The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Strait and Social Anthropology

Part 3. W.H.R. Rivers' contribution to social anthropology; Rivers between anthropology and psychology

W.H.R. Rivers’ contribution to social anthropology

What were the distinctive features of British social anthropology in its heyday around mid-century? The following would be a shortlist of elements for an ideal type.

1. Ethnography: the habit of writing about one people circumscribed in time and space.

2. Fieldwork: the intensive study of living activities where they take place.

3. Ideas from life: abstract generalizations realised in concrete descriptions.

4. Kinship: the field of professional specialization, especially the use of genealogies for formal modelling (“kinship algebra”).

5. Social structure: emphasis on a coherent system of social rules, not on culture or psychology.

6. Comparative method: sometimes limited to regional surveys.

7. Professional jargon: close specification of concepts and terms, as opposed to popular usage.

8. Functional integrity: the social or cultural whole expressed through institutional patterns in the here and now.

9. Culture contact: the form in which social change was addressed, also as practical anthropology.

10. Science of society: social anthropology as the sociology of primitive societies.

What did Rivers contribute to the development of this intellectual project?

1. Ethnography. His The Todas (1906) was at the time a pioneering example of the new intensive ethnography. Rivers was unusually transparent in listing his sources and this has been used to discredit his seriousness as an ethnographer (by Stocking, for example). Functionalists tend to be more discrete or even actively misleading. Having said this, Malinowski’s wrote his monographs on a superior level, making Rivers look like a plodding amateur in the genre.

2. Fieldwork. This was the great message of the CETS and Rivers subsequently argued for the superiority of long-term immersion on the part of a single fieldworker. He wrote up this approach at length in the official handbook of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Notes and Queries (1912). Even so, the shortcuts he took for granted reveal him as a transitional figure in the development of fieldwork practice.

3. Ideas from life. By participating in the CETS and afterwards, Rivers developed the genealogical method (sometimes called “the concrete method”). This consisted of mapping kinship relations within a community on a network diagram compiled from the perspective of multiple informants. The publication of this cubist solution to the problem of mediating the abstract and the concrete in modern society was contemporary with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)—see Anna Grimshaw’s The Ethnographer’s Eye. Rivers was always more precise on methodological issues than his functionalist successors.

4. Kinship. Fortes traced the British school’s focus on kinship in a direct line from L.H. Morgan through Rivers and Radcliffe-Brown to himself. This lineage is disputed, not least because of Radcliffe-Brown’s efforts to downplay his own debt to his teacher. He took Rivers’s dynamic genealogical method and turned it into the static kinship algebra for which British social anthropology became (in)famous.

5. Social structure. At one stage Rivers went out of his way to separate the study of social structure as an analytical field from psychology, producing a book from lectures on the subject. He seems not however to have been influenced in this enterprise by Durkheim’s sociology, as were both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown.

6. Comparative method. Rivers was interested in regional variations, but as a connected historical process, unlike both the evolutionists and the functionalists, who preferred to construct abstract taxonomies.

7. Professional jargon. This was Radcliffe-Brown’s speciality, somewhat to Malinowski’s disgust. Rivers put his energies into method and theoretical analysis.

8. Functional integrity. Rivers saw this—how otherwise could he have developed a notion of social structure? But he chose to emphasize the wider historical context.

9. Culture contact. This preoccupation of the British school between the wars was of primary concern to Rivers (and Haddon). They sought to give the problem a functional twist, making a sort of synchronic history (one of several oxymorons in their repertoire). But this forgotten legacy of Haddon and Rivers was submerged in the functionalist rhetorical denigration of “conjectural history”.

10. Science of society. Radcliffe-Brown mastered the rhetoric of science, but Rivers pioneered its practice. Whereas British social anthropology occupied a no man’s-land between science and literature, Rivers believed he was helping to build an impersonal scientific community, in fact more than one, until the circumstances of the First World War led him in a more individual and personal direction.

The purpose of this exercise is not to settle competing claims for independent invention of modern social anthropology—according to the logic of intellectual property rights—but rather to place persons in the history of an ongoing conversation about humanity. The prima facie evidence of the summary comparison above is that Rivers’s contribution to the development of British social anthropology is far more than “the history of an error”. He made both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown possible and they in turn gave a decisive impetus to the formation of a discipline that seems in retrospect to have been unusually well-adapted to mid-century Britain and possibly to the world at large.

