Humanities Research Journal Series: Volume XIV. No. 1. 200767 Paul D. Barclay Contending Centres of...

humanitiesresearch Vol XiV. No. 1. 2007

The journal of the Research School of HumanitiesThe Australian National University

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Historicizing

Research

Cross Cultural

HUMANITIESRESEARCH

GUEST EDITOR Benjamin Penny

EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Tony Bennett, Open University, UK; Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago; James K. Chandler, University of Chicago; W. Robert Connor, Teagle Foundation, New York; Michael Davis, University of Tasmania; Ian Donaldson, The Australian National University; Saul Dubow, University of Sussex; Valerie I. J. Flint, University of Hull; Christopher Forth, The Australian National University; Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Connecticut; Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge; Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles; Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge; W. J. F. Jenner, The Australian National University; Peter Jones, University of Edinburgh; E. Ann Kaplan, State University of New York at Stony Brook; Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University; David MacDougall, The Australian National University; Iain McCalman, University of Sydney; Fergus Millar, University of Oxford; Anthony Milner, The Australian National University; Howard Morphy, The Australian National University; Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University, Hong Kong; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Australian National University; Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago; Paul Patton, University of New South Wales; Paul Pickering, The Australian National University; Monique Skidmore, The Australian National University; Mandy Thomas, The Australian National University; Caroline Turner, The Australian National University; James Walter, Monash University.

Humanities Research is published by the Research School of Humanities at The Australian National University.The Research School of Humanities came into existence in January 2007 and consists of the Humanities Research Centre, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, National Europe Centre and National Dictionary Centre.

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Published by ANU E Press Email: [email protected] Website: http://epress.anu.edu.au

© The Australian National University. This Publication is protected by copyright and may be used as permitted by the Copyright Act 1968 provided appropriate acknowledgment of the source is published. The illustrations and certain identified inclusions in the text are held under separate copyrights and may not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the respective copyright holders. Copyright in the individual contributions contained in this publication rests with the author of each contribution. Any requests for permission to copy this material should be directed to RSH Administration. The text has been supplied by the authors as attributed. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the publisher.

Printed in Australia

Vol XIV. No. 1. 2007 ISSN: 1440-0669 (print), ISSN: 1834-8491 (Online)

Contents

HistoriCiZing Cross-Cultural researCH

1 Benjamin Penny Historicizing “Cross-Cultural”

11 Bronwen Douglas The Lure of Texts and the Discipline of Praxis: Cross-Cultural History in a Post-Empirical World

31 Benjamin Penny More Than One Adam? Revelation and Philology in Nineteenth-Century China

51 Henrika Kuklick The Rise and Fall — and Potential Resurgence — of the Comparative Method, With Special Reference to Anthropology

67 Paul D. Barclay Contending Centres of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan: The Rhetorics of Vindicationism and Privation in Japan’s “Aboriginal Policy”

85 P. G. Toner The Gestation of Cross-Cultural Music Research and the Birth of Ethnomusicology

Vol XIV. No. 1. 2007 ISSN: 1440-0669

CONTRIBUTORS

is Associate Professor of History at LafayetteCollege in Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. He is

PAUL D. BARCLAY

currently writing a social and cultural history ofJapanese colonial rule in Taiwan's highlandterritories.is a Senior Fellow in Pacific and Asian History inthe Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies

BRONWEN DOUGLAS

at The Australian National University. Her currentresearch project is exploring the entanglements ofthe scientific idea of race with encounters inOceania. She has also written extensively on theintersections of Christianity and gender in Melanesiaand on the colonial history of New Caledonia. Sheis the author of Across the Great Divide: Journeysin History and Anthropology (Amsterdam; HarwoodAcademic Publishers, 1998) and has edited severalcollections, including Tattoo: Bodies, Art andExchange in the Pacific and the West (London andDurham: Duke University Press, 2005), co-editedwith Anna Cole and Nicholas Thomas.is a Professor in the Department of History andSociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania.

HENRIKA KUKLICK

A specialist in the history of the human sciences,her publications include The Savage Within: TheSocial History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991,1992, 1993), an edited collection, A New Historyof Anthropology (forthcoming 2007, BlackwellPublishing), and articles in The AmericanEthnologist, The Annual Review of Sociology, TheBritish Journal for the History of Science, Historyof Anthropology, The Journal of the History of theBehavioral Sciences, Sociological Quarterly, andTheory and Society.is a Research Fellow in the History of China in theResearch School of Pacific and Asian Studies at

BENJAMIN PENNY

The Australian National University. He is the editorof Religion and Biography in China and Tibet(London: Curzon Press, 2002) and Daoism inHistory: Essays in Honour of Liu Ts’un-yan (London:Routledge, 2006). He is currently writing amonograph on the Falun Gong as well as

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undertaking projects on the cult of the South SeaGod in southern China and the history of Sinology.is an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist at St.Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick,

PETER TONER

Canada. He has conducted almost two years ofresearch on Yolngu music, principally in Gapuwiyak,N.T., on issues relating to social identity, culturalchange, and historical aspects of music research.His current research interests also include folkmusic and Irish cultural identity in Atlantic Canada.

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Humanities Research Vol XIV. No. 1. 2007

HISTORICIZING “CROSS-CULTURAL”

BENJAMIN PENNY

In 2000, a few years into the 10-year his-tory of the ANU’s Centre for Cross-Cultur-al Research, a new field of research for theCentre was announced: “ConceptualisingCross-Cultural Research”, which in lateryears became “Interrogating Concepts ofthe Cross-Cultural”.1 The 2007 iterationof the website summarizes it in this way:

By "cross-cultural research" wemean scholarship that is orientedtowards tracing patterns of trans-action and translation betweencultures. Methodologically, suchscholarship transcends convention-al national and area studies framesof reference by recognising theincreasing porousness of culturalboundaries. This program exam-ines both the disciplinary and in-terdisciplinary ramifications of theterm "cross-cultural" in Humanit-ies research. It does so by explor-ing the theoretical links betweenthe notion of the "cross cultural"as it has emerged in the disciplin-ary fields of anthropology, history,literary studies and linguistics, andcontemporary conceptualisationsof "cultural difference" in thetransdisciplinary fields of postco-lonial, migration and globalisationstudies.2

Although this description locates the par-ticular interest of “cross-cultural research”

in recent changes in the state of the worldand of academic disciplines, it is clear that“transaction and translation between cul-tures” has been going on for as long asthere have been people, and the “tracingof patterns” in this process is by no meansonly a recent phenomenon. The essays inthis volume are concerned with examininghow such patterns were traced before themiddle of the twentieth century, when theterm “cross-cultural” was coined. Theytherefore involve studies both of particularencounters between people of differentcultures and investigation of the disciplin-ary categories in which those studies tookplace.

The literature of encounter betweenpeople from different cultural back-grounds is, of course, vast and the essayshere only address a few examples of therich legacy of work left by generations ofexplorers, traders, missionaries and consu-lar officials, as well as people who thoughtof themselves as scholars. Some smallamount of this work is well known butmore of it is much less read than it shouldbe and, in general, deserves rediscoveryand reassessment. The people who conduc-ted this research worked within theparadigms of their owns eras: the waysthey thought through what they saw andheard may sound unfamiliar, if not simplyodd, to a contemporary ear, but such per-plexity is all to the good, as it makes usponder the earlier forms — indeed, often

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the foundations — of the disciplines thatcurrently hold sway.

However, just as the essays in thisvolume seek to historicize “cross-culturalresearch”, it is also possible, and illumin-ating, to historicize the word “cross-cultur-al” itself, and the major part of this essaywill be concerned with the first significantacademic project to use the term “cross-cultural” in its title. It is important to dothis to expose the difference in concep-tions between its use today and what itmeant at the time of its coining, in orderto lay bare the foundations of the field.

The first citation the Oxford EnglishDictionary gives for “cross-cultural” comesfrom Malinowski’s A Scientific Theory ofCulture (1941) in a chapter outlining“Concepts and Methods in Anthropology”.Having discussed “evolutionism” and“diffusionism”, and mentioning function-alism in passing, Malinowski says:

Thus there is the comparativemethod, in which the student isprimarily interested in gatheringextensive cross-cultural document-ations, such as we see in Frazer’sThe Golden Bough, or in Tylor’sPrimitive Culture, or in thevolumes of Westermarck on mar-riage and morals. In such worksthe authors are primarily inter-ested in laying bare the essentialnature of animistic belief or magic-al rite, of a phase in human cultureor a type of essential organization.Obviously, this whole approachpresupposes a really scientificdefinition of the realities com-pared. Unless we list, in our ex-haustive inventories, really com-parable phenomena, and are never

duped by surface similarities orfictitious analogies, a great deal oflabor may lead to incorrect conclu-sions.3

There are two points that I want to focuson from this passage. First, Malinowskisaw Frazer, Tylor and Westermarck — hewas probably referring to Westermarck’sThe History of Human Marriage and TheOrigin and Development of the Moral Ideas4

— as using comparison to reveal “the es-sential nature” of a particular phenomen-on, much as nineteenth-century classicalphilologists sought the underlying Indo-European language by comparison ofknown tongues. In such projects, it is of-ten the origin or source of a specific cultur-al activity that is the primary goal. Thispresumes, of course, that there is a sharedcultural substratum in humanity; indeed,it may have been argued, that substratumis made up of those essential characteristicsthat make us human. Secondly, comparis-on, for Malinowski, meant “cross-culturaldocumentations” — but it was imperativethat those comparisons be made between“really comparable phenomena” specifiedby a “really scientific definition”. He wasobviously reacting against some earlierexcesses of the comparative method here,but nonetheless we might baulk, some 65years after Malinowski’s death, at the no-tion that cultural phenomena can bedefined with such accuracy and precision,and at the tendency towards circularityin so reducing the set of items we mightcompare to only such things that we defineas being “really comparable” in the firstplace.

Even so, it is important to recognizethat at its appearance in academic writingat least, “cross-cultural” collocated most

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comfortably with the idea that insightsinto the nature of the human conditioncould best be drawn through comparingthe various forms that particular featuresof people’s lives took in different placesand, as we shall see, at different times. TheOED’s definition for “cross-cultural” indic-ates that it appeared before 1940 and, in-deed, in 1937 Yale University launched amajor project under the name of “TheCross-Cultural Survey”, later incorporatedinto the Human Relations Area Files.5 Thissurvey, headed up by George Peter Mur-dock (1897–1985), produced both theOutline of Cultural Materials, with its firstedition in 1938, and the supplementaryOutline of World Cultures, first publishedin 1954. Both works continue to be revisedand published and are now available elec-tronically. Murdock explained the genesisof the project in an article from 1940:

For a number of years, the Insti-tute of Human Relations at YaleUniversity has been conducting ageneral program of research in thesocial sciences, with particularreference to the areas common to,and marginal between, the specialsciences of sociology, anthropo-logy, psychology, and psychiatry.In 1937, as one of the specific re-search projects on the anthropolo-gical and sociological side of thisprogram, the Cross-Cultural Sur-vey was organized.

A year of previous experiencein collaborating with other socialscientists in research and discus-sion had made it clear to the an-thropologists associated with theInstitute that the rich resources ofethnography, potentially of ines-timable value to workers in adja-

cent fields, were practically inac-cessible to them. Working in thelaboratory, the clinic, or the com-munity, the psychologists, sociolo-gists, and others made frequentrequests of the cultural anthropo-logists for comparative data onvarious aspects of behavior amongprimitive peoples. Sometimes theywanted perspective, sometimessuggestions, sometimes a check ontheir own scientific formulations.In trying to assist them, the anthro-pologists found that they couldusually cite a limited number ofcases from their own knowledgeand give an impressionistic judg-ment as to the general status ofethnography on the question. Forscientists, however, this was oftennot enough. What guarantee wasthere that the remembered caseswere representative, or the impres-sions valid? What was needed wasaccess to a dependable and object-ive sample of the ethnographicevidence. Only rarely was it pos-sible to refer the seeker to an ad-equate summary of the evidence;in the great majority of instances,he could satisfy his scientific curi-osity only by resorting to the vastdescriptive literature itself andembarking on a research task ofdiscouraging magnitude.6

To overcome this problem, Murdock estab-lished the Cross-Cultural Survey, whichwas designed to be “a representativesample of the cultural materials on thevarious societies of the world…organizedfor ready accessibility on any subject”.7

This was an encyclopaedic project; onethat sought an Olympian view of all hu-

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Historicizing “Cross-Cultural”

manity, a kind of grand ethnographicpanopticon with each discrete unit of cul-ture defined and arranged for easy compar-ison. The foreword to the first edition ofthe Outline of Cultural Materials states thatit was “designed primarily for the organiz-ation of the available information on alarge and representative sample of knowncultures with the object of testing cross-cultural generalizations, revealing deficien-cies in the descriptive literature, and dir-ecting corrective fieldwork”.8 By thethird edition, the goal was significantlymore ambitious: the “large and represent-ative sample of known cultures” had be-come, by 1950, “a statistically representat-ive sample of all known cultures, primit-ive, historical, and contemporary”.9 Thus,there were two processes necessary forthis project to be fulfilled. First, materialsneeded to be gathered; secondly, theyneeded to be classified. Murdock ex-plained the progress in collection in 1940in this way:

Since the publication of themanual, in 1938, the staff of theCross-Cultural Survey has beenengaged in the actual assemblingof materials. To date, the descript-ive data on nearly a hundred cul-tures have been abstracted, classi-fied, and filed. It is hoped ulti-mately to assemble and organizeall the available cultural informa-tion on several hundred peoples,who will be adequately distributedwith regard to geography andfairly representative of all majortypes and levels of culture. Al-though primitive cultures willpreponderate numerically, becausethey reveal the widest range ofhuman behavioral variations, there

will be a fair representation of thehistorical civilizations of the past,of modern folk cultures, and of thecommunities studied by contem-porary sociologists.10

The single-minded collection of data wasnot something that Murdock simply deleg-ated to his staff. An obituary by JohnW.M. Whiting, one of his former students,in the American Anthropologist recalledthat,

When I was a graduate student atYale in the 1930s, Pete [as he wasknown to friends and family]would spend nearly every week-day night from 8.00 p.m. to 5.00a.m. in the Yale library examiningevery possible source of ethno-graphic information, identifyingthe group described and listing allthe references. As a consequencehe was able to publish a listing ofall known cultures of the world —The Outlines of World Cultures.This served as an approximationof the universe of known peoplesof the world, which was necessaryif the aim of the files was to pro-duce a representative sample ofthis universe.11

The completeness of Murdock’s files isindicated by his description of the meth-ods of collection:

For each of the cultures analyzed,the entire literature is covered, in-cluding manuscript materials whenavailable. In some instances, morethan a hundred books and articleshave been combed for a singletribe or historical period. All ma-terial in foreign languages has

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been translated into English. Theinformation, if of any conceivablecultural relevance, is transcribedin full — in verbatim quotationsor exact translations. The objecthas been to record the data socompletely that, save in rare in-stances, it will be entirely unneces-sary for a researcher using the filesto consult the original sources.12

Classification of the data was according totwo broad criteria. The first was geograph-ical: the world was divided into continentsor their equivalent, then countries or largeportions of countries, then specific groups.Thus, Australia is found under Oceania,with the sub-classifications: “Australia [ingeneral], Historical Australia, Norfolk Is-land, Prehistoric Australia, AustralianAborigines [in general], Andedja, Arabana,Aranda, Barkindji, Dieri, Kabikabi, Kamil-aroi, Karadjeri, Kariera, Kawadji, Kurnai,Murngin, Narrinyeri, Tasmanians, Tiwi,Ualarai, Wikmunkan, Wogait, Worimi,Yiryoront, Yungar”.13 The second cri-terion was according to content and ismuch more complex. In a system reminis-cent of Roget’s Thesaurus, the entirety ofhuman activity is broken down into 79sections and 619 subsections. The editorsof Outline of Cultural Materials write:

The reader must expect to findclassified under the same headingsuch superficially divergent phe-nomena as the Indian medicineman and the modern psychoana-lyst under Category 756 (Psycho-therapists), and the primitivequarrying of flint and the contem-porary activities of the AnacondaCopper Company under Category316 (Mining and Quarrying). Sim-

ilarly, there can be no special cat-egory like “Christianity,” pertain-ing to only a limited number ofcultures, but only general categor-ies like 779 (Theological Sys-tems).14

The editors remark that, “any element ofculture may have as many as seven majorfacets any one of which may be used asthe primary basis of classification”, andproceed to list these facets as being:

1. a “patterned activity” (travel, conver-sation, crime),

2. only occurring under certain circum-stances (rest days and holidays, dis-asters, menstruation),

3. being associated with a particularsubject (division of labour by sex,sibs, priesthood),

4. being commonly directed towardssome object (poultry raising, kin rela-tionships, child care),

5. being accomplished by some externalmeans (telephone and telegraph,weapons, mutual aid, agency),

6. being normally performed with apurpose or goal (mnemonic device,sorcery, techniques of inculcation),

7. having a concrete result (shipbuild-ing, sanctions).15

Systems of classification are, of course,challenging to develop but this one doesseem both arbitrary and, in the characterof those examples thrust together in paren-theses, to approach self-parody.16 How-ever, even if we discount the problemsassociated with developing a taxonomy,the subsequent process of classification ofany given cultural phenomenon is itselfoften complex, difficult and as arbitraryas the classificatory categories them-selves.17

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However, for the present purposes thedetails of the classification scheme thatMurdock and his colleagues developed areless important than the fact that he didattempt to encompass “the universe ofknown peoples of the world” and to pro-duce “a representative sample” of themfor the purposes of making comparisons.This striving towards a rigorously definedtaxonomy of the entirety of human exper-ience was by no means a new goal. Mur-dock and his colleagues were clear meth-odological descendents of Edward Tylor,whose “On a Method of Investigating theDevelopment of Institutions; Applied toLaws of Marriage and Descent” providedthe model for this variety of research. AsGeorge Stocking remarked, in relation toHerbert Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology,“Spencer may thus be regarded as the ulti-mate source of the later Human RelationsArea Files; Tylor, of the systematic compar-ative cross-cultural study of the data theycontain.”18 The purpose of comparisonunderlying the Cross-Cultural Survey wasto find systematic correlations betweencultural variables, as Tylor had done.Thus, to take one example, for Guy E.Swanson to answer the question “Fromwhat experiences do the ideas of the super-natural and its myriad forms arise?”, heanalyzed data from a “randomly” selectedset of 50 societies from Murdock’s list,correlating various aspects of social organ-ization with particular varieties of reli-gious belief: monotheism, polytheism, an-cestral spirit belief, reincarnation, the im-manence of the soul, witchcraft and theinteraction of the supernatural and moral-ity.19 His conclusions — in the case ofmonotheism — are indicative of the styleof the whole:

1. Monotheism is positively related tothe presence of a hierarchy of threeor more sovereign groups in a soci-ety.

2. There is no relationship between thenumber of sovereign groups in sucha hierarchy, and the likelihood thatthe monotheistic deity will be seenas active in earthly affairs includingthe support of human moral relation-ships. High gods do tend to be activein societies having two or more sover-eign communal groups.

3. A variety of other indices of socialcomplexity are not related to thepresence of monotheistic beliefs in asociety.

4. The data seem to run counter to theexpectation of certain anthropologiststhat a highly developed monotheismwould be likely to appear in thesimplest and most isolated societies.20

During the late 1930s and 1940s othersused “cross-cultural” in this same sense,notably Margaret Mead,21 and after theSecond World War its use spread widelyin Anthropology, Psychology, Educationand related fields. At some point in themid-1950s another sense of “cross-cultur-al” started to appear. Rather than standingfor a type of work that surveyed a rangeof cultures for examples of a particularphenomenon, it focused on differencesbetween the perceptions two particularpeoples held of each other, or the percep-tions two particular peoples had of somespecific event, or set of circumstances, orobject. Thus, for example, the two theses“Military Government and the GermanPress: an Experiment in Cross-CulturalInstitutional Change” and “The JapaneseStudent’s View of America: a Study inCross-Cultural Perception” were both ac-

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cepted in 1954, the former from ColumbiaUniversity and the latter from Ohio StateUniversity.22

This new meaning of “cross-cultural”arguably marks the origin of its use in thecontext of the encounter between twopeoples of different cultures. In the post-war world that saw the start of long-termoccupations of defeated countries by theirvictors — and the continuing presence oftheir military bases — the increasingpresence of foreign students and staff inthe universities of the first world, theformation of initiatives such as the PeaceCorps and the burgeoning of disciplineslike Social Psychology, discussions of howpeople of different cultures understoodeach other gained a new relevance. Onemanifestation of this interest was the de-velopment of the field of “cross-culturaltraining” in the late 1960s and early 1970s,where people about to be posted to anoth-er country were sensitized to the differentways their new hosts perceived the worldand behaved.

As the decades progressed, there weretwo fields in which the term “cross-cultur-al” became preponderant in book titles:one represented the stream concerned withcross-cultural comparison and the otherwas represented by applied studies of en-counter situations. The first was found inmedical research where particular diseasesor treatments or syndromes were studied,often statistically, in different parts of theworld for the purposes of comparison; thesecond is apparent in the field of “cross-cultural communication”. By 1997, theyear the ANU’s Centre for Cross-CulturalResearch was founded, the books with“cross-cultural” in their titles in the Lib-rary of Congress catalogue still largely

comprised works with a strong comparat-ive and statistical bias, notably fourvolumes of Philip M. Parker’s Cross-Cul-tural Statistical Encyclopedia of the World,or studies of cross-cultural communication— for instance, Cross-Cultural and Interdis-ciplinary Aspects of Teaching Languages forProfessional Communication and Cross-Cultural Communication and Aging in theUnited States.23 It is interesting, however,that lurking amongst these titles, one bookundoubtedly hailing from the humanitiesappears: Claudio Gorlier and Isabella MariaZoppi’s edited volume Cross-CulturalVoices: Investigations into the Post-Colonial.Despite its title, the essays in this bookactually differ little from the traditionalstudy of “Commonwealth Literatures”;indeed, one of its editors disclaims anydesire to enter “into the heart of the vitaland multi-faceted debate concerning a‘post-colonial discourse’”.24 However, themere juxtaposition of “cross-cultural” and“post-colonial” marks a shift to anothervariety of “cross-cultural research” — thekind the Centre for Cross-Cultural Re-search pursued over the decade of its life-time. One of its five “key programs” was,in fact, “Postcolonialism and CulturalHistory”.25 Another, as I noted at the be-ginning of this essay, was “InterrogatingConcepts of the Cross-Cultural”, the rubricunder which the original series of seminarson “Historicizing Cross-Cultural Research”was given that led to this volume of es-says.

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ENDNOTES

1 I would like to thank Henrika Kuklick for herhelpful suggestions in the preparation of this essay.2 http://www.anu.edu.au/culture/research/interrog-ating.php (accessed 7.4.07)3 Malinowski, B., A Scientific Theory of Culture andOther Essays (Chapel Hill: The University of NorthCarolina Press, 1944), p.18.4 Westermarck, E.A., The History of Human Marriage(London: Macmillan, 1891) and subsequent editions;The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (Lon-don: Macmillan, 1906–08) and second edition.5 In 1971, when he was at the University of Pitts-burgh, George Murdock and others founded the So-ciety for Cross-Cultural Research, under whose aegisthe journal Cross-Cultural Research is published. Thewebsite of the society says: “Whereas early memberswere heavily involved in hologeistic research, oftenin conjunction with the Human Relations Area Files(HRAF), the methodological perspectives of themembership have broadened over the years to in-clude a wide range of cross-cultural interests andapproaches” (http://www.sccr.org/description.html,accessed 13.4.07). Hologeistic — “whole world” —research is usefully discussed in Richard W.Thompson and Roy E. Roper, “Methods in SocialAnthropology: New Directions and Old Problems”,American Behavioral Scientist 23, 6 (July/August,1980), 905–24, pp.907–11.6 Murdock, G.P., “The Cross-Cultural Survey”,American Sociological Review 5, 3 (June 1940),361–70, p.361.7 Murdock, “The Cross-Cultural Survey”, p.362.8 Murdock, G.P., et.al., Outline of Cultural Materials(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945), p.v, re-printing the foreword to the first edition of 1938.9 Murdock, G.P., et.al., Outline of Cultural Materials,3rd revised ed.(New Haven: Human Relations AreaFiles, Inc., 1950), p.xii.10 Murdock, “The Cross-Cultural Survey,” pp.362–3.11 Whiting, John W.M., “George Peter Murdock(1897–1985)”, American Anthropologist 88, 3(September, 1986), 682–6, pp. 684–5; my emphasis.12 Murdock, “The Cross-Cultural Survey,” p.363.13 Murdock, G.M., Outline of World Cultures, 3rdrevised ed. (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files,Inc., 1963), pp.125–7.14 Murdock, Cultural Materials, p.xviii.15 See, Murdock, Cultural Materials, pp.xix–xx.

16 And, indeed, to echo Borges’s taxomony of anim-als from the “Celestial Emporium of BenevolentKnowledge” (famously cited by Michel Foucault inthe preface to The Order of Things): “(a) those thatbelong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) thosethat are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f)fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are in-cluded in this classification, (i) those that tremble asif they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) thosedrawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) others,(m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n)those that resemble flies from a distance.” (J.L.Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”,in Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, trans., Ruth L.C.Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964),p.103.)17 For a critique on these grounds, see Köbben, A.J.,“New Ways of Presenting an Old Idea: The StatisticalMethod in Social Anthropology”, in Frank W. Moore(ed.), Readings in Cross-Cultural Methodology (NewHaven: HRAF Press, 1966), 166–92.18 Stocking, G.W. Jr., Victorian Anthropology (NewYork: The Free Press, 1987), p.316.19 Swanson, G.E., The Birth of the Gods: The Originof Primitive Beliefs (Ann Arbor: The University ofMichigan Press, 1966, first ed. 1961), p.1. For detailedanalysis of four other studies from this school —Murdock’s own Social Structure (New York: Macmil-lan, 1949), D. Horton’s “The Functions of Alcohol inPrimitive Societies”, Quarterly Journal of Studies inAlcohol, 4 (1943), C.S. Ford’s A Comparative Study ofHuman Reproduction (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1945) and L.W. Simmons’s The Role of the Agedin Primitive Society (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1945) — see Köbben, “New Ways of Presentingan Old Idea”, pp.180–91.20 Swanson, The Birth of the Gods, p.81. Swanson’s“certain anthropologists” are Father Wilhelm Schmidtand his followers: the work Swanson refers to inparticular is Schmidt’s The Origin and Growth of Re-ligion, Facts and Theories, translated by H.J. Rose(London: Methuen and Co., 1935).21 Thus, for instance, “The importance of cross-cul-tural comparisons in helping to clarify, sharpen,limit, and enlarge the instrumental concepts whichare being used in the analysis of our own society”,in Mead, M., “Public Opinion Mechanisms amongPrimitive Peoples”, The Public Opinion Quarterly, 1,3 (July 1937): 5–16, p.5.22 Hurwitz, H.J., Military Government and theGerman Press: an Experiment in Cross-Cultural Insti-tutional Change, Masters Thesis, Columbia Univer-sity, 1954; H. A. Gould, The Japanese Student’s Viewof America: a Study in Cross-Cultural Perception,Masters Thesis, Ohio State University, 1954.

