with some stone implements and charms, but for the first time they brought some pieces of hard madrepore coral which were fastened in a fork of a cleft stick [sketch]. B. had never seen these before though they are the implements most used for grinding the inside of shell armlets. The next day several more were brought… I bought some… W[ilkin] photographed the process of making armlets. I believe that this has not been described or collected – although collectors have been here for 20 years.4

The figures alone suggest the centrality of photography in the study and collection of material culture and the fact that, at a basic level, the camera was being used as the salvage tool par excellence.5 More important, these photographs had a constitutive role, in that they reflect those elements Haddon considered significant in the delineation and analysis of the geographical distribution of racial and cultural varia-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Surveying Culture

7:13 pm

Page 107

107

Figure 5.1: Making the shell armlet, Port Moresby. From a dry gelatin plate negative by Wilkin and/or Haddon, 1898.

tion in the region. This is especially so of two categories: houses and pottery. Photography was not only integral but planned in the recording of this particular material culture. It would appear that photographs did not merely supplement drawing. Rather, they were integrated with the drawings, and appear to have reflected a different agenda of direct observation, the choice of representational forms being made according to their function at the specific moment of recording. There are a number of references to the interlocking modes of inscribing house types, whether through photographs, sketches or mapping. For instance, Wilkin’s notebook on Yule Island includes a map of the village of Tsiria, details of roof construction and a plan of the post layout of a hut that links directly to a photograph that introduces the impression of the third dimension. At Mohu, Mekeo District, Wilkin’s notes divide houses into broad types: round at both ends, broadside verandah, oblong with broadside platform, etc. All are meticulously documented with detailed sketches and lists of materials which again are directly linked to, but are not tautological of, the photographs.6 An analysis of the photographs reveals a strong sense of this systematic approach to photographing buildings. A highly spatialised narrative of the complexities of settlements emerges. Indeed there is almost a kinetic quality to some series of images, for example, those from Mohu: the collector’s eye, embodied in the camera,

O'Hanlon/Welsh

108

1/11/00

7:13 pm

Page 108

Elizabeth Edwards

Figure 5.2: Houses at Zaria, Yule Island. From a dry gelatin plate negative by Wilkin and/or Haddon, 1898.

moves through the village space. These were not the sweeping views of the exotic such as those of Williamson’s photographs (Macintyre and MacKenzie 1992: 159–60), but a careful consideration of spatial relations. The balance between detail and long views suggests that observation goes beyond the random collection of facts of surface detail to suggest a desire to position buildings within their social spaces. The systematic and scientific approach to material culture, which Haddon had developed in his earlier studies of decorative art, is most apparent in a series of twenty photographs made to document the pottery making process.7 These constitute a ‘grouping of usable facts’ on which to base an exploration of the significance of the pottery distribution which Haddon suggests in his anthropogeographical analysis of the region (Haddon 1900: 429). At the same time the photographs bring together the different registers of truth value in photography – the controlled specimen and naturalistic observation. At one level these photographs operate to ‘show how’ in relation to pottery collected in the Port Moresby region: ‘The process of pot making in New Guinea has several times been described and occasionally photographed but so far as I know no one has done this systematically so as to illustrate all the phases’.8 However, the images are especially significant in that they show clearly how photography acts out the process of observation and the collection of visual data. The way the camera moves around the group of women working at the ‘bench’

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Surveying Culture

7:14 pm

Page 109

109

introduces an active spatial relationship between observer and observed. One feels the act of observation as the camera, acting as the viewer’s eye, moves around the group ‘to see better’, ‘to reveal more’, to intensify the record. The observer is almost embodied, outside the photographic frame, as Wilkin or Haddon move around the group.9 There is a strong performative quality to the interaction, the performance of making pottery, the performance of observation, and the making of scientific information, all worked out simultaneously within the same

Figures 5.3 and 5.4: Demonstrating pottery making, Ballantine’s compound, Port Moresby. From a dry gelatin plate negative by Wilkin and/or Haddon, 1898.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

110

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 110

Elizabeth Edwards

performative space. Indeed the direction of responses of the women suggests there was another focus of attention of conversation, another camera perhaps. There is a sense of interaction between the whole group, not merely between performers and camera but by constant reference to what is beyond the frame on a number of spatial axes. Yet what made this series possible was that it was reenacted: it was an event taken from its normal place and time. The expedition had tried to photograph pottery at Hanuabada but the crowd of spectators made precise observation impossible. As with the Torres Strait photographs, the emphasis on visual precision is significant. Haddon wrote: I arranged through Ballantine for some women from Hanuabada to come to B’s compound so that we might photograph all the stages without a crowd of onlookers and under our own conditions of light and grouping.10

This is interesting because it is photography of a very different order in anthropological terms – it creates the conditions for precise, measured scientific observation, reminiscent of the laboratory. It relates back to Portman’s strictures about meaningful anthropological photography – an interventionist, tightly controlled scientific truth. It is consistent with the instructions of Notes and Queries. The ‘Photography’ section of the 1899 edition, written by Haddon, stated: It is most important to get photographs of various stages of a ceremony, or of the making of any object. Pictures of the way in which tools and implements are held, and of the stages of manufacture are more valuable than tedious verbal descriptions. (Haddon 1899: 240)

The controlled observation of isolatable phenomena evident in the pottery photographs is created through a concentrated focusing on the subject to be defined within the photographic frame. This is on a very different intellectual register from that argued recently by Young (1998: 18–19) in relation to Malinowski’s photography; the latter’s consistent wider framing perhaps articulated an idea of social interconnectedness of phenomena instead of the isolation of pure form as practised in these photographs of making pottery. The inability of the photograph to capture sustained action is compensated by the serial approach which forms the narrative of event. There is a filmic quality to the photographic narrative which fulfils Mast’s definition of visual narrative (1984: 98), with coherent links between images and coherent control over information within the frame itself. The suggestion of real-time, a temporal flow dictated by the process itself – the making of pottery – is translated into a near seamless sequence which masks the demonstrational character: the dislocation of ‘real-time’. These qualities presage later developments in

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Surveying Culture

7:14 pm

Page 111

111

film, not merely in the sequencing of images to create a temporal flow but in the movement of the camera. There is a similarly constructed series of three images on tattoo taken in the mission compound at Keapara.11 Again, the photographs are of a reenactment and again, intrusions into the frame in the form of shadows, or shifting camera angle, inscribe observation. These organised photographic sessions were markedly different from the kind of observation which expedition members made in the nearby village of Babaka where they had been informed that a dance was to take place. In the resulting photographs of the Babaka dance, the camera angle and distance never shift more than a couple of feet. The spatial and kinetic elements of observation are constrained by the action itself and the observer’s relationship with the event. The camera position here articulates the observer’s naturalistic relationship with the event. Unlike the pottery series, the observer does not intervene and the spatial and kinetic relations are on the participants’ terms. In terms of the relationships of collecting, all the series of photographs considered here are as articulate about what is beyond the frame as what is in it. They bring to mind the ‘endlessness’ which Kracauer (1980: 264) identified as one of the four affinities of photography: an endlessness where the frame marks only a provisional limit, the content of the frame constantly referring beyond itself – here to the acts of observation, collecting and interaction.

Figure 5.5: The dance at Babaka. From a dry gelatin plate negative by Wilkin and/or Haddon, 1898.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 112

112

Elizabeth Edwards

A Living Past Underlying all the photographic inscription related to collecting was a strong idea of authenticity, of the past, and the urgent need for salvage. The fieldwork considered here belongs to the end of that particular period when anthropology was still actively engaged with the past. Engagement with the cultural past informed a wide range of anthropological ideas, from evolutionary paradigms to Boasian distribution-based reconstructions, which entailed the collection and utilisation of indigenous texts. Thus such arch-constructions of archaeological or historical imagination are far from uncommon at this date. What is significant here is the consistency and intensity with which photography, collecting, description and archaeological imagination come together. The nature of photography itself, as a medium, projects the archaeological into the present and stills the moment in apparent timelessness. If photography is the salvage tool par excellence, it is also the tool of the archaeological imagination. The naturalism of photography itself merges with the naturalism of field observation: ultimately both embodied the eye of the fieldworker. The photographic agendas of the expedition accord with this construction of atemporality. The more overtly ‘primitive’ appearance of New Guinea (when compared to that of the Torres Strait Islands) is played out for the camera as pristine form, in primitivist tropes such as dance, clothing, and tattoo. The inherent fragmenting and atemporal potential of photography itself was integral to this archaeological effect. Likewise the indexicality of photography helped reify the values attached to this appearance. Thus photography served to ‘collect’ technological processes and enhance the documentation of material culture but at the same time to suspend it in a timeless discourse. As discussed elsewhere (Edwards 1998), certain aspects of the expedition, especially Haddon’s work, were strongly inflected with a romantic structure of feeling, primitivist subjectivities existing ambiguously with systematic scientific intention. In the case of the New Guinea photographs it could be argued that the temporal backward projection implied in the cultural area study, with its historical reconstruction and conjecture about the past, embedded within its methodology the romantic structures of primitivist subjectivities. Despite the fact that the coastal villages were heavily missionised by this date, there was little recording of ‘hybridity’ or material culture change, so evident in the Torres Strait photographs and in some other photographs of British New Guinea at this date. The culture collected photographically is one of near pristine, static appearance. The entanglements of economics, colonial development and material culture were noted by Haddon, but often in ambiguous terms:

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Surveying Culture

7:14 pm

Page 113

113

I witnessed one of those extremes of culture that are rarely met with even in frontier colonies… Gewe, [Chief of Agi in the Owen Stanley Range] – clad in his medley of nineteenth century garments was solemnly chipping a hole in a stone club with a piece of flint. Nearby another mountaineer clad in his native fringed belt a sporran holding a cheap mirror before his face and shaving himself with a fragment of bottle glass.12

Similarly, in the office of Burns Philp – the shipping company but also a local centre for trade – there were strings of worked shell necklaces hanging up ‘such as natives wear all round the coast’.13 Two or three all but nude Papuan boys came into the store and bought a couple for one shilling. It seemed so strange to see natives buying a native ornament which was used as shell money in a large store with a coin of the realm. (Haddon 1901: 206)

Indeed Haddon recorded his surprise (perhaps disappointment?) that people wanted money for ‘curios’, rather than tobacco sticks or whatever, and that prices as a rule were very high.14 The romantic construction of ‘salvage’ is given direct expression in New Guinea. Commentary on culture, behaviour and technologies was often couched in terms of archaeological allusion and metaphor, the tensions between the ‘deep past’ (represented through material culture and technology) and present experience. In his diaries, letters and even in his published work (especially Headhunters 1901), Haddon repeatedly revealed his archaeological imagination, with its romantic and nostalgic registers at work. Note how the present and past were conflated at Keapara on an occasion when Haddon bought a hafted stone axe: ‘Had afternoon tea & went to the village. First we saw the operation of canoe building and made photos…. It was most interesting to see neolithic men at work’.15 The evolutionary connection is made even more strongly in Headhunters when the making of the canoes is described as being ‘probably in precisely the same manner, save that no metal tool was available, our Neolithic ancestors manufactured their canoes. It was an unexpected surprise to have this glimpse into the Stone Age’ (Haddon 1901: 220; my emphasis). Considering this he wrote again a few days later, clearly greatly exercised by the significance of this temporal slippage: ‘We saw neolithic man making canoes at Kerepuna [Keapara] and here at Hula we saw the pile-dwellers’ whom Haddon related directly to neolithic Swiss Lake dwellers.16 Indeed Haddon referred to the destruction by fire in a raid of the earlier village of East Kapakapa as ‘a repetition of history of the Swiss Pile Dwellings’.17 Similarly, having made the pottery series discussed above, Haddon’s immediate response was to note in his diary that he should publish them with a commentary in ‘The

O'Hanlon/Welsh

114

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 114

Elizabeth Edwards

Figure 5.6: Demonstrating raising a pile, Hula. From a dry gelatin plate negative by Wilkin and/or Haddon, 1898.

Reliquary and Illustrated Antiquary as it will be of interest to archaeologists, for doubtless our Neolithic ancestors did what our contemporary “Neolithic” Papuans are doing now’.18 Salvage agendas and latent primitivist responses played a significant role in defining the subjects perceived as ‘photographable’. Indeed, Haddon expressed disappointment when people he wished to photograph were wearing European clothing (similar sentiments were expressed in relation to Torres Strait). It is significant that these New Guinea photographs were more widely disseminated. In Haddon’s popular lantern slide lectures over the years there were vastly more on ‘Savage Life in New Guinea’ than on the Torres Strait.19 In both cases the presentation of cultures rested on the surface appearances of these images, in New Guinea that of the ‘primitive’ and in Torres Strait that of the acculturated and ‘culturally disappeared’. Thus the romanticism of the salvage paradigm is equally, if not more clearly articulated, in the collection of material culture and photography from the southern New Guinea coast than that from Torres Strait. Its articulation may be different but it emerges from the same nostalgic tropes inherent in the ‘salvage’ exercise (Edwards 1998: 109–15). However, the indigenous population in British New Guinea is not represented as the irredeemable savages of many a stereotype. Haddon’s ‘primitives’ are survivors of a distant period of antiquity, a window on the European Neolithic. There is also an element of nobil-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 115

Surveying Culture

115

ity within this discourse implied through classical comparison, for example: ‘Papuan warriors are certainly as great at boasting and bluff as were the Homeric heroes or the ancient Irish champions’ (Haddon 1900: 282). This was not a naive or bald equation of present with archaeological past, but rather an affective tone of observation, informed by evolutionary models of interpretation, which projected the present back into conjectured and imagined pasts. Photography reified these pasts.

Photography, Indigenous Population and the Currency of Collecting This section looks at issues of agency in the process of photographic collecting, for obviously it is implicated in the demonstrations and reenactments, the photographing of technological processes and simultaneous collecting of objects.20 Almost all the expedition’s dealings in New Guinea were mediated through the colonial infrastructure. This highlights a crucial difference between the New Guinea and Torres Strait work. In Torres Strait, although the expedition had depended upon the broad colonial infrastructure, in terms of observation and collecting, interaction had been largely with Island elders themselves. In New Guinea, by contrast, the colonial networks mediated all relationships. For instance, Ballantine set up photographic opportunities or arranged trips to villages; Anthony Musgrave (Government Secretary) advised when a dance was going to take place, lent the Government launch and so forth. There was little local agency in the selection of sites or the giving or denying of access. Nevertheless, the making of the images cannot be reduced simply to a series of colonial manipulations. The reenactments or demonstrations point to levels of local collaboration (or at least accommodation) and agency in such enterprises – an intersubjective dialogue between actor and ethnographer, however muted, which can emerge through the photographs. As suggested above, in making the pottery series, the interaction is almost palpable, constituted through the relations between what is inside the photographic frame and what is beyond it. Haddon also recorded a certain misunderstanding at the pottery session: The women were very indignant with me when I took away 3 unfinished pots in different states of manufacture. They thought I was gammoning them & that I meant to finish them off myself… When I brought back the incipient pots for baking… they laughed greatly & I believe they were reconciled to me.21

O'Hanlon/Welsh

116

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 116

Elizabeth Edwards

There is a photograph of an unfinished pot,22 possibly one of the offending ones, displayed to the camera, filling the frame, and photographs of the pots being fired. Haddon made numerous references such as this to negotiations over photography or collecting objects, and to the role played by photographs and objects in the shared space between collectors and local people. The reality effect of the photographic surface and the fragmenting characteristics of photography tend always to disguise the fundamentally artificial nature of transactions between ethnographer and informant. However, what is relevant in the context of these British New Guinea photographs is that not all fieldwork interactions are alike, even within one concentrated fieldwork period only two months long. They vary from those occurring naturally on the actor’s patch, or specifically arranged by the actors (Sanjek 1991: 618) – for instance, the dance at Babaka which was photographed – to those arranged by the ethnographer or his agent, such as the occasion on which the pottery was photographed. Likewise the over-homogenising rubrics attending the ‘colonial gaze’, so often used in the analysis of photographs of this period, need unpacking in relation to specific photographic encounters. The whole gamut of types of interaction is featured in the British New Guinea photographs. Like the reenactments themselves, photography relied on at least a minimal level of cooperation. The Revd W.G. Lawes, the London Missionary Society missionary, reported in his journal of 15 November 1877 that: The natives are very excited about the photographs when I was here last. I have brought copies with me which were printed at Port Moresby and as I produced each one the natives shout with delight [and] surprise calling out the names of their friends. (Quoted in Webb 1997: 17)

While Lawes recorded a fear of photography when he first attempted it, by 1877 he was reporting ‘The people are anxious to be taken but many can’t remember to remain still. Will turn round to speak to some one when the plate is half exposed & so on’. Haddon recorded a similarly shaped collaboration between ethnographer and local, copying a tattoo pattern. Tattoo was one of those elements of collecting where Notes and Queries actually recommended drawing rather than photography because of the difficulty of inscribing tattoo on a dark skin on to a photographic plate: I made an accurate copy of the tattooing on the body and arm of one young woman – she posed excellently and evidently felt proud of being drawn, especially as a noisy crowd collected around us and when I sketched a tattoo mark – the onlookers told her or touched the patterns as I drew them.23

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Surveying Culture

7:14 pm

Page 117

117

The local population also had the power of non-cooperation. For example, near Gaile the expedition came across a widow wearing her mourning dress, shaved head, charcoaled, covered with netting, a long tasselled petticoat and numerous ornaments: such ‘primitiveness’ was clearly a candidate for photography within a ‘salvage’ agenda. The woman was evidently in a house: She would not come on the platform to be photographed, the reason being assigned that she would get a bad name if she showed herself in public. She would not mind being photographed in the house, but that was impossible as it was so dark.24

Presumably the widow was in seclusion, as was customary, but one may also conjecture that she was perhaps familiar enough with photography to be able use darkness as an inoffensive way of evading the camera. Local familiarity with Western imaging systems forms, surely, a subtle subtext to the local role in making images for the collection of material culture and local people’s responses to the act of photography. Lawes’ diaries suggest that he, at least, showed people their photographs. While Haddon certainly gave sitters copies of their photographs in Torres Strait, it is not clear whether he did so in New Guinea. There is no record of whether the expedition had brought with them the equipment and chemicals for developing and printing or whether, perhaps, they availed themselves of photographic equipment owned by the government, colonial officers or missionaries.25 By this date photography was, like collecting, an expected behaviour of the White man. Consequently the native population was enmeshed in a colonial currency of images, familiar with the requirements for being photographed and with Western imagery in general. Haddon (1904: 33–6) himself said as much when discussing a set of drawings from Hula, noting that ‘naturally they have seen very numerous pictures of European origin’. The most obvious site of graphic encounter was the use of images in mission teaching. The people of the southern coastal region were familiar with a wide range of Western imagery used in these contexts (Langmore 1989: 139, 145): indeed Haddon recorded his admiration of the use of visual instruction by Father Guiband of the Sacred Heart Mission, Yule Island.26 The circulation of Western images was perhaps most common in the form of the ubiquitous lantern slide, illustrating everything from local views to British home life, from morally uplifting tales to the Royal family. However, as Haddon’s observations make clear, there was a general circulation of graphic material. The currency of such imagery is instanced by an appeal, probably dating from around the time of the expedition, from the New Guinea Mission. The Mission asked its Friends for boxes of

O'Hanlon/Welsh

118

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 118

Elizabeth Edwards

useful articles to be sent to New Guinea, including ‘Scripture prints & other pictures for Schools, Illustrated London News, British Workman & other good Pictorials (for the sake of the pictures) etc.’27 The British Workman, for instance, a journal for ‘the sons of toil’, was a temperance publication full of handy tips, uplifting stories and, above all, images of noble and selfless labour (possibly themselves made into lantern slides), with a strong non-conformist missionary element. Not everyone, of course, possessed this familiarity with Western images and imaging, as is evident from the way in which a group of men from the Owen Stanley Range become enmeshed in photographic discourses. They had come down to the Astrolabe Range with Ballantine and then returned to Port Moresby with members of the expedition, who had been on a three-day trip to the Astrolabes, collecting and photographing.28 Haddon wrote in his Diary: Ballantine brought the crowd to the hotel [again we have colonial mediation and the removal here into the non-ordinary space for scientific observation]. I wanted to measure and photograph them – I began with Gewe [the chief]29… First we took him as he was, then by gentle persuasion we divested him of his regalia and it was evident that parting with his hat was the sorest trial. It was appearing to be quite hopeless to get a side view of his face till B[allantine] suggested that I should show him some pictures – so I produced a coloured plate of Torres Straits and others which so fascinated him that he became rigid immediately. I then measured his height, span and head & it was with great relief that he resumed his hat – I did not take all the measurements I should have liked as he became restive & all of a sudden he stalked off…30

Magic lantern shows had many agendas which are beyond the scope of this chapter.31 While local missionaries such as Lawes and Dauncey were not necessarily particularly imperially minded, magic lantern shows of preaching intent often finished with a slide of the Queen (Langmore 1989: 146). Indeed the image of the Queen was hung in offices, and thus was seen by the local population during the daily interchange between missionaries, colonial agents and so forth. If some of these images inculcated colonial, and indeed increasingly imperial agendas, very significant is a report of a lantern slide show which positioned the expedition members within these agendas. It was given by Ballantine and attended by many local people, by expedition members, and by the men who had come down from the Astrolabes and Owen Stanley Range. The latter were exposed at this point to what Taussig (1993: 212–35) has discussed as the technology of enchantment. The show was punctuated by songs and tunes on the phonograph demonstrated by Ray, and Haddon commented in his Diary ‘I think they did not take to the latter – but the pictures were thoroughly appreciated’. He went on:

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Surveying Culture

7:14 pm

Page 119

119

Gewe expressed wonder and admiration by a broad grin and glistening eyes and by making various sucking and clicking noises with his lips. He also, like the others, flicked his teeth with his thumb nail. Our glances often met and we nodded and smiled at each other once or twice with exuberant feeling when a slide especially pleased him, he caught hold of my hand. I got quite fond of the old chap – He has a fine distinguished face. He holds himself well and behaves like a gentleman. When a portrait of Queen Victoria was on the screen – the phonograph played ‘The Soldiers of the Queen’ and I made Gewe take off his hat. He did so cheerfully – as if he understood that the Queen should be respected and directly the picture changed I let him put it on again.32

Haddon saw this particular manifestation of the technology of enchantment as part of colonial agendas of pacification. He finished this account with a temporal inflection: ‘The raiders and the raided… sharing the same food and looking at the same lantern slides together and the villages they had actually raided.’33 This description is accompanied, in the Diary, by a little sketch map, showing how far Gewe and his companions had to walk home – temporal and spatial distance seem to be operating in the same register. Finally, this section looks at photography as a currency for collecting. It is quite clear to anyone with a comparative knowledge of photograph collections that the flow of images between scholars and other interested parties was both frequent and significant. At this period, before photographs entered what might be described as the private domain and became specific to individual fieldwork, they constituted a centralised resource in anthropology, moving visual information from the colonial periphery to metropolitan sites of interpretation. In this sense photographs might be seen as broadly ‘public’ within a disciplinary context. The development of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s collection exemplifies this process (Poignant 1992). Photographic collections in the universities and other major learned institutions and museums follow a similar pattern. They often comprise collections assembled by individuals through disciplinary networks – for example, E.B. Tylor’s collection at Oxford or Anatole von Hügel’s collection at Cambridge. For if colonial networks were central to the collecting of material culture, the role of the exchange of images within this was integral to maintaining these networks. Collecting photography and collecting with photographs were certainly integral to the currency of colonial collecting and material culture recording in New Guinea. Photographs were displayed, swapped, collected and made for collectors as active participants in the making of meanings around material culture from New Guinea. Most anthropologists with an interest in the region had photographs from Lindt’s

O'Hanlon/Welsh

120

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 120

Elizabeth Edwards

Picturesque New Guinea (1887) and from Lawes.34 The latter, for instance, were used as the basis for some of the engravings in W. Turner’s ‘Ethnology of Motu’ (1878), and therefore might be seen as entering early into the cultural currency of New Guinea. New Guinea photographs were also exhibited. For instance, photographs by H.O. Forbes, from his 1887–8 expedition to the Owen Stanley Range, were exhibited in the Anthropological Institute in 1889 (1889: 241). We know that Haddon saw these for he made sketches of some of them.35 Haddon had been integrally involved in this exchange system before the 1898 Expedition.36 There is a very interesting correspondence with Otto Finsch on the subject of Melanesian photographs which exemplifies not only the exchange of photographs in developing an ethnographic baseline for a region, but the declining evidential value of certain forms of anthropological photography in the late nineteenth century. In a letter dated 24 May 1893, quoted here at length because such extended comment on photographs is rare, Finsch wrote: I send you a rough list which of course only shows the location. But I can give to each Photo a full description on all particulars and these information [sic] balance the imperfections of many plates [i.e., data emerges from a combination of different representational forms]. As a whole the collection, never published, reference a lot of interesting types and would be very valuable to the knowledge of Races of men, and for Anthropological and Ethnological Science in general. But according to my experience Science does care very little on such material and its scientific value and so it becomes a useless thing and a source of constant harm to the poor creator regarding to the many costs, not to mention the amount of time and trouble.37

This does suggest the shifting truth values accorded to certain kinds of images, where ‘types’ which had dominated much anthropological visual discourse in the 1870s and 1880s were beginning to give way to the truth values of observation through the ‘no-style’ style of photography.38 Whatever the eventual outcome, it can be argued with some safety that Finsch’s photographs entered the general visual discourse by means of which Haddon was beginning to think through his cultural region of New Guinea in the mid-1890s. There are many other examples of photographic interchange. Seligmann was given photographs by A.C. English39 and others, to further his collection of data on dubu platforms.40 It would appear that it was these that he used as lantern slides to illustrate his paper on the houses and dubu of British New Guinea at the Dover meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September 1899. Ballantine arranged to have his stone clubs photographed for Haddon who had decided to write a typological catalogue of them.41 Ballantine showed local lantern slides to the expedition members after

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 121

Surveying Culture

121

dinner one evening (Haddon 1901: 206). It is often difficult to track this kind of exchange – it is seldom written about, and even when it is, there is seldom more than a chance remark (which is why the Finsch letter is so important). What is being argued is that the collecting of images and their trade routes are integral to the making of meaning of collections of material culture at this date: photographs not only documented in a primary sense, but reproduced those visual registers through which objects were understood. These images also entered an exchange system once the expedition returned home. For instance, Haddon sent Henry Balfour of the Pitt Rivers Museum a full set of the pottery-making series, apparently relatively soon after the return of the expedition. The prints were made on a very similar print-out-paper (probably a gaslight paper judging from the tonal range) to that of the contact prints in Wilkin’s own personal albums of the expedition photographs.42 These photographs were still active in making meanings within the Pitt Rivers Museum in the 1930s, when they were integrated into a typological series on ceramic technology43 and thus were absorbed into the museum’s own representational systems.44

Conclusion At one level the New Guinea photography shares a methodology with the photographs produced in the Torres Strait in its systematic conception, integrated nature and focussed subject matter. Yet it was also able to encompass both a response to the seductiveness of the surface and the desire for precise visual mapping to produce ‘facts about which there can be no question’. Wolfe has recently argued that, in a field context, photography collapsed the distinction between observation and collection (1999: 152). But photography cannot be reduced to merely analogical indexicality. While at one level it operated as a visual notebook, photography cannot be dismissed as unconsidered or incidental to the main concerns of observation and collecting. Nor can it be reduced to a set of undynamic observational relationships. This material cannot be characterised as an undifferentiated ‘colonial gaze’, but rather as a more nuanced and negotiated production of certain kinds of colonial knowledge where photography was active in a number of interlocking spaces between anthropologists, colonials and local people. Further, the act of photography, especially as it relates to material culture and collecting, demanded specific sets of fluid cross-cultural relationships. These permeated, through their visualisation, the perception of cultural specifics and the meaning of objects belonging to those specific

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 122

122

Elizabeth Edwards

cultural contexts. Photography established parameters and articulated expectations active in the making of meanings. It naturalised and normalised. It exoticised and authenticated. Its discursive tentacles reached way beyond the purely descriptive. The emphasis in this chapter has been on photography more than collecting per se because photography suffused almost all aspects of collecting by this period: it documented, authenticated, collected substitute objects, and provided a site of social interaction in many directions. It set an affective tone through which the representation of a culture and its material culture was mediated, in the field, in the museum, in publication and even in the sale room. The focus has been the British New Guinea material of Haddon and his colleagues on the 1898 Torres Strait Expedition, but this kind of analysis could be extended to many other endeavours of field collecting in Melanesia.

Notes I am extremely grateful to Michael O’Hanlon for encouraging me to engage seriously with this material, for his careful reading of this chapter and his interesting and constructive suggestions throughout the process. Stimulating discussions with my colleagues Chris Gosden, Anita Herle, Chantal Knowles, Christopher Morton, Jude Philp and participants in the ‘Hunting the Gatherers’ workshop in Oxford in May 1999 have also been invaluable. Finally, I am most grateful to the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Pitt Rivers Museum and Sub-Faculty of Anthropology, University of Oxford for the financial support which enabled my research. Abbreviations used for archival sources: HP Haddon Papers, Cambridge University Library CUMAAPC Torres Strait Expedition Photographs, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Photograph Collections 1. The photographs are in the collections of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. 2. The social ‘depth’ which was the concern of social anthropology by the interwar period had limited systematic use for photography and its privileging of surface. Unsurprisingly, it was in material culture and collecting that photography, with its authorising analogical discourse, based on the indexical mapping of physical objects, was longest lived as a significant and systematic practice. 3. David Ballantine, Treasurer and Collector of Customs, ‘proved himself a very good friend and benefactor to the expedition’ (Haddon 1901: xi). 4. Haddon Diary 1898: 156, HP. 5. ‘Salvage’ is used in the sense of rescue on the cusp of disappearance. However this contains within it the idea of recording for post-collection analysis in another place at another time. There is a slippage between levels of ‘disappearance’: disappearance from the fieldworker’s world as he returns to his study and disappearance from the face of the world. The ‘holding’ function of photography is integral to the medium – the stilling of time, the fragmentation of space and the projection of a past into the present. As many theorists have argued, photographs remind of the final disappearance, they are the death-mask of time.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Surveying Culture

7:14 pm

Page 123

123

6. All these are collated, with each other and with published sources on houses, in Haddon’s later notes (HP Envelope 2033) and also with Wilkin’s field notes (HP Envelope 1027). 7. CUMAAPC Pap.C.D. 96–103, 106, 108–18. 8. Haddon Diary 1898: 154, HP. 9. Wilkin was Expedition photographer, but overall Haddon appears to have had directorial control. However, in New Guinea, Wilkin seems to have had some photographic independence, and gone off to take photographs, sometimes for a couple of days, without Haddon’s directorial presence. Haddon was perhaps too busy collecting objects. It is not clear what photographic equipment went to New Guinea from Torres Strait. Haddon always talked about cameras in the plural. It would appear that the main Expedition quarter-plate camera, a Newman and Guardia Series B, went to New Guinea. There appear to have been other quarter-plate cameras in New Guinea; these may have been Expedition members’ personal cameras. I have not found any halfplate images from the New Guinea part of the Expedition. Further, a half-plate negative exists for the Queen’s Birthday dances on Mer, Torres Strait, which took place while Haddon and Wilkin were in New Guinea. The photographer on this occasion was Myers (I am grateful to Jude Philp, who found the plate, for drawing this to my attention). Therefore it would seem that this camera stayed in Torres Strait. 10. Haddon Diary 1898: 154, HP. 11. CUMAAPC Pap.C.D. 230–32. Photographed at the same time was a demonstration of bleeding by shooting a miniature bow and arrow (CUMAAPC Pap.C.D. 229). 12. Haddon Diary 1898: 139–40, HP. Gewe had been given some red turkey twill, a belt, a cotton shirt, a secondhand guards bandsman’s tunic and an old top hat by Mr Gor, Burns Philp manager in Port Moresby. 13. Haddon Diary 1898: 76, HP. 14. Ibid.: 99. 15. Ibid.: 113. 16. Ibid.: 116. 17. Ibid.: 100. 18. Ibid.: 155. The journal in question was concerned with ‘archaeological progress at home and abroad, couched in language sufficiently divested of technical jargon’. Presumably the many photographic illustrations were seen as direct knowledge, divested of the noise of jargon. Coverage was largely British, but non-European material was often presented as comparative within a broadly progressivist agenda. The cover design included an Iban shield, a vaguely Polynesian figure and some indeterminate spears. 19. Various lists, flyers and cuttings survive in Envelope 1022, HP. 20. Although my particular focus here is on photography, it should be noted that Haddon remarks repeatedly on the desire for trade among the local population. For example, ‘The Keapara natives buzzed around us like flies offering for sale curios of all kinds and sea-shells. One did not know which way to turn so persistent were they and the din was deafening’ (Dairy 1898: 114, HP). ‘The Motu people, especially the women, are such keen traders that they condescend to forge “curios”’. (Diary 1898: 156, HP). 21. Haddon Diary 1898: 154, HP. 22. CUMAAPC Pap.C.D.108. 23. Haddon Diary 1898: 94, HP. 24. Ibid: 99. 25. Quanchi (1993) enumerates some of the large quantities of photographic supplies entering New Guinea by the late 1890s. 26. ‘[H]e had on the altar rails a large coloured picture card of the Last Supper – in the upper corners were two small pictures – one being Elijah fed by ravens and below was

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 124

124

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

Elizabeth Edwards a picture of a Catholic Communion Service. From time to time the good father pointed with a short stick to details in the picture. Believing firmly as I do in visual instruction – I was particularly pleased with this innovation.’ (Haddon Diary 1898: 66, HP). B10/1024, HP. Haddon Diary 1898: 139, HP. Interestingly, Gewe is one of the few local people named in the documentation of the New Guinea photographs. In contrast, almost all the subjects of Torres Strait photographs are named, possibly owing to Rivers’s influence on Expedition practice in Torres Strait and the importance of naming within his developing genealogical method. Haddon Diary 1898: 140, HP. There have been relatively few studies of lantern slides and their agendas, perhaps the best to date being Landau, 1994. See also Thomas 1992. Haddon Diary 1898: 141, HP. Ibid.: 150. Haddon acknowledges Lawes who ‘has taken a large number of most excellent photographs illustrating Papuan ethnology and he generously deposited the negatives with Mr. H. King, Georgestreet [sic], Sydney N.S.Wales, in order that anthropologists might have the opportunity of purchasing authentic photographs’ (1894: 275). For Haddon’s annotated list of Lawes photographs, see Box 16/ Envelope 2012, HP. Envelope 3053, HP. Haddon was active in the collection and exchange of photographs throughout his life. In May 1936, to mark his eightieth birthday, he was presented with copies of his photographs, classified, mounted and housed in special cabinets. These he presented back to the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (cutting from the Observer, 24 May 1936. Box 10/Envelope1025, HP). Envelope 4, HP. Finsch’s original English. Haddon clearly acquired some of these photographs and used them in Torres Strait. Whether he did so in British New Guinea too is not clear, but it is certainly possible for Finsch lists about seventy images from southern New Guinea. Government Agent in Rigo district with whom Seligmann stayed. Royal Anthropological Institute, Photograph Collections Box 167. These appear to be a set of photographs which survive in Haddon’s collated notes on New Guinea stone clubs (HP 3034). Significantly, the photographs are numbered and written over, i.e., they had been worked with. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, MMA 90.1–4. Pitt Rivers Museum Photograph Collections C1.12.6a–g, 7a–g, 8a–k. The Expedition photographs were in circulation and active in making meanings around material culture from New Guinea, through lectures, publication and museum use, long before the objects themselves entered this currency. It was many years before the Expedition’s crates were unpacked because of lack of space in Cambridge.

Bibliography Anthropological Institute, Report in Journal of the Anthropological Institute vol. xviii (1889): 241. Clifford, J. ‘Paradise’, Visual Anthropology Review vol. 11 no. 1 (1995): 92–117. Edwards, E. ‘Performing science: still photography and the Torres Strait’ in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 anthropologi-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Surveying Culture

7:14 pm

Page 125

125

cal expedition eds A. Herle and S. Rouse. University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 106–35. Haddon, A.C. Decorative art of British New Guinea. Cunningham Memoirs vol. 10, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, 1894. ———. ‘Photography’ in Notes and queries on anthropology, 3rd edn. British Association for the Advancement of Science, London, 1899. ———. ‘Studies in the anthropogeography of British New Guinea’, Geographical Journal vol. 16 (1900): 265–91, 414–41. ———. Headhunters black white and brown. Methuen, London, 1901. ———. ‘Drawings by natives of British New Guinea’, Man vol. IV (1904): 33–6. ———. ‘A plea for the investigation of biological and anthropological distributions in Melanesia’, Geographical Journal vol. 28 (1906): 155–63. Kracauer, S. ‘Photography’ in Classic essays in photography ed. A. Trachenberg. Leete Island Books, New Haven, 1980. Landau, P. ‘The illumination of Christ in the Kalahari Desert’, Representations vol. 45 (1994): 26–40. Langmore, D. Missionary lives: Papua 1874–1914. Hawai’i University Press, Honolulu, 1989. Lindt, J.W. Picturesque New Guinea. Longmans Green & Co., London, 1887. Macintyre, M. and M. MacKenzie ‘Focal length as an analogue of cultural distance’ in Anthropology and photography 1860–1920, ed. E. Edwards. Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 1992, 158–64. Mast, G. ‘On framing’, Critical Inquiry vol. 11 no. 1 (1984): 82–109. Notes and queries on anthropology, 3rd edn. British Association for the Advancement of Science, London, 1899. Poignant, R. ‘Surveying the field of view’ in Anthropology and photography 1860–1920, ed. E. Edwards. Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 1992, 42–73. Porter, G. ‘The economy of truth: photography in museums’, Ten-8 vol. 34 (1989): 20–33. Portman, M.V. ‘Photography for the anthropologist’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute vol. 15 (1896): 75–87. Quanchi, M. ‘Representation and photography on the Papuan coast 1880–1930’, unpublished paper presented at the Pacific Arts Association, Adelaide, April 1993. Read, C.H. Preface to Notes and queries on anthropology, 3rd edn. British Association for the Advancement of Science, London, 1899. Sanjek, R. ‘The ethnographic present’, Man vol. 26 (1991): 609–28. Taussig, M. Mimesis and alterity: a particular history of the senses. Routledge, New York, 1993. Thomas, N. ‘Colonial conversations: difference, hierarchy and history in early twentieth century evangelical propaganda’, Comparative Studies in Sociology and History vol. 34 (1992): 366–89. Thurn, E. im, ‘Anthropological uses of the camera’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute vol. 12 (1893): 184–203. Turner, W. ‘The ethnology of Motu’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute vol. vii (1878): 470–81.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

126

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 126

Elizabeth Edwards

Webb, V.-L. ‘Missionary photographers in the Pacific’, History of Photography vol. 21 no.1 (1997): 12–22. Wolfe, P. Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology. Cassell, London, 1999. Young, M. Malinowski’s Kiriwina: fieldwork photography 1915–1918. University Press, Chicago, 1998.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 127

Chapter 6

COLLECTING PYGMIES: The ‘Tapiro’ and the British Ornithologists’ Union Expedition to Dutch New Guinea, 1910–1911

Chris Ballard

Colonial Technologies of Knowledge and the ‘Pygmy Question’ It might seem rather obvious to remind the reader, as Johannes Fabian has done, that objects such as artefacts are classically ‘good to label, classify, judge, attribute to, serve as evidence, in short to carry out all those operations by virtue of which information becomes knowledge’ (1998: 84). It is perhaps necessary, however, to reaffirm the extent to which the collection of artefacts has operated historically within the broader contexts supplied by the meta-narratives of colonial exploration and the grand project of racial typification: as one among a battery of technologies of knowledge that were deployed as a means of knowing race and culture, of identifying and hierarchically ordering suites of corresponding mental, moral and physical characteristics (Coombes 1994: 141; Schildkrout and Keim 1998). The colonial fantasy of a perfectly mapped cultural topography sought, in material culture as it had in physiognomy (Pinney 1990), an exact grid from which the desired characteristics of a colonised people might be read. Leo Frobenius could thus propose a link between the use by African forest-dwellers of bows and their ‘cagey’ personalities, and contrast this with the ‘open aggressiveness’ of spear-wielding communities of the savannah (Fabian 1998: 96).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

128

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 128

Chris Ballard

The development of this capacity to appraise from a distance the material attributes of cultural others, and then confidently to link these material attributes to non-material characteristics such as intelligence, morality, or the capacity for labour, is found in the promiscuous interplay between popular travelogues, fiction and scientific writing. A professionalising anthropology has insisted upon distancing itself from these other genres of writing with which it previously enjoyed a correspondence, but there were far fewer degrees of separation evident at the turn of the century when the theories of race and material culture which will be considered here were in circulation. Accounts of the exploration of Africa during the Victorian era were received with enormous interest among an enlarged reading public (Brantlinger 1986: 195), generating narrative tropes that were further developed through fiction and rendered respectable in academic publications. These same tropes then supplied models that structured the course of subsequent exploration and artefact collection (Schildkrout and Keim 1998: 7). We might therefore question the extent to which collections were permitted to challenge these powerfully entrenched discursive contexts, which effectively encompassed the process of collection and preempted analysis (Bal 1994). Exploration was as much an enactment of ceremonies of colonial power and knowledge as an engagement with difference, and illustration, rather than illumination, was the unspoken goal of much collection. Though ethnography and anthropology were ostensibly directed towards filling gaps in the cultural topography of colonial knowledge, they approached the task with a form of knowledge that always foreshadowed and anticipated its object (Schildkrout and Keim 1998: 4; Fabian 1998: 80). In a passage that post-dates the events discussed in this chapter, but serves to demonstrate the potency and durability of some of the central themes of the exploration genre, Prince William of Sweden (1923:1) conjures up the desired goal of the 1921 Swedish Zoological Expedition to Central Africa: The volcanic tract of country north of Lake Kivu, the heart of Africa, has for long been comparatively unknown. Thence strange rumours have in the past reached the ears of white men. There were said to be great lakes and towering mountains reaching up into the clouds, which vomited forth fire up to the very sky. Giants and pygmies, ape-men, and men-apes. Gold, copper, and boiling springs.