But there is more to Rivers than a proto-functionalist ethnographer who failed to make the grade. He never abandoned his commitment to psychology and it is in this dialectic of emergent academic specialisms that we find unfinished intellectual agendas that might well inform our own efforts to know the world and ourselves in new ways. For the notion of British social anthropology as a self-contained, coherent enterprise is long gone, leaving a terrain animated only occasionally by the latest ideas from America and France.

Rivers between anthropology and psychology

William Rivers started out as a physiologist and had already established the first two experimental psychology laboratories in England before joining the CETS to which he contributed both studies of perception and the genealogical method. As a result of his neurological experiments with Head, he developed a two-stage model of nerve regeneration, the protopathic and the epicritic. He developed the sociological study of kinship and social structure and took his ethnological enquiries toward German historicism and beyond, into the wilder regions of global speculation. He became a psychoanalyst who applied Freud’s ideas critically and served as an army psychiatrist in the war, finding in the treatment of shell-shock victims a version of social psychology. He ended his life as a socialist politician and friend of progressive literary men. In the last few years before his death, 1917-1922, he appears to have had a personality transplant, the first stages of which are depicted by Pat Barker in the Regeneration trilogy. Once a conservative member of the academic establishment, a recluse with a stammer, he became the very model of an outgoing public intellectual.

There is much more to this fascinating story than I can tell here. But I wish only to summarize how Rivers approached the disciplines of psychology and anthropology (in which he included ethnology and sociology). His first preoccupation was to build up academic specialisms of which he was a leading practitioner. He subscribed to compartments of knowledge, serving as president of both the national bodies responsible for supervising professional practice in British psychology and anthropology. He brought to these enquiries a common methodological outlook that never sacrificed active engagement of the investigating subject to an objectifying positivism that was taking root in the universities at the time. It is indisputable that he sought to separate the study of society from that of individuals, in much the same way that chemistry was hived off from physics. At this stage he seems to have made little of the fact that he combined these branches of study within himself.

Rivers’s war experiences changed all that. In the last five years of his life he produced some forty pieces of work, of varying quality and length, while maintaining a punishing regime of professional and public commitment. Inevitably, he wrote these pieces off the top of his head, relying on whatever was stored in his memory from decades of specialist practice. In the process, his method became more autobiographical and self-reflexive; the boundaries between disciplines became blurred in a synthesizing drive to comprehend and influence personal experience of impersonal society.

In his posthumous book, Conflict and Dream (1923), Rivers recalls one of his own dreams whose preoccupation was with “Hidden Sources”. His initial explanation is that the dream referred to his frustration in not being able to reply to mistaken American critics of his kinship theories because of overwork as an army psychiatrist. In a practical sense but more seriously, a conflict existed between psychology and ethnology. But, pushing the analysis further, Rivers concludes that the dream reveals the fundamental harmony between psychoanalysis and ethnology based on the same method, the excavation of hidden sources that help us to understand the complex history of both human personality and culture.

Armed with this integrated vision of self and society, Rivers came out of the war ready to change the world, not just to understand it. In this he differed markedly from Radcliffe-Brown—who spent much of the war teaching in a Sydney suburb—and Malinowski who, as we know, sat it out on a Pacific island. It was they, however, who forged an academic discipline attuned to the needs of the corporate state in mid-20th century Britain. Not Rivers. What he might have done with Rockefeller funding is anyone’s guess. The 1920s were a fruitful period to examine the relationship between the new ethnography and psychoanalysis. Malinowski was actively engaged with Freudian ideas at this time, until the exchange went the wrong way from his point of view. There was support from Seligman. But the trend, both in anthropology and psychology, was towards divorce, not marriage. The name of the game in our century has been division of the professional pie.

It is more likely, had he lived, that Rivers would have become a disestablished outsider—like his friend Myers who left the academy to found the Institute of Industrial Psychology without government support—than continuing as the central figure of two disciplines or the founder of a new academic synthesis. In that respect, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were more attuned to conservative times. But they did not solve the problem of social reproduction adequately. Malinowski fell out with all his leading male students before fleeing Britain; while Radcliffe-Brown died alone after a life of nomadism. Rivers’ premature death did allow them to reinvent themselves, sometimes at his expense, as the only begetters of British social anthropology. If nothing else today, I hope to have made it clear that this formation myth is bad history. In that light, we might gain something from revisiting the legacy of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait in 1898.