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23 Parker, Philip, M., Cross-Cultural Statistical En-cyclopedia of the World (vol.1, Religious Cultures,vol.2, Linguistic Cultures, vol.3, Ethnic Cultures,vol.4, National Cultures) (Westport: GreenwoodPress,1997), Daniela Breveníková et al. (eds.), Cross-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Aspects of TeachingLanguages for Professional Communication (Bratislava:Ústav jazykov Ekonomickej univerzity v Bratislave,1997), Hana S. Noor Al-Deen (ed.), Cross-CulturalCommunication and Aging in the United States (Mah-wah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1997).24 Gorlier, Claudio and Isabella Maria Zoppi (eds.),Cross-Cultural Voices: Investigations into the Post-Colonial (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), p.13.25 http://www.anu.edu.au/culture/research.php(accessed 7.4.07)

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THE LURE OF TEXTS AND THE DISCIPLINEOF PRAXIS

Cross-Cultural History in a Post-Empirical World

BRONWEN DOUGLAS

PROLOGUE: NARRATIVE ANDTEXTS

The main aim of this paper is to tell storiesabout interactions between Europeanvoyagers and Aboriginal people in NewHolland (mainland Australia) and VanDiemen's Land (Tasmania) at the end ofthe eighteenth century. I start, however,with the terms in the title. First, “texts”and “discipline of praxis”.1 The disciplineof praxis is, of course, history, which byprofessional convention is empirical andobjectivist. In the 1940s, R.G. Collingwoodoutraged this orthodoxy with his “ideal-ist” proposition that history is inseparablefrom the historian and “the here-and-now”and that “the past” is a creation of “thehistorical imagination”.2 Since the furtherouting of history as thoroughly text-bound by Roland Barthes, Hayden Whiteand other textual theorists,3 historianswith any claim to anti-positivism havebeen teased by the challenge of how tojuggle the tension between narrative andtexts: between their core brief to tell inter-esting stories about the past and the needto incorporate at least some textual analys-is — because the past is only accessiblethrough texts of one sort or another.4

Textual analysis requires an historicallycontextualized grasp of the ideologies,discourses, language, protocols and exper-iences which informed authors’ percep-tions and thinking, but it can clot a narrat-ive and make it less readable.

Second, “post-empirical world”. Thediscovery of the past by anthropologistsand non-empirical “new historicists” in awide range of “studies” formats — liter-ary, cultural, gender, media, colonial,postcolonial, indigenous, and so forth5 —has at once made history fashionable andmarginalized conventional practitionersof the discipline as, at best, utilitariansuppliers of historical background and, atworst, boring empiricists devoid of flairor theory. Historians in turn often lamentthe lack of detailed, particularistic archivalresearch by such interlopers and typecastthem as dangerous postmodernists, ob-sessed with texts at the expense of messyrealities and often just plain wrong.

So much for insulting stereotypes. Asan historian of cross-cultural encountersin Oceania (including Australia) in theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ihave a foot in both camps. I derive muchof my theoretical and methodological mo-mentum from anthropology, feminism,

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literary studies and Subaltern Studies:notably, the concept of culture itself; aconcern for the politics of language, rep-resentation and narrative construction;and techniques of textual critique. Yetthose techniques complement rather thansupplant the principles for the collectionand rigorous comparative scrutiny ofdocuments which I learned as an appren-tice historian. I am committed to writingabout particular past human interactionsand the gendered ambiguities of agencyin actual encounters.6 That pragmaticorientation privileges persons and actionsover the teleology of imagined structuresand outcomes but its inductive logic isanalogous to the ethnographic inductivismof anthropologists — typically, our gener-alizations depend on particularities, eitherpast events or observed human behaviour.Indeed, in cross-cultural research, the rel-ative emphasis on inductive or deductivereasoning constitutes a major fault line. Itdifferentiates the empirical disciplines ofhistory and anthropology from more tex-tualist or formalist approaches in culturalstudies, literary critique and art historywhich focus primarily on the objectifiedrepresentation of indigenous people incolonial texts, images and collections —on signifiers rather than referents, the in-digenous settings and the personal interac-tions represented which are of special in-terest to historians.

Furthermore, my theoretical perspect-ive proposes an intimate liaison betweenindigenous actions or contexts and theirrepresentation by foreign observers —between referents and signifiers. Suchrepresentations should be read not merelyas reflexes of dominant metropolitan dis-courses and conventions but also as per-sonal productions generated in the stress

and ambiguity of actual encounters. Bythis reasoning, the behaviour, appearanceor lifestyle of particular indigenous peopleattracted, intimidated or repelled observ-ers, affected their perceptions, challengedor confirmed their predispositions, andleft distorted countersigns in what theywrote and drew. Without empiricalgrounding, history tends to be little morethan a priori background noise. Yetweaving an imaginative, accessible, butfaithful narrative out of the fragmentarygleanings of archives and memories is hardwork, especially if you care about indigen-ous agency and therefore also need ethno-graphic expertise and sensitivity — whichis also useful in trying to decipher pastEuropeans. I, too, find it easier to stick totexts, with their built-in limits to enquiry,but writing stories about actual pasts re-mains a key goal.

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION

The final problematic term in the title is“cross-cultural”, which I overuse becauseit is a handy shorthand for encounters,interactions and mutual (mis)conceptionsbetween indigenous people and foreigners.Yet “cultural” is among the least transpar-ent of words and has at least three strikesagainst it in this context. First, it is ab-stract: “culture” is a concept, not a thing;and cultures don't meet or encounter eachother, people do. To reify such interactionsas cross-cultural assumes that dramaticdifferences in language, thinking, historyand way of life between two seeminglyhomogeneous communities are what mat-ters when their members come together.This distanced binary perspective has itspoints, especially politically, but in prin-ciple it essentializes each side as permanent

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and monolithic and in practice privilegesélite male perspectives, taken as opposed.By contrast, a close look at particular pastsituations may also reveal multiple alli-ances between local inhabitants and for-eigners whose respective unstable group-ings intersected ambiguously and frac-tured internally along lines of gender, age,vocation, place, and rank, class or status.I still use “culture” strategically, butpluralized to imply flux and diversityrather than fixity or uniformity.7

Second, cultural is ethnocentric: in thesocial sciences and increasingly in popularusage, culture has the naturalized anthro-pological connotation of a bounded, col-lective pattern of belief, thought and beha-viour. Yet, so far as we can tell, Oceanianpeople did not usually objectify their totalway of life in this fashion, even in con-frontation with Europeans, though indi-genous people these days often appropri-ate the term in oppositional political rhet-oric.

The third problem with cultural isanachronism: in English, culture only ac-quired its naturalized modern anthropolo-gical meaning (Edward Burnett Tylor’s“complex whole”8 ) from the mid-to-latenineteenth century. This usage emergedout of an ambiguous raft of earlier senses,literal and metaphoric, substantive andabstract, as traced in Raymond Williams’soutline of the convoluted history of theword and its cognate term “civilization”.9

Already multivocal at the end of theeighteenth century, culture denoted theprocess of “cultivation”, both literally inanimal or crop husbandry and metaphor-ically in development of the human intel-lect: “The mind is strengthened by thecultivation of the arts and sciences”, pro-

nounced the English translator of LaPérouse’s narrative in 1798.10 However,a detailed search turned up few uses ofculture or its derivatives by Oceanic voy-agers before the 1830s and those alwaysin the primary physical sense of hus-bandry. It is entirely absent from the En-deavour journals of the Englishmen JamesCook (1728–79) and Joseph Banks(1743–1820) and from the Investigator andother journals by Matthew Flinders(1774–1814).11 In the published narrativeof the Endeavour voyage, though, Cook’seditor John Hawkesworth (1715?–73) re-placed Cook’s wording “rais'd with verylittle labour”, said of the “produce” ofTahiti, with the phrase “with so little cul-ture”. Culture also occurs in passing in thepublished narratives of the French voy-agers Jean-François de Galaup de LaPérouse (1741–88) and Antoine-Raymond-Joseph de Bruni d'Entrecasteaux(1737–93), with the same incorrect anddemeaning implication that the people inquestion — the Samoans and the Kanakof New Caledonia, respectively — had noor little familiarity with “the art of cul-ture”.12

Embedded in these casual assertionsthat Pacific Islanders ignored agricultureis a tacit shift from purportedly empiricalfact to loaded judgement. This verbalslippage betokens a universalist but pro-foundly ethnocentric developmentalismwhich was given detailed expression withrespect to Oceania by Johann ReinholdForster (1729–98), the German naturalistwho sailed on Cook’s second voyage of1772–75 and in 1778 published a treatiseon natural philosophy. For Forster, the“cultivation” — or its synonym “culture”— of crops and animals was a prerequisitefor “progress” in “civilization”:

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The Lure of Texts and the Discipline of Praxis

…mankind, in a pastoral state,could never attain to that degreeof improvement and happiness, towhich agriculture, and the cultiv-ation of vegetables, will easily andsoon lead them. I do not, how-ever,…insist that mankind shouldentirely neglect the culture, anddomestication of animals;…it is thejoint care of animals and agricul-ture, which leads mankind to thehighest degree of content, andpaves the way to perfect happi-ness.13

The presumption of a critical causal nexusbetween agriculture and civilization wasa standard trope in developmentalist orsocial evolutionary theories from the En-lightenment onwards.14 Forster’s versiondrew on the idea of a common stadial orgraded development of civil society fromsavagery to civilization proposed by Scot-tish philosophers such as Henry Home,Lord Kames (1696–1782), whose treatiseon the “progress towards maturity ofknowledge and civilization…in differentnations” included an equally loaded alleg-ation about “Negroes”: “[T]hey live uponfruits and roots, which grow without cul-ture.”15

By the late-eighteenth century, the ab-stract noun “civilization” denoted boththe Enlightenment idea of a general secularprocess of human development from aprimordial state of savagery and the ulti-mate outcome of that trajectory: a condi-tion of refinement or social order, of being“cultivated” or “civilized” — “civil soci-ety” in English — which was supposedlyrealized in (European) modernity and wasset in binary opposition to “savagery” or“barbarism”. In German, Zivilisation and

Kultur were synonymous whereas by theearly-nineteenth century the English termculture was increasingly reserved for intel-lectual, spiritual and aesthetic advance, inopposition to the perceived materialism ofcivilization. However, the anthropologicalapplication of culture to mean a particularway of life came via the German conflationof civilization and culture as a generalhuman process: indeed, Tylor's celebrateddefinition referred to “culture or civiliza-tion, taken in its wide ethnographicsense”.16

Men of their time, European travellersundoubtedly regarded Oceanian people,as Roy Porter put it, “through eyes alreadytrained in seeing stereotypes about thesavage and the civilised”.17 Yet the term“civilization” was not often used by Brit-ish voyagers before 1830,18 though fromtime to time they mentioned “civil” beha-viour or “civility”, often connoting reliefthat nothing nasty had happened. ThusSydney Parkinson (1745?–71), Banks’sartist, commented that some Maori men“behaved very civil to us” in New Zealand(Aotearoa) in 1769.19 Banks, the well-brednaturalist, often used the word “civil” andshowed his concern for refinement ofmanners and social rank in frequent refer-ences to the exchange of “civilities”, usu-ally with “the Better sort of people”.20

On the other hand, a familiar ambivalenceabout the civilized state — “weEuropeans” — was implicit in Banks’swell-known primitivist description of theinhabitants of eastern New Holland in1770 as “these I had almost said happypeople, content with little nay almostnothing, Far enough removd from theanxieties attending upon riches, or eventhe possession of what we Europeans callcommon necessaries”.21 Cook, the farm

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labourer’s son, endorsed the sentiment butadded feelingly: “They live in a Tranquil-lity which is not disturb'd by the Inequal-ity of Condition”, a reminder of the entan-glement of the ideas of civility and class.In the journal of his second voyage, Cookexplicitly referred to “our Shame [as] civ-ilized Christians” in venting an elegiacoutburst against the negative impact onthe Maori, especially on their sexual mor-ality, of “the commerce they had withEuropeans”.22

In contrast to the British, French voy-agers made far greater use of civilisation,in both its abstract senses.23 They expli-citly located particular Oceanian groupsalong a universal trajectory bridging theopposed poles of savagery and civilization— but always towards the savage end.However, the moral implications of thatopposition were fiercely contested, ran-ging between triumphalist acclaim forcivilization as unequivocal progress andnostalgic disgust for aspects seen as degen-erate and contrary to nature. Experienceof Oceanian people provided grist to bothrumour mills; indeed, both extremes wereenunciated at different stages in the courseof a single narrative, that of Bruni d'En-trecasteaux's voyage in search of LaPérouse in 1791–93.

I have argued elsewhere that the rhet-orical somersaults in d'Entrecasteaux'sevaluations of particular indigenouspeople were at least in part a product oftheir perceived behaviour towards theFrench — that the content and wordingof his narrative were infused with indigen-ous countersigns, that referents could im-pinge on signifiers.24 Thus, in Van Die-men’s Land, the inhabitants’ “peaceabledispositions” showed him that “these men

so close to nature…are good and trusting”and provided “the most perfect image ofthe first state of society, when men are notyet troubled by the passions or corruptedby the vices which civilization sometimesbrings in its wake”. These infantilizedpeople were at once “less advanced incivilization” than the Maori of New Zeal-and (Aotearoa) but also less “fierce”.25 Incontrast, though Tongans were not “natur-ally ferocious”, the seemingly arbitrarybrutality of chiefs towards ordinary Is-landers horrified d'Entrecasteaux andproduced the global assertions that “senti-ments of humanity are unknown to them”and they “attach no value to humanlife”.26 For their part, the Kanak of NewCaledonia so appalled him with a single“act of ferocity” — cannibalism — thathe denied them “the least degree of civiliz-ation” and deemed the Tongans “muchmore advanced”.27 Yet, in Tonga, advancewas an equivocal blessing which had pro-duced a “feudal”-style government with“weak”, “effeminate” chiefs whose “volup-tuous” lifestyle and arbitrary “abuses” ledto a “state of anarchy” and forced the or-dinary people into dissimulation, theft and“acts of cruelty”.28 Finally, his colleagues’accounts of vivid insults exchangedbetween two warring parties in theLouisiade Archipelago (Papua NewGuinea) saw d'Entrecasteaux damn entiregroups as “cannibals” and deplore “theexcesses in which the human species canindulge when customs are not moderatedand softened by civilization”. Rhetorically,this was a long way from the naturalcharms of the “simple and good” inhabit-ants of Van Diemen’s Land.29

These fluid, late-eighteenth-centuryrepresentations of particular Oceanianpeople were moulded by cumulative exper-

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iences of indigenous reception of foreign-ers — local actions and demeanour —which the author tried to square with hisgeneral values, preconceptions and de-sires, and with place-specific precedentsderived from reading voyage literature.The moral universalism of d'En-trecasteaux's developmentalist discourseremained intact across the spectrum of hisrepresentations but the specific moralvalence of his words shifted dramaticallyin response to particular indigenous ac-tions. However, his vocabulary did notyet signify the racialization of observedhuman differences and is inappropriatelyread in terms of the now familiar namedracial phenotypes into which the peopleof the region were shortly to be classified.In principle at least, eighteenth-centuryhumanism, both neoclassical and Christian,allowed the potential for progress or salva-tion to all human beings while construingboth in thoroughly ethnocentric ways.

VOYAGERS AND TEXTS

I now turn to narrative history, to storiesabout encounters between particular Ab-original people and outsiders during threevoyages. My main focus is the youngEnglishman Matthew Flinders, thensecond lieutenant on HMS Reliance. In sixexpeditions between 1795 and 1799, somein open boats, Flinders and his friendGeorge Bass (1771–1803?), the ship’s sur-geon, between them explored half the eastcoast of New Holland, from Hervey Bay(Queensland) to Westernport (Victoria),plus Van Diemen’s Land.30 I discussepisodes during their joint visit to VanDiemen’s Land in December 1798 andduring Flinders’s fifteen-day stay atMoreton Bay (Queensland) in July 1799

accompanied by Bungaree, a Broken Bayman who became the key protagonist inwhat ensued.

The texts used are undoubtedly bothethnocentric and élitist. They comprisecontemporary journals and later, morepolished narratives: manuscript copies,seemingly abridged, of Flinders’s journalsof his two voyages;31 accounts of the samevoyages “taken from” the journals of Bassand Flinders and published in volume twoof An Account of the English Colony in NewSouth Wales by the Marine lieutenant-colonel David Collins, who had beenjudge-advocate and colonial secretary atPort Jackson and would be the founderand lieutenant-governor of Hobart Town;Flinders's brief coastal Observations pub-lished in 1801 to accompany the charts ofhis early surveys; and, finally, the longhistorical introduction to his Voyage toTerra Australis, on “Prior Discoveries”.32

The third voyage, mentioned onlybriefly for comparative purposes, is thatof the Frenchman Nicolas Baudin(1754–1803), who explored western andsouthern New Holland on the Géographeand the Naturaliste in 1801–03, in directcompetition with Flinders, who was thensurveying the New Holland coast in HMSInvestigator. I refer to an episode duringthe French visit to southeastern Van Die-men’s Land in early 1802, drawing onBaudin’s shipboard journal (1974), a con-temporary official report by Baudin (1978),and the later published narrative of thevoyage by the young naturalist FrançoisPéron (1775–1810).33

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FIRST HISTORY: VAN DIEMEN’SLAND, DECEMBER 1798

Late in 1798, Flinders and Bass in the 25-ton colonial sloop Norfolk, with a volun-teer crew of eight, sailed through BassStrait and around Van Diemen’s Land,thereby proving it to be an island. Theysaw signs of human presence at severalpoints but interacted with only one localinhabitant. At Port Dalrymple — theTamar estuary — they saw three or fourpeople “at a great distance”, who accord-ing to Flinders walked away, “most prob-ably at our approach”, whereas Bass saidthat they “ran off into the woods” andmade the incident emblematic of the “ex-treme shyness” of the inhabitants which“prevented any communication”.34 Butin the upper Derwent they came face toface with two women and a man. The wo-men “scampered off” (said Bass) “scream-ing” (said Flinders) but the man showedno “signs of fear or distrust” and accepteda dead swan “with rapture”. Apparently“ignorant of muskets”, his only interestwas the swan and the Englishmen’s redneckerchiefs. He did not know theirsmattering of Port Jackson and Tahitianwords but seemed to understand theirsigns and agreed to show them his habita-tion. However, his “devious route andfrequent stoppages” convinced them thathe sought only “to amuse [himself] andtire them out” — Bass read caution in thisstrategy and “jealousy” about “his wo-men” — but they parted “in great friend-ship”.35

Exegesis: This fleeting individualcontact — so typical of the serendipitous,almost spectral quality of early voyagers’reports of meetings with the elusive andenigmatic inhabitants of Van Diemen’s

Land — was loaded with considerable in-terpretive weight by Bass and Flinders, asindeed it is by this historian given the rel-atively few such meetings reported. In aclassic slippage, they made a single humanspecimen stand for an entire group: theman’s “frank and open deportment” pro-duced a “favourable opinion of the dispos-ition” of the inhabitants of Van Diemen’sLand.36 Their reportage is a prime sampleof a rhetorical trajectory I have previouslyidentified in voyage texts:37 from reliefat approved conduct by indigenous peopleto positive depictions of their essentialcharacter or appearance and explicit dis-tancing from a standard compendium ofsupposedly Negro traits. Such representa-tions are oblique reflexes of actual indigen-ous behaviour, processed by Europeantravellers in the light of the profound in-security of sailing in unfamiliar waters andtheir usual distaste for Negrophysiognomy. Consider these sequencesin Flinders’s two extant reports of themeeting at the Derwent. In 1801: the man“seemed to be devoid of fear”; “his coun-tenance was more expressive of benignityand intelligence, than of ferocity or stupid-ity”; “his features were less negro-likethan is usual in New South Wales”. Andin 1814: “the quickness with which hecomprehended our signs spoke in favourof his intelligence”; his hair “had not theappearance of being woolly” — code for“Negro”.38 It is difficult to say muchabout the actual encounter except that thelocal man was evidently alert, wary andsought to control and profit from themeeting on his own terms while the wo-men avoided it, possibly through fear ofthe strangers, or the man, or all three.

Flinders’s reference to New SouthWales exemplifies a persistent sub-text in

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all these accounts: a comparative — whatwould now be called ethnological —agenda which sought empirical evidenceof the relative “condition” of differentgroups, always pivoting on the authors’claim to expert knowledge of Port Jackson.Thus, the young men in a party en-countered at Twofold Bay en route to VanDiemen’s Land were “better made, andcleaner in their person than the natives ofPort Jackson usually are”. Even the invis-ible people of Port Dalrymple were de-duced to be “much inferior in some essen-tial points of convenience to…the despisedinhabitants of the continent”, a judgementbased on only three elements of materialculture: the leakiness of their habitations,their apparent lack of canoes and the“roughness” of the marks they left ontrees, suggesting a less “sharp-edged tool”than that used on the mainland. “But”,added Bass, yoking pragmatic relativismto a tacit developmentalist philosophy,“happiness…exists only by comparisonwith the stage above and the stage belowour own”.39

SECOND HISTORY: MORETONBAY, JULY 1799

Six months later, Flinders set out in theNorfolk to examine the coast north of PortJackson, without Bass but accompaniedby Bungaree,40 “whose good dispositionand manly conduct” had attractedFlinders’s “esteem” and who for the next30 years would be among the best-knownand oft-portrayed Aborigines in thecolony.41

On 16 July, at a sandy point east of themouth of Moreton Bay — Flinders’s PointSkirmish, still so named, on the southerntip of Bribie Island42 — Flinders and

Bungaree conversed “by signs” with sev-eral apparently unarmed local men.Bungaree went ashore, also unarmed, andengaged in the first of several exchanges— his yarn belt for a kangaroo fur band— by which both parties presumablysought to establish, maintain or develop arelationship. Bungaree was the key figurein these transactions. Flinders eventuallylanded, armed against “treachery” with amusket, but his own efforts at exchangefailed when he refused to give up his cab-bage-tree hat on demand. As Flinders andBungaree retreated to the boat, crowdedfrom behind by the men, one tried good-humouredly to take the hat by ruse butfailed. The situation then deteriorated.Firewood was thrown at the boat, fellshort, and was “treated as a joke” but oneman hurled a spear, which narrowlymissed. Alarmed, Flinders shot at “the of-fender” and continued to do so throughtwo misfires until he finally wounded him.Another man was reportedly shot in thearm by a seaman and the Aboriginesfled.43

Although Flinders professed satisfac-tion at “the great influence which the aweof a superior power has in savages”, hisjournal also tells another story, of ongoingapprehension and jumbled emotions: in-sult at the “impudent” and “very wantonattack”; regret that he had been provokedinto firing; hope that it would deter fur-ther attacks by “the enemy”; anxietynonetheless; and vulnerability because hehad to remain in the bay to do his surveyand repair the sloop. For five days, hecautiously avoided further contacts despiterepeated Aboriginal invitations. Hisprudence seemed justified on 18 Julywhen the Norfolk was assailed by “a partyof natives…who appeared to be standing

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up in their canoes, and pulling towardthem, with all their strength, in very reg-ular order…after the manner of the SouthSea islanders”. Then, as “about 20 of themwere counted, and seemed to be comingon with much resolution”, the decks werecleared, the men armed, and the sloop boreaway towards the attackers who had sur-prisingly come no closer. Flinders recoun-ted the denouement with wry retrospect-ive appreciation of its absurdity: “thishostile array turned out to be a fewpeaceable fishermen” standing on a sandflat and “driving fish into their nets”.44

Yet dark imaginings about savage hordeswere standard fare for sailors in a regionoffering notorious precedents in the realor assumed fates of Cook, La Pérouse andnumerous lesser figures. Flinders knewfrom personal experience as a midshipmanwith William Bligh (1754–1817) in theTorres Strait Islands in 1792, when theships were twice attacked by men in ca-noes and a seaman died, how lethally un-stable the equation between the “superior-ity of our arms” and “great differences ofnumbers” could be.45

From 21 July, Flinders's tensiongradually eased as Bungaree, “in his usualundaunted manner”, facilitated relationswith the local people, who welcomed himenthusiastically but remained apprehens-ive of the white men, their muskets and,especially, Flinders. Hardly any womenwere seen. During the last two days of thevisit, with the sloop detained by badweather near Skirmish Point, the ex-changes expanded to include theEuropeans and featured much singing anddancing, presumably an Aboriginalstrategy to pacify or control the dangerousstrangers who thought they were being“entertained”. Flinders found their dan-

cing “not ungraceful”, especially in con-trast to the “clumsy” efforts of threeScottish sailors who had earlier beenordered to dance a reel without “musick”and had not impressed the local audience.Their singing was “musical and pleasing”in contrast to Bungaree's reciprocal offer-ing, which “sounded barbarous and grat-ing” and “annoyed his auditors” — buthe was accounted “an indifferent songster,even among his own countrymen”. These“friendly interchanges” culminated in aname exchange — they called Flinders“‘Mid-ger Plindah’” and he recorded threeof theirs — which he took for an import-ant “ceremony” on the analogy of Cook'saccount of a similar practice at EndeavourRiver in 1770.46

Exegesis: In a later brief history of his15-day visit to Moreton Bay, Flinders at-tributed the eventual “friendly” relationsto “a salutary change” induced in Abori-ginal attitudes by “the effect of our fire-arms”. But the content and wording of hisown journal suggest that the most potentelement in local responses to the strangersand repeated expressions of eagerness tocommunicate with them was Bungaree.Though he “could not understand” theMoreton Bay language, the local peoplepersistently sought him out, while hismediatory skills were much valued by theEuropeans with whom he did share a lin-gua franca.47 Flinders represented him asthe key agent in three of the four exchangesituations which succeeded the initial viol-ence. On 21 July, “about six miles” fromSkirmish Point, two men signalled forthem to land but fled when Flinders ap-proached, only to return when they sawBungaree. He “made a friendly exchange”with them and went to the boat for addi-tional items, “to make the exchange

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equal”.48 There was a more elaboratetransaction four days later, with Bungareeagain the main player:

Presents were made them of yarncaps, pork, and biscuit, all ofwhich they eagerly took, andmade signs for Bong-ree to go withthem, and they would give himgirdles and fillets, to bind roundhis head and the upper parts of hisarms. So long as their visitors con-sisted only of two, the nativeswere lively, dancing and singingin concert in a pleasing manner;but the number of white menhaving imperceptibly increased toeight, they became alarmed andsuspicious.49

On 28 July, members of the crew choppeddown a tree and the noise of its fall greatly“startled” several local men. Flinders, everpragmatic, thought it “might probablyassist in giving them a higher idea of thepower of their visitors”. Bungaree —“gallant and unsuspecting” according toFlinders but the second epithet is surelywrong — made amends for their fright bygiving them a spear and a throwing-stickand showing them the use of the latter, ofwhich they appeared “wholly ignorant”.50

I take this tutorial as a genuinely cross-cultural act which symbolized a reciprocalrather than a hierarchical relationship andbelies the reified idea of the cross-culturalas a binary divide between opposed, ho-mogenized cultures. It is likely that theMoreton Bay people took Bungaree for theleader of the expedition and the white menfor his followers — which might explainwhy the modern town near Skirmish Pointis called Bongaree and not Flinders.