The contrasts presented between the miniature and the gigantic, the bestial men-apes and the gentleman explorer, the life-threatening springs and volcanoes and the promise of wealth, are all staples of the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Collecting Pygmies

7:14 pm

Page 129

129

Western imaginary that were in circulation well prior to the European exploration of Central Africa (Mason 1998). A single member of the cast of this imaginary – the Pygmies1 – can be used to illustrate how their ‘cultural character’ was conceived and embellished by explorers and anthropologists, first in Africa and then in New Guinea. Much of the ethnographic imaginary deployed by British and Australian explorers and colonial officials in New Guinea drew its inspiration more or less directly from the classic narratives and the popular imagery of African exploration. The role of the Royal Geographical Society of London in the exploration of Africa was specifically invoked by the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia as the model for its own approach to interior New Guinea (Glen 2000). The emergence of the notion of a ‘pan-Pygmy’ culture, which extended over the Old World before the spread of taller human races, permitted the cultural character of African Pygmies to be exported wholesale to New Guinea and other areas where unexplored interiors could be expected to reproduce the conditions that had allowed the survival of Pygmies in Central Africa. The brief review below of the history of Pygmy mythology in the West is followed by a summary of the Pygmy ‘character profile’ contained in African travel writing from the 1870s to the 1890s, the period immediately preceding the discovery of ‘Pygmies’ in New Guinea. In 1910 the British Ornithologists’ Union Expedition to Dutch New Guinea provided science with the first, long-anticipated evidence for Pygmies in New Guinea. How the corpus of knowledge gathered under the rubric of the ‘Pygmy Question’ assisted in the identification of these New Guinea communities as Pygmies, and how the material and bodily markers of this new status were collected, are the principal concerns of this chapter. Perversely, in the context of a book on the collection of artefacts, a critical element of Pygmy mythology was its insistence on a poverty of material production to match their presumed primordial status. Collectors focused instead on other means of communicating the racial character of Pygmies, chief among which was the compilation of anthropometric measurements, supplemented and authenticated by photography. Where the collection of material culture functioned as an auxiliary to the establishment of race, the knowledge of Pygmies consisted principally of the ability to document, by as many means as possible, their diminutive stature and their proximity to an imagined early human ancestry. The chapter concludes by considering the manner in which the field reports of these New Guinea Pygmies were analysed and fashioned, by metropolitan academics such as Alfred Cort Haddon, in accordance with the general precepts of the ‘Pygmy Question’.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 130

130

Chris Ballard

Pygmy Mythology There are no miniatures in nature; the miniature is a cultural product, the product of an eye performing certain operations, manipulating, and attending in certain ways to, the physical world. (Stewart 1993: 55)

Susan Stewart’s remarkable treatise on the role of exaggeration in the Western imagination shows how the miniature and the gigantic figure in contrasting narratives of interiority and exteriority, respectively. The miniature, evoking a nostalgia for childhood and summoned through minute writing, tableaux, dolls’ houses and toy worlds, furnishes us with a ‘still context of infinite detail’ (1993: 47), a perfect interior world capable of being entirely possessed and manipulated. Although this sense of a ‘contained world’ offers the possibility of a complete knowledge, a total collection, it retains a strangeness by virtue of the impossibility of our inhabiting it in real life; a strangeness that renders the miniature a particularly apt figure for the presentation of ‘the lower classes, peasant life, or the cultural other within a timeless and uncontaminable miniature form’ (1993: 66). The resilience of the figure of the Pygmy in Western mythology draws extensively upon the power of this narrative of the miniature, which combines the qualities of darkness, interiority and primordiality. Pygmy mythology in the West has its origins in classical Greek and medieval European legend.2 Subsequent encounters with short peoples, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards, have failed to release Pygmies from this prison-house of myth. Earlier myths have been exposed only to be supplanted by others, and Tomas’s (1993: 68) observation on the ‘continued dominance of a mythological frame of reference’ in eighteenth-century descriptions of Andaman Islanders might be said to extend unbroken into the present. The modern form of the myth was famously introduced by the German botanist, Georg Schweinfurth, who consciously invoked the Homeric term, ‘Pygmy’, in reference to a group of small men whom he observed in 1870 while they gathered to pay tribute to a Bantu king: ‘finally, there before my eyes was the living incarnation of a myth which had lasted for thousands of years’ (cited in Bahuchet 1993: 153, my translation). From the 1870s the principal figures in the European exploration and division of Central Africa all faithfully reported their often fleeting encounters with Pygmies. What is striking, reading these accounts in tandem, is the extent of internal reference between one text and another, and the speed with which casual observations assumed the status of academic fact. During the period of this late nineteenth-century ‘rush’ on Pygmies, there was a seamless intertextual progression

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Collecting Pygmies

7:14 pm

Page 131

131

from fictional account to travel narrative and thence to academic authority, at a time, of course, when scholars relied heavily on information supplied by naturalist collectors and other travellers. What is particularly striking in reading these accounts now is the remarkable self-assurance of pronouncements on every aspect of Pygmy life; a confidence common to much colonial writing on racial types (Thomas 1994: 77, 87), but also expressive of the character of the miniature as a universe that is accessible in its entirety to the observer. A fairly stable set of diagnostic features for Pygmies emerged, principal among which was stature – a feature that came to stand for all the other characteristics ascribed to Pygmies: ‘I now had a complete view of my visitors, and what struck me first of all was naturally the shortness of their stature’ (Lloyd 1909: 310, my emphasis). Fabian’s notion of ‘visualism’, in which ‘the ability to visualise a culture or society almost becomes synonymous for understanding it’ (cited in Mirzoeff 1998: 168), finds a striking resonance in accounts of Pygmies. The simple depiction of small stature was sufficient for the viewer to deduce thereby a number of other physical and non-material characteristics of the camera’s subject. The taxidermist and amateur ethnographer Herbert Lang could thus assume that his photographs of Mbuti Pygmies would reveal to educated viewers the visual signs of racial difference (Mirzoeff 1998: 186). The arbitrary manner in which Pygmies were identified was evident in the debate during the 1890s about the definition of Pygmy stature, in which acceptable heights ranged from a rather generous 5 feet 4 inches (approximately 160 cm) to less than 4 feet (approximately 120 cm). The definition finally adopted was the metric ‘bar’ for adult males of 150 cm (4 feet 11 inches), proposed by Schmidt in 1905 (Cavalli-Sforza [ed.] 1986: 17). Stature aside, other physical markers of Pygmy status included hair (‘woolly’ and black ‘but often with a reddish tinge’); head shape (usually, but not exclusively, round and broad or brachycephalic); skin colour (black or dark, but often lighter than in surrounding non-Pygmy tribes); the form of the upper lip between the nose and mouth (long, deep and convex in shape), and that of the nose (short to medium, often sunken or flat and broad at the root).3 Although academic anthropologists were constantly engaged in legislating, with increasing precision, the definitions of these physical attributes, the proliferation of scientific terms for Pygmy features such as hair (‘ulotrichous’), head shape (‘meso- to low brachycephalic’) or skin colour (‘yellowish-brown’), too often masked the blatant subjectivity of assessments both in the field and in subsequent analysis. As Bahuchet (1993: 165) argues, the vagueness of travel accounts on most matters other than stature legitimated generalisations about all else that pertained to Pygmy life.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

132

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 132

Chris Ballard

A suite of other non-physical features that were held to be diagnostic of Pygmy status in the nineteenth-century travel narratives included their surrounding environment, language, material culture and mode of subsistence. Pygmies were intimately linked with the forested interior of continents and large islands, or with small, remote islands, and the contrast was repeatedly drawn between their diminutive size and the gigantism of their environment, with its huge trees and giant fauna. The archetypal Pygmy environment was the Great Central African Forest, and ‘the dark gloom of the primeval forest’ (Lloyd 1909: 297) provided a crucial setting for the Pygmy interior. Stanley went so far as to attribute the physically ‘degenerate’ form of the Pygmy to the ‘complete absence of solar light’ in the depths of the forest heart (cited in Bahuchet 1993: 166). Others identified the unbroken forest cover as the source of the lightness of Pygmy skin relative to that of surrounding African tribes. There was frequent comment on the apparent loss of an original Pygmy language, through the adoption of the languages of their Bantu neighbours (Bahuchet 1993: 173); or, alternatively, a curious lack of their own language altogether: ‘No doubt there are latent words and symbols in their utterances’ (Burrows 1898: 198–9). Pygmy material culture, and indeed Pygmy life in general, was characterised by absences, by the lack of features held to be representative of other African societies (Bahuchet 1993: 170). Key Pygmy traits thus included an indifference to clothing and a lack of evidence for body-piercing, tattooing or scarification. An absence of fire-making skills was claimed for some Pygmies, but for many others a key element of the toolkit was the primordial fire-making apparatus of a split stick and cane. In addition to these diacritical markers of Pygmy identity, three broad tropes all commonly employed to describe colonial subjects more generally (Thomas 1994: 101, 132) – the primordial, the infantile and the bestial – were seen as somehow excessively present in the Pygmy. In keeping with their preference for the primeval forest, Pygmies were held to be a primordial race: ‘Officially stated to be the missing link between the ape and the man’, as the Birmingham Daily Mail claimed for a group of Pygmies displayed in England between 1905 and 1907 (Green 1995). The observation that the stature of adult Pygmy men approximated that of a twelve-year-old European boy was frequently combined with notions of their poor mental development, to suggest that Pygmies were arrested at an infantile stage (Bahuchet 1993: 170). Pygmy bows and arrows were said to ‘have the appearance of harmless toys that children in Europe would disdain as playthings’ (Hinde 1897: 83–4). Finally, the identification of Pygmies as relics of an earliest form of humanity found them finely balanced in

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 133

Collecting Pygmies

133

many accounts between human and animal, both in terms of their physical form and through claims for the absence in Pygmy communities of the basic structures of human sociality. ‘Pigmies [sic] have apparently no ties of family affection, such as those of mother to son, or sister to brother, and seem to be wanting in all social qualities’ (Burrows 1898: 182). A suite of Pygmy characteristics was thus generated during the late Victorian exploration of Central Africa, in which material culture, if only by virtue of a series of absences, played a minor but necessary role.

‘Negritos’ and Interior New Guinea One of the central debates among anthropologists during the second half of the nineteenth century was the opposition between theories of evolution and those favouring degeneration to account for the variation among human races (Bowler 1992). Evolutionists generally regarded Pygmies as a distinct and very early branch of the human tree that preserved many of the features of an original stage of human development, dispersed prior to the evolution of taller human races in Europe or Africa. Degenerationists preferred to view Pygmies as the consequence of unfavourable environments operating on a single, divinely created human form. The pivotal position occupied by Pygmies in the debates between evolutionists and degenerationists rendered the question of their presence beyond Africa a matter of considerable significance. Observations on ‘dwarfish races’ had been received from colonial possessions other than those in Africa. Detailed reports on the Andaman Islanders, or ‘Mincopies’, had been available since at least 1771 (Tomas 1993), and closer studies of their physique and language during the 1850s and 1860s had in fact preceded the ‘rediscovery’ of African Pygmies. However, the African accounts supplied a comparative framework from which metropolitan scholars such as Hamy and de Quatrefages were able to generate the first theories of Pygmies as a global race. Further discoveries of small peoples, such as the Aeta of Luzon, the Semang of Malacca, the Sakai or Senoi of Perak, and the Australian Tasmanians were deemed sufficient grounds for the assumption of a universal Pygmy race. The term ‘Negrillo’ or ‘little Negro’ was commonly used to refer to all of these ‘dwarfish races’ until 1887, when Armand de Quatrefages distinguished the branch ‘Negrito’ to embrace the Pygmy groups to Africa’s east, contrasting the short Negritos with the tall ‘Oceanic Negroes’ or Papuans (1895 [1887]). In New Guinea, the dolicocephalic, or long- and narrow-headed Papuans could be separated from the brachycephalic, or broad-headed Negrito-Papuans on the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

134

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 134

Chris Ballard

basis of head shape. In a nice illustration of the power of visualism, de Quatrefages noted approvingly that the Italian anthropologist Mantegazza had ‘been converted to the duality of the races merely by the sight of the craniological collection brought back by D’Albertis’ (1895 [1887]: 63). Any confusion between the two races, de Quatrefages felt, would surely be resolved through closer consideration of their ‘social state, customs, beliefs, and industries’ (1895 [1887]: 62). Well prior to Schweinfurth’s African encounter with Pygmies, in a reference not apparently known to Bahuchet and other historians of the ‘Pygmy Question’, George Windsor Earl had noted the presence in New Guinea of tribes ‘whose proportions are so small as almost to entitle them to the appellation of pygmies’ (1853: 4). Earl cites no sources for this observation, but another contemporary account of ‘Negrillo’ slaves brought to Singapore from New Guinea (Pickering 1851: 178) suggests that the notion of small peoples in the interior of New Guinea was well established by the 1850s. From the 1870s, several of the early naturalist explorers of New Guinea – Beccari, Meyer and D’Albertis among them – had noted the existence of small individuals in New Guinea (de Quatrefages 1895 [1887]: 28). A handful of skulls, collected on maritime voyages passing through New Guinea and duly submitted to anthropometric analysis, had been shown to be brachycephalic or broad-headed, and their overall size was held to indicate the stature of a Pygmy (Haddon 1912a: 313). On this all too slender evidence hung a debate about the relationship between Papuans and Negritos. As early as 1878, Francis Allen had identified at least two strains of thought: the first, that Negritos in New Guinea represented ‘a variety of the Papuans, debased and stunted by hard usage’; and the second that the presumed ‘superiority of the Papuans [was] due to an admixture of Malay blood’ (1879: 39). A simple hierarchy suggested itself to Allen, in which the three races, the Negritos, the ‘black’ Papuans, and the ‘brown’ Malay Polynesians, represented successive waves of settlement: ‘the position of the black race in the interior of the islands and its constant persecution by the brown race prove, I think, very clearly its superior antiquity. Possibly, also, the Negrittos [sic] may have preceded the Papuans themselves in their islands’ (1879: 40). By 1888, leading ethnologists such as William Flower had already passed their verdict on the presence of Pygmies in New Guinea: ‘That [the Negrito race] has contributed considerably to form the population of New Guinea is unquestionable’ (cited in Haddon 1912a: 307). If de Quatrefages and Hamy dominated debates about the status of African Pygmies, or Negrillos, A.B. Meyer was probably the leading expert of the period on Negritos. His 1893 work on the Negritos of the Philippines contained a chapter on Negritos elsewhere, including New Guinea. Meyer took issue with the followers of de Quatrefages and

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Collecting Pygmies

7:14 pm

Page 135

135

Hamy, and insisted that there was no compelling evidence for a division between Negritos and Papuans in New Guinea: ‘a Negritic race side by side with the Papuan race nobody has been able to discover just because it does not exist, and it does not exist because the Papuan race, in spite of its variability, is on the one hand a uniform race, and on the other as good as identical with the Negritos’ (1899: 85). According to Meyer, the exceptional physical diversity evident in New Guinea owed less to the influx of distinct races than it did to habitat, food supply and other environmental factors (1899: 80). Adamant that any further speculation should await studies of a sophistication akin to that of the Sarasins on the Weddas, which for the Papuans would be ‘work for generations’, Meyer was scathing in his assessment of the ‘NegritoPapuan’ race proposed by de Quatrefages and Hamy on the basis of ‘a few brachycephalic, partly artificially deformed skulls, with, in addition, partly fictitious localities’ (1899: 82). The field methods and the results of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait played an important role in breaking down Meyer’s resistance to the possibility of a ‘Negrito element’ in New Guinea. Acknowledging that this was precisely the sort of field study for which he had been calling, and impressed by Sidney Ray’s identification of a Papuan linguistic family (Urry 1998: 203), by 1908 Meyer had declared that he was now inclined to the view that Papuans were composed of a mixture of Malay and Negrito elements: ‘I am eagerly looking forward to the exploration of the interior of that great island [New Guinea], when here too the Negrito element may perhaps be brought to light in its old and more constant form as still existing in the Philippines, Andamans, and Malakka’ (cited in Nature 1910). The discovery of Negritos or Pygmies in the forested highland interior of New Guinea was thus keenly anticipated, and the characteristics of these imagined communities mapped in detail and commonly understood well in advance of the actual encounter.

The British Ornithologists’ Union Expedition to Dutch New Guinea, 1910–1911 In December 1908, the year that Meyer ‘turned’ and predicted a Pygmy interior for New Guinea, the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) decided to commit resources to ‘some great zoological exploration’ to commemorate the occasion of its jubilee celebrations (Ogilvie-Grant 1916: i). Walter Goodfellow and W.R. Ogilvie-Grant had been planning a small zoological expedition to the Snow Mountains of Dutch New Guinea since 1907, and took advantage of the BOU jubilee to propose the adoption of this particular project. A BOU

O'Hanlon/Welsh

136

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 136

Chris Ballard

committee approved their proposal and identified the members of a team of naturalists, to be joined by two surveyors from the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). The team included Goodfellow, the leader, and the taxidermist and trapper Wilfred Stalker, both of whom had previous experience in New Guinea; the collector Guy Shortridge; Alexander (A.F.R.) Wollaston, a medical doctor and keen climber; and the RGS surveyors, Captain C.G. Rawling, a veteran of the Younghusband Expedition to Tibet, and Eric Marshall, who had been a member of Shackleton’s South Pole Expedition. The last member, the field naturalist Claude Grant, joined the expedition at a later stage after working in South America and South Africa. The focus here is on Wollaston, partly because he wrote more about the expedition than did any other member and also because he led a second, smaller expedition to the same region in 1912 (Wollaston 1916; 1933). A Cambridge-educated surgeon, and a keen ornithologist, Wollaston had previously travelled in German New Guinea and on the British Museum’s Ruwenzori Expedition (1905–6), during which he had endured the ‘damp and gloom’ of the Congo forest, meeting Pygmies (‘jolly little people’) but no okapis (1933: 92). Almost certainly familiar with the key texts of Central African exploration, Wollaston was himself a contributor to the genre, as the author of From Ruwenzori to the Congo (1908). Significantly for the current argument, Wollaston was the expedition’s link to academic knowledge of Pygmies, and would later invite A.C. Haddon, then Reader in Ethnology at Cambridge, to contribute an appendix on the ‘Pygmy Question’ to his account of the expedition (Haddon 1912a). The chief aim of the expedition was the zoological exploration of the Snow Mountains, ‘an unexplored and greatly desired goal for the traveller’. Ogilvie-Grant, as the expedition’s London-based secretary, wrote a series of eleven articles for the magazine Country Life in which he chronicled the progress of the expedition; a subscription drive was launched and readers were entreated to assist in this ‘great scientific exploration’. The bulk of the funding for the BOU expedition came from the British Government (£4,000), the RGS (£750), and individual subscribers such as members of the Rothschild family: a total of £9,293.12s.11d. was raised (Ogilvie-Grant 1916: v). With all the skill of a modern weekly editor, Ogilvie-Grant offered potential subscribers the chance of a better return in terms of collections than might be expected from financing polar exploration. In addition, he mooted the possibility of trapping the first ‘gazeka’, a gigantic animal first reported by Monckton to exist in the highland interior of British New Guinea, or a specimen of the (inevitably) ‘enormous’ black and white striped animal recently sighted by Dutch explorers at high altitude in the Central Range (Ogilvie-Grant 1910/11: 547).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Collecting Pygmies

7:14 pm

Page 137

137

Further whetting the appetite of his readership, Ogilvie-Grant’s second article for Country Life listed the peculiar practices of native tribes among the splendours of New Guinea’s fauna. There is no indication, however, that the study of local communities or the collection of artefacts was intended as anything more than an incidental bonus to the main collection of zoological specimens. At least three of the members (Wollaston, Rawling and Grant) carried cameras, and Marshall was equipped with a ‘cinematograph camera’, but none of them had any training in the fledgling discipline of anthropology. Dutch exploration of their New Guinea possession had been limited essentially to a few coastal depots until the launch of a series of military expeditions between 1904 and 1915, which mapped the entire coastline for the first time and systematically explored most of the major rivers (Verslag 1920; Ploeg 1995). The ultimate prize in this process of exploration was the first ascent of the snow-capped peaks of the Central Range, first viewed from the sea in 1623 by Jan Carstensz. The British team, arriving in Batavia (now Jakarta), showed its hand too early in declaring the snows to be one of their objectives. The Dutch authorities insisted that they delay their landing in New Guinea until New Year’s Day of 1910, to allow a Dutch team under Lorentz sufficient time to reach the snow-covered Mt Wilhelmina, to the east of the Carstensz Mountains (Wollaston 1933: 103). The British were then reassigned to a less promising river route, the Mimika River, while the Dutch hastily despatched another military team to the Otakwa or Utakwa River, which initial reconnaissance had identified as providing the best access to the Carstensz Mountains. The BOU expedition was a spectacular failure in almost every respect. It lost its most experienced member, Wilfred Stalker, during the first week when he drowned on a night-time walk and, thereafter, things got steadily worse. Over a fifteen-month period, from January 1910 until March 1911, the expedition suffered an astonishing 12 percent mortality rate, with 83 percent of its more than 400 members being invalided out of New Guinea (Wollaston 1916: 22). Hampered by the difficult terrain, poor weather and logistical problems with their carriers, it took the expedition three months to travel less than forty kilometres from its first camp at Wakatimi, across the lowland plains, to the foothills of the Central Range. Ascending the Mimika River, the expedition established a base-camp at Parimau. From here, numerous attempts were made to find a means of entry to the mountain range above, following tributaries of the Mimika and Kapare Rivers, but they found themselves hemmed in by impassable gorges, and forced each time into ignominious retreat to what Rawling, in exasperation at their circumstances, referred to as that ‘hideous, dingy plain’ (1911: 249).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 138

138

Chris Ballard

Map 4: BOU expedition to Dutch New Guinea, 1910–1911

The tedium of the expedition’s lengthy delays on the lowland plain resulted not in a closer relationship with the ‘Mimika Papuans’ of the local Kamoro-speaking settlements at Wakatimi and Parimau, but in a distinct and evidently mutual antipathy. Almost as a means of passing time, the expedition amassed a large and very thorough collection of Kamoro artefacts, ranging from elaborately carved boards and ceremonial shields through to the mundane tools, clothing and personal ornaments of everyday life (Haddon and Layard 1916). Under its own stringent terms for success, however, the expedition’s need for novel discoveries was not met here, as Kamoro art had been collected periodically since at least 1828 (Kooijman 1984). The expedition’s extensive botanical and zoological collection, described in two limited edition volumes published in 1916, similarly failed to excite: the mammals were ‘few and inconspicuous’, the Birds of Paradise were all previously known, and the flowers, insects and butterflies were ‘neither so numerous nor so brightly coloured as might be expected’; and there was no ‘gazeka’ (Wollaston 1916: 21).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 139

Collecting Pygmies

139

The ‘Tapiro Pygmies’ The signal achievement of the expedition, in the eyes of its own members, was the ‘discovery’ of a community of Pygmies living in the mountain foothills. On 3 March 1910, while returning down the Kapare River after another failed attempt to establish a camp further upstream, Rawling’s Kamoro carriers broke into a run on the track of what were obviously human footprints: from the forest there emerged a confused mass of savages, in the centre of which, held firmly by the arms and driven forward by sundry proddings behind, were two small naked men differing in appearance from any we had hitherto seen. … The capture was of such absorbing interest that we decided to postpone any further advance till the next day, and returning to camp were enabled to examine our prisoners more closely… their small size was very noticeable. (Rawling 1913: 109–10)

The expedition quickly pronounced them to be a ‘hitherto unknown race of pygmies’ (Rawling 1913: 112), identified by the Kamoro of Parimau as ‘Tapiro’ people, and a search was initiated to locate their settlement. Two more men were captured several days later and Rawling immediately did what he evidently felt was required of him: ‘Despite their protests, I measured them then and there as well as was possible, and found them to be four feet five inches and four feet six inches respectively’ (Rawling 1913: 115). In best military fashion, Captain Rawling planned his ‘attack’ on a garden clearing visible in the hills above. Rawling and Wollaston finally reached the clearing on 12 March, meeting eight men, ‘truculent, unsociable souls, retreating on any attempt to draw near, and holding their bows and arrows ready for instant use’ (Rawling 1913: 119). Wollaston recorded his first impressions of the Tapiro: ‘Excepting one rather masterful little man, who had no fear of us, they were too shy to approach us closely and remained about ten yards distant, but even so it was plainly evident from their small stature alone, that they were of a different race from the people of the low country’ (1912: 161). There followed a brief exchange, at arm’s length, of arrows for beads (‘an article of commerce they were quite unable to resist’), evidently facilitated by Peau, one of the first two men captured. While this trade was in progress, Rawling, his surveyor’s plane table at the ready, hastily mapped the clearing. It proved to be a large garden, of about 120 acres in area, both more extensive and more intensively planted than anything seen in the lowlands. The Tapiro soon made it clear, however, that the visit was unwelcome, and the expedition members retreated, ‘followed, so long as we remained in sight, by the scowls of the excited and jabbering pygmies’ (Rawling 1913: 121).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

140

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 140

Chris Ballard

Despite sorties launched with directions to ‘find fresh pygmies’ (Rawling, in Ogilvie-Grant 1910/11: 81), eight months elapsed before contact was made again in early November 1910. Claude Grant, newly drafted to the expedition to replace the invalid Goodfellow, had met small groups of two to three Tapiro men visiting Parimau and the expedition’s Kapare camp to trade and, following them, stumbled on the trail that led to their settlement, at an altitude of about 1,800 feet (approximately 550 metres). Rawling, now leading the expedition, resolved to camp with Grant and Marshall for two nights close by the settlement. From 8 to 10 November 1910, the three expedition members set about documenting the Tapiro, measuring and taking photographs of their bodies, and trading for those artefacts that the Tapiro were willing to relinquish. As in many of the African accounts of Pygmies, the encounter between the BOU and the Tapiro was a fleeting one, lending itself to a ‘knowledge’ of the Tapiro that owed as much to Pygmy mythology as it did to the process of documentation at the Tapiro settlement. While the expedition brought with it a sophisticated panoply of documentary technologies, and a complex theory of racial types in which the Tapiro could be readily located, the Tapiro themselves largely managed the practice of the encounter. The expedition was forced to observe a regular ritual of announcing its presence when approaching, thus allowing women and children to evacuate the settlement and sufficient men to gather. The older Tapiro men formed what Rawling called the ‘obstructionist party’, ensuring that the women were maintained at a distance from the expedition and often refusing either to be measured or to part with any of their possessions: ‘they made it apparent that they did not want us or our trade, and that they considered our visit an intrusion’ (Marshall, in PIM 1956: 93). One older man, later identified by Wollaston as ‘unquestionably the headman of the place’, was singled out as the principal source of objections: ‘Finally we had a personal interview with him, and held out three bright axes, which made his one eye glisten with greed, but he still remained obdurate’ (Wollaston 1912: 206). Though the expedition met more than forty Tapiro men, they were never permitted to meet or even to see the Tapiro women, to their great chagrin: ‘in spite of the fact that the heaviest bribes were offered, never once did we get a sight of a woman’ (Rawling 1913: 257). On one occasion, a possible sighting was made of these elusive women: ‘Entering the clearing I caught a fleeting glimpse of one or two naked forms disappearing into the jungle, but whether men or women it is impossible to say. A good deal of excitement prevailed’ (Marshall, in PIM 1956: 95). On another occasion, tantalisingly, ‘we could hear the high treble voices of the women on the clearing opposite, although it was

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Collecting Pygmies

7:14 pm

Page 141

141

impossible to catch a glimpse of them’ (Marshall, in PIM 1956: 95). The terms of this account – the excited anticipation, the fleeting glimpses – match closely those of the great naturalist narratives of Wallace and D’Albertis in their quest for rare Birds of Paradise (Glen 2000). The disappointment of the BOU expedition was founded not so much on prurience as on the need for a set of measurements to match those of the Tapiro men: ‘As it was, we were forced to leave without seeing [the women and children], and… it may be many years before their photos and measurements can be added to our meagre knowledge of these primitive people’ (Marshall, in PIM 1956:95). The process of collecting knowledge of the Tapiro was greatly hampered by the lack of any means of verbal communication: ‘I perforce had to speak in English and in the language of signs’ (Rawling 1913: 112). The term ‘Tapiro’ and the name of their settlement, ‘Wamberimi’, were both supplied by the Kamoro.4 Tapiro language was clearly distinct from Kamoro, although a few Tapiro could understand some Kamoro.5 There was thus obviously some contact between the Papuan Kamoro and the Tapiro, evident in the trade of Tapiro tobacco for Kamoro dogs and shells, but also a degree of distrust; Wollaston (1912: 206) wondered if the seclusion of the Tapiro women was not related to the presence of Kamoro carriers. Peau, one of the Tapiro men captured in the lowlands in March, had remained at Parimau for some days thereafter, apparently working and carrying wood for the Kamoro (Rawling 1913: 111). Once in the hills, he emerged as a crucial go-between, guiding the expedition to Wamberimi, and acting as an advocate for their brief stay (Rawling 1913: 250). The expedition pitched its tents on one of the terraces on which the fourteen houses of Wamberimi were located. Netbags were opened for Rawling and Marshall to inspect their contents, and the houses were entered, but most of the trade was conducted in the clearing at the centre of the settlement. Initially Grant had experienced some difficulty in using any of the expedition’s trade goods to obtain artefacts, but by the time that the larger group visited Wamberimi a rough scale of equivalence had been established. In descending order of value, the expedition offered axes and knives, blue-white beads, strips of red cloth and store tobacco. In return, the Tapiro were prepared to offer most of their possessions with the exception of the most finely carved arrows, the boars’ tusks, and a single, tiny iron axe-blade. As later expeditions to the New Guinea Highlands would discover, the one item of trade that might have secured a glimpse of the Tapiro women was cowrie-shell, and the Tapiro for their part must have been equally disappointed at the reluctance of the expedition to reveal the true form of its wealth. Inducements were offered to the Tapiro for almost every activity, with cloth, tobacco and beads given in reward to the reluctant subjects

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 142

142

Chris Ballard

of measurement and photography: ‘Every man who could be persuaded to step forth was thoroughly measured with the standard and with the craniometer, an operation so appalling that large strips of cloth had to be offered before they could be tempted to surrender their bodies into the hands of the Inquisitors (Rawling 1913: 258); ‘Bribery again had to be resorted to in order to induce the men to stand for the camera and manoeuvre for the cinematograph… But it was an easy method of earning beads, and they had to part with nothing!… All the while a white man grinds the handle of a big box and seems unnecessarily gratified at the result…’ (Marshall, in PIM 1956:95). When the expedition came to leave, at the end of two days of frenzied documentation and trading, Rawling (1913: 263) concluded that: [Tapiro] curiosity was satiated. They had obtained some of our goods and learnt that we were harmless, and all they now desired was to see the last of us. On our side we had gained much. Careful and elaborate measurements of many men had been made as well as a large number of photographs taken with the cinematograph and the ordinary camera, and in addition we had obtained many of their goods by exchange.

The hierarchy of achievements, as listed here, is revealing and offers some insight into the technological process of ‘collecting Pygmies’. Measurements of the body assume a prime importance, followed by photographs (which it is argued serve principally to illustrate the size of the body – see Figure 6.2) and, in third place, by material culture.

The Collection of Pygmies Members of the expedition, notably Wollaston, were familiar with the travel narratives from Central Africa, and had not hesitated to identify the first two captive Tapiro as Pygmies. The discovery of the Tapiro was first reported in the 4 June 1910 issue of Country Life, and the authority of Pygmy experts such as de Quatrefages, Flower and Meyer was cited in support of the claim that the discovery of ‘a tribe of pigmy people, of whom the tallest stood four feet six inches, the average height being four feet three inches’, represented ‘somewhat of a bombshell’ (Ogilvie-Grant 1910/11: 797). The only feature reported, and essentially the only one deemed necessary to communicate the character of this new race, was their height.6 The expedition’s priority, at every encounter with the Tapiro, was to secure measurements: ‘I induced the four to come back to my camp, and offered them various things if they would allow me to measure them, but they refused’ (Grant, in Ogilvie-Grant 1910/11: 269). Although the more sober

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Collecting Pygmies

7:14 pm

Page 143

143

average height subsequently recorded for the Tapiro was four feet nine inches (144.9 cm), this was sufficient to secure their place in the text books as the ‘type’ specimens of the long-awaited New Guinea Negrito or Pygmy (Haddon 1924; Kleiweg de Zwaan 1956).7 Various other physical characteristics were identified as further confirmation of the status of Tapiro as ‘pure’ or ‘true’ Pygmies, but not without some internal contradiction and some obvious shifts in position. African Pygmy mythology stipulated that Pygmy skin colour was black, but lighter than that of surrounding, taller races. In the first report, Tapiro skin was initially reported to be ‘very black in colour’ (Ogilvie-Grant 1910/11: 254), an excess in keeping with their exotic novelty. In subsequent reports and publications, however, Tapiro skin colour became significantly lighter, though still obviously subject to a wide range of interpretation: ranging from ‘dark chocolate’ (Rawling 1913: 110), ‘chocolate or deep brown’ (Marshall, in PIM 1956: 93), and ‘very light brown’ (Goodfellow, in Ogilvie-Grant 1910/11: 296), to ‘almost yellow’ (Wollaston 1912: 198). Tapiro hair was susceptible to a similar variation in observation, with Rawling recording ‘coal black’ with instances of ‘very dark brown or even reddish brown’ (1913: 252–3), but Wollaston suggesting that shades lighter than black were achieved with the addition of lime or mud. It is not the difference of opinion that is significant here but rather, as considered below, the selection of certain observations over others in the subsequent process of academic analysis and judgement. Photography played an important part in the documentation of the BOU encounters with both Kamoro and Tapiro, and plates and prints were rushed from Dutch New Guinea to London in order to feature in the Country Life articles. The books by Rawling and Wollaston were heavily illustrated with photographs, the glass plate negatives for which are still held at the Royal Geographical Society.8 A review of the negatives suggests that there are important distinctions between the photographs taken of the lowland or coastal Kamoro and those of the highland Tapiro. The Kamoro, in whom the expedition was interested largely as a source of labour and of wooden carvings, were commonly posed together with artefacts, such as fishing nets, axes, clubs, and widows’ clothing. Most of the artefacts depicted were subsequently collected, and these photographs thus serve principally to ground or authenticate the collection. In contrast, the photographs of Tapiro had as their principal objective the portrayal of Tapiro bodies, either through group portraits of Tapiro, illustrating the uniformity of their Pygmy form (Figure 6.1), or in photographs of them together with the tallest of the Kamoro, to dramatise the difference in stature (Figure 6.2). If the status of Pygmy was held to be visually self-evident, as argued here, then photography offered the most striking and effective means of communicating that knowledge.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 144

144

Chris Ballard

Figure 6.1: ‘A group of Tapiro pygmies standing in front of the tallest of their houses’. Rawling.

Figure 6.2: ‘Plainsmen and Pygmies’. Rawling.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Collecting Pygmies

7:14 pm

Page 145

145

In third place, after the measurements and photographs, were the artefacts and the observations on other Tapiro material culture. The process of artefact collection does not appear to have been governed by any particular principle, other than the structure imposed by such a limited contact and the ability of the Tapiro to control what was made available for trade; certain prized items such as woven cane cuirasses, shields, and stone knives wrapped in butterfly cocoons were never seen by the expedition, though Wollaston would later find them among the neighbouring Amungme of the Tsinga Valley, to the east of the Tapiro (Haddon and Layard 1916). The expedition’s goal thus appears to have been to acquire almost anything that was offered, a practice that yielded a fairly thorough sample of the portable material culture of Tapiro men (but not women). Certain items of material culture, such as the penis gourds and the fire-making toolkits, attracted particular attention. The penis gourds worn by the Tapiro men were a novelty for the expedition: ‘The most remarkable thing about them is the case that each man wears, his only article of clothing’ (Wollaston 1912: 161).9 Exotic and yet familiar from the Pygmy predilection for minimal cover, the gourds were an especial target for collection. Likewise the fire-making toolkit of a split stick and rattan cane, ‘[b]y far the most interesting of the possessions of these people’, aroused considerable interest in the expedition, as a diagnostic feature of the primordial material culture of Pygmies elsewhere: ‘the split stick and rattan strip method of fire-making may be a criterion of Negrito culture’ (Haddon 1912a: 318). Demonstrations of the technique, demanded by each expedition member in turn, were photographed repeatedly. To a significant extent, the expedition members expected no more than they found, and the tone of surprise was reserved for the presence of items unanticipated in a Pygmy culture. Brief though the encounter with the Tapiro was, it was still sufficient to introduce an experiential element, an excess that contradicted and confounded the narrative expectations generated by Pygmy mythology. Much of this surprise was registered through comparisons drawn between the interior Tapiro Pygmies and the coastal Kamoro Papuans. In light of the presumed equation of a primordial, interior people with diminished stature and mental capacity, the industry and apparent intelligence of the Tapiro were held to provide an unexpected contrast with the ‘laziness’ and sullen disengagement of the Kamoro. This view was not uniformly held, however, with both Goodfellow and Wollaston (the latter perhaps mindful of Haddon’s contribution to his volume) insisting on the low mental capacities of the Tapiro: ‘They seemed to be extremely stupid people. We used to strike matches in front of them and do other things which we thought might interest them, but they would not

O'Hanlon/Welsh

146

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 146

Chris Ballard

look; they turned their heads away’ (Goodfellow, in Ogilvie-Grant 1910/11: 296); ‘When [the Tapiro] were seen in company with the Papuans, the latter, who usually looked dull and expressionless, appeared by contrast to be full of life and animation. The Tapiro, as a rule, looks blank and rather sad, and when a smile does appear upon his face, it dawns slowly and reluctantly’ (Wollaston 1912: 207, my emphasis). The more subjective the judgement, it seems, the more emphatically it was pronounced. Expedition members also differed on the matter of Tapiro capacity to count, the ‘rough test of an uncivilised man’s intelligence’, with Rawling and Grant claiming that the Tapiro could count to ten. Wollaston, however, could get the Tapiro to count only to two, though he was somewhat at a disadvantage in insisting on their using Kamoro terms (1912: 207). Other evidence of Tapiro ‘superiority’, relative to the Kamoro, included the construction of their houses, which were more substantial than the ‘huts’ of the latter; their extensive gardens; ‘their habit of using a common retiring place at the edge of a small stream’ (Wollaston 1912: 205), and their reluctance to appear fully nude, as Kamoro often did. Yet, in keeping with their presumed Pygmy status, the Tapiro were also frequently portrayed using bestial analogues: ‘In talking [the Tapiro] have a curious habit of protruding the lips, which recalls in a striking manner a familiar grimace of the anthropoid apes’ (Wollaston 1912: 206–7); ‘Their eyes are noticeably larger and rounder than those of the Papuans, and there is in them something sleepy and dog-like which gives a pathetic expression to their faces’ (Wollaston 1912: 198). The confidence of the expedition’s characterisation of the Tapiro was founded upon their familiarity with the general outlines of Pygmy mythology, and the knowledge that their observations broadly accorded with those of authorities on the ‘Pygmy Question’. Any doubt or variation of opinion on the matter of the Tapiro was then effaced, as the weight of academic judgement was brought to bear on these field observations in the form of contributions by A.C. Haddon (1912a) to Wollaston’s ‘official’ volumes on the expedition, and by Dr. H.S. Harrison (1913) to Rawling’s account.

A.C. Haddon and the ‘Cultural Character’ of New Guinea Pygmies Haddon’s essay for Wollaston’s volumes, and subsequent references to the Tapiro in his writing, were to play a crucial role in cementing the status of the Tapiro and conferring academic respectability on the expedition’s results: ‘the members of this Expedition have for the first time

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Collecting Pygmies

7:14 pm

Page 147

147

proved the existence [in New Guinea] of a pygmy people, known as the TAPIRO, who may be regarded as predominantly Negritos’ (Haddon 1912a: 313). Ironically, given his lifelong advocacy of field studies (Kuklick 1998), Haddon himself appears to have acted as the metropolitan hub for a network of correspondents writing about Pygmy discoveries in New Guinea. Though Haddon’s area of special interest was the Torres Strait and New Guinea, he was well versed in Pygmy literature and gave lectures on African Ethnology in which he made particular use of material from the Congo (Coombes 1994: 155). He was instrumental in introducing Meyer’s Pygmy work to a wider anglophone audience through his digests of the work of Meyer and others in Nature, and was the first to report to the scientific community the implications of the discovery of the Tapiro (Haddon 1910). In addition to the appendix for Wollaston, Haddon wrote a separate report on Tapiro material culture with Layard (1916) and an introduction for Robert Williamson’s 1912 monograph on the Mafulu ‘Pygmies’ (Haddon 1912b). He maintained a wide-ranging correspondence with people reporting sightings of small people in New Guinea, including patrol officer Leo Austen on the Ok Tedi people and Lord Moyne on the latter’s 1935 discovery of the Aiome Pygmies, about whom Haddon’s daughter, Kathleen, then co-authored a paper with Moyne (Moyne and Haddon 1936). This wealth of written opinion, spanning some thirty-five years, allows for an appreciation of changes in Haddon’s understanding of the racial character and evolutionary position of Pygmies, and in the nature of his analytical method. Cautious in his 1899 review of the equally cautious Meyer, Haddon warned against ‘specious generalisation’ on the question of the Pygmy race, noting the ‘urgent need for further evidence’ and promoting his case for ‘observation in the field [as] by far the most important branch of anthropological work at the present time’ (1899: 433–4). Sensitive to the complexity of the racial history of New Guinea and the absence of ‘pure types’, Haddon turned his attention to uncovering ‘strata’ of peoples, of which the oldest in New Guinea, in his opinion, were the Negritos: ‘the living representatives of the oldest peoples in the southern part of the Old World’ (Urry 1998: 210–11, 215). For Haddon, the first news of the Tapiro discovery thus neatly confirmed both the presence of Negritos and the necessity of field investigations: ‘judging from their stature, which is all we have to go upon, we may regard them as being very little, if at all, mixed with a Papuan element’ (Haddon 1910: 434). If, as Haddon admitted in opening his appendix on the ‘Pygmy Question’, stature could not ‘be taken as a trustworthy criterion of race’, it could at least be taken as indicative, and ‘the suspicion becomes confirmed if we find other characters associated with pygmy stature’ (1912a: 303).10 In Haddon’s analysis, how-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

148

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 148

Chris Ballard

ever, these other characters, material culture among them, offered no challenge to the initial suspicion. After a review of the available Pygmy archive (suggesting that the relevant comparative context for the Tapiro was already decided), Haddon noted the instances of correspondence which he felt to be conclusive, including other details of physical appearance and the ‘cultural characters… which differentiate [the Tapiro and other Negritos] from their neighbours’ (1912a: 315). Having determined in his review of the archive that relative lightness of skin and hair were critical markers of Negrito status, Haddon duly identified the Tapiro as ‘of a lighter colour than… the neighbouring Papuans, some individuals being almost yellow’ (1912a: 313); and while their hair was generally black, promising cases of brown hair had been reported. Wollaston’s description of the upper lip of the Tapiro as ‘long and curiously convex’ – an all-important Pygmy detail – was approvingly cited (1912a: 314). Like other Pygmies, the Tapiro used bows and arrows, wore little clothing, employed the split-stick method to start fires, and did not practise ‘artificial deformation’ of the body. These rather unremarkable instances of correspondence aside, the intriguing feature of Haddon’s analysis was his careful accounting for, or outright omission of, points of difference. Well after the Tapiro discovery, Haddon was still describing the character of New Guinea Pygmies in terms either of absences, or of presences that could otherwise be accounted for: ‘We are now beginning to recognize that there is a large diffused “Pygmy” (Negrito) element in the interior of New Guinea. The customs of the “Pygmy” folk have not been recorded, but it is very improbable that they have elaborate ceremonies. Thus it is to the true Papuan that we must look as being the main source of these customs’ (1920: 256). Confronted with the form of Tapiro houses, obviously more elaborate than the ‘simple huts’ of other Pygmies, he declared that ‘they have evidently been copied from those of other tribes in the interior’ (1912a: 316–17), though no such tribes were then known to exist.11 Conversely, where items equated with Pygmy status, such as the split-stick method of fire-making, were found in non-Pygmy groups, Negrito influence could be presumed (1912a: 318). With no trace of embarrassment, having noted that Negritos ‘never cultivate the soil unless they have been modified by contact with more advanced peoples’ (1912a: 316), Haddon passed over in silence the numerous reports of the expedition on the large cultivated garden plots of the Tapiro. He noted that Tapiro bows, long in length, resembled those of the Andaman Islanders (but not their still closer resemblance to the bows of other, more proximate communities in New Guinea). Nowhere in Haddon’s essay on the Tapiro was there an attempt to compare the characteristics of the adjacent ‘Papuan’ Kamoro and ‘Negrito’ Tapiro. This, perhaps, was

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Collecting Pygmies

7:14 pm

Page 149

149

the effect of stature in settling the issue of Pygmy status, and precluding other avenues of enquiry: Tapiro artefacts common to other Pygmy groups were carefully enumerated; all others, by definition, were introduced. When Haddon did turn to a comparative analysis of the material culture of the Tapiro and their neighbours, the ‘Mountain Utakwa’ (Amungme) of Wollaston’s second expedition and the ‘Pesegem’ (Nduga or Dani) encountered by Dutch expeditions to Mt Wilhelmina, his arguments became still more convoluted.12 Strong similarities were apparent between the material cultures of all three communities (with the exception of a few additional items, such as the woven cane cuirass and shields acquired by Wollaston during his more lengthy stay among the Amungme), yet the average heights for both the Pesegem and Amungme placed them above the Pygmy bar of 150 cm. Haddon’s solution was to identify a ‘common substratum’ of Negrito in each group, and to refer the increased height of the latter two, as well as the various non-Pygmy items of material culture, to mixture with Papuan groups; the presence of the cuirass and the penis gourds, he felt, implicated communities at the headwaters of the Sepik and Fly Rivers, known today as the Mountain Ok (Haddon and Layard 1916: 17). Although Haddon himself later grew disenchanted with physical anthropology and the search for correspondence between racial and cultural characteristics (Herle and Rouse 1998: 21), the legacy of this earlier judgement has endured in New Guinea. The Tapiro served to crystallise more than fifty years of intense speculation and, in the aftermath of their discovery, Pygmies were eagerly sought in New Guinea during the 1920s and 1930s. As late as the 1950s, patrol officers citing ‘Haddon’s Scale’ were reporting the discovery of new Pygmy groups (Simpson 1953: 185), and random latter-day explorers in New Guinea continue to draw on the stock motifs of Pygmy mythology (e.g. Leigheb 1986). If artefact collections provided a useful tool in the production of knowledge about colonial subjects, they did so within a broader context supplied by loosely formulated but nevertheless powerful narratives of racial difference. In certain situations, such as the initial encounters described here, the evidence of material culture could simply be overwhelmed by this discursive context. In the case of Pygmies, artefacts appear to have played a supporting role to observations on stature. A Pygmy material culture, almost by definition, was de trop, and the process of collection among communities already identified visually as Pygmies, such as the Tapiro, was essentially an ingrained reflex. Photographs and measurements provided the necessary evidence, and artefacts served, perhaps, as tokens or poor substitutes for the one form of material that was truly required to substantiate the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 150

150

Chris Ballard

claim of Pygmy: cranial and other skeletal material. Although the BOU expedition was able to collect a large number of skulls from the coastal Kamoro, no such material was forthcoming from the Tapiro, and the dark secret carried by Wollaston to his grave was the manner in which he was able, finally, to obtain skulls from the mountain people of his second expedition (Ballard n.d.). This chapter has not sought to consider the veracity of claims for the presence of Pygmies, in New Guinea or elsewhere, or to address such matters as the effects of environment and heredity on stature, because essentially these issues lie beyond its more limited goals, which have to do with the manner in which colonial subjects for study were constituted and rendered knowable, and the extent to which the experience of encounters was permitted to challenge metropolitan conceptions of racial difference. My sympathies, however, are evidently in accord with Serge Bahuchet’s retort to the ‘Pygmy Question’ (1993:175, my translation), in which he observes that, ‘In truth, there are no Pygmies. Instead there are people who bear the names Baka, BaBongo, BaKola, BaAka, BaSua, Efe, Asua, BaTwa… Who knows what else they might have in common, other than the capacity to excite the imagination of Westerners?’

Notes This chapter was written while I was an Exchange Fellow at the Amsterdam Branch of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), and then a Visiting Fellow at the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie (CREDO-CNRS) in Marseilles. I am most grateful for the warm and scholarly context for research and writing provided by colleagues at both of these institutions. David Glen very kindly granted permission to cite his unpublished thesis, and I would like to acknowledge the inspiration of his own writing and insights more generally. Thanks are also due to Joanna Scadden and Sharon Martins for their kind assistance at the Picture Library of the Royal Geographical Society. Comments made on the draft version of this chapter by other contributors at the Oxford colloquium, and in particular by the editors and by my discussant, Elizabeth Edwards, have been instrumental in the production of this final text, as have careful readings by Brigid and John Ballard. Errors of fact and persistent obscurities of argument are all my own work. 1. I capitalise the term ‘Pygmy’ throughout to signal its literary origins and character and to guard against the naturalising properties of the lower case. 2. See Tyson (1966 [1699]), Ritson (1831) and Bahuchet (1993) for reviews of the history of this mythology. 3. These descriptions are culled from a variety of sources; Haddon (1924) provides a fairly standard introduction to conceptions of racial type of the period. 4. On the basis of their location, in the lower Boma Valley, the ‘Tapiro’ would appear to have been an outlying settlement of Moni-speakers. Although there are numerous oral traditions among the neighbouring Amungme (with whom I work) relating to Wollaston’s subsequent expedition to the Tsinga Valley in 1912, I have not been able

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 151

Collecting Pygmies

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

151

to document Moni versions of their encounter with the BOU expedition. However, Amungme with Moni affines claim to know of this event, and can recall the names of some of the ‘Tapiro’ of 1910. These sources also suggest that the ‘Tapiro’ settlement was decimated by disease in the aftermath of the 1910 encounter. No attempt was made to document the Tapiro language; note that Ray did not – as Urry (1998: 215) claims – describe the language of the Tapiro, which is nowhere identified as ‘Papuan’. The expedition’s zest for measurements of stature evidently impressed the Tapiro. In 1934, when the Dutch missionary Tillemans retraced the BOU route up the Kapare River, he carried with him a measuring rod: ‘Two men remembered the same procedure; long, long ago, a white man had used a pole like this!’ (Bijlmer 1939: 119). Tapiro stature, based on measurements of a total of approximately fifty men, ranged from 1.326 m (4feet 41/4 inches) to 1.529 m (5feet 01/4 inches). However, no other New Guinea community since has recorded an average stature this low, and only two other communities, the Kamaweka and the unfortunately named ‘Goliath Pygmies’, have average heights below 150 cm (Kleiweg de Zwaan 1956: 322). Bijlmer (1939: 118), who revisited the Tapiro vicinity in the 1930s, was able to obtain an average height of ‘only’ 151 cm, 6 cm higher than the BOU claim and just above Schmidt’s bar of 150 cm. A public viewing of Marshall’s film footage was planned before the return of the expedition (Ogilvie-Grant 1910/11: 662), though it remains to be determined whether these screenings took place, or if the footage has survived. Coyly described to the readers of Country Life without reference to their location on the body, the penis gourds were evidently too provocative for a metropolitan readership and were effaced from the prints in Rawling’s volume (e.g., 1913: plates facing p.262), to be replaced by pubic aprons scratched on to the negatives. Haddon’s notion that ethnographic material naturally formed discrete ‘sets’ (Herle 1998: 78, fn.7) appears to have extended to non-material attributes: ‘The assumption that the Papuans were the original inhabitants of New Guinea was confirmed not only by their primitive physical features but also by their cultural practices. These included an inability to count in the sophisticated manner of the PapuoMelanesians and by other social facts and customs’ (Urry 1998: 214). Harrison’s verdict on the Tapiro houses was congratulatory: ‘the Tapiro have done well to model their houses on those of a more advanced people’ (1913: 272), to which he added that the ‘jew’s harp’ of the Tapiro was ‘no doubt borrowed from their neighbours’ (ibid.: 274). The BOU collection of Tapiro material culture was deposited at various stages by different individual members at the British Museum, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden. As a whole, the collection appears not to have been examined in any detail since 1914, when Haddon and Layard inspected it in preparing their report on the new Utakwa material from Wollaston’s second expedition; further evidence, perhaps, of the irrelevance of artefacts to the core concerns of the ‘Pygmy Question’. An inventory of the collection is currently being prepared.

