Abstract
In this paper I provide an interpretative reading Spencer and Gillen. What is read depends in part on what one is looking for, on the purposes for which it is being read, and, what is there to be read depends partly on the audiences that the author has in. I provide a critique of social Darwinist and post-colonial readings of their work. I employ the concept of a motivating theme, which can be applied to segments of the text, which share a common purpose. The themes reflect the ways in which different scholars — historians and anthropologists — have read into the text. I will consider three categories of motivating themes: general contextualisations, ethnographic descriptions, and explanations of data. My discussion of their explanatory approach is centred on their analysis of ritual performances. The accounts of the rituals are not just unanalysed ethnography but are ordered by relating ritual event to social organisation. The centrality of ritual to Aboriginal society has contributed to the lasting impact of their work.
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Notes
See for example the chapter on ‘The Great Toa Hoax’ in Jones and Sutton’s 1986 book, Art and Land.
Kuklick (2006:561 ff.)) develops a relevant argument when she argues that many of Spencer and Gillen’s key questions were addressed to countering presuppositions of settler-colonial Australian’s as to the innate inferiority of Aboriginal people in racial terms.
See for example Diane Austin-Broos’ review of My Dear Spencer (Austin-Broos 1999).
The aim of the anthropologist is to try to gain ‘access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live so that we can in some extended sense of the term, converse with them’ (Geertz 1975: 24).
Kuklick (2006) develops a parallel argument to mine and concludes with reference to Spencer and Gillen: ‘Frazer deduced a variant of the “Whig” narrative of British history, imputing to all of humankind a trajectory of progress that led upward from the baseline of its existence. Malinowski pronounced that the degree to which any given social order operated effectively had to be measured by its own standards. Goldenweiser found justification for an American pluralist vision. Schmidt judged modern society spiritually corrupt. Durkheim identified a civic morality, an analogue to the liberal, secular ideology he had been advocating for France since the 1880s. Although these anthropologists disagreed on many matters, all of them had evidently read the same work’.
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Morphy, H. Reading Spencer and Gillen. SOPHIA 51, 545–560 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0291-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0291-z