Bungaree also served Flinders as adatum point in the continuation and exten-sion of the comparative agenda previouslynoted with respect to Van Diemen’s Land.At the mouth of the Clarence River, enroute to Moreton Bay, they had seen threelarge, well-built habitations whichBungaree “readily admitted…were muchsuperior to any huts of the natives whichhe had before seen”. A fishing net takenfrom a house in Moreton Bay was “proofof the superior ingenuity of these over thenatives of Port Jackson”. Their singing,too, was more complex: “not merely in thediatonic scale, descending by thirds, as atPort Jackson: the descent of this waswaving, in rather a melancholy soothingstrain”. On the other hand, Bungaree’sweaponry was superior and, although theinhabitants of Moreton Bay bore a generalphysical resemblance to those of PortJackson, there was none “whose counten-ance had so little of the savage, or thesymmetry of whose limbs expressedstrength and agility, so much, as those oftheir companion Bong-ree” — a classicinstance of a personal relationship tran-scending a demeaning stereotype.51

These piecemeal contrasts were specificand empirical rather than systemic. How-ever, at the end of the account of his stayin Moreton Bay, Flinders outlined an in-ductive environmentalist theory of thedevelopment of civil society which is per-tinent to this paper. In his 1814 narrative,he summarized the situation thus: “Theyfish almost wholly with cast and settingnets, live more in society than the nativesto the southward, and are much betterlodged.”52 Here is his contemporary ex-planation of why this should be so asrendered by Collins, but the ideas areclearly Flinders's:

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[T]he inhabitants of this bay ap-peared to possess in general a verypointed difference from, if not asuperiority over, those of NewSouth Wales, particularly in theirnet-works…There was no doubtbut they were provided with netsfor catching very large fish, or an-imals…[T]his mode of procuringtheir food would cause a character-istic difference between the manners,and perhaps the dispositions, ofthese people, and of those whomostly depend upon the spear orfiz-gig for a supply. In the onecase, there must necessarily be theco-operation of two or more individu-als; who there, from mutual neces-sity, would associate together. Itis fair to suppose, that this associ-ation would, in the course of a fewgenerations, if not much sooner,produce a favourable change inthe manners and dispositions evenof a savage. In the other case, thenative who depends upon his fiz-gig or his spear for his supportdepends upon his single arm, and,requiring not the aid of society, isindifferent about it, but prowlsalong, a gloomy, unsettled, and un-social being [Bungaree?]…

The net also appearing to be amore certain source of food thanthe spear, change of place will beless necessary. The encumbrancetoo of carrying large nets from oneplace to another will require amore permanent residence; andhence it would naturally follow,that their houses would be of abetter construction…; this superi-ority Mr. Flinders attributed to the

different mode of procuring fishwhich had been adopted by the inhab-itants. He likewise supposed thatthe use of nets…arose from the formof the bay… 53

THIRD HISTORY:SOUTHEASTERN VANDIEMEN’S LAND,JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1802

I leave commentary on this passage to theconclusion and turn to my brief third his-tory of incidents during Baudin's six-weeksojourn in southeastern Van Diemen’sLand in January–February 1802. Since Ihave discussed the episode in some detailin other papers,54 I limit myself here to afew relevant points.

Baudin arrived in Van Diemen’s Landwith favourable preconceptions about thepeople he would meet, derived from theCook and d'Entrecasteaux voyage reports,and bound by both his instructions andhis inclinations to avoid violence againstthem except in extreme self-defence. Hewrote at the outset that “the people of thiscountry do not appear to be savage, exceptwhen provoked”.55 His contemporaryjournal gives a dispassionate empirical ac-count of frequent, mostly amicable rela-tions with local people, broken by twosudden, unexplained assaults on shoreparties by men at Bruny Island who hadbeen amicably interacting with the Frenchand been “loaded with presents”: the firsttime, a single spear wounded a midship-man in the neck; the second time, a “hailof stones” wounded Baudin “fairlysharply” on the hip.56 Despite thesecontretemps, the tone of the journal ismatter-of-fact and even-handed about theindigenous people, including the attackers.

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In sharp contrast, in an official reportwritten later in the year, Baudin emphas-ized the violence of the encounters anddeplored the “fickleness” of “primitivemen of nature…at the furthest degreepossible from civilization”, whose unpre-dictable mood shifts back and forth fromamity to aggression made it impossible toform “a clear idea of their character” andleft sailors dangerously exposed.57

However, even Baudin’s report is relat-ively restrained and empirical in compar-ison to the exaggerated language of theofficial voyage narrative written by Péron,the expedition’s zoologist and anthropolo-gist. Before the voyage, he had professeda qualified primitivist idealization ofpeople “closer to nature”, contrasting“degenerated and debased man of [civil-ized] society” to the “robust majesty ofnatural man”.58 In the event, any residualprimitivism was rapidly dispelled in fearsprovoked by trying experience of so-called“natural man” in Van Diemen’s Land.Within a few pages, the rhetoric of Péron’snarrative shifts from romantic approval ofthe “affectionate” and “frank” demeanourof “our good Diemenlanders” to vilifica-tion of “these fierce men”. Within the text,this discursive shift is a direct response tothe spear- and stone-throwing incidentsand suggests a tortuous passage from ref-erents to signifiers. “Men of nature” areno longer “good and simple” but“wicked”. “After all we have seen”, heproclaimed, “one cannot sufficiently mis-trust men whose character has not yet beensoftened by civilization.” He wrote sub-sequently of the people of Maria Island,with whom Baudin had found no fault,that “all their actions bore the stamp oftreachery and ferocity”. These actionsgoaded him to a diatribe on “the diffi-

culties faced by travellers in communicat-ing with savage peoples, and the impossib-ility of overcoming the natural ferocity oftheir character and their prejudices againstus”.59 Péron’s ambivalence and outragewere epitomized in his reaction to the manthe French knew as Bara-Ourou, whomPéron praised as “the handsomest man inthe band” but also damned as the mostthreatening (see Figure 1).60

CONCLUSION

These particular histories of interactionsbetween shipborne strangers and Abori-ginal people in Van Diemen’s Land or NewHolland at the end of the eighteenth cen-tury both mirror and illuminate the prob-lematics of my title. My artificial and par-tial separation of stories from exegesis isa metonym for the tension between narrat-ive and texts that plagues anti-objectivisthistory. Narrative is necessary becausesmall histories speak to large issues. So toois textual analysis but it must be contextu-alized. In this paper, historicizing authors,their ideas and their experiences high-lights the ambiguity of the concept “cross-cultural” with reference to periods andcontexts in which it was clearly anachron-istic or inappropriate. Close attention tothe words voyagers used to describe theirexperiences and the indigenous peoplethey saw makes it clear that whatever theythought were doing, it was normally notengaging in cross-cultural encounters.Their key trope was not culture but civil-isation (in the French case) and civility orcivil society (in the British case).

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23

Figure 1: Barthélémy Roger after Nicholas-Martin Petit, ‘Terre de Diémen. Bara-Ourou’, stipple engraving, 31.8 x 24.2 cm, in Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicholas-Martin Petit, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes exécuté par ordre de S.M. l’Empereur et Roi. Partie Historique. Atlas (Paris : Imprimerie impériale, 1807): plate 8.

That said, civilization is no moretransparent than culture. Its discursiveinstability, in conjunction with that of theidea of “race”, was nicely captured byGeorge Stocking: “in the later eighteenthcentury, the idea of ‘civilization’ was seenas the destined goal of all mankind, andwas in fact often used to account for appar-ent racial differences. But in the 19th cen-tury more and more men saw civilizationas the peculiar achievement of certain‘races’”.61 I have written elsewhere aboutbroad discursive transitions at the end ofthe eighteenth century with particularreference to race.62 The texts consideredhere are on the cusp of this shift in themeaning of civilization which is exempli-fied in the similarity and contrast betweend'Entrecasteaux's and Péron's narrativizedresponses to volatile indigenous behaviourin Oceania. It was the spectre of cannibal-ism — an offence against humanity —which led d'Entrecasteaux (writing in 1793but edited for posthumous publication in1808) to deplore “the excesses in whichthe human species can indulge when cus-toms are not moderated and softened bycivilization”; it was particular insult at the“violent aggression” directed against hiscolleagues that saw Péron (publishing in1807 about events in 1802) use the sametrope: “[O]ne cannot sufficiently mistrustmen whose character has not yet beensoftened by civilization.” Both envisagedthe need to respond with force but ford'Entrecasteaux it was a council of despairrather than a prescription: compare hislament that “we must renounce visiting[Pacific Islanders]…, or we must inspirerespect in them by very great severity”with Péron's dogma that “one must onlyapproach these peoples armed with suffi-cient means to curb their ill will or repel

their attacks”.63 “Curb” is a key termwhich spoke to a paradox at the heart ofEnlightenment humanism: that its moraluniversalism was at once inclusive, philan-thropic, and optimistic about all humanbeings, including so-called savages, butalso ethnocentric, hierarchical, paternalist,prescriptive and acquisitive. These latterstrands, which would not accommodateother people’s assessments and exercise oftheir rights, desires and autonomy, camesteadily to dominate the discourse ofcivilization. Colonization was in the airand in September 1803, 18 months afterBaudin’s visit, it became a grim fact in VanDiemen’s Land.

The particular wording of these pas-sages also signals a semantic instability inthe word “civilization”, noted by Willi-ams: a slippage from the idea of civilizationas “refinement of manners and behaviour”to its preferred modern connotation of“social order”.64 D'Entrecasteaux usedthe term in the earlier sense, lyrically cel-ebrating indigenous sociality in Van Die-men’s Land as “evidence” of the “firstnatural affection” and a “school ofnature”.65 Péron did so in the later sense:these same people — “so close to the zeropoint of civilization”,66 the “children ofnature par excellence” — epitomized “non-social man” who must be “curbed”. Thereis, moreover, overt racialization in his as-sertion that they “differ essentially [andperhaps originally?] from all other knownpeoples” and in his conclusion that theywere “the most savage [people] of all”,consigned by physical deficiencies to thebottom of a hierarchy of races whose relat-ive “physical strength” he claimed to haveestablished “by direct experiments”. Apassionate advocate for “the progress ofcivilization” and the superiority of “civil-

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ized” over “savage man”, Péron arguedfor a close causal nexus between “physicalconstitution” and “social organization” orits purported “absence” — between raceand civilization: the “peculiar conforma-tion” and the alleged physical “weakness”he discerned in the inhabitants of VanDiemen’s Land were products of inad-equate diet and lifestyle which were inturn “an immediate and necessary resultof the savage state in which these unhappypeoples vegetate”.67

Williams, furthermore, suggested anational difference in the usage of “civiliz-ation”: “From e[arly] C19 the developmentof civilization towards its modern mean-ing…is on the whole earlier in French thanin English.”68 The shift in French waspresumably fuelled by the experience ofrevolution, whereas its later Englishmanifestation related more to colonialism.My sample of voyage texts, though toosmall to be conclusive, partly bears outWilliams’s observation. Civilization is onlyimplicit in most of the British texts but forBass it meant relative “convenience” and“happiness”, in Forster's sense, whichwere corollaries of refinement. Flinders'sprimary concern was to explain “a charac-teristic difference between the manners,and perhaps the dispositions” of the PortJackson and the Moreton Bay people —“manners” came first — and he did so interms of a simple environmentalist devel-opmentalism which also reads like a distil-lation of Forster: it was ultimately “theform of the bay” which produced“more…society” at Moreton Bay.69

Yet the distinction between refinementand social order was not simply linear butwas also one of emphasis, degree andpragmatic context: if manners mattered

more aesthetically and in the abstract,“superior power” — Flinders's phrase —came to the fore when the always-lurkingspectre of savagery materialized into realor threatened action. In an ironic passage,Flinders acknowledged the intimate link-age of power and refinement: having failedto impress the Moreton Bay people with“the effect and certainty of his fire-arms”when he shot at a hawk and only brokeits leg, he recalled wryly how:

…ineffectual had been someformer attempts…to impress themwith an idea of the superior refine-ment of his followers. Bong-ree,his musician, had annoyed hisauditors with his barbaroussounds, and the clumsy exhibitionof his Scotch dancers…had beenviewed by them without wonderor gratification.70

I approached these texts with theworking hypothesis that they would dis-close a broad contrast between Englishpragmatism and French abstraction. It waspartly confirmed in the distinctionbetween explicit French and implied Eng-lish usages. However, again the questionis more complex and ambiguous. Class andoccupational differences were at least assalient as national ones. In many respects,sailors like Cook and Baudin — an officierbleu, of non-noble birth, he had no realcareer in the French Marine until after theRevolution — had far more in commonwith each other, as their pragmatic, empir-ical language showed, than either did withtheir more sophisticated naturalists Banksand Péron. Furthermore, if French sailorsfulminated more about civilisation, theyalso fired less often on indigenous peoplethan did the British. Unlike Flinders at

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Moreton Bay, Baudin was “not obliged tofire” on his stone-throwing assailants inVan Diemen’s Land because when heaimed his firearm at one man, they allscattered — they had prior experience ofmuskets whereas the Moreton Bay peopleseemingly did not. But for Baudin, it wasalso a matter of principle: “experience”had taught him that “superior force” wasnot always the only guarantee against “thetraps of the man of nature” and that“prudence” could avert endless alarms.71

As they made their way around theNew Holland coast, voyagers of both na-tions evinced a keen predatory interest inthe resources offered by the land and itspotential for pasture and agriculture butthe British, already ensconced, did so moresystematically, persistently and, in theend, effectively.72 The initial British set-tlement in Van Diemen’s Land was placedat Risdon Cove on Bass’s recommendationand the definitive settlement at HobartTown that followed in February 1804 wasled by Collins, the amanuensis of Bass andFlinders. I conclude by suggesting thatwhereas “cross-cultural” is in principle anegalitarian, relativist concept which ac-knowledges the specificity and validity ofparticular ways of life, the idea of civiliza-tion, in all its manifestations, is hierarchic-al, universalist and assimilationist. Fromthis perspective, the only named cross-cultural actor in my histories was Bungar-ee.

ENDNOTES

1 For aesthetic reasons, I make minimal use of inver-ted commas: they are included on first mention ofan English term in its contemporary sense and thenomitted, except for direct quotations; non-Englishwords are italicized; inverted commas are implied inthe case of now problematic terms such as “race”,“civilization”, “savage”, “Negro”.

2 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1946), pp.242, 248.3 Roland Barthes, “Le discours de l’histoire”, Inform-ations sur les sciences sociales, vol. 6 (1967), 65-75;Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultur-al Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univer-sity Press, 1978); Hayden White, The Content of theForm: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representa-tion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,1987).4 In principle, I use the term “text” in the widestsense to mean any vehicle for representation —written, drawn, photographed, made, performed,spoken, remembered. In practice in this paper, thetexts considered are all written and visual represent-ations are used mainly for illustration.5 See, for example, Aletta Biersack (ed.), Clio inOceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology (Washing-ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Fred-erick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions ofEmpire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); H.Aram Veeser (ed.) The New Historicism (New York:Routledge, 1989).6 The problematic concept of “agency”, particularlythat of indigenous, female and other historicallysuppressed categories of persons, here neither neces-sarily infers intention nor presumes a modernist no-tion of the individual as a bounded, autonomoussubject. Rather, I take it as given that there is a gen-eral human potential to desire, choose, and act stra-tegically which must be historicized within the limitsand possibilities of unstable assemblages of ideas,systems, personalities and circumstances.7 The anthropologist Francesca Merlan proposed theterm “intercultural” as the most effective way toconceptualize “difference-yet-relatedness within anincreasingly expanding social field” in a “globalizedworld” (Francesca Merlan, "Explorations TowardsIntercultural Accounts of Socio-Cultural Reproduc-tion and Change", Oceania, vol. 75 (2005), 167-82).However, attentiveness to “complex articulationswithin and across particular social groups” ratherthan emphasis on “an ‘interface’ between separatelyconceived domains” is an equally apt strategy forhistorians of early encounters between indigenouspeople and Europeans (Melinda Hinkson and Ben-jamin Smith, “Introduction: Conceptual Moves to-wards an Intercultural analysis”, Oceania, vol. 75(2005), 157–66, pp.157–8).8 “Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethno-graphic sense, is that complex whole which includesknowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and anyother capabilities and habits acquired by man as amember of society” (Edward B. Tylor, PrimitiveCulture: Researches into the Development of Mythology,

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Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vols. (Lon-don: John Murray, 1871), vol. 1, p.1).9 Raymond Williams, Keywords: a Vocabulary ofCulture and Society, Rev. ed. (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1983 [1976]), pp.57–60, 87–93; seealso Claude Blanckaert, “La naturalisation de l'hommede Linné à Darwin: archéologie du débat nature/cul-ture”, in A. Ducros, J. Ducros, and F. Joulian (eds),La culture est-elle naturelle? Histoire, épistémologie etapplications récentes du concept de culture (Paris :Editions Errance, 1998), 15–24, pp.19–23.10 Anon., “The Translator’s Preface”, in J.-F. deGalaup de La Pérouse (L.-A. Milet-Mureau, ed.), TheVoyage of La Pérouse Round the World, in the Years1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788 …, vol. 1 (London: JohnStockdale, 1798), [1]–[7], p.[3].11 See the transcriptions of Cook's and Banks'sjournals by the Australian National Library's SouthSeas Project, <http://southseas.nla.gov.au/>, andFlinders's journals in the Matthew Flinders ElectronicArchive of the State Library of NSW, <ht-tp://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/flinders/archive.html>.12 James Cook (J.C. Beaglehole, ed.), The Journals ofCaptain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, vol.1,The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771 (Cambridge:Hakluyt Society, 1955), p.121; Antoine-Raymond-Joseph de Bruni d'Entrecasteaux (E.-P.-E. de Rossel,ed.), Voyage de Dentrecasteaux envoyé à la recherchede La Pérouse…, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie impériale,1808), vol.1, p.355; John Hawkesworth, An Accountof the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His PresentMajesty for Making Discoveries in the SouthernHemisphere…, 3 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T.Cadell, 1773), vol.2, p.186; [Jean-François de Galaupde La Pérouse] (L-A. Milet-Mureau ed.), Voyage dela Pérouse autour du monde…, 4 vols (Paris, Plassan,1798), vol. 3, p.236. In the Endeavour journal, Cookelaborated his assumption that Tahitians did not needto practise agriculture: “in the article of food thesepeople may almost be said to be exempt from thecurse of our fore fathers; scarcely can it be said thatthey earn their bread with the sweet of their brow,benevolent nature hath not only supply’d them withnecessarys but with abundance of superfluities”(Journals, vol. 1, p.121). By contrast, in the journalof his second voyage on HMS Resolution, Cook defen-ded the Tahitians in this respect in a careful empiricalpassage challenging the ethnographic expertise ofhis French predecessor Louis-Antoine de Bougainville(1729–1814): “it is true some things require but littlelabour, but others again require a good deal, such asroots of every kind and Bananas and Plantains willnot grow spontaneously but by proper cultivation,nor will the Bread and Cocoa nutt trees come to per-fection without” (James Cook, Journals, vol. 2, TheVoyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772–1775(Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1961), p.235).

13 Johann Reinhold Forster (N. Thomas, H. Guestand M. Dettelbach, eds), Observations Made Duringa Voyage Round the World (Honolulu: University ofHawaii Press, 1996 [1778]), pp.234–5, 238.14 Thus, for example, the French comparative ana-tomist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) discerned: “verydifferent degrees in man’s development…Man hasreally only succeeded in multiplying his species toa high degree, and in advancing very far his know-ledge and his arts, since the invention of agricul-ture…Mild climates, soils naturally watered, andrich in plants, are veritable cradles of agriculture andcivilization” (Georges Cuvier Le règne animal distribuéd'après son organisation, pour servir de base à l'histoirenaturelle des animaux et d'introduction à l'anatomiecomparée, 4 vols (Paris: Deterville, 1817), vol.1,pp.91–4); Charles Darwin (1809–82) applied similarlogic to the particular case of Aboriginal Australians:“they appeared far from such utterly degraded beingsas usually represented. — In their own arts they areadmirable… — They will not however cultivate theground, or even take the trouble of keeping flocksof sheep which have been offered them; or buildhouses & remain stationary. — Never the less, theyappear to me to stand some few degrees higher incivilization, or more correctly a few lower in barbar-ism, than the Fuegians” (Charles Darwin (R.D.Keynes, ed.), Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.398).15 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the Historyof Man, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: W. Creech and London:W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1774), vol.1, pp.32, 43.16 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol.1, p.1; Williams,Keywords, pp.58–9, 89–90.17 Roy Porter, “The Exotic as Erotic: Captain Cookat Tahiti”, in G.S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds),Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1990), 117-44, p.122.18 A notable exception was George Vancouver(1757–98), who twice sailed as a midshipman withCook and commanded a major surveying expeditionto the Pacific Ocean in 1791–95. In a journal passageextolling a Hawaiian man who had retained a pieceof Vancouver's hair given to him four years previ-ously, Vancouver invoked two ethnocentric tenetsof contemporary humanism: first, that the man’s“pledge of friendship” arose from “principles innateand common to the species” and showed the “simil-arity in the human mind” in “every stage of civiliza-tion”; and second, that “the untaught inhabitantsof…the uncultivated world” and “the civilized andpolished states of the world” represented startingpoint and culmination of a unilinear historical traject-ory (George Vancouver (W. Kaye Lamb, ed.), AVoyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean andRound the World 1791–1795, 4 vols. (London:Hakluyt Society, 1984), vol.3, p.862).

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19 Sydney Parkinson (Stanfield Parkinson, ed.), AJournal of a Voyage to the South Seas in his Majesty’sShip, the Endeavour…Embellished with Views andDesigns, Delineated by the Author, and Engraved byCapital Artists (London: Stanfield Parkinson, 1773),p.97.20 For example, in Raiatea (French Polynesia) inAugust 1769, “we all went to see the great king [ofBorabora] and thank him for his civilities” (JosephBanks (J. C. Beaglehole, ed.), The Endeavour Journalof Joseph Banks 1768–1771, 2 vols. (Sydney: PublicLibrary of NSW with Angus and Robertson, 1962)vol.1, p.327; vol.2, p.124).21 Banks, Endeavour Journal, vol.2, p.130.22 Cook, Journals, vol.1, p.399. The later passageruns: “we debauch their Morals already too proneto vice and we interduce among them wants andperhaps diseases which they never before knew andwhich serves only to disturb that happy tranquillitythey and their fore Fathers had injoy’d” (Cook,Journals, vol.2, p.175).23 For example, the idea of civilisation as a universalhuman process underwrote the acknowledgementby La Pérouse’s editor that the piecemeal introduc-tion of its trappings was a mixed blessing for peoplehe placed at the level of “savages”. His preferredstrategy was “to raise them by degrees in order tocivilize them, by making orderly communities [despeuplades policées] before making polished people[des peuples polis], and only giving them new needsand new procedures along with the means to supplythe first and make effective use of the second. Thiswill prepare their descendants for and guaranteethem the happy results of the development of thehuman faculties” (Louis-Antoine Milet-Mureau,“Discours préliminaire du rédacteur”, in La Pérouse,Voyage, vol.1, xix–lxviii, p.lxvi).24 Bronwen Douglas, “Art as Ethno-historical Text:Science, Representation and Indigenous Presence inEighteenth and Nineteenth Century Oceanic VoyageLiterature”, in N. Thomas and D. Losche (eds), DoubleVision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in thePacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999), 65–99, pp.73–83; Bronwen Douglas n.d., “Inthe Event: Indigenous Countersigns and the Ethno-history of Voyaging”, in M. Jolly, S. Tcherkezoff,and D. Tryon (eds), Oceanic Encounters (in prepara-tion).25 d'Entrecasteaux, Voyage, vol.1, pp.230–2, 242,243.26 Ibid, p.308.27 Ibid, pp.333, 343.28 Ibid, pp.298, 305–12.29 Ibid, pp.421–3, cf. p.234.

30 For a chart of Flinders' voyages, see: 'MatthewFlinders, General chart of Terra Australis or Australiashowing the parts explored between 1798 and 1803by M. Flinders Commr. of H.M.S. Investigator', StateLibrary of NSW, Sydney, <http://im-a g e . s l . n s w . g o v . a u / c g i - b i n / e b i n d -show.pl?doc=flinders_maps/a125;seq=16>.31 Matthew Flinders, Narrative of the Expedition inthe Colonial Sloop Norfolk, from Port Jacksonthrough the Strait which Seperates Van DiemensLand from New Holland; and from thence round theSouth Cape back to Port Jackson, Completing theCircumnavigation of the Former Island, with someremarks on the Coasts and Harbours, MS copy, StateLibrary of NSW, Sydney, 1798-99, viewed 24 April2004 <http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/flinders/manu-scripts/1.html>; Matthew Flinders, A Journal in theNorfolk Sloop, 8 July–12 August 1799, MS copy,State Library of NSW, Sydney, 1799, viewed 24 April2004, <http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/flinders/manu-scripts/2.html>.32 Bass's original journal of the voyage to Van Die-men’s Land in 1798–99 is to my knowledge no longerextant and so the accuracy of Collins’s renditioncannot be verified. However, a comparison of parallelpassages in Collins’s version of Flinders’s 1799journal and in the manuscript copy of this journalsuggests that Collins did not take undue libertieswith his material. Strikingly, the copies of Flinders’sjournals, made for Governor Philip Gidley King, onlyrefer to the absence of indigenous people at particularplaces. They entirely omit any mention of the twoepisodes of interaction between voyagers and localinhabitants at the River Derwent in 1798 and More-ton Bay in 1799 which are the main focus of this pa-per. The episodes are described in detail in Collins’spublished version of Bass’s and Flinders’s journals(David Collins, An Account of the English Colony inNew South Wales, from its First Settlement, in January1788, to August 1801: with Remarks on the Disposi-tions, Customs, Manners, &c. of the Native Inhabitantsof that Country. To Which are Added…An Account ofa Voyage Performed by Captain Flinders and Mr. Bass;by which the Existence of a Strait Separating VanDieman’s Land from the Continent of New Hollandwas Ascertained. Abstracted from the Journal of Mr.Bass, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies,1802), vol.2, pp.187–8, 231–56) and briefly byFlinders in his two publications (Matthew Flinders,Observations on the Coasts of Van Diemen’s Land, onBass’s Strait and its Islands, and on Part of the Coastsof New South Wales; Intended to Accompany theCharts of the Late Discoveries in Those Countries(London: John Nichols, 1801), p.8; Matthew Flinders,A Voyage to Terra Australis; Undertaken for the Pur-pose of Completing the Discovery of that Vast Country,and Prosecuted in the Years 1801, 1802, and 1803 inHis Majesty’s Ship the Investigator, and Subsequently

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in the Armed Vessel Porpoise and CumberlandSchooner…, 2 vols. (London: G. and W. Nicol, 1814),vol.1, pp.clxxxvi–clxxxvii, cxcvi–cxcviii).33 François Péron and Louis de Freycinet, Voyage dedécouvertes aux terres australes…sur les corvettes leGéographe, le Naturaliste, et la goëlette le Casuarina,pendant les années 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803 et 1804.Historique, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1807-16).34 Bass in Collins, Account, vol. 2, p.168; Flinders,Narrative, p.[21].35 Bass in Collins, Account, vol. 2, p.187; Flinders,Observations, p.8; Flinders, Voyage, vol.1,p.clxxxvi–clxxxvii.36 Bass in Collins, Account, vol. 2, p.188.37 Douglas, “Art”, pp. 70-3; Bronwen Douglas,“Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History ofMan”, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 38 (2003), 3–27,pp.12, 17.38 Flinders, Observations, p.8; Flinders, Voyage, vol.1,p.clxxxvii.39 Bass in Collins, Account, vol.2, pp.169–70, myemphasis; Flinders, Voyage, vol.1, p.cxl.40 For a later portrait of Bungaree, see: Philip ParkerKing, 'Boong-gar-ree Aboriginal of New South Wales1819 who accompanied me on my first voyage to theNW coast', watercolour, 16.2 x 10 cm., PXC 767 f.48,State Library of NSW, <http://im-a g e . s l . n s w . g o v . a u / c g i - b i n / e b i n d -show.pl?doc=pxc767/a1084;seq=2>.41 Flinders, Voyage, vol.1, p.cxciv.42 For Flinder's chart of Moreton Bay, see: MatthewFlinders, 'Chart of part of the coast of New SouthWales from Ram Head to Northumberland Isles byM. Flinders, 2nd. Lieut. of H.M.S. Reliance, 1800',State Library of NSW, <http://im-a g e . s l . n s w . g o v . a u / c g i - b i n / e b i n d -show.pl?doc=flinders_maps/a125;seq=14>.43 Flinders in Collins, Account, vol.2, pp.232–4.44 Ibid, pp.239–44.45 This episode took place off Darnley Island inSeptember 1792 and led Flinders to reflect: “Had thefour [canoes] been able to reach the cutter, it is diffi-cult to say, whether the superiority of our armswould have been equal to the great differences ofnumbers; considering the ferocity of these people,and the skill with which they seemed to manage theirweapons” (Flinders, Voyage, vol.1, pp.xxi–xxvi).46 Flinders in Collins, Account, vol.2, pp.243, 245,249, 250–3, 255.47 Flinders, Voyage, vol.1, p.cxcviii.