Bibliography Allen, F.A. ‘On the original range of the Papua and Negritto races’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute vol. 8 (1879): 38–50. Bahuchet, S. ‘L’invention des Pygmées’, Cahiers d’études africaines no.129, vol. 33 (1) (1993): 153–81.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

152

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 152

Chris Ballard

Bal, M. ‘Telling objects: a narrative perspective on collecting’ in The cultures of collecting eds J. Elsner and R. Cardinal. Reaktion Books, London, 1994, 97–115. Ballard, C. ‘A.F.R. Wollaston and the “Utakwa Mountain Papuan” skulls.’ MS. n.d. Bijlmer, H.J.T. ‘Tapiro pygmies and Pania mountain-Papuans: results of the Anthropological Mimika Expedition in New Guinea, 1935–36’, Nova Guinea (n.s.) vol. 3 (1939): 113–84. Bowler, P.J. ‘From “savage” to “primitive”: Victorian evolutionism and the interpretation of marginalized peoples’ Antiquity vol. 66 (252) (1992): 721–9. Brantlinger, P. ‘Victorians and Africans: the genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent’ in ‘Race’, writing, and difference ed. H.L. Gates. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986, 185–222. Burrows, G. The land of the Pigmies. C. Arthur Pearson, London, 1898. Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., ed. African pygmies. Academic Press, Orlando, 1986. Coombes, A.E. Reinventing Africa: museums, material culture and popular imagination. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994. Earl, G.W. The native races of the Indian archipelago: Papuans. Hippolyte Baillière, London, 1853. Fabian, J. ‘Curios and curiosity: notes on reading Torday and Frobenius’ in The scramble for art in Central Africa eds E. Schildkrout and C.A. Keim. University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 79–108. Glen, D. ‘The last elusive object’, unpublished M.A. thesis, Australian National University, 2000. Green, J. ‘Edwardian Britain’s Forest pygmies’, History Today vol. 45 no. 8 (1995): 33–9. Haddon, A.C. ‘The little negroes of the East’, Nature vol. 60 (1899): 433–4. ———. ‘New Guinea pygmies’, Nature vol. 83 (1910): 433–4. ———. ‘The pygmy question’, Appendix B to Pygmies and Papuans: the Stone Age to-day in Dutch New Guinea, by A.F.R. Wollaston. Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1912a, 303–21. ———. Introduction to The Mafulu: mountain people of British New Guinea, by R.W. Williamson. Macmillan, London, 1912b, xvii–xxiii. ———. ‘Migrations of cultures in British New Guinea’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute vol. 50 (1920): 237–80. ———. The races of man and their distribution, 2nd edn. University Press, Cambridge, 1924. Haddon, A.C. and J.W. Layard ‘Report made by the Wollaston expedition on the ethnographical collections from the Utakwa River, Dutch New Guinea’ in Reports on the collections made by the British Ornithologists’ Union expedition and the Wollaston expedition in Dutch New Guinea, 1910–13, 2 vols. Francis Edwards, London, 1916, vol. II, part 19. Harrison, H.S. Chapter XIX in The land of the New Guinea pygmies: an account of the story of a pioneer journey of exploration into the heart of New Guinea, by C.G. Rawling. Seeley, Service, London, 1913. Herle, A. ‘The life-histories of objects: collections of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait’ in Cambridge and the Torres

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Collecting Pygmies

7:14 pm

Page 153

153

Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition eds A. Herle and S. Rouse. University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 77–105. Herle, A. and S. Rouse ‘Introduction: Cambridge and the Torres Strait’ in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition eds A. Herle and S. Rouse. University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 1–22. Herle, A. and S. Rouse, eds Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition. University Press, Cambridge, 1998. Hinde, S.L. The fall of the Congo Arabs. Thomas Whittaker, London, 1897. Kleiweg de Zwaan, J.P. ‘The Papuans of Dutch New Guinea: a physico-anthropological survey’, Antiquity and Survival vol. 1 no.5 (1956): 321–42. Kooijman, S. Art, art objects and ritual in the Mimika culture. E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1984. Kuklick, H. ‘Fieldworkers and physiologists’ in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition eds A. Herle and S. Rouse. University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 158–80. Leigheb, M. ‘Irian Jaya, gli ultimi neolitici. Una ricerca in Nuova Guinea su una tribù pigmea, nana per mutazione genetica’, in ‘Tuttoscienze’, La Stampa, Turin, 24 December 1986. Lloyd, A.B. In dwarf land and cannibal country: a record of travel and discovery in Central Africa. T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1909. Mason, P. Infelicities: representations of the exotic. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1998. Meyer, A.B. The distribution of the negritos in the Philippine Islands and elsewhere. Stengel, Dresden, 1899. Mirzoeff, N. ‘Photography at the heart of darkness: Herbert Lang’s Congo photographs (1909–1915)’ in Colonialism and the object: empire, material culture and the museum eds T. Barringer and T. Flynn. Routledge, London, 1998, 167–87. Moyne, W.E.G. and K. Haddon (Mrs. Rishbeth) ‘The pygmies of the Aiome Mountains, Mandated Territory of New Guinea’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute vol. 66 (1936): 269–90. Nature Untitled editorial vol. 83 (1910): 498. Ogilvie-Grant, W.R. ‘The expedition of the British Ornithologists’ Union to the Snow Mountains of New Guinea’, Country Life (1910/11) vol. 27: 437–40, 545–8, 617–20, 797–8; vol. 28: 253–4, 278, 661–2, 887–8; vol. 29: 80–81, 293–6, 719–23, 735–6. ———. Preface to Reports on the collections made by the British Ornithologists’ Union expedition and the Wollaston expedition in Dutch New Guinea, 1910–13, 2 vols. Francis Edwards, London, 1916, vol. I, i–v. PIM ‘How in 1910 Britishers discovered pygmies in Netherlands New Guinea’, Pacific Islands Monthly vol. 26 no. 10 (May 1956): 86–7, 93–5. Pickering, C. The races of man; and their geographical distribution. H.G. Bohn, London, 1851. Pinney, C. ‘Classification and fantasy in the photographic construction of caste and tribe’, Visual Anthropology vol. 3 no. 2/3 (1990): 259–88. Ploeg, A. ‘First contact, in the highlands of Irian Jaya’, The Journal of Pacific History vol. 30 no.2 (1995): 227–39.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

154

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 154

Chris Ballard

Quatrefages, A. de, The pygmies, trans. Frederick Starr. Macmillan, London 1895 (originally published 1887). Rawling, C.G. ‘Explorations in Dutch New Guinea’, The Geographical Journal vol. 38 no. 3 (September 1911): 233–55. Rawling, C.G. The land of the New Guinea pygmies: an account of the story of a pioneer journey of exploration into the heart of New Guinea. Seeley, Service, London, 1913. Ritson, J. Fairy tales, now first collected: to which are prefixed two dissertations: 1. on pygmies, 2. on fairies. Payne & Foss and William Pickering, London, 1831. Schildkrout, E. and C.A. Keim ‘Objects and agendas: re-collecting the Congo’ in The scramble for art in Central Africa eds E. Schildkrout and C.A. Keim. University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 1–36. Simpson, C. Adam with arrows: inside New Guinea. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1953. Stewart, S. On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Duke University Press, Durham, 1993. Thomas, N. Colonialism’s culture: anthropology, travel and government. University Press, Melbourne, 1994. Tomas, D. ‘Transcultural space’, Visual Anthropology Review vol. 9 no. 2 (1993): 60–78. Tyson, E. Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris: or, the anatomy of a pygmie compared with that of a monkey, an ape, and a man. To which is added, a philological essay concerning the pygmies, the cynocephali, the satyrs, and sphinges of the ancients, wherein it will appear that they are all either apes or monkeys, and not men, as formerly pretended, facsimile with an introduction by Ashley Montagu. Dawsons, London, 1966 (originally published 1699). Urry, J. ‘Making sense of diversity and complexity: the ethnological context and consequences of the Torres Strait Expedition and the Oceanic phase in British anthropology, 1890–1935’ in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition eds A. Herle and S. Rouse. University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 201–33. Verslag van de militaire exploratie van Nederlands-Nieuw-Guinea 1907–1915. Landsdrukkerij, Weltevreden, 1920. William of Sweden, Prince Among pygmies and gorillas: with the Swedish zoological expedition to Central Africa 1921. Gyldendal, London, 1923. Wollaston, A.F.R. From Ruwenzori to the Congo: a naturalist’s journey across Africa. J. Murray, London, 1908. ———. Pygmies and Papuans: the stone age to-day in Dutch New Guinea. Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1912. ———. Introduction to Reports on the collections made by the British Ornithologists’ Union expedition and the Wollaston expedition in Dutch New Guinea, 1910–13, 2 vols. Francis Edwards, London, 1916, vol. I, 1–22. ———. Letters and diaries of A.F.R. Wollaston, selected and edited by M. Wollaston. University Press, Cambridge, 1933.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 155

Chapter 7

ONE TIME, ONE PLACE, THREE COLLECTIONS: Colonial Processes and the Shaping of Some Museum Collections from German New Guinea

Robert L. Welsch

Introduction Museum collections, as this book demonstrates, are complex assemblages of objects, each with their own social and cultural biographies. It is the complexity of these biographies that is the concern of this chapter. Since Appadurai (1986) we have come to assume that each object has had its own individual social life. But for most curators, each collection of objects has its own special identity as an accession representing a certain collector, a specific set of communities, and a unique time of collecting. We tend to think of each accession as having a distinctive identity that simultaneously reflects the collector and his social world on the one hand, and on the other the local people who made, used, or sold the objects in the first place. But quite often the culture of museum administrators has also shaped the character and contents of a collection, distorting the role of both collector and villager. Two competing ways of understanding the history of collections have emerged in the literature. The first theme is typified by Thomas (1991), who focused on the processes by which European and American culture appropriated exotic ethnographic objects for their own purposes and agendas. His analysis of how Western collectors ignored

O'Hanlon/Welsh

156

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 156

Robert L. Welsch

the local meanings and uses of Pacific artefacts is paralleled by other studies in North America (Cole 1985) and Central Africa (Schildkrout and Keim 1998). In their various ways, these authors emphasize how objects were stripped of their indigenous meanings and contexts, which were replaced by meanings and contexts of the collector’s culture. Carrying the argument somewhat further, Price (1989: 82–99) shows how the transformation of ethnographic ‘curios’ into examples of ‘primitive art’ has often displaced indigenous meanings and notions of ownership in favour of provenance and the history of Western ownership of these objects.1 Without disputing any of these perspectives, another theme has also emerged in the literature in recent years. O’Hanlon (1993) argued that whatever the intentions of Western collectors might be, assemblages of objects contain a great deal of indigenous agency often frozen and unrecognised in these collections. My own study of A.B. Lewis and his collection (Welsch 1998; 1999) explored the complex relationship between one anthropologist and his early twentieth-century collection. Although Lewis was eager to preserve the original context of his collection (Welsch 1998), his field notes demonstrate the constant tension between his goals and local people’s eagerness to sell certain objects rather than others.2 In short, most collections reflect simultaneously the subtle interplay between the indigenous and collector agendas. While it may be obvious that an object hanging in a prestigious art museum has been removed from its original context, not all objects have been totally stripped of the documentation, information and historical record that allow us to appreciate some of this context. At issue is not so much whether objects lose context and take on other contextualising attributes, as the process by which recontextualisation occurs. This problem becomes a more subtle one for the main ethnological collections of Melanesia because most of these assemblages of objects were collected by anthropologists or agents of museums, and it is clear that anthropologists and museums desired context for the collections they wished to display. Thus it is not simply that indigenous agency competes with the goals of a collector, but that both compete with other processes that occur outside the field context. In part these processes have to do with the structure of museum procedures, such as how three-dimensional objects are transformed into written records (see, e.g., Jenkins 1994), or how museums record and preserve ethnographic data (Welsch 1999). But the colonial process itself – the competition among collectors of different nationalities working for competing institutions, and working with expatriate agents eager to profit economically from their dealings with museums – has also served to confuse and confound these processes and has shaped virtually all early museum collections

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 157

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

157

from Melanesia, no matter whether made by scholar, sea captain, or visiting sailor. For those researchers who would like simply to use museum collections as tangible evidence of earlier times – even if not pristine evidence – objects have suddenly become quite complicated documents about the past. They embody the goals of collectors, the cultural lives as well as the interests of villagers, the varied concerns of other local agents, the concerns of national policies, and the competitive interests of the international museum world. Each player in the process distorts the cumulative record according to his or her own interests. This chapter considers the relationship between three apparently distinct, pre-First World War collections from German New Guinea: the Dorsey, Voogdt and Umlauff collections at the Field Museum in Chicago. It will be argued that, despite their varied histories and the diverse lineages supplied and consolidated by their separate museum documentation, these three collections naturally form a single coherent collection made at the same time and in the same villages, by two or three collectors who shared a common vision about what the act of collecting was all about. In some respects, this case is atypical, but it illustrates the delicate balance between competing interests and the colonial processes that probably underlie most ethnographic collections from this period.

Three Collections The three collections in question, acquired by the Field Museum between 1908 and 1913, were assembled by three different individuals: 1. Field Museum curator George A. Dorsey in August 1908. The Field Museum received this collection in December 1908. 2. Sea Captain H. Voogdt of the New Guinea Company. Voogdt originated in Hamburg. He worked for the Company from about 1895 to 1914 and was based in Friedrich Wilhelmshafen (now Madang). He sent his collection in two consignments, which reached the Field Museum early in 1909. 3. J.F.G. Umlauff, the prominent Hamburg curio dealer. Although Umlauff liked to advertise his operation as a museum, he was a dealer in ethnographic curios. In 1905 he sold the Field Museum a large Oceanic collection. By 1911 or 1912 Umlauff had another large collection from New Guinea for sale. Dorsey examined this in January 1913 and the Field Museum purchased it two months later. Each of these three collections would be important and well-known if it was housed in any other museum with a smaller Melanesian hold-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

158

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 158

Robert L. Welsch

ing. But at the Field Museum each is dwarfed by the much larger, better known, and better documented A.B. Lewis collection, which contains more than 14,000 objects and was assembled much more systematically during a four-year expedition between 1909 and 1913 (Welsch 1998). Despite the diverse backgrounds of their assemblers, at the Field Museum it has generally been clear that all three collections were obtained from along the same stretch of the northwest coast of German New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelmsland). Ironically the overlap among these collections and the much larger Lewis collection has enhanced their separate identities as distinct collections. Each arrived in a different year, from a different collector, and each collection was mixed with objects from other parts of German New Guinea. In the context of the massive Lewis collection each of these other three collections seems much smaller, and each seems distinctive because one came from a curator, one from a ship’s captain, and one from a curio dealer.3 However, as ethnological objects representing discrete communities these three collections exhibit remarkable similarities in quality, materials and style. It would be difficult, for example, to identify any particular object as being from Dorsey, Voogdt, or Umlauff, even after a close examination of their collections. And yet all three collections differ quite perceptibly from similar collections made by A.B. Lewis in many of the same villages. For example, the Lewis collection contains very few objects made with beads, cloth, yarn, paper, or other materials of European manufacture, while all three of these other collections (not infrequently) contain bits and pieces of modern materials. Similarly, the Lewis collection contains many samples of raw materials and examples of objects that were incomplete because they were in the process of being made when collected. The Dorsey, Voogdt and Umlauff collections have very few raw materials in their inventories and even fewer unfinished items. Both of these differences can be understood as part of the implicit – and at times explicit – collecting goals of the individual collectors. But, in part, these differences also reflect how Lewis on the one hand and Dorsey and Voogdt on the other hand went about collecting objects. The Lewis collection also differs from the other three collections in its overall coherence. In each community sampled it consistently offers a better representation of the different kinds of objects and the range of workmanship that would have been available.4 To the present writer it appears that the items assembled by Dorsey, Voogdt and Umlauff are on average finer examples of traditional carving than comparable Lewis pieces, and they are often much showier than objects in the Lewis collection. While this aesthetic dimension (sensu Stocking 1985: 6) is difficult to define, even Lewis recognised these differences because

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 159

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

159

he often chose Dorsey and Voogdt examples for his exhibition and catalogue (Lewis 1932). Why should such similarities exist? What processes have shaped these three collections so that they possess these characteristics in common? Each of these three collections has a separate accession number and the Field Museum curators and other staff have generally referred to them as separate collections. In working with the Lewis, Dorsey, Voogdt and Umlauff collections from the North Coast of New Guinea for more than a decade (Terrell and Welsch 1990; Welsch et al. 1992) the present writer had always viewed each of these collections as having its own identity as a collection. To add to the confusion, the accession records about the provenance and histories of these collections are singularly vague and perhaps misleading. While the Lewis collection (Welsch 1998; 1999) unambiguously has its own separate identity, the other three collections appear to be systematically related to one another. Closer interrogation of scattered museum files and documentation shows that they represent essentially the same communities, the same moment in time, and are in essence the same collection. It now seems that most of the objects were purchased in August 1908 when George A. Dorsey visited this remote German colony. For nearly a month Dorsey toured the mainland of German New Guinea escorted by H. Voogdt (Welsch 1998 [vol. 2]: 160–62), captain of the New Guinea Company steamer Siar, and also accompanied by Georg Heine (Welsch 1998 [vol. 2]: 76), chief administrator of the New Guinea Company’s operations in the territory. Their travels took them along most of the coast and offshore islands between what is now Madang and the Indonesian border, a distance of some 700 kilometres. Perhaps more importantly, their journey in the little steamer Siar brought them 125 kilometres up the mighty Sepik River, known to the Germans as the Kaiserin Augusta River. This was the first documented ascent of the Sepik in the twentieth century and the first attempt to enter the river in fifteen years (Welsch 1998 [vol. 1]: 295–7). While these three collections were made simultaneously and had once shared cabin space on the tiny Siar, when the steamer reached its home port of Friedrich Wilhelmshafen the collections began the complex process of establishing the three separate identities by which we know them today. It was an odd set of circumstances that dispersed this collection and transformed it into three separate collections, but an even stranger set of circumstances that later brought the three collections back together. After Dorsey’s departure for America these three collections began their separate existences, residing for a time on three continents (New Guinea, North America and Europe). Dorsey arranged shipment of the collection he had made to the Field Museum. Voogdt merged the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

160

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 160

Robert L. Welsch

artefacts he had collected with other specimens he obtained in the Huon Gulf later in 1908.5 Early in 1909 he sent two shipments to the Field Museum on approval. Dorsey recognised the high quality of the Voogdt collection, but it was almost certainly the material from the Huon Gulf,6 which Dorsey had not visited, rather than that from the North Coast that Dorsey found of especial interest. This new material closely resembled the quality of Dorsey’s own collection and, after a lengthy period of negotiation in Chicago, he persuaded the Field Museum administrators and patrons to purchase these two shipments from Captain Voogdt .7 Voogdt did not dispatch his entire collection to Chicago in these two shipments, but also sent some of it home to Germany (Voogdt 1909).8 It is not clear whether he already had another buyer with whom he was negotiating (Buschmann 1999) or if he was hoping to test the waters at the Field Museum.9 In any event he was hoping to realise a substantial profit from one or other museum, each of which was eager to acquire important collections from the colony. Once the collection was in Germany, Voogdt could not find a buyer among the major museums because, despite their desire for the collection, they had no funds (see Buschmann 1999). While Voogdt was awaiting the Field Museum’s payment for the first two shipments, the relationship between him and Dorsey changed dramatically.10 In September 1909 Dorsey had published a diary account of his travels in German New Guinea in the Chicago Tribune. These newspaper columns contained many self-serving comments as well as several less than charitable remarks about his German hosts. As described elsewhere (Welsch 1998 [vol. 1]: 226–32), the reaction to the columns in German New Guinea was pronounced. New Guinea Company personnel refused to assist the Field Museum thereafter, a decision that caused considerable difficulty for Lewis, who had only recently arrived in the colony. For Voogdt, however, Dorsey’s anti-German sentiments served to accentuate his dissatisfaction with the Field Museum’s long delay in paying him for the collections sent on approval. Although the Field Museum had had part of the Voogdt collection in its possession since January 1909, Voogdt was still requesting prompt payment as late as April 1910. Voogdt turned with new resolve to find a buyer for the rest of his collection in Germany. When he was unsuccessful in attracting one of the German museums, he turned to J.F.G. Umlauff, who purchased the remainder of Voogdt’s collection, adding it to material from several smaller collections that he had acquired from other expatriate Germans in New Guinea. 11 Although the date of this transaction is uncertain, it was probably in late 1910 or 1911, because Umlauff had offered the collection for sale by 1912. Umlauff prepared a stencilled catalogue as

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 161

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

161

well as a few photographs of part of the collection, all of which were sent to likely buyers in the museum world. The catalogue was duly sent to Chicago, and Dorsey saw the collection in Hamburg in January 1913 and urged its purchase. The shipment arrived in Chicago in March 1913 and payment was made by cable the next month. Thus, by the spring of 1913, the Dorsey, Voogdt and Umlauff collections had been reunited once more. We have a rare opportunity to compare these collections and their documentation to assess how they have each had their own social lives as collections, independent to some degree from the social life any individual object may have had before it left German New Guinea.

George Amos Dorsey George A. Dorsey (1868–1931) was the driving force behind most of the Field Museum’s anthropology collections and he was clearly the architect of the museum’s vast Melanesian holdings. Dorsey earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1893 and came to the Field Museum in 1896, two years later becoming Curator of Anthropology. It was in this capacity that he was able to shape the department’s collections and staff for the next twenty years (see Welsch 1998; 1999). In October 1907 Dorsey began making plans for a round-the-world expedition, which included a stop in the South Seas. 12 He described his original plans to the Field Museum’s Director F.J.V. Skiff as follows: My plan would be to leave Chicago early next year for the Philippines where I would spend some time in making collections, using the Cummings’ funds for such purpose and also defraying from the same fund a legitimate share of my expenses while abroad. From the Islands I should proceed by direct route to New Ireland, and then visit in turn the Maoris of New Zealand; at least one Australian tribe, the Australian museums; two or three different regions in New Guinea, both English and Dutch; one or two of the smaller islands of the Dutch archipelago; at least one region in Java; one in Borneo; one or two tribes in the Malay Peninsula, and the Rock Veddas of Ceylon. I have made as accurate an estimate as to the time involved in such a trip as possible, and believe it could be done in the neighborhood of six months.13

It was an ambitious plan to be sure, but fully in keeping with Dorsey’s grandiose style. When the Field Museum Trustee E.E. Ayers offered to buy some Egyptian antiquities for the department, Dorsey gladly altered his travel plans, reversing the direction of his itinerary to visit the South Seas last. The Board of Trustees approved money for his travels in December 1907 and Dorsey set off for Europe early in January 1908. He visited

O'Hanlon/Welsh

162

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 162

Robert L. Welsch

Egypt, India, Ceylon, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies and Australia, before arriving in German New Guinea on 9 July. During most of the next month, he travelled with Imperial Governor Albert Hahl, a man of considerable education and a strong supporter of science. 14 During these travels Hahl also invited the geographer Karl Sapper to join him as they made tours of inspection to the Admiralties, New Ireland, New Britain, Buka and Bougainville. Together with Hahl and Sapper, Dorsey was among the first Europeans to cross Bougainville (Dorsey 1909b). After a month touring the German colony, Dorsey had collected about 1,500 specimens. 15 On their return to the colonial administrative headquarters at Herbertshöhe (now Kokopo in East New Britain), the Governor invited Dorsey to accompany him to the New Guinea mainland where Hahl wanted to explore the Ramu River. Dorsey decided to extend his stay in the German colony for an additional month, but he chose instead to accompany Captain Heinrich Voogdt in the New Guinea Company’s 200 ton steamer Siar. Voogdt and his superior Georg Heine were about to embark on a tour of inspection of most of the company’s stations west of Friedrich Wilhelmshafen and Dorsey was welcome to join them. This trip lasted from 8 August 1909 till the end of the month and Dorsey collected more than 2,000 specimens from some twenty-one communities, not only on the coast and on several of the offshore islands but also as far as 125 kilometres up the Sepik River. This averaged more than one hundred specimens per day and Dorsey’s diaries give ample evidence of how rushed his trading for specimens often was: Finally an old man came up and I made a trade with him for his hair comb and arm band; that was all he had on. Within five minutes I was doing a brisk business that lasted for two hours. Their greed for fishhooks and lines and knives truly was gratifying. (1909a: 15 August 1908, Angel) 16 I had less than an hour ashore, but every minute was a busy one, and I came back to the Siar with a good boat load. Much of my collection having been bought for small boxes of red paint and looking glasses. (1909a: 16 August 1908, Sissano) I opened [my] bag and offered two fishhooks for an arm ring; that opened the briskest two hours’ trading I ever went through in my life. Their greed for fishhooks, fish lines, mirrors, paint, and arm rings was really great. In that time I made just 288 distinct trades. It was hot, fast, and furious. (1909a: 17 August 1908, Angriffshafen) I did a brisk trade for half an hour, the most common object sought being fishhooks, ‘Me likem huke, master.’… In my haste to make the most of my time, and in their greed to get fishhooks and lines a big crowd got about me

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 163

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

163

and nearly swamped me. One old chap brought up a club, gave it to me, grabbed three fish lines and ran. I could not stand that and it looked like trouble for the moment. They were a greedy, wild lot, and never would let go of a thing till they had the trade equivalent in their hands. When I started to leave they tried to steal more than half of my plunder. There is a great harvest here, but a single man might be killed. (1909a: 22 August 1908, Roissy Island)

While not doubting the villagers’ eagerness for trade goods, one senses in such comments that Dorsey has projected some of his own desire for specimens into his descriptions of the villagers’ desire for fishhooks and other imported goods. At the least, had Dorsey not been so eager to buy things the trade would never have been so brisk. Both parties were eager to trade and their time was quite limited. One reason why the Dorsey collection was so dependent on brisk periods of trading with villagers was that Captain Voogdt and Herr Heine were simultaneously trying to recruit plantation labourers in most of the villages they visited. Dorsey repeatedly reminds his readers that he ‘was not allowed to trade for fear it would interfere with recruiting’. But in most places, Voogdt’s recruiting efforts seem to have produced few labourers and, when recruiting failed, the captain turned to the only other activity that could generate a financial gain – curios: We returned at 5 o’clock to the Siar in two boats well laden, for the captain early gave up the hope of recruits and traded in earnest for his own collection. The other two boats already had returned, but had not a single recruit. Smart people these; why should they leave their own fine land, with plenty of food, to work for the New Guinea company for something they do not want. (1909a: 17 August 1908, Angriffshafen) There are splendid things in this village, masks, skulls, images, big and little carved drums, spears, and throwing sticks, stone tools, fine wooden dishes. But of all these wonderful things I got only a few samples for as soon as Mr. Heine decided he could get no boys he felt compelled to move on. (1909a: 23 August 1908, on the Sepik River)17

Dorsey made little of the evident competition with Captain Voogdt to buy specimens and he alluded to the Captain’s collection only on three occasions in his entire published diary.18 His motives for this omission are as obvious as his text is self-serving: he wanted to portray himself as the only active collector on board. But Dorsey’s letters and diaries also confirm another level of competition for collections in the German colony. Everywhere he went Dorsey saw European colonists, officials and scientists busy collecting, many for civic honour, medals, and colonial honours (see Rubel and Rosman 1996). For example, he wrote to Skiff saying:

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 164

164

Robert L. Welsch

Within one month I have seen the camps of three distinct groups of investigators from the Berlin Museum – just beyond, in the Solomons, were three British investigators, one of them collecting for the New York Museum; the other day I dined here on the S.S. Peiho, 800 tons, chartered for two years by the Hamburg Museum, and fitted up as a floating workshop and filled with investigators. Practically every German in the colony is a collector – the higher officials for the love of their local Museum at home – Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, Strassburg, etc., etc.; the lesser officials for gain – shipping their material to dealers at home or in Sidney [sic]. Every traveler through here carries away old ‘curios’ – a mask, a bundle of spears, a bundle of bows and arrows, a carved bowl, a carved drum. The missionaries are all collectors of ethnological material, and the most of them are ‘on the make.’ Every man’s house here is a Museum. My landlord here at the hotel will sell you material from St. Matthias where no white man has yet landed. There are whole regions in New Guinea where everything has been swept away by missionaries, traders, collectors and investigators.19

Like Lewis a few years later, Dorsey met scientists throughout the colony: Drs Fulleborn and Müller of the Peiho, Professors Sapper and Friedrici from Berlin, Otto Schlaginhaufen from Dresden, and, while in Bougainville, Dorsey just missed meeting Richard Thurnwald from the Museum of Ethnography in Berlin. One of the consequences both of the competition and the breakneck pace of purchasing specimens was that Dorsey rarely obtained any information about the local names for things, their methods of manufacture or use, or even whether they were produced locally or obtained from people in other villages. In this respect, the Dorsey collection is far inferior to the Lewis collection. Equally striking is the fact that the Voogdt and Umlauff collections similarly contain no additional information beyond the place where the object was acquired. The one area where Dorsey’s notes actually do provide systematic and detailed information is in specifying where each object was acquired.20 He listed each assemblage of objects according to the place they were obtained, usually indicating the date they were purchased. While this is scanty information by almost anyone’s standards, it is substantially more reliable as data than provenance information in the Voogdt and Umlauff collections.

Captain H. Voogdt Captain Voogdt had a long history in New Guinea, first arriving from Hamburg in the 1890s to work for the New Guinea Company, originally as captain of the sailing vessel Senta but, from 1902 onwards, as captain of the Siar. Based at Friedrich Wilhelmshafen, Voogdt and his

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 165

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

165

wife had a house at Kalibobo, not far from the modern Coast Watchers monument in Madang. Aboard the Siar, Voogdt’s primary responsibility was to call in at each of the Company’s small stations every two or three months to pick up the copra that company agents had been stockpiling, offloading trade goods and other supplies, and recruiting labour for the firm’s extensive plantations around Astrolabe Bay. While each of these activities was lucrative for the company, none would have been personally rewarding for the captain, above and beyond his ordinary salary. But his frequent trips along the coast brought Voogdt in contact with dozens of villages and their local handicrafts, all of which had commercial value on the international curio market. On Dorsey’s return from New Guinea, he described the ‘genial Captain’ in the following way: Voogdt is captain of the New Guinea Company’s trading streamer, is hard working, shrewd, energetic, with a keen eye for business. Immediately on being associated with him on a month’s cruise, I learned that he was an extremely active collector, sending much material to German museums. Realizing his great ability as a discriminating collector and that he could collect more cheaply than any one else, for his time is otherwise paid for, and he has at his service a ship, it seemed to me that here was presented a remarkable opportunity for securing a large collection from the coast villages of German New Guinea, which I believe to be the richest of all the territory of this vast island.21

It is not clear how much Voogdt collected in the early years aboard the Siar.22 But by 1908 he seems to have been collecting a great deal. By the summer of 1908 most New Guinea Company agents were collecting for their own profit. Dorsey, for example, mentions that the agent at Potsdamhafen had a collection for sale, and the following year Lewis purchased some material from the same agent as well as from other Company personnel in Friedrich Wilhelmshafen. Lewis had also planned to buy some Sepik River material from the man serving as replacement captain of the Siar while Voogdt was on leave, but this unfortunate man died a few weeks after completing their ascent of the river and Lewis was never able to augment his Sepik collections. Voogdt’s collecting activities resembled those of nearly every other settler along the coast. The major difference was that he had frequent contact with villagers all along the coast and presumably built up some rapport in most of his ports of call. Dorsey provided one observation at Angriffshafen (the modern Vanimo), suggesting that whatever rapport the captain may have had with village men did not necessarily apply to the women and children: [The trading] was hot, fast, and furious. At the end of an hour I went into a group of the houses we had passed. Women ran and closed their doors

O'Hanlon/Welsh

166

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 166

Robert L. Welsch

and children screamed. This, though they have seen the captain four times a year for years. (1909a: 17 August 1908, Angriffshafen)

Thus one likely implication of the captain’s brief but periodic visits is that it must have been much easier for him to collect curios from men than from women.23 It is noteworthy that, while Voogdt clearly did collect objects directly from villagers, he also had several New Guinean crew members who acquired curios from villagers for him. For example, west of the modern Vanimo, Voogdt sent his crew to recruit labourers at Yoko (Yako) and Warimo, while he did the same in Wanaimo (Vanimo): At 11 o’clock we entered Angriffs Hafen, which contain three large villages strung along the shore about two miles apart, Yoko, Warimo, and Wanaimo, respectively, from west to east. We halted off Yoko, where the two whale boats were put off in charge of the second officer with recruit ‘trade.’ We returned east down the coast, and anchored off Wanaimo at 11:30, the plan being that the second officer should recruit in the two western villages and the captain would try the first. (1909a: 17 August 1908, Angriffshafen)

In this case, no recruits were signed on, but it seems that the second officer was successful in acquiring at least a few specimens for the captain because the Field Museum acquired eleven Yako specimens from Voogdt in 1909 and another fifteen objects from Warimo that came from Umlauff. Another 182 objects in the Voogdt collection are simply listed as ‘Angriffshafen’ and could equally be from Yako, Warimo or Vanimo.24 Unfortunately, while both Dorsey and Lewis made reference to this practice, neither described the activities of these men in any detail.

Figure 7.1: Landing from a boat, German New Guinea, Dorsey Collection, 1908.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 167

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

167

Probably the collecting activities of New Guinean crew members closely resembled that of Voogdt, Dorsey and Lewis: exchanging various kinds of trade goods for specimens. But recent analyses of the activities of ‘boss boys’ and policemen in the Central Highlands suggest that the crew may not have been bartering in quite the same style as their White colleagues and their relationship with villagers would have been at least minimally different (see, e.g., Connolly and Anderson 1987).

J.F.G. Umlauff Naturalienhandlung und Museum The firm of J.F.G. Umlauff in Hamburg was established by the patriarch of the Umlauff family, Johann Friedrich Gustav Umlauff (1833–89) and managed by his sons after his death (Thode-Arora 1992). Umlauff purchased a number of collections from Carl Hagenbeck and from other prominent German collectors and dealers. In 1905 the Field Museum purchased a Maori house from the firm (Hakiwai and Terrell 1994), as well as another 2,500 specimens from the South Seas, the majority from German New Guinea (1,886 specimens from all parts of the colony). The 1913 Umlauff accession contained about 2,000 objects, virtually all from the coast of Kaiser Wilhelmsland including several Sepik River villages and some Huon Gulf material, but most was from the coast west of the Sepik. Field Museum accession records identify the collectors merely as ‘Voogdt and Others’. The extensive catalogue sorted the collection by object type rather than locality and this method of organisation confuses the list of places represented and their relative numbers. The original Field Museum accession card gives the ‘Date Collected’ as 1910–12, suggesting (if true) that this Voogdt material must be of later date than the material collected with Dorsey in 1908. But there is good reason to believe that, while part of the Umlauff material may represent later collecting, a substantial part can best be attributed to Voogdt’s 1908 activities. Table 7.1 compares all the North Coast collections contained in the Dorsey, Voogdt and Umlauff accessions at the Field Museum. Here the numbers of specimens from each locality are less important than the localities represented in the three accessions. As can be seen from the annotations to this table, Voogdt or his crew – according to Dorsey’s 1908 diary – visited nearly every one of the communities represented in one or other of the Voogdt and Umlauff collections. The only places west of the Sepik not specifically mentioned in Dorsey’s diary are: (a) Bougainville Bay, which the crew may have visited independently, (b) But village, which lies near Smein, and which may also have been visited by some of the crew and (c) Kirau (in the Murik Lakes).25

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 168

168

Robert L. Welsch

Table 7.1. Number of catalogue numbers from each locality in the Dorsey, Voogdt, and Umlauff collections (The Field Museum, Chicago). Locality Bougainville Bay Yaco Warimo Wanimo Angriffshafen Leitere Sissano Warapu Berlinhafen Tumleo Ali Seleo Angel Tarawai Walis But Smain Coffe Mushu Sup Dallmannhafen Inland Dallmannhafen Kirau Kaiserin Augusta River KAR, Coast nr mouth KAR, mouth KAR, Kopar KAR, Bin KAR, Yabinga KAR, Singrin KAR, Imbuando KAR, Olin KAR, Magim (Magem) Schouten Islands Roissy (Wogeo) Island Deblois (Koil) Island Manam Island Hansa Bay Potsdamhafen Kronprinzhafen Karkar Island Janar, North Coast

Notes 2. 1.

3.

2.

2. 4.

6.

4. 4. 4. 4. 5.

Dorsey

Voogdt

0 0 0 217 1 36 63 98 3 101 1 172 159 155 69 0 22 0 0 16 18 0 0 36 0 0 22 59 0 10 40 38 70 0 88 83 0 0 152 0 0 0

42 11 0 1 182 28 1 1 46 100 1 38 17 0 3 0 0 10 9 3 70 2 0 30 112 0 0 0 0 113 29 0 71 61 32 0 1 2 37 55 35 0

Umlauff

Total

0 0 15 25 5 9 55 47 21 0 0 17 9 19 8 3 3 1 5 0 257 19 19 125 1 7 0 0 32 0 0 0 24 24 0 0 0 11 108 0 1 1

42 11 15 243 188 73 119 146 70 201 2 227 185 174 80 3 25 11 14 19 345 21 19 191 113 7 22 59 32 123 69 38 165 85 120 83 1 13 297 55 36 1 continued

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 169

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

169

Table 7.1. (continued) Locality German New Guinea North Coast Northwest Coast Central Coast Northeast Coast Total

Notes

Dorsey

Voogdt

Umlauff

Total

0 1 0 2 0

12 1 34 0 0

43 31 0 0 8

55 33 34 2 8

1,732

1,200

953

3,885

Notes: 1. Voogdt’s crew collected here. 2. Voogdt’s crew may have collected here. 3. Dorsey’s Diary indicates that he collected heavily here, but his specimen list does not. 4. Dorsey did not visit in August 1908. 5. Location of this north coast village unknown. 6. Location by this name unknown, probably Bin village in the lower Sepik. Locations of places not included on Map 3 may be found in Welsch 1998 vol. 1: 60 and 222.

The most telling localities of all are those from the Sepik (the Kaiserin Augusta River or KAR) because all of these were places that Voogdt visited with Dorsey in 1908 on the first known ascent of the river in the twentieth century. The most striking Sepik location is Magem (also called Pagem), which appears on the Umlauff list and probably represents part of the 1908 collection. Several other ascents of the Sepik occurred in 1909 and 1910, but unless there were unrecorded collecting voyages up river these objects could not have been collected prior to 1908 because no European had made it up river that far. Had these objects been acquired by any subsequent visitor, it seems unlikely that Magem would be the only up-river locality in the assemblage. All of the other known ascents of the Sepik went well into the middle Sepik district and brought back large numbers of carvings, masks, hooks, skulls and the like. This highly desirable material would almost certainly have been offered for sale had it been acquired. Thus these twenty-four specimens are probably the last part of Voogdt’s 1908 Sepik collection. We cannot be so certain about the specimens from other locations, but it is reasonable to assume that, since some of the material was definitely collected in August 1908, much of the remainder is likely to have been also.26

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 170

170

Robert L. Welsch

Differences Between the Three Collections The most interesting differences among these three collections emerge if we consider, first, the number of objects with uncertain provenance and, second, the proportion of the collection that has only general locality information. By ‘uncertain provenance’, is meant catalogue records bearing a specific locality, but qualified with the term ‘probably’ or a question mark. Table 7.2 compares the three collections according to the number of items with uncertain provenance. Just over 100 (2.7 percent) of the 3,800 plus artefacts are of uncertain provenance, but their distribution is informative. While a negligible number of Dorsey pieces are of uncertain provenance, 2.5 percent of the Voogdt objects and 4.5 percent of the Umlauff accession have uncertain locality information. The figures suggest that, as the collection got farther away from its collector, it soon began to lose definitive provenance information. Table 7.2: Catalogue numbers with uncertain provenances.

Total number of catalogue numbers ‘Uncertain provenance’ (Percentage uncertain)

Dorsey

Voogdt

Umlauff

Total

1,732 2 (0.1)

1,200 50 (4.2)

953 51 (5.4)

3,885 103 (2.7)

Another measure of documentation loss can be found in Table 7.3, which compares the numbers of objects with imprecise or general locality information. The most striking of these attributions is ‘German New Guinea’, a designation that almost certainly refers to Kaiser Wilhelmsland and, by inspection, refers largely to any locality along the North Coast west of Madang. While none of the Dorsey collection contains such a general attribution, twelve Voogdt pieces (1.0 percent) and forty-three Umlauff pieces (4.5 percent) are so identified. The several other general locations are similarly skewed in favour of the Umlauff collection (27.2 percent) and the Voogdt collection (24.8 percent), while only 2.5 percent of the Dorsey material has a vague provenance. A third measure of how much the Voogdt and Umlauff collections have lost of their original documentation comes from objects that seem to have incorrect locations. For example, two Voogdt bone daggers and two Umlauff daggers have designs that seem from their style to be almost certainly from the Angriffshafen area, but their extant attributions place them along the Berlinhafen coast. Similarly, a shell ring boring set is identified as being from Vanimo, but this sort of kit seems only to have been used in the Berlinhafen Islands and on

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 171

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

171

Table 7.3: Catalogue numbers with vague or general provenances.

German New Guinea North Coast Northwest Coast Central Coast Northeast Coast Berlinhafen Schouten Islands Kaiserin Augusta River KAR, coast near mouth KAR, mouth ‘General provenance only’ Total Percentage of total

Dorsey

Voogdt

Umlauff

Total

0 1 0 2 0 5 0 36 0 0 44 1,732

12 1 34 0 0 47 61 30 109 3 297 1,200

43 31 0 0 8 21 24 125 1 7 260 953

55 33 34 2 8 73 85 191 110 10 601 3,885

2.5

24.8

27.2

15.5

Tarawai Island. Although it seems certain that these particular attributions are wrong, one must be cautious in thus arguing from artefacts’ style to their locality. On this coast in particular, material culture is traditionally traded and exchanged far too widely for the location at which an artefact is collected to be a firm guide to its place of origin. At best this is a method that can raise hypotheses, but other historical data must be weighed very carefully against extant documentation, or we risk adding misinformation to the data.

Why are these Three Collections so Similar? If my deductions about the origins of the Umlauff accession are correct, then Voogdt and his crew collected the majority of these objects in August 1908 while Dorsey was aboard the Siar. This association explains why the Voogdt and Umlauff collections are so similar: they were collected by the same man at the same time. Similarities between the Dorsey and Voogdt material are more problematic, since the collections were clearly collected by different individuals, from different countries, with different interests and occupations – one a museum curator and anthropologist, the other a sea captain with no particular interest in the material beyond its economic value. We will probably never be fully certain what life aboard the Siar was like, but Dorsey’s observations hint at an oddly symbiotic relationship between Voogdt and Dorsey. For example, when he first arrived on the North Coast, Dorsey was surprised by the high prices he had to pay for objects that two weeks earlier had been so cheap on Bougainville:

O'Hanlon/Welsh

172

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 172

Robert L. Welsch

These people are keen traders, and what could be bought for a stick of tobacco in Buka or an arm ring in Bougainville here took a small knife, but by 11 I was glad to gather my spoils together and return to the ship. (1909a: 12 August 1908, Potsdamhafen)

The previous day Dorsey had been caught short in one of the villages and figured out what he needed for his ‘trade box’: As I had no ‘trade’ goods I made no attempt at purchases, but started back at 11 o’clock, stopping on the way at the little island village of Ragatta. . . . [Later] I went to the company’s store to lay in a ‘trade box’ full of trade – calico, fishhooks and lines, stick tobacco (Virginia), knives, big and little hatchets and USA axes (the natives won’t have a German made ax), beads and planes, i.e., the blades of planes which the natives use as substitute for their shell or stone adze blades, and matches. (1909a: 11 August 1908, Friedrich Wilhelmshafen)

Clearly, these comments about the desirability of American-made axes and tobacco were aimed at Dorsey’s American readership in Chicago and here, as elsewhere, Dorsey was playing to this audience. But in spite of these nationalistic sensitivities one can feel Dorsey’s discomfort at not having the right trade kit for buying the specimens he wanted. Faced with this lack of local knowledge, Dorsey must have turned to the other Europeans around him for help, including perhaps the shop keeper. He would also have turned to ‘the genial captain’, as he often described Voogdt, to find out about the local price structure, what items were most desired, and how to get the best price during his brisk trade. For the first part of the journey, Dorsey would have been largely dependent on Voogdt and Heine for knowing what kinds of European trade goods to buy, since they knew what the villagers desired. Once he had mastered this challenge, Dorsey was able to brag about the extensive supplies he was acquiring, but his success in trading must in large part have come from Voogdt’s knowledge of the coast and its peoples: At noon I made a hurried trip ashore to replenish my depleted stock of trade, adding beads, paints, mirrors, Chinese glass, arm rings, cheap knives, etc. I do not know the law here, but I think I should take out a trading license to be on the safe side, so greatly does my cabin look like a shop, but it is more orderly than most of the shops I have been in, and I have wiped the mold from my rings and the rust from my iron. (1909a: 15 August 1908, Eitape)

The relationship between these two men must have been even more complex when it came to their collecting activities. Although the captain had presumably been trading for some time, he was still keen to acquire objects that would bring a good price in the museum market.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 173

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

173

In this respect, Dorsey undoubtedly proved to be a useful informant. But in a different sense, Voogdt – who knew the coast and its curios – was probably Dorsey’s most important source of information about what was available in different places and how the villagers would respond to different kinds of trade goods. Indeed, it is likely that most of what Dorsey described in his diary was shaped by his conversations with Voogdt and Heine. One example will illustrate this. On their trip back down the Sepik, Dorsey described his activities at Magem (see Figures 7.2 and 7.3) and added a few general comments about the different villages and their contact experiences: Permission for me to collect could be withheld no longer and I got busy, in the busiest thirty minutes I ever spent in my life, I have done some strenuous collecting in the last seven weeks. During this time I made eighty-six individual purchases, my most prized possessions being several wonderfully decorated and carved skulls. This village represents, perhaps, the third of three grades of condition of culture I have encountered in New Guinea. The first is represented in Potsdam Hafen; there they were fairly well supplied with beads, knives, axes, etc., but they have to pay taxes and they know the purchasing power of the mark, and their frequent request was ‘Me likem moaney.’ The first village we encountered down the river represents the second; they have a few knives and axes; they are ready for beads and calico. But these Magem people, well, they have had just enough experience of steel knives and axes to know the superiority of such tools over their own of stone and shell. They wanted steel and they wanted it badly, especially small axes. Their contempt for beads, fish hooks, fish lines, looking glasses, and especially, calico was simply superb. One could not give away calico, and as for tobacco, they have tobacco to sell, besides they roll their own cigarets [sic] and do not know the pipe, and our ‘negro-head twist’ is a pipe tobacco. I got some really fine material and would have got more, had just got started, in fact, but the captain felt that his time was up. (1909a: 25 August 1909, Magem)

Here it seems likely that Dorsey was reporting details that Voogdt had told him over the previous two weeks. The examples were probably drawn from Dorsey’s own experiences, but the framework is one that was shared by labour recruiters and traders throughout the colony and Dorsey would have internalised this framework during the voyage. Lewis heard similar comments the following year. The implications of this relationship between Dorsey and Voogdt are significant. It would seem that not only did Voogdt train Dorsey in what to use for trade and what was available to buy but, through their nightly conversations, Voogdt moulded Dorsey’s perceptions about what was desirable to buy. In effect, by helping Dorsey make lucrative

O'Hanlon/Welsh

174

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 174

Robert L. Welsch

Figure 7.2: Magem men with skull and steel axe, Dorsey Collection, 1908.

