The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Strait and Social Anthropology
Part 1. CETS in anthropology's history of anthropology; between evolution and ethnography; its participants
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Contents
The CETS in the history of anthropology
Between evolution and ethnography
The CETS’ participants (minus Rivers)
The CETS and functionalist ethnography
The two sides of British social anthropology and the nation-state
W.H.R. Rivers’ contribution to social anthropology
Rivers between anthropology and psychology
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The CETS in the history of anthropology
Lecture given in the opening session of a conference held at St. John’s College, Cambridge, “Anthropology and psychology: the legacy of the Torres Strait expedition, 1898-1998”, organized by Paul Whittle and me on 10-12 August 1998. Published online in Science as Culture (1998).
Why organize a conference to mark the centenary of this expedition? The best reason is to explore the possibilities for a rapprochement between anthropology and psychology by looking at a period and individuals who were more open to collaboration between the disciplines than we have since become. But my task here is to examine the significance of the CETS for the subsequent development of social anthropology in Britain. The CETS was a turning point in the history of anthropology. If Victorian anthropologists worked from the armchair, this event marked a turn to fieldwork in Britain. If we ask what impact its participants made on professional anthropologists and their students today, the answer is likely to be negligible.
For the conventional wisdom is that modern British social anthropology was born without significant antecedents in 1922, when the publication of monographs by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown launched a “functionalist revolution”. The lineage of British social anthropologists has always had a double descent myth of itself, tracing its foundation to these two ancestors, who might as well have sprung from the ground for all that their followers know or care. When I agreed to help organize this conference, a senior colleague told me “Well, I suppose there is some point in examining the history of an error”! In the light of this remark and of the prevailing attitude it expresses, I should make my own motives more explicit.
Anthropology, the aspiration to place knowledge of humanity on a rigorous footing, has been through three phases corresponding roughly to the last three centuries. In each case its object and method reflected the movement of world history when seen from a European perspective. Anthropology grew out of the critique of the old regime of agrarian civilization as part of a search for the universal foundations of democratic society. Rousseau and Kant in the 18th century enlightenment—following Locke’s foundation for the middle-class revolution in the 1690s—wished to base the social contract on human nature, and to that end their method was philosophical reasoning, supported by the best information available on the uncivilized peoples of North America and the South Seas. Immanuel Kant published Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View at the end of his century; but you will not find references to that in today’s courses on the history of social anthropology.
The 19th century put the spirit of democratic revolution firmly in the past and addressed a world brought into being by western imperialism powered by a machine revolution. The question Victorians asked was how they were able to conquer the planet with so little effective resistance. They concluded that their culture was superior, being based on reason rather than superstition, and that this superiority was explained by racial difference. Their perspective on world society was inevitably one of movement, so that the racial hierarchy they found there was still evolving. The object of 19th century anthropology was thus to explain the origin of the continuing inequality between the races of humankind; its method was evolutionary history based on widespread comparison of examples linked by an assumption of human psychic unity. In other words, they could become like us once they submitted to an appropriate form of government and education by us.
In the 20th century anthropology took the predominant form of ethnography. That is, individual peoples, studied in isolation from their wider context in time and space, were written up by lone ethnographers whose method was prolonged and intensive immersion in their societies. Nowhere was this project pursued more rigorously or exclusively than in the British social anthropology of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. By the end of the century, most professionals in social and cultural anthropology around the world pay at least lip service to this ethnographic ideal, although in the other imperial centers (the United States, France, Russia, India) the methods employed are more varied. Within Britain, the basic model of functionalist ethnography has been undermined from numerous angles for several decades now.
One of my aims in revisiting a formative event one hundred years ago is to throw light on our own contemporary search for a new paradigm, by investigating in detail how 19th century anthropology became its 20th century successor, at least in Britain. I also hope to illuminate the relationship between the dominant object and method of the last century discipline and the history of world society of which it has been a part. The ultimate purpose of this, of course, is to clarify what form anthropology should take if it is to help us make an informed connection with world society in the coming century.