48 Flinders in Collins, Account, vol. 2, p.243.49 Ibid, p.245.50 Ibid, p.249.51 Ibid, pp.228, 238, 249, 250, 252.52 Flinders, Voyage, vol.1, p.cxcviii.53 Flinders in Collins, Account, vol.2, pp.253–5; myemphasis.54 Douglas, “Seaborne Ethnography”, pp.19-26;Bronwen Douglas, “Slippery Word, AmbiguousPraxis: ‘Race’ and Late 18th-Century Voyagers inOceania”, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 41, 1-29,pp.23-5, 27-9.55 Baudin to Freycinet, 14 January 1802, in NicolasBaudin (C. Cornell, tr.), The Journal of Post CaptainNicolas Baudin Commander-in-Chief of the CorvettesGéographe and Naturaliste Assigned by Order of theGovernment to a Voyage of Discovery (Adelaide: Lib-raries Board of South Australia, 1974), p.302.56 Baudin, Journal, pp.300–50, 304–5, 321, 345–6.57 Nicolas Baudin, “Des naturels que nous trouvionset de leur conduite envers nous [Baudin to Jussieu,18 Nov. 1802]”, in J. Copans and J. Jamin (eds), Auxorigines de l'anthropologie française: les mèmoires dela Société des Observateurs de l'Homme en l'an VIII(Paris : Le Sycomore, 1978), 205–17, pp. 207–14.58 Péron, François, “Observations sur l'anthropolo-gie, ou l'histoire naturelle de l'homme, la nécessitéde s'occuper de l'avancement de cette science, etl'importance de l'admission sur la flotte du capitaineBaudin d'un ou de plusieurs naturalistes, spéciale-ment chargés des recherches à faire sur ce sujet”, inCopans and Jamin (eds), Aux origines de l'anthropolo-gie française, pp.183–4.59 Péron and Freycinet, Voyage, vol.1, pp.231, 237,238, 285, 287; my emphasis.60 Ibid, p.287.61 George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture and Evolu-tion: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York:The Free Press, 1968), pp.35–6.62 Bronwen Douglas, “Science and the Art of Repres-enting ‘Savages’: Reading ‘Race’ in Text and Imagein South Seas Voyage Literature”, History and Anthro-pology, vol.11 (1999), 157–201; Douglas, “SeaborneEthnography"; Bronwen Douglas, “Notes on ‘Race’and the Biologisation of Human Difference”, Journalof Pacific History, vol.40 (2005), 331–8; Douglas,“Slippery Word”.63 d'Entrecasteaux, Voyage, vol.1, pp.359, 423; Péronand Freycinet, Voyage, vol.1, pp.238, 285.64 Williams, Keywords, p.58.65 d'Entrecasteaux, Voyage, vol.1, p.234.

29


66 François Péron, Île Maria: observations anthropo-logiques: entrevue avec les naturels de cette île etdescription d'un tombeau trouvé sur la côte nord dela Baie de l'Est. Ventose an Xe [February–March1802], MS 18040, Collection Lesueur, Muséumd'Histoire naturelle, Le Havre, France, p.2.67 Péron and Freycinet, Voyage, vol.1, pp.285, 446,448, 452, 457, 458, 466, 471; vol.2, p.164; my emphas-is.68 Williams, Keywords, p.58; original emphasis.69 Bass in Collins, Account, vol.2, p.169; Flinders inCollins, Account, vol.2, pp.253–4, my emphasis;Flinders, Voyage, vol.1, p.cxcviii.70 Flinders in Collins, Account, vol.2, pp.234, 252–3.71 Baudin, Journal, pp.x–xi, 346; Baudin, “Desnaturels”, pp.210–11.72 For example, “The account of the Derwent riverbeing now closed, and the whole of what was learnedof Van Diemen’s land related, it may not be improper,says Mr Bass, to point out the manner in which thiscountry and New South Wales appear to differ intheir most essential quality, that of their soil”(Collins, Account, vol.2, p.189).

30


MORE THAN ONE ADAM?

Revelation and Philology in Nineteenth-Century China

BENJAMIN PENNY

From Marco Polo to Richard Nixon, narrat-ives of the encounter between Chinese andWesterners have been defining texts ofEuropean cultures and their descendants.Successive but sporadic reports fromtravellers, missionaries, diplomats, tradersand others have provided a model of analternative way of arranging people, oforganizing their lives, of thinking aboutthe state of being human; one that de-scribed a government that was, or at leastwas represented as being, as authoritativeas anything at home, with military powerthat could challenge any other, and withcultural achievements as profound. Tradi-tionally labelled “inscrutable”, Chinanonetheless possessed a written literature,an esteemed bureaucracy, technologicalachievements, complex financial systems,codes and courts of law, and religions thathad texts, buildings and hierarchies ofpriests. In other words, though not likeus at all, they were exactly like us.

The voluminous literature of the en-counter with China is above all, and con-sistently, a literature of comparison. Fromeating manners, to the rigging on boats,from city design to imperial customs, re-ports of the Chinese exotic have beenseized on by centuries of eager westernreaders and, latterly, viewers. But thethrill these stories generate is possible only

as a response to a condition where recog-nition and bafflement are mixed in equalparts, where things are close enough to befamiliar but far enough away to be bizarre.This is psychically exciting but it is alsodiscomforting and unstable, and one ofthe effects of this has been to move theChinese to the discursive comfort of oneextreme or the other; to find a way ofwelcoming them into the fold or to definethe conditions of their exclusion. Neithermove is unproblematic: if, fundamentally,the Chinese are like us then their veryobvious differences must be accounted foror, less satisfactorily, elided; if they arebasically not like us, the reverse is thecase. What these two moves have in com-mon, however, is that they have soughtthe fundamental similarity — or difference— between China and the West in featuresdeemed to lie at the core of what it means,or meant, to be Chinese and whatever itis, or was, that we conceived ourselves tobe at that moment in history: early on itwas religion; later, language came ontocentre stage; now perhaps it is in concep-tions of the rights of individuals.

This paper focuses on a largely forgot-ten chapter in this history in the form ofa book that attempts to show, in the wordsof its subtitle, that the Languages of Europeand Asia have a Common Origin, and in

31

doing so that the people of China andEurope, too, share a common descent. Thebook is China’s Place in Philology, writtenby the Reverend Joseph Edkins, Doctorof Divinity, who lived from 1823 until1905 and was resident in China from 1848until his death.1 Edkins left an enormouslegacy of work across the whole range oftopics in the history, religions, literature,geography, philosophy, and economy ofChina (as well as its language) in English,apart from his copious translations intoChinese — not least of the Bible — andoriginal works in that language. Publishedin 1871, China’s Place in Philology did notmeet with universal acclaim; indeed, insome quarters it was derided, but his workin this field remained, in Edkins’s ownopinion, his most valuable and far-reach-ing.

Edkins was sent to China by the Lon-don Missionary Society or LMS, an evan-gelical Protestant society based in Londonestablished in 1795 as The Missionary So-ciety, changing its name in 1818. This wasby no means the only mission society act-ive in China through the nineteenth cen-tury: there were representatives of mostof the Christian denominations, RomanCatholic and Orthodox as well as Protest-ant. Among the Protestants were mission-aries from across the English-speakingworld, usually attached to their own na-tional and denominational groups, and alsofrom many European countries, each withtheir own goals and emphases. Evenamongst the British evangelical societies,there were clear demarcations: not only inthe region, or mission field, but in strategyand theology as well.2

For many years, mission history wasan unfashionable field of research, bedev-

illed as it was, and to a certain extent stillis, by people for whom conversion wasnot just a phenomenon to be studied buta goal to be prayed for. However, inChinese Studies at least, to ignore mission-ary writings is to ignore a vast and valu-able archive. And to understand thenature of these writings, the particularitiesand specific contexts of each author haveto be understood: to regard them all ashaving the same ideologies, the same atti-tudes to Chinese people, the same project,is much mistaken. From the 1950s to the1980s, a standard textbook on modernChinese history was Teng and Fairbanks’sChina’s Response to the West.3 This titlereflected the commonly accepted totalizingbinary of the time. Fortunately, however,in more recent years a pluralizing tend-ency has gained ground, with both of thecategories “China” and “the West”gradually becoming disaggregated in thescholarly literature. In Edkins’s time, un-der the category “the West” there existeda web of heterogenous possibilities of in-volvement with all sorts of differentChinese people. Europeans of many kinds,Americans, Australasians; missionaries aswell as traders, customs officials, militarypersonnel and diplomats; and bureaucratsand scholars who worked on China basedin western capitals — to aggregate allthese into a single entity that had a unifiedproject is to grant, perhaps, more credenceto justifications emanating from the metro-politan capitals for foreign adventurismof various kinds than the complex situ-ation on the ground might warrant.

Thus, it is important to place JosephEdkins in his place and time, to grant himhis individuality and idiosyncrasy, and toallow him his disputes with colleagues,fellow nationals and co-religionists.

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Edkins, along with most of his colleagues— with the major exception of JamesLegge — has received only passing schol-arly attention.4 One of the goals of thispaper, and the larger project of which itis a part, is to rescue Edkins and hisscholarly colleagues from the academicobscurity into which they have fallen. Itis my contention that this notable groupof scholar-missionaries — not that theywould have seen themselves as a group —laid down the analytical categories forunderstanding aspects of Chinese societythat stood for decades in the West and invarious Chinese societies across the world,including the People’s Republic, and in-deed to some extent still stand. Beforemoving on to a detailed discussion ofEdkins, his work and its reception, andEdkins’s conception of his own positionin relation to the Chinese people amongstwhom he lived most of his adult life, itmay be useful to review and discuss someof the vocabulary of encounter.

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION

While we may judge that what Edkins wasdoing in China’s Place in Philology —which was completed in 1870, the yearTylor’s Primitive Culture appeared inLondon — was what we would call “cross-cultural research”, the word “culture” inits common usage does not appear in hisbook. Indeed it was not until 1912 that thetitle of a book in English about China usedthe word “culture” in this sense — inErnst Boerschmann’s pamphlet ChineseArchitecture and its Relation to ChineseCulture.5 Boerschmann was a Germanphotographer resident in China who is notgenerally recognized as a writer in Englishand this sense of culture is of German de-

rivation, so Boerschmann’s case is complic-ated. The first clear case of a work by anEnglish native speaker is Maurice Price’sChristian Missions and Oriental Civiliza-tions, a Study in Culture Contact; the Reac-tions of Non-Christian Peoples to ProtestantMissions from the Standpoint of Individualand Group Behaviour: Outline, Materials,Problems, and Tentative Interpretations,privately printed in Shanghai in 1924.6

What word — what category — didEdkins and his colleagues use instead of“culture”? Or did they simply get bywithout one? One candidate for this taskwas “civilization”, but if culture is com-plicated, civilization is perhaps even moreso, in this context at least. Raymond Wil-liams' Keywords proves a useful startingpoint. Starting life as a term that describeda process, originally “to make a criminalmatter into a civil matter, and thence, byextension, to bring within a form of socialorganization”, by the latter part of theeighteenth century “civilization” had ac-quired the sense of “a state of social orderand refinement, especially in conscioushistorical or cultural contrast with barbar-ism”.7 This sense of civilization places itat one end of a unilinear scale againstwhich all societies, and activities, can beplaced and compared. The fact that thisunilinear scale was generally accepted atthe time did not mean that there was gen-eral acceptance of what societies occupiedwhat positions on the scale. In the case ofChina, it managed to occupy positionscorresponding to both barbarism and tocivilization according to different peopleat different times. Thus, while its criminaljustice system with its public executions,torture and physical punishments like thecangue was deemed barbaric in the ex-treme by some outraged expatriates, its

33

More Than One Adam?

court and ritual code could equally be heldup at the same time as the epitome of civilhuman relations.8 The sense of civilizationas “an achieved condition of refinementand order” finds its way into discussionof China by at least the early-nineteenthcentury. In 1804 Sir John Barrow, Secret-ary to the Admiralty and founder of theRoyal Geographical Society, published hisaccount of Britain’s first embassy to Chinaof 1793, on which he accompanied EarlMacartney, the appointed envoy. Thisbook is called Travels in China: ContainingDescriptions, Observations and ComparisonsMade and Collected in the Course of a ShortResidence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-min-yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey fromPekin to Canton. In which it is Attemptedto Appreciate the Rank that this Extraordin-ary Empire may be Considered to Hold inthe Scale of Civilized Nations. In this book,Barrow claims to show the Chinese as theyreally were, as opposed to the view ofthem commonly held on the basis of re-ports from the Jesuit missionaries whichhad held sway for decades. Thus, hewrites:

The voluminous communicationsof the missionaries are by nomeans satisfactory; and some oftheir defects will be noticed andaccounted for in the course of thiswork; the chief aim of which is toshow this extraordinary people intheir proper colours, not as theirown moral maxims would repres-ent them, but as they reallyare…and to endeavour to drawfrom such a sketch…as may enablethe reader to settle, in his ownmind, the point of rank whichChina may be considered to holdin the scale of civilized nations.9

Barrow’s discussions of China’s positionin this scale of civilization begin by assert-ing that “civilization” depends to a largeextent on material progress: science, arts,manufactures, the conveniences and lux-uries of life, to use his measures. On thisscale he judges China “greatly superior”to Europe “from the middle to the end ofthe sixteenth century”. Indeed, “when theKing of France introduced the luxury ofsilk stockings, which, about eighteen yearsafterwards, was adopted by Elizabeth ofEngland, the peasantry of China wereclothed in silks from head to foot.”

However, “the Chinese were, at thatperiod, pretty much in the same state inwhich they still are; and in which they arelikely to continue”; that is, they had notdeveloped further in the previous twocenturies and had been overtaken byEurope during that time.10

For Barrow, this civilization is a matterof social attainment rather than beingdefined or limited by descent. Thus, heasserts that while the Chinese and thosehe calls “Malays” were both “unquestion-ably descended from the ancient inhabit-ants of Scythia or Tartary,” the Malays’conversion to Islam “first inspired, thenrendered habitual, that cruel and sanguin-ary disposition for which they are remark-able”.11 Thus while the Chinese havebettered themselves on the scale of civiliz-ation, people of the same ancestry, theMalays, have regressed.12 For Barrow,then, civilization is a state that societiesachieve or lose, and on the basis of whichsocieties can be compared, like to like, fa-vourably or unfavourably on a singlescale, taking into account attributes suchas material progress or the propensity tospill blood.13

34


In 1840, some 36 years after Barrow’sbook had appeared and, importantly, afterthe first wave of British Protestant mission-aries had made their way to China, theReverend W.H. Medhurst, who had ar-rived in Malacca in 1817 to work on themission to the Chinese — moving toShanghai after the First Opium War — andwho was, like Edkins, employed by theLondon Missionary Society, published hisChina: its State and Prospects, with EspecialReference to the Spread of the Gospel, Con-taining Allusions to the Antiquity, Extent,Population, Civilization, Literature, andReligion of the Chinese.14

Medhurst begins his chapter on “TheCivilization of China” in this way:

In seeking to evangelize the hea-then world, two descriptions ofpeople claim our attention:namely, the barbarous and thecivilized. China belongs to the lat-ter class. Instead of a savage anduntutored people — without asettled government, or writtenlaws, — roaming the desert, andliving in caves, — dressed inskins, and sitting on the ground,— knowing nothing of fashion,nor tasting luxuries; we behold inthe Chinese a quiet, orderly, well-behaved nation, exhibiting manytraces of civilization, and display-ing them at a period when the restof mankind were for the most partsunk in barbarism.

We see here the same evaluation of Chinaas a civilized nation, familiar from Barrowbut, unlike him, Medhurst tempers hisenthusiasm with an explicit appeal to reli-gion: “Of course we must not look for thathigh degree of improvement, and those

well-defined civil rights, which are ingreat measure the effects of Christian-ity.”15

With Medhurst, then, the categories“civilization” and “barbarism” are over-layed with another set, namely “heathen”and “Christian”. That these categories donot necessarily map onto each other isclear from the evaluation of China as bothcivilized and heathen — distinguishing itfrom much of the mission field where“heathen” and “barbarism” collocatedcomfortably. Indeed, China stood as theexemplum, if not the only case, of a civil-ized and heathen nation of the presentthough it had precursors in the ancientworld in pre-Christian Greece and Rome.“Christian” and “barbarism”, needless tosay, is not a possible combination.

Williams notes, in his article on “civil-ization”, that “there was a critical momentwhen civilization was used in the plural”,noting that the English use is later thanthe French.16 This use of “civilizations”approaches the contemporary meaning of“cultures”, at least insofar as it implies thatdifferent places have distinctive ways oflife and thought that are organicallywhole. What distinguishes this meaningof “civilization” from the comparablemeaning of “culture” — as in “Chinesecivilization” and “Chinese culture” — isa question of register: discussions of“Chinese civilization” usually begin withthe ancient philosophical systems and in-clude examples of artistic and technologic-al achievements arranged in historical se-quence. “Chinese culture” on the otherhand tends to be less historical and moreconcerned with the lives of ordinarypeople. Of course, there are no firm linesof demarcation between civilization and

35

More Than One Adam?

culture, as there equally are not betweenthe senses of civilization in the singularand the plural. It is worth stressing thatsuch changes in meaning are gradual anduneven and single authors may shift al-most imperceptibly from one sense to an-other; indeed, we should acknowledgethat the use of the singular form “civiliza-tion” and the plural “civilizations” some-times overlaps.

In writings on China in English theplural sense of civilization seems to appearin the latter part of the 1880s, well afterEdkins’s cogitations on the nature andorigins of the Chinese language, and hisunderstanding of the meaning of civiliza-tion seems close to Medhurst’s. It is inter-esting, though, given Williams’s observa-tion on the earlier French use of the pluralform “civilizations”, that perhaps its firstclear use in relation to China is in a trans-lation from that language: Pierre Laffitte’sA General View of Chinese Civilization andof the Relations of the West with China,published in French in 1861, and in Eng-lish translation not until 1887. Laffitte,who revelled in the wonderful title “Dir-ector of Positivism”, was Auguste Comte’sdirect disciple but was no specialist onChina. This did not stop him in his ambi-tious undertaking, in three lectures:

Gentlemen, We are to enter to-dayupon a survey of the whole fieldof Chinese civilization. In view ofthe importance of such a study,both in itself and in its bearingson the problems of the science ofsociety, we shall devote to it threelectures…At the base of thefarthest East is a noteworthycivilization, which, say what wemay about it, is in constant devel-

opment and in full activity, and isbeing brought day by day intocloser contact with the West. Thiscivilization, in so many respectsso much misunderstood, is that ofChina.17

In these lectures, Laffitte treats “Chinesecivilization” as a discrete entity that pos-sesses certain distinctive features, hasspecific traits and manifests a particularpattern of development. A civilization, forLaffitte, is a kind of entity made up of se-lected elements of a nation’s lifeways,rather than an attribute a nation has moreor less of, as it was for Barrow andMedhurst. Civilizations, so conceived, canstill be judged against each other in termsof their attainments or levels, but Laffitte’sapproach also pointed to the possibility ofa model of human development thatmoved away, potentially at least, from anuncompromising unilinearity. With thismodel, the possibility is raised of the waysof life and systems of thought of differentplaces developing along their own tracksto equally civilized points but remainingthoroughly distinct. That such a possibil-ity was conceived in the middle of thenineteenth century is, of course, no acci-dent, parallel as it is to the rise of national-ist movements across Europe with theirconceptions of specific national essencesand peculiarities. Aligned to this distinc-tion, though different from it, are discus-sions related to whether humankind — orparticular features of people’s lives — hada single origin or multiple origins. Argu-ments about monogenetic and polygenetictheories, as they are called, featured cru-cially in the study of the origins of lan-guage and the history of specific lan-guages, as will be discussed below.

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Along with the two models of develop-ment, leading respectively to “civilization”and to “civilizations”, a third story shouldbe considered. Specifically Christian, and,in relation to studies of China, usuallyProtestant, this story is found most expli-citly in works of those highly educatedand thoroughly modern scholar-missionar-ies (including Edkins) who we would nowalso refer to as scriptural literalists; thatis, people who took the words of the Bibleas literally true. So with the book of Gen-esis in one hand and a knowledge of recentscientific advances in the other, thesescholars set about to demonstrate as wellas they could that the ultimate monogenet-ic hypothesis, namely that we all derivefrom Adam and Eve, was not only compat-ible with the state of knowledge of thetime but could be proved with academicrigour. In Edkins’s words — about lan-guage but it could equally apply in manyother fields — this work was “for thevindication of Scripture and the progressof knowledge”.18

Positing Adam and Eve at the root ofthe tree of humanity, as this position did,the process of change that produced hu-man diversity often became understoodas one of degeneration, as moving away,step-by-step from the point of our commonorigin and God’s first revelation, both lit-erally in geography and metaphorically inculture. From this point of view, howeversavage or barbaric the people you mightmeet in your travels, their origins werethe same as yours and, though subject todifferent conditions since the originalrevelation, you and they were all part ofa common brotherhood and their forebearshad, therefore, received the same revela-tion from God as had yours. One attrac-tion, then, for the study of ancient societ-

ies and languages in the nineteenth cen-tury — Egyptian, Accadian, Sanskrit,Chinese — was to try to recover thoseremnant parts of the original revelationpreserved in non-Semitic textual tradi-tions. As Max Müller, Professor of Sanskritat Oxford, editor of the Sacred Books ofthe East series and doyen of comparativephilology, wrote in 1878: “The more I seeof the so-called heathen religions, the moreI feel convinced that they contain germsof the highest truth.”19

Yet the fact remained that Europeancivilization was only made possible, insome versions of this theory at least, byits Christian character. The revelation ofJesus reversed the degenerative processand not only granted salvation to human-ity but also a civilized character to society.As Medhurst wrote: “Of course we mustnot look for that high degree of improve-ment, and those well-defined civil rights,which are in great measure the effects ofChristianity.”

It was on this theoretical terrain thatEdkins produced his work that attemptedto demonstrate that “the Languages ofEurope and Asia have a Common Origin”.To understand this work — its motiva-tions and its methodologies — we mustwalk this ideological landscape with him,following the same scholarly maps, ob-serving what lay at his horizon. Settingaside the arrogance of hindsight, we canapproach an understanding of how Edkinsand his colleagues saw themselves andtheir work among Chinese people only byallowing argument from a literal readingof Genesis to stand as the unassailablefoundation of theory.

37

More Than One Adam?

JOSEPH EDKINS

Edkins’s death at 81, in 1905, producedfour obituaries, one in each of the majorChinese Studies journals of his day.20 Theoverriding impression from them is of anold campaigner who had died in harness,a figure notable a generation or two beforewho continued to plough his furrow withenergy but whose best work had beenproduced some time earlier. There is, inone at least, the snide tone of a youngercompetitor keen to prick the bubble ofwhat he evidently saw as an overblownreputation.

Edkins was born in Nailsworth, nearStroud, in Gloucestershire, on December19, 1823. The son of a Congregationalminister who also ran the school whereEdkins was first educated, he later enteredCoward College for theological training.He graduated in arts from the Universityof London and was ordained in 1847 at theage of 24 in the Stepney Meeting House,London, a Congregational institution. Ongaining ordination, he left England forChina under the auspices of the LondonMissionary Society, arriving in Hong Kongin July 1848 and proceeding to Shanghaisoon after. In his first correspondence withthe LMS in London in 1848 Edkins startedto plead for a Miss Phillips to join him inChina. These pleas continued for almosttwo years, and were evidently never ac-ceded to, as he finally had to let the Lon-don office know that his engagement hadterminated.21 His colleagues at Shanghaiincluded Medhurst, William Lockhart, anotable medical missionary with whom hewould later travel to Beijing, and Alexan-der Wylie. With Wylie, in 1857, he formedthe Shanghai Literary and Debating Soci-ety that later became the North China

Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society ofNorth China. In 1858 he left for Englandin order to marry his wife, Jane (neeStobbs, 1838–61), a Presbyterian minister’sdaughter from Orkney. Returning the fol-lowing year, in 1860 he made severalfamous visits to the leaders of the TaipingRebellion in Nanjing and Suzhou, not farup the Yangtse from Shanghai.