Figure 7.3: Magem men, Kaiserin Augusta River, German New Guinea, Dorsey Collection, 1908.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 175

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

175

trades with the villagers, Voogdt shaped Dorsey’s collection. Then, when Voogdt wanted to sell his own collection back to Dorsey, it naturally had all the desirable characteristics that Dorsey had come to appreciate. Not surprisingly, on his return to Chicago, Dorsey was eager to find funds for purchasing the entire Voogdt collection. Given the brisk pace of trading, some of the similarities between the Voogdt and Dorsey collections must, of course, represent the role of indigenous agency. Villagers brought out only what they wanted to sell and only these objects could have been purchased no matter who the collector might have been. The fact that the Dorsey and Voogdt collections tend to be more ‘aesthetic’ than the Lewis collection made a year or two later, probably speaks to the dwindling number of ‘fine old pieces’ being offered for sale. But other factors, such as Lewis’s objection to purchasing objects decorated with European beads, typify the collecting strategy that shaped the Lewis collection but had no effect on the Dorsey, Voogdt or Umlauff collections. This is not to suggest that villagers did not have their own agendas, but rather that while they were together on the Siar, Dorsey, Voogdt and Heine participated in the same culture of collecting. The suggestion that Voogdt had shaped Dorsey’s collection is not intended to imply some insidious manipulation of a museum curator. Dorsey had limited experience in this part of the world, just as most anthropologists have little to draw upon during their first weeks in a field site. As a consequence, our initial impressions are shaped by the expatriates, leading citizens and friendly neighbours we meet in our first days or weeks (see, e.g., Knowles in this book). But while most anthropologists now spend a year or two in a community, Dorsey made the whole of his North Coast collections in seventeen days. If he felt comfortable in this field situation, it was because Voogdt and Heine helped him throughout the journey. It may be felt that this chapter over-interprets what amounts to rather meagre data about both Dorsey’s and Voogdt’s motivations. But A.B. Lewis’s early impressions and collecting strategies seem to have been similarly shaped by his contact with a different set of well-situated expatriates (Welsch 1999). But whether Dorsey’s impressions were shaped by Voogdt, or Voogdt’s collection was shaped by Dorsey’s likes and dislikes, it is clear from Field Museum records that Dorsey lusted after the Voogdt collection. Later he lusted after the Umlauff collection, in much the way Dorsey’s ‘natives’ lusted after fishhooks. And that is how the Field Museum came to own the Dorsey, Voogdt and Umlauff collections, three collections that represent the same time and the same places.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 176

176

Robert L. Welsch

Notes Abbreviation used for sources: FM Anthropology Department Archives, the Field Museum, Chicago. 1. One merely needs to note the high prices paid for objects once owned by well-known collectors or prominent museums to see that the lineage of ownership has supplanted and taken precedence over indigenous meanings. 2. I first made this point in 1991 in preparing the A.B. Lewis case at the entrance of ‘Pacific Spirits’ in the Regenstein Halls of the Pacific at the Field Museum, Chicago. Drawing on Lewis’s field notes, I showed how sophisticated in bargaining villagers in New Guinea could be over the sale of a carving that both Lewis and the villagers found especially desirable. 3. I have prepared and published a comparative tabulation of these four collections (Terrell and Welsch 1990: 162–3), in which I assumed the distinctiveness of the Lewis, Dorsey, Voogdt and Umlauff collections. 4. A correspondence analysis (Welsch 1996) comparing the Lewis collection with the Dorsey-Voogdt-Umlauff collections, and with the earlier Field Museum collections (especially the Finsch and Parkinson collection), suggests that such differences between the Dorsey, Voogdt and Umlauff collections on the one hand, and the Lewis collection on the other hand, are quantifiable. 5. Dorsey to F.J.V. Skiff, Director of the Field Museum 9 February 1909, FM. Correspondence in the archives of the Field Museum is in the Director’s Files; a few are also in Accession 1063. 6. Dorsey referred to the Voogdt collection as the ‘Huon Gulf Collection’ in the letter to Field Museum Director Skiff of 9 February 1909 where he urged its purchase. 7. Dorsey to Skiff 9 February 1909, FM. 8. Voogdt to Field Museum 19 July 1909, FM. 9. For example, Voogdt sent two large items to Chicago and asked Dorsey to set a fair price for them. 10. See, for example, Voogdt’s letters to Dorsey of 2 January 1910, 29 February 1910 and 26 March 1910, FM. 11. See FM Accession Files for the Voogdt collection, Accession 1080 and 1088, and also Buschmann (1999). 12. While researching material for this chapter, it became clear to me for the first time that as early as October 1907 Dorsey was developing a plan for sending A.B. Lewis to Dutch New Guinea (Dorsey to Skiff 16 October 1907, FM). According to this plan Lewis’s field research would have been part of Dorsey’s larger research programme. 13. Dorsey to Skiff 3 October 1907, FM. 14. Hahl was renowned for helping nearly every one of the scientists who visited his colony. When Lewis was ostracised by the New Guinea Company and by many government officers, Hahl remained supportive, though this ceased when he went on home leave early in 1910. See Welsch (1998 [vol. 1]: 259–60; [vol. 2]: 70–71). 15. These other Melanesian accessions were: Accession 1063 from the Admiralty Islands and St Matthias (74 catalogue numbers); Accession 1069 from Bougainville (590 catalogue numbers); Accession 1072 from New Ireland (359 catalogue numbers). There were also two separate accessions of human crania not considered directly here, which entered the department’s somatology collection: Accession 1065 (from New Ireland) and 1066 (from the mainland of German New Guinea). 16. References to Dorsey’s (1909a) expedition diary are cited in this format throughout this chapter; all were published in the Chicago Tribune. I have reconstructed the dates Dorsey was writing about from his specimen list, which refers to particular vil-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 177

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

177

lages by date. My reconstructions are as follows: 27 September 1909 (6–9 August 1908), 28 September (10–11 August), 29 September (12–13 August), 30 September (14–15 August), 1 October (15–17 August), 2 October (17–20 August), 3 October (21–22 August), 4 October (23–24 August), 5 October (25–26 August), 6 October (27 August–6 September). Subsequently, Lewis (Welsch 1998 [vol. 1]: 296, 307ff.) also experienced similar difficulties aboard the Siar when he ascended the Sepik in 1910. He was prevented from buying anything at all with trade goods until recruiting was over, and then had to compete with the New Guinea Company personnel who were buying up every ethnological specimen in sight. Dorsey’s original, handwritten diary has not survived and he may have edited his comments about Voogdt – essentially writing the captain out of the story – as he undoubtedly has done elsewhere in his published account. Dorsey to Skiff 8 August 1908, FM. About 100 catalogue numbers in the Dorsey collection (5.8 percent) have no field numbers, including a group of thirty objects identified merely as ‘Kaiserin Augusta River’ (Sepik River). I am reminded of a story I heard in 1989 from Thomas Harding, which he had heard in Europe from the late Alfred Bühler. Bühler had told Harding that he once met a German who had lived in New Guinea. This man claimed he had lost his collection of curios in a poker game with Dorsey. Since all of the other specimens are clearly identified by the community where they were collected and these are sorted by date and correspond closely to his diary account, only these 100 unnumbered pieces could possibly have been Dorsey’s gambling spoils. The story may be apocryphal, but whether true or not, it suggests some of the unusual social lives that collections may take. Dorsey to Skiff 9 February 1909, FM. Elsewhere (Welsch 1998 [vol. 2]: 160–62) I suggested that the 1909 accessions may have been collected as early as 1902. Voogdt had certainly visited most of the villages and communities represented in these accessions as early as 1902, but increasingly it appears that, while other items were collected early on, the bulk of the North Coast collection was made in 1908. Voogdt and Dorsey made the first twentieth-century contact with the Sepik River villages represented in this collection, so at least that part of the collection was from August 1908. For example, although both men and women used and carried string bags they are unambiguously a woman’s craft. String bags make up some 3.6 percent of the Lewis collection, but only 2.3 percent of the Dorsey collection and 2.8 percent of the Voogdt collections comprise string bags. While these statistics would seem to support this analysis, 7.3 percent of the Umlauff collection is made up of string bags. The Voogdt collection also contained forty-two items from Bougainville Bay (Wutung). It is not clear whether these were specimens collected by Voogdt on an earlier trip to the area, or if his crew visited Bougainville Bay while Voogdt and Dorsey looked around Vanimo. Neither in his diary nor in his correspondence does Dorsey mention Bougainville Bay, a village situated near the Dutch-German border. It is reasonable to suppose that Dorsey might not have known all the place-names along this stretch of coast, particularly since he himself did not go further west than Vanimo. Four other places west of Madang are included in the Umlauff accession: Manam Island, Hansa Bay, Kronprinzhafen and Karkar Island. Dorsey visited none of these, though Voogdt may have at some time between 1907 and 1909. Equally likely, however, is the possibility that Wilhelm Gramms (Welsch 1998 [vol. 2]: 66) or one of the other New Guinea Company agents acquired these items and sold them in a small lot to Umlauff. One further piece of evidence is that in September 1912, Voogdt contacted Dorsey once more, offering a new collection of 6,000 specimens from the coast of Kaiser

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 178

178

Robert L. Welsch Wilhelmsland. Dorsey rejected it on the grounds that the Field Museum already had ample collections from this region (Dorsey to Voogdt 7 September 1912, FM). This new collection was far larger than that offered by Umlauff, so we can safely assume that the new collection did not go to Umlauff in 1911, or the latter firm would have prepared a much larger catalogue.

Bibliography Appadurai, A., ed. The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. University Press, Cambridge, 1986. Buschmann, R. ‘The ethnographic frontier in German New Guinea, 1884–1914’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Honolulu, 1999. Cole, D. Captured heritage: the scramble for Northwest Coast artifacts. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1985. Connolly, B. and R. Anderson First contact. Viking Penguin, New York, 1987. Dorsey, G.A. ‘One hundred instalments of a diary of a 47,000 mile journey’, 16 August 1909 to 23 November 1909, Chicago Daily Tribune, 1909a. ———. ‘A visit to the German Solomon Islands’ in Putnam anniversary volume: anthropological essays presented to Frederic War Putnam in honor of his seventieth birthday, April 16, 1909. G.E. Stechert & Co, New York, 1909b, 521–44. Hakiwai, A. and J. Terrell Ruatepupuke: a Maori meeting house. The Field Museum Centennial Collection, The Field Museum, Chicago, 1994. Jenkins, D. ‘Object lesson and ethnographic displays: museum exhibitions and the making of American anthropology’, Comparative Study of Society and History vol. 36 no. 2 (1994): 242–70. Lewis, A.B. ‘The ethnology of Melanesia’, Department of Anthropology Guide, part 5. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 1932. O’Hanlon, M. Paradise: portraying the New Guinea highlands. British Museum Press, London, 1993. Price, S. Primitive art in civilized places. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989. Rubel, P.G. and A. Rosman ‘George Brown, pioneer missionary and collector’, Museum Anthropology vol. 20 no. 1 (1996): 60–68. Schildkrout, E. and C.A. Keim, eds The scramble for art in Central Africa. University Press, Cambridge, 1998. Stocking, G.W. ‘Essays on museums and material culture’ in Objects and others: essays on museums and material culture ed. G.W. Stocking. History of Anthropology, vol. 3, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1985, 3–14. Terrell, J. and R.L. Welsch ‘Trade networks, areal integration, and diversity along the North Coast of New Guinea’, Asian Perspectives vol. 29 (1990): 156–65. Thode-Arora, H. ‘Die Familie Umlauff und ihre Firmen – EthnographikaHändler in Hamburg’, Mitteilungen aus dem Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg (N.F.) vol. 22 (1992): 143–58.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 179

One Time, One Place, Three Collections

179

Thomas, N. Entangled objects: exchange, material culture and colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991. Welsch, R.L. ‘Language, culture, and data on the North Coast of New Guinea’, Journal of Quantitative Anthropology vol. 6 no. 4 (1996): 209–34. ———. ‘Historical ethnology: the context and meaning of the A.B. Lewis collection’, Anthropos vol. 94 (1996): 447–65. Welsch, R. L., ed. An American anthropologist in Melanesia: A.B. Lewis and the Joseph N. Field expedition, 1909–1913, 2 vols. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 1998. Welsch, R.L., J. Terrell and J.A. Nadolski ‘Language and culture on the North Coast of New Guinea’, American Anthropologist vol. 94 no. 3 (1992): 568–600.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 180

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 181

Chapter 8

THE CARELESS COLLECTOR: Malinowski and the Antiquarians

Michael W. Young

‘Not the sort of man who is any good for museum work’ As in so many other domains of Bronislaw Malinowski’s personal and professional life, contradictions characterised his career as a field collector. Two vignettes illustrate different views of his ambiguous achievement. In August 1921 Malinowski’s chief British mentor and patron, Charles G. Seligman, wrote to him in the Canary Islands about the prospects of finding him a job in England. Seligman thought that something might turn up at the London School of Economics (LSE); as for Cambridge, Rivers had advised there was very little hope of being favoured by Haddon, who had his own pupils to consider. Besides, added Seligman, with a hint of reproach, ‘it is quite clear you are not the sort of man who is any good for Museum work’.1 Having by then already ended his effective career as a collector, Malinowski would not have disagreed. Coincidentally, a few weeks earlier Seligman had written to inform Malinowski that his artefacts had finally arrived from Australia and been delivered to the British Museum.2 The Keeper of Ethnography, H.T. Braunholtz, later recalled: We had been warned that it would be large; but I must confess to a feeling of some astonishment, almost amounting to dismay, when I perceived some twenty-five or thirty large packing cases arriving on the Museum doorstep. This was his collection from the Trobriand Islands, comprising

O'Hanlon/Welsh

182

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 182

Michael W. Young

every kind of object made and used by the inhabitants, in numerous examples. One could not help wondering if anything had been left in situ. (1943:15)

The occasion of Braunholtz’s eulogy was a memorial meeting held for Malinowski in May 1942. Not surprisingly, then, Braunholtz offered a charitable judgement of one who has been accused (along with Radcliffe-Brown) of tolling the death knell for museum-based comparative ethnology (Welsch 1998: 558–61). Malinowski, said Braunholtz, ‘has been credited with a distaste for concrete and material things’: The intractability of hard dead things, divorced from their true setting, seemed at times to daunt and even repel him. I think that he felt that they clogged the freedom of his spirit. But if so, then his achievement as a collector becomes all the more remarkable. And of course, it was precisely the spirit, or I might say the spirituality of the collector, which was needed to infuse life into the dry bones. (Braunholtz 1943: 15)

Malinowski’s earliest published statement concerning the elusive meaning of mute artefacts is well-known. The Trobriand canoe, he wrote, ‘can be described, photographed and even bodily transported into a museum. But – and this is a truth too often overlooked – the ethnographic reality of the canoe would not be brought much nearer to a student at home, even by placing a perfect specimen right before him’ (1922: 105). In notes which can be dated to May 1921, Malinowski toyed with the idea of embodiment. He loftily characterised material culture as ‘the embodiment of spiritual creation’ and ‘the permanent framework of social life, and of all cultural activities’. Items of material culture also embodied ‘social ideas’. This line of thought led Malinowski to ‘the meaning of things and of words’ and bore fruit in one of his most influential essays, published in 1923. In the following sentence, ‘word’ can be replaced by ‘artefact’: ‘…the meaning of a word must always be gathered, not from a contemplation of this word, but from an analysis of its functions, with reference to the given culture’ (Malinowski 1960 [1923]: 309). Philosophers of language had got ‘meaning’ the wrong way round: they looked for content, what a word or utterance contained, when they should be looking at what contained the utterance. In short, meaning was always defined by an utterance’s ‘context of situation’. Malinowski had viewed photography in the same way: the social context provided the only reliable guide to the interpretation of an image, and this, as has been argued, was the reason he always took his photographs from the middle distance and invariably framed them horizontally, thereby capturing to an optimum degree the visual context of situation (Young 1998: 16–20). Extrapolating this argument to material culture, we can readily understand how Malinowski came to regard

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

The Careless Collector

Page 183

183

museum specimens as ‘disembodied’, lifeless artefacts, without stories to tell. Once embalmed in a museum, they were bereft of the context of situation which had given them vitality and meaning. In Coral Gardens and their Magic, Malinowski’s greatest monument to functional analysis, he eloquently expressed his position with respect to material culture: As a sociologist, I have always had a certain amount of impatience with the purely technological enthusiasm of the museum ethnologist. In a way I do not want to move one inch from my intransigent position that the study of technology alone and the fetishistic reverence for an object of material culture is scientifically sterile. At the same time, I have come to realise that a knowledge of technology is indispensable as a means of approach to economic and sociological activities and to what might be adequately called native science. (1935: 460)

‘Personally,’ he wrote elsewhere in the same volume, ‘I am interested in technology only in so far as it reveals the traditional ways and means by which knowledge and industry solve certain problems presented by a given culture’ (1935: 240). This statement prefaces a highly detailed, thirty-page description of the construction of a Trobriand yam storehouse, abundantly illustrated with diagrams and photographs. Malinowski’s self-confessed ‘ignorance of certain technological principles’ and ‘lack of competence’ in technical description echoes his disarming mea culpa concerning photography: ‘I put photography on the same level as the collecting of curios – almost as an accessory relaxation of fieldwork’, and he implicitly denigrated the activities of collecting and photography by relegating them to ‘secondary occupations’ of fieldwork (1935: 460–1). His disappointment with photographs was not unlike his dissatisfaction with museum displays: they failed to convey the complex ‘reality’ of native life. Once spirited away from their living contexts, items of material culture were, in Braunholtz’s phrase, ‘hard dead things’. Addressing a Cornell University audience in March 1933, Malinowski provocatively declared that in its fascination with ‘skulls, bones, debris, dust’, antiquarian anthropology was ‘necrophilous’. Elsewhere in these unpublished Messenger Lectures, he lamented the evolutionary assumptions organising the displays of ‘primitive money’ in the British and the Pitt Rivers Museums. In a striking surgical image, he scorned ‘the dissecting-room anthropology which cuts apart the essential ligatures of culture, [and] vitiates from the outset the results’. He was equally scathing when attacking those ‘pernicious’ theories – Kulturkreislehre and diffusionism – conceived by ‘museum moles like Graebner and Ankermann’ and ‘born in the dust and welter’ of an ethnographic museum.3

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 184

184

Michael W. Young

In April 1914, in preparation for his forthcoming trip to New Guinea, Malinowski visited the renowned physical anthropologist Felix von Luschan at the Museum of Ethnography in Berlin. He noted in his diary: ‘The Museum, it seems to me, is significantly better than the Brit[ish Museum]. This excites me a bit.’ Why it excited him he does not say, but its founder was Adolf Bastian (best remembered today for his slogan ‘the psychic unity of mankind’), and it is likely that the displays reflected Bastian’s thinking concerning ‘elementary ideas’ and their expression in material culture. As a collector, Bastian was considerably ahead of his time, and in 1885 (when Malinowski was but a year old), he had written: The traveller who is sent out by a museum…should be advised not to be taken in by extraordinary dazzling items – which were so well suited to be hung as trophies in the old style curio-cabinets – but to look for the normal and average character of the life-style of a particular ethnic group and collect tools and artefacts accordingly. (Cited in Koepping 1973: 20)

‘I bargain till I am ready to drop’ Malinowski’s collecting career may be said to have begun, in a modest way, in Western Australia where he and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, his companion from Zakopane, spent a couple of weeks before sailing east to Adelaide. It was near Perth, according to Malinowski’s unpublished diary, that he made his first contact with Aborigines (his 1913 book on their family life having being written before he had ever seen one). On Sunday 26 July 1914, the two friends were conducted to a ‘blacks’ camp’ where they were treated to a demonstration of boomerang throwing. After tea Malinowski obtained ‘a woomera and a churinga; both good’. A few days later he obtained ‘a large quantity of first-rate things and interesting information’, though what ultimately happened to these specimens is a mystery. Malinowski interrupted his diary at this point. A few days later the three hundred visiting scientists who had come to Australia for meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science learned that the Empire was at war with Germany. Among the British anthropologists were A.C. Haddon, W.H.R. Rivers, R.R. Marett, Henry Balfour, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (then simply A.R. Brown), John Layard and, of course, Malinowski, who was generously permitted by the Australian authorities to proceed to Papua as planned. It was the parting of the ways for Staś Witkiewicz who returned to Russian Poland to fight with the Tsar’s army. Cut off from his mother in Poland and from his friends and funds in England, under suspicion as an ‘enemy alien’ in Australia and Papua

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

The Careless Collector

Page 185

185

and required to report regularly to the police, Malinowski managed to put a brave face on it. ‘September 1st began a new epoch in my life: an expedition all on my own to the tropics,’ is how he resumed his diary in Port Moresby. Soon he was dabbling in fieldwork among the local Motu, aided by Ovia Ahuia whom Seligman had trained as an informant a decade earlier. And soon he was discovering how difficult it was to write accurate descriptions of artefacts and technical processes. Halfway through his first field notebook he wrote: ‘Net (koda) for catching pigs, a piece of rantang [sic] cane bent into a circular shape, in the joint wound around with pieces of split cane bark. A semicircular piece of cane comes from the point when joining space finished. String comes from ogeta, a fibre obtained from the bark of a tree’.4 A pencil note inserted beneath this passage snaps irritably: ‘This whole description is muddled up – moreover unnecessary, as we have plenty such nets in the museums’. This was an early sign that Malinowski was inclined to shirk the demands of painstaking technical description. For a time he would struggle to conform, though his English was frequently not up to the task. ‘On abstract questions he writes quite well, but there is some trouble with his technical descriptions,’ Sir Edward Stirling told Haddon while he was editing The Natives of Mailu.5 Yet this monograph has been commended by a museum anthropologist as ‘a veritable treasure-trove of data on objects, their manufacture and function’ (Norick 1976: 5). In his first letter to Seligman from ‘the Promised Land’ of Papua, Malinowski remarked on the trouble he was having: The villages [around Port Moresby] are beastly corrupted and polluted: there are a couple of iron bungalows stuck right into the middle of the old houses. I tried to get a detailed account of the manner in which a native house is built, but did not succeed so far. I learned from Ahuia’s second wife… to make sihi strings and net bags. I find investigation and description of technical details (technology) more difficult than anything else.6

Malinowski’s real battle with technology began on Mailu Island. Although Seligman had tried to nurture Malinowski’s fickle interest in technology and the collection of specimens, it was Notes and Queries on Anthropology that Malinowski consulted for guidance. As historians have repeatedly emphasised, the 1912 edition of this handbook was significant for its innovative sociological contributions by Rivers, presaging the paradigm shift which Malinowski would appropriate as his revolution in anthropology (Urry 1972: 51; Stocking 1995: 121–3). What is too easily forgotten is the dominant place accorded to technology in this and previous editions. Part II (Technology) of the fourpart manual was the longest section (some ninety pages compared to

O'Hanlon/Welsh

186

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 186

Michael W. Young

seventy on sociology and eighty on arts and sciences). This is a fair indication of the weight given to technology by the anthropological establishment. In short, fieldworkers were expected to investigate all aspects of material culture and record them minutely. In this edition there was also a two-page ‘General Note on the Collection of Specimens’, contributed by Haddon’s pupil, Barbara FreireMarreco, which would have been Malinowski’s most reliable guide to collecting during his three separate fieldtrips between 1914 and 1918. It helped, perhaps, that he was personally acquainted with Miss FreireMarreco, having met her in England in 1910. She urged the fieldworker to collect ‘not fine specimens only, but objects in common use’, to document the making of an article from start to finish, and to obtain specimens of the raw and prepared material of the finished article and of the article ‘in various critical stages of manufacture’. Large manufactured objects such as houses and boats ‘must be described as fully as possible, with photographs, drawings, models, and measurements’ (BAAS 1912: 27). One can imagine Malinowski (a poor draftsman and inept handyman) groaning in the face of such onerous technical demands. For only a few items of material culture did he follow most of these instructions almost to the letter. Alas, he ignored Freire-Marreco’s commonsense guidelines on labelling: ‘Label every specimen at once or mistakes will certainly follow…. Give the English and native names for the object, its use, by whom and where made, from whom, where, and when obtained, the price given, and clear reference to your other notes or photographs’ (1912: 28). It seems that not a single specimen collected by Malinowski has or ever had such a perfectly documented label attached to it. Judging Malinowski’s collecting performance against the exacting standards and yardstick advice offered in these few pages of Notes and Queries (representing as they did conventional anthropological wisdom), he must be marked beta-minus. His most serious shortcoming was that he did not document his specimens systematically enough. In a word, he was careless. To resume this chronicle of Malinowski’s collecting career, we find him in Mailu on Thursday 12 November, barely tolerating a visit to the island by Haddon and his daughter Kathleen (Malinowski 1967: 27). The unlikely appearance of the itinerant Cambridge don and exemplary fieldworker (whom Malinowski held in guarded esteem but did not greatly like) must have appalled the young apprentice. After all, Haddon was the most influential man in British anthropology: mentor and patron of Malinowski’s own mentor and patron, Seligman. Noting his ‘passions and moods’ on that day in Mailu, Malinowski recorded: ‘hatred for Haddon for annoying me, for conspiring with the missionary. Envy because of the specimens he is obtaining’. Why envy? Was Haddon, secure in his professional seniority and invulnerable British status in a British colony,

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 187

The Careless Collector

187

pulling rank on the insecure, penniless Pole, whisking the best specimens from under his nose and paying for them handsomely? Apparently not. Unlike Malinowski, Haddon was a paragon of specimen-collecting, artefact-sketching virtue. He dutifully recorded in his notebook exactly what artefacts he purchased and precisely how much he paid for them, which he did with sticks of black twist tobacco.7 Haddon’s Mailu haul consisted of: 4 clay pots 4 sago adzes 1 stone implement 2 armshells 2 smoking pipes Matting for sails Materials for skirt

4 sticks 18 3 6 2 1 1

Thus, fifteen items cost Haddon thirty-five sticks of tobacco. At two pence per stick this added up to five shillings and ten pence, worth about £12 in today’s money. Was this level of payment, modest as it may now seem, beyond the means of Malinowski? Certainly not. In the Acknowledgement to Argonauts of the Western Pacific he states that his annual budget during the six years 1914–20 was approximately £250 a year (about £10,500 today), out of which he ‘defrayed’ the cost of ‘a fair amount of ethnographic specimens’ (1922: xix). He is as coy about the sum he ‘defrayed’ as he is about the number of specimens he purchased, but he told T.A. Joyce of the British Museum that he had spent £300 on his Trobriand collection.8 It seems likely that he exaggerated. The only general statement of Malinowski’s collecting strategy on record is the one he gave to Atlee Hunt, Secretary of the Department of External Affairs and his chief patron in the Australian Government. Not long after settling in Kiriwina in 1915, he wrote to Hunt concerning the specimens he was collecting for the National Museum in Melbourne at the behest of its director, Baldwin Spencer. It was a strategy that echoed the one recommended by both Bastian and Freire-Marreco: I may mention that the value of the collection will not consist in the rarity of the objects – as I have no means to acquire rare and expensive things as, e.g. specimens of large stone axes or “shell-money”. I am trying to collect a number of well-described specimens, representing the different phases of native life.9

Seligman’s letters frequently refer to the kind of specimens he expected Malinowski to obtain. The most detailed such letter dates from the period between Malinowski’s first and second Trobriand fieldtrips:

O'Hanlon/Welsh

188

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 188

Michael W. Young

let me especially urge on you the importance of decorated pots and potsherds, carved canoe ornaments, lime spatulae, and so on, which you can actually acquire or take careful photographs of while you find out the significance of each part of the carving or other decoration on the object. About skulls, collect all you can of which you can ascertain the origin, and do this even if you have to pay a few shillings each, which I will defray as a private affair of my own.10

Malinowski only partly heeded Seligman’s exhortations. There are apparently no human skulls in the official collection, although he told his Cornell audience in 1933 that he had taken a few skulls from the burial caves on Kiriwina. His collection of pots was pathetic: two intact and one broken one, provenance undocumented (but undoubtedly from the Amphlett Islands). His haul of about seventy carved canoe ornaments (tabuyo and lagim splashboards particularly) was far more impressive. After stone implements and fragments thereof, lime spatulae (kema) account for the most numerous category of artefact in the collection (about 180 items). Every visitor to the Trobriands leaves with a fistful of carved wooden spatulae, the cheapest, most portable and aesthetically pleasing of all Trobriand artefacts. Like the wooden bowls (kaboma) and pig figures (tokwalu), limesticks were already being carved for a nascent tourist trade. Entries in Malinowski’s diaries suggest that his collecting was for the most part haphazard and opportunistic, though the Trobriand collection itself is testimony to a considerable amount of systematic collecting. He refers to collecting most often, however, while in Mailu and elsewhere on the south coast during December 1914, so it is ironic indeed that this entire collection appears to have been lost. In a Suau village on 9 December, he ‘strolled about and bought a few curios’ (Malinowski 1967: 51). At Dahuni, further round the Suau coast: ‘In the evening I bought a few objects – the beginning of “new type museum”: household objects’ (1967: 57). He sounds rather pleased with himself – perhaps recalling the advice of Bastian, Haddon and Freire-Marreco. Back in Mailu on 19 December, he made ‘an attempt to collect examples of all technical objects, etc.. Around 6 went to the village, distributed tobacco and ordered a model of an oro’u [canoe]’ (1967: 58). The next day: ‘Ordered a stone for grinding sago and a model of a boat, for 10 sticks of tobacco’ (1967: 59). In the longest entry concerning his collecting activities he wrote: After breakfast I took a pile of tobacco and went to the village and photographed the lugumi [canoes], then… went to buy stuff. Usually I overpay tremendously, I think, but I bargain till I am ready to drop… Two fellows brought me oba’ua – little axes made of shells. I went to the village around

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

The Careless Collector

Page 189

189

4, bought two bamboo sticks with feathers…. Keneni and Dini went home with me and gave me descriptions of the specimens (1967: 72).

Malinowski’s collecting in the Trobriands receives scant mention in his last diary. He appears to have done some systematic collecting during his first few months there, but he kept no diary of that first fieldtrip to Kiriwina. His notebooks, however, do suggest a flurry of investigations into material culture during those months. Shortly after he arrived in Kiriwina in late June he filled several pages with descriptions of types of stone implements and several more pages on types of women’s skirts and their manufacture. In early August he devoted much of the first half of his notebook to the description of specimens of all kinds.11 Initially, he would have been aided by R.L. Bellamy, the Assistant Resident Magistrate at Losuia, with whom he stayed before pitching his tent in Omarakana. Bellamy was obviously in a position to order people to bring artefacts to Malinowski for purchase. It was shortly after his arrival, during the celebratory milamala period following the yam harvest, that Malinowski secured a large collection of dancing shields (kaidebu). As he later explained, these so excited the young men of Omarakana that they promptly organised dances – to the annoyance of the elders, who then blamed the anthropologist for breaching ritual protocol and antagonising the ancestral spirits (Malinowski 1916: 380; see Young 1998: 92–3). During these first few months of fieldwork in Kiriwina Malinowski had plans to catch a boat to the Mambare region in northeastern Papua, so it made sense to collect as much as he could before leaving

Figure 8.1: Trobriand dancers with kaidebu (dance shields), photographed by B. Malinowski, 1915.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 190

190

Michael W. Young

the Trobriands. In the event, of course, he decided to stay there – a significant decision, it transpired, for the future of social anthropology (see Young 1984).

A Careless Collector? Today, Malinowski’s collection of Trobriand artefacts resides in three separate locations in three different continents. The largest, of 1,519 specimens, is housed in the Robert H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology (recently renamed The Phoebe Hearst Museum) at the University of California, Berkeley.12 The most select – what might be called the ‘core collection’ – is in the British Museum and consists of 672 registered items. The smallest collection of 282 objects is to be found in the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne.13 Before discussing these three collections, an attempt will be made to appraise Malinowski in his guise as collector. To my knowledge, no one has made a more thorough study of his Trobriand collections than Frank Norick of the Lowie Museum. It was Norick who rescued from its ‘uncatalogued limbo’ the collection Valetta Swann, Malinowski’s widow, sold to Robert F. Heizer of the Lowie Museum in 1965. Norick also made a comparative study of Malinowski’s collection in the British Museum, although at the time of his research he was unaware of the smaller collection in Melbourne. Given his intimate familiarity with the Trobriand material, Norick’s evaluation of Malinowski’s achievements and shortcomings as a collector must be respected. He concluded: It is apparent from the range and type of material that Malinowski collected… that he made an effort to acquire a representative collection of artefacts. While he may be faulted for a certain lack of thoroughness, one must admire the deliberateness he showed in obtaining variant examples of a single type of object. (1976: 220)

On the negative side, Norick criticised Malinowski for his failure to supply adequate documentation, his dismissive attitude towards material culture in general, and his ‘inconsistent’ treatment of technology. One must be cautious here, for perhaps Malinowski was not quite as guilty as Norick believed him to be. On the paucity of documentation, the charges must stand, though perhaps in mitigated form. Norick complained that ‘not a shred’ accompanied the collection sold to the Lowie Museum, ‘no field notes or even a register of artefacts’. And his sanguine expectations of thorough documentation of the British Museum’s collection were also disappointed; there was only ‘a catalogue of sorts in which the objects are roughly ordered according to categories of use or function. With few exceptions… none of the specimens therein listed had more

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

The Careless Collector

Page 191

191

than a one or two word description’ (1976: 4). Norick made an unfavourable comparison with Seligman’s earlier collection from British New Guinea, donated to the British Museum as the Cooke Daniels Collection, which is (as might be expected of an ‘antiquarian’) more thoroughly documented than Malinowski’s.14 The present writer has also been unable to find among Malinowski’s papers any list or lists of the specimens he collected (and there is no comprehensive list of his photographs). But one might enter the plea that Malinowski had much of the documentation buried in his fieldnotes, where they are inaccessible to any but the most diligent researcher.15 Descriptions of artefacts and the processes of their manufacture are scattered throughout his fieldnotes, but with a few exceptions he did not collate them or write them up in systematic format. What Norick takes to be Malinowski’s ‘missing’ documentation on particular artefacts is in certain cases silently present among his copious notes on every conceivable topic. For what it is worth, a rough count of the number of pages Malinowski devoted to artefacts and Trobriand technology in his notebooks yields about 180 of a total of 1,400 (almost 13 percent). In addition to notebooks (the use of which he abandoned soon after beginning his second period of fieldwork in Kiriwina), Malinowski kept loose-leaf files of larger format.16 But relatively few among the many hundreds of sheets are devoted to technological description and sketches. There is an instructive parallel between Malinowski’s conduct as a photographer and as a collector. His exertions in both fields, while sometimes driven by a keen desire to ‘cover the ground’ (as he once said of his efforts to complete Mailu ethnography), were sometimes perfunctory and unsystematic. At best, they were conscientiously conducted rather than passionately pursued. Just as he endeavoured to photograph instances of every significant cultural activity in the Trobriands, so he tried to collect samples of every type of artefact in different stages of manufacture. He sought total coverage, full representation of the islanders’ material culture. But in the last analysis he was negligent in providing thorough documentation. His photographic archive, too, is replete with silent images of anonymous people in unnamed villages. Malinowski’s evident reluctance to document his collections (whether of photographs or artefacts) once he got them home smacked of his attitude towards domestic chores. Housekeeping was for servants.

The Disposal (and Loss) of ‘representative collections’ Not only a careless collector, Malinowski was also a careless curator. His Mailu collection appears to have been lost in its entirety and the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

192

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 192

Michael W. Young

larger part of his Trobriand collection finished up in a museum not of his own choosing. The missing Mailu collection remains a mystery. His diary refers to collecting in Motu, Samarai and Suau, as well as in Mailu, and there was certainly an assumption on the part of Seligman, Hubert Murray and Atlee Hunt that such a collection existed. Yet today none of the museums with which Malinowski had any dealings (in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, and subsequently London, Oxford and posthumously Berkeley) have anything, however modest in size, that can be identified as a Mailu collection. Soon after his return to Melbourne in October 1918, Malinowski wrote to Baldwin Spencer promising to ‘select and catalogue’ a collection of ‘Trobriand ethnological artefacts’ for the National Museum of Victoria: According to an agreement I made with Prof. Seligman in May, 1914, any specimens collected by me are the property of the University of London, Prof. Seligman having the sole right to dispose of them. I understand that Prof. Seligman has talked the matter over with you, and he gave me accordingly instructions to select a representative collection for the Melbourne Museum.17

Malinowski had been given £30 from the Museum Trustees ‘towards the expenses of collecting’, but he proposed to return this sum ‘as it appears to me now that it will be simpler if a free gift is made to the Museum of the specimens as well as of my personal work in collecting, arranging and cataloguing them’. He suggested: that it would be marked plainly that the collection has been donated by Prof. Seligman, and that all specimens have been collected and catalogued by myself. I consider that authorship and scientific responsibility should be as plainly stated on scientific collections as on scientific publications.18

When Spencer objected that there were ‘technical difficulties’ in returning the grant, Malinowski proposed that the money be sent to ‘Mr William Hancock, trader & pearler in the Trobriand Is.’ who ‘gave a considerable amount of his time & took great trouble in assisting me to collect, pack & transport the specimens’.19 Billy Hancock’s crude lists of the contents of twenty-two cases of ‘curios’ survive, proving that Malinowski had indeed left to him the job of packing the collection. There can be little doubt that Malinowski also used Hancock as a middleman in the acquisition of specimens. Many fine artefacts (including kula valuables) passed through the pearl trader’s hands, and he probably set aside choice items for Malinowski’s inspection and possible purchase (see plate 187, Young 1998: 268). His collection would have been stored at Billy’s place at Gusaweta, the most central and most frequented of Malinowski’s recreational sites while he was in the field.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

The Careless Collector

Page 193

193

Figure 8.2: Hancock, Malinowski (centre) and Toguguwa with betel-chewing utensils. Malinowski holds kula valuable with Pandanus streamers over his left arm. Possibly photographed at Gusaweta, 2 January 1918.

It was a full year later when the cases finally arrived in Melbourne, and it was not until late February 1920, a matter of days before Malinowski’s departure for England, that he wrote to inform Spencer that he had ‘arranged and exhibited’ the collection of ‘Ethnological Specimens from the Trobriand Islands’ in accordance with Spencer’s instructions.20 Malinowski had earlier proposed that the collection be donated in C.G. Seligman’s name, but Seligman modestly demurred; he ‘rather fancied’ that it should commemorate Malinowski’s main financial benefactor. Accordingly, it was named The Robert Mond Collection.21 The register lists 282 items in this collection, and they were accompanied by thirty-three of Malinowski’s best photographs. The documentation he supplied for most items was minimal: for example, ‘shark rattle’, ‘head pad, woven vegetable fibre’, ‘nose stick, made of the orange coloured hinge part of the clam shell’. But he wrote a number of detailed labels for sets of specimens (stone tools, lime spatulas, and toy canoes) and for a lavish display of women’s skirts (dobe), showing how they were manufactured. Two years later he would present copies of the same labels to the British Museum, together with his ethnological introduction to the Trobriand Islands which probably graced the entrance to the exhibition (reproduced in Young 1998: 31–5). How representative was this Melbourne collection, of both the range of Trobriand technology and Malinowski’s collection as a whole? There are fifty-five different categories of object in the register,

O'Hanlon/Welsh

194

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 194

Michael W. Young

an average of five items per category. Many categories are over-represented: there are approximately forty stone implements, fourteen ‘ceremonial’ axe blades (beku), eighteen canoe washboards (lagim and tabuyo), twelve dance shields (kaidebu), thirty-three lime spatulae, eleven wooden bowls, and seventeen skirts or parts thereof. Together these specimens make up about half the Robert Mond Collection. Conversely, many categories of object are under-represented; for example, there are only two kula armshells (mwali), two shields, one large drum (kupi), and the two clay pots that Malinowski collected in the Amphletts. Conspicuous by their absence are digging sticks (dayma), carved human or pig figures (tokwalu), shell belts (wakala), boar’s tusk pendants (doga), and whalebone lime spatulae (bosu). Concerning the uneven balance between classes of items in the three collections, just a few examples are offered. There are no carved ebony walking sticks in the British Museum, yet there are five in Melbourne and thirty in Berkeley. There are no shields in Berkeley, but six in the British Museum. Conversely, there are no cooking paddles (kaineva) in either the Victoria or British Museums, yet there are as many as twenty-five in Berkeley. Such anomalies cannot easily be explained. Spencer had arranged for the bulk of Malinowski’s collection to be repacked and forwarded to England. ‘The British Museum is going to purchase my collection & I gather they are going to pay me royally,’ Malinowski wrote to James Kershaw, the curator who had helped him display the Melbourne collection.22 Following the arrival of his packing cases at the British Museum, a brief correspondence ensued between Joyce and Malinowski, who was then staying in the south of France. It concerned the payment of £150 for the collection (or that part of it the museum wanted), a sum which apparently satisfied Malinowski.23 If it was indeed true (as he had righteously informed Spencer) that the specimens were the property of the University of London then he must have secured Seligman’s and the University’s permission to sell them. There is no correspondence concerning this issue, however. It was presumably British Museum staff, in consultation with Malinowski, who selected the specimens for purchase. We can only imagine how the process worked, but one must suppose that at some stage Joyce and Braunholtz declared ‘That’s enough for now’, and offered to store the remaining artefacts pending a future decision as to whether or not to purchase any more. The registration of the specimens began in 1921, but it is not known when it was completed. The status of the ‘remaining’ artefacts is also unclear, at least until 1936 when, pleading shortage of space, the museum apparently asked Malinowski to remove them. This much is known, not from British Museum records, but from the other end of the Earth.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

The Careless Collector

Page 195

195

In early July 1936, Ian Hogbin of the University of Sydney, who had recently spent some months in London attending Malinowski’s seminar, contacted the Australian Museum in Sydney. Hogbin informed the director that Malinowski was willing to offer his Trobriand collection ‘now stored in the British Museum’ to the Australian Museum, if he were to ‘make application’ for it.24 The director promptly wrote to Malinowski expressing great interest and asking for further details.25 There is no correspondence from Malinowski’s side other than a brief reply by his research assistant, Iris Harris, saying that Professor Malinowski was abroad, representing the University of London at the Harvard University Tercentennial.26 Malinowski obviously changed his mind about offering his collection to Sydney, however, and a reminder from the director the following April went unanswered. The latter appeared to believe that the collection in question was the one Malinowski had given (or rather sold) to the British Museum: ‘It is, we understand, to be disposed of by the British Museum because of lack of storage accommodation’, as the original memorandum put it. But it seems highly unlikely that the British Museum would wish to divest itself of the Malinowski collection altogether, and one can only assume that what Malinowski had in mind to dispose of was the large ‘surplus’ or ‘remnant’ collection of Trobriand artefacts that the British Museum had declined to accept in 1922. Malinowski probably pondered various possibilities for the disposal of this collection. We know now, of course, that it finished up, not in Sydney, but in the Robert Lowie (now the Pheobe Hearst) Museum at Berkeley. Malinowski’s youngest daughter, Helena Wayne, remembers the artefacts being stored in the family home on Primrose Hill. She also recalls something about a ‘row’ with the British Museum: What I was told as a child… is that [my father] had had some altercation with the British Museum which led to the return of some of the collection to him. At any rate these Trobriandiana were stored in our house in Oppidans Road in what was known as the Dead Corner, a windowless bay off the children’s basement nursery used for general storage too.27

Recalling Malinowski’s dim view of dusty, tenebrous museums, it is perfectly apt that he should refer to the temporary repository of his artefacts as the Dead Corner. It was only after the war, however, that Helena learned from Ursula Grant Duff (family friend and former guardian of Malinowski’s daughters) that the Trobriand artefacts had been moved to a barn in the grounds of High Elms in Farnham, Kent, the home of Ursula’s mother, Lady Avebury. Following Malinowski’s death, Audrey Richards and Iris Harris had taken upon themselves the task of clearing the house in Oppidans Road. Mindful

O'Hanlon/Welsh

196

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 196

Michael W. Young

of the London bombing, they decided (together with Ursula and her mother), that the safest place for the collection was in the country. These women had apparently been told by Malinowski before his departure for America that he had ‘promised’ the collection to the Pitt Rivers Museum. In May 1946, Audrey Richards wrote to T.H. Penniman, asking if there was ‘any likelihood’ of the Pitt Rivers wanting ‘the remains’ of Malinowski’s Trobriand collection. She was aware that in 1921 the whole was roughly valued at three hundred pounds and that the British Museum had paid half of that for its portion, though Braunholtz now estimated that ‘the rest… could not be worth more than 100 pounds’.28 Penniman’s reply is not on file, but soon afterwards Beatrice Blackwood, deputy curator, went to High Elms to inspect the collection. It was infested by insects and deteriorating. She took back with her to Oxford a case of artefacts bearing the label ‘Provisionally selected by Prof. H. Balfour for Pitt Rivers Museum’. As Balfour had died in 1939, this label is proof that he had seen the collection before Malinowski left Britain for the United States.29 The case contained only fifty-two specimens, however, mostly shell ornaments and lime spatulae. Before the museum had expressed any interest in the rest of the collection, Richards sent a warning letter to Blackwood, saying she had heard from Malinowski’s widow in Mexico City, who ‘wants to sell none of her husband’s things’. Madam Malinowska ‘seems to have misunderstood the situation and to have thought that you and I were somehow stealing her property!’30 Blackwood nonetheless registered and numbered the items. Almost a year elapsed before Valetta Malinowska wrote to the museum, peevishly demanding their return. She had been waiting in vain, it seems, for some kind of offer from the museum, but ‘in no circumstances’ did she now wish to sell the specimens, and wanted everything to be shipped to her, a task which she imposed upon her stepdaughter, Helena.31 In a temperate reply Beatrice Blackwood regretted the ‘misunderstanding’ which had led the museum to believe that Madam Malinowska had wished to sell the collection. But she tartly concluded a memorandum for the file: ‘I hope it costs colossal sums to send the collection to Mexico!’32 Carelessly, Malinowski had died intestate. Under British and American law a widow inherited everything. What Valetta Swann Malinowska did with the collection in Mexico for the next eighteen years is anyone’s guess. Presumably it remained in its ‘uncatalogued limbo’, slowly deteriorating in its English packing cases yet, like fine wine, steadily increasing in value. But Malinowski’s failure to leave a will meant that the Pitt Rivers’s loss was the Lowie’s eventual gain. Curiously, it took six women to organise the salvage and protection of the neglected collection, and a seventh to decide its final destination.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 197

