Table Of ContentEncountering Aborigines
A Case Study: Anthropology and
the Australian Aboriginal
KENELM BURRIDGE
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Copyright © 1973, Pergamon Press Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Burridge, Kenelm.
Encountering Aborigines; a case study: anthropology and the Australian aboriginal.
(Pergamon frontiers of anthropology series, PFAS-1)
1. Australian aborigines. 2. Ethnology-Philosophy. I. Title.
GN666.B87 301.29'94 72-11991
ISBN 0-08-017071-4
ISBN 0-08-017646-1 (S)
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Printed in the United States of America
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J.L. B.
b. Canberra 25.8.51
Preface
Australia's Aboriginal peoples, so long cut off from the mainstreams of
humanity's endeavors, are now beginning to tread the boards of the
world's stage. Many scores of authors, anthropologists and others have
introduced them to us, provided accounts of their problems, described
their ways of life, analyzed their cultures, posed problems for future
research. The Aborigines are strangers no longer. Hence this book. It
extends a welcome to the Aborigines, attempts to bring researches on
Aboriginal culture within a more general framework and perspective,
and offers some suggestions as to why they have been written about so
much.
My own personal and firsthand acquaintance with Aboriginal life has
been short and entirely superficial. But this, I think, matters little in the
context—and may even be an advantage. The book is about what others
have thought is significant in Aboriginal life, and the kinds of problems
which have seized the attention of anthropologists in particular. The
reader who wants a more direct introduction to Aboriginal peoples them
selves should consult, for example, the works of A. A. Abbie, A. Capell,
R. M. and C. H. Berndt, A. P. Elkin, L. R. Hiatt, Ursula McConnell,
M. J. Meggitt, D. J. Mulvaney, Marie Reay, W. E. H. Stanner, T. G. H.
Strehlow, and W. L. Warner—a few names chosen from a host of profes
sional anthropologists — and G. F. Angas, Daisy Bates, Mary Durack,
Ion Idriess, Jack McLaren, Alan Marshall, and Bernard Smith —among
the nonprofessionals —who will lead him into a delightful world of
ix
x Preface
personal experience and impression. Again, anyone with half an eye who
wants to know what the problems of Aboriginal research are, have been,
or might be from the inside has only to sift through The World of the First
Australians (Berndt and Berndt, 1964), Australian Aboriginal Studies
(Shiels, 1963), Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia (Mulvaney
and Golson, 1971), and the works of C. D. Rowley. And there is little
point in repeating, rehearsing and summarizing what has already been
well done elsewhere. Nonetheless, the intellectual background and
general assumptions guiding research have not always been clear, and as
particular problems are tackled and fought over in professional circles
the major questions from which they have been derived tend to drop from
sight. So, what I have tried to do, in generally historical if idiosyncratic
vein, is go over old problems and try to pose new ones by filling in some of
the historical and intellectual background to Aboriginal studies. But the
historical perspective should not be confused with history. It is simply a
means of attempting to show where anthropology stands, and why anthro
pologists do what they do.
It would be impossible in a book of this kind to allude to all of the prob
lems in Aboriginal studies, and, regrettably, many an important contribu
tion has had to go unnoticed. Although the book is in no way a biblio
graphical essay, or a handbook for students looking for a thesis topic,
most of the "starters" have been mentioned. Besides, for the specialist,
John Greenway's bibliography (1963) is comprehensive up to 1959, and
full references on any topic may be obtained as quick as thought from the
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra. On the whole, I
have attempted to provoke thought by a technique of indirection rather
than solve problems or tag them with markers.
There is one further point. As a subject or set of disciplines, Anthro
pology is wavering, beginning to atomize into numerous specialisms
whose particular interests and problems could only be placed within the
covers of a large symposium. Seen from these varying standpoints every
thing is bound to seem different, the skew wrong or mistaken. This one
has to accept. But while I have kept my colleagues in mind, the book has
a particular stance and is dedicated to my son, born in Canberra when that
capital city was mostly grassland. He and others of his age have very
positively occupied my thoughts. Young, vigorous and imaginative, the
future belongs to them. They travel the world on a shoestring with an
ease and nonchalance their fathers never possessed. They encounter all
sorts, even communicate. If in a small way reading this book starts some
into attempting to deepen the impact of casual acquaintance, or into
Preface xi
trying to unravel the past, and presses others to reflect a little on peoples
who, like the Aborigines, are so very differently situated, I shall be well
satisfied.