After the opening of more treaty portsafter the Second Opium War, in 1860Edkins moved to Yantai in Shandong, thento Tianjin in 1861 and finally in May 1863to live permanently in Beijing, where hespent nearly 30 years. Jane Edkins haddied of dysentery in 1861 at the age of 23but some of her letters home were pub-lished posthumously under the titleChinese Scenes and People, with Notices ofChristian Missions and Missionary Life ina Series of Letters from Various Parts ofChina. In one of her letters to Edkins’sbrother she wrote endearingly:

You ask me to tell you about yourbrother. He is very well indeed,and is busy as a bee. We breakfastevery morning at eight, and haveprayers before. He spends themorning at home studying, and inthe after part of the day he is inthe city preaching, and otherwiseattending to the work of the Mis-sion. I have got his study all innice order, and there he is in hisglory. From nine till one each dayyou might take a peep in and findhim excogitating, diving deeperand deeper into the mysteries ofBuddhism and Confucianism.Seated thus by his study table heputs me in mind of that picture,"As Happy as a King," for he looks

38


quite that, with all his Chinesebooks in notable confusion besidehim.22

In Beijing, Edkins spent much of his timepreaching in the hospital Lockhart hadestablished and otherwise going aboutmission business in Beijing and surrounds.In 1862 he requested that a Miss White besent to marry him and she arrived earlythe following year. They married on May9, 1863.23 The second Mrs Edkins sub-sequently founded a school for girls andgave birth to three daughters. The familywent to England in 1873, when Edkinswas honoured in 1875 with a doctorate indivinity from Edinburgh University. Theysubsequently returned to Beijing in 1876,but his wife died the next year from breastcancer — two of their children hadalready died and, two years later, the thirdgirl was buried next to her mother andtwo sisters.24

Relations between Edkins and someyounger missionaries from the LMS sta-tioned in Beijing became strained by thelate 1870s. In particular, it would appearthat Edkins was viewed as being too gen-erous to Chinese converts with the mis-sion’s funds. His younger colleagues wererather more suspicious than Edkins of themotivations of new converts who weregiven to “backsliding” as it was called.Ultimately, as Box wrote in his obituary:“In 1880 he resigned his connection withthe L.M.S., not through any lack of in-terest in mission work, for until his deathhe was devoted to the cause of missions,but through difference of opinion with hiscolleagues as to methods of mission work.”

There was, however, another side tothis story revealed in his unpublishedcorrespondence. For the second time in

his life, head office of the LMS appears tohave refused Edkins’s request to get mar-ried — this time to an expatriate Germanmissionary by the name of Miss JohannaSchmidt.25 After resigning from the LMS,Edkins married Miss Schmidt and beganworking for the Inspector-General of Im-perial Maritime Customs while still activein the life of the church. About 1890 theymoved to Shanghai, where they stayeduntil his death. Little is known about thethird Mrs Edkins, including how long shestayed in China, and when and where shedied. Box relates Edkins’s passing in a su-perb description of the “good death”:

As she [Johanna] sat by his bedsideshe saw his eyes fixed upward and hisface suffused with a strange light. Hislips moved, and presently she heardhim murmur, “Wonderful! Wonder-ful!” She asked him what he saw, andhe replied, “I cannot tell you, but youwill know what it means tomorrow!”It was on the morrow he passedthrough the gates of death into “theGlory Land”, of which he evidentlyhad a vision.26

Throughout his time as a missionary,Edkins was also writing. His scholarlyoutput is extraordinary in its sheervolume, its range and its quality. HenriCordier’s obituary is, in reality, a catalogueof Edkins’s works and incomplete thoughit is, it lists more than 140 books andlearned articles. His best-known worktoday, though it is by no means as well-known as it ought to be, is his ChineseBuddhism: a Volume of Sketches, Historical,Descriptive and Critical from 1880.27

However, it is clear that, as Bushell wrotein his obituary, “China’s Place in Philology

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More Than One Adam?

was probably the book nearest the au-thor’s heart”.28 But he continues:

…the general consensus of opinionis that it hardly suffices to provehis somewhat daring thesis of thecommon origin of the languages ofEurope and Asia. Dr Edkins wasalways original. His reading ofChinese literature was most extens-ive, and the words of the otherlanguages cited in the text wereactually taken down from themouths of Tibetans, Koreans,Manchus, and Mongols, yet thetheme was almost too discursiveeven for his power of concentra-tion.

Others, too, marvelled at his proficiencyin languages; thus Box: “His knowledgeof languages was most extensive — Eng-lish, German, French, Latin, Greek,Hebrew, Assyrian, Persian, Sanscrit,Tamil, Chinese (in most of its dialects), theMiao dialects (…), Japanese, Manchu,Corean, Thibetan, Mongolian and others.”

The anonymous obituarist in theJournal of the China Branch of the RoyalAsiatic Society was more caustic:

It is only fair to say that in hisphilological theories Dr Edkinsstood almost alone, and that verylittle sympathy, sometimes evenvery little patience, was shown tothem by other scholars whosestudy of the Chinese language it-self had perhaps been more thor-ough than that of Dr Edkins.However, it must be said that incombining a knowledge of Easternlanguages — of Hebrew, Persianand Sanskrit — with a knowledge

of the modern languages ofEurope, Dr Edkins was perhapsthe foremost of his generation. Thevast scope of his language studiesmade them all more or less superfi-cial, while at the same time it madeit possible for him to make philolo-gical comparisons which wouldhave been impossible to anyoneelse.29

In these comments it is possible to see theemergence of one style of scholarship, andthe concomitant decline in another, whichhas ruled much of humanities scholarshipto this day. Edkins was one of the lastgeneration, in Chinese Studies at least, ofthe grand comparativists. Partly as a resultof the decline in the kind of broad linguist-ic training he received, and partly becauseof the growth in university departmentsconcentrating on a single subject (theChairs in Chinese Studies at Oxford andCambridge date to 1876 and 1888 respect-ively), scholars of later generations haveploughed much narrower, but muchdeeper.

CHINA’S PLACE IN PHILOLOGY

By Edkins’s time, the shared history of theIndo-European languages had beendemonstrated and accepted. The great im-petus for this study had been the growthof European scholarship on Sanskrit, andthe major figure in the first half of thenineteenth century in this field had beenFranz Bopp (1791–1867). Bopp had shownthe relationship between Sanskrit, Persian,Greek, Latin and the Germanic languages(and later Old Slavonian, Lithuanian, andZend — the language of the ZoroastrianAvesta scriptures) through his comparativestudy of grammatical forms; thus his first

40


work was on verbal inflexions. He is bestknown for his Comparative Grammar ofthe Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuani-an, Gothic, German, and Sclavonic Lan-guages which appeared in German from1833 and in English translation beginningin 1845.30

Edkins’s comments on the Indo-European project open his book:

To show that the languages ofEurope and Asia may be conveni-ently referred to one origin in theMesopotamian and Armenian re-gion, is the aim of the presentwork. Sanscrit philologists, en-tranced with admiration of thetreasure they discovered south ofthe Himalayan chain, forgot tolook north of that mighty barrier.Limiting their researches to theregions traversed by Alexanderthe Great, they allowed themselvesto assume that there was no access-ible path by which the linguisticinvestigator could legitimatelyreach the vast area existing bey-ond their adopted boundary. Theresult of this abstinence on thepart of Bopp and other scholars ofhigh fame has been that the ideaof comparing Chinese, Mongol,and Japanese with our own moth-er-tongue appears to some chimer-ical, hopeless, and uncalled for.

“Yet,” he continues:

…Scripture, speaking with an au-thoritative voice and from an im-mense antiquity, asserts the unityof the human race, traces the mostgeneral features of the primevalplanting of nations, and declares

that all men once spoke a commonlanguage. The most revered andmost ancient of human books, inmaking these statements, sheds abright and steady light on the ob-scurity of history, and at the sametime reveals the imperfection ofthose views held by some modernthinkers and writers who denythat the languages of the worldhad one origin and that its racescame from one stock.

Edkins was by no means the first to seelinks between Chinese and languages ofpeoples far to the west — such discussionsgo back at least to John Webb’s An Histor-ical Essay Endeavouring a Probability thatthe Language of the Empire of China is thePrimitive Language, published in 1669.31

Most of these works refer to Biblicalchronology, a detailed discussion of whichwill occur below, as the crucial evidenceput forward for the truth of Edkins’s pro-position comes from the beginning of theeleventh chapter of Genesis: “And thewhole of earth was of one language, andof one speech.” First, however, we shouldnote that Scripture was only the spur toEdkins’s work, and did not relieve thescholar from further research, informedby the most advanced studies of his time.Indeed, Edkins placed his work in a thor-oughly modern linguistic context and inthis book was launching a serious critiqueof accepted linguistic wisdom. Thus, rely-ing on Max Müller’s hypothesis of “dia-lectal regeneration” — first published inMüller’s Lectures on the Science of Languagein 1864 — to bolster his argument, Edkinscontended that the Indo-European inflec-ted languages and agglutinative languages(such as those of Tartary, South India andJapan) were fundamentally related. This

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More Than One Adam?

flew in the face of contemporary ideasabout language taxonomy and was onereason, Edkins claimed, for the exclusionof Asian languages from comparativephilology.

Another was the so-called isolatingnature of some of these languages, Chinesebeing the classic case. In Chinese mostmorphemes are free-floating and rely onsyntax to acquire grammatical function:words neither inflect, as in most Europeanlanguages, nor glue together — the etymo-logical root of “agglutinative” — as in Ja-panese. In the case of Chinese, it was obvi-ously impossible to compare its verb end-ings with those in, say, Sanskrit, becauseit didn’t have any. Thus, Edkins proposedthat the word roots of Chinese and similarlanguages should be compared to bringthem into the comparative fold. This didnot find favour with some reviewers butit did represent an attempt to introduceinto the discussion an original methodo-logy designed to address a question thathad previously simply been ignored.

Implicit in Edkins’s arguments is hisdefence not only of Scripture in generalbut, more specifically, for the position thatthe languages of humankind had a singleorigin. For Edkins, with his scientific castof mind, finding the language of Adamhimself was never going to be a viablescholarly project, though he did allowhimself some speculations of the nature of“the primeval language”. Rather, in ar-guing the monogenetic case on purelyphilological grounds, Edkins, arguably,sought to lay a scientific foundation forfaith. In these debates it is worth stressingonce more that for Edkins, Scripture wasnot the proof; rather, it was philological— and other modern scientific — argu-

ment that worked towards a vindicationof Scripture. He applies the same attitudeto another lively field in nineteenth-cen-tury scholarship: “After a careful siftingof recent discoveries by the geologists onthe antiquity of man, it will be the dutyof the Christian theologian to examineafresh the question of early Biblical chro-nology. All new light brought upon thissubject from unexpected quarters must becheerfully accepted…”32

And, similarly, Edkins adopted a modelof linguistic evolution pioneered by MaxMüller on the Darwinian model. The Originof Species had been published in 1859, andprovided linguistics with the tools capableof turning the study into a science, as itwas perceived, with linguistic laws beingthe equivalent of the laws of the naturalsciences. Müller adopted a model of natur-al selection in language with alacrity ar-guing, in the Lectures on the Science ofLanguage, that languages formed, changedand died out through a series of processescorresponding to the biological model,except that:

…natural selection, if we couldbut always see it, is invariably ra-tional selection. It is not any acci-dental variety that survives andperpetuates itself; it is the individu-al that comes nearest to the origin-al intention of its creator, or whatis best calculated to accomplish theends for which the type or speciesto which it belongs was called intobeing, that conquers in the greatstruggle for life. So it is in thoughtand language.33

Thus, the imperatives of religion and sci-ence were both met: the fundamentals ofthe faith were safe from being overthrown

42


by the discoveries of comparative philo-logy and comparative philology would beable to take its place beside astronomy andgeology in the scientific pantheon.

This position, was, of course, more thanacceptable to Edkins, providing him witha mechanism of linguistic change to applyto his grand model of the development ofthe world’s languages. It should be noted,however, that for Edkins language evolu-tion is not teleological. We are, perhaps,too accustomed to seeing the process ofbiological evolution leading inexorably tous; that is, from lesser to greater complex-ity up a developmental ladder. In fact,however, natural selection need not leadto greater complexity, simply to greatersuitability to the environment in whichthe organism finds him or herself. Thus,for Bible-believing linguists, languageevolution could simply mean languagechange as the people who spoke each lan-guage found themselves in new environ-ments. This is important from two pointsof view: firstly, the original language wasgiven by God to Adam and it would beinconceivable to believe that this firstlanguage could be improved over time —if anything the reverse should be the case,as in the model of degeneration; secondly,Edkins and his colleagues were linguistic-ally very capable and would have appreci-ated that languages do not necessarily in-crease in complexity as time passes. An-cient languages like Latin, Greek andHebrew were, after all, no less complexthan modern English or modern Chinese.

To return to the book itself: China’sPlace in Philology reads as a linguistic andcultural history, from prehistory up to thedevelopment of European languages incomparatively recent historical times.

There is not the space here to give a com-plete summary of Edkins’s work, and in-deed much of it is complex and needs tobe read closely to follow his arguments,so here I will concentrate on the underpin-nings of his research and give a broadoutline of his views.

Edkins’s argument does not, in fact,begin with language but with a comparis-on between the civilizations of the ancientChinese and the ancient inhabitants of theMiddle East: “The resemblance existingbetween the old [that is, ancient] Chinesecivilization and that of the Hamite race[that is, the descendants of Ham, thesecond son of Noah] long ago developedon the banks of the Nile and the Euphratesis very remarkable."34

There follows a catalogue of similaritiesin customs, agricultural methods, and ar-chitecture, amongst other topics, and thebasic proposition is raised:

So close a similarity in geniusbetween the descendants of Cushand Mizraim [two of the sons ofHam], who founded the first artsof the west, and the Chinese, whoon the east of the Indo-Europeanarea have always reigned supremein intellect and manual ingenuity,argues a probable connexion ofrace.35

Importantly, for Edkins, there were also(as he saw them) close affinities betweenthe worship, sacrifices and religiousbuildings in the ancient Holy Land andthose in China. For him this pointed to anoriginal monotheism in the Chinese, amonotheism that derived from their sharedancestry with the Semitic peoples. Thisstance echoes throughout the history of

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More Than One Adam?

the Western encounter with China, mostparticularly, of course, in missionarycircles where the possibility of conversionwas seen to be enhanced if, at the veryroot of Chinese religion, lay a belief in asingle all-powerful deity — especially ifthat deity was actually, originally, Je-hovah. It also had direct consequences forperhaps the longest-running and mostbitterly fought controversy amongst themissionary fraternity in nineteenth-cen-tury China — the so-called term question.The essence of the “term question” can beeasily stated: what is the best translationof the word “God” in Chinese? Which, ifany, of the words found in Chinese textsmeant what Christians mean by God? Hugestorehouses of human effort were expen-ded on these questions, and acrimony wasoften not far from the surface, as, forProtestants at least, translation of Scripturewas at the core of their vocation and it wasobviously imperative to get the word for“God” right. So, if the ancient Chinesewere truly the descendants of people whohad received the original revelation, themystery and nature of ancient Chinese re-ligion could be understood and the rightwords could be identified.

Now, as obvious for Edkins that theChinese were originally monotheistic wasthe fact, observable about him in Beijingas well as in the most ancient of texts, thatChinese religious practice also includedfeatures not found in ancient semitic reli-gion. One of these clearly non-monotheist-ic practices was the role played by heav-enly bodies in astrology as well as in starcults. Edkins uses the term “Sabeanism”to describe this style of worship, explain-ing: “That the early Chinese should, inaddition to their monotheism, have be-come infected with the Sabeanism that Job

condemned, and with some other heathenusages found to prevail long after in thecountries from which they came andthrough which they passed, need not bewondered at…”36

Thus, the people we know as Chineseoriginated in the Mesopotamian regionand migrated slowly eastward, arriving inChina at “nearly 3,000 years B.C.”. Theyentered that land, “by the usual highwayfrom Mohammedan Tartary, into Kansuand Shensi, founding colonies along thebanks of the western tributaries of theYellow River, where we find the ancestorsof the family,”37 then subsequentlyspread out into those areas of early Chinesesettlement we know from the ancienttexts.

These Chinese were not, however, thefirst to enter the territory of China. InEdkins’s scheme, the “migrations of raceshave been in the direction of radii from acommon centre where the first human pairwere created”.38 One route was into Indiathrough the Punjab and was followed firstby the Dravidians “and after them theHindoos”. Another group — “the Easternand Western Himalaic races” — crossedTibet and followed the Brahmaputra,heading south and east into Indo-Chinaand north and east into south-westernChina. The Chinese, meantime, went northand west along what became known, muchlater, as the Silk Route. The Himalaicbranch that entered China from the southconstituted, according to Edkins, the“Miau, Lo lo, Nung, [and] Yau” ethnicgroups known under the current dispens-ation as “national minorities”. This south-erly branch met with the northerly branchin various regions across China.

44


Following this explanation of how theChinese entered their destined territory,Edkins moves back to postulate on theorigins of language itself. He proposes thatsome elements and characteristics of “theprimeval language” are retrievable byphilological comparison. Thus, “that it wasmonosyllabic is deducible from the fact,that in all the families, from the Indo-European upwards, the roots are monosyl-lables”39 and “the structure of sentencesin the primeval language, it may be reas-onably concluded, was according to theorder of nature. The nominative precededthe transitive verb, and the transitive verbpreceded its object. The Chinese, theHebrew, and the English here agree.”40

The other way of determining the natureof the first language, of course, is by re-course to Scripture. The classic statementof language origin in the Bible is from thesecond chapter of Genesis: “And out ofthe ground the Lord God formed everybeast of the field; and every fowl of theair; and brought them unto Adam to seewhat he would call them: and whatsoeverAdam called every living creature, thatwas the name thereof.”41 This, in Edkins’sreading, meant that while “divine assist-ance” was required to make language, itwas not fully developed at that stage. Thiswas so because the initial language act wassimply the naming of animals — full lan-guage competence was a gradual processaided by divine assistance but not grantedcomplete. Edkins quotes a Dr Magee ap-provingly in this context: “It is sufficientif we suppose the use of language taughthim [Adam] with respect to such things aswere necessary, and that he was left to theexercise of his own faculties for furtherimprovement upon this foundation.”42

Having established the essential charac-teristics of the primeval language, Edkinsaddresses the important issue of combiningBiblical chronology with his scheme oflanguage development. The downfall ofthe primeval language was, of course, theConfusion of Tongues at the Tower of Ba-bel, an event Edkins dates to 400 yearsafter Noah’s Flood, which itself took place2,200 years after Creation.43 However, hisposition on Babel is, perhaps, surprising:

The Scriptural account of the De-luge and of the Confusion ofTongues I suppose to refer partic-ularly to the world according toits dimensions as then understood,

the [pasa oikou-mene, all inhabited regions of theday]. Colonies that went beyondthe limits of the Flood of Noah, ifthere were such, were lost fromview.44

What this enables, for him, is the possibil-ity that in some specific cases the primevallanguage may have survived God’s inter-vention, if the speakers of the primevallanguage, or their descendents, no longerlived in the world as known by the Baby-lonians. He cites two cases of this: first, inGenesis 4 it says that when Cain was ex-pelled from the presence of the Lord, he“dwelt in the land of Nod, to the east ofEden”.45 With his wife, he subsequentlyproduced the line of succession that ranfrom Enoch to Lamech and beyond. Ofthis, Edkins says:

The Cainites went…to the east.Whether any of them and the oth-er descendents of Adam passedinto East Asia and America duringthose 2,000 years now so little

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More Than One Adam?

known, we cannot tell. If they did,they would have there been bey-ond the reach of the Deluge, whichscience has shown did not extendto the more distant parts of thecontinent.46

The second case is that of the Cushites, thedescendants of Cush, the son of Ham,grandson of Noah and father of Nimrod,the mighty hunter. The Cushites were,then, Nimrod’s people who built theTower at Babel. Edkins proposes, on thebasis of the shared culture of the Babyloni-ans and the Chinese that he observedearlier, that the wave of emigration thatproduced the ancient Chinese left theCushite region after the Flood — therebyacquiring Babylonian civilization — butbefore the Confusion of Tongues — topreserve the primeval language. Thus,when these Chinese arrived in China fromthe north they displaced the people theymet there, the Eastern and Western Him-alaics who had arrived earlier from thesouth, and who were the result of migra-tions from before the Flood, and thereforeless civilized. This accounts for why bothgroups in China spoke monosyllabic lan-guages like the primeval tongue as theywere not subjected to God’s punishmentafter the Tower of Babel.

I have spent a good deal of space onEdkins’s explanations of the origins of theChinese people and their language. In therest of the book, he proceeds to explain insimilar terms the Semitic, Himalaic, Tura-nian, Malayo-Polynesian and Indo-European language families, though I willnot cover that ground here. Let me addthat, while cataloguing those parts of hiswork I have neglected in this paper, eachstep of his developmental edifice is illus-

trated with copious linguistic examplesdisplaying his remarkable breadth ofknowledge. The point of the whole enter-prise, however, remains a proof of thefundamental unity of the world’s lan-guages and of the world’s peoples, andespecially the original revelation that allpeoples received in the beginning. In hisconclusion he writes, inter alia quotingthe seventeenth chapter of Acts and afamous passage from Max Müller’s Lec-tures on the Science of Religion:

“God hath made of one blood allnations of men for to dwell on allthe face of the earth.” When theEuropean goes into the other con-tinents of the world, as traveller,colonist, missionary, and civilizer,he meets everywhere with men ofthe same race. “But what have wein common with the Turanians,with Chinese, and Samoyedes?Very little it may seem: and yet itis not very little, for it is our com-mon humanity. It is not the yellowskin, or the high cheek-bones, thatmake the man. Nay, if we look butsteadily into those black Chineseeyes, we shall find that there, too,there is a soul that responds to asoul, and that the God whom theymean is the same God whom wemean, however hopeless their ut-terance, however imperfect theirworship.” Language proves themto be one with ourselves.47

Edkins’s radical monogenism is, thus,buttressed on the one hand by his firmbelief in the literal truth of Scripture, andon the other by an ethic of the commonbrotherhood of all peoples; the savage, thebarbaric and the civilized. In a kind of

46


reply essay in The China Review to someharsh reviews of China’s Place in Philology,Edkins describes the two schools ofthought relating to ancient China. Thefirst, he claims, “looks upon its old civiliz-ation as self-grown, desiderates no connec-tion with the old Asiatic empires of theOld Testament, and detracts in many waysfrom the credit hitherto allowed to theancient Chinese”. “The other party”, ofwhich Edkins was a member, he suggests,“desires to harmonize the safe conclusionsof modern geologists and ethnologists withregard to the antiquity of man, both withthe historical traditions of Judea andBabylon, and with those of the Chinese.”The choice between them, he says, isbetween the proposition that “religion,language and history are one in origin”and the alternative that, “there was morethan one Adam”.48 In his view, anypolygenetic model was, by definition,against science, against Scripture, andagainst common brotherhood.

CONCLUSION

Edkins’s book was ambitious in its scope,taking in all the world’s peoples and theirlanguages. There is, however, a strikingabsence: the living, breathing, speakingChinese he lived among. This is somewhatstrange as his other writings, onBuddhism, on fengshui, on other aspectsof folklore and religion, are full of anec-dotes and the fruits of his day-to-day inter-actions. We also know from varioussources, including his correspondence,that he spent much of each day while athome preaching and circulating among theChinese who attended the mission hospitalto which he was attached in Beijing.

Even stranger, perhaps, given that thekind of philology Edkins practisedstressed seeking out the most ancient oftexts and reconstructing the early pronun-ciation of characters, is his lack of interestin what the classical Chinese texts saidthemselves about the origins of their lan-guage. They are certainly not silent onmatters of how writing was invented, howpeople communicated before writing, andhow things came to be named. It must beobserved, however, that the Chinese liter-ary tradition always stressed the writtenover the oral, and speech itself appears tohave been taken as a given. With the onlywritten language in their known world,the ancient Chinese do not seem to havebeen much interested in comparative lan-guage studies and since Edkins’s projectrelied on the twin pillars of spoken lan-guage and comparison, it may simply havebeen that the ancient Chinese texts weresimply answering different questions fromthe ones he was asking.

Comparative studies of all kinds on thescale that Edkins undertook, especiallythe comparative study of languages, areparticularly notable for including in theirpurview both the language (or mythology,or religion, etc.) of the observed people,or peoples, and the language (or whatever)of the observer. Thus, in Edkins’s studythe Chinese language and the Europeanlanguages stand at each end of the schemehe sets out of the unrolling of linguistichistory. To be sure, the European lan-guages are seen to be the last group tohave evolved but they are not, as I ex-plained earlier, regarded as the most com-plex or most perfect of linguistic creations.By including his own language andChinese in the same scheme, Edkins’smodel, and indeed comparative philology

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More Than One Adam?

as a discipline, can be seen both as relativ-izing the language of the analyst andgranting the language of study a degreeof respect. On the other hand, with themove to the study of single languages andsocieties at the end of the nineteenth cen-tury, and the decline of this kind of com-parative study, the scholar became re-moved from the object of research. TheChinese became discursively disconnected,if not from the rest of the world, certainlyfrom Europe and the West.

With this kind of model — us here andthem over there — there developed a sensethat we inhabited discrete worlds andways of being. And from this, perhaps,developed an anxiety that somethingneeded to be crossed to get from one tothe other; a psychic metaphor of the vastEurasian steppe. Nineteenth-century mis-sionary writings on China in English cer-tainly display anxieties on the part of theirauthors but those anxieties do not, in myreading, appear to include the sense thatno matter how hard we try we will nevertruly understand the Chinese mind. “Eastis east and west is west and never thetwain will meet” is a notion surprisinglyabsent in this context. It is absent, I wouldsuggest, because these were people of reli-gion, something we must take seriously ifwe are to approach an understanding ofthe encounter between Chinese people andWesterners before our times. Edkins andothers like him knew exactly what theywere doing in China and why they werethere. We may not approve of what theywere trying to achieve but there is littledoubt that the only meaningful thing thatdivided Europeans and Chinese was thatwe were Christian and, by and large, theywere not — yet.