The Careless Collector

197

‘Technological Enemy No.1’ Malinowski’s inadvertent loss of control of the larger part of his Trobriand collection was, it may be surmised, directly linked to the souring of his relations with officials of the British Museum. This was a consequence of his rejection of their role in providing teaching in technology at the LSE. Relevant in this connection, too, was Malinowski’s ambivalent relationship with Charles Seligman. Indeed, it is ‘Sligs’ the honourable antiquarian who emerges as the real hero of this story. It is entirely fitting that the only article Malinowski devoted exclusively to technology was his contribution to Seligman’s Festschrift. ‘Stone Implements in Eastern New Guinea’ built on his mentor’s pathbreaking account in Melanesians in British New Guinea (1910). In his brief essay, Malinowski made it clear that he regarded the topic as ‘distinctly antiquarian’, but he had hoped thereby to render his tribute to Seligman ‘even more personal and discriminate’ (Malinowski 1934). The dry tone is unmistakable. Ironically, this essay in honour of his patron and colleague was published about the time that Malinowski was – to Seligman’s great consternation – squeezing technology from the curriculum. The teaching of technology at the LSE had been instituted in 1921–2 with a series of demonstrations given by Joyce at the British Museum, under the rubric ‘The Useful Arts of Primitive Peoples’ (Calendar 1921–22: 54). In 1924–5 (the year Malinowski began full-time teaching), the scope of Joyce’s course was expanded and for the following decade it remained one of the staples of the University of London’s anthropology curriculum. By the beginning of 1934, Seligman had retired and Malinowski was head of the Department of Anthropology. His gradual accession to professorial power coincided with the global depression and the drying up of Rockefeller funding. From the late 1920s, the massive injection of Rockefeller money into the LSE had bankrolled Malinowski’s functional revolution and his push into Africa; but with tightening purse strings he had to manoeuvre adroitly to keep his pupils in the field and to fulfil his ambition of expanding the department. Ostensibly to save money, in early 1934 Malinowski made the decision to get rid of Joyce. If the technology teaching was done by someone within the department it would save the School fifty pounds a year. As he was shortly to make his first visit to Africa, Malinowski also had designs on that money for himself. He left it until May before writing to warn Joyce that, owing to financial stringency and the need to ‘sacrifice’ some of the interests of the department, he was about to be dropped. Joyce replied, thanking him stiffly for the ‘private notice’ of his ‘sack’, but raising concerns about his replacement:

O'Hanlon/Welsh

198

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 198

Michael W. Young

The lecturer must make it plain that Technology & Sociology are mere academic distinctions…. That house-building & canoe-building (& iron-working) belong to definite families. And how can you get anyone to explain what a five-harness diagonal twill is (& its distribution) without demonstration…. You had better put me in touch with the man who is taking over my job, because I lecture only from notes, & most of my slides are my own property, & I shall remove them at once. I want them for personal use.33

Understandably, Joyce sounded piqued. On the eve of his flight to Africa, Malinowski replied: I had to take over the lecture on Technology myself. I shall naturally concentrate on those aspects of Technology which I know best, that is the technology of construction, of industrial enterprise, of economic activities in the wider sense.34

This could only have rubbed salt into Joyce’s wounded pride. Worse still, Malinowski blithely told him (‘in confidence’) that he planned to enlist Camilla Wedgwood’s assistance with the course on her return from Australia; he would pay her from his own pocket as the School was ‘absolutely obstreperous [sic] to producing an extra penny’. In the event, Camilla Wedgwood remained in Australia. Two years were to pass before matters came to a head. Although retired from the School, Seligman retained a passionate paternal interest in the wellbeing of the department he had sired and nurtured. After waiting a respectful interval following the grievous death of Elsie Malinowska in September 1935, Seligman wrote to Malinowski in early March 1936 to protest that technology had not been taught the previous year, although it had appeared in the Calendar under Malinowski’s name. He felt ‘very strongly’ that it was a mistake to let this teaching lapse. He added: ‘Even now it has not been dropped officially so far as the University is concerned’.35 It is clear from other correspondence that Malinowski’s expansion of his department had come at the cost of the museum-taught course on technology. In a lengthy, reproachful letter Seligman repeated his objections: the School had a technological syllabus in its Calendar and a definite agreement with University College to teach it. He proposed to see the director, Sir William Beveridge, about the matter; but his chief quarrel was with Malinowski and his tacit indifference to the fate of technology teaching. ‘If in fact there is such shortage of money you are Technological Enemy No.1 for not having realised that after taking all the money for Cultural Anthropology there would be none available for Technology.’36 Seligman wrote to Beveridge, urging him to understand that ‘the future of Anthropology at London must suffer if teaching in Technology is dropped’. He suggested that Braunholtz might be employed in

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 199

The Careless Collector

199

place of Joyce, who was ailing.37 Seligman sent a copy of this letter to Malinowski with a friendly invitation to meet for lunch at the Saville Club. The contention between them might well have been amicably resolved over coffee and brandy, for there is no response from Malinowski in the archive. But Seligman’s suspicions concerning his adversary’s motives were probably correct, and it does appear as if Malinowski’s tactic of ‘marking time’ by proposing to teach technology himself was designed to get rid of it altogether. The weakening of technology was perhaps inevitable in the broader developments which Malinowski spearheaded. It was a natural casualty of the process of making LSE anthropology more ‘practical’, more of a social science and less of a comparative history. An economic nudge was provided by the depression, which robbed the School of its Rockefeller milch cow. But the teaching of technology did not disappear and it was even revitalised in the years that followed. Evidently Seligman won the battle over whether it should be taught in 1936–7. Under a slightly revised rubric, ‘Primitive Crafts’ – a course of six lectures – was taught by Raymond Firth in that year. The syllabus retained some Joycean elements, but the stress was now upon the relation of manufacturing techniques ‘to their cultural setting of economics, scientific knowledge, ritual and art’. Firth taught the same course the following year (1937–8), which happened to be Malinowski’s last at the School. In October 1938 he departed for the USA on sabbatical leave. The war effectively exiled him and he did not return to England before his death in May 1942. Firth taught ‘Primitive Crafts’ once more in the Lent Term of 1938–9, but it appears to have been dropped from the curriculum the following year; in any case, the war forced the closure of the School in late 1939. Following its re-opening in 1944, Firth succeeded to Malinowski’s chair, and, before being appointed to a position in the School, Edmund Leach taught a course of lectures on ‘Primitive Technology’. Subsequently, there was a curious reversal of history. By the late 1950s technology was being taught once more by officers of the British Museum. This time it was the Department of Anthropology at University College London, under the stewardship of Daryl Forde, that hosted the course on ‘Primitive Technology’ given by Bryan Cranstone and Adrian Digby.38

Coda The ‘altercation’ that Helena Wayne vaguely remembers between her father and the British Museum can be given a context. What follows is in part conjectural, for the documentary evidence is incomplete; but the connections made are entirely plausible and warranted by their coincidence in time.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 200

200

Michael W. Young

In 1934 Joyce was piqued at being ‘sacked’ by Malinowski. To add insult to injury, Malinowski proposed to teach Joyce’s course himself, and even to recruit an untrained female co-lecturer. By 1936 it had become clear that Joyce would not be reinstated, that Braunholtz would not be invited to replace him, and that the teaching of technology at LSE would remain in-house. As quid pro quo, Joyce and Braunholtz agreed it was time for Malinowski to remove from the British Museum the Trobriand artefacts they had been storing for the past fifteen years. The excuse that the museum was short of space was neither more nor less true than the plea of financial stringency that Malinowski had used to oust Joyce. Piqued in turn, Malinowski had his cases of artefacts moved to the basement of his house on Primrose Hill. It was about this time, say June 1936, that Malinowski authorised Ian Hogbin to approach the Australian Museum, but he soon changed his mind and informally approached the Pitt Rivers Museum. Henry Balfour inspected the collection and selected a few choice items, with a verbal agreement to consider the rest in due course. Busy as ever, Malinowski did nothing further about the matter. He sailed off to America and gave the collection only passing thought during the years that followed. The rest, as they say, is history.

Notes For their generous help in my research for this chapter I thank Barry Craig, Elizabeth Edwards, Dean Fergie, David Kaus, Apolline Kohen, Mike O’Hanlon, Angela Raspin, Jim Specht, Ron Vanderwal, and, as always, Helena Wayne. Abbreviations used for archive sources: AA Australian Archives, Canberra AMS Archive of the Australian Museum, Sydney HPC Haddon Papers, Cambridge University Library MPL Malinowski Papers, London School of Economics MPY Malinowski Papers, Yale University Library NMV Archive of the National Museum of Victoria, Melbourne PRM Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Seligman to Malinowski 30 August 1921, MPL. Seligman to Malinowski 25 July 1921, MPY, box 7/566. MSS drafts and notes, ‘Culture’ Boxes, MPL. Hanuabada Fieldnotes MPY, 24/197. Stirling to Haddon 28 August 1915, HPC, envelope 8/24. The Natives of Mailu was published in December 1915 in The Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of South Australia; see Young 1989. 6. Malinowski to Seligman 20 September 1914, MPL. 7. HPC, envelope 2009. 8. Malinowski to Joyce 8 July 1922. Correspondence archives, British Museum, London.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 201

The Careless Collector 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

201

Malinowski to Hunt 16 August 1915. Malinowski File, AA. CRS A1, item 21/866. Seligman to Malinowski 15 August 1916, MPY, 7/565. Field notebook, pp. 905–12; 921–39, MPL. It was a selection of ‘exemplary specimens’ from this collection that the Lowie Museum exhibited in 1984 to commemorate the centenary of Malinowski’s birth. The exhibition travelled from Berkeley to the Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, Tucson; thence to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, and finally to the Jagiellonian University Museum in Cracow, Malinowski’s birthplace. One might wonder whether anyone remarked the irony of several ethnographic museums commemorating the man so widely perceived to have denigrated them. The sources for these figures are Norick 1976: 15 and Bolton 1980: 114. Norick states that the Cooke Daniels Register of the British Museum (Ethnological Documents 1010) was in many respects ‘infinitely more valuable’ to his research on Trobriands artefacts than Malinowski’s ‘all too brief and imprecise notes’ (1976: 31). Norick had been unable to study Malinowski’s fieldnotes in the LSE archive as they remained uncatalogued in the early 1970s. See Young 1998: 143 for a facsimile sample page. Malinowski to Spencer 6 November 1918, NMV. Malinowski to Spencer 6 November 1918, NMV. Malinowski to Spencer 18 December 1918, NMV. Malinowski to Spencer 17 February 1920, NMV. Seligman to Malinowski 21 December 1918, MPY 7/565. Malinowski to Kershaw 3 June 1920, NMV. Malinowski to Joyce 8 July 1922; Joyce sent a cheque for £150 to Malinowski on 14 July 1922. Archives of the British Museum. Memo to the Director 2 July 1936, AMS, 330/36. Anderson to Malinowski 9 July 1936, AMS 330/36. Harris to Anderson 25 August 1936, AMS 330/36. Personal communication 25 February 1999. Richards to Penniman 20 May 1946, Malinowska File, PRM. Valetta Malinowska to Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum 11 July 1947, PRM. Richards to Blackwood 12 September 1946, PRM. V. Malinowska to Director 11 July 1947, PRM. Blackwood to V. Malinowska 18 July 1947, and memo., PRM. Joyce to Malinowski 9 May 1934, MPY 4/318. Malinowski to Joyce 11 May 1934, MPY 4/318. Seligman to Malinowski 2 March 1936, MPL. Seligman to Malinowski 22 May 1936, MPL. Seligman to Beveridge 23 May 1936, MPL. I well remember, in 1961, Adrian Digby’s enthusiastic demonstration of an Australian Aboriginal spear thrower (woomera) which involved embedding the spear in the rear wall of the Anatomy Theatre on Gower Street.

Bibliography BAAS (British Association for the Advancement of Science) Notes and queries on anthropology, 4th edn. London, 1912. Bolton, L.M. Oceanic cultural property in Australia. Australian National Commission for UNESCO, Sydney, 1980.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

202

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 202

Michael W. Young

Braunholtz, H.T. Address in Professor Bronislaw Malinowski: an account of the memorial meeting held at the Royal Institution in London on July 13th 1942. Oxford University Press, London, 1943. Calendar for 1921–2. London School of Economics and Political Science. Koepping, K.-P. ‘Ethnographic collecting and the “new identity” of native populations – an eristic argumentation for humanistic anthropology’, Occasional Papers no. 2. University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, 1973. Malinowski, B. ‘Baloma: the spirits of the dead in the Trobriand Islands’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute vol. 46 (1916): 353–430. ———. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Routledge, London, 1922. ———. ‘The problem of meaning in primitive languages’, supplement 1 in The meaning of meaning eds C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards. Routledge, London 1960 (originally published 1923), 296–336. ———. ‘Stone implements in Eastern New Guinea’ in Essays presented to C.G. Seligman eds E.E. Evans-Pritchard, R. Firth, B. Malinowski and I. Schapera. Kegan Paul, London, 1934, 189–96. ———. Coral gardens and their magic, vol. 1. Allen and Unwin, London, 1935. ———. A diary in the strict sense of the term. Routledge, London, 1967. Norick, F. ‘An analysis of the material culture of the Trobriand Islands based upon the collection of Bronislaw Malinowski’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, 1976. Seligman, C.G. The Melanesians of British New Guinea. University Press, Cambridge, 1910. Stocking, G.W. After Tylor: British social anthropology 1888–1951. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1995. Urry, J. ‘Notes and queries on anthropology and the development of field methods in British anthropology, 1870–1920’, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute for 1972, 45–57. Welsch, R., ed. An American anthropologist in Melanesia, vol. 1. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 1998. Young, M.W. ‘The intensive study of a restricted area, or, why did Malinowski go to the Trobriand Islands?’, Oceania vol. 55, no. 1. (1984): 1–26. ———. Malinowski’s Kiriwina: fieldwork photography 1915–18. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998. Young, M.W., ed. Malinowski among the Magi: ‘The natives of Mailu’. Routledge, London, 1989.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 203

Chapter 9

FELIX SPEISER’S FLETCHED ARROW: A Paradigm Shift from Physical Anthropology to Art Styles

Christian Kaufmann

Introduction This chapter sets out to show how and why Felix Speiser changed his anthropological focus while analysing collections he made in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in 1910 to 1912. Faced with an unexpected degree of local variation in the cultural forms of the islanders, he shifted his research from the study of physical anthropology to the study of art. Speiser saw two different measures of human diversity in these two data sets, evolutionary and historical. Although he set off for the New Hebrides intending to analyse cultural evolution from the standpoint of biological variation, he came to understand human diversity as the result of long-range historical processes that led to the formation of local or regional ‘cultural complexes’ (Kulturkomplexe). As Speiser defined them, cultural complexes were sets of structurally linked elements or culture traits. He developed this theoretical core between 1914 and 1919 against an emerging anthropology of Melanesia. In his theoretical approach Speiser translated a model with which he was already familiar into what he saw as a tool for a scientific analysis of observed cultural facts. His model was that of molecular chemistry, where a chemical formula expressed an arrangement of elements that formed a compound. Paradoxically, at the time he was still of the opinion that physical anthropology would yield more con-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 204

204

Christian Kaufmann

clusive results because of its more immediate link to humankind’s physical make-up. A key issue for Speiser and other anthropologists of the time working in Melanesia was the quest for evidence of the existence – or otherwise – of both a ‘pygmy’ race and a ‘pygmy’ culture. Speiser and other anthropologists saw the fletched arrow as a trait they expected to find associated with ‘pygmies’ (see Sarasin and Sarasin 1889–1908, vol. 3: 427–8, vol. 4: 52; Basler Nachrichten 23 July 1919). The enigmatic fletched or feathered arrow of this chapter title refers to this preconceived idea that Speiser took with him to the field.1 Subsequently this idea that particular groups would have particular material culture traits helped structure his field collecting throughout the New Hebrides. But in the end, when Speiser analysed all the evidence he had collected in the field, he rejected the basic hypothesis he had originally set out to prove. Rather than a marker of a ‘pygmy’ race, the fletched arrow would become a pointer for him to seek cultural diversity as a locally-developed configuration of cultural elements.

Felix Speiser Who, then, was Felix Speiser?2 Born in Basel, Switzerland, on 20 October 1880, Speiser studied at Neuchâtel, Göttingen, Munich and at Basel, where he completed a doctorate in chemistry in 1904. He then received further training in pharmacology in Berlin and studied dyes in Leeds, before taking a position with J.R. Geigy & Co. in New York. While in America he took the opportunity of visiting a Hopi Indian reservation in the American southwest for four weeks. Speiser published an account of this trip in two series of articles in the Sunday edition of Basel’s leading newspaper (Basler Nachrichten April/May 1908, January/February 1909). This experience in America set a pattern for his later fieldwork in the New Hebrides, where he chose to work on his own, swapping his Hopi horse for the small boats of planters, traders and missionaries, which allowed him to be independent of colleagues and as little dependent on colonial officials as possible. Speiser attributed his interest in ‘primitive cultures’ to his maternal uncle, Paul Sarasin (1856–1929), a noted zoologist who had earlier conducted anthropological fieldwork in Ceylon. Speiser’s experience in Arizona further whetted his curiosity, and in 1906 he changed from chemistry to anthropology. With the encouragement of Paul Sarasin and Sarasin’s younger cousin Fritz Sarasin (1859–1942), Speiser enrolled at the University of Berlin from May 1908 to April 1909 to study physical anthropology and ethnology with Felix von Luschan, Director of the Berlin Museum of Ethnography. In Berlin, Speiser

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 205

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

205

learned the field methods of physical anthropology and museum collecting. The Sarasin cousins continued to play a key role in Speiser’s research for many years,3 but it was von Luschan who first encouraged his interest in the New Hebrides (Speiser 1950). From 1910 to 1912 Speiser conducted more than two years’ fieldwork, travelling from island to island in the newly formed Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides and Banks Islands and the Santa Cruz Islands in the British Solomon Islands. His methods were primarily aimed at documenting local peoples and their culture: he collected more than 2,000 items of material culture, recording their exact geographical origin; made a detailed photographic record of the villages he visited, and took many physical anthropological measurements. Subsequently, as Professor of Ethnology at the University of Basel and Curator at the Basel Museum of Ethnography, he spent a further twelve months in 1929–30 in the northern Solomons, southern New Britain, northeastern New Ireland and the Sepik region, bringing back another important collection of objects, field notes, still photographs and even cine footage of a boy’s initiation on the Sepik. By this time, however, his trajectory had taken him from a concern with evolution towards a focus on art forms.

The Background to the 1910 Fieldwork: Physical Anthropology and Art In 1910 Paul and Fritz Sarasin had an immediate goal for Speiser. They wanted him to organise scientific field collecting in the island regions where one might hope to identify the remnants of man’s early culture. The Sarasins had an evolutionary world view and sought evidence of an early neolithic stage of culture analogous to the pile dwellers’ sites found on the shores of Lake Zurich, which were much in the public mind at the time (see, e.g., Sarasin and Sarasin 1897). They even hoped Speiser might find examples of a late paleolithic or mesolithic stage. They were eager to be able to demonstrate a very early evolutionary sequence such as the ‘pygmoid’ Veddah (or Wedda) in Ceylon, whom they had studied twenty years earlier and as recently as 1907. Finding evidence in Melanesia for the presence or absence of pygmies related to the Veddah would provide clues to the different evolutionary stages of humankind. To solve this typological problem would require data from physical anthropology, mainly from craniology, and from material culture. Speiser’s first professional paper (1909), a rather slight piece about decorated Santa Cruz arrows, offers us a glimpse into his thinking. Written before he set off for the New Hebrides, it reflects a nascent interest in art. The first paragraph defines the unity of this collection of

O'Hanlon/Welsh

206

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 206

Christian Kaufmann

arrows as all ‘expressing the same style’, despite the fact that ‘no item is exactly analogous to any other’. It was because the arrows ‘are that congruent in all essential parts, that their common origin (Heimat) becomes immediately apparent’ (Speiser 1909: 308).4 He noted the absence of a flight-balancing mechanism – no fletched arrow thus far – and proceeded to analyse the fine ornamentation on the foreshafts. He found traces of typological development of an earlier form with barbs, commonly present in the Solomon Islands, and concluded by suggesting that these elaborate decorations were the ‘stylish and beautiful products of an artist who works consciously and in a fully controlled manner.’ In his last sentence, Speiser (1909: 311) said that he would like ‘to take these observations much farther (auszuspinnen), to conclusions of far-reaching potential’, but these were beyond the scope of his text. These were bold words for a young natural scientist only recently turned anthropologist. His view that such decoration was the work of a Melanesian ‘artist’ tallies with von Luschan’s position,5 but is far removed from what we might expect from someone about to collect material culture and physical anthropology data for an evolutionary project. How should we read this? Von Luschan himself was first and foremost a physical anthropologist. He had recently published for the Berlin Museum the third edition of Anleitungen für ethnographische Beobachtungen und Sammlungen in Afrika und Ozeanien (1904), a collector’s field guide and the German equivalent of the British Notes and Queries on Anthropology. This guide suggested that even non-specialists should try to obtain photographs and hair samples and ‘as large a series of skulls as is possible’. Collectors should obtain a coherent series from one locality, if possible ‘without causing irritation and unhappiness’ (von Luschan 1904: 121–2; see also Schindlbeck 1993, 1997). During the years from 1900 to 1914, von Luschan advocated a physical anthropology interested in all things physical, including all sorts of material things as well as their aesthetic impact, whether objects, people, architecture, or landscape: an encompassing approach shared by A.C. Haddon, Karl von den Steinen, Ernst Grosse and Franz Boas. In von Luschan’s field guide, ‘art’ was not treated as a subject in its own right but was included under different headings, such as ‘Body Decorations’, ‘Processes of Production’ and ‘Religion, Ritual, and Mythology’ (1904: 98–110). Von Luschan’s (1904: 98) introductory statement encouraged the collector to learn the local language because ‘we now know [unlike Finsch in 1888] that all these works of art are based on religious or mythological, or otherwise important ideas’. We may assume that Speiser was familiar with von Luschan’s ideas about methods of field research as laid down in the latter’s paper on

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 207

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

207

ethnological studies in the Sepik (von Luschan 1910). From his training in Berlin, Speiser would have been led to believe that man’s physical characteristics would reveal something about his ultimate origins, while works of art would provide reasons for the variety of cultural forms. Similar forms in a large series would point to a common origin (Heimat) of the sub-set. Artists were their authors. Artistic production was thus seen as an integral part of material culture inasmuch as aesthetically efficient ways of expression pointed even more directly to the social and ceremonial life of populations studied than did their everyday implements or their patterns of warfare. How material culture would relate to religion was thus a promising question for debate, even in the vision hinted at by young Speiser. For Speiser and his peers, trained by a generation of evolutionists, it was obvious that while questions of cultural meaning required time for learning local languages, ‘physical things’ were immediately accessible for study by methods they felt had been tested scientifically and which now belonged to the core of a natural science approach. There was a sense of urgency to understand the diversity of ‘utilitarian’ material culture before moving to ‘luxury objects’ linked to art and ritual. In this respect, Fritz Sarasin (who later became Speiser’s superior at the Basel Museum) was strict in demanding that proper field collecting had to provide the basis for all further analysis, including that of art, which Sarasin himself did not recognise as a separate category for field collecting even as late as 1936.6

‘Salvage’ Anthropology for a Disappearing World By 1910 the catastrophic effects of Western impact had already reached the interiors of the largest islands in southern Melanesia. The populations of most coastal areas and of the smaller islands suitable for coconut or coffee plantations had been particularly hard hit. From 1830 the New Hebrides had been affected both by devastating foreign diseases brought by ships seeking water, firewood or sandalwood, and by ‘Blackbirders’ and recruiters seeking labour for plantations in Fiji or Queensland. The desire to control the labour trade and to establish traders and planters had led Britain – with the support of its Australian colonies – into joint action with the French in the area from 1890, culminating in the establishment of the condominium in 1906. For the British, control was intended to protect the local population, if only as a reservoir of local labour, whereas the French were not free of colonial greed for land. The effects of European incursion had not only led to a steep decline in local populations in the New Hebrides but also had a devastating

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 208

208

Christian Kaufmann

effect on the morale of survivors in coastal communities. The British Resident, Morton King, established the first comprehensive census in 1910, recording a total of 64,555 indigenous inhabitants that cannot be very far off the mark. By 1910 Aneityum, the southernmost island, had only 11 percent of the size of population known to have been present in 1859. Speiser (1991 [1923]: 37–9), following a careful evaluation of all sources available to him, estimated the overall decline during the nineteenth century at as much as 90 percent. More recent authorities have tended to lower these estimates to something of the order of 50 to 60 percent (Rallu 1990, 1996; Spriggs 1996: 93). Whatever the exact figures, the swift decline in population established the sense in Speiser and other anthropologists that this older and more ‘primitive’ world was rapidly disappearing. Depopulation continued after 1910 (Deacon 1934: 19–20), but the largest losses had occurred about thirty years before Speiser arrived. Despite, or perhaps because of this, access to human remains, particularly skulls, was relatively easy. The depressing reality of human life in the islands led Speiser to react decisively in support of the indigenous communities. In his popular travel account of 1913 and in other essays, Speiser (1922; see also Frankfurter Zeitung 21 May 1911) publicly blamed the attitudes of the two colonial administrations for not reacting effectively to protect the people from cheap alcohol and guns, which had made local communities completely dependent on a few European traders and planters.

Speiser’s Field Practices Early in 1910 Speiser set off from Marseilles, visiting first Sydney and then Noumea. Fritz Sarasin was planning to spend nine months the following year in New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands, on his own field project documenting the forms of zoological and anthropological life on these islands. Sarasin would bring with him the zoologist Jean Roux from the Basel Museum of Natural History and he expected Speiser to make arrangements for them in Noumea. Speiser interrupted his own project in the New Hebrides in February and March 1911 to help launch the Sarasin-Roux expedition in New Caledonia (see Sarasin 1916; Sarasin and Roux 1914–29). But otherwise he spent from May 1910 to April 1912 travelling around the condominium with few interruptions. Speiser did not begin fieldwork proper until July 1910, having ‘wasted’ two months at a French plantation at the Canal de Segond in the south of Espiritu Santo at the instigation of the French Resident (Speiser 1913: 37–52). Following this delay, he worked as independently of French administrators as possible and travelled from island to

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 209

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

Map 5: New Hebrides, Banks and Torres Islands (early twentieth century).

209

O'Hanlon/Welsh

210

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 210

Christian Kaufmann

island by whatever means of transport was made available by traders, planters, missionaries or the British Resident. Speiser visited some communities in the New Hebrides and Banks Islands repeatedly during his travels. And in May and June 1912 he managed to visit the Santa Cruz group and even Tikopia on board the Southern Cross, the Anglican mission steamer. Speiser recorded little about his collecting practice, but from the few notes that have survived we can see that he followed von Luschan’s advice to collect skulls.7 We can also assume that he discussed collecting strategies with Fritz Sarasin in some depth when they were together in Noumea in 1911. The most vivid images of his collecting style come in popular reports sent to Basel’s leading newspaper (Basler Nachrichten 29 October 1911, 5 November 1911 and 12 November 1911; see also Frankfurter Zeitung 21 May 1911). People in Basel would read how a mission doctor helped the young anthropologist hire four Ambrym youngsters to assist him with his collecting in neighbouring villages. Speiser gives a general description of his collecting: the White man arrives and the women and children retreat with a variety of cries. Slowly the men and boys come closer and his crew of four explain the White man’s intentions, which regularly provokes intense laughter and disbelief. Next they question the White man about his name, where he lives, whether he will be stingy with his money, his likes in food, tobacco and drinks, how many guns or pairs of trousers he owned, and so on. Concluding the interview, they form an opinion as to whether the White man should be treated as a dangerous magician – in which case everyone would retreat – or as a fool. The latter response immediately provokes the men to test him, trying to sell worthless old objects at very high prices. This begins long negotiations about what to offer and what to sell. Apparently Speiser did not find these transactions very satisfying. Often, at the moment of leaving, those who had refused to take any interest in selling an object would, with a simple nod, motion him into a corner and sell the same object they had vehemently refused to part with earlier. He apparently purchased objects with money, because in one text Speiser mentioned that the men would need money equivalent to 40 Swiss Francs (about US$300 today) to buy one of the locally valued pigs with prominent tusks. But when asked for skulls, the people seemed to react somewhat numbly. They would simply point to a repository in the bush or, more rarely, fetch a skull on a high pole (Basler Nachrichten, 5 November 1911). Elsewhere in this series of newspaper articles, Speiser writes about a man from Dip Point on Ambrym, who had volunteered to accompany him as a guide to other parts of the island. ‘Only through him was I able to obtain a number of pieces that I would otherwise not

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

Page 211

211

even have seen. He really understood what I intended to collect. Women came on their knees because they are not allowed to walk in the presence of their men, and brought . . . mats, baskets, arm rings; the men also brought small items’ (Basler Nachrichten, 12 November 1911). Speiser goes on to describe how most people handed their object to a third person who would negotiate the selling price because both ‘sensibility and pride’ demand that they avoid rejecting the White man’s requests for certain objects and his offers when too low. Speiser’s attempt ‘to buy a few bull roarers’ leads to some embarrassment and he is hushed into the men’s ceremonial house. He describes his impression of being in ‘a real museum, where my mouth is watering’ in view of the ‘splendid things’ hanging there, such as mask costumes, ritual objects and musical instruments. However, these things still mean too much to the community to be given away and there is stalemate. Eventually, an old man ‘in a trembling state’ hands him a carefully wrapped bull roarer with instructions not to show the object to anyone outside the house. Speiser also buys ‘some of the less well-done masks’ (Basler Nachrichten, 12 November 1911). These two brief stories make it clear that Speiser was after objects in daily use as well as those that were aesthetically and ritually important. We may assume that he was not always so fortunate in locating an intermediary as he was in western Ambrym. Overall, the picture was darkened by Speiser’s strong impression that the local populations were so depressed that they lacked any drive or cultural vision. On visiting the Santa Cruz Islands in the British Solomons at the end of his fieldwork, Speiser was struck by the difference in terms of the more relaxed colonial administration and in indigenous life, for he found people were still actively engaged in making items of material culture that were already a thing of the past in the New Hebrides. When Speiser returned to Melanesia in 1929–30, his interests had become much more firmly based in what we would now view as anthropological methods. His field notes, typed while still in New Britain, show that he enquired about local languages as well as social organisation and mythology, even though the main concern of his work was collecting material culture for the Basel Museum of Ethnography. While he conducted some research in physical anthropology, it was no longer a central activity because he brought with him Heinrich (Heini) Hediger, a zoology student at the University of Basel, who was explicitly instructed to collect zoological specimens and assist with anthropometry (Hediger 1990: 47–49, 61–94). It is clear from Speiser’s cine footage that masks and masked performances captivated his imagination and that visual representation had now moved clearly to the centre of his interests in the field.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

212

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 212

Christian Kaufmann

Thus Speiser’s collecting was not that of an eighteenth-century collector of curiosities, nor that of a nineteenth-century missionary. Aside from his preconceived idea about the fletched arrow in Melanesia at the start of his fieldwork, Speiser seems to have collected with a relatively open mind, looking for both the familiar as well as the unusual. Considering the short time spent at each island or village, his collections are quite representative, although they also have gaps. His personal interest in art seems to have kept him on the lookout for both the typical and the innovative, and he seems always to have wanted to document variation.

Analysing Speiser’s Collections: the ‘pygmy question’ The collection Speiser brought back from the New Hebrides and Banks Islands in 1913 consists of 1,826 objects and about 1,620 field photographs. A separate collection of 303 objects from Santa Cruz was also accessioned that year, together with six objects and twenty-four photographs from Tikopia.8 An undetermined number of other objects were considered ‘duplicates’ (Doubletten). Belonging to an identified type and not needed for demonstrating the typology, they were not catalogued but were exchanged, donated or sold to other museums and public collections in Hamburg, Geneva, St Gall, Cologne and Dresden, and possibly to Bern, Zurich and other places. Because Speiser was also responsible for collecting on behalf of the Natural History Museum in Basel, there was, as might be expected, considerable material in zoology and physical anthropology as well. In the annual report for that museum in 1913, Fritz Sarasin gives high praise to Speiser’s zoological collections, ‘though limited in numbers they are rich in rare items’ (1914: 12). The anthropological material consists of 400 skulls, sets of measurements from approximately 500 individuals and a number of photographs. Thus, while Speiser is now best known for his ethnological collections he clearly also spent considerable time pursuing the interests of von Luschan and Sarasin in obtaining physical anthropology specimens. As might be expected from his association with the Sarasins, Speiser took a closer look at the so called ‘pygmy question’ in Melanesia and other evolutionary problems, addressing these first in his 1914 manuscript (published as his 1991 [1923] monograph) and then in a paper fourteen years later (1928). He also returned to this question in Speiser (1946b). In his monograph, he concluded that ‘The first point to notice is that nowhere in the group are there any indisputable traces of a paleolithic settlement; the present culture is that of Neolithic hoe-farming’ (1991 [1923]: 399). Then, turning to the ‘pygmies’, he stated:

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

Page 213

213

The population that clearly differs anthropologically from the other in the New Hebrides – the pygmies – may be dealt with first. The question whether they are to be segregated anthropologically from the other Melanesians, that is, whether the pygmies are not simply a mountain variety of the coastal Melanesians, will be left open. If the latter were the case, it would have to be assumed that the pygmy population split off from the coastal people a very long time ago, for the emergence of small stature is only conceivable as the result of long isolation. This isolation of the pygmies may be regarded as particularly probable because of their very limited cultural possessions, for they lack important items of material culture… Nevertheless in their regions there are many phenomena alien to other areas of the islands: the feathered arrow, pottery, the T-shaped hut. (1991 [1923]: 399)9

Speiser went on to discuss whether the Sakao population of northeast Espiritu Santo, who were considered culturally ‘primitive’ because of their lack of ‘sculpture, plaiting, masks, and so forth’, could be equated culturally with the ‘pygmies’. His list of material culture absent among the Sakao directly echoes the list of items of material culture that were also absent among the ‘pygmies’ (1991 [1923]: 399). At this point he raised the question of whether the fletched arrows he had collected only in the interior of Santo could be a positive marker of ‘pygmy’ culture. To this, Speiser gave an ambiguous answer; and he did not consider that the data from physical anthropology were adequate to clarify the question. In his 1928 publication on the physical anthropology of the peoples of Santo, Speiser concluded that groups of small average height like the Sakao showed fewer differences from their taller neighbours than from short-statured groups on Malekula. He therefore concluded that the ‘pygmy’ or ‘pygmoid groups’ were not a race all their own and never had been. Here Speiser felt it plausible that isolation in the interior, combined with a lack of salt and protein, might have produced these ‘modifications’ – a term Speiser preferred to ‘mutations’. He cited a letter from Revd F.G. Paton to the effect that these modifications are reversible: as soon as children got better food at the Mission school they grew taller than their parents (1928: 165). In a 1946 statement on recent findings of Pithecanthropus, Speiser (1946b) was even more explicit: none of the ‘pygmy’ or ‘pygmoid’ groups of Oceania, Southeast Asia, or Africa were remnants of an early race, long separated from other human groups. They lacked the common physical traits one would expect, and they had not even the slightest knowledge of a common language. Their differences from larger-statured groups were therefore cultural and mark them out as foraging groups who had retired to forest and mountain zones. They depended as much on their neighbours as they defended their own identity from them.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

214

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 214

Christian Kaufmann

From Speiser’s evidence of cultural variation, we might imagine that the question of whether the ‘pygmies’ and the Sakao were truly ‘primitive’ had become peripheral to him. Whatever the cultural relationships between the ‘pygmy’ groups on Malekula and the Sakao on Santo, if they ever did represent separate strata these would have to have been overlain by ‘nambas culture’ (a culture named after the local term for the men’s attire). In any event, there were no clear indicators of any historical or evolutionary sequence from the distribution of racial types. And when Speiser considered the facts of material culture, analysed according to material, form and distribution, it was clear that the important variation was the vast difference between the ‘pygmies’ and the real latecomers, the Polynesians. Physical anthropological evidence was either unavailable or too uncertain to be helpful. No wonder, then, that he concluded his monograph by bidding farewell to the physical anthropological problem of what the migration of new races may have contributed: ‘It will be the task of those who study the anthropological material from the New Hebrides to supply the answer to this question’ (1991 [1923]: 402). Ironically, having bid farewell to these biological problems, it was Speiser (1923; 1928) who produced the first detailed physical anthropology studies about the New Hebrides. But, at the same time as he was publishing these studies, he was also publishing further studies about the region’s art (e.g., 1929a, 1934, 1936) and was increasingly involved in artistic matters, becoming a member of Basel’s Arts Board in 1927. The overall drift from physical anthropology to art, then, was a sort of zigzag in search of an efficient way to analyse and explain cultural diversity in Melanesia. Speiser looked at historical processes with the pragmatic attitude of a natural scientist, even though by 1933 this approach had led him to reject the idea that race and culture could be seen as closely interrelated.10

Developing a Theory of Cultural Complexes Of the two sets of reference material that Speiser had brought back in 1913 – about physical anthropology and about objects as indicators of culture – Speiser had in fact tackled the second set first. He prepared drawings and photographs of 1,055 items for publication in his monograph (1991 [1923]), which was basically finished in 1914 and turned in as a Habilitation thesis at the University of Basel. His method was both systematic and comprehensive in scope, discussing whatever earlier published information he could locate in the accounts of missionaries, traders, settlers, sea captains and government officers. He evaluated these accounts, adding his own observations and, in effect,

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

Page 215

215

provided the first ethnographic overview for most of the central and northern New Hebrides including the Banks group. To get an idea of what parts of his collection Speiser valued we can turn to the plates in Ethnographische Materialien (1991 [1923]). Of 109 plates, seventy-two are devoted to objects. To the 1,055 objects from his own collection Speiser added illustrations of 111 further items from collections in Le Hâvre, Leipzig, London, Hamburg, Paris, Melbourne and two private collections. In addition he included 153 sketches of objects seen during fieldwork but not collected, and he added a number of field photographs to document the main variations in wooden and tree-fern sculpture. While privileging to some extent items with a strong aesthetic message that Europeans in 1914 would have considered as either ‘beautiful’ or ‘full of strong expression’,11 Speiser did not neglect small, utilitarian items. His plates were an important step toward typologising variation in forms, but at the same time by presenting a wide selection of types he kept signaling that the reader should consider the importance of the small differences between one knife, or arrow, or carving and the next, especially if they came from neighbouring localities. It is in keeping with Speiser’s early appreciation of artists that the illustrations convey this message more than his text. Speiser based his comparative cultural analysis on his detailed knowledge of objects and other cultural features. His grouping of objects in the series of related plates in his 1991 [1923] monograph reveals his selective criteria (see Table 9.1): a type may have several important variations. In his 1919 contribution to the Sarasin Festschrift, Speiser tried to give a first comprehensive view of where his analysis had brought him. Unlike more senior branches of science, ethnology, in his view, lacked knowledge of a key ‘factor in any ethnological formula: the working pattern of human consciousness’ (Speiser 1919: 142). The strategy he proposed in order to fulfil the requisite scientific analysis, defined cultural elements that would aggregate into cultural complexes, ranked on a historical-evolutionary ladder, but following multilinear pathways. Human groups would easily recombine elements from different complexes but only by amalgamating elements from a lower, more ‘primitive’ complex into a ‘higher’ and more developed one. Conversely, an element from a higher order complex would not really integrate with older elements and the latter would persist. Here, the fletched arrow of the Sakao made its appearance again, even if only as a local invention (1919: 153). Speiser saw this model as explaining why introduced elements from industrial cultural complexes, such as firearms, alcohol, or Christian marriage, would inevitably destroy the original cultural complexes. A synoptic presentation took the form of a matrix in his 1991 [1923] monograph

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 216

216

Christian Kaufmann

Table 9.1: Speiser’s selecting and grouping of object types. The plates in Speiser 1991 (1923) follow more or less the thread of the main text of the work; the numbers below refer to the plates. Those plates showing primarily field photographs of material culture items too big to collect, including houses and ceremonial structures, or of items in use, are not taken into account here. Plate 19 20, 21 22, 23 24–26 27 28, 29 32, 33 34 35-45 46, 47 49-59 60 61

Household utensils, e.g. containers of everyday use and for kava Scrapers and shell knives, fish trap, utensils for food preparation and cooking, pig ropes Pudding knives in an almost complete series, and wooden nalot pestles as well as bone spatulae Baskets and containers made from wood and stone; traps Pigs’ jaws, tusks and ceremonial gear Tools for fishing, and planting Stone adzes and axes, with and without handle Combs Adornments and then clothing the human body, including tattoo Male and female belts; a small sample of items related to ethno-medicine Weapons: spears, bows and arrows, individual clubs Thirty-eight types of clubs in sketch drawings, not meant to represent individual items Slings and toys

The first two sections show a certain basic homogeneity across the whole area while at the same time indicating a relatively high degree of regional diversity in form, e.g., for pudding knives, pestles, spears, arrows and clubs. 64 65, 66 67–77

78

Canoe outfit and equipment, and carrying bags Ceramics and two different procedures of pottery manufacture on West Santo Textiles in the broad sense of the term, starting with plaited containers and ending with the designs applied by reserve dyeing methods, e.g., stencils Barkcloth (painted and feather-decorated tapa) and valuables, i.e., shell money

In this third section regional and even local specificities become apparent. 81-85 90–95 98, 99 102, 103 106,108,109

Overmodelled skulls, shell money; ceremonial equipment like dancing sticks, amulets, movable figures Masks, pig-killing clubs, sculptures and paintings Ceremonial masks Ceremonial masks and outfit; musical instrument Musical instruments

In this section dedicated to objects of ceremonial use, the quota of items represented from the total of items collected or seen is markedly higher than in the other sections.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

Page 217

217

(reproduced as Table 9.2 in this chapter). Here he identifies significant cultural elements and notes their geographical distribution. Grouping together cultural elements that ‘have coextensive areas of distribution’ allows Speiser to identify ‘the special character of the culture bringing these items to the New Hebrides. However, scrutiny of [Table 9.2] shows that very few items are coextensive in their distribution… they are rather found overlapping in a quite irregular pattern’ (1991 [1923]: 399). Starting with the ‘pygmies’ and the Sakao as the supposed relics of the most ancient culture, where the fletched arrow, perhaps, serves as a marker of isolation, we move through a series of other strata. The next most ancient are elements of nambas culture, where penis covers made from small mats or fibre bundles are interpreted as corresponding to female fibre skirts. For Speiser, the nambas culture was a pre-pig and probably pre-kava culture, spreading from New Caledonia in the south into the New Hebrides. He noted regional differences in the distribution of some important elements belonging to this complex: bamboo combs, fear of the dead, stone rings set up around graves. Boundaries were thus overlapping boundaries, such that the next cultural complex – the pig and kava culture – arrived from the north bringing the horizontal drum, the triangular comb, the trochus armlet, the armlet of shell beads, fine plaited mats, and possibly tattooing, the pestle, the three-part bone arrow and the house base of dry-stone walling. Since these elements never reached the southern islands, a break in inter-island relations is suggested. The most recent complex, the suque culture, had (according to Speiser) developed in the Banks Islands where the secret suque society practised chiefly ancestor worship (1991 [1923]: 402) and was associated with breeding tusked pigs. The suque complex spread rapidly over all the northern islands, especially on Ambae, Maewo and Santo where the more sophisticated form of ancestor worship had not penetrated. In other areas where masks and statues were used, it became linked with these. Thus the suque culture did not correspond to a uniform cultural complex but took on a somewhat different configuration in each locality. Speiser’s elaborate effort to define a series of structured cultural complexes suggests how he tried to reduce the highly differentiated regional scene – both in cultural and biological patterns – into a model that systematised relationships, and in so doing recalls his early university training in chemistry. However, he did not stop there, but brought us one decisive step further by opening the door to human inventiveness, temperament and needs, as well as including a role for historical change. Basically, he argued that any cultural item might be reinvented in an appropriate context. Thus, to trace historical

O'Hanlon/Welsh

218

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 218

Christian Kaufmann

Table 9.2: Speiser’s matrix of cultural elements from the New Hebrides, the Banks and Torres Islands.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

Table 9.2: Continued

Page 219

219

O'Hanlon/Welsh

220

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 220

Christian Kaufmann

processes of exchange, invention and adaptation – which, for Speiser, were cumulative processes – it is necessary to identify elements that are interrelated because of their common origin and to separate them from independent inventions and developments. Objects of a utilitarian nature tend to be developed into their ideal, functional form. These forms depend on what the mechanical functions really are, and on the materials being used to create the objects. All the objects Speiser labelled as ‘luxury items’ are linked to nonmaterial functions of life, such as ritual, dance or adornment, and show a much broader range of variation. Drawing conclusions from a classification of decoration without considering their underlying significance would be especially prone to error (1919: 157–9). For Speiser, this line of argument allowed him to preserve the fundamental model of a controlled scientific explanation of observed facts, like a natural science experiment, because, besides the diffusion of cultural elements, ‘new items of culture appear, for which the origin is to be sought in the inner disposition of man himself, rather than in the culture of others’ (1919: 247). Speiser developed this argument further in his analysis of art styles in Melanesia (1936) and Oceania (1941). In light of this analysis, we need to consider the role that ‘art’ played earlier in Speiser’s thinking. Originally, his interest was not so much in sculpture or other kinds of plastic art, but in motifs and ornaments found in larger series of objects. In his 1915 paper on decorative art from Santa Cruz, we find, surprisingly, in a very short paragraph, the key to his method. In an obvious reference to his pre-fieldwork analysis of arrows (1909), he wrote that abstract forms are used ‘to create rhythmic series’ at the ‘artist’s urge to activate a surface’, the artist working with ‘almost constant elements of form.’ As a result, ‘complexes of form’ are constantly changing because of ‘the artist’s action of varying organisation and composition’ (1915: 323–4, emphasis in the original). Here the chemical engineer attempted to come to grips with the world of art and culture: stable (or almost stable) elements, recombined by an artist into complex configurations – or should we say compounds, as in chemistry – which form the very basic structures of local or regional cultures. The chemical formula, that is to say, the ‘complex’ or ‘compound,’ makes the dynamic arrangement of ‘elements’ evident. Here, the ‘elements’ lay out the metaphor behind the structure, while ‘the artist’ helping to arrange the elements stands for human consciousness and inventiveness, for human feelings as well as for their expression. Reread in this way, Speiser’s whole method, which was earlier mistakenly viewed as additive and mechanistic by the present writer, becomes structurally almost as transparent as a display case. It also makes much more sense as an explanation of historical processes. For

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 221

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

221

each complex configuration, the list of elements has to be read as representing the pertinent structural order in its historically determined form; it is not merely a ‘shopping list’ for historical reconstruction. The difficult point to understand is that Speiser listed, as elements of the same order, object types as well as different types of social institutions and cultural behaviours, including religion. While object types are informed by the naturalist’s abstractions of physical things seen and analysed, the ethnological abstractions from real life do not allow easy verification. On this point, Speiser simply believed in his discipline’s ability to categorise coherently. Defining cultural complexes was thus the first step in defining the field of cultural action that was not predetermined by utilitarian function. For Speiser, ritual function lay at the origin of such decorative elements as the bird, or more specifically, the frigate bird (see Speiser 1915: 328; Haddon 1902 [1895]: 266 who acknowledges Codrington as appreciating the bird’s ritual significance). But art forms can also survive the end of a functioning ritual context. They can even be further developed along with new ideas that somehow become associated with traditional ones. Either new ideas are so powerful as to reintegrate forms into a more developed stage of that style, or the forms themselves become blurred and confused. In this context, Speiser invoked both the Santa Cruz style, where the bird motif is central, and the suque style of the northern New Hebrides, where it appears as a combination of circular and triangular formal elements, referring simultaneously to the tusked pigs needed for sacrifice, and to the ancestral spirits. Thus, geometrical patterns could carry highly abstract meaning. Often we do not know about this meaning. Nevertheless style remains more than the way we do something; for Speiser it needed a basic representational idea (‘realistische Vorstellung’), an idea rooted in the real world.