KENELM BURRIDGE
A cknowledgments
Professor Cyril Belshaw, general editor of this series, suggested that I
write this book. I thank him for the challenge and opportunity. Professor
D. J. Mulvaney and Dr. Robert Tonkinson were kind enough to read a
draft and have been most generous with their comments. I am most
grateful for their help in making this a better book than it might have been.
I thank, too, Professor R. M. and Dr. C. H. Berndt for their stimulus and
encouragement to interest myself in Aboriginal studies; Miss Jennifer
Gould for her valuable bibliographical assistance; The Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies for financial assistance in making a short
field trip in Western Australia; and the Canada Council for making it
possible to visit Australian libraries. Finally, I thank the librarians of the
Mitchell Library in Sydney, and the library of the University of Western
Australia for all their help and advice whilst fossicking around the
stacks.
Acknowledgments are made to the Oxford University Press, the
Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, and Angus and Robertson
for permission to quote from works under their imprint.
Preface xi
trying to unravel the past, and presses others to reflect a little on peoples
who, like the Aborigines, are so very differently situated, I shall be well
satisfied.
KENELM BURRIDGE
A cknowledgments
Professor Cyril Belshaw, general editor of this series, suggested that I
write this book. I thank him for the challenge and opportunity. Professor
D. J. Mulvaney and Dr. Robert Tonkinson were kind enough to read a
draft and have been most generous with their comments. I am most
grateful for their help in making this a better book than it might have been.
I thank, too, Professor R. M. and Dr. C. H. Berndt for their stimulus and
encouragement to interest myself in Aboriginal studies; Miss Jennifer
Gould for her valuable bibliographical assistance; The Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies for financial assistance in making a short
field trip in Western Australia; and the Canada Council for making it
possible to visit Australian libraries. Finally, I thank the librarians of the
Mitchell Library in Sydney, and the library of the University of Western
Australia for all their help and advice whilst fossicking around the
stacks.
Acknowledgments are made to the Oxford University Press, the
Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, and Angus and Robertson
for permission to quote from works under their imprint.
CHAPTER 1
Anthropological Man
1 INTRODUCTION
Since its inception in 1961 The Australian Institute of Aboriginal
Studies in Canberra has collected over 30,000 references to various
aspects of Aboriginal life. They range from the observations of Dutch
navigators in the first half of the seventeenth century to the present
time. For three hundred years varieties of individuals of European
cultural background have been describing the Aborigines and their ways
of life —Why? What questions have been explicit or implicit in their de
scriptions? This business of describing and asking questions of other cul
tures has become so pointed and specialized over the last century or so
that it has given rise to the various branches of professional anthropology —
Why have anthropologists, especially social and cultural anthropologists,
been interested in other cultures? Why have they been interested in
Australian Aborigines? What has been, and is, the significance of their
work? What are the unanswered questions that could form the basis of
future work, and what intellectual challenges lie in the material?
Attempting to answer these questions entails a movement of the mind
between the Aborigines themselves and their cultures, and the investiga
tors and their cultures: a quadratic relationship whose intricacies the
mind has to hold and map. Aboriginal cultures are specimens of ways of
life, particular solutions to the problems of living in community. They
present scientific and intellectual problems that we recognize as such in
virtue of our own cultural heritage. On the other hand, the Aborigines
1
2 Anthropology and the Australian Aboriginal
are people, not just problems. They are men and women, shaped in our
image, part of ourselves. Their ways of life are strangely familiar, yet
quite different and other. To understand this otherness we can go to live
and work with them, or simply read about them. We can collect, measure,
and document. Either way, perhaps, we may be allowed braver insights
into the mystery of our being as man: reflections on what we once were, or
a more accurate measure of what we think ourselves to be. If imagination
founders, for what it is worth we may chalk up an addition to knowledge.