Between evolution and ethnography
The intellectual history of British social anthropology has been well-served of late with books like Henrika Kuklick’s The Savage Within and Jack Goody’s The Expansive Moment (both participants in this conference). Not long ago, Adam Kuper’s Anthropologists and Anthropology: the British school 1922-1972 had the field virtually to itself. But the recent publication of a tome of almost 600 pages by George Stocking, the preeminent historian of anthropology of our day, overshadows these. After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951 is the sequel to Victorian Anthropology; its theme is precisely that shift from armchair evolutionary comparison to fieldwork-based ethnography with which this talk is concerned. Stocking sets out to disarm his critics in a preemptive preface where he represents his own approach as “historicist” rather than “presentist”. That is, he claims to have no axe to grind as far as today’s disputes within academic anthropology are concerned, preferring to capture as nearly as possible what the participants in the story took to be the truth. In consequence, his judgements are implicit and tend to favor conventional wisdom today.
Stocking’s method is biographical, focusing on a few individuals who made a big difference. He takes Tylor as his point of departure for the Victorian evolutionary approach, with Frazer as a later exponent of that tradition. Towards the end of the book, he lists the individuals who dominate the story of British social anthropology’s formation as follows: “from Tylor through Haddon, Seligman, Marrett and Rivers to Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown” (p. 437). Given that the beginning and end of the story are virtually axiomatic, the interest of the plot lies mainly in the middle. It is notable that of the intermediate quartet mentioned here only Robert Marett of Oxford was not a member of the CETS. But Stocking pays little attention to Haddon and Seligman who enter the story from time to time as institutional godfather figures, but never as pioneers of theory or method, when seen teleologically from the perspective of what British social anthropology eventually became. Marett’s claims to have been influential are likewise marginal. Which leaves us with the enigmatic figure of William Halse Rivers Rivers.
Rivers joined the CETS as an experimental psychologist and he has been celebrated recently as a military psychiatrist in the First World War through Pat Barker’s trilogy of novels, Regeneration. But he probably did more than anyone to set British social anthropology on its modern course. Stocking gives Rivers more space than anyone else after Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown (a major section devoted largely to him in each of three chapters). His tone is often grudgingly dismissive, but Rivers’ prominence in the narrative of the early decades is unavoidable. Inevitably, the question of the CETS’ historical significance becomes conflated with the need to assess Rivers’s relationship to the functionalist movement that Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and their followers claimed to have initiated, more or less out of nothing.
There is a case for arguing that Rivers deserves to be seen as the founder of professional social anthropology in Britain, an equal of his acknowledged counterparts in America and France, Franz Boas and Marcel Mauss. But I have no wish to play a zero sum game of that sort, denigrating Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown as they and their descendants did Rivers. To an extent, Anna Grimshaw and I exhausted that line of polemic in the pamphlet we wrote a few years ago—Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals (Prickly Pear Press, 1993). It is obvious enough to me, as it is to everyone, that Malinowski was a writer and fieldworker of genius, the dominant figure in British social anthropology between the wars; and that Radcliffe-Brown, especially after Malinowski left England shortly before the second world war, was responsible, with the help of his close colleagues Evans-Pritchard and Fortes (the gang of three), for the structural-functionalist paradigm that gave British social anthropology such a coherent, if rather narrow profile in mid-century.
The only reason for taking up the cudgels on Rivers’s behalf is that his contribution has been all but eliminated from the collective memory of the discipline. To an extent, this is because by a cruel irony he died unexpectedly in the same year 1922 that the functionalist revolution is thought to have taken off with the publication especially of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, but also The Andaman Islanders. (This annus mirabilis also saw the publication of Lugard’s The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa, as well as Ulysses, The Waste Land and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)
The 1920s were witness to a diffusionist revival which made “conjectural history” the main target of the new ethnographers and Rivers had nailed his flag to that mast for a time. As the dominant institutional figure before the war, his achievements had to be downgraded if his successors wished to represent themselves as revolutionaries. Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were economical with the truth when it came to discussing their own antecedents and methods, whereas Rivers cultivated a self-effacing transparency. The problem was particularly acute for Radcliffe-Brown as a product of the Cambridge school led by Haddon and Rivers.
Unlike Stocking, I have explicit axes to grind; but my concerns are not strictly presentist since, when I insert myself into the conversation about anthropology, I want to grant an appropriate measure of respect to those predecessors who made a major difference. Something valuable would be lost if we reduced Rivers’s contribution to that conversation. In what follows, I hope to show that he is central to the formation of the British school in the 20th century, with the added twist that he was never wholly specialized in anthropology. The way he constructed the relationship between anthropology and psychology went through significant shifts over time; and this makes his example instructive as we negotiate the uncertainties of a paradigm lost. But before embarking on this narrative, I should briefly mention CAETS itself and the part played by Haddon and Seligman in the subsequent development of British social anthropology.