Speiser’s Contribution While Speiser’s work as a field collector remains to be fully appreciated and understood, this chapter has attempted to show how his analytical conclusions largely emerged from study of these collections. Through the historical sequence of his publications, Speiser’s interests gradually shifted away from the physical traits of the peoples he studied (and their material products). Ultimately he focused on studying and displaying how art in these societies revealed a different record of human history. From his earliest publication on Santa Cruz arrows to his first temporary exhibition about decorated mats in 1925, to his exhibition with

O'Hanlon/Welsh

222

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 222

Christian Kaufmann

Paul Wirz on Art and Ritual in New Guinea (Speiser and Wirz 1931), to the Art Styles of the Pacific (1941) and the installation (jointly with Alfred Bühler) of a permanent exhibition of malanggan from New Ireland at the heart of the Basel Museum of Ethnography, we can see clearly the different stages in Speiser’s drift away from physical anthropology toward the arts. Ironically, over that period he had felt himself to have become particularly competent as a physical anthropologist. Speiser developed his comparative study of material culture by careful analysis when drawing or sketching an item, exactly as he did with craniology. It allowed him to visualise types as well as their important variations. His theory of cultural complexes established a scientific model for exploring the ways by which different cultural elements aggregated into functional units. In marked contrast to his travelogue of 1913, these publications only obliquely reflected the realities of Pacific life, even as they depicted the realities of particular objects in great detail. Speiser’s analysis of art styles almost immediately opened up for him a concern with local creativity (1909; 1915; 1936; 1941). This creativity, in his view, took the form more of re-creation than of inventing from scratch. It responded to local needs – for example, by creating and advertising local identity through ritual processes such as initiation (1929b, 1945/46) – as well as adapting ideas arriving from abroad. In the end Speiser largely abandoned the evolutionary models that he had started with in the New Hebrides, turning to historical explanations. For example, he mentioned several times the possibilities of chance arrivals of traits from East or Southeast Asia to explain the limited distribution of certain objects like the blowgun found in Melanesia only in southwestern New Britain.12 History became the key issue for Speiser, both at the continental and the regional level. In both his detailed survey of Melanesian art styles and his more comprehensive study of Pacific material culture his analysis drew simultaneously on far-reaching migrations of Austronesian populations as well as on important local developments by indigenous groups (1936; 1938; 1941; 1946a). As he changed his theoretical orientation and recognised that the evidence from material culture pointed in quite a different direction than he had originally anticipated, his reputation grew in stature. He was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1932 and his work was appreciated by many colleagues in a volume intended as his Festschrift for his seventieth birthday, but published as a memorial volume (Bandi et al. 1951). Unfortunately, by the time he had shifted from an evolutionary to an historical approach in the 1930s and 1940s there were too few scholars in German-speaking countries who were still interested in developing projects using Speiser’s new analytical tools. He did keep in touch with A.C. Haddon and Beatrice Black-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 223

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

223

wood, but by this time museum studies of material culture had become less important even at Cambridge and Oxford. In 1942 Speiser finally became Director of the Museum of Ethnography in Basel, succeeding Fritz Sarasin, who was still Chairman of the Trustees at the age of 83. Speiser remained director until his death seven years later. Ironically, the English translation of his monograph in 1991, more than forty years after his death, has renewed international interest in Speiser and the collection he assembled between 1910 and 1912. The 1996 exhibition, Arts of Vanuatu (Bonnemaison et al. 1996), which was exhibited in Port Vila and drew largely on Speiser’s collection, has started to bring an important source of information about their past back to the people of Vanuatu. Not surprisingly, these volumes and the exhibition are simultaneously a source of information and an inspiration to maintain the rich traditions of earlier decades. Speiser’s ‘salvage’ anthropology of earlier days is beginning to bear fruit, in a manner that Speiser and others would not have dreamed of. If there is a lesson for the discipline, it is that we still have to come to grips with questions of form, style, type and structure through fieldwork, if we do not want to abandon the study of art and material culture again.

Notes 1. The idea that fletched arrows were associated with a very primitive people had weighed so heavily on Speiser’s mind that he had two (and only two) stamps made up before he began cataloguing his New Hebrides collection. One read ‘Gefiederte Pfeile’ (fletched arrows), the other, ‘Ungefiederte Pfeile’ (unfletched arrows). He collected only thirty-one of the former, all from Espiritu Santo (but registered on only five catalogue cards), while he obtained over two hundred of the latter. 2. For biographical details of Speiser’s life, see Adam (1950), Dietschy (1949), Kaufmann (1991), Meuli (1950), Speiser (1950). 3. Both Sarasins had studied in Würzburg, conducted extensive fieldwork in Ceylon, the Celebes and elsewhere, worked in Berlin and, in 1896, both were appointed simultaneously trustees to the Basel Museum of Natural History and the separate Ethnological Collection. See Speiser (1943: 269). 4. Apart from works in English shown in the bibliography, translations are my own. 5. At that time von Luschan was preparing a major study of Benin art. 6. Speiser (1943: 277–8) tactfully glosses over his difficulties with Fritz Sarasin at the museum in the 1930s, but there was a genuine difference of opinion on many theoretical points. 7. The notes in his personal journal show him often in contradictory moods, torn between feelings of loneliness, boredom and duty, especially with regard to his photographic responsibilities and packing collections for shipment. Collecting skulls appears almost an obsession. 8. The New Hebrides and Banks material is in accession V 90a for 1913, a gift by Felix Speiser to the ethnographic collection. A parallel accession included his field photographs, among which were those from Santa Cruz. The Santa Cruz and Tikopia objects are in accession V 68 for 1913. During his five months in New Britain in 1929–30, Speiser collected 337 objects and took an equal number of photographs.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 224

224

Christian Kaufmann

9. In an earlier paper (1919: 201) Speiser had written almost the opposite about the anthropological and cultural situation of the ‘pygmies’. However, in Speiser’s proof copy, preserved in the library of the Museum of Ethnography in Basel, the key sentence is underlined in pencil with the remark ‘falsch’ (wrong) added in Speiser’s own handwriting. Is this the beginning of Speiser’s shift? 10. In stating his views in a review of Egon von Eickstaedt’s new anthropology, Speiser nevertheless admired the study for its accurate description of racial diversity (Basler Nachrichten or National-Zeitung, clipping from 1933, no specific date). At the time there were evident political implications in holding such views, not least at Basel University, right on the intellectual and political border between pluri-cultural Switzerland and a Nazi-dominated Germany where the concepts of a pure Aryan race and of a purified true Germanic culture flourished. Speiser’s growing distance from physical anthropology may, however, owe more to the staunch political republicanism practised at his university than to a critique of physical anthropology. 11. The latter expression sums up the admiration of German expressionists for ‘primitive art’ from Africa, the Americas and especially Oceania (see Macke 1979 [1912]: 53–9). The first of these, purposefully, if naively, applies the concept of beauty to non-Western works, creating a provocative tension. For Speiser’s generation, ‘beautiful’ probably implied ‘beautiful according to natural standards’ (such as plumes, beetles, butterflies, etc.) rather than ‘culturally beautiful’. He avoids the subject by grounding art in religion, not in aesthetics. 12. Speiser made this point in a public lecture on ‘Ethnologische Probleme aus der Südsee’, Geographische-ethnologische Gesellschaft Basel (Manuscript H. Spei 5, in the Basel Ethnographic Museum Library, 16 December 1931).

Bibliography Adam, L. ‘In memoriam Felix Speiser’, Oceania vol. 21 (1950): 66–72. Bandi, H.-G., R. Bay and H. Dietschy, eds Gedenkschrift zur Erinnerung an Felix Speiser. Südseestudien, Museum für Völkerkunde und Schweizerisches Museum für Volkskunde, Basel, 1951. Bonnemaison, J., K. Huffman, C. Kaufmann and D. Tryon, eds, Arts of Vanuatu. Crawford House Publishing, Bathurst, and University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 1996. Deacon, A.B. Malekula. A vanishing people in the New Hebrides, ed. C.H. Wedgwood, with a preface by A.C. Haddon. George Routledge & Sons, London, 1934. Dietschy, H. ‘Felix Speiser, 1880–1949’, Phoebus vol. 2 (1949): 191–2. Haddon, A.C. Evolution in art: as illustrated by the life-histories of designs. The Contemporary Science Series, Walter Scott, London, and Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1902 (originally published 1895). Hediger, H. Ein Leben mit Tieren im Zoo und in aller Welt. Werd, Zurich, 1990. Kaufmann, C. ‘Felix Speiser, anthropologist’ in Ethnology of Vanuatu. An early twentieth century study, by F. Speiser, trans. D.Q. Stephenson. Crawford House Press, Bathurst, 1991(originally published Berlin 1923), 411–15. Luschan, F. von, Anleitungen für ethnographische Beobachtungen und Sammlungen in Afrika und Ozeanien, 3rd edn. Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, 1904.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Felix Speiser’s Fletched Arrow

Page 225

225

———. ‘Zur Ethnographie des Kaiserin-Augusta-Flusses’, Baessler-Archiv vol. 1 (1910): 103–17. Macke, A. ‘Die Masken’ in Der Blaue Reiter ed. K. Lankheit. Piper, Munich, 1979 (originally published 1912), 53–9. Meuli, K. ‘Felix Speiser (20 Oktober 1880 – 19 September 1949)’, Verhandl. Naturforsch. Gesellschaft Basel vol. 61 (1950): 1–12. Notes and queries on anthropology, (3rd edn) British Association for the Advancement of Science, London, 1899. Rallu, J.-L. Les populations océaniennes aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Series Travaux et Documents, cahier no. 128, Institut National d’Études Démographiques, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1990. ———. ‘The demographic past’ in Arts of Vanuatu eds J. Bonnemaison, K. Huffman, C. Kaufmann and D. Tryon. Crawford House Publishing, Bathurst, and University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 1996, 318–19. Sarasin, F. ‘Bericht über das Basler Naturhistorische Museum für das Jahr 1913’, Verhandl. Naturforsch. Gesellschaft Basel vol. 26 (1914): 12. ______. ‘Streiflichter aus der Ergologie der Neu-Caledonier und Loyalty-Insulaner auf die Europäische Prähistorie’, Verhandl. Naturforsch. Gesellschaft Basel vol. 28, part 2, (1916): 1–27. Sarasin, F. and J. Roux, eds Nova Caledonia. Forschungen in Neu-Caledonien und auf den Loyalty-Inseln / Recherches scientifiques en Nouvelle-Calédonie et aux îles Loyalty. C.W. Kreidel, Berlin/Munich, 1914–1929, series A-D. Sarasin, P. and F. Sarasin Ergebnisse Naturwissenschaftlicher Forschungen auf Ceylon in den Jahren 1884 bis 1886, 4 vols. C.W. Kreidel, Wiesbaden, 1889–1908. ———. ‘Über den Zweck der Pfahlbauten’, Globus vol. 72, no. 18, (1897): 277–8. Schindlbeck, M. ‘The art of collecting. Interactions between collectors and the people they visit’, in ‘Museums in dialogue’ eds C.Müller and M.Schindlbeck, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie vol. 118 (1993): 57–67. ———. ‘Die Südsee-Ausstellungen in Berlin’ in ‘Gestern und Heute – Traditionen in der Südsee. Festschrift zum 75 Geburtstag von Gerd Koch’ ed. M. Schindlbeck, Baessler-Archiv, (N.F.) vol. 45 (1997): 551–86. Speiser, F. ‘Pfeile von Santa Cruz’, Archiv für Anthropologie (N.F.) vol. 8 (1909): 308–11. ———. Two years with the natives in the western Pacific. Mills & Boon, London, 1913. ———. ‘Die Ornamentik von St.Cruz’, Archiv für Anthropologie (N.F.) vol. 13 (1915): 323–34. ———. ‘Kultur-Komplexe in den Neuen Hebriden, Neu-Caledonien und den Sta-Cruz-Inseln’ in Beiträge zur Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Festschrift F. Sarasin). A. Kündig, Geneva, 1919, 140–247. ———. ‘Decadence and preservation in the New Hebrides’, trans. A.I. Hopkins, in Essays on the depopulation of Melanesia, ed. W.H.R. Rivers. University Press, Cambridge, 1922, 25–61. ———. ‘Anthropologische Messungen aus den St.Cruz-Inseln’, Archiv für Anthropologie (N.F.) vol. 19 (1923): 89–146.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

226

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 226

Christian Kaufmann

———. ‘Anthropologische Messungen aus Espiritu Santo (Neue Hebriden). Ein Beitrag zur Pygmäenfrage’, Verhandl. Naturforsch. Gesellschaft Basel vol. 39 (1928): 79–166. ———. ‘L’art plastique des Nouvelles-Hébrides’ in ‘Fascicule consacré à l’art des océaniens’ ed. C. Zervos, Cahiers d’Art vol. 4 no. 2–3 (1929a): 91–4. ———. ‘Über Initiationen in Australien und Neu-Guinea’, Verhandl. Naturforsch. Gesellschaft Basel vol. 40, part 2 (Gedenkschrift Paul Sarasin) (1929b): 53–258. ———. ‘Versuch einer Kultur-Analyse der zentralen Neuen Hebriden’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie vol. 66 (1934): 128–86. ———. ‘Über Kunststile in Melanesien’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie vol. 68 (1936): 304–69. ———. ‘Melanesien und Indonesien’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie vol. 70 (1938): 463–81. ———. Kunststile in der Südsee. Führer durch das Museum für Völkerkunde, Basel, Museum für Völkerkunde, Basel, 1941. ———. ‘Geschichte des Museums für Völkerkunde’, Verhandl. Naturforsch. Gesellschaft Basel vol. 54 (1943): 265–80. ———. ‘Kulturgeschichtliche Betrachtungen über die Initiationen in der Südsee’, Bulletin der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie und Ethnologie vol. 22 (1945/46): 28–61. ———. Versuch einer Siedlungsgeschichte der Südsee. Denkschriften der Schweizerischen Naturforschenden Gesellschaft vol. 77, Abh. 1, Fretz, Zurich, 1946a. ———. ‘Die Pygmäenfrage’, Experientia vol. 2 (1946b): 297–302. ———. ‘Personalien, geschrieben 1948’ in Zur Erinnerung an Prof. Dr. Felix Speiser. 1880–1949. Privately printed, 1950. ———. Ethnology of Vanuatu. An early twentieth century study, trans D.Q. Stephenson. Crawford House Press, Bathurst, 1991 (originally published under the title Ethnographische Materialien aus den Neuen Hebriden und den Banks-Inseln, Berlin, 1923). Speiser, F. and P. Wirz Kunst und Kult auf Neu-Guinea. Die Sammlungen von Prof. Dr. Felix Speiser und Dr. Paul Wirz. Ausstellungsführer Gewerbemuseum, Basel, 1931. Spriggs, M. ‘An agricultural art: taro irrigation in Vanuatu’ in Arts of Vanuatu eds J. Bonnemaison, K. Huffman, C. Kaufmann and D. Tryon. Crawford House Publishing, Bathurst and University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 1996, 90–93.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 227

Chapter 10

ON HIS TODD: Material Culture and Colonialism

Chris Gosden

Introduction This chapter explores the sets of negotiations and performances involved in colonial relations in New Guinea between the Wars. While we now know that there was enormous movement of objects between all parties in colonial New Guinea, these movements of material and their consequences are often hard to document. Museum collections, by their nature, were the outcome of negotiations and performative actions, so that they provide well-documented instances of movements of goods between local people and settlers. This chapter focuses upon the collection of a single individual, John Alexander Todd, who was a student in anthropology at the University of Sydney and who worked on the south coast of New Britain between 1933 and 1936. However, the focus on an individual is counterbalanced by a stress on the broader set of colonial relations in which Todd was enmeshed. The point explored is the possibility that what Todd took to New Guinea was as important as what he took away. Many studies of colonialism consider the global forces at work in colonial relations and exploitation, paying less attention to how local relations were worked out in particular times and places. A focus on the local is not an escape from larger issues into parochialism, but can provide insights into the compound of local and broader social relations that make up all colonial situations. This study is not just of

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 228

228

Chris Gosden

what Todd took from coastal New Britain during his stays there in the 1930s, nor of the intellectual interests that lay behind his collections, but more broadly of how he fitted into colonial society in New Guinea, and how this may have influenced his own states of mind. Todd was a man who appears to have attempted to merge into colonial New Guinean society as far as he could, and his unhappiness and neuroses, while deriving from his personal history of which we know little, also mirrored broader colonial concerns. Our knowledge of Todd is skewed by the fragments that remain of his work. His field notes, one thousand photographs and an unknown number of sound recordings are lost, for the present at least. He never wrote up the broader synthesis of society on the south coast of New Britain which was his major aim, and left only five articles, written as preliminary statements (Todd 1934a and b; 1935a and b; 1936). A small number of letters and applications to funding councils have been recovered by the present author and Chantal Knowles, but our major analysis has been of Todd’s collection. This was made as something of an aside, but is now ironically the largest surviving result of his fieldwork, and is one of four collections made in New Britain between 1910 and 1937 which are now being analysed (Gosden and Knowles, in preparation). His receipts have also been recovered; they were presented to the Australian National Research Council and this unusual economic record of his work provides insights into how he set himself up in the field, modelling his life quite closely on broader colonial society. Before considering Todd himself, however, we need to think a little about the broader social and cultural situation in which he found himself in New Britain.

Colonialism’s Non-Culture Most recent discussions of colonialism (for example, Bhabha 1994; Thomas 1994) have highlighted the contradictory nature of colonial regimes, and the argument presented here seeks to add a new dimension to these contradictions. As many chapters in this book make clear, there was a vast trade in objects between Whites and indigenous New Guineans. This trade comprised, in turn, only one aspect of the relations between White and Black communities in towns, on plantations, in villages and in the bush. Black, Asian and White participants in New Guinean colonial culture were linked through a mass of social relationships which created roles, statuses and forms of exchange. These links pulled together initially disparate groups of people into known relations and forms of practice and helped initiate Europeans into the sets of skills, physical and social, needed to survive in tropical

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

On His Todd

7:14 pm

Page 229

229

New Guinea. At the level of social relations, all members of colonial society were inextricably joined. A brief historical sketch may give some more concrete sense of the manner in which New Guineans and Whites were linked through social relations. From the German period onward there was considerable labour-recruiting and people were inducted into colonial society forcibly in this way. Recruiting around New Britain, even at its western end, was intense. The disastrous social consequences of recruiting were recognised in the enforcement of a ban between 1912 and the start of 1914 in the Sulka and Mengen areas and the whole coastline from Cape Gloucester to Montagu Harbour. In 1913 recruitment was reaching its limit in coastal areas: it is estimated that nearly every unmarried man in the villages of the northwest coast of New Britain was a recruit that year or had been one recently (Firth 1973: 173), and much the same may have been true of the south coast. In 1933 there were 8,069 indentured labourers within New Britain as a whole, out of a total censused adult population of 17,000. Todd, reporting on the situation in 1933, said that ‘most of the younger men have served a period as indentured labourers for the European both British and German’ and that it was very common to find these people travelling to and from their places of employment (Todd 1935b: 438). He also noted that, by the 1930s, there were a number of older men who had worked in continuous employment for Europeans for over thirty years. Thus most of the male population of the southwest coast of New Britain had worked on plantations or in town in some capacity, bringing with them views of the broader colonial society, trade goods and money. As well as people leaving their local communities there were outsiders coming in. Where Todd was located at Möwehafen there was a small plantation (125 acres, approximately 50 hectares) owned at that time by Harold Koch, but managed for most of the year by a native foreman and worked by a small group of labourers, both local and from further afield. The plantations had effects other than bringing in outsiders. Much of the fresh food for the plantations was grown in local gardens. Todd reported on an extension of garden activity in the ten years prior to his arrival and attributed this to the cessation of warfare and people’s subsequent willingness to travel further afield to their gardens. Colonial peace, so called, must have been part of the story, but the effect of plantations and subsequent mission stations must have had considerable effects on people’s subsistence practices. During Todd’s stay there were three plantations on the south coast within the Gasmata sub-district. The largest by far was Lindenhafen, with a smaller one, Aliwa, directly in his field area and a third at Arawe further down the coast. The missions were about to arrive on that part of the south coast and Todd recounted how a native catechist set up in

O'Hanlon/Welsh

230

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 230

Chris Gosden

Möwehafen during his stay and the Anglican mission was starting up in the Arawe Islands in 1934–5. The south coast of New Britain, despite its relative proximity to Rabaul and the regularity of shipping along the coast, was considered remote and little known. Elkin, then Chairman of the Department of Anthropology in Sydney, wrote to Todd in 1933: ‘Like your Mother, we are all pleased that you will not be quite so isolated as you expected to be’. The Gasmata sub-district, comprising the southern half of western New Britain, was administered from the government station of Gasmata, set up by the Germans in 1912. In theory there should have been an Assistant District Officer, and a Cadet patrol officer, plus a medical assistant. But while Todd was there in 1933–4 there was only the Assistant District Officer, one F.W. Mantle, who was English, wore a monocle and adhered strictly to the official dress code (described below). In addition there were roughly twenty native police, a number of native medical orderlies and labourers and servants. There was a police post at Möwehafen, set up in 1930, where some of the police would have been resident. In 1922 there were 116 villages in the District with luluais and tultuls (appointed village officials), and that total would not have increased greatly in the ten years before Todd’s arrival. For the same year, there is a record of 2,500 natives attending the Christmas feast at Gasmata station, though it is not clear if such events continued into Todd’s time. However, at the level of perceived custom and forms of representation, the different groups had no means of conceiving of, or thinking about, the ties that bound them. Each side thought about the other, but mainly in terms of difference and Otherness. The White community in New Guinea was a literate one, with many surviving accounts of people’s time in the colony, and it is possible to pick out recurring themes in people’s writings. Most Whites stressed their separateness from Melanesian society. All the patrol officers wrote of being alone in the bush, even when surrounded by dense populations of locals, so that cultural isolation was transmuted into physical isolation. The anthropologists did the opposite, making the White community disappear from view and stressing the immediacy of their links with relatively pristine locals. Todd wrote of the south coast of New Britain that: ‘From the sociological point of view, these people are in excellent condition for investigation. They have been subjected to that slight contact with European culture which is a prerequisite for successful fieldwork. On the other hand, however, their culture is, as yet, practically unimpaired’.1 The plantation in the area that he worked in disappeared from his account, as did the regular visits by schooners on trading and recruiting voyages, although it must be said that it might well have been unwise to stress the impact of non-Melanesians in a grant application at the time. Anthropologists were not isolated in villages in New Guinea, but rather were temporary members of a broader colonial society, of

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

On His Todd

7:14 pm

Page 231

231

which they studied only a part. In fact, in order to operate in New Guinea they had to be inducted into life in Rabaul or the government station and here people like Chinnery, the government anthropologist and administrator, were vital in explaining the customs of the locals, who included the Government Secretary or the manager of the local Burns Philp store, in addition to the indigenous inhabitants. To stress the temporary nature of anthropologists’ participation in colonial New Guinea society is to ignore the fact that there were a series of values and roles set aside for them. McCarthy (1963: 9), discussing old (White) New Guinea hands’ attitudes to the ‘mollycoddling’ regime in Papua, quoted some as saying that Hubert Murray, Papua’s Governor, ‘was encouraging nothing more than an anthropologists’ zoo on his side of the border’. New anthropologists in New Guinea may have been innocent, but the society which greeted them was not, having a range of defined views as to their likely disruptive or beneficial effects, and this was as true of their informants as the White element of the community. Anthropologists also operated through networks of dependency on New Guineans and, just as with the patrol officers or plantation owners, many of their activities were structured through their close personal links with servants, key informants and others, all of whom knew how to deal with White people. Colonial society in New Guinea had a very partial sense of itself and this comes out in the contradictions inherent in the social ties that held people together and the lack of joint representation which kept them apart. Particular sets of relationships were suppressed by the participants in colonial culture: Whites could not accept that there were situations in which New Guineans had power over them (or could only conceive of such situations in terms of extreme danger). New Guineans were unlikely to see that Whites were deeply dependent on them in many ways. The lack of these two views within overall schemes of representation meant that forms of mutuality were never a real part of the sense that people had of the culture in which they lived. This fractured people’s basic scheme of representation, only allowing each side to think about the Other in those distanced terms and not to see mutualities of power and dependence. To stress the conjoining nature of social relations, but also the confusing absence of a full scheme of representation, is to make a rather different argument from either Bhabha or Thomas about the contradictions of colonialism. Both of these writers argue that colonial cultures represented hybrid, creolised forms and both are insistent that the ability of the colonised to subvert forms of representation within colonial cultures should be recognised, and that such forms of subversion are integral to the nature of colonial culture. Thomas (1994: 55–7) criticises Bhabha for focusing on terms like mimicry, which only

O'Hanlon/Welsh

232

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 232

Chris Gosden

allowed the colonised to speak in a language initially created by the colonisers. By contrast, this chapter concentrates on the things about which people, both White and Black, could not speak. The main gap in people’s discourse and knowledge of their own situation was the ties that bound people together. The absence of a discourse of mutuality made performativity and negotiation crucial. Objects were central to both negotiation and performativity.

The Colonial Gap: Negotiation and Performativity Colonial culture was a profoundly material culture. The main motive for Europeans going to New Guinea was material: to extract copra, rubber, gold or oil and to make a profit in so doing. Such pursuits necessitated the payment of local people in cash and/or material things and many relationships of planters and business people were constructed through the flows of materials. The movement of materials through New Guinean society was basic to that society and part of what held it together. Collections were one aspect of these flows of material and were made by many Whites in New Guinea, ranging from official collectors, like patrol officers, to plantation owners, missionaries and travellers who wanted curios as reminders of their time in the tropics. The important aspect of museum collections is that they are generally well-documented examples of broader collecting practice, and help to reveal the sorts of relations involved in collecting and the values, monetary or otherwise, attached to it. However, it is argued here that collecting cannot be understood as an isolated activity, but must be seen as one which was deeply embedded in the overall set of colonial relations pertaining at the time. For instance, Marcus Schindlbeck has discussed Lewis’s collecting on the Sepik in 1910, when the captain of the Siar on which he was travelling would not allow him to collect on the way up the river, as this would make his recruitment of labourers, to be paid in trade goods, much more difficult. On the way down river, the captain, who had been unsuccessful in his attempts to recruit, collected 2,000 artefacts for sale in order to turn the trip to profit (Schindlbeck 1997: 35–6). Important to the present argument is the fact that roles and statuses were also marked in material terms in a rigidly defined manner. An extract from a 1936 New Guinea government handbook gives some idea of the distinctions which were applied. ‘The standard attire for white men is the white duck coat and trousers, with shirt of white or cream silk’… ‘the white solar topee is the customary headgear’… ‘evening wear for men comprises black dress trousers, white starched dress shirt, cummerbund and short white mess jacket’… ‘fashions may

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

On His Todd

7:14 pm

Page 233

233

be varied in the bush, or where it is not possible to conform to the convention of an entire change of clothes at least daily’ (quoted in Downs 1986: 51–2). New patrol officers arriving in Rabaul were generally told to visit a Chinese tailor to kit themselves out with the requisite clothing. Nor did dress regulations apply only to Whites. Forms of dress were laid down for indigenous government employees, who had to wear short lavalava, which by official order should come to just above the knee. Downs, a patrol officer who arrived in Rabaul in early 1936, noted that ‘There was an irrational belief among Europeans that long lavalava were an expression of insolence and worn by people of insubordinate or even rebellious nature’, whereas local people in fact preferred them due to their comfort and elegance (Downs 1986: 53). Village officials all had caps and canes, which were their emblems of office, and were expected to wear store-bought dress, and the short lavalava, when greeting patrol officers in their area. Contained in Todd’s accounts for his 1935–6 trip, which will be discussed in more detail below, are receipts for kitting out his two local servants, which include reference to ‘boy’s plate, cup and cutlery, plus boy’s tinned meat’, indicating that there were grades of quality for these items which distinguished European and Melanesian. This obsession with marking status in material form derived from models of representation which provided knowledge of Self and Other, but not of how these terms were linked, creating a great uncertainty about the mass of social relations linking all parties in New Guinea. The lack of conscious appreciation of the basic social situation gave New Guinean culture a radically performative aspect. The term ‘performative’ is used here in a manner which follows Judith Butler’s (1993; 1997) usage. She, in turn, follows speech act theorists, who have concentrated on the class of acts of speech which can actually make a difference to states of affairs in the world. A vicar saying ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ actually joins single people in marriage and brings about a new state of affairs. Butler looks at a range of acts (not just of speech) which realise things, in the sense of making them real. Dress and bodily comportment realise gender differences and these differences could not exist in the same form without the acts and objects connected to them. For Butler, all cultures are performative: sex, gender and class for instance are names given to differences and mutualities which exist through both schemes of representation and the acts which bring them to life. Colonial societies have both differences and similarities with other social forms in this respect. Because the social relations that bind colonial societies together are not sufficiently recognised at the level of representation, these relations exist only insofar as they are performed: performances bring them to life and they then sink out of sight, below the level of consciousness. Colonial New Guinea

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 234

234

Chris Gosden

was only held together through acts, because representations were too partial to encompass all social relations. The radical performativity of these social forms led to a stress on both formalisation of clothing and comportment, but also of constant negotiation of roles and relations. The information on Todd not only provides insights into how collections may inform us on the process of negotiation, but also shows that the things that Todd took to New Guinea were used in particular types of performativity which he hoped would realise a new state of affairs: a job for him. It will be argued that we can only understand Todd within the overall network of colonial relations. Todd made two field trips to New Britain, both of roughly a year’s duration: 1933–4 and 1935–6. On the first he made a collection, which is now in the Australian Museum, Sydney. For the second we have no record of what he brought back, but we know what he took, as we have the receipts for items he took with him into the field and the things he took were quite extraordinary and provide a detailed glimpse into colonial life. This is a tale of two field trips, with different insights deriving from each. First let us look at Todd himself.

Todd: Man and Mystery J.A. Todd was born on 19 February 1911. His birthplace is unknown, but was either in New South Wales or New Zealand, as his family seem to have been New Zealanders, but were probably resident in Sydney at this time. His father was Capt. David Todd, who was probably employed by the Union Steam Ship Co. of New Zealand Ltd. Between 1923 and 1927 Todd attended North Sydney Boy’s School, and in 1927 (at the age of 16) went on to the University of Sydney where he earned a B.Sc. degree in Science, specialising in the chemical and biological sciences. Following his B.Sc., Todd took Anthropology I and II as a postgraduate diploma, presumably in 1930 and 1931 under Ian Hogbin and Raymond Firth, with some success as he was awarded the Frank Albert Prize in Anthropology for Anthropology II. During the year of 1932 Todd worked for eleven months as a Research Assistant on Australian National Research Council (ANRC) funding, under the supervision of Firth, who was Acting-Chairman of the Department after the departure of Radcliffe-Brown to Chicago. Firth himself left Sydney on 8 December 1932 to take up a lectureship at the London School of Economics (LSE). During this year’s research Todd wrote two reports: ‘Criteria for the classification of Cultures’ and ‘Affinal Relationships in Melanesia’. He may not have finished either as he resigned before the end of his twelve-month stint, to go into the field, and Firth had also departed. These reports have never been found. However, it seems very likely that the latter report influenced his choice of topic for

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

On His Todd

7:14 pm

Page 235

235

research and altered his approach to it. During this time he also attended postgraduate lectures in anthropology. Todd left Sydney on the MacDhui on 2 February 1933 for fieldwork on the southwest coast of New Britain for which he received an ANRC grant of £475 for field expenses and travel and £100 as a year’s allowance. His research proposal is still extant in the ANRC archive in the National Library of Australia and it says that he wanted to undertake general sociological study, looking at problems of kinship and social groupings with special emphasis on the reported ‘sex totemism’ of the region. This follows reports by Chinnery (1925; 1926), then government anthropologist, on two visits he had made to the area in 1925 and 1926 in which he had reported men belonging to one totemic group, and women to another. Todd hoped that ‘Sex totemism’ would throw light on analogous Aboriginal institutions. This hope turned out to be totally unfounded due to the erroneous nature of Chinnery’s observations, but it did mean that Todd concentrated on issues of kinship and the possible existence of totemic groups as part of his fieldwork. He also wanted to collect data on ‘the physical constitution of the natives’, especially on head binding. Arriving in New Guinea, Todd spent a month in Rabaul and was hosted by Chinnery, and Mr and Mrs McLean of Rabaul and then stayed for a time with Mantle at the Sub-District Office, Gasmata. Between 1 April 1933 and 1 April 1934 Todd was in Möwehafen, living in Aviklo village on Geglep Island (except for five weeks at the end of 1933 spent in Gasmata). All his published work relates to this first visit to New Guinea. Todd made a collection of 185 artefacts on this trip, took over a thousand photographs and made an unknown number of sound recordings. The artefact collection is now in the Australian Museum, Sydney (having originally gone to the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney and then to the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra), but the photographs and sound recordings are missing. Between 19 July 1935 and 24 June 1936 Todd spent a further year in New Britain, at Melenglo and Möwehafen. His budget was £400 for field expenses and £150 personal allowance. He planned to go to the Arawe Islands further to the west in New Britain and to the Siassi Islands off the western end of New Britain and walk from Siassi to Gasmata, but never did. He spent two weeks in Rabaul (31 December 1935 to 11 January 1936) and was later hospitalised in Rabaul (4 to 8 February 1936), possibly with malaria. The only academic record of his second trip is a report in a letter to Elkin, with at least one page missing. The stipend from this second trip was paid until December 1936. In February 1937 Todd started studying law and in 1939 he was admitted to the New South Wales Bar. The final academic word we have of him is in a letter to Elkin (22 November 1939) in which he says

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 236

236

Chris Gosden

he will start writing up his notes over the long vacation and that he is fairly physically fit, but washed out after study. We know from records of the legal profession that he was a barrister between 1940 and 1951, but that he gave up practising law soon after 1956, when he was about 45 years old, perhaps for reasons of ill health. Todd died on 22 December 1971 at Lower Fort Street, Sydney, aged 60 years. From the little snatches of information available, Todd appears to have been a man ill at ease with himself. In a letter to Elkin from the field in 1935 he said of someone he had met that he liked to talk big and do nothing. ‘I know the type having lived with one of them every minute of my life’. Further on in the same letter he wrote that he could not see how his work would get written up and that ‘perhaps it isn’t worth it anyway’. At the same time he wrote to Gibson, Secretary of the ANRC, ‘it is apparent that when I return from the field next year I shall be forced to cease being a professional anthropologist and seek some other career. As my qualifications and prospects for any other career are nil I can view the future only with foreboding and dismay.’ He was a man obsessed with his health, of which there are many mentions in his letters, and here he was reflecting broader colonial concerns. He concluded a letter to Chapman, then the Chairman of the ANRC, which was otherwise about the financial details of his fieldwork, saying that ‘My work progresses slowly and I continue to enjoy relatively good health. The diet however is probably to blame for the dental decay which goes on at a rate nothing short of startling’.

Todd’s Collection As an aside, it is worth noting that all the other students at Sydney in the late 1920s and early 1930s made collections, including Firth, Powdermaker, Hogbin, Bell and Kaberry. Many of these are in the Australian Museum in Sydney, with relevant archival documentation and photographs in the Sydney University archive and the ANRC records in the National Library of Australia in Canberra. For those interested in the individual researchers or a comparison of the collections as a whole these represent a fascinating set of possibilities. It seems that little analytical use has been made of the collections. However, photographs and objects were used as displays within the Department of Anthropology and were part of publicising the work going on there and making the distant tangible and accessible. Todd’s collection is fascinating for its surprises. We do not know how much he spent on each of the 185 items, but in his project budget drawn up for the ANRC he included ‘£30 for specimens’. At a time when the most valuable individual item would have cost about 10

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 237

On His Todd

237

shillings this would not have restricted his choice too much. The major structuring influences on his collection would have been his own intellectual interests, any instructions on what to collect from his Sydney department, and his relations with local people. Todd’s collection appears to have been a relatively minor aspect of his work as a whole, a part of what was seen as adequate empirical documentation of the people with whom he worked, together with photographs and sound recordings. The documentation that survives with Todd’s collection seems to indicate that he was thorough. However, Todd denies any real knowledge of material culture in a letter to Beatrice Blackwood, saying that he has no objections to Blackwood’s writing on the material culture of the area. He obviously saw himself as very much a social anthropologist, for whom objects were a secondary consideration. We are able to gain extra insight into what Todd collected through comparison with the other collections. For the larger project the artefacts have been categorised under a number of headings, first by classes of object (hunting and fishing, ornaments and clothing etc.), then by whether they were made locally or obtained in longer distance exchange, and finally by some crude generalisations about gender (see Table 10.1). Table 10.1: What Todd took from New Guinea, in comparison to other collectors. Lewis 1910

Speiser 1929

Todd 1933–4

Blackwood 1937

Totals

Hunting/fishing 38 Warfare 42 Axes/obsidian 7 Food preparation and eating 14 Ornaments and clothing 62 Containers 38 Craft production 9 Valuables 59 Music 24 Totals 293

15 12 8

9 8 1

36 5 89

98 67 105

8

19

7

48

26 10 2 8 10 99

60 38 1 23 10 169

34 9 24 16 16 236

182 95 36 106 60 797

Local Local exchange Long distance exchange Totals

83 121

33 50

62 72

45 101

223 344

89 293

16 99

35 169

90 236

230 797

Male (mostly) Female (mostly) Ungendered Totals

161 44 88 293

49 17 33 99

59 74 36 169

77 21 138 236

346 156 295 797

O'Hanlon/Welsh

238

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 238

Chris Gosden

Todd’s collection is structured partly by its absences: he showed no interest in stone tools (one item collected). At the time, many were working within a ‘salvage’ paradigm, which stressed that local cultures were being erased by colonial influences, and that the change from stone to steel was one of the best instances of this process. Nor did he take any notice of the production of materials (craft production in Table 10.1). However, he did show a marked interest in the everyday: utensils for food preparation and eating and containers are very well represented. His major interests seem to have been in the areas of ornaments, clothing and valuables. The last is not a puzzle: Englishspeaking commentators from Lewis and Chinnery onwards noted how deeply involved these south coast cultures were with the Siassi people, who moved items in long distance exchange. Not only were material things moved but a whole range of ceremonial activity involving masks and bullroarers, often used at circumcision ceremonies, was closely linked to the Siassi, with people in New Britain often importing ritual forms, as well as material items. For us, looking at the region from an historical point of view, one of the strengths of the small corpus of Todd’s published work is its description of ceremonial activity, which can be linked to artefacts which were just about to go out of use with the coming of the missions. Todd was obviously interested in ceremony and the structures of belief that lay behind it and his second piece of fieldwork seems to have been aimed partly at looking at the ritual complex to the east in Melenglo, which he considered to be the border of this complex. The largest category of items is that of ornaments and clothing, most of which belonged to women. Todd collected more female items than any of the other three collectors compared in Table 10.1, including Beatrice Blackwood, confounding any straightforward notion of how gender might bias collecting. Why this should be is hard to say: the number of female items may be partly because of Todd’s initial interest in ‘sex totemism’, taking him close to what we would today call ‘gender’. It may also reflect the structure of Todd’s local relations, which may have been very local. Although on both field trips he aimed to travel, illness and the difficulty of moving around appear to have prevented him from doing so. On his first visit we have no evidence that he left Aviklo and the immediate area, except for his Christmas holiday at Gasmata. The structure of the local community and Todd’s own sedentary habit could have been the major structuring principles influencing his collecting. Given the number of men away at work on plantations, these communities were probably held together by women. The gender bias in the collection may indicate that he had good relations with local women and either took a real interest in their lives or took the path of least resistance and collected the items which

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 239

On His Todd

239

were easiest for him. Todd seems to have taken some care in collecting, for many of the women’s skirts and much of the clothing he collected were new and therefore probably made especially for him. This again contrasts with all the other collections in Table 10.1 where most of the personal items collected had been worn and used. The contrast with our one woman collector, Beatrice Blackwood, is intriguing: her collections were dominated by stone tools and evidence of production processes, both of which are due to her brief from Balfour, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum where she worked, who wanted evidence of technology and economy. However, there is no especial evidence that Blackwood had better relations with women than men, so that in these two instances it may have been the personalities of the two collectors, plus their intellectual interests, which were the main causes of the structure of their collections, rather than their gender.

What Todd Took to New Guinea Of Todd’s second field trip in 1935–6, we know very little. What evidence we do have is from his grant application to the ANRC, which contains little detail (especially in comparison to what we have to write today), and comprises part of a letter to Elkin from the field, and Todd’s receipts which were kept much more carefully for his second field trip. This additional care with bookkeeping was probably due to Chapman’s misappropriation of the ANRC funds, during his time as ANRC chairman. This led both to Chapman’s suicide when he was discovered in 1934 and to the Rockefeller Foundation withdrawing their support (Wise 1985). The Rockefeller decision was the root of all Todd’s problems, as once their money vanished the possibility of getting support to write up his results went with it. Before the Rockefeller money was withdrawn Todd had secured ANRC funds for a second piece of fieldwork which he undertook in the knowledge that his time in anthropology would probably come to an end and that once he obtained alternative employment his chances of writing up his material were limited. Todd may have taken his disappointment personally, feeling in some obscure way that his failure to get funding was partly due to the lack of quality of his work. However, it seems likely that Todd was only partially doing fieldwork on his second trip and that he mainly went to New Guinea with the hope of getting employment there. Given the depth of the Depression in Australia at the time he probably felt he had little prospect of work there. He made very scant references to any information he collected on this second trip in later letters, such as those to Blackwood,

O'Hanlon/Welsh

240

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 240

Chris Gosden

and most of his allusions are to material gathered on his first visit. Also, by spying on him through his receipts, it is evident that he spent some time in Rabaul, although this may have been partly because he was sick. He also shifted his field site closer to the government station in Gasmata and the main plantation in Lindenhafen and made regular trips to both, perhaps to make and reinforce contacts with both planters and government officials. But his strategy to gain admittance to New Guinea society was also a material one and is of interest in itself and for the light it throws on the broader colonial society. Let us look at the way in which Todd kitted himself out in the field on this second trip. First of all, as we have seen he had two servants, Kitegit and Masawa, whose pay was 10 shillings a month each, plus food, lodging and other extras. Their wages would have cost £12 over the course of his trip and this figure would have at least doubled when other costs were added and this is out of a total budget of £400. Judging by today’s standards, two servants seem a little unnecessary, but it must be admitted that against the broader standards of colonial New Guinea this would have been seen as thin provision, for ‘The average bungalow home requires from 3–5 native servants; the essentials at any rate are the cook, laundry boy… and the house boy’ (Official Handbook of the Territory of New Guinea 1937). Todd had perhaps the most extensive medical kit on the south coast of New Britain outside Gasmata hospital, as detailed in Appendix 10.1. There are a variety of possible motives for this. One is Todd’s obsessive interest in his own health – a preoccupation common to Europeans, and with good reason in the days before antibiotics. But it may not have been just selfish concerns that motivated Todd and we cannot know how much he provided a health service for local people. However, the manner in which Todd set up his house can only have been for his own benefit. On his first trip Todd lived in a local materials house in Aviklo village (Todd 1934a, plate B) and there is no indication that he had unusual amounts of furnishings. He took from the ANRC equipment store: ‘1 camp table (used), 1 folding chair (used), 1 canvas bath and basin without stand (used)’;2 what else he might have had is not recorded. The second visit was very different. He bought two 100–gallon tanks in Rabaul, and he had a boiler that he had brought from Sydney. This time he had new furniture, not things from the ANRC store, plus a most extensive range of cooking pans and eating utensils (Appendix 10.1) and a very impressive set of hooks and fittings. Todd may have been disturbed by the discomforts of his first trip, but it can be argued that there was more to his strategy than comfort. Last, but not least, he took with him a mountain of canned food (see Appendix 10.1) and had regular deliveries from Sydney on the MacDhui, which included either 150 or 168lbs of potatoes every two months.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

On His Todd

7:14 pm

Page 241

241

Even at this distance of time it is hard not to feel queasy at the thought of ‘20 dozen tins of dripping, rissoles, sausages, steak and kidney, Irish stew etc.’ – of the kind advertised in Figure 10.1 – in a tropical climate. This amount represents close to a tin a day for the year he spent on his second trip, especially if we take out the time he spent in Rabaul and on plantations. Some of the food may have been destined for exchanges with local people, but there are also receipts for ‘boy’s meat and rice’ for his servants. These were presumably cheaper than tinned foods from Australia and would have been acceptable to local people and part of the distinctions which applied in New Guinea colonial culture. The mass importation of food has a number of implications. First, being so self-sufficient in food would have cut, or at least altered, Todd’s links with the local community, who presumably supplied him with a good quantity of food on his first field trip. His receipts for the second trip reveal a number of occasions when he bought coconuts, but no other indications of food buying. He did buy trade tobacco and things such as fish hooks, which might have been used for local transactions, but there is no indication that he bought food in large amounts and on a regular basis. Eating so much tinned food was in disregard of explicit health warnings. The Official Handbook for the Territory of New Guinea for 1937 (p. 146) contains a section on Abuse of Tinned Foods (bold in the original): Many Europeans in the island dependencies, Sir Raphael Cilento [1925] states, suffer from an improper diet, largely because they rely on tinned foods. The lassitude, lowered energy and lowered disease resistance, ‘directly traceable to the vitamin-deficient but handy preserved foods and their attractive labels’, are, in the opinion of Sir Raphael Cilento, wholly unjustified, since the soil is fertile and provides a profusion of edible products.

