Publication: Oceania
Publication Date: 01-MAR-05
Format: Online - approximately 8473 words
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Hinkson, Melinda
Article Excerpt
W.E.H Stanner is a key figure in the history of Australian anthropology and Aboriginal affairs. Born in 1905, he was among the first group of undergraduate students to be educated by Radcliffe-Brown at Sydney University in the late 1920s. He wrote his PhD at the London School of Economics under Malinowski in the mid-1930s. Firth was a considerable influence throughout Stanner's professional life as teacher, friend and mentor, as was Elkin to a lesser extent. Stanner's anthropological research was carried out in the Daly River region of North Australia over four decades, with shorter periods of research conducted in Kenya in the 1930s, and the Pacific in the 1940s.
Like many of his contemporaries, Stanner was by no means straightforwardly an academic. Throughout his working life he traversed quite different arenas--he was a journalist, government adviser, public administrator, army man, university-based anthropologist, public intellectual. Stanner's corpus of writing reflects the strongly-held view of many of his generation, that anthropology should engage a wide audience and be useful to society at large. Many of his writings in turn attempt to engage diverse audiences: the general public, ministers and bureaucrats, and his academic colleagues.
Stanner's anthropological works reveal a desire to contribute to anthropological theorising in the tradition of Radcliffe-Brown, his most formative intellectual influence, cut across by a keen awareness that anthropology's greatest challenge lay in the conceptualisation of social transformation, and more specifically, the interplay between the creative and innovative actions of persons and abstract notions such as structure. Writing to his student and friend T.N. Madan in 1962, Stanner put his endeavour in characteristically evocative perspective:
I respect both A.R-B's and BM's memories: they taught me much, but neither ever really satisfied me. We have to use the natural science approach--but we have to avoid A.R-B's effort of making human, man-made facts seem non-human; and we have to grasp more of the creative and aspirational side of man than BM did. How odd the scheme of 'primary and derived needs' now seems! What 'derived needs' prompt me to write poetry in my private moments? (cited in Barwick, Beckett and Reay 1985:27).
In his writings on Aboriginal religion and a small number of other papers written in the 1950s and 1960s Stanner attempted to develop a theoretical approach that could take account of human agency in a way that structural-functionalism could not (see Stanner 1963, 1967, 1985). While regarding his work as ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, the subsequent generation of anthropologists working in this field have observed that Stanner was not successful in this endeavour, never managing to provide an adequate theory of action (Keen 1986:41, cf. Morphy 1988). Others have suggested that his failure to comprehensively transcend the limits of structural-functionalism owes much to his abiding intellectual commitment to Radcliffe-Brown's ideas (see Beckett 1985, Ernst 1985).
In this paper I trace Stanner's attempt to wrestle with the conceptual framework imparted to him by Radcliffe-Brown, on the ground, as it were, during his first field research. My interest in doing so is threefold. Firstly, Stanner has left behind unpublished materials which are revealing of this process on a number of counts. These materials are of clear historical and public interest and deserve to be brought to light. Secondly, it is a truism to observe that the process with which this paper is concerned--the anthropologist's attempt to take a set of conceptual approaches learned and distilled in the classroom and apply these to the practical circumstances encountered in the field--is a key process through which anthropology reproduces itself. It follows that our consideration of the challenges faced by anthropologists in the past can bring important perspectives to bear on those we wrestle with in the present. As historians of anthropology such as Stocking (1968, 1992) and Kuper (1977) have reminded us, there are multiple pitfalls to be encountered in approaching the past from the perspective of the present. In what follows I attempt to be mindful of these. My third and final interest in considering Stanner's early fieldwork from this perspective is for the light it can shed on the long and steady process by which anthropology's object has itself been reformulated intergenerationally. Since its inception the discipline has been continuously redefined as its practitioners and theorists have encountered a steady stream of controversies and 'crises' (see for example Asad 1973; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Hymes 1969; Leach 1961). The preoccupation of this volume is with the conceptual honing of the notion of intercultural engagement. Lest it be thought that this is a peculiarly late modern or postmodern concern, in reading the early work of anthropologists such as Stanner we identify some early attempts to sketch the contours of such a concept. (1)
A selective reading of the notes Stanner made in Radcliffe-Brown's lectures in 1929 and 1930, (2) the field diaries associated with his 1931 research and his subsequent Master of Arts (M.A.) thesis which was submitted at Sydney in 1934, provide the primary materials for this discussion. Access to this thesis remains restricted. Stanner himself denied the requests of anthropologists in the 1970s to read this work for the purpose of land claims research, as he did not feel confident of having mastered the complexity of social organisation on the Daly River and thought the work likely to be shot through with inconsistencies and errors. In recognition of his ambivalent regard for his M.A. thesis the identities of most individuals and places have been disguised. My interest in the thesis is not at the level of data it presents but rather what it reveals about the challenges of anthropological engagement in frontier contexts. In what follows it is not my aim to provide a summary of this thesis, nor to distil the knowledge Stanner acquired in the field. What I am interested in doing is constructing a picture--necessarily fragmentary--of what 'the field' was like, the kinds of constraints Stanner experienced in undertaking his research, and to consider how he attempted to make sense of this field in terms of the conceptual framework he inherited from Radcliffe-Brown.
A brief word on the constraints on our access to this past world: in his lectures Radcliffe-Brown had gone to some lengths to spell out to his students what the scientific approach to anthropology did not include: paramount here was 'the observation of society on the basis of everyday life'. Descriptions of the everyday, Radcliffe-Brown told his students, had no place in scientific inquiry (3) This directive highlights one of the key methodological differences between Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski's approaches. The latter identified the description of everyday practices ('the imponderabilia of everyday life') as the third tier in his methodology. (4) Radcliffe-Brown insisted that the most important task of anthropology was to look beyond the flux of everyday life, to establish the regularities of social structures. As Kuper has observed, in Radcliffe-Brown's scheme social structure had nothing to do with empirical reality (Kuper 1977:4). Such a conceptual model had clear implications for ethnographic method.
Stanner's 1932 notebooks suggest he was an attentive listener. Unfortunately the everyday of his time at Daly River was not documented. Nor is there a Malinowskian diary that might reveal with gritty realism Stanner's experience as a field worker. (5) But aspects of the everyday necessarily intrude on the process of data collection and certain moments are recorded in his field diaries. Among other things, these moments reveal the slow, grasping, often frustrating process by which Stanner took key concepts from his education and attempted to apply them to the unexpected complexity of the situation he found himself in. And while he fell short of actually throwing into question the framework of analysis he inherited from his anthropological forebears, there are instances in which we observe Stanner straining against the structural-functionalist logic of his time, in an attempt to make sense of...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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