ENDNOTES

1 Edkins, Rev. J, China’s Place in Philology: An At-tempt to Show that the Languages of Europe and Asiahave a Common Origin (London: Trubner, 1871).2 For an outline of the multitude of missions, seeLatourette, K.S., A History of Christian Missions inChina (London: Society for Promoting ChristianKnowledge, 1929).3 Teng, Ssu-yü and J.K. Fairbank, with E-tu ZenSun, Chaoying Fang and others, China's Response tothe West; a Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954, re-printed until at least 1979).4 On Legge, see Girardot, N., The Victorian Transla-tion of China: James Legge’s Oriental Progress(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), andnumerous papers by Laurence Pfister. On Edkins,see my “Meeting the Celestial Master”, East AsianHistory, 15/16, June/December pp.53–66.5 Boerschmann, Ernst, Chinese Architecture and itsRelation to Chinese Culture (Washington: Govt. Print.Office, 1912). This was an offprint from the Smithso-nian report for 1911.6 Price, Maurice, Christian Missions and OrientalCivilizations, a Study in Culture Contact; the Reactionsof Non-Christian Peoples to Protestant Missions fromthe Standpoint of Individual and Group Behaviour:Outline, Materials, Problems, and Tentative Interpret-ations (Shanghai: privately printed, 1924).7 Williams, Raymond, Keywords (London: Fontana,1983), pp.57–8, italics in the original.8 On Chinese punishments, see Mason, G.H., ThePunishments of China, illustrated by twenty-two en-gravings: with explanations in English and French(London :W. Miller, 1801). Although he did not usethe word “civilized” or its equivalents it is worthnoting that Leibniz ranked China in advance ofEurope itself in areas of human relations at the veryend of the seventeenth century. See, for instance, inhis “Preface to the NOVISSIMA SINICA” (trans.Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemount, Jr.), in Cookand Rosemount, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Writingson China (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), pp.46–7:"…who would have believed that there is on eartha people who, though we are in our view so veryadvanced in every branch of behaviour, still surpassus in comprehending the precepts of civillife?…certainly they surpass us (though it is alsoshameful to confess this) in practical philosophy, thatis, in the precepts of ethics and politics adapted tothe present life and use of morals. Indeed it is diffi-cult to describe how beautifully all the laws of theChinese, in contrast to those of other peoples, are

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directed to the achievement of public tranquillityand the establishment of social order…"9 Barrow, Sir John, Travels in China: Containing De-scriptions, Observations and Comparisons Made andCollected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Im-perial Palace of Yuen-min-yuen, and on a SubsequentJourney from Pekin to Canton. In which it is Attemptedto Appreciate the Rank that this Extraordinary Empiremay be Considered to Hold in the Scale of CivilizedNations (London: T. Cadell and W. Davis, 1804),pp.3–4. Underlining in the original.10 Ibid, pp.28–9.11 Ibid, pp.50–1.12 Ibid, p.29.13 This is not to say that Barrow does not dabble inracial theory of a more egregious sort. In a bizarrepassage he cites his own Travels into the Interior ofSouth Africa of 1802 (a journey he made after return-ing from China) opining that the structure of theupper lid of the eye of “a real Hottentot” was justlike that of a Chinese and, in general, “their physicalcharacters agree in almost every point”. Recalling “aHottentot who attended me,” he claims this man was“so very like a Chinese servant I had in Canton, bothin person, features, manners, and tone of voice, thatalmost always inadvertently I called him by the nameof the latter”: Ibid, pp.48–9.14 Medhurst, W.H., China: its State and Prospects,with Especial Reference to the Spread of the Gospel,Containing Allusions to the Antiquity, Extent, Popula-tion, Civilization, Literature, and Religion of theChinese (London: J. Snow, 1840).15 Medhurst, W.H., China: Its State and Prospects,pp.97–8. It is worth noting in this context that alsolike Barrow, Medhurst points out that “China pos-sesses as much civilization as Turkey now, or Eng-land a few centuries ago” and that the Chinese areexaggerated in their self-assessment: “They denom-inate China ‘the flowery nation,’ — ‘the region ofeternal summer,’ — ‘the land of the sages,’ — ‘thecelestial empire,’ — while they unscrupulously termall foreigners ‘barbarians,’ and sometimes load themwith epithets still more degrading and contemptuous,such as swine, monkeys, and devils.” (p.98) He con-cludes with a discussion of the advantages of attempt-ing evangelization in “civilized nations” rather thanin those “altogether barbarous”: in the latter case henotes, “Instances have occurred of savage tribesfalling upon the messengers of mercy; and, immedi-ately on their arrival, proceeding to plunder, murder,and, even eat them. But this is not likely to occuramong a people, in a great measure, civilized” (p.120).16 Williams, Keywords, p.59.17 Laffitte, Pierre (trans. John Carey Hall), A GeneralView of Chinese Civilization and of the Relations of the

West with China (London: Trübner and Co; Yoko-hama, Shanghai & Hong Kong: Kelly & Walsh; Tokyo& Yokohama: Z.P. Maruya & Co., 1887).18 Edkins, China’s Place in Philology, p.xii.19 Müller, M., Letter to A.P. Stanley, quoted inGirardot, The Victorian Translation of China, p.245.20 Bushell, S.W., “Obituary Rev Joseph Edkins,D.D.”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (January,1906), pp.269–71, Box, Rev. E., “In Memorium, Rev.Joseph Edkins, D.D.”, The Chinese Recorder, 36 (June,1905), pp.282–9 (see also “Editorial Comment” in theMay 1905 issue, pp.261–2), Anon., “In MemoriumRev. Joseph Edkins, D.D.”, Journal of the ChinaBranch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol 36 (1905),pp.157–9, Cordier, H., “Nécrologie Joseph Edkins”,T’oung Pao, VI (July, 1905), pp.359–66. See also,Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese:giving a list of their publication, and obituary noticesof the deceased with copious indexes (Shanghai:American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1867, reprintedTaibei: Ch’eng-wen Publishing Company, 1967),pp.187–91.21 Edkins, letters to Rev J.J. Freeman (13.10.1848)and to Rev. Arthur Tidman (14.1.1849, 13.7.1849,11.4.1850, 11.6.1850) in the Archives of the Councilfor World Mission: Central China, London Univer-sity, SOAS.22 Edkins, Jane, Chinese Scenes and People, with No-tices of Christian Missions and Missionary Life in aSeries of Letters from Various Parts of China, with aNarrative of a Visit to Nanking by Her Husband theRev. J. Edkins, also a Memoir by her Father, the Rev.W. Stobbs (London: J. Nisbet, 1863). The excerpt isquoted in Box’s obituary of Joseph, p.284.23 Edkins, letters to Tidman (6.9.1862, 11.4.1863,25.5.1863), Council for World Mission: North China,London University, SOAS.24 Edkins, letters to Tidman (12.9.1865) letters toMullens (27.2.1866, 14.11.1867, 28.12.1877), Meechto Whitehouse (22.9.1879), Council for World Mis-sion: North China.25 Edkins, letter to Whitehouse (13.12.1880), lettersto Thompson (21.12.1880, 1.2.1881), Council forWorld Mission: North China.26 Box, Obituary, p.289. See also the editorial com-ment from The Chinese Recorder: “We said it was withmingled feelings that we write of his death. Whilehis place will be vacant here and his presence missed,yet when one, like this, is gathered in as a shock ofcorn, fully ripe, when the streets of toil are changedfor the streets of gold, when the mortal puts on im-mortality, one cannot refrain from a feeling of sym-pathy with the joy of one who has gone up higher,who has stepped across the border and sees hisMaster face to face.”

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More Than One Adam?

27 Edkins, J., Chinese Buddhism: a Volume ofSketches, Historical, Descriptive and Critical (London:Trubner & Co., 1880).28 Bushell, “Obituary,” p.270.29 Anon, “In Memorium,” pp.158–9. It is probablyscholars such as the one that wrote this obituary thatBox was referring to when he wrote, “[Edkins’s] twopet aversions (and I believe his only aversions) werethe Higher Critics and those Philologists who de-clined to accept his theories on words, their originand connection with each other. He rightly, I think,applied the laws of evolution to language, but hismethods, I must confess, went beyond the limits ofmy poor comprehension.” (“Obituary,” p. 288).30 Bopp, Franz (trans. Edward B. Eastwick), A Com-parative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin,Lithuanian, Gothic, German, and Sclavonic Languages(London, Madden & Malcolm; James Malcolm: Lon-don, 1845–50)31 See, Rachel Ramsey, “China and the Ideal of Orderin John Webb’s 'An Historical Essay…'” Journal ofthe History of Ideas 62, 3 (July 2001), 483–503.32 Edkins, China’s Place in Philology, p.xx.33 Müller, M., Lectures on the Science of Language,quoted in Harris, R. and Taylor, T.J., Landmarks inLinguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from So-crates to Saussure (London: Routledge, 1989), p.166.34 Edkins, China’s Place in Philology, p.135 Ibid, p.236 Ibid, p.30. Job’s condemnation can be found atJob 31:26–28: “If I beheld the sun when it shined,or the moon walking in brightness; And my hearthath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissedmy hand: This also were an iniquity to be punishedby the judge: for I should have denied the God thatis above.”37 Ibid, p.31.38 Ibid, p.34.39 Ibid, p.51.40 Ibid, p.55.41 Genesis 2:19.42 65, On the Atonement, Dissert. 53. This is likelyto be William Magee, successively Bishop of Raphoeand Archbishop of Dublin, Discourses & Dissertationson the Scriptural Doctrines of Atonement & Sacrifice:and on the Principal Arguments Advanced, and theMode of Reasoning Employed, by the Opponents of thoseDoctrines as Held by the Established Church: with anAppendix Containing some Strictures on Mr. Belsham’saccount of the Unitarian Scheme, in his Review of Mr.Wilberforce’s Treatise (London, 1801).

43 Edkins seems generally to follow the chronologyof Dr. William Hales (1778–1821) found in his A NewAnalysis of Chronology; in which an Attempt is Madeto Explain the History and Antiquities of the PrimitiveNations of the World, and the Prophecies Relating tothem, on Principles Tending to Remove the Imperfectionand Discordance of Preceding Systems, 3 vol. (London,1809–12). Hales followed the Septuagint text, unlikethe more-famous chronology of Archbishop JamesUssher (dating Creation to 4004 B.C) who based hiswork on the Masoretic text.44 Edkins, China’s Place in Philology, p.67–8.45 Genesis 4:16.46 Edkins, China’s Place in Philology, p.68.47 Ibid, p.395.48 Edkins, “Chinese Philology”, The China Review1, 3 (1872), 181–90, 1, 5 (1873), 293–300, pp.181–2.

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THE RISE AND FALL — AND POTENTIALRESURGENCE — OF THE COMPARATIVE

METHOD, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TOANTHROPOLOGY

HENRIKA KUKLICK

INTELLECTUAL RESISTANCE TOCOMPARISONS

Each of us has his or her standard academ-ic questions, asked with tedious regularityof the presenters of papers at scholarlymeetings. No names need be mentioned,but we all know a person whose usualploy is to present a speaker with a sum-mary of her paper, ask her if the summaryis correct, and then ask for clarification ofa point or two after being praised for hisaccurate summary. We also all know aperson whose level of antisocial behaviouris tolerated in few places outside the sem-inar room, who will ask a speaker somevariant of the question, “Why have I beenobliged to listen to your stream of sen-tences that make no evident sense?” Myown standard question is, “Compared towhat?”

My point is that a comparative ap-proach is always an option for me and forothers of like mind. The sorts of papersmost likely to provoke my question arethose that consider a development (anydevelopment) in a specific national con-text, without any consideration of thepossibility that the causal factors assumed

to be critical in said national context maynot be so. For example, historians of theUnited States have of late devoted someattention to the baseline assumption of theexistence of “American exceptionalism”,which informs a good deal of Americanscholarship.1 The ingredients of theAmerican exceptionalist argument that theUnited States has had a history unlike anyother nation-state have been few andstraightforward: the United States hasbeen distinctive because it has had nohereditary aristocracy to impede upwardsocial mobility of individuals who earntheir leadership positions; the culture ofthe United States has been formed in a“melting pot” (or sometimes, of late, in a“salad bowl”), in which diverse traits ofa population of immigrants have beenblended in a fortuitous mixture of a con-geries of elements gathered from every-where; and an abundance of land on whichthe geographical frontier receded but(notwithstanding official pronouncements)never really closed has provided recurrentopportunities for ambitious individualsand social innovation. At the moment, inthe popular version of the American excep-tionalist argument, there is a fair amountof conversation that suggests that the

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United States is a nation uniquely guidedand favoured by an interventionist Chris-tian deity. Indeed, as historians of the de-velopment of the discipline of Americanhistory have informed us, employment asan academic historian was once contingenton professing this view.2 Perhaps interna-tional developments will cause this xeno-phobic line to moderate (if not disappearaltogether) in popular discourse in the fu-ture.

What’s wrong with thinking that thereis something exceptional about the thesisof American exceptionalism? Never mindits unwarranted message that the UnitedStates has been free from class-based socialstrife. We also easily recognize that itsimplicit assumption that the United Statusenjoys special status in the eye of God isfound in other national histories. Andcomparison with the standard histories ofother nation-states reveals many narrativeelements that are similar in their particu-lars. For example, for more than two cen-turies Russians have argued (not withoutsome apparent justification) that they havehad in Siberia a frontier conducive tofreedom and innovation.3 Histories ofother white-settler societies — such asSouth Africa and Australia — have poin-ted to factors very similar to those invokedin many histories of the United States (es-pecially those written for schoolchildren);white-settler narratives commonly celeb-rate egalitarian styles of personal relation-ships and unfettered opportunities forupward mobility — although, of course,the populations to which these generaliza-tions apply have been implicitly under-stood to be males of European extraction— and Western (or at least Central)European extraction at that.4 Indeed,school textbook histories everywhere seem

generically designed to impart pride inunique national virtues, and efforts tomodify the moral lessons they convey in-variably provoke controversies.5 In theversions of history taught to schoolchil-dren, if not also in writings of many pro-fessional historians, virtually every na-tion's history is an exceptionalist one.

THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

By contrast, however, comparisons amongnations seem to have been relatively fre-quent in the nineteenth century, when itwas assumed that national histories fitgeneral patterns. In Britain, for example,contemporary Britons and ancient Phoeni-cians were frequently equated. As Alexan-der Wilmot wrote in 1896:

[F]rom the fourteenth to the fourthcentury before Christ the Phoeni-cians…sent forth the most daringand successful fleets and coloniesof antiquity…Their small territoryrequired outlets for a redundantpopulation… In all history thereis no greater analogy than thatbetween the Empire of Britain andthat of Phoenicia at its culminatingpoint of glory…6

In his introduction to Wilmot’s book, thenovelist H. Rider Haggard wrote that thePhoenicians were “this crafty, heartlessand adventurous race…the English of theancient world without the English hon-our”.7 Indeed, the British-Phoeniciananalogy was a commonplace in continentalEurope throughout the nineteenth cen-tury. Moreover, the Phoenicians were notthe only ancient peoples to whom Britonsonce compared themselves. Pondering thecondition of their empire, they attempted

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to explain why Rome fell, and wonderedhow to avoid replicating Rome’s errors.Considering ancient Greece, they weighedthe merits of the social organizations ofAthens and Sparta.8 (It is of interest thatsome academics of British origin who havetaken positions in the United States, suchas Paul Kennedy and Niall Ferguson, haveembraced a similarly moral approach tohistorical analysis, preaching the lessonsto be learned from Britain’s imperial exper-ience to the citizens of what is now anAmerican empire in all but name.)

There is one obvious reason that Bri-tain's educated classes were once wont tocompare themselves with the classical an-cients: they were educated in the classics.But this explanation is only a partial one.If one can speak in the intellectually vagueterm of the zeitgeist (and sometimes onemust), the nineteenth century was a histor-ically self-conscious age, aware that therewas inevitably a “spirit of the age”, inJohn Stuart Mill's phrase.9 And one canonly understand the development of thecomparative method in anthropology ifone sees it as the product of an age withhistoricist sensibilities. Among the mostimportant questions practitioners of thismethod asked was: Was it possible toachieve better understanding of the clas-sical ancients who were responsible forlaying the basis of western civilization byexamining then-contemporary non-west-ern peoples, who were presumed to be inat least some particulars analogous to theancients?

I will discuss the comparative methodin anthropology largely with reference toits use by practitioners who fell within theBritish sphere of influence. This is not be-cause its practice was restricted to that

sphere. The greatest of nineteenth-centuryAmerican anthropologists, Lewis HenryMorgan (1818–81), worked in a style thatresembled nineteenth-century British an-thropologists, although he was not an“armchair” scholar in the mould of hisBritish contemporaries; they were able toachieve eminence in anthropologicalcircles without leaving the comforts ofhome, drawing on information collectedby others to produce their generaliza-tions.10 Morgan was something of a fieldnaturalist, so that direct observation in-formed his analysis of Native Americans(and of beavers); arguably, he alsoreasoned with greater intellectual rigourand used more elaborate documentationthan was employed by most British schol-ars; the informants who imparted theirknowledge of exotic peoples both to Mor-gan and to British armchair anthropolo-gists were apt to be rather contemptuousof the generalizations produced by thelatter.11 And the greatest of late-nine-teenth/early-twentieth century Frenchsocial scientists, Émile Durkheim(1858–1917) — an armchair scholar whoseworks are still considered relevant to con-temporary disciplinary inquiries by anthro-pologists, sociologists, and others12 —also practised a variant of the comparativemethod. Certainly, differences obtainedamong practitioners of this method in dif-ferent national contexts. But the case ofBritish proto-anthropologists who usedthe comparative method should serve asgenerally illustrative.

THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OFCOMPARATIVE RESEARCH

The comparative method in nineteenth-century anthropology was born of four

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The Rise and Fall of the Comparative Method

elements, none of which was peculiar toanthropology: one, an approach to collect-ing information; two, an established styleof dividing intellectual labour; three, amethodological orientation; four, an aes-thetic of generalization and explanation.

Collecting information: There was astandard way to collect information aboutany given specific object, creature, orpractice that was found in many places —the questionnaire. The most important ofanthropologists’ questionnaires was thevolume jointly published by the BritishAssociation for the Advancement of Sci-ence and the Royal Anthropological Insti-tute at irregular intervals from 1874 to1951, Notes and Queries on Anthropology(it was originally entitled Notes and Quer-ies on Anthropology for the Use of Travellersand Residents in Uncivilized Lands).13 Thiswas not the only anthropological question-naire circulated; individuals such as J.G.Frazer, for example, drew up and distrib-uted their own questionnaires. But it isimportant to recognize that Notes andQueries on Anthropology merely elaborateda general form. This had taken shape nolater than the late seventeenth century,when some Fellows of the Royal Societyprinted and circulated a questionnaire toelicit information about the natural andbuilt features of the environments of Eng-land and Wales.14

Consider the periodical entitled simplyNotes and Queries, a vehicle for inquiringminds who were curious about virtuallyanything. On March 18, 1854, for example,it published a query from a reader whoseemed bent on acquiring confirmation ofhis judgement that mackerel were blind(his explanation for their lack of interestin the flies he cast in the waters in which

he wished to catch them).15 On November28, 1857, Notes and Queries published arequest for information about the careerof a small child who had at some time beenexhibited in London, in the irises of whoseeyes was said to be visible the name “Em-peror Napoleon”.16 And on February 1,1862, it published readers’ responses to aquestion about the number of societiespast and present in which human corpseswere ceremonially buried in the foetalposition. One of these responses came fromSir John Lubbock (a baronet, later LordAvebury), a scientific polymath with spe-cial expertise in insects, who knew CharlesDarwin as a neighbour, family friend andintellectual mentor, and who was a long-serving member of Parliament as well as awealthy banker. Lubbock’s many accom-plishments included being the first presid-ent of the Anthropological Institute ofGreat Britain and Ireland (later the RoyalAnthropological Institute), formed in 1871from the union of the previously warringEthnological Society of London and theAnthropological Society of London.17

That Lubbock was among the readers ofNotes and Queries, along with the incom-petent mackerel fisherman, surely indic-ates that this publication reached a broadaudience.

Then, there existed the informal ques-tionnaire, such as the letters of inquirythat Charles Darwin mailed to his globalnetwork of naturalist-informants, withoutwhose assistance he could never havegathered the wealth of data from whichhe produced such works as the On theOrigin of Species in 1859.18 Last, buthardly least, there were information-gathering kits, such as those for collectinginsects that would-be purchasers of speci-mens distributed to travellers to foreign

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parts (such as naval officers and traders);these included operating instructions, aswell as the materials necessary to kill,preserve and store insect specimenswithout mutilating them.19 Of course, in-dividual scholars supplemented the mater-ial they gleaned from systematic inquirieswith information they happened upon invarious ways, but it is the existence of avariety of routinized forms of deliberatesolicitation of information that is signific-ant.

Division of labour: There was a cleardivision of labour between collectors ofinformation and analysts thereof, whichrepresented a division along class lines —roughly, the division between players andgentlemen, respectively. Those who re-ceived compensation for their scientificactivities, as collectors often did, were notconsidered capable of judging evidencedispassionately — and also were not, inany event, “clubbable”, almost invariablybeing considered unfit for leadership rolesin the societies of enthusiastic amateurswho dominated many spheres of Britishscientific life until the twentieth century.Consider the case of Paul du Chaillu, aFrench-born traveller to equatorial Africain the middle of the nineteenth century(who had various financial supporters,including, for example, the Academy ofNatural Sciences in Philadelphia). Whenhe made public appearances in London,his descriptions were greeted with scepti-cism and he himself was widely believedto be something of a cad: his reports ofAfrican peoples and their natural environ-ment, which included the first eyewitnessobservations of the gorilla, were acceptedonly after authentication by gentlemen-scientists. The gentlemen-scientists hadno empirical basis for their judgements,

basing them on their assessments of duChaillu’s character. Evidently, their highsocial status counted for more in scientificcircles than du Chaillu’s research experi-ence.20

I must emphasize that to report thisstandard division of labour is not to sug-gest that we must identify with the viewof the gentlemen-amateurs, or that wemust believe that the collectors whoserved gentlemen-scientists regarded theirrole as that of mere servants. As AnneSecord has ingeniously documented,working-class collectors who suppliednineteenth-century gentlemen-botanistswith specimens had considerable scientificexpertise, as well as genuine commitmentto scientific inquiry.21 But no matter whatwere the satisfactions working-class col-lectors derived from their scientific la-bours, their voices were not audible inprestigious scientific circles.

Methodological orientation: The collec-tion of evidence from thither and yonsomehow had to be rationalized as a reas-onable procedure. Intellectual historiansmust begin with the working principlethat the figures we study were at least assmart as we are, and so we should not besurprised to learn that many nineteenth-century anthropologists were aware thattheir informants were not presenting themwith what the philosopher of science calls“brute facts” — as she customarily does,immediately prior to declaring that thereare no such things. At least some of anthro-pologists' disciplinary ancestors recognisedthat, as the philosopher Mary Hesse hasmemorably stated, theories are always“underdetermined by facts” — a point es-pecially relevant in accounts of paradigmchange (and to which we will return).22

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In 1870, for example, John Lubbock ob-served that the particular perspectives ofindividuals shaped their reports, saying,“Whether any given writer praises orblames a particular race, depends at leastas much on the character of the writer ason that of the people.”23 Indeed, attentionto observer bias had a considerable lineagein science, dating at least to the astro-nomers’ definition of the so-called personalequation in the 1820s, a phenomenon ofwhich Sir John was surely aware, sincehis father was a distinguished astro-nomer.24 That is, by the end of the eight-eenth century, astronomers had noted thatindividual observers varied in their reac-tion times to, say, the transit of a star, andastronomers subsequently undertook tocalculate patterns of variations among in-dividuals, specifying individuals’ differ-ences, so as to achieve inter-subjectivemeasures by which vital matters such asthe setting of clocks could be resolved.25

It is no accident, to use historians’once-canonical locution, that FrancisGalton delivered descriptions of some ofhis most important statistical innovationsto the Anthropological Institute, of whichhe was President from 1885 to 1888, as hedid when he described the normal fre-quency distribution (also known as thebell curve) which should be observablefor any variable, ranging from, say, heightto life expectancy; he intended his statist-ics to be useful in describing the phenom-ena anthropologists examined, includingcultural and biological traits. In his historyof the development of statistics in Britain,Donald MacKenzie emphasizes that Galtonand others, most notably Karl Pearson,who developed such statistical measuresstill in use as the correlation coefficient,were motivated by their desire to docu-

ment patterns of human heredity so thatthey could promulgate eugenic strategiesfor improving the physical and mentalcondition of the British population.26 ButGalton was surely aware of anthropolo-gists’ problem in reconciling disparate re-ports in order to formulate generalizations.And if he did not say explicitly that heexpected his statistical techniques to solveanthropologists’ methodological problem,another sometime president of the Anthro-pological Institute, E. W. Brabrook, did,stating that anthropologists need nottrouble themselves with inconsistenciesin the reports they received from “everydirection”, but could trust “rather to thegeneral laws of numbers than to the skillof individuals to eliminate errors”.27

An aesthetic of generalization: Thecomparative method in anthropology wasborn in an era in which it was assumedthat all satisfactory explanations werehistorical ones. It was not merely the casethat historical analogies were frequentlymade, and history examined for its morallessons, as I have already discussed. Thegeneral idea of evolution, once called“transformism”, antedated Darwin’s con-ceptualization of it and was applied to de-scription of various natural phenomena.Consider the practice of embryology in thelast quarter of the nineteenth century,when it was a highly prestigious area ofresearch in the biological sciences. Embry-ological research was animated by the re-capitulation hypothesis, which could beapplied more or less strictly. Compatiblewith Darwinism (although also reconcil-able with other developmental schemes),this was the idea that ontogeny recapitu-lated phylogeny, that the development ofeach individual recapitulated the historyof the development of the species to which

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it belonged. Thus, examination of em-bryonic growth patterns was expected toyield answers to the fundamental ques-tions of species’ evolution. For example,a development in an embryo that provedjust a transient phase in the progress of anorganism to its infant stage could indicatewhether degeneration was just as importanta feature of its evolutionary history asprogress — a possibility much debated atthe end of the century. (In the develop-mental scheme so influentially promul-gated by Herbert Spencer in the late-nineteenth century, progress generallymeant a movement from simplicity tocomplexity.)28 To give another exampleof the use of the recapitulation hypothesis,Sigmund Freud's Lamarckian explanationof the structure of the individual psycheconjured up real human experiences in theremote historical past that would be re-capitulated in childhood maturation —which could constitute degeneration (orat least arrested development) if the fullcourse of the species’ development wasnot followed.29

In the first decades of the twentiethcentury, all manner of varieties of historic-al explanations would be dismissed assuch, as expressions of what philosopherstermed the “genetic fallacy” — a pejorat-ive phrase expressing the idea that theorigins of any given institution in the pasthad no necessary relevance to understand-ing the operations of that institution in thepresent. Nowadays, facile dismissals ofassertions as expressions of the geneticfallacy are rarely heard, although we caneasily conjure up illustrations of argu-ments that might be dismissed as based onthe genetic fallacy. For example, weshould not devalue Galton and Pearson’sstatistics because the two men were motiv-

ated by eugenic objectives, since theirstatistics can be used in all manner of re-search projects. At the same time, we canalso see that the historical antecedents ofsome present practices may be meaningfulin contemporary contexts. And historicalexplanations are back in fashion. Regard-less, appeals to historical explanations arethemselves historical phenomena; theyhave seemed more plausible in some erasthan in others.