At any rate, for those whose cast of mind has been shaped by European
civilization, because the Aborigines are there — "out there" —some
attempt, it seems, must be made to bring them within our comprehension
as parts of ourselves.
Sir James Frazer, perhaps the most renowned of British anthropolo
gists, never visited the peoples about whom he wrote so much. Reaching
over time and space from his workroom, he asked himself a question:
Why did he who would become Diana's priest at Nemi first have to pluck
a branch from a tree in the sacred grove and then slay his predecessor? A
straight answer eluded him —as indeed it must elude anyone who asks
such a question. But, like his fellow classical scholars who regularly
visited Italy and Greece, Frazer went to the lake of Nemi in the Alban
hills, hoping perhaps to find some guidance in the atmosphere of the
place. He was led into strange paths. His question, he found, was not
simply an historical or antiquarian one. It embraced the evolutionary,
psychological, and sociological implications of why this kind of thing
should be done by any people anywhere. It drew him deeper and deeper
into the complexities of being another kind of human being. Yet what
started Frazer on his quest, why his question should have seemed to him
so important, is difficult to answer. Why, once started, he should have
continued is rather easier. It was the adventure itself that absorbed
him, not its end. And though this is probably the truest and most general
answer to any endeavor, like scholars and scientists in other disciplines,
anthropologists and others who go to live among strange peoples have
their own personal reasons or justifications for doing what they do. Thus,
to take a more contemporary example, Richard Gould (1969, p.5) draws
the contrast between ourselves, with a nuclear technology, and the tradi
tional hunter-gathering way of life of the Australians. Observing then, that
it is given to only a few anthropologists to see this kind of life at firsthand
before it disappears for ever—to feel it and learn from it —he goes on to
say: 'This is the reason I came to the Gibson Desert... living and sharing
experiences with these nomadic people is exhilarating but carries with it an
Anthropological Man 3
inescapable feeling of loss ... as if we were watching the last redwood or
the last bison disappear."
The romantic impulse, the sense of physical and intellectual adventure,
and the poetic juxtaposition of different kinds of human experience are
clear. They serve the explicit and scholarly purpose of studying an un
familiar way of life. But there is more in it than simply recording a way of
life that seems destined soon to disappear—though this would be adequate
reason enough. Because Gould asked himself how Australians lived, and
set himself to study a way of life which, in a general way, was lived by
our own remoter ancestors, there is the assumption that in learning what
it feels like to be a hunter-gatherer we are rescuing a part of our own
heritage as human beings. What of man the hunter-gatherer remains in,
and is inextricably a part of, the men who stepped on the moon? Or, as
Frazer might have put it, What part of me is in the King of the Wood at
Nemi?
By contrast, Mervyn Meggitt (1962, pp. xvi-xvii) is much more specifi
cally intellectual and scientific. His main object, he says, is to undertake a
detailed analysis of Walbiri society in order to facilitate the placing of this
central Australian people within an overall comparative framework.
Within this broad approach, he goes on, he intends to deal with some
specific problems: whether marriage is determined by reference to
genealogical relations of kinship, or by reference to sections and sub
sections; the relative importance of locality, genealogy and subsection in
relation to life crises such as birth, betrothal, initiation and death; the
relation of kinship to totemic organization; the significance of unilineal
descent groups; the changes that have occurred in response to contact
with Europeans. To a layman unfamiliar with the technical terms of
anthropology all this may seem rather baffling. Yet having braved the
words —and they will have to be encountered again in later pages —a lay
man could surely discern that Meggitt's interest was directed to the details
of a social organization that lie behind the convenient but more general
expression "way of life." He is taking much the same direction as Gould,
but he intends to go much further and he makes explicit just what detail he
is going to cover. He is talking not so much to the public at large as to his
colleagues. If here and there in his book something may be gleaned of his
personal relations with, and interest in, the Walbiri people, he has ruth
lessly subordinated them to the scientific and intellectual problems of a
professional anthropologist.
Take another standpoint: an anthropologist as seen by the novelist,
Xavier Herbert (1959). The anthropologist and his context are, of course,