There is a whole subject of ethnographic study contained in this passage, which suggests that Europeans had some fear of the ‘profusion of edible products’ offered by the tropics as the consumption of these might link them too intimately to local ways and people. Instead they preferred the comfort of tinned stuff, which was only just food in a nutritional sense, but had the right superficial appearance, conveyed partly by their ‘attractive labels’. We can be sure that some of the natives of colonial New Guinea were easily tricked into acquiring objects that appeared attractive, but were in fact almost useless. Todd, unfortunately, may have been among their number, at the cost of his teeth and general level of health. Todd may well have enjoyed his comforts, but the construction of the house, its furnishing and the amount of food he had, went beyond comfort. It is argued that with his servants, door mat, lemon squeezer

O'Hanlon/Welsh

242

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 242

Chris Gosden

Figure 10.1: Advertisement for imported tinned and other foods from Australia, from the Official Handbook of the Territory of New Guinea, 1937.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

On His Todd

7:14 pm

Page 243

243

and Australian food, Todd had constructed his life along the lines of many Whites in New Guinea at the time, although presumably in a manner that was not average for anthropologists. In doing so, Todd wanted to fit into White society and perhaps fit in so well that that society would offer him something tangible in the shape of a job. Can we glimpse a shadowy scene with Todd set up in a house which was a smaller version of a plantation owner’s, rather than that normal for an anthropologist, entertaining the local Assistant District Officer to a dinner of tinned European foods, waited on by Kitegit and Masawa? And was this part of a strategy of performativity to appear a member of colonial society, as someone who knew the material codes and forms of action and was thus a natural candidate for employment within it? On his first field trip Todd was an anthropologist, with all the ambiguity and sense of threat that living with the natives held for White colonial society, but on the second he gathered little data and was attempting to occupy a different niche within colonial society. How well his strategy endeared him to the local community at Melenglo we can only speculate, on a coast so given to cargo cults. And we do not know what happened to Todd’s house and contents when he left: whether he turned this to some undeclared profit by selling to Koch or another plantation owner, gave it away to White or local people, or simply abandoned it in disgust. In a post-colonial world the attempt to transform oneself from anthropologist, who held local people’s interests at heart, to colonial officer, whose job it was to restrain and channel local people’s desires, may seem unusual and unprincipled. However, in the 1930s the study of native peoples was partly for the purposes of governance. The Chair of Anthropology in Sydney, held by Radcliffe-Brown from 1926, was established ‘to “provide anthropological training” for cadets and senior officers in New Guinea and Papua, to train research workers among Australian Aborigines, and to offer degree courses’ (Stocking 1995: 340). This was also the case with the appointment of Chinnery as Government Anthropologist in New Guinea in April 1924, whose brief was to provide information based on ‘disinterested research’ on vital issues such as population decline, but also to help train patrol officers through the cadet system introduced in 1925 (Campbell 1998). This helped Australia to demonstrate that it was discharging its duties to the Territory of New Guinea mandated to it under the League of Nations at the Treaty of Versailles (Commonwealth Government of Australia 1923). Todd’s own work was partly aimed at purposes of administration and one of his articles (1935b) is specifically to do with the European administration of justice. The paper starts ‘It is common knowledge that the contact of European and native cultures leads to many serious administrative difficulties’ (1935b: 437). It ends ‘At the same time it should be our aim to

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 244

244

Chris Gosden

bring the natives to obey the law because they believe it to be just, and to instruct them that a reasonable respect for other people’s rights is essential for the well-being of any society’ (1935b: 460). It is obvious that he saw his work, as did many others at the time, not just as the sympathetic understanding of local culture, but rather as generating a form of understanding which would allow Whites to administer a set of societies undergoing profound, but inevitable, change. One natural outcome of his work would have been a move into some form of colonial administration. However, we do not know whether he ever applied for such work directly, or was feeling his way as to whether this was something that he wanted to do and exploring whether he might be accepted. It may be that among other things his health let him down. In a letter to Elkin from the field in 1935 he wrote that he ‘can’t join New Guinea District Service as the climate would make me a physical wreck’ and worries about his health were obviously part of what separated him from New Guinea. He may not have blamed just his personal frailness for the lack of success in finding a place in New Guinean society. Todd blamed that society itself. He wrote in a letter to Beatrice Blackwood in 1937, at the point at which all his hopes of an anthropological career had been dashed: ‘I’m no admirer of humanity as a rule and the white savages of the South seas are a class all on their own and if possible are a “lower type” than any others’.

Final Thoughts Todd represents colonial relations in microcosm, as they were refracted through an individual personality. This scale of analysis has benefits and disadvantages. The focus on a single person shows that collections were structured by personality, as well as by broader colonial and intellectual forces, but at the same time the details of an individual’s life and work provide a fine texture to our understanding of colonial forces that would otherwise be lacking. The shadowiness of Todd makes him all the more interesting and it is hard, even at this distance, not to feel sorry for a man led to such desperate and vain measures to attempt success in his chosen career. The focus on Todd has suggested the way in which his personal relations in the field may have helped structure his collections, indicating that mutualities were important. His second trip may have been a prolonged performance to create himself as a person suitable for colonial service. The two field trips and their material evidences give us – when combined – an outline of the range of colonial relationships. On the first Todd was engaged in a conventional activity of collecting objects for the purposes of study, which fitted within the range of col-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

On His Todd

7:14 pm

Page 245

245

lecting activities that most White people engaged in when in New Guinea. His second trip was more unusual in that he brought with him far more objects than he took away. In this case artefacts were supposed to be his most convincing demonstration that he knew the codes of New Guinea colonial society and was happy to work within them, giving us the chance to see in microcosm what some of these codes were. Colonial society was obsessed with bodily health, and with correct forms of dress and housing. But in many ways most prominent was the emphasis on sociability and consumption, where the houses of planters and government officials were seen as oases of culturally recognisable foods, drink and furniture, even if all of these were parodies of what was found at ‘home’. A tinned steak and kidney pudding had little resemblance to a home baked one, but at least it was not taro. A stress on such symbols served to emphasise that the eaters had not gone native and maintained the fiction of separateness from the local culture in which they were in fact deeply enmeshed. What we take from the field is a direct indication of our interests, finances and capabilities. What we take into the field is important in showing our position within local society and our material attempts to affect that position. Ethnographic collection, then, is one aspect of broader sets of relationships, both social and personal, and needs to be seen as such.

APPENDIX 10.1: WHAT TODD TOOK TO NEW GUINEA Medical On 1 June 1935 in Sydney he bought a medical kit including ointments (6 types), bandages, lint, tourniquet, surgical needles, hypodermic, quinine, iron and arsenic compound, zinc creams, cocaine hydrochloride for hypodermic, strychnine for hypodermic, olive oil, iodine, eye droppers (doz.), thermometers (1 doz.), dental floss, suture silk, small kidney basin, tubing, 3 dozen toilet lanolin – total cost £8.5s.9d. – from Burrough’s Wellcome & Co. Plus syringe – 10s.6d. 26 June 1935 – Hallam, Chemists – throat brush, Eucalyptus blue ointment, castor oil, jars, medicine measure, iodine, Friars Balsam 99 shillings. 6 adhesive plasters, Enos salts, listerine, castor oil, paraffin oil, Eucalyptus oil, Tonic £2.14s.3d. Cologne, soap, Velmot Liq., Dental powder, ¾ doz. J&J Baby Powder, Petroleum Jelly. Household For constructing and kitting out his house he took the following: 14 June 1935, Nock & Kirby: 8 ft. oars, rivets, screws, boot last, hammer, nails, solder, sewing awl, bag handles, screws, tacks, staples,

O'Hanlon/Welsh

246

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 246

Chris Gosden

hooks, handles, brackets, picture wire, chisel, oil can, hand drill + 4 drills, HS blades, pliers, rasp, punch, snips, driver, tongs, 66 inch tape – £3.9s.4d. Also, – 3 tins ‘3 in 1’ oil, 2 boot brushes, spoons, mets, blacks, cards mendits [sic], 2 can openers, 2 forks, 6 bottle stoppers, 2 umbrella covers, 3 mouse traps, 1 scale, 2 steels, 1 egg slice, 1 wire grid, 1 flour sifter, 1 soap saver, 1 galv. Dipper, 1 colander, 1 funnel, pie dish, scrub brush, 2 enam. Disks, 2 coffee strainers, 1 feather duster, 2 pairs gloves, 1 kero. pump, 2 atomizers, 1 plug and basin, 2 baking dishes, 1 lemon squeezer, 1 steel dish, 1 coke safe, 1 pudding basin, 1 fry pan, 2 soap dishes, 100ft. wire line, 1 mop, 3 trouser hanger, 1 belt, 1 aluminium bowl, 1 scoop, 1 measuring jug, 1 tea pot. – £4.6s.8d. 14 June 1935, Also Nock & Kirby: spokeshave, set of spanners, spanner, driver, rule, crook bar, trowel, file, hasps and staples, 1 doz. tins kiwi polish, tie wire, glass paper, emery paper, 3 hat and coat hooks, 2 gate hooks, 4 iron bars, 1 lb galvanised wire, 14 inch bush shower, brushes, marine Lacquer, and 5 tins of paint £2.8s.0d., 2 nipples, prickers, washers, tape, rowlocks, 1 reef anchor, 2 thimbles, hanks of rope, 50ft. coir 1 inch, swivels, ring bolt, binnacle ring, cleats, shackles, water putty, split links, 8 ft. chain, hocks, 6 needles, twine, 1 knife, 1 thermos, 1 watch, 1 clock – £2.4s.0d. 14 June 1935 Stationary [sic] etc. W C Penfold: stamp pad, 4 camel hair brushes. Glass with labels, glue, 1 gross rubber bands, 1 gross S. G. Fasteners, 1 12 inch ruler, 2 large quill pens, 3 red pencils, 3 penholders [+4 illegible items] 15s.4d. 14 June 1935 Also Penfolds: ½ doz. exercise books, 1 doz… blocks, 4 doz tags, ½ doz progress filed 12s.5d. 20 June 1935, Hoffnung: Coir Door Mat (2s.3d.). 6 ½ inch iron box, 2 ½ gall. steel boiler, steel pots, chamber pot, kettle, 3 padlocks, 10 ft. hose, mattock, spade, – £6.15s.1d. 22 June 1935, Smith, Copeland & Co.: canvas and waterproof goods – 1 camp bed 6ft. x 2ft.3inches, steel stool, Duck mail bag £1.18s.5d. 25 June 1935 Photos equip (Harringtons): Hypo in bottles £1.10s., also Alum, Fine grain Johnsons DW, Pushpins, Tripod, stirring rod, Grease proof envelopes. 3 ½ x 3 ½ plates – £1.9s.2d., Johnsons developer 2s.10d. 6 August 1935: 2 hundred gallon tanks, 2 lengths of gutter, pipe, sheets water container G. Renton, Rabaul £6.3s.0d.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 247

On His Todd

247

2 September 1935, from BP Rabaul: kerosene, benzine [sic], oil, meths, grease, 1 boy’s cheap cooking pot, 2 cases boy’s meats, 2 doz. tins tobacco, 2 doz. cig papers [both these labelled servants’ rations], 6 bags boy’s rice, matches, 10 lbs trade tobacco, 1 doz. tins ranch pipe tobacco (personal deduction), 1 doz. good laplaps, 2 boy’s baskets – £22.15s.6d. Undated Sargood Gardiner: 2 pillows, 6 towels, 3 glass towels, 3ft. mosquito net – £3.3s.1d. 3 pyjama suits, 6 underpants [both personal deduction]. Padlocks – doz., 6 boxes mosquito coils, 12 kitchen knives, 12 pkts razor blades, balls [?], cleaner, can opener, haversack, fishing line, 1 tobacco pouch [also personal deduction], wash leather, 1 doz. axe handles, 2 doz. fishing lines, 4 doz. fishing hooks – £5.1s.2d. Food 23 July 1935 Foggitt Jones Pty Ltd.: Rex Pie, 2 doz lunch tongues, 6 camp pie, 12 curried sausages. £1.14s.5d. 23 July 1935: 2 cases Green beans, 2 cases French beans, 1 case carrots – £6.10s.0d. 23 July 1935: 3 cases Globe meats containing 20 dozen tins of dripping, rissoles, sausages, steak and kidney, Irish stew etc. 23 July 1935: 2 doz tins cream 6s.4d., case tins ideal milk £3.4s.0d. 23 July 1935: 150 lbs potatoes 15s.0d. 24 July 1935 Mitchell & Co.: vinegar, arrow root, soap, Gruyere cheese, starch, soda, Reckitts Blue, Safety marches, ammonia, turpentine, vanilla, cleaner, flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, boiled sweets, butterscotch, cocoa, coffee essence, shrimp paste, ham, ham paste, lemon bitter, ginger, Horlicks, White lemon essence, Carb. Soda, C/ Tartar, barley, texwax, soap, plum puddings, canadian salmon, marmite, bovril, lux, blanco, Ground ginger, prunes, banana creams, wheatmeal, sausage wafers, fairy cakes, arrow root, fruit Luvo cakes, – £20.15s.7d. 6 August 1935: 2 cases trade tea – Rabaul B.P. 2s.9d. ? December 1935: 1 lb coffee from Koch 3s. 31 December 1935: 20 lbs potatoes, 4 bags rice, 10 lbs trade tobacco, sunlight soap and Tilley lamp vaporizer – BP Rabaul £5.12s.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 248

248

Chris Gosden

23 January 1936: Doz cans meat 8s.10d. 24 January 1936: 1 case french beans, 1 case green peas £1.6s.0d. 24 January 1936: Sugar, boiled sweets, salmon paste, soap, white flour, ammonia, Horlicks, fruit salts, Johnson’s baby powder, coal tar £3.15s.9d. 28 January 1936: 168 lbs potatoes £1.1s.0d. 28 January 1936: Formalin, oil, lines, rope, pliers, nails, screws 19s.11d. 28 January 1936: 3 cases tinned fruit and soup £2.12s. 29 January 1936: 1 case Globe Beef £1.0s.0d. 30 January 1936: Flask – 2 pt 6s. Rosells undated: 2 cases pears, 2 cases peaches, 2 cases fruit salad, 1 case pears and peaches, 1 case apricots and fruit salad, 1 case of pea, celery and vegetable soup – £10.2s.6d.

Notes The research carried out for this chapter was supported by grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy which are both gratefully acknowledged. The staff in the Department of Anthropology, Australian Museum were extremely supportive of the research and I thank especially Dr J. Specht, Elizabeth Bonshek and Nan Godsell. The staff of the University of Sydney archive and the archive room of the National Library of Australia were also very supportive. While carrying out the research in Australia I was a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University and I thank Atholl Anderson for making this possible. I thank Jim and Jill Allen for all sorts of hospitality and help. I also gratefully acknowledge the amount of detective work done by Tom Harding into Todd’s post-fieldwork career and the destiny of his documentation. Without Tom’s efforts we would know much less about Todd than we do. Discussions with Jim Allen and Glenn Summerhayes helped improve the direction and content of this chapter considerably. Both Mike O’Hanlon and Jim Specht made detailed comments on the chapter, improved the argument and corrected many minor errors. 1. Application to the ANRC 9 September 1932, Sydney University, Elkin papers 40, Box 160, items 27 and 77. 2. Sydney University archives 4/1/69.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 249

On His Todd

249

Bibliography Bhabha, H. The location of culture. Routledge, London, 1994. Butler, J. Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’. Routledge, London, 1993. ———. Excitable speech: a politics of the performative. Routledge, London, 1997. Campbell, I.C. ‘Anthropology and the professionalisation of colonial administration in Papua and New Guinea’, The Journal of Pacific History vol. 33 (1998): 69–90. Commonwealth Government of Australia. Report to the League of Nations on the administration of the Territory of New Guinea from 1921 to 1922. Government Printer, Melbourne, 1923. Chinnery, E.W.P. ‘Notes on the natives of certain villages of the Mandated Territory of New Guinea.’ Territory of New Guinea, Anthropological Reports Nos. 1 and 2. Government Printer, Melbourne, 1925. ———. ‘Certain natives in south New Britain and Dampier Straits.’ Territory of New Guinea, Anthropological Reports No. 3. Government Printer, Melbourne, 1926. Cilento, R. ‘The white man in the tropics’, Department of Health, Publication No. 7. Department of Health, Melbourne, 1925. Downs, I. The last mountain: a life in Papua New Guinea. University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1986. Firth, S.G. ‘German recruitment and employment of labourers in the west Pacific before the First World War’, unpublished D. Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1973. Gosden, C. and C. Knowles. Material culture and colonialism in New Britain, Papua New Guinea (in preparation). McCarthy, J.K. Patrol into yesterday: my New Guinea years. F.W. Cheshire Ltd, Melbourne, 1963. Official Handbook of the Territory of New Guinea. Commonwealth Government Printer, Canberra, 1937. Schindlbeck, M. ‘The art of the head-hunters: collecting activity and recruitment in New Guinea at the beginning of the twentieth century’ in European impact and Pacific influence eds H. Hiery and M. Mackenzie. Tauris Academic Studies, London, 1997. Stocking, G. After Tylor. British social anthropology 1888–1951. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1995. Thomas, N. Colonialism’s culture. Polity Press, Oxford, 1994. Todd, J. A. ‘Report on research work in south west New Britain, Territory of New Guinea’, Oceania vol. 5 no.1 (1934a): 80–101. ———. ‘Report on research work in south west New Britain, Territory of New Guinea’, Oceania vol. 5 no.2 (1934b): 193–213. ———. ‘Glimpses into the daily life of the natives of New Britain’, Mankind vol. 1, no.11 (1935a): 278–9. ———. ‘Native offences and European law in south-west New Britain’, Oceania vol. 5 (1935b): 437–60.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

250

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 250

Chris Gosden

———. ‘Redress of wrongs in south west New Britain’, Oceania vol. 6 (1936): 401–40. Wise, T. The self-made anthropologist. A life of A.P. Elkin. George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 251

Chapter 11

REVERSE TRAJECTORIES: Beatrice Blackwood as Collector and Anthropologist

Chantal Knowles

Introduction This chapter examines the movement of objects between different categories of people, and, in particular, the extent of gift exchange between museum professionals. Anthropologists have often focused on gift exchange and the movement of objects in Pacific societies and more recently research has begun on the movement of objects across the ‘frontier’ or coexisting space of colonial and indigenous cultures (Thomas 1991). But the ‘entangled’ nature of these objects goes far beyond the initial transactions that took place in the field. Anthropologists circulated ‘collectible’ objects both in and after leaving the field, and specific individuals used objects in the museum world as collateral for the acquisition of a more diverse range of objectives. The focus will be on the collecting activities of one Oxford anthropologist, Beatrice Blackwood, during two separate pieces of fieldwork in New Guinea, when she made substantial collections of material culture at five different sites between 1929 and 1937. Objects represented a central thread in Blackwood’s social relations in the field and in the museum. The majority of objects she acquired in the field were purchased, but in the museum world she exchanged them as gifts, inverting our respective expectations as to artefact movement in the Pacific and the metropolis. These collections, and their constituent artefacts, became entangled in unexpected sets of social relations which – if we study them in their total-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

252

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 252

Chantal Knowles

ity – provide us with a snapshot of anthropology from the perspective of one individual’s experience at a time of ferment in the discipline. Blackwood’s career charts a methodological and theoretical course almost the inverse of that of her peers. She narrowed her focus from broader anthropological questions down to material culture, choosing to go against the general tide among her contemporaries and in particular her colleagues at Oxford. Her collections form the strongest evidence of her positioning in the discipline, but also highlight broader issues as to how material culture was perceived in the discipline at that time. Blackwood’s social relationships with anthropologists and with local people were often broached, stimulated and maintained through the collection and circulation of objects. Her engagement with the collections and use of certain objects seem to have been a tool through which she gained respect and consolidated her position in several different communities: her field community, the colonial community, the museum community and the wider academic community. It is now acknowledged that the contents of a collection made by an anthropologist during fieldwork is not the objective raw data that it was assumed to be at the turn of the century (Herle 1998: 97). The contents of collections are structured by diverse influences on the collector, including the concerns of the host community and the perspective of the anthropologist (O’Hanlon 1993: 55). This chapter looks beyond the content of Blackwood’s collections and examines how the process of collecting and exchange which she carried on both in the field and in the museum, created, cemented or realigned personal and community relations with the collector. In looking at two periods of fieldwork, separated by a five-year period when Blackwood was back in Oxford and her job and position changed dramatically, it is possible to identify an evolving fieldwork style and collecting methodology, which in turn emphasise the multidisciplinary nature of early anthropology at Oxford and its gradual hardening into certain theoretical groups. These were ‘institutionalised’ with the arrival of Radcliffe-Brown to take up the Chair of Social Anthropology in 1937, and by the narrowing of spheres in which material culture was used both theoretically and physically. Blackwood, whose career at Oxford University spanned the years from 1908 to 1975, was a participant in, reacted to, and observed these changes.

Blackwood’s Education and First Melanesian Fieldwork Having initially studied English there, Blackwood returned to Oxford in 1916 to begin voluntary work in the department of Human Anatomy and to sign up for the Diploma in Anthropology which had

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Reverse Trajectories

7:14 pm

Page 253

253

been instituted in 1907. During this period anthropology and human anatomy were closely linked at Oxford through the study of archaeology and physical anthropology. The Human Anatomy department was based in Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History which itself serves as the entrance to the Pitt Rivers Museum where the University’s ethnography collection is held. This spatial contiguity reflects the original link between evolutionary and ethnological theory, current at the museum’s foundation and which persisted during Blackwood’s early career (Stocking 1995: xv–xvi). Having gained her diploma, Blackwood became a Research Assistant in the department of Human Anatomy and concentrated on the anthropological fields of physical anthropology and archaeology. In 1924 she was awarded a fellowship to carry out an anthropological study on the relative intelligence of the indigenous and immigrant populations in various regions of North America (Blackwood 1927). It was on the strength of this work that she was offered another research grant – this time from the American National Research Council – to ‘study the problems of sex in a primitive society’. It was this that led to her fieldwork in Buka and Bougainville, part of the Mandated Territory of New Guinea. Blackwood left Oxford for New Guinea in early July 1929, having been given special leave from her post in the department of Human Anatomy. She went to the field under the auspices of Dr Clark Wissler, whom she had met at Yale and who had engineered her funding. But from the day of her departure, Blackwood wrote a weekly chronicle to her mentor, Arthur Thomson, Professor of Human Anatomy and teacher of physical anthropology at Oxford, who was her main contact and source of intellectual advice and stimulus in the field. Wissler, in contrast, received only periodic reports, and seemed content for Blackwood’s Oxford colleagues to advise her about choice of field area and methodology. In addition to those with whom she was in direct contact, Blackwood had also been primed by others of the British school who wanted information or specimens from the region, or had suggestions as to what her work should focus on. Notable among these were R.R. Marett, the ‘armchair’ social anthropologist at Oxford, and Henry Balfour, curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, who requested a collection and who provided her with a letter of recommendation to E.W.P. Chinnery, the Government Anthropologist in New Guinea, soliciting his help in selecting a field site. Along with Thomson, these men formed the three pillars of Blackwood’s anthropological teaching and symbolised the discipline of anthropology at Oxford at this time (see Figure 11.1). In addition to the Oxford influences, Blackwood had contact with two veterans of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait: Sidney Ray and Charles Seligman. Where Ray, the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

254

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 254

Chantal Knowles

specialist in linguistics, offered advice, Seligman requested information in the form of the narratives of dreams for interpretation. Blackwood travelled to New Guinea via Australia where she visited Radcliffe-Brown’s department in Sydney. Here she met recent returnees from the field, Camilla Wedgwood and Raymond Firth, who both advised her on the practicalities of fieldwork. She attended departmental coffee breaks in Radcliffe-Brown’s room with his students, including

Figure 11.1: Examiners and students for the Oxford Diploma in Anthropology, 1910. Left to right (back row): Wilson D. Wallis, Diamond Jenness, and Maurice Barbeau; (front row) Henry Balfour (Curator, Pitt Rivers Museum), Arthur Thomson (Professor of Anatomy), and R. R. Marett (Reader in Social Anthropology).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Reverse Trajectories

7:14 pm

Page 255

255

the colonial office cadets, where she enjoyed the intellectual stimulation and anticipated the promise of a new period of fieldwork. In contrast to her American fieldwork, and following the style of fieldwork publicised by Malinowski and endorsed by Radcliffe-Brown, Blackwood intended to concentrate on a single field area for nine months, long enough, she hoped optimistically, to enable her to learn both the lingua franca, Tok Pisin, and whatever the local language should prove to be. After leaving Sydney she travelled to Rabaul, the colonial capital of the territory, where Chinnery advised her that Petats, a coral islet off the coast of Buka, would make a suitable field site. As there was no transport immediately available, Blackwood spent a week with Hortense Powdermaker on Lesu, New Ireland. Powdermaker, who had been in the field for just under six months, began teaching her Tok Pisin and they discussed her field methods and results (Powdermaker 1967: 83). Here, Blackwood also began purchasing artefacts, in one case reluctantly ceding precedence to Powdermaker noting: ‘as I was her guest I could not very well grab it from under her nose, though I should have liked to do so.’1 Blackwood reached Petats on 29 September 1929, but was disappointed to find an established mission station in close proximity. Over the next three months she felt acutely the presence of the missionaries, believing that they had so influenced the islanders that she could no longer class them as truly ‘primitive’ (Blackwood 1935: xix). Furthermore, she feared that the mission presence inhibited local people from frank discussion of certain topics. After three months she felt it expedient to move to Kurtatchi village on the main island of Bougainville, which was reassuringly less accessible to her White neighbours who were a full day’s walk away. Throughout the twelve months in the field Blackwood concentrated on the specific grant remit, while also holding that social practices and ceremonial events could not be understood unless she studied all aspects of the villagers’ lives. This at times worried her correspondent Thomson, who, though he had never carried out an intensive study himself, felt that she should restrict her coverage. Blackwood defended her approach, saying: if I ignored their material culture I should lose a lot of sex taboos e.g. while fishing, hunting etc. If I don’t bother about their medicines I lose a lot of charms for making people fall in love with you, to say nothing of contraceptives, etc. If I omit astronomy, I lose e.g. an interesting connection between certain appearances of the moon and menstruation. If I omitted their genealogies–a job which takes endless time and patience–I could never understand their society and should never have heard of a number of anomalous marriages which throw light on the problems with which I am immediately concerned. And so on through the range of human activities.2

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 256

256

Chantal Knowles

While Blackwood was developing a definite fieldwork methodology which she was willing to defend vociferously to her mentor, she still went through periods of doubt about the aims of her work and the quality of her research. While in the field she read Malinowski’s recently published Sexual Life of Savages (1929), and then sent for Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). The quality of Malinowski’s results and the theories he wove around them preyed on her mind. She wrote to Thomson: ‘That’s why I feel depressed when I read Malinowski’s works, he seems to have a broad grasp of fundamental principles which I lack, and can theorise about things which to me remain facts’.3 Blackwood developed a routine, spending mornings collecting dream narratives and then, if an invitation arose, accompanying a specific group on their chosen activity for the day. If nothing of interest was taking place she remained in the village to work on notes for the day. This also meant playing host to a variety of visitors, who occasionally included those bringing artefacts as gifts or in exchange for trade goods. In the evenings her most productive interviews were conducted after she had lit a lantern on her verandah, which signalled to the village that she was ready to entertain visitors as they told stories and discussed genealogies or events.

The First Collection Objects and exchange formed a large part of Blackwood’s relations in the field and in some cases were the means of eliciting information. During this period of fieldwork she was formulating a collecting policy. She already understood the collecting practice of the Pitt Rivers Museum, which was to make a comprehensive collection from an area, to be employed in the museum either to illustrate the culture in question or to make cross-cultural comparisons of type. Balfour determined most of her initial choices, as he wanted specific items for the collection, generally to fill perceived gaps in particular typological display series. Once she arrived at her field site Blackwood sent him a proposed list of possible specimens which he duly annotated and sent back with a further ‘shopping list’.4 This list was entered into the back of her diary where a tick was put against each item as it was acquired (see Figure 11.2). The acquisition of some objects was time-consuming and she constantly had to reassure Thomson that making a collection for Balfour was not the main focus of her efforts in the field.5 As she worked from Balfour’s ‘shopping list’, Blackwood came to realise that the objects created connections between her and the community she was living in. She found that when gifts were offered she could not refuse them and had to give a return gift, whether she wanted

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Reverse Trajectories

7:14 pm

Page 257

257

Figure 11.2: ‘Things to get if possible’: part of Blackwood’s ‘shopping list’ from Balfour, which was entered at the back of her diary.

the original item or not. When an item was presented as a purely economic transaction, however, she was able to choose whether or not to accept. Examination of how particular items were acquired also provides some insight into the extent of local agency in constituting the collection. Blackwood’s diaries are full of references to choices she made while collecting objects, and some of these are outlined below. However, there were also choices made on her behalf by members of the community, sometimes acting alone and at other times representing the community as a whole. These not only shaped the content of her collection but also in turn affected her ability to control the future use of certain artefacts. A striking encounter that Blackwood documents in her monograph was the procuring of three bullroarers from a young man. Community elders had vetoed the sale of bullroarers to her quite early on in her stay because, they said, such items could only be made for ceremonial use. After several months in residence she was approached in secret by a young man who offered her for sale two used and one newly made bullroarer. Here, at one level, she was putting her wish to make a comprehensive collection above ritual sanctions that applied to the sale of such artefacts. Her justification was that of ‘salvage ethnography’. The sale proved, in her eyes, that traditional ways were in decline: the elders no longer wielded the political power or the respect to enforce this prohibition on the younger generation (Blackwood 1935: 215–16). On another occasion, she expressed feelings of outrage and compassion at the expulsion of an adolescent boy from the community after a government doctor had removed his upi hat (the wearing of which was

O'Hanlon/Welsh

258

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 258

Chantal Knowles

part of the rite of passage into manhood) and shaved his head against his wishes in order to cure a minor sore. This action did not prevent Blackwood from buying the hat (otherwise difficult to obtain) from the doctor and she did not query his appropriation of it. She wrote: The doctor offered to sell me the hat and the hair and as the mischief was done I agreed to buy it – but not for worlds would I have him cut it off for me! We are lucky though because the upis are very sacred and are always burnt when their function is over, and I had very little hope of getting one.6

Blackwood’s Buka and Bougainville collection is layered, in both the types and categories of objects she collected and the relations and exchange patterns they fostered or followed. She spent substantial amounts of her time and resources securing particular artefacts and yet felt able to reassure Thomson that it was not her priority in the field. She made specific choices about certain material, such as artefacts she received and considered as personal gifts, incorporating them among her own possessions that she had brought to the field. These included, for example, a gold lip shell which she used as an ash tray, and a possum teeth necklace and dance belt which were made especially for her and which she wore while in the village. This delighted the locals while Blackwood herself was sure it would upset colonial visitors as worrying evidence of her having ‘gone native’.7 It is not clear what happened to these objects on her return to the museum, as none of them are listed in the collections. Other artefacts were purchased as private gifts for Thomson, despite the fact that the procurement of a second example for the museum was unlikely. In particular she commissioned a rare walking stick (of a type made and used in the area) especially for him and the museum never received a similar example. She also sent him as a birthday gift two rare female figures, telling him to pass them on to the museum if he did not like them. When Thomson said he wanted them himself, Blackwood replied: ‘Most decidedly don’t hand them over to Balfour if you care to keep them’.8 She made other choices. She rejected a model boat because it used modern paint in its decoration and indeed commented on its subsequent acquisition by a local White resident: One thing was funny. There was a model of a canoe hanging up in the verandah – he was boasting about the presents the natives had brought him and instanced this one which a certain boy had given him. Says I, without thinking, ‘Oh, he offered it to me yesterday and I turned it down because it had European paint on it’.9

Yet included among her collection of shell-disc ornaments were examples where the shell disc had been replaced with adapted crockery

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 259

Reverse Trajectories

259

saucers. However, that ambiguous status in her eyes is reflected, perhaps, in her exclusion of them from the series illustrated in her later publication (Blackwood 1935: Plate 68). In sum, during her first Melanesian fieldwork, Blackwood was operating on a fairly broad front. She was at the start of her career and was at least as concerned with how her anthropological work would be received by the wider academic community, as with her collecting. She was developing her collecting methodology but the collection she made was ad hoc, and in response to several competing influences, of which Thomson’s was stronger than Balfour’s. Since no one was directly funding her to collect, her obligations to those who wished for artefacts or information were social rather than financial.

Changes at Oxford Blackwood returned home via Sydney and New York. In Sydney, she was put out by an encounter with Radcliffe-Brown and she immediately regaled Thomson with the details in one of her final letters: Sydney was awful. Radcliffe-Brown was stuffy and indicated that he didn’t see how I could possibly have done any decent work up there because I had no training in social anthropology. He asked who [was] the social anthropologist at Oxford, when I told him Marett, he said ‘The unfortunate thing about Marett is that he has never seen a savage’.10

This comment was in contrast to her earlier reserved, but genuinely interested, attitude to Radcliffe-Brown and his social anthropology and perhaps marked the beginning of her shift away from social anthropology towards a primary concern with material culture. In New York she caught up with Wissler and handed in and discussed the results of her fieldwork. On 1 January 1931 Blackwood arrived back in England, making it back to Oxford to meet Professor Thomson, on the same day. Once she returned to Oxford, she began the process of partitioning the collection. The following extract from the department of Human Anatomy’s annual report (Thomson 1930) gives an idea of its extent: Miss Beatrice Blackwood,… after having been engaged for a year in the study of the natives of the Northern Solomon Islands, returned here on January 1, 1931. She has brought back with her many specimens of rare value relating to their arts and crafts, besides making collections of herbs and plants reputed to have medicinal properties amongst the natives. So, too, she has gathered shells and corals from known localities, as well as having obtained valuable crania, characteristic of the aboriginal types of

O'Hanlon/Welsh

260

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 260

Chantal Knowles

the Southern Pacific area. All these she is handing over to the respective University Departments concerned.

The University was not the only beneficiary of Blackwood’s collections. Although she ranked the university departments above other institutions and gave them first choice of specimens, she also requested that duplicate geological specimens were divided between two local school museums that she had been instrumental in setting up some years earlier, and the majority of the botanical specimens went to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. She also creamed off fortynine objects from her ethnographic collection and sent them to Dr H.D. Skinner in Dunedin, New Zealand for the Otago Museum, on the understanding that in due course he would provide the Pitt Rivers Museum with local equivalents. She was delayed in sending these items, so ‘added a few things I really intended to keep for myself, by way of interest on the time which has elapsed since they might have reasonably be supposed to have got to you’.11 The addition of further gifts as compensation for the late arrival of the original gift, gives a sense of how important to Blackwood was the relationship she was building – this was not a purely commercial transaction. In fact Blackwood had visited Skinner in New Zealand on her return from the field and her sense of personal obligation is signified through these extra items. During her Buka and Bougainville fieldwork Blackwood made most of her decisions about exchange and use of objects while she was in the field or very soon after. Only once she had decided who was to get what did she turn over the remaining bulk of the items to Balfour at the Pitt Rivers Museum. This was partly because she was not an employee of the museum and would therefore have no control over the destiny of artefacts in her collection from this point on: and indeed, in contrast to her later collections, that from Buka and Bougainville remains in its entirety in the museum today. Blackwood also began to write up her notes for publication. For advice on different sections of what became Both Sides of Buka Passage (1935) she liased with Henry Balfour on the subject of the arts and industries, with R.R. Marett on the social anthropology of the region, and with Brenda and Charles Seligman on the data from the dreams she collected. The result was a volume of over six hundred pages. On publication, the book was well received; it also gained her a certain amount of notoriety in the international press, as it sparked off a number of articles written under such headlines as ‘Woman Lived Among Primitive People for More Than Year’ in which she was described as a modern day heroine.12 In the academic world it brought her much acclaim and A.P. Elkin included it under a list of works that contained ‘descriptions of the Malinowski type, though not necessarily of the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 261

Reverse Trajectories

261

“school”’ (1953: 15), ranking it alongside Powdermaker’s Life in Lesu (1933) and Firth’s We, The Tikopia (1936). In 1933 Thomson retired and with the appointment in 1934 of Wilfred Le Gros Clark, whose interests lay in experimental anatomy, Blackwood’s working life became extremely difficult. Her whole career up until this point had been centred at the University Museum of Natural History, of which the Pitt Rivers Museum had originally been a department. With the shift away from physical anthropology the two museums drew further apart. Blackwood found her area of expertise sidelined and her position became untenable as she was marginalised within the University Museum. In 1936 her post was transferred to the Pitt Rivers Museum where she became Lecturer in Ethnology. But, before she took up the post proper, Balfour arranged for money from the Museum to send her on a second field trip to the Pacific, this time with the sole aim of amassing specific collections for the museum with attendant documentation.

Return to the Field Blackwood’s return to the Pacific was a direct result of news received of the expeditions by Hides, Leahy, Taylor and others which had penetrated the highland interior of New Guinea and reported on their discovery there of major hitherto uncontacted populations. Blackwood was dispatched to ‘study the technique of a modern Stone-age people before it follows that of our own Neolithic forefathers into the realm of archaeology’ (Blackwood 1950a: 12). This, in turn, reflected General Pitt Rivers’s original intention that the Museum should represent ‘Man as he is, and man as he was’, a principle to which Balfour – still the Museum’s curator – continued to adhere (Penniman 1946: 70–1). The Museum’s interest did not, however, extend to lavish funding: Blackwood was given little more than the cost of her return travel to New Guinea and was expected to use her salary to cover most of her field expenses. Blackwood hoped to base herself in the Mount Hagen region, in the heart of the newly contacted highlands, but, on arrival in Salamaua, she found that the area had been declared ‘uncontrolled’ and access was limited to government officials. After taking advice from Patrol Officers, from Mick Leahy and from others, she decided to head for the Upper Watut. Although much of this region was also ‘uncontrolled’, there was a trio of villages under government control several days walk from the patrol station of Otibanda, where it was reported that stone tools were still being made. Blackwood had very specific tasks set by the Pitt Rivers Museum and she chose to move between the three villages, to compare their

O'Hanlon/Welsh

262

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 262

Chantal Knowles

specific stone tool assemblages. This entailed dealing with several different languages and, while Blackwood recorded a considerable vocabulary, much of her information was necessarily gathered by observation and through discussion in Tok Pisin with her servant and the younger men of the village. At the end of nine months she was instructed by Balfour to leave the region to make collections from other regions of New Guinea, ‘instead of staying the year [she] consider[ed] the necessary minimum for an ethnological study’ (Blackwood quoted in Simpson 1954: 67). In later years she was to see this period of fieldwork as productive in terms of material culture and technology, yet largely unfinished. The contrast between her focus during this period of fieldwork and that on Buka and Bougainville is marked. Here her only academic ‘read’ was the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s Notes and Queries on Anthropology, and initially she consulted it as an aid to fieldwork practice. She seemed only to worry about the results of her work in terms of the museum’s needs and Balfour’s expectations, not in the wider context of publication. While in this region, Blackwood spent time corresponding about other possible field sites where suitable collections might be made. She also made use of other Whites in the field – gold prospectors, traders, residents and government officials – to supply her with artefacts from beyond her fieldwork area. Whereas in Buka and Bougainville she had established and maintained social connections through artefacts, this time she called in favours to acquire objects. Even before leaving Salamaua, Blackwood had set up, and begun to fill, a repository to which artefact collections made by others could be sent. By the time she reached her first village in the Upper Watut, some items had in fact already been received, packed and shipped back to Oxford. In most cases these items were gifts from the donor, with at most transport costs being paid by Blackwood. Blackwood left the Upper Watut, after having made what she considered to be a representative collection of Anga material culture with a heavy bias toward technological process. She had begun to explore some of the social aspects of Anga life, with preliminary genealogies and notes on birth, marriage and death being sketched out, but felt that she had barely scratched the surface of these issues. Unlike her previous work, where she cast around for documentation of every aspect of the society, she focused directly on the technology of the Anga, the aspect of the research on which Balfour would judge her and the results of which would provide revised museum displays. As a break, and while she made arrangements to move to a new fieldwork site, she accepted an invitation from F.E. Williams and his wife to visit them at Orokolo, where he had worked as a government anthropologist for Papua since 1922. Blackwood and Williams were old friends, having got to know each other when Williams had come to

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Reverse Trajectories

7:14 pm

Page 263

263

Oxford for a year in 1933 to write his B.Sc. thesis. Blackwood spent just over a week with Williams and his wife Constance, the majority of the time being spent on a canoe trip up the Purari River. This interlude in Blackwood’s fieldwork, although making up only a fraction of her time in the Pacific, is unique for the number of artefacts collected in so limited a period. The majority of specimens were acquired under the guidance of Williams. This is the only example of Blackwood’s collection content being overtly directed by someone else in the field and Williams’s influence was immediate. Williams saw collecting as a useful tool in the science of anthropology, but with the caveat that ‘the thing is to keep his [the native’s] art going; not to collect his art-treasures on the assumption that the art will soon be lost’ (Williams 1923: 7). While helping Blackwood collect, Williams was also making a collection himself, ‘illustrating the best Papuan workmanship with a view to getting it encouraged’.13 The dynamic of two collectors working together with such different aims may have engendered a reflexivity in their own collecting intentions while in the field. It was certainly the first time Blackwood had actively collected with another Westerner and she was taking instructions and advice from him while also observing how he went about fulfilling his aims as a collector. Williams’s connections with Oxford and the Pitt Rivers Museum and his personal acquaintance with Blackwood encouraged him to go out of his way to help her and, through her, his Oxford teachers and associates. Just as Blackwood had earlier used artefacts to forge links and cement relationships, Williams, too, maintained his link to Oxford through assisting Blackwood with her collecting. He directed the nature of the trip, the places visited and he was very much the leader and guide; Blackwood, on a ‘busman’s holiday’, readily acquiesced. In contrast to all her previous collecting she spent only several hours, or at most a day, at each site, setting up what she described as ‘marts’ to which villagers brought artefacts that they were willing to sell or exchange and which Blackwood purchased at prices suggested by Williams. It is also apparent from her diaries that Williams advised Blackwood on other issues relating to collecting, including the quality of workmanship and the rarity of the artefacts, and as a follow-up furnished her with related documentation. Through Williams, who seems to have been genuinely liked by locals throughout the area where he had so far spent fifteen years, objects were forthcoming that perhaps in other circumstance might not have been. After each ‘mart’, Blackwood and Williams would collectively sort through all the objects and name and label them, Blackwood relying on Williams’s various publications to supply the ethnographic setting rather than embarking on her own research. After packing the specimens and leaving them to be shipped home, Blackwood (having given up all hope of returning to any of the high-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

264

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 264

Chantal Knowles

land regions) left for Kandrian on the southwest coast of New Britain to pursue a request from Balfour, made seven years before when she was in Buka and reiterated in a recent letter: ‘I am extremely anxious to obtain artificially deformed skulls from New Britain… they are important for my series’ [Balfour’s underlining].14 Arriving in Kandrian during the rainy season, she settled in an unoccupied patrol officer’s house which, to her dismay, proved to be on the mainland coast and isolated from the villages on the offshore coral islands. She immediately engaged a servant, named Magnin, and made the acquaintance of several big-men and women who became her principal suppliers of artefacts and information. She found that the rainy season was a quiet time for the ceremonies at which prized personal possessions were worn. However, certain activities, such as the hunting of birds with sixteen-foot blowguns and the head binding of infants to create the aesthetically appealing ‘longhead’, went on regardless of season. The fact that much local material culture was not in evidence in local ceremonial activity meant that Blackwood had to rely on people to show it to her, or on information from the White population as to what might be available. This is the only diary where we have a real sense of a primary informant who is also the broker in almost all of her transactions. All Blackwood’s commercial, and even to some extent social relations in this region, were set up by Magnin, who had elected to be her servant while she was in the area. Primarily Magnin seems to have negotiated the sale of the majority of items, acting as a go-between with the vendor and Blackwood. In general, Magnin seems to have acquired the items Blackwood wanted from his own relatives and he in turn may have used her to consolidate his position within his kin group and probably his kin group’s place in Kandrian society. The contrast between Williams as broker, a colonial employee, and Magnin as broker and a local man, raises interesting parallels and contradictions. Magnin took his cue from Blackwood, obviously having no prior knowledge or experience of the Pitt Rivers Museum. His reactions were presumably influenced, at least in part, by his position in his community and his desire to capitalise on his relation with Blackwood. Williams, in contrast, guided Blackwood’s collecting policy through his own assessment of the Pitt Rivers Museum, from his personal experience and from a combination of relations and social obligations he had to his anthropological colleagues at Oxford and his relations with the Gulf communities. This period of fieldwork grated with Blackwood. She had no say in the choice of field site, she was there at the wrong time of year, in a place evidently highly influenced by a resident White population, where day-to-day interaction with them was not uncommon. After the rigours and excitement of the Upper Watut, Kandrian also seemed

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Reverse Trajectories

7:14 pm

Page 265

265

mundane. In addition, she felt restricted from conducting any in-depth survey of the region as she was ‘poaching on the preserves’ of J.A. Todd, who had done a year’s fieldwork in the region before her own visit.15 Within three weeks she wrote to Balfour to say that she had acquired everything he wanted. Blackwood had imagined that some of the items would be difficult to persuade the locals to part with, in particular skulls for Balfour’s series on head deformation. However, the impact of numerous recently arrived missionaries on the ceremonial life of the region predisposed people to sell certain categories of object, including skulls. Blackwood easily obtained the six examples which her government license allowed her to acquire and export, and – as offers of further examples continued – she applied for an additional permit for a further six skulls. The skulls were traditionally deployed in important exchange cycles. Missionary enthusiasm for their reburial interrupted such cycles and the readiness with which local people parted with skulls to Blackwood may have reflected their hope of exploring alternative exchange relationships. Blackwood had expected it to be difficult to acquire skulls, but it is apparent from her diaries that she would not have purchased them had local people been unwilling, however much urged to do so by Balfour. At this fieldwork site she also recorded for the first time the restitution of a specimen. When she found that another family member objected to her purchase of a skull, she agreed to return it. The prospect that this would precipitate further requests concerned Blackwood, but her worries proved unfounded. While in New Britain Blackwood heard the news that RadcliffeBrown had been appointed to the Chair in Social Anthropology at Oxford. She noted that at least it was not Malinowski, and spoke of making ‘the best of it’.16 This is, again, in contrast to her earlier enthusiasm and interest in Malinowski’s work, and is a further sign of her shift from anthropological to more narrowly museological interests. Despite having acquired everything requested by Balfour within three weeks of arrival, Blackwood was compelled to stay on the south coast for three months due to a volcanic eruption in Rabaul in May 1937 which disrupted the administration and transport throughout the region. She finally left and settled in Madang Province as her final place for fieldwork, having discounted the north coast of New Britain as being ‘good for a study of culture contact, but probably disappointing from the standpoint of museum collecting’.17 Blackwood took a steam boat up the Ramu River, settled at Bosmun for nine weeks and achieved almost instant results. In the first week she ‘bought a large number of miscellaneous specimens’18 and in later weeks concentrated on specific crafts and industries in the region, including pottery, skirt-making and fibre-dying, which all resulted in journal publications (Blackwood 1950b; 1951). By this stage her

O'Hanlon/Welsh

266

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 266

Chantal Knowles

enthusiasm for fieldwork was waning and after the first six weeks her diary petered out following a fortnight of introspective entries recording her depression and desire to leave. She had come to the end of an arduous eighteen months in the field and was ready to go home. The lack of diaries and letters from this period makes any analysis very difficult and it seems that the collection (made with the aid of the Wauchopes, plantation owners in the region) is the only substantial evidence of her time in the field. Her subsequent publications came later and were apparently done from memory, as her notes were sparse. Perhaps the brevity of her last two excursions, which prevented her from learning the language, took its toll on someone who seems to have relished the hardships and isolation from Whites entailed in getting to know a community. In contrast to the Buka and Anga work her three subsequent interludes of fieldwork reinforce the point that collecting does not necessarily entail any full engagement with a community. It is not an inevitable by-product of the collecting process and whether relationships are built up depends upon the agendas of those involved. Blackwood herself always appears to have been keen to construct such relationships and was frustrated when all that seemed to be required of her was the purchase of artefacts. When it came to disposing of the collection she had made, contrasts can be drawn between Blackwood’s first and second Melanesian fieldtrips. Where she had used artefacts collected on her first trip to consolidate relations with people in a position to assist her career, Blackwood was sent on her second trip specifically to acquire artefacts for Balfour’s museum. What she collected was claimed by the museum from the outset. Rather than using the collection to reinforce links with contacts beyond the museum, Blackwood used it to consolidate her position within the museum itself. It was not until 1948 that any part of the second collection was used in exchanges, when thirteen items were exchanged with the Denver Art Museum. Later, in 1953, twelve further items were exchanged with the Museum voor Land en Volkenkunde in Rotterdam, and a final exchange was made with the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 1968 in return for ‘valuables’ from Mount Hagen. Blackwood directed all these transactions as an employee of the museum, evidently feeling sufficient ownership of the collections in question to deploy them in this way.