THE COMPARATIVEANTHROPOLOGICAL PROJECT

What kinds of questions did anthropolo-gists hope to answer with their comparat-ive method? They wanted to trace the de-velopment of institutions, such as replace-ment of the practice of tracing descentfrom the mother by the supposedly super-ior practice of tracing descent from thefather. Consider what was arguably thesingle most important article published byE.B. Tylor, whose appointment as Readerin Anthropology at Oxford in 1884 (thefirst such position in Britain)30 represen-ted a decisive shift toward the profession-alization of the subject. Published in 1888,Tylor’s article, “On a Method of Investig-ating the Development of Institutions,Applied to Laws of Marriage and Des-cent”, used information gathered aboutsocieties all over the world, to which soci-eties Tylor assigned grades on a unilinearscale of evolution, analyzing data with amethod he called adhesions” (which wewould call “correlations”). Tylor thoughthe could thus determine how transitionsfrom one stage of evolution to anotherwere effected; his most notable findingwas that the practice of couvade — inwhich the father of a child apparently

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suffers birth pangs during the course ofits birth, and is sympathetically attended— denoted progress toward creation offamily structures in which fathers assumedtheir appropriate responsibilities.31

Anthropologists also wanted to determ-ine what relationship obtained betweenthe biological and social development ofthe human species. Consider the resolutionof the problem first raised in 1858 byWilliam Gladstone, the future prime min-ister: How should one interpret the recur-rent use of such descriptions as “wine-dark sea” in Homer? Perhaps it was legit-imate to analogize ancient Greeks to con-temporary primitives — to assume that allpopulations negotiated an identical courseof biological as well as social development,and that the ancient Greeks’ perceptualsensibilities had not yet matured to thedegree observed among modern peoples.Perhaps ancient Greeks really could notdistinguish between the colours of the seaand of wine, a conjecture supposedlyconfirmed by babies’ apparent initialpreference for red over blue (rememberthat the development of babies’ sensibilit-ies supposedly recapitulated the matura-tion pattern of the entire human species).This argument was not discredited untilW.H.R. Rivers put it to empirical testduring the 1898 Cambridge Anthropologic-al Expedition to Torres Straits, which wasorganized by the man who would occupyCambridge University’s first position insociocultural anthropology, A.C. Had-don.32 The Torres Straits expedition wasthe first venture to take British scientistsinto the field to do their own anthropolo-gical research, and it afforded Rivers theopportunity to observe that the islandershad no difficulty seeing blue — althoughit was not their favourite colour.33

Or, anthropologists wanted to use em-pirical evidence to chart the emergence ofsuperior morality and spirituality — andto compel recognition of “survivals” ofearlier, irrational and immoral times —“survivals” which could then be deliber-ately eliminated. Theirs was anthropologyas the “reformer’s science”, as E.B. Tyloroften spoke of it. And self-understandingand consequent self-conscious reform wasJ.G. Frazer’s objective when he dissemin-ated his interpretation of Baldwin Spencerand F.J. Gillen’s 1899 classic Native Tribesof Central Australia — Australia’s pioneer-ing contribution to the development ofanthropological field-research method —even though, as it happened, he disagreedwith Tylor in his interpretation of Spencerand Gillen’s findings. Understanding Ar-rernte ignorance of the facts of procreationand their totem ceremonies to be analogousto Christian belief in the virgin birth ofJesus and the ceremony of the Eucharist,Frazer believed that he had exposed sur-vivals of truly primitive habits, persistingin what was a supposedly rational age.34

I will shortly return to consideration ofthe international anthropological contro-versy that Frazer’s views provoked.

Clearly, the unilinear evolutionistmodel that relied on the comparativemethod was not really historical but histor-icist — or, at least, historicist in the pejor-ative sense. Cross-cultural research wasused by anthropologists to document theassumption that differences between soci-eties were matters of degree rather thanof kind; that some societies had simplyadvanced further along the teleologicaltrajectory of human progress than others.Why was this research mode abandoned?It would be easy to say that anthropolo-gists dismissed their model and method

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rationally because these were proven de-fective. Reasoned judgement was not irrel-evant to intellectual change, but we shouldbriefly pause in our consideration of an-thropology’s paradigm shift to ask,“Compared to what?”

Consider the case of economists, polit-ical scientists and sociologists who haveattempted to formulate guidelines formodernizing non-western societies.Among these, the recapitulation hypothes-is remained respectable for roughly half acentury longer than it did for anthropolo-gists. In fact, one could say that anthropo-logy differentiated itself from other socialscience disciplines by being first on themark to reject this hypothesis — and that“modernization” theory ceased to be re-spectable as much in consequence of ri-dicule animated by political concerns asanything else.35 Or consider the contem-porary primatologists whose projects rep-resent a residue of the objective that an-thropologists abandoned when they jet-tisoned the recapitulation hypothesis —scientists who imagine that they can recon-struct the behaviour of earliest humankindon the basis of their observations, dividedthough they may be by certain disputes.Which particular primate species consti-tutes the best prototype of humans’ ancest-ors? What sorts of observations are reliable— in the laboratory or in the field? If theobserver is in the field, should she makethe ground her vantage point or can shesee natural behaviour while being an in-trusive presence perched in a Land Rover?Where is the demarcation boundarybetween humans and other primates if thelatter can be taught to communicate insome form of language? Likewise, whatdoes it mean to be human if primates havebeen tool-users and have even developed

culture?36 The historian of nineteenth-century anthropology feels weary as shewatches intellectual history repeating itselfamong primatologists.

THE DECLINE OF THECOMPARATIVE METHOD

But I return to the history of anthropologywithin the British sphere of influence. Itreveals widespread dissatisfaction withthe theory and method required for com-parative analysis by the end of the nine-teenth century. In the 1892 edition ofNotes and Queries on Anthropology, for ex-ample, C.H. Read observed that thepassing traveller could not obtain “evensuperficial answers” to the questions an-thropologists wanted answered; only per-sons with “long-continued residenceamong a native race” were trustworthyinformants.37 And when in 1902 A.C.Haddon described Spencer and Gillen’sNative Tribes of Central Australia as “thebest book of its kind about any people”,he signalled the claims to authority of anew style of anthropologist, persons suchas Baldwin Spencer and himself, trainedscientists, whose specialized observationalskills were more reliable (and more rapid)means to collect accurate information thanthe intellectual habits formed during “longcontinued residence among a native race”,and whose primary task was to accumulatedetailed knowledge of delimited areas —which might be, but need not be, used incomparative analyses.38 Authoritativejudgements entailed personal experienceof field research among the peoples theanthropologist wished to describe —periods of research that became possiblewith the development of academic careers,such as Haddon and Spencer enjoyed.

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Field trips of a year or more would becomethe anthropological gold standard in thetwentieth century, when anthropologistshad better opportunities for financingthem with the patronage of private philan-thropies and government agencies, but inearlier times it became possible to dofieldwork for the simple reason that aca-demic lives were punctuated by longbreaks.39 Much of the research for NativeTribes was done during Spencer’s 1896–97summer vacation from his position as Pro-fessor of Biology at the University of Mel-bourne, when he was able to work withGillen in Central Australia. There, Gillen,a civil servant who was given leave towork with Spencer, was the effective ad-ministrator of the area’s Aborigines, andhad accumulated a good deal of ethno-graphic knowledge during two decades’residence.

Haddon urged researchers to under-stand exotic peoples from the “nativepoint of view”, an injunction echoed bySpencer and Gillen when they argued thatanthropologists must enter “into the men-tal attitude of the native”. Though the“genealogical method” Rivers developedfor the Torres Straits expedition provedremarkably durable, however, Haddon’sventure did not provide an imitable model.Taking seven men to spend roughly sevenmonths living for periods of variablelength on one or another portion of an is-land cluster, dividing investigative labouramong themselves, the Torres Straits ex-pedition constituted a hybrid genre ofanthropology. The six volumes of ReportsHaddon edited — five published beforeWorld War I, and the last (Volume I) in1935 — received largely favourable re-views, but they were, in part, exercises inold-style research, relying on evidence

that Haddon solicited from afar to supple-ment the information his team hadgathered in the field. Moreover, whileteamwork remained common in naturalscientific practice (and one could say thatpractitioners of the comparative methodwere members of informally constitutedteams), teamwork did not become anthro-pology’s ideal method. Rather, Spencerand Gillen’s Native Tribes became an ex-emplar. It represented an approximationof the anthropological method that wouldsoon be conventional: a comprehensivestudy of a delimited area, based on sus-tained fieldwork conducted by one or twopeople (if the latter, often a husband andwife), portraying a population’s distinctivecharacter.

The significance of Native Tribes in theera of its publication was rather different,however. In 1913, for example, BronislawMalinowski said of Spencer and Gillen’sstudies that “half the total production inanthropological theory ha[d] been basedupon their work, and nine-tenths affectedor modified by it”. Native Tribes inspiredan intense international debate, arguablythe most international of controversies inanthropology’s history. As E. SidneyHartland had observed in 1900, so pervas-ive was the debate that the “quiet non-combatant student” was “astonished tofind himself in the theatre of war”, assaul-ted by “jarring theories and conflictingclaims”, and “searching in vain” for “abomb-proof burrow”. The debate wasframed by J.G. Frazer (broker of thebook’s publication by Macmillan). It waspredicated on the assumption that indigen-ous Australians were the most primitiveof living peoples, whose totemism was(somehow) at the base of civilization’shighest achievements — monogamous

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marriage and truly spiritual religion. Sus-tained with intensity through the mid-1920s, the debate proved irresolvable inFrazer’s terms. Pondering conflicting inter-pretations of totemism, anthropologistsrejected unilinear models of social evolu-tion like Frazer’s; if nothing else, theyagreed that it was impossible to gradepeoples according to the rate at which theywere making progress from savagery tocivilization because evolution everywheredid not fit a single pattern.

In the early twentieth century,bounded populations of professional an-thropologists emerged, developing varioustheoretical schemes; international intellec-tual exchanges were impeded by languagebarriers. Some (although certainly not all)of these anthropologists insisted that theindigenous peoples of their countries —such as those in North America and Aus-tralia — were quite distinctive, defyingcomparison with groups elsewhere; it isinteresting to note that these includedSpencer and Gillen, who lamented the ab-sence of a special term for the Australianvariety of totemism, which they con-sidered unlike any other. Some anthropo-logists, particularly those in German-speaking areas, as well as those influencedin North America by the German-born and-trained Franz Boas, dedicated themselvesto varieties of historical analyses, but theirunderstanding of historical change wasinformed by attention to particularities oftime and place. In the United States, forexample, sociocultural anthropologistschose a truly historical approach, emphas-izing the unique characteristics that distin-guished peoples from one another; Boashimself decried efforts to produce pro-found generalizations from cross-culturalcomparisons (his students would later

disagree). In sum, concerted efforts to usethe comparative method to solve a problemthat all participants in the debate over to-temism had initially agreed was importanthad resulted in consensus that totemismwas not a unitary phenomenon whereverit was found, that evolution did not followa standard course, and that the comparat-ive method was impracticable.40

Twentieth-century British anthropolo-gists did not abandon their predecessors'aspirations to formulate scientific general-izations. But they repudiated the notionthat laws of development that obtained inall societies. Instead, they attempted todocument the postulate that all societieswere fundamentally identical, all of themsharing certain essential properties, allperforming the same basic functions. Andthey reasoned that the point of studyingso-called simple (or technologically under-developed) societies was not that thesesocieties were qualitatively different fromtechnologically sophisticated ones but thatthey were relatively simple to study, apoint also made by Émile Durkheim(among others).41

That is, the functionalists who domin-ated British anthropology from the late1920s to the 1960s dismissed efforts athistorical explanations as nonsensical —as expressions of the genetic fallacy. Con-sider the 1911 pronouncement of theyoung Malinowski, who would shortlybecome a protégé of Baldwin Spencer (al-though he would see Spencer as his enemywithin a decade):

[T]he interest of an exact scientistshould focus on understandingand penetrating the mechanismand essence of social phenomenaas they exist at present and are

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accessible to observation, and notin order that these phenomenashould serve as the riddle of aprehistoric past about which wecannot know anything empiric-ally.42

Defining the fundamental principle offunctionalist anthropology as that “inevery type of civilisation, every custom,material object, idea and belief fulfillssome vital function…represent[ing] an in-dispensable part within a working whole”,Malinowski said in 1926 that evolutionaryprogress “consist[ed] not in a sequence ofdifferent forms changing one into another,but in a better adaptation of an institutionto its function” [emphasis mine].43

A quarter-century later, Haddon andRivers’s most distinguished student, A.R.Radcliffe-Brown, who was Malinowski’s(sometimes antagonistic) co-conspirator inthe establishment of functionalist para-mountcy, was still making similar argu-ments, saying that there was no point inattempting to chronicle the histories ofnon-literate societies because such societiesdid not leave reliable written records. Buteven if accurate histories could be plottedsomehow, they would be irrelevant to theprimary goal of social anthropology. Ashe said: “History, in the proper sense ofthe term, as an authentic account of thesuccession of events in a particular regionover a particular period of time, cannotgive us generalizations.” He endorsedcross-cultural comparisons, however,saying that the comparative method was“one by which we pass from the particularto the general, from the general to themore general, with the end in view thatwe may in this way arrive at the universal,at characteristics which may be found in

different forms in all human societies”.44

In short, the functionalists' position, asarticulated with exceptional clarity byRadcliffe-Brown, was to support cross-cultural research, but to suggest thatwhatever insights might be gleanedthrough use of the comparative methodwould not likely challenge the generaliza-tions the anthropologist could producefrom a single case study, since all societieswere fundamentally alike.

But then, during the 1960s and 1970s,the functionalist model became a target ofridicule, much as the evolutionist modelhad been a target before it. Certainly, onemight say that reports of functionalism’sdeath have been greatly exaggerated, or,at least, that functionalist analysis persistsin truncated form. No self-respecting an-thropologist today would open herself toridicule by postulating that any given so-ciety constitutes a bounded whole, inwhich all component parts are integratedin a mutually reinforcing system; but shewill, nevertheless, describe interdependentbeliefs and practices (as, indeed, sheshould).45 One might also note that certainof evolutionists’ assumptions were neverthoroughly dispelled, either; not the leastof these being that those societies whichit is no longer politically correct to call“primitive” are in some sense doomed,bound to lose their idiosyncratic character-istics as they are caught up in the whirl-wind of globalization; my point is that itshould not be assumed that these societiesexperience historical change in a distinct-ive way.

Regardless, contemporary anthropolo-gists' definition of their purview haschanged, returning to one approximatingthat of the nineteenth century. Once again,

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anthropologists study the entire world,not just technologically unsophisticatedpeoples — although the student whowrites his Ph.D. thesis on homelessness inNew York City, say, or on the conditionsof innovation in a biotechnology company,may find herself hard-pressed to find anacademic job as an anthropologist in theUnited States, since many anthropologydepartments continue to place high valueon fieldwork in remote places. Interest-ingly, in Britain, unlike in the UnitedStates, sociocultural anthropologists whodo their Ph.D. fieldwork in their own soci-ety are as likely to find academic employ-ment as those who do research abroad.46

But, then, our young, non-traditional an-thropologist may find herself non-academ-ic employment, as many anthropologistsdo nowadays, in which her anthropologic-al skills may prove to have commercialvalue. Not the least of her marketableskills (and certainly not the only one) isher capacity to appreciate cross-culturalvariation, an important asset in the globalmarketplace: consider the anthropologistwhose job it is to appreciate local differ-ences in the use of ostensibly culture-freetechnology, such as computers.47 In somedisciplines — say, economics, biology andphysics — practical application has en-hanced the discipline’s prestige in the eyesof both practitioners and laypersons. Per-haps academic anthropology will nowabandon the haughty disdain for appliedwork that it has sustained for more thanhalf a century.

POSSIBILITIES OF THE FUTURE

Returning to academe proper, however,we observe that disciplinary boundariesare now being renegotiated in ways condu-

cive to cross-cultural, comparative analys-is. Disciplinary genres are blurring. Fromits text alone, a reader may not be able tojudge whether any given article waswritten by a historian or an anthropologist(or some other academic type), and practi-tioners of different disciplines have appro-priated each other’s theories and methods.Anthropology itself is becoming more in-ternational, although there are certainlydistinct cleavages; British anthropologistswho object to their colleagues’ increas-ingly closer intellectual ties to Americans(formed not least because there are nowmany Americans employed in British de-partments) have looked for like-mindedassociates in continental Europe.48 Andover the past decades there have beenwidespread intellectual trends. Anthropo-logists — and others — have encouragedattention to the peculiarities of the local,while historians have been especiallyconcerned to establish patterns of every-day lives among the ordinary folk of thepast. Nowadays, it seems that the focus ofpast decades on accumulating knowledgeabout the peculiarities of the local hasprovoked a reaction; various types ofscholars are now producing sweepingsurveys of times and places. They areasking genuinely comparative questionsabout differences and similarities. Butgenuinely cross-cultural, comparative re-search poses technical difficulties. It re-quires not only a wealth of accumulatedknowledge about a range of places but alsoparticular skills, such as the command ofa number of languages and the ability todecipher old styles of handwriting. Themost promising way to do cross-culturalresearch may be to form collaboratingteams. Thus, we may revive anotherstructural feature of nineteenth-century

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scholarship, albeit one in which the socialstratification in the division of academiclabour will be based on the professionalstandards of the modern university, ratherthan on the general class structure.

ENDNOTES

1 See, for example, Dorothy Ross, The Origins ofAmerican Social Science, New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1991, which argues that belief inAmerican exceptionalism has been sustained by allvarieties of social science practised in the UnitedStates.2 See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, New York:Cambridge University Press, 1988.3 See Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: NationalistImagination and Geographical Expansion in the RussianFar East, 1840-1865, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1999.4 See, for example, Richard White, Inventing Aus-tralia, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981.5 See, for example, Felicity Barringer “Africa’s Claimto Egypt's History Grows More Insistent”, The NewYork Times, “Week in Review”, February 4, 1990,6; Clyde H. Farnsworth, “Aborigine Enters HistoryBooks, 100 Years Late”, The New York Times, August15, 1997, A4; Ethan Bronner, “Israel’s History Text-books Replace Myths With Facts”, The New YorkTimes, August 14, 1999, A1, A5; Joseph Kahn,“Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books”, TheNew York Times, September 1, 2006, A1, A6; HassanM. Fattah, “Beirut Memo: A Nation With a LongMemory, but a Truncated History”, The New YorkTimes, January 10, 2007, A4.6 Alexander Wilmot, Monomotapa (Rhodesia), Lon-don: Greenwood Press, 1969 (facsimile of the original1896 edition), 118.7 H. Rider Haggard, in Ibid., xvii.8 For one exercise in documenting Britons’ tendencyto analogize their society to classical ancient societies,see Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and AncientGreece, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1980.9 He first used it in an article that appeared in sevenparts in The Examiner between January and May1831.10 Figures prominent in anthropological circles inthe latter part of the nineteenth century, such as E.B.Tylor, Francis Galton and T.H. Huxley, did under-take journeys to exotic parts when they were youngmen. In their day, however, high reputations in an-

thropology were not contingent on having had per-sonal contact with the subjects of scholarly analyses,as would be the case in the twentieth century.11 For example, the Australian civil servant A.W.Howitt and his collaborator Lorimer Fison, a retiredmissionary, who provided information to both Mor-gan (whom they called “their chief”) and to a numberof British armchair scholars, disparaged the work ofthe latter. See, for example, George W. Stocking, Jr.,Victorian Anthropology, New York: The Free Press,1987, 236.12 See Karen E. Fields's preface to her new translationof Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of ReligiousLife, New York: Free Press, 1995 [originally 1912],xvii-lxxiii.13 For a discussion of Notes and Queries on Anthropo-logy, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 258.14 See E.G.R. Taylor, “Robert Hooke and the Carto-graphical Projects of the Late Seventeenth Century(1666–1696)”, The Geographical Journal 90 (1937):529–40.15 Notes and Queries Vol.9, No. 229 (March 18, 1854),245.16 Ibid. Vol.4, 2nd ser., No. 100 (November 18,1857), 434.17 Ibid. Vol.1, 3rd ser., No. 5 (February 1, 1862), 99.18 On Darwin’s information-gathering practices, seeJanet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place,New York: Random House, 2002, passim.19 On the material culture and formalized instruc-tions for collecting natural specimens, see AnneLarsen, 'Not Since Noah: The English Scientific Zoolo-gists and the Craft of Collecting, 1800–1840', Ph.D.Dissertation, Princeton University, 1993.20 Stuart McCook, “‘It may be the truth, but it isnot evidence’: Paul du Chaillu and the Legitimationof Evidence in the Field Sciences” in Henrika Kuklickand Robert Kohler, eds., Science in the Field, issue ofOsiris n.s.11 (1996): 177–200.21 Anne Secord, “Science in the Pub: Artisan Botan-ists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire”, Historyof Science 32 (1994): 269–315.22 I am, of course, referring to the dramatic changesthat can occur in the theories and practices of scientif-ic enterprises that have been called “paradigm shifts”ever since the publication of Thomas Kuhn, TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1962.23 John Lubbock, On the Origin of Civilisation andthe Primitive Condition of Man, London: Longmans,Green, 1870, 296.24 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 150.

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25 In the received history of experimental psycho-logy, astronomers’ recognition and calculation ofvariation among individual observers marks the be-ginning of their enterprise. See Edwin G. Boring, AHistory of Experimental Psychology, Second Edition,New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1950, 31,134–5.26 See Donald MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain,1865–1930, Edinburgh: University of EdinburghPress, 1981, 16–7.27 E.W. Brabrook, “On the Organisation of LocalAnthropological Research”, Journal of the Anthropo-logical Institute 22 (1892): 271.28 See, for example, Adrian Desmond, Huxley: TheDevil’s Disciple, London: Michael Joseph, 1994, 90,125–6, 184, 190–9. For a survey of various Britishand European notions about degeneration in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see DanielPick, Faces of Degeneration, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1989.29 Freud wrote a number of implicitly Lamarckiananalyses of this sort. For one example, see his Totemand Taboo: some points of agreement between themental lives of savages and neurotics, translated byJames Strachey, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,1950 [originally 1913].30 In 1896, Tylor was given a personal professorship,retiring in 1909; his successor, R.R, Marett, retiredas a Reader.31 E. B. Tylor, “On a Method of Investigating theDevelopment of Institutions, Applied to Laws ofMarriage and Descent”, Journal of the AnthropologicalInstitute 18 (1888): 245–72.32 He was appointed University Lecturer in Ethno-logy in 1900; in 1909, he became a Reader, and re-tired as such in 1926. At the time of the expedition,he was Professor of Zoology at the Royal College ofScience in Dublin.33 See my The Savage Within, New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991, esp.146–9.34 For explication of Frazer’s views, see my “‘Human-ity in the chrysalis stage’: Indigenous Australians inthe anthropological imagination, 1899–1926”, BritishJournal for the History of Science 39 (2006): 535–68.35 See, for example, Michael E. Latham, Moderniza-tion as Ideology: American Social Science and "NationBuilding" in the Kennedy Era, Chapel Hill: Universityof North Carolina Press, 2000.36 The pioneering study is Donna Haraway’s PrimateVisions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World ofModern Science, New York: Routledge, 1989. For arecent survey that attends to these issues, see RobertN. Proctor, “Three Roots of Human Recency”, Cur-rent Anthropology 44 (2003): 213–29.

37 C.H. Read, “Prefatory Note” to Part II, “Ethno-graphy”, John Garson and Charles Hercules Read,eds., Notes and Queries on Anthropology, Second Edi-tion, London: The Anthropological Institute, 1892,87.38 A.C. Haddon to Baldwin Spencer, 5 May, 1902,in the Spencer Papers, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,Box 1. Near-contemporaries, Spencer and Haddonwere both trained as biologists, and were professionalrivals as such before they became like-minded anthro-pologists. Haddon came second in the competitionfor Spencer’s Melbourne chair. It is worth notingthat when the natural history sciences (ranging fromanthropology to zoology) differentiated at the turnof the twentieth century, they embraced a commonmethod — the detailed study of a delimited area. ForHaddon’s rallying cry to embrace this method (aswell as an account of the vicissitudes of his career),see my “Islands in the Pacific: Darwinian Biogeo-graphy and British Anthropology”, American Ethno-logist 23 (1996): 611–38. On the field method em-braced by the natural history sciences, see my “AfterIshmael: The Fieldwork Tradition and its Future” inAkhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Anthropolo-gical Locations, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1997, 47–65. For one statement of the claimthat their training made anthropologists more accur-ate and efficient observers of native peoples thansuch long-resident observers as colonial officials, seeC.G. Seligman, quoted in Richard Temple, Anthropo-logy as a Practical Science, London: G. Bell and Sons,Ltd., 1914, 44. Seligman participated in the TorresStraits expedition.39 This is not to say that fieldworkers such as Had-don did not require grants to finance their fieldwork,but their patrons were not very generous. They hadto exercise considerable ingenuity in order to as-semble sufficient funds, and might supplement theirgrants through personal efforts. Haddon, for ex-ample, collected ethnographic artefacts to sell tomuseums; see my “Islands in the Pacific”, op. cit.40 This discussion of the totemism controversysummarizes my “‘Humanity in the chrysalis stage’”,op. cit., and all of the quotations in my discussionare used in this article. The most famous illustrationof Boas’s students’ efforts to produce comparativegeneralizations about societies is Ruth Benedict’sPatterns of Culture, New York: Houghton MifflinCompany, 1934.41 For a succinct summary of the differences betweenBritish and American anthropology, see George W.Stocking, Jr., “The Basic Assumptions of BoasianAnthropology” in his The Shaping of American An-thropology, New York: Basic Books, 1974, 1–20.42 Bronislaw Malinowski, “Totemism and Exogamy”in Robert Thornton and Peter Skalník, eds., The EarlyWritings of Bronislaw Malinowski, translated by

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Ludwik Krzyzanowski, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1993 (from the portion of the essayoriginally published in 1911), 140.43 Bronislaw Malinowski, “Anthropology”, The En-cyclopaedia Britannica, 13th Edition Supplement,London and New York: The Encyclopaedia BritannicaCompany, 1926, 133.44 A.R. Radcliffe Brown, “The Comparative Methodin Social Anthropology”, Journal of the Royal Anthro-pological Institute 81 (1951): 22.45 See, for example, Kingsley Davis and RobertMerton’s definitions of functionalist analysis, bywhich any demonstration of association between onesocial element and another counts as functionalistanalysis. By this token, of course, unilinear evolution-ist analyses were also functionalist, since they as-sumed the interdependence of the component partsof any stage of evolution. But consider Paul Rabinow,Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 1977. Recognized as a pion-eering example of a new anthropological genre, itpurports to challenge all functionalist conventionalwisdom, but nevertheless invokes some all-pervasiveMoroccan cultural spirit, and accounts for the phe-nomena Rabinow observed in terms of an implicitwhole.46 Jonathan Spencer, Anne Jepson, and David Mills,“Career Paths and Training Needs of Social Anthro-pology Research Students. ESRC [Economic and SocialScience Research Council] Research Grant RES-000-23-0220. End of Award Report”, unpublished manu-script, 2005, 9.47 See, for example, the work of Genevieve Bell, whoearned her Ph.D. in anthropology at Stanford in 1997,who works for Intel Research. Observing 100households in 19 cities in seven countries in Asia andthe Pacific, she has observed differences in use oftechnology that Intel hopes to apply to futuredesigns. See Michael Erard, “For Technology, NoSmall World After All”, The New York Times, May6, 2004, “Circuits” section, G5.48 See, for example, Adam Kuper, “Alternative his-tories of British social anthropology”, Social Anthro-pology 13 (2005): 47–64.