3. The CETS protagonists (minus Rivers)
CAETS was Alfred Haddon’s doing, a sequel to the natural history expedition he had undertaken a decade earlier to the islands between Australia and New Guinea. His interest now was in anthropology, seeing the Torres Straits islanders as a threatened culture, literally as islands in a sea of imperialist expansion. He expected to cover the sociology, folklore and material culture himself; but he also took along a linguist, Sidney Ray, a trainee student, Anthony Wilkin (who died young), and three experimental psychologists—three because Rivers first nominated two of his students, Charles Myers and William McDougall, and then decided to come along too. A friend of Myers and McDougall, a medical pathologist called Charles Seligman, talked his way onto the expedition at the last minute. The book on the CETS—edited by Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse for Cambridge University Press—contains essays on the expedition itself. If you came here hoping to find out more about it, you will be disappointed. For the focus of the conference is principally on the consequences of the expedition.
As far as British social anthropology is concerned, the CETS confirmed Haddon as the founder of a precocious school of anthropology at Cambridge which is held to have suffered a decline between the wars, only to be resurrected by Meyer Fortes in the 1950s. More important perhaps, the expedition launched Rivers and Seligman as anthropologists, the latter as an influential figure in the discipline at the London School of Economics. Six volumes of reports on the expedition were published—the introduction was last in 1935. The two-part volume on physiology and psychology, for which Rivers was largely responsible, came out first. We will be devoting a full session to Haddon and one and a half to Rivers. Seligman is unfortunately neglected here, a fate that is mirrored by his treatment in most histories of the discipline, including Stocking’s.
Haddon and Seligman were both prominent patrons of young ethnographers in the period before Malinowski got the fellowship program of the International African Institute rolling in the 1930s. In addition to their institutional prominence at Cambridge, the LSE and the Royal Anthropological Institute, Seligman, with his wife Brenda (also an anthropologist), was independently wealthy and thus a source of private financial support. Haddon and Seligman were always marginal to the functionalist revolution, but tolerant of it, giving vent occasionally to fogeyish complaints, but recognizing a good thing when they saw it. They each retained a Darwinian evolutionary approach in which culture remained linked to biology. They both, especially Haddon (in collaboration with Huxley and Carr-Saunders), made a belated contribution to the anthropological critique of racism in the 1930s, despite remaining attached to racial taxonomy. Haddon was from the beginning troubled by the plight of natives in the colonies and Seligman too became involved in what was known between the wars as “practical anthropology”.
Haddon was a popularizer, author of general books on the evolution of art and on human history as the migration of peoples. He reviewed books for the Daily Telegraph in its heyday. Seligman became interested in psychoanalysis in the 1920s, a fact that has been noticed by the Frenchman, Bertrand Pulman, but not by many of his British colleagues. Stocking’s narrative gives some prominence to this moment of potential rapprochement between anthropology and psychology. Malinowski too played his part in an exchange which would have been made for Rivers, had he not died. Most important, Seligman led the movement of British social anthropology from the insular Pacific to Africa, carrying out with Brenda a survey of the Nile valley which acted as a bridge between Sir James Frazer’s interest in divine kingship and the subsequent study of African political systems by functionalist ethnographers. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, African Political Systems (1940), to Seligman. More than any other single volume, it announced the arrival of a new school, British social anthropology.
Haddon and Seligman were more than just bit players in the story of British social anthropology; but of the CETS protagonists no-one would deny that they were secondary to Rivers. It would be no exaggeration to state that the principal legacy of CETS was the (partial) conversion of Rivers to anthropology. In what follows, and contrary to Stocking’s method, I will pursue a teleological line, first outlining the distinctive features of British social anthropology in mid-century. I will argue that functionalist ethnography was an allegorical commentary on a world divided into nation-states, its double ancestry reflecting the contradictory dualism (nation and state) at the heart of 20th century society. Then I will list Rivers’ main achievements, to place his contribution to the development of anthropology in perspective. I shall claim that Rivers’s long struggle to combine the study of anthropology and psychology, a struggle which underwent notable shifts, provides an ample source for reflection on how a future anthropology might succeed in bringing the subjectivity of individuals and the history of human society into a creative methodological synthesis.