Blackwood, her Legacy and Oxford Anthropology Like many anthropologists at the start of their career, and not yet established in her field, Blackwood’s Buka and Bougainville work shows the signs of an intellectual alive to, and participating in (albeit

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Reverse Trajectories

7:14 pm

Page 267

267

relatively privately), the debates of the discipline at that time. Her eye was on the quality of her first major publication (1935) and its reception by the international anthropological audience, and how this would affect her career. What is surprising is that someone who was so receptive to the emerging theoretical debates in 1929, would turn so completely against them and concentrate, in contrast to her academic peers, on material culture. It is clear that her employer and funding bodies for fieldwork had specific influences on the tenor of her work, but why did Blackwood, who defended the all-encompassing nature of her early fieldwork to those who challenged it, acquiesce in such a narrow fieldwork focus on her second trip? Partly Blackwood had no choice: she could not directly oppose instructions from her director, Balfour, and partly circumstance intervened. The Upper Watut was categorized as uncontrolled after she came down for the visit to the Papuan Gulf and the further fieldwork which she attempted to arrange became impossible. If a return to Watut had been a possibility, Blackwood might well have solicited other people’s assistance in collecting on her behalf the items Balfour wanted from elsewhere. It is important to note how Blackwood’s collecting programme differed from others. Her contemporaries, such as Wedgwood, Firth and Todd all collected in the field. What sets Blackwood apart is that her collecting was strongly influenced by a professional link with a museum which had a perceived need and use for artefacts. Blackwood, through her correspondence with Balfour, was continually being advised on what to procure and Balfour’s own categorisation of certain object types led him to rank specific objects above others in terms of his and the museum’s ‘needs’. By her second field trip Blackwood’s methodology had evolved: she had had to analyse her first collection of material culture, and to write up her monograph, and she had seen the artefacts incorporated into the museum’s typological displays. In doing so she had reassessed the value of material culture. Her original intention had been to write up her observations on material culture separately from her monograph; only after Marett and Balfour had convinced her of its integral importance did she agree to devote two chapters to it. In contrast to most of her contemporaries and certainly those in the evolving British school of anthropology, her career took her further into the museum and a curatorial role, so that for her second field trip she not only narrowed her main field aim to the study of material culture, but became much more rigorous in the way she collected and much more systematic in her documentation. As her collecting methodology became more sophisticated over her periods of fieldwork, and her relationship with the museum was formalised by her becoming an employee, social anthropology became peripheral to her interests and she concentrated fully on material culture. Thus her

O'Hanlon/Welsh

268

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 268

Chantal Knowles

sidelining in Oxford anthropology was a combination of her own sense that she was inadequate to the demands of a theoretical discipline, and political machinations in the departments at Oxford. The area of the world in which Blackwood made her major collections is renowned for the constitution of relationships through the exchange of artefacts. This chapter has explored Blackwood’s collecting in Melanesia but has also drawn attention to the way in which she herself used artefacts to constitute social relationships beyond her specific field sites. Blackwood had a hierarchy of recipients and obligations, with Professor Arthur Thomson at the top (both privately and institutionally), the Pitt Rivers Museum running a close second, and various other interested parties further down the list; the two school museums received ‘duplicate’ specimens only if other interested parties agreed. Within the Pitt Rivers Museum, the public exhibition of artefacts hid the extent to which they were given values and became collateral in the endless search for the ‘completion of series’. Exchange was embarked upon with other museums or collectors using ‘duplicates’ to elicit offers of particularly coveted items. Blackwood was already doing this in the field. For example when she met Felix Speiser of Basel Museum in Buka she made arrangements to exchange a Buka item for a New Britain blowgun of which Speiser had several examples in his collection. The negotiations were formalised and the deal carried out some years after her return from the field. In other transactions, the return constituted not another artefact but a sense of indebtedness, or the promise of future artefacts (as with Skinner in New Zealand and artefacts given to Haddon at Cambridge as an investment in good relations and long-term returns). In some cases the long-term investments foundered as parameters changed: for example, as natural history and anthropology moved apart, intellectual links embodied in artefact exchange collapsed and Blackwood made no further donations to Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History after those from her first Melanesian field trip. Relationships which Blackwood had established in the field also persisted beyond her time in New Guinea, illustrating the potential of collecting to create enduring social ties there too. Blackwood’s detailed descriptions of specific Buka ceremonies led one man to contact her in the late 1960s to ask for a copy of her monograph so he could use the information to encourage his elders to share information and revive some ceremonies and technical skills. In return for this information, Blackwood was sent as thanks a contemporary artefact for the museum.19 In the early 1970s, not long before her death, Blackwood was also sent a letter and tin containing gifts from her former haus boi [domestic servant] in the Upper Watut. In contrast to the former example, these gifts rekindled a personal relationship between the fieldworker

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 269

Reverse Trajectories

269

and her employee. Although sent to her at the museum, Blackwood kept these artefacts at home and they were not accessioned until after her death. In each case Blackwood’s categorisation of the relationship as ‘professional’ or as ‘personal’ decided the home of the artefact. This chapter tackles several issues and raises more questions than it resolves. Underlying all of them, however, is the issue of the mutability of collections and their constituent objects and their ability to collect personal and cultural histories. We might suggest that museum objects have longer life expectancies, and do not get ‘used up’ in the way that many other kinds of object are. In retaining the capacity to generate further sets of social relationships, museum objects have the potential to illuminate both personal and institutional histories.

Notes The research carried out for this chapter was supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust for which I am grateful. I would like to thank in particular Chris Gosden and Mike O’Hanlon for advice and discussion of earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank Alison Petch, Lorraine Rostant, Gwyneira Isaac and Laura Peers for their comments. Abbreviation used for manuscript sources: PRM Pitt Rivers Museum manuscript collections 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Blackwood to Balfour 7 July 1930. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Thomson 4 May 1930. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Thomson 14 March 1930. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Balfour 14 December 1929: ‘I have made a list of a number of other things which I will be most pleased to get if you want them… If you would return the enclosed list with comments on it I will act accordingly.’ PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Thomson 27 July 1930. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Thomson 4 March 1930. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Thomson 4 March 1930. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Thomson 7 November 1930. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Thomson 28 June 1930. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Thomson 28 October 1930. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Skinner 22 April 1932. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Headline as in the Montreal Daily Star 4 January 1936. PRM. Blackwood notebook 8/4/2. PRM. This letter from Balfour dated 26 August 1936 is one of many from Balfour discussing artefacts from this region. His introductory letter to Chinnery dated 24 June 1929 contains the first of many references to the region. Balfour seems to have fixated on several items from this area as key to the completion or expansion of specific typological series in the museum. References to the objects and the region appear throughout the correspondence between Balfour and Blackwood during both periods of fieldwork and Blackwood expends considerable energies trying to secure the items through other sources. In a letter to Balfour dated 7 July 1930, she wrote ‘I have just had a visit from Dr Speiser of the Basel Museum,… He has some blow-guns from New Britain and I think I can get one in exchange for an upi (boy’s

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 270

270

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

Chantal Knowles hat, of which I see my way to three specimens, I take it you don’t want more than two), later on, if Chinnery doesn’t bring you one. I hardly think he will, as I believe he is taking a tour in U.S.A., and they are not exactly things you can carry about in your pocket.’ PRM, Blackwood correspondence. As soon as Blackwood was informed of Todd’s work by the local plantation owner, she wrote to him and confessed that she had been ‘poaching on his preserves’. Blackwood to Todd 31 October 1937. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to T.K. Penniman 7 January 1937. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood to Balfour 14 September 1937. PRM, Blackwood correspondence. Blackwood diary BB.9.3. PRM. In this case, Blackwood had entered into a long correspondence with a young Buka man who had heard of her book but had been unable to find a copy and had hoped she would do so. Blackwood eventually managed to find a copy and sent it to him; he responded by discussing what a suitable exchange would be for such a gesture in England and mused on the obligations of gift exchange in their two cultures. Their correspondence continued and they were able to discuss the ethics of anthropologists and their use of material and many other pertinent subjects. In 1969 Blackwood received a basket from the Buka man. PRM, Blackwood correspondence.

Bibliography Blackwood, B. A Study of mental testing in relation to anthropology. The Williams and Wilkins Company, Baltimore, 1927. ———. Both sides of Buka Passage: an ethnographic study of social, sexual, and economic questions in the north-western Solomon Islands. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1935. ———. ‘The technology of a modern stone age people in central New Guinea’, Occasional Papers on Technology no. 3. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 1950a. ———. ‘Reserve dyeing in New Guinea’, Man, May (1950b): 52–5. ———. Some arts and industries of the Bosmun, Ramu River, New Guinea. Südseestudien, Museum für Völkerkunde und Schweizerisches Museum für Volkskunde, Basel, 1951. Elkin, A.P. Social anthropology in Melanesia: a review of research. Oxford University Press, London, 1953. Firth, R. We, the Tikopia: a sociological study of kinship in primitive Polynesia. Allen and Unwin, London, 1936. Herle, A. ‘The life-histories of objects: collections of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait’, in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition eds A. Herle and S. Rouse. University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 77–105. Malinowski, B. Argonauts of the western Pacific. George Routledge, London, 1922. ———. The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia. George Routledge, London, 1929. Notes and queries on anthropology. British Association for the Advancement of Science, London. Editions 1874, 1892, 1899, 1912, 1929. O’Hanlon, M. Paradise: portraying the New Guinea highlands. British Museum Press, London, 1993.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Reverse Trajectories

7:14 pm

Page 271

271

Penniman, T.K. ‘General Pitt Rivers’, Man vol. 46 (1946): 70–1. Powdermaker, H. Life in Lesu: the study of Melanesian society in New Ireland. Williams and Norgate, London, 1933. ———. Stranger and friend: the way of an anthropologist. Secker and Warburg, London, 1967. Simpson, C. Adam with arrows. Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1954. Stocking, G.W. After Tylor: British social anthropology 1888–1951. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1995. Thomas, N. Entangled objects: exchange, material culture and colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991. Thomson, A. Annual report, Department of Human Anatomy, University of Oxford, 1930. Williams, F.E. ‘The collection of curios and the preservation of native culture’, Anthropology Report no. 3. Government Printer, Port Moresby, 1923.

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 272

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 273

Chapter 12

EPILOGUE Nicholas Thomas

Over the last forty or so years, much scholarship on colonial and crosscultural histories has become increasingly concerned to qualify the obvious, indeed almost tautological, sense in which colonial relations are relations of dominance. Liberal historians and theorists of resistance alike have sought to recover and foreground the agency of colonised populations; in some cases the identification of such agency has become a formulaic operation, a matter of signposting moments of resistance, rather than an investigation of an elusive and variable business of confrontation, negotiation, miscommunication and accommodation. Whatever the adequacy of current thinking in this area, it is notable that the trend came only belatedly to address ethnographic collecting. While processes such as conversion to Christianity have long been understood to be subjects of interwoven local and external agendas, collecting has, as Michael O’Hanlon points out in his Introduction, in recent years been broadly regarded as abduction and appropriation. The continuing public and professional debate about repatriation, and the often-intransigent stances of major institutions with respect to the return of material, have reinforced a broad perception that, typically, collections were unjustly acquired and are unjustly kept. It should be emphasised that research on the formation of collections draws attention to the complexity of the processes, but prompts a more focussed rather than a muted critique. There is abundant evidence for the removal of objects in the absence of their owners, and for more or less coercive collecting. Nor, in any event, does the circumstance that objects were obtained through apparent fair dealing at a particular time have much bearing on the question of whether or not

O'Hanlon/Welsh

274

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 274

Nicholas Thomas

it may be desirable to negotiate their repatriation now. However, this volume of essays on collectors and agency in Melanesia does complicate our understandings of what ethnographic collections are, in a number of suggestive ways. In the first instance, however, it is striking just how difficult it is to recover and characterise indigenous agency, in any specificity, from the historical record. In the great majority of cases, the same kinds of processes that shaped O’Hanlon’s recent collecting efforts among Wahgi (see Introduction) must have had a bearing on the practices and outcomes of early collecting; in a scant minority, it seems, can we say much about them. If our analysis is conveniently structured by divisions between the ‘before of ’, the ‘scene of ’, and the ‘after of ’ collecting, it is striking that the issues which most engage O’Hanlon in his Introduction concern the scene of collecting, namely the context in which there is most patently and directly an encounter between the indigenous people whom we cast in the role of yielding things up for collection, and the collectors who are there to take what they can get. Yet most contributors have far more to say about the ‘before’ and ‘after’ than they do about these interactions. I take it that this imbalance arises not from an unwillingness to explore the issue of negotiation around the practice of collecting, but rather from the paucity of information which bears directly upon it. In these concluding comments, I do not want to review the points at which the chapters do touch on this theme, and otherwise add very greatly to our understanding of these intersections between the history of anthropology, the history of museums and the histories of various Melanesian societies. Instead, I suggest, first, that our efforts to identify indigenous agency in the formation of collections need to be more searching and more indirect. Second, I suggest that information here points us to think of the content of ethnographic collections in a novel way. And finally, I want to pose the question of what implications these studies have for curatorial practice. In recent essays and in current work Bronwen Douglas (1999) has addressed the varied ways in which colonial archives – textual and visual – incorporate muted traces of indigenous agency. These may lie behind the use, in representation, of one stereotypic figure rather than another, or behind absences and lacunae in description (which may manifest the degree to which indigenous people refused Europeans access to spaces, information, and so forth). Douglas’s work does not address collecting but does have implications for the reappraisal of collections. Agency is registered in a range of indirect ways and can be explored indirectly. To draw on an example from an earlier period, it is immediately striking that Cook voyage collections of artefacts from eastern and western Oceania are quite different. As is well known, the

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

Epilogue

7:14 pm

Page 275

275

material gathered from eastern Polynesia – from Tahiti and Hawaii, for example – incorporates a range of highly important art forms, many of which were obtained in ritual precincts, or within houses and villages. Although Society Islanders and Hawaiians refused to part with certain objects, or generally refused to part with them, they gave or sold various voyage participants a broad variety of both quotidian and prestigious or sacred things (baskets, mats and pieces of barkcloth; feather gods and capes; examples of the ‘chief mourner’s costume’; bowls; fish hooks, and so forth). Material obtained from western Oceania, on the other hand, is limited almost exclusively to weapons – clubs, spears, arrows, and the occasional implement. Within what we now regard as ‘the arts of Vanuatu’ a range of large-scale sculptural traditions are significant; some of these flourished in parts of Malakula visited during Cook’s second voyage, but are entirely unrepresented in Cook voyage collections, as are decorated mats, among other major kinds of objects from this area. Similarly, as is well known, sculpture is highly significant in New Caledonian art, but does not feature in the collections. The causes of this rather striking contrast are not difficult to identify. In Polynesia, in general, Cook and his parties were freely and extensively engaged with; Europeans were able to roam extensively on shore, to travel into island interiors, and visit virtually any sites which interested them. In a social sense, they were not exactly and not fully incorporated into indigenous society, but they were accorded degrees of inclusion appropriate to guests, or to taio (friends), and were moreover in many instances sexual partners, subjects of tattooing, and so forth. In contrast, the peoples of both northern and southern Vanuatu adopted cautious or positively hostile attitudes toward the Europeans. In Malakula they virtually stopped them from venturing beyond the beach; at Erromanga they repelled them; and on Tanna they were wary and discouraged excursions inland without absolutely preventing them. The attitudes at Balade on New Caledonia were slightly more open but were not nearly as inclusive as those in most parts of Polynesia. Hence, on Malakula, no voyage participant did as much as sight a village, let alone enter one; in none of these localities do there appear to have been any sexual contacts between islanders and Europeans at this time; and it is small wonder that the range of material culture collected was as limited as it was. (For documentation of the differing experiences see, e.g., Forster 2000 [1777].) To put this another way, the collections are indices of the western Oceanic effort to contain and limit the voyagers’ incursion, on the one hand, and the far more open-ended eastern Oceanic response to contact, on the other hand. This is broad-brush, but does capture the sense in which the larger qualities of particular indigenous-European interactions impact fundamentally on the collec-

O'Hanlon/Welsh

276

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 276

Nicholas Thomas

tions that are found in museums today. In this respect, what is lacking from those collections tells us as much as what is present in them. Young notes in his chapter that in the course of collecting ‘technical’ objects, Malinowski commissioned one model canoe on 19 December 1914, and another the next day. As O’Hanlon notes in the Introduction, museum collections of Melanesian (and other Pacific) material in fact include very considerable numbers of models, particularly but not exclusively of objects such as canoes and houses that were generally too large to be collected themselves. This is to alert us to a fairly basic misapprehension about the nature of museum collections, which is arguably unexamined among scholars as well as prevalent among wider audiences. Whereas it is commonly supposed that collections consist of more or less representative samples of the arrays of material culture in use among particular populations, and/or their more notable art forms, it is probable that a significant proportion of the material was not extracted from daily use or ritual life in this sense but, rather, was produced on commission. More significantly, a considerable amount of material did not take the form of copies of types of artefacts that were otherwise in use, but constituted instead artefact types that were unprecedented, in local material cultures. This is not to say that no models were made for internal use (toy canoes are attested to, as well as miniature houses which were ritually significant, e.g., in Fiji and Hawaii); but it is increasingly evident that models were produced in considerable numbers, and sometimes became standardised handicraft objects. Hence, in a deeper sense than we have acknowledged, museum collections are artefacts of encounters with collectors. Many of the items they contain were not only obtained through those encounters; the encounters, rather, stimulated their invention. Examples of essentially innovative artefact genres which were commissioned or produced for collectors include not only scale models of houses and boats, but also figure sculptures made to illustrate forms of dress and body decoration. Tene Waitere’s famous relief panel in Te Papa/the Museum of New Zealand, which depicts male and female tattoos and was made for Augustus Hamilton, director of the antecedent Colonial Museum, is a deservedly famous but by no means unique case. Given that many models are exhibited without their specific and innovative nature being acknowledged or explained on labels, this suggests a need to redefine and literally re-caption many of the objects in collections. This brings me to a broader issue, namely the implications of studies such as those in this book for the presentation of collections through exhibitions. How can and how should the knowledge we are piecing together about the acquisitions of things enter into the framing of exhibitions and the contextualisation of specific works within them? The issues are problematic, not least because there might be a tension between such contextualisation and one of the most conspicuous,

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 277

Epilogue

277

and arguably most desirable, trends in re-presenting collections today. This is the effort to acknowledge their continuing significance for the indigenous communities that produced them; though this effort is made unevenly, and in some places not at all, there is an increasing interest in presenting quotations from named indigenous individuals on captions, and more generally a sense that it is appropriate to present the views of modern indigenous authorities as well as, if not rather than, those of ethnologists, concerning the uses and meanings of artefacts. If, in other words, there is not a great deal of actual repatriation proceeding, there is a broader sense that rights to represent, define, and caption things that remain in museum collections and displays ought to be repatriated or at least pluralised. In this context, the burdening of a thing with a detailed story about the dealings between an anthropologist or missionary and a tradestore owner may not help. It may instead, once again, shift the emphasis away from indigenous producers to European agency. It may echo the operation of the tribal art market and the connoisseur, that draws attention to the fact that a piece was collected by Viot and was for some time in Ernst’s studio – that in other words places indigenous practice in an obscure domain antecedent to the culturally formative actions of Europeans, whether the evaluations of members of the avant-garde, or the classificatory practices of museum employees. Yet it is surely desirable to find other ways of tracing the cross-cultural identities of things, that acknowledge the singular circumstances of their genesis and their lives as specimens and/or exotica within Europe, without at the same time diminishing their significance for past and present indigenous producers, users and viewers. This is not the place to make specific suggestions about how these tensions might be negotiated, or indeed to consider whether they already have been more or less effectively negotiated, in exhibitions to date. My final point is rather that the choice of curatorial options – of emphasising European rather than indigenous contexts – could be seen as a productively intractable one. And one that reflects something permanently contradictory in the artefacts themselves, that in turn embodies a constitutive paradox of cross-cultural history: that the narratives of colonisers and colonised are linked but not shared, and connected but incommensurable.

Bibliography Douglas, B. ‘Art as ethnohistorical text’ in Double vision: art histories and colonial histories in the Pacific eds N. Thomas and D. Losche. University Press, Cambridge, 1999, 65–99. Forster, G. A voyage round the world eds N. Thomas and O. Berghof. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2000 (originally published 1777).

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 278

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 279

INDEX

Illustrations are indicated by bold italic text. A Africa, 3–4, 6, 12, 25, 48, 127-34, 136, 140, 142, 147, 156, 197, 213, 224 agency, indigenous/local and anthropometry, 140ff and collecting, 3, 15-18, 38ff, 52, 84, 140-1, 156, 165, 167, 172-5, 189, 192, 210-11, 257, 258, 262ff, 274ff, 277 and colonialism, 273 and photography, 115-19, 140, 142 see also collecting by intermediaries Amungme (Mountain Utakwa) (people), 145, 149, 150n4 Anga (people), 11ff, 262, 266 anthropometry, see physical anthropology Appadurai, A., 56, 155 art, 203ff, 214, 220ff, 224n11, 263, 275-6 artefacts and indigenous identity, 21, 67, 89 as art, 10-11, 104, 138, 156, 158, 175, 205-7, 215, 263, 277 as curiosities/curios, 56, 64-6, 70, 85, 156, 232 as embodied knowledge, 5, 89, 157, 182 as evidence, 5-6, 10, 35, 157, 182

as scientific specimens (‘ethnographica’), 2, 26, 56 as trophies, 65 biographies of, 1, 28, 56, 195-6, 277 see also collections, social life of commercially produced, 3, 19, 31, 71, 276 commissioned items, 3, 188, 239, 276 duplicate, 26-28, 59, 90-91, 95, 212, 267 economic value of, 49, 51, 88, 113, 141, 171, 176n1, 188-9, 236-7 see also collections, economic value of effects of commercial production on, 19, 71, 188, 276 hoax/forged, 19, 63, 76n18, 123n20 hybrid, 22, 23, 48-49, 112, 158, 175, 258-9 incorporating human remains, 40, 45, 173 indigenous trade in, 20-21, 171, 238 model, 19-20, 186, 188, 193, 276 museum exchanges of, 89, 91, 94, 260, 266, 268 scarcity of, 19, 21, 45, 71-72, 88, 175 stone, 11-12, 19, 48, 83, 106, 113, 120, 145, 172-3, 187ff, 238-9, 261-2

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 280

280 template artefacts, 11, 263 unfinished items, 158, 186, 191 utilitarian items, 184, 207, 215, 220, 238 see also material culture Aua (Durour), 2, 6, 10, 19, 57, 62, 67, 71-4, 76n32 see also ‘Matty’ mystery Australian Museum, Sydney, 25, 38, 4950, 91, 94, 195, 200, 234-6 authenticity, 11, 19, 28, 48, 57, 76n18 see also photography, and evidential value B Balfour, H., 49, 121, 184, 196, 200, 239, 253, 256ff Banks Islands, 205, 209, 210, 212, 215, 217 Basel Museum of Ethnography, 205, 207, 211, 222-3 Bastian, A., 22, 57-61, 73, 184, 187, 188 Bismarck Archipelago, 7, 8, 36ff, 57, 62, 66ff Blackwood, B., 9ff, 196, 222-3, 237-9, chapter 11 collections, 256, 259, 263, 264-5 blowguns, 222, 264, 268, 269n14 Boas, F., 5, 112, 206 Bosmun, 62, 265 Bougainville, 7, 48, 161ff, 176n15, 253ff Bougainville Bay, 62, 167, 177n24 Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, 49 Braunholtz, H.T., 181-3, 194ff British Museum, London, 1,12, 50, 91, 136, 151n12, 155, 181, 184, 1901, 193ff, 199, 200 British New Guinea (Papua), 3, 10, 14, 15, 24ff, chapter 4, chapter 5, 136 British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) Expedition, 127, 129, 135ff, 138, 140ff, 150 collection, 151n12 Brown, G., 4, 8ff, 21ff, 28-30, chapter 2, 84 collection, 16, 27ff, 36, 49-52 Buka, 7, 9, 68-9, 162, 172, 253ff

Index C Cambridge University Expedition to the Torres Strait, 27, chapter 5, 135, 253 Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 93, 106, 119, 151n12, 266ff cataloguing, see Collections, documentation of Chinnery, E.W.P., 231ff, 253ff Christianity, and economic mores, 13, 29, 35, 4145, 47, 52 and graphic imagery, 48-9, 117-8 and the freely given gift, 8, 35, 43-44 as a trade item, 8, 42 see also missions Clifford, J., 1, 28, 55, 103 Cole, D., 31n2, 156 Collecting, aims, 88, 136, 263 see also collectors, motives of and agency see agency and Christianity/missions see Christianity and cultural impoverishment, 21, 164 and diffusionism, 5ff, 47, 151n11, 183, 222 and ethnographic research, 70-71 and evolutionism, 5-6, 9-10, 35, 467, 53n25, 67, 112ff, 133, 183, 203ff, 212ff, 222, 253 and functionalism 2, 5-6, 9-10, 183 and gift exchange, 49, 84, 87, 256-8, 262, 268 see also collectors, gift exchange between and indigenous trading networks, 3941, 52n8 and labour recruiting, 13, 163, 166, 177n17, 232 and national rivalry, 24-5, 137, 156-7 and photography, 27, 104, 121, 122n2 and reenactment, see reenactment and regional perspectives, 6-8, 104, 108 as obloquy, 2, 3, 28, 71, 273 as plunder, 26, 29-31, 70-73, 86, 89, 273 as undocumented activity, 11, 44, 46, 88, 164, 189, 274

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 281

Index by intermediaries,15-16, 38, 45, 48, 66, 70, 72, 156, 166-7, 192, 21011, 262 by seizure, 87 colonial context to, 3, 5, 23-25, 45, 50-51, 67, 69, 81, 84, 115, 150, 164, 208-11, 227, 232, 264 see also colonialism commercial, 11-12, 45, chapter 3, 156, 165 ‘concomitant’, 12-13, 22-3 ethics of, 15, 28-30, 70, 72, 86-7, 257-8, 265, 269n15 impact of, 18-21, 72-73, 151n4, 189, 210 intellectual potential of, 5 ‘mobile’, 15-16, 18, 22 ‘official’, 3, 11-12, 15, 28-9, chapter 4 pace of, 11, 26, 162, 263 ‘primary’, 12-13, 15, 22, 52, 71, 261 private, 10, 12, 45, 59-60, 82ff, 165, 188, 258 ‘privatisation’ of, 6 see also photography ‘representative’, 22, 45, 83, 87-88, 95, 158, 184ff, 190ff, 212, 262, 276 ‘secondary’, 6, 12-13, 15, 22, 58, 85, 137-8, 183, 228, 237, 256, 258 skulls, see physical anthropology ‘stationary’, 15-18, 22, 67, 238 varieties/types of, 12-15 see also collections; collectors Collections, and contingency/chance, 26, 45, 8788, 162, 188-91, 195-7, 200, 228, 267 as heritage/cultural property, 4, 21, 25, 30-31, 36, 50ff, 67, 95, 97, 223 as lacking context, 156, 182-3 bias in, 4, 16, 22-23, 39-40, 87-88, 145, 165-6, 177n23, 238, 274-5 conservation of, 30, 50 content of, 21-23, 39-40, 49, 87-89, 97, 100n12, 106, 157-8, 167, 176n15, 177n24, 177n25, 190, 193-4, 205, 212, 223n8, 237-8, 259-60 contextualisation, 149, 156, 276-7 documentation of, 6, 26-27, 29-30, 44-46, 50-1, 55-6, 59-61, 65, 70,

281 94ff, 122, 156, 159, 164, 167, 170-71, 177n20, 185ff, 190-1, 193-4, 205, 214-5, 236, 263ff economic value of, 30, 50, 55, 56, 59, 63-64, 73, 75n11, 75n15, 83, 187, 194, 196 exhibition of, see exhibitions export controls over, 50, 265 integrity of, 13-15, 29, 36, 49ff, 81, 89ff marketing of, 60, 71, 177n26 national aspects to, 24, 36, 89-91, 94ff packing of, 192, 196, 223n7 photographic, see photography, collections of ‘political’, 13, 81, 85ff, 96ff recontextualisation, 156 repatriation of, see repatriation sale of, 28-30, 36, 49ff, 60-61, 64-66, 70, 73, 75n11, 76n29, 77n48, 157-60, 165, 169, 175, 194-5 social life of, 27, 155, 177n20, 269 see also artefacts, biographies of see also collecting; collectors Collectors, and national stereotypes, 25, 86 biographical focus on, 8 funding of, 11-12, 61, 83, 85-87, 136, 187, 192-3, 235-6, 239, 259, 261 gift exchange between, 8, 24, 120-21, 251-2, 258, 260, 266, 268 intellectual agendas of, 3-4, 8, 82-83, 127-9, 146ff, 155, 158, 187, 205ff, 217-220, 230ff, 255, 267 manipulation by, 29, 210 motives of, 9-10, 45-6, 52, 71, 73, 81-2, 86, 88-90, 163-4, 171, 236, 256, 261, 267 professional, 38, 59, 70-71, 84-5, 164 rivalry between, 25, 45-6, 85, 156, 163-4, 177n17, 186-7, 255 training/education of, 9, 59, 66, 70, 74, 82, 136, 204-5, 252-3, 259 see also collecting; collections Colonialism, 57, chapter 4, 207-8, chapter 10, 273 and cultural change, 57-8, 112-4, 208, 211, 238 and exploration, 127-8, 137

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 282

282 and museums, 29, 91, 156 and teaching of anthropology, 243-4 and White material culture, 24, 23943, 245-8 as non-culture, 228-32 status and material culture, 232-4 use of artefacts to promote, 29, 6061, 64-5 Cooke Daniels collection, 191 Craig, B., 25 ‘cultural complexes’, 9, 23, 76n32, 203, 214-22 culture contact, 22-3, 173, 185, 211, 230, 255, 265 see also artefacts, hybrid curatorship, 277 use of trained curators, 59, 65 D D’Albertis, L., 15, 25, 29, 86, 134, 141 degenerationism, see pygmies, evolutionist/degenerationist debate diffusionism, see collecting, and Dorsey, G.A., 8, 11-12, 16, 19, 25-6, chapter 7 collection, 157-9, 168ff Duke of York Islands, 16, 23, 38-43, 478, 62 (inset) duplicates, see artefacts, duplicate Dutch New Guinea (West Papua), 137, 138 E Eoe, Soroi, 51, 101n60 Errington, F., 21 Espiritu Santo, 208, 209, 213-4, 217, 223n1 ethnographic frontier, see ‘first contact’ exchange, of artefacts by museums, see artefacts, museum exchanges of of photographs, see photography, as collecting exhibitions, 1, 276-7 Arts of Vanuatu, 223 British New Guinea (MacGregor), 83, 94 display, 64, 276-7 Ethnological Specimens from the Trobriand Islands, 193 George Brown Exhibition, 49, 51

Index German Commercial Exposition (German Colonial Exhibition), 64-5 of items from Lewis, Dorsey and Voogdt collections, 159 ‘Matty’ artefacts, 69 Malinowski centennial, 201n12 photographic, 120 Speiser’s, 221-2 touring, 51 F Fabian, J., 127, 131 Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 11, 27, 157-161, 166-7, 175 Fiji, Joe, 10, 16, 31n4, 100n16 Finsch, O., 60, 120-1, 206 collection, 60-3, 75n15, 176n4 ‘first contact’, 22, 81, 84, 87-88, 139, 149, 261 Firth, R., 199, 234, 254, 261 collection, 236, 267 Friedrich Wilhelmshafen (Madang), 62, 157ff, 170, 172, 177n25 G German Colonial Museum, 29, 64-5 German New Guinea, 2, chapter 3, 62, 136, chapter 7 Gewertz, D., 21 Godeffroy Company, 56, 58-61, 65, 74 Godeffroy, J.C., 58-61, 70-71, 74 collection, 73-4, 75n11 Godeffroy Museum, Hamburg, 16, 27, 45, 58-60 H Haddon, A.C., 9, 20, 25, 29, 86, 94, chapter 5, 129, 136, 138, 145-9, 181, 184-8, 206, 222, 268 Hahl, A., 63, 162 Hancock Museum, Newcastle-uponTyne, 30, 36, 49-50 Hancock, W., 16, 192, 193 Handler, R., 21 Hansemann, A. von, 60-64 Harrison, S., 21 Hellwig, F., 66-7, 70-73 collection, 71, 73, 76n29 Herbertshöhe (Kokopo), New Britain, 19, 62, 162 Herle, A., 20

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 283

Index Hernsheim Company, 56, 60, 65-66, 6874 Hügel, A.A.A. von, 37-8 collection, 119 Huon Gulf, 62, 160, 167, 176n6 I Ishimori, S., 51 J Jenkins, D., 4 jew’s harp, 48, 151n11 Jones, P., 3 Joyce, T.A., 12, 187, 194, 197-200 K Kaiser Wilhelmsland, 61, 62, 63-4, 158, 167, 170, 177n26 Kaiserin Augusta (Sepik) River, 13, 18, 25, 62, 149, 159, 162ff, 173, 174, 177n17, 177n20 Kamoro (people), 138-9, 141, 143, 1456, 148, 150 Kandrian, New Britain, 18, 62, 264 Kaplen, 39, 45, 52n8 kava, 217 Keesing, R., 21 King Dick, see To Pulu kite fishing apparatus, 91, 92, 93 Kitegit, 240, 243 Kleinschmidt, T., 16, 45-6, 59 Knauft, B.M., 6 Kubary, J., 59, 61 Kuchler, S., 3 kula shell/valuables, 49, 88, 192, 193, 194 L labels, see collections, documentation of Lawes, W.G., 116-18, 120 collection, 124n34 Lawson, B., 3, 22 Le Bera, 43 Lewis, A.B., 12, 25, 156, 158, 160, 1647, 173, 175, 232, 238 collection, 158-9, 164, 175, 177n23 Loria, L., 15, 25, 29, 86 Lowie Museum, see Robert H. Lowie Luschan, F. von, 26, 29, 55, 61, 62-5, 67-71, 73, 184, 204-7, 210, 212

283 M MacGregor, W., 3-4, 8-11, 13, 16, 19, 22-24, 28-30, 46, chapter 4 collection, 9, 24, 26, 30, 81, 83, 87ff Mack, B.J., 3 Madang see Friedrich Wilhelmshafen Magem (Magim/Pagem/Pagim), 62, 169, 174 Magnin, 18, 264 Mailu Island, 14, 26, 185-8, 191-2 malanggan, 2-3, 19, 222 Malekula (Malakula), New Hebrides, 209, 213-4, 275 Malinowska, Valetta (Swann), 190, 196 Malinowski, B., 2, 6, 9-13, 15-16, 20, 22, 26, 94, 110, chapter 8, 193 Mailu collection, 188, 191-2 Trobriand collection, 181-2, 187, 189, 190-7, 200 Marett, R.R., 184, 253, 254, 259-60, 267 Masawa, 240, 243 material culture, 1 decline of interest in, 2, 5-6, 182-3, 222-3, 252, 267 revival of interest in, 2 use in cultural classification, 3, 6, 9, 21, 57-8, 203ff, 256 use in racial classification, 5, 35, 67, 127-8, 148-9, 214 White, see colonialism ‘Matty-Mystery’, 2, 6, 10, 19, 57, 66-74, 76n30, 76n32, 77n40 Matupit (Matupi) Island, 39, 62, 65-6, 69-70 Melanesia/Polynesia debate, 10, 35-36, 46-49, 53n18 Merrie England, S.S., 84, 97, 100n12 Micronesia, 67, 76n32 missions and science, 9, 37-9, 44ff Anglican, 230 evangelical, 37 influence of, see culture contact London Missionary Society, 116 Methodism, 37, 46, 51 Sacred Heart Mission, 117 Unitarianism, 10, 37 see also Christianity models, see artefacts, model money convertibility, 29, 113, 173, 210

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 284

284 shell (divara/diwarra/tambu/tabu), 8ff, 21, 36, 40-42, 47, 113, 187 stone rings, 48 Mosuwadoga, G., 97-8 Motu (people), 120, 123n20, 185, 192 Murray, J.H.P., 93-5, 192, 231 collection, 94 Museum of Ethnography, Berlin, 55-8, 60-67, 164, 184, 204, 206 Museum of Natural History, Berlin, 19, 63 Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, 11, 91, 187ff Museums, and commerce, 55-9, 61, 65, 74 archival systems of, 4, 25-7, 51, 1567 ethnography of, 4 purpose of, 55, 57 rivalry between, 25, 73, 76n29, 1567, 160, 163-4 Musgrave, A., 83-4, 93, 115 Myers, C., 3, 20 N nambas culture, 214, 217 National Museum and Art Gallery, Port Moresby, 95-9 National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, 30, 36, 49-51 natural history, 138 collections, 16, 37, 46, 59, 61, 82ff, 212 ethnography as branch of, 9-10, 61, 85, 253, 261 Nerakua, 38 New Britain, 62 New Caledonia, 7, 208, 217, 275 New Guinea (Mandated Territory of), 62 see also German New Guinea New Guinea Company (Neu Guinea Compagnie) (NGC), 1, 60-65, 74, 157ff New Hebrides (Vanuatu), 8, 48, chapter 9, 209 New Ireland, 62 Newcastle University, see Hancock Museum Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 22, 105, 110, 185-6, 206, 262

Index O Omarakana, Trobriand Islands, 14, 20, 189 Osaka, Japan, see National Museum of Ethnology Ovia Ahuia, 185 P Papua (Territory of), 14, 92-4 see also British New Guinea Papua New Guinea, 30, 51, 95-9 Papua New Guinea Museum see National Museum, Port Moresby Papuans, 13, 29, 84, 98-9, 113-5, 263 see also Melanesia/Polynesia divide; pygmies Parkinson, R., 55-6, 61, 68ff collection, 176n4 Peau, 18, 139, 141 Peni (Lelei), 47 Penny, G., 25 performativity, 24, 109-10, 227, 232-4, 243 Phoebe Hearst Museum, see Robert H. Lowie Museum photography, 6, 11, 27, chapter 5 and archaeology, 104, 112-115 and atemporality, 112 and colonialism, 24, 115-7 and context, 27, 103, 182 and evidential value, 105, 112, 1201, 129, 142-3, 149, 182 and fieldwork, 105, 183 and film/cinematography, 110-11, 137, 142, 205 and framing, 110-11, 182 and material culture, 122n2 and observation, 108, 111, 121 and reenactment, see reenactment and ‘salvage’, see ‘salvage’ and spatial relations, 107-8 as collecting, 106, 108, 119-21 as social interaction, 27, 108, 122 as visual notebook, 103, 104, 110 censorship of, 151n9 collections of, 104-5, 119-20, 124n36, 193, 212, 228 exhibitions of, see exhibitions indigenous responses to, 116, 118-9, 142 lantern slides, 24, 114, 117-20 ‘privatisation’ of, 6, 119 styles of, 105

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 285

Index physical anthropology, 46, 106, 149, 203-6, 211-4, 222, 253, 261 and Nazism, 224n10 anthropometry, 129, 133, 139, 1401, 205, 212 skulls, collection of, 86, 134-5, 14950, 163, 174, 188, 206, 208ff, 223n7, 264-5 Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 11, 26, 31, 49, 121, 183, 196, 200, 239, 253, 256, 260-6, 268 Polynesia, 275 Polynesian/Melanesian debate, see Melanesia/Polynesia debate population decline, 19, 72, 74, 207-8, 243 Port Moresby, 14, 22, 82-4, 88, 95, 989, 106-9, 116, 118, 185 Portman, M.V., 105, 110 pottery, 10, 47-8, 93, 106-11, 113ff, 187-8, 194, 213, 265 Powdermaker, H., 236, 255, 261 Price, S., 2, 156 Purari River, 14, 16, 87, 263 pygmies, 5-6, 9, 18, chapter 6, 204-5, 212-4, 217 Aiome, 62, 147 and fletched arrows, 204, 217, 223n1 and Papuans (‘Oceanic negroes’), 133-5 ‘bestial’ nature, 132-3, 146 ‘collection’ of, 142-6 defining criteria, 131-3, 142-3, 151n7 environment, 132 evolutionist/degenerationist debate, 132ff exoticism, 143 fire-making capacity, 32, 145, 148 ‘infantile’ nature, 129-30, 132 interiority, 129-30, 145 language, 132, 141, 213 material culture, 132-3, 142, 145, 147-9, 205, 213 mental capacity of, 132, 145-6 mythology, 129-33, 149 Ok Tedi (Mountain Ok), 14, 147, 149 ‘primordial’ nature, 132 pygmy question, 133-5, 147-8, 204, 212-14 see also Tapiro; Veddah; Amungme

285 Q Queensland Museum, Brisbane, 8, 24ff, 83, 87, 89-97 R Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 182, 184, 234, 243, 252ff, 265 Ray, S., 104, 118, 135, 151n5, 253 reenactment, 3, 20, 28, 42, 51, 110-11, 115-6, 189 repatriation, 4, 15, 28-30, 50-51, 81, 95-99, 265, 273-4, 277 Rivers, W.H.R., 5, 124n29, 181, 184-5 Robert H. Lowie (now Phoebe Hearst) Museum of Anthropology, Berkeley, 190, 195-6, 201n12 Rockefeller Foundation, 12, 197, 199, 239 Royal Museum of Ethnography, see Museum of Ethnography, Berlin S ‘salvage’, 4, 10-11, 55ff, 73-4, 83, 104, 106, 112-4, 117, 122n5, 196, 207-8, 223, 238, 257, 261 and commercial collecting, 56, 73-74 and photography, 11, 104, 106, 1124 Santa Cruz Islands, 7, 205, 210-12, 220-1, 223n8 Santo, see Espiritu Santo Sarasin, F., 135, 204-5, 207-8, 210, 212, 215, 223 Sarasin, P., 135, 204-5 Schindlbeck, M., 18, 232 Schmeltz, J.D.E., 59-60 Seligman(n), C.G., 22, 104, 120, 181, 185-8, 191-4, 197-9, 253-4, 260 collection, see Cooke Daniels Sepik, see Kaiserin Augusta River shell money, see money, shell Siar (New Guinea Company steamer), 159, 162-5, 171, 175, 232 skulls, see physical anthropology Solomon Islands (British), 7, 46, 48, 164, 205-6, 211, 259 Southern Cross (Anglican Mission steamer), 210 Specht, J., 50-1 Speiser, F., 9, 23, chapter 9, 268 collection, 212, 223n8 Spencer, Baldwin, 187, 192-4

O'Hanlon/Welsh

1/11/00

7:14 pm

Page 286

286 Stewart, S., 130 Stocking, G.W., 2 suque culture, 217, 221 T Tanna, New Hebrides, 48, 209, 275 Tapiro (people), 5, 18, 21, 139-50 tattooing, 111-2, 116, 132, 217, 275-6 technology, 5, 12-13, 20, 24, 47, 105-6, 112ff, 140, 142, 183ff, 190ff, 262 teaching of, 12, 197-200 Teem, 38 Thiel, M., 65-6, 68-74 Thomas, N., 2, 21, 56, 58, 155, 231 Thomson, A., 253-6, 258-9, 261, 268 Thurn, E. im, 105 Thurnwald, R., 25, 164 Tikopia, 7, 210, 212, 223n8 To Mum, 39 To Pulu (King Dick), 16, 38-9, 41, 52n8 Todd, J.A., 3, 9, 11-13, 24, chapter 10, 265, 267 collection, 227, 228, 234, 236-9 Torrence, R., 19 Torres Islands, 209, 217 Torres Strait Islands, 14, 20, 104, 110ff, 121, 147 see also Cambridge Expedition to trade goods, 13, 17, 25, 71, 85-87, 1401, 163ff, 172-3, 229, 232, 241, 256 Trobriand Islands, 14, 181-3, 187-97, 200 Tugeri (Marind-anim) (people), 11, 29, 87 collection, 88 Tylor, E.B., 10, 21, 29, 36, 46-8 collection, 119 U Umlauff, J.F.G., 64, 157, 160, 166-9 collection, 158-61, 164, 167-71, 175 Company, 75n9 University Museum of Natural History, Oxford, 223, 253, 261, 268 Upper Watut, 62, 261-2, 264, 267-8 V Vanuatu, see New Hebrides Veddah (Vedda/Wedda) (people), 135, 161, 205 ‘visualism’, 131, 134

Index Voogdt, H., 12, 16, 157, 159-60, 162-7, 169, 171-3, 175 collection, 158-61, 164, 166-7, 16971, 175, 177n26 W Wahgi (people), 17-18, 274 Wahlen, H.R., 15, 71-2 Wamberimi, 138, 141 Waruwarum, 38-41, 43 Wayne, H., 195-6, 199 weaponry, 10, 19, 22-3, 38-41, 44ff, 67, 70-71, 84-5, 87-8, 97, 113, 120, 127, 132, 139ff, 163-4, 204-6, 212ff, 275 Wedda, see Veddah Wedgwood, Camilla, 198, 254, 267 Wilkin, A., 104, 107, 109, 121 Williams, F.E., 10, 12, 16, 29, 262-4 Wollaston, A.F.R., 9, 136-7, 139-43, 145-50 Wuvulu, see ‘Matty-Mystery’