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CONTENDING CENTRES OF CALCULATIONIN COLONIAL TAIWAN

The Rhetorics of Vindicationism and Privation in Japan’s “AboriginalPolicy”

PAUL D. BARCLAY

INTRODUCTION

In the following analysis of Japanese sur-vey anthropology’s golden age in colonialTaiwan,1 I argue that the enterprise’shistorical importance derives from its ex-tra-scientific impact as a discursive inter-vention. Soon after the colony was an-nexed in 1895, Japan’s small contingentof Tokyo-based anthropologists beganmaking their way south. Quite self-con-sciously, they sought to replace “pre-modern discourses” that accentuated theOther’s lack of civility with a cultural-pluralist framework that affirmed theOther's intrinsic attributes. Within a dec-ade, Japan’s survey anthropologists com-pleted a serviceable ethnic map ofTaiwan’s Indigenous Peoples.2 Positioningthemselves in sub-bureaucratic “centersof calculation”,3 their synoptic vision ofa complex and previously inchoate localsituation provided the ground for morerefined surveys and detailed censuses aswell as schema, images and terminologiesthat proliferated in Japanese propaganda,commercial writing and scholarly produc-tion.4

However, survey anthropology’s aca-demically informed model of human di-versity did not enter Japanese colonialdiscourse uncontested. As it turned out,the cultural-pluralist framework was in-commensurate with statist priorities ofeconomy and speed, institutionalized un-der the leadership of de facto viceroy GotShinpei (r.1898–1906).5 In fact, the ulti-mate centre of calculation in Taiwan waslocated in the Governor General’s office,not on the anthropologist’s desk. In thefinal analysis, I argue, the governmentanthropologist in Taiwan was an “intellec-tual middleman”,6 neither an author ofpolicy nor a scholarly innovator. As inter-mediaries between field officers with day-to-day contact with Taiwan Aboriginesand policy-makers who rarely venturedoutside of Taipei, they formed the linchpinin a multi-tiered sifting mechanism thatproduced the centre’s working-knowledgeof conditions in the highlands. In the end,their energetic and sophisticated discurs-ive interventions could not prevent thenorthern tribes of central Taiwan frombecoming typecast as unreconstructedsavages who lacked the reason or cultural

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capacity to respond to any policy butbrute force.

BACKGROUND ANDDEFINITIONS

Before fieldwork became the sine quanon of anthropological research, text-basedscholars initiated cross-cultural comparis-on as a method of writing the universalhistory of human progress.7 Reflecting anon-conformist heritage of engagementwith the abolitionist cause, champions ofthe method postulated the “psychic unityof man” as the ground for considering allpeoples candidates for fruitful comparison.This “psychic unity” postulate pitted thecomparativists against polygeneticists,who argued for the existence of distincthuman races. As post-colonial critics havebeen quick to point out, however, thecomparativists, by ranking peoples on ascale from savagery to civility, also contrib-uted an intellectual justification for ideolo-gies of difference and contempt for non-Europeans. According to the critical tradi-tion, the evolutionists defeated the poly-geneticists only to establish a more insidi-ous paradigm for racism, substituting“culture” for “race” on the evolutionaryscale, eventually succumbing to a pessim-istic belief that cultural divides could notbe bridged through the agencies of educa-tion and enlightenment.8

Like their intellectual forebears andactual teachers, survey anthropologistshave left an ambiguous legacy, as champi-ons of causes progressive for their timewho also took part in a generalized appar-atus of oppression. Survey anthropologistsform a sort of historical “missing link”between armchair theoreticians and post-Malinowskian participant-observers. Ad-

mired for their stamina, ingenuity andencyclopaedic knowledge of world ethno-logy, they also find themselves excludedfrom the intellectual lineage of anthropo-logy’s exemplary scholars. At the sametime, like the comparativists, they remaininteresting to historians as shapers andemblems of intellectual life in colonies,metropoles and the places in-betweenduring the period of high imperialism.Unlike the armchair anthropologist, how-ever, survey anthropologists physicallyconfronted cultural variation in its envir-onmental setting. They saw, heard,touched and smelled material and non-material artefacts in situ. Field experience,according to some, allowed survey anthro-pologists to conceptualize practices andobjects as integrated ensembles, as compon-ents of particular cultures. In other words,their research methods lent themselves toa pluralist outlook. Their comparativistpredecessors, in contrast, regarded imple-ments and institutions as decontextualizeddata from which to distil a speculativehistory of the whole human race, insteadof subdivisions thereof.

Because they ultimately relied uponthe existence of a Latourian “center ofcalculation” to consolidate their findings,this essay considers survey anthropologyas an extension and modification of thecomparativist tradition, rather than as aprecursor to participant-observation. Un-like their descendents, survey anthropolo-gists never sought to view the worldthrough the eyes of the peoples theystudied; empathy was never the goal.Rather, survey anthropologists dividedpopulations into intellectually and admin-istratively digestible numbers of sub-units(tribes, races, ethnic groups) to answerquestions or solve problems generated in

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colonial metropoles. For our purposes, thecolonial metropole, where “notes andqueries” are authored, sent out from andultimately collated, are equivalent to La-tour’s “center of calculation”, the priv-ileged place from which a totality of localsituations can be viewed, abstracted andreduced to system.

Lastly, a word on the term “pluralism”.Nicholas Thomas argues that the modernpluralistic view of culture/ethnicity thatinformed and was elaborated by surveyanthropology should be viewed as thesuccessor of Christian and Enlightenmentworld-views that considered “heathens”,“infidels” and “primitives” as fundament-ally incomplete human beings, either inneed of salvation/education or expendableon the chopping block of history. Theirnegative traits — ignorance, illiteracy, etc.— defined the Other in the eyes of theobserver. Building on the work of Jo-hannes Fabian, Thomas argues that thediscursive construction of tribes, races andethnic groups as internally coherent col-lectivities which can be known, comparedand ranked by recourse to study of “idealtypes” ushered in the age of anthropologic-al typification. His elegant formulationbears quotation in full:

What I seek to extrapolate from[Fabian] is an argument that inpremodern European discourses,non-Western peoples tend to becharacterized not in any anthropo-logically specific terms, but as alack or poorer form of the valuesof the centre…My analytical fic-tion, then, tells of a shift from anabsence of ‘the Other’ (as a beingaccorded any singular character)to a worldview that imagines a

plurality of different races orpeoples. The distinctively modernand anthropological imaginingprojects natural differences amongpeople that may be rendered atone time as different ‘nations’, atanother as distinct ‘races’ or ‘cul-tures’. The underlying epistemicoperation — of partitioning thehuman species — makes possiblea variety of political and ethno-graphic projects: particular popu-lations may be visible as objects ofgovernment; they may serve asethnological illustrations or sub-versive counter-examples in com-parative social argument; andthese reified characters may beavailable for appropriation in anti-colonialist, nationalist narratives.9

This “distinctively modern and anthropo-logical imagining” received much of itsimpetus, and exerted its influence, in thedialectical circulation of images, goods andpeople between colonial settings and met-ropolitan publics. Fortuitously, Thomas’sadmittedly simplistic historical sketch, or“analytical fiction”, well describes therupture in consciousness that Japanesesurvey ethnologists hoped to bring aboutin Taiwan. For this essay, the term “plur-alism” is defined, following Thomas, as “aworldview that imagines a plurality ofdifferent races or peoples” in contradistinc-tion to a worldview that conceptualizesdifferent peoples “as a lack or poorer formof the values of the centre”.

PARTITIONING THE HUMANSPECIES IN UPLAND TAIWAN

The Qing empire ceded Taiwan to Ja-pan as part of the settlement to end the

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Contending Centres of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan

Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95. As theTaiwan Government-General began settingup its capital in the face of armed resist-ance in June 1895, reports describing thecurious folkways of the empire’s newsubjects began to circulate in Japan. Espe-cially prominent in the early wave of“first-encounter” documents were travelaccounts of the hill tribes, collectivelyknown as “banjin”, “seibanjin”, “yabanjin”or “banzoku”.10 Even before the Govern-ment-General could safely inhabit its cap-ital, Takigawa Miyotar published “OurNew Territory: The Island of Taiwan” topopularize the quasi-ethnographic inform-ation contained in Ueno Sen’ichi’s famousmilitary intelligence report on conditionsamong the Aborigines.11 Ueno’s reportwas an amalgam of first-hand accounts andinformation collected by British light-house-keeper George Taylor.12 Well intothe 1900s, the occupation inspired popularethnography for Japanese consumption,in the form of newspaper, magazine andscholarly accounts of life in “DarkestTaiwan’s” interior.13

For the small coterie of anthropologistsattached to Tokyo University, the ethnolo-gical bounty of the new colony proved ir-resistible. The intellectual backgroundsand institutional affiliations of the majorplayers, In Kanori, Torii Ryūz and MoriUshinosuke, have been well documentedelsewhere.14 For our purposes, it isenough to say that In Kanori (1867–1925),our major protagonist, set sail for Taiwanon November 3, 1895. At the time, Insupported himself as an editor of an edu-cation journal while contributing notes onfolklore to the Journal of the Tokyo Anthro-pological Society and attending the lecturesof Japanese anthropology’s foundingfather, Tsuboi Sh gor . In embarked un-

der the auspices of the Japanese Army,thereafter working in the documents sec-tion of the Government-General and as anadministrator of the Japanese Languageschools, pursuing his interest in Taiwananthropology between assignments.15

In ’s most remarked-upon contributionto Taiwan anthropology was precisely thekind of “epistemic operation” describedby Nicholas Thomas as quintessentiallymodern: an ethnic map cum taxonomy ofthe Taiwan Aborigines. In sought to re-place the casual observations of his ama-teur co-nationals and the pre-modern Qingdescriptions of Taiwan Aborigines with ascientifically ascertained taxonomy basedon the investigation of racial-cultural di-versity in upland Taiwan. In Kanori suc-cinctly stated these goals in mid-1895:

The people of Taiwan are knownby three types: Chinese (shinajin),cooked barbarians (jukuban), andraw barbarians (seiban). As for theChinese, of course their descend-ents will become obedient citizens(kika no min) — it should notpresent much difficulty to governthem. However, the raw andcooked barbarians need to be in-vestigated from the perspectivesof natural as well as conjecturalscience (keijikaj ). Thereafter, anadministration and an educationalpolicy can be structured. As for“cooked” and “raw”, these aregeneral terms formerly used to re-flect degrees of submission to[Qing] government. If we look atit from a scientific point of view,however, there are at least four orfive different tribes/races (shuzoku)[of Aborigines], as we know from

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looking at the articles written byforeigners who have investigatedthis area. But what about the in-trinsic, distinctive (koyū)physiologies, psychology and localcustoms of the various tribes?What about their connections tothe Philippine islands and neigh-boring islanders? To this day,these are unsettled issues. Today,by the hands of our countrymen,the clarification of these questionswill, it goes without saying, con-tribute to our political goals…Andwe shall also see results in regardto our scholarly aspirations.16

In ’s manifesto (and subsequent writings)called for Japanese survey anthropologiststo identify the unique features of eachshuzoku (tribe/ethnos) on Taiwan in orderto better understand the differences amongthe groups subsumed under the Qingterms shengfan (raw barbarian) and shufan(cooked barbarian). In also emphasizedthat anthropology should render faithfulservice to the state as a form of intelligencegathering. These two goals would comeinto conflict, I will argue, underminingIn ’s ability to construct a coherent ac-count of Japanese relations with the up-landers, in effect forcing him to choosebetween loyalty to an emerging disciplineor obedience to his bureaucratic superiors.

On May 26, 1897, In formed an exped-ition party to begin a 192-day ethnograph-ic survey tour by order of the colony’sBureau of Education. The Government-General ordered In and his partner,Awano Dennoj , to devise a portrait ofAboriginal society for the purpose ofmaking recommendations on the subjectof Aboriginal schooling. The results were

sent to Got Shinpei in early 1899 as a re-port titled Taiwan Banjin jij (Conditionsamong the Taiwan Aborigines).17 Con-sidered In ’s magnum opus, Banjin jij isa rich, descriptive and internally conflic-ted document that speaks in multiplevoices, reflecting In ’s intermediary posi-tion in the colonial order of things. Rely-ing on his own observations in the field(though never in any one spot for long),archival research in Chinese records andinterviews with Pacification-Reclamationofficers,18 In constructed a matrix of de-fining traits — physical features, everydayusages and implements (dozoku), culturalpractices (kanshū), language and oral tradi-tions — to classify the inhabitants ofTaiwan’s interior into eight discrete ethnicgroups.

The Janus-faced nature of this docu-ment, a testament to survey anthropo-logy’s ambiguous legacy, is illustrated byIn ’s characterization of the Atayalpeoples. On the penultimate page of his283-page report, In warned Japanese offi-cials against the temptation to caricaturethe Aborigines (banzoku) as savageheadhunters.19 In In ’s taxonomic grid,“headhunting” comprised a single itemout of six elements called “customs”, while“customs” themselves stood beside otherbundles of defining traits, such as “phys-ical features”, “language”, “technology”and others. In emphasized that manyAboriginal groups had ceased headhunt-ing, but even those who continued, likethe Atayal, were also competent agricultur-ists and weavers. Moreover, continuedIn , the savage custom of headhunting wasperpetuated as a form of defence againstaggressive Han settlers. In finished byasserting that the tribes of Australia andAfrica were much more primitive than

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Taiwan’s headhunting Atayal, therebyrelativizing their backwardness by re-course to the accumulating world-widedatabase of “cultures” put into play bythe armchair comparativists of yore.20

Going completely against the grain ofhis conclusion, In began the substantivesections of Banjin jij by fixing the Atayalpeoples as Taiwan’s least-advanced tribe,describing them as preternaturally xeno-phobic, bloodthirsty headhunters respons-ible for over a hundred beheadings annu-ally.21 In ’s evolutionary ranking of thetribes, in what we might today call the“bullet-points of the report”, attributedthe Atayal’s bottom position to environ-mental factors:

Taiwan’s most advanced Abori-gines are the Peipo tribe (ping-puzu), followed by the Parizarizaosection of the Paiwan tribe, thePuyuma tribe, the Amis tribe andothers who inhabit the plains. Thelowest position is occupied by theAtayal tribe, who all live deep inthe valleys, whose steep mountainpaths have obstructed intercourseand made travel difficult…Thereis no doubt that this state of affairsis directly related to the degree ofintercourse with the Chinese. Espe-cially in those villages locatedamong Chinese settlements, we seethe most pronounced progress(shinpo).22

Thus, In ’s evolutionary perspective repro-duced elements of the old Qing “Sino-centric World Order” ethos that equated“civilization” with proximity to China’ssacral-political centre. Emma Teng, in heranalysis of Qing nomenclature, discourseand travel writing vis-à-vis the Taiwan

Aborigines, identifies a persistent strainin Qing documents which demonizes theAborigines for their lack of civility. Sheterms such discourse the “rhetoric ofprivation”, in contrast to the more roman-ticized rhetoric of primitivism (the “NobleSavage”).23 Though In equated distancefrom Chinese influence with savagery inmuch of his ethnology, he severely criti-cized the rhetoric of privation as non-sci-entific in another venue, writing:

When the Chinese first learned ofTaiwan’s location, they acknow-ledged the existence of the island’sown people, or “the natives”.There are many writings that attestto this. But at the time, they onlyrecognized the natives as a differ-ent people, with different languageand customs, but did not givethem a particular name…In Mingtimes, the name “Eastern Barbari-ans” (dongfan) was used, probablymeaning “the barbarians of theEastern Seas…After the Qing occu-pied Taiwan, there were two majordivisions, based on the presenceor absence of political compliance[to the Qing], the seiban and thejukuban…They did not, [however,]make observations about race.24

In this passage, the term “political compli-ance” is loaded. From the SinocentricWorld Order perspective, the court of theChinese emperor is the metonymouscentre/apex of tradition, refinement,power and learning. The source of human-ity-making benevolence is configured asa geographical node of virtue, which radi-ates outward and downward via the powerof attraction, imitation and what we mighttoday call acculturation. The boundaries

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of the realm of civilization are extendedby bureaucracy, the repository of Con-fucian learning and instrument of Chinesestatecraft. Thus, in the passage above “theabsence or presence of political compli-ance” also denotes “cultural” submissionto the Chinese centre.25 Thus, In ’s cri-tique prefigures Thomas’s characterizationof pre-modern discourses about the Other;they are distinguished from modern sci-entific discourses by their fixation on lackor presence, their overbearing concern withthe “values of the centre”.

There are, then, two major contradic-tions in In ’s ethnology of Taiwan Abori-gines. First, the relativizing rhetoric of theTaiwan Banjin jij ’s conclusion contra-dicts the rhetoric of privation that per-meates the body of the report; and In ’sexplicitly modern-pluralist approach totaxonomy is undermined by his ultimaterecourse to the Sinocentric preoccupationwith the Atayals’ physical and culturaldistance from the Middle Kingdom. Theseglaring contradictions call for explanation,because In was, if anything, a deliberatescholar, a man obsessed with establishinghimself as a member of the Meiji-periodbureaucratic-literary elite.

As an ethnologist in 1899 colonialTaiwan, In was writing against a dis-course that put the human status of theAtayal into question. AnthropologistDavid Scott uses the term vindicationismfor such narratives.26 In other words, ifthe question is: “Are the Atayal beasts orhuman beings?” then In ’s reply, in thevindicationist mode, is “They are humanbeings.” In ’s contemporary Torii Ryūz ,fellow survey anthropologist and veteranof Tsuboi Sh gor ’s seminars, also lacedhis ethnological notes with vindicationist

rhetoric. Moreover, Torii’s interpreter,Mori Ushinosuke, who would himself be-come a prominent government expert onAboriginal languages, was an adamantvindicationist as well.27 Thus, it wouldbe fair to characterize Taiwan survey an-thropology of the Meiji period (1895–1912)more generally as a vindicationist enter-prise.

Banjin jij was, however, only partlyan ethnological study. Primarily, it wasedited and abbreviated for practical applic-ation as a report submitted to Got Shin-pei, Taiwan’s Minister of Civil Affairs from1898 to 1906. Analyzing the interplaybetween Got the powerful administrativesuperior and In the dutiful bureaucrat isas important as it is difficult.28 As a self-styled visionary and actor on the globalstage, Got , an accomplished physicianand public-health administrator, fre-quently invoked the scientific method asa rationale for his policy proclamations.Got ’s avowed appetite for research oncolonized populations, is matched by InKanori’s reputation as a producer of suchknowledge. In , the indefatigable, drivenand scrupulous editor, compiler, analystand fieldworker, is commonly regarded asthe father of modern Taiwan Studies, andwas certainly the government’s acknow-ledged expert on Aboriginal countryaround 1900. In addition, both men hailedfrom the area of northeastern Japan’sIwate prefecture, giving them commoncause as rising men from Japan’s ruralperiphery. Considering these factors, onewould expect In ’s ethnological laboursto have had a large impact on Got ’s viewof Aborigines in Taiwan. Paradoxically, itappears that Got influenced In ’s think-ing instead; though Got of course hadvery little specific knowledge about the

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Aborigines themselves, and was ostensiblybeing informed by In ’s work.

E. Patricia Tsurumi has aptly character-ized Got ’s rough-and-ready sociology ofTaiwan as garden-variety Spencerianevolutionism.29 Tsurumi’s judgementfinds evidence in a much-reproduced 1901policy statement entitled “An Opinion onthe Necessity of Conducting a Survey intoCustomary Law for the Governance ofTaiwan”. Here, Got applied Spencerianlogic to assert that Taiwan’s Chinese pop-ulation was not ready for the sudden intro-duction of fully civilized Japanese legalcodes, because it had become accustomedto a partially civilized legal regime during200 years of Qing rule. In other words, therights guaranteed to Japanese subjectsunder the 1889 constitution would not begranted to Taiwanese (though, of course,the obligations would) for fear that too-sudden a change would shock the “organ-ism” of Taiwanese society. And as for theAborigines, Got used the general markerfor savagery, yaban, to degrade them andassert that they also could not be governedthrough modern law codes.30 Got re-ferred to the “savages who dwell in theundeveloped lands” as living fossils fromantiquity in a classic example of what Jo-hannes Fabian has called “allochronic”discourse.31

On one important point only, it appearsthat Got incorporated In ’s ethnologyinto his own thinking. His declaration thatthe Aborigines and the Chinese were dis-tinct populations was of a piece with In ’s1895 manifesto quoted above. We shallreturn to the significance of this agreementbelow. On the whole, however, it appearsthat Got was more hostile to than ignorantof In ’s report of 1899. In what must have

come as a stinging rebuke to In Kanori,Got applauded the efforts of governmentemployees (like In ?) to submit their hard-earned local knowledge to the governmentin the form of reports. Got rejected,however, the existing knowledge at handas too unsystematic and non-specialist.Got wrote that Western nations had suf-ficiently developed scholarly communitiesto let specialists compete among them-selves to study native customs, laws andeconomy; in these advanced nations, thegovernment only had to convene thesescholars and reap the harvest. For Got ,Japan’s civil society (kokumin/“nationalpeople”) was still too immature for itsgovernment to take such a laissez-faireapproach.32

Matsuda Ky ko argues that In ’s re-course to Social Darwinism stemmed fromhis visceral reaction to harsh researchconditions. Poor infrastructure, lack ofsecurity and forbidding terrain combinedto provoke In to project his “struggle toconduct a survey” onto the Atayal peoplesas a “struggle for survival”. In short, Inreasoned that the Atayal had been pushedto such extreme living conditions becausethey had been forced into the interior bysuperior forces (the Chinese).33 This ana-lysis is attractive, for it shows the surveyanthropologist responding to the local en-vironment, yet in such a way that his ownrelationship to the culture-bearer is reifiedinto an enduring characteristic of that so-ciety, exposing both the strengths andweaknesses of the genre. At the same time,Matsuda’s analysis does not explain thegrave contradiction between In ’s vindic-ationism and his rhetoric of privation.

My alternative explanation is admit-tedly speculative, but has the advantage

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of clarifying the contradictions withinIn ’s corpus. I believe that In adoptedelements of the rhetoric of privation andthe language of Social Darwinism in theBanjin jij to anticipate or answer toGot ’s objections to his vindicationism.In began and finished his field surveybefore Got came to Taiwan, concludingon December 1, 1897. During a 13-monthinterval, In collated his data, read moredeeply in Qing documents and drew hisconclusions. He filed his report to Got onJanuary 9, 1899, about eight months intoGot ’s tenure. During his write-up period,he was fired as part of Got ’s and Gov-ernor-General Kodama Gentar ’s adminis-trative house-cleaning of March 1898, onlyto be re-hired soon after. He then quitagain in December 1898 to return to Tokyofor a year.34 Considering that Got ’sfondness for evolutionary metaphors waswell-known to In during a period of inter-mittent unemployment, it seems not un-reasonable to expect that In would recasthis survey ethnology to meet the expecta-tions of powerful and sceptical readers. IfIn often portrayed himself as the centreof calculation vis-à-vis colonial policemen,military officers and amateur ethnograph-ers,35 he in turn answered to an evenmore paramount centre of calculation inthe person of Got Shinpei.

As we have seen, Got Shinpei did notthink In ’s survey worthy of the name“science” in 1901. Nonetheless, he suffi-ciently appreciated In ’s skills as an editorand compliant underling to commissionhim for several more projects, making In ,in effect, the Government-General’s in-house historian of indigenous Administra-tion, for both the Qing and Japanese peri-ods.36 In this new role, In would begina second career in Taiwan as an histori-

an,37 shifting his purview from the map-ping of cultures in space to the identifica-tion of meaningful segments of linear time.

A BROKEN NARRATIVE: INKANORI’S “10-YEAR HISTORY”

Like the 1900 Taiwan Banjin jij , InKanori’s 1905 Ry Tai jūnen shi (10-YearHistory of the Occupation of Taiwan) wascompiled for the Government-General’ssecond-in-command, Got Shinpei.38

Got ’s preface stressed that the history ofTaiwan was testament to Japan’s achieve-ments as a modern colonial power. In ofcourse inscribed Got ’s progressive viewof history into this historical digest,though he stumbled in his short chapteron indigenous Administration, the topiche knew best. As a government scribe, Inimposed a linear, progressive narrativestructure upon the confused history ofJapanese-indigenous relations by makingJapan’s “punitive policy” into the dynam-ic element of the narrative. In therebyde-emphasized the record of conflictwithin the administration and the complexstory of frontier diplomacy in the earlierperiod. This simplification, in turn, erasedthe pluralistic view of Taiwan’s internallydifferentiated Aboriginal population fromthe official narrative, while maintainingthe major distinction between Chinese andAustronesian races.

In its chapter on indigenous Adminis-tration, the “10-Year History” ignores thefirst eight months of martial law onTaiwan (August 1895–March 1896) to openwith the Government-General’s declarationof civilian rule on April 1, 1896. Thisopening gambit is important, for it estab-lishes the Confucian subtext of In ’s pre-ferred and intended narrative structure:

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civil government is normal, ideal andlaudable, while martial law is a last resort,an expedient for failed policies. Again wecan detect Got ’s hidden hand here, recall-ing that the Minister of Civil Affairs in-sisted, upon taking the portfolio in 1898,that he be paramount to all military menin Taiwan, except for the Governor-Gener-al, Kodama Gentar . To dramatize hismuch-publicized belief that military rulewas ruining the colony, Got actuallystruck a naval officer in front of a militaryaudience to defend his own honour.Kodama, ever Got ’s protector, approvedof Got ’s brash action.39

The first event of In ’s history, then,is the establishment of the Pacification-Reclamation Office (bukonsho). TheBukonsho, wrote In , was chartered “solelyto enact ‘moral suasion’ (ky ka) among theAborigines”. In then added, contradictor-ily as it turned out, that the Bukonsho wasalso charged with overseeing the “econom-ic development” (kaihatsu) of the “Abori-ginal territory” and “finding useful em-ployments for the Aborigines (banjin nojusan)”. The tension between ky ka andkaihatsu becomes clear if we comprehend“moral suasion” as a spatial metaphorrooted in the “Sinocentric” topographicalpolitical imagination,40 and conceive ofkaihatsu as a temporal metaphor more ap-propriate to Enlightenment theories ofprogress. In the former model, the centreof calculation is the Imperial Centre itself,eternal, patient and inevitably triumphant.In the latter model, the centre of calcula-tion is the state’s political leadership,which resolves conflicts and defines effi-ciency in the context of national interestin a world of competing nation-states.

Perhaps anticipating Got ’s views onthe subject, In posited headhunting asthe defining trait for “certain tribes in thenorthern half of the island” to introducethe Aborigines in his “Ten-Year history”.This stereotype, based on a single trait ofthe population in question, was preciselythe kind of demonizing In decried in hisvindicationist mode five years earlier.Adding force to the “trope of the savageheadhunter”, In used the contrastingterm ry min to describe their victims. InQing-period usage, ry min (Chinese: liang-min) referred to tax-paying artisans, mer-chants and agriculturists: literally, the“good people”.41 In attributed ry minvictimhood to the atavistic Aboriginal“custom” of headhunting, initially con-structing a culturalist explanation redolentwith the rhetoric of privation. In the dis-cursive field of “moral suasion” (ky ka),then, such “evil customs” would ideallybe reformed by the civilizing, edifyinginfluences of the centre, as transmitted bycivil (Chinese: wen, Japanese: bun) institu-tions like the Bukonsho.

In the first turning-point in his narrat-ive, In recounted that the Bukonsho couldnot stop Aboriginal attacks on ry minthrough moral suasion alone. Therefore,the Government-General formulated asystem of punishments (ch batsu) directedat Aboriginal headhunters in late 1897.Despite this concession to expedience(force), In assured readers that Japanesepolicy remained organized on the principleof “reassurance through acts of kindness(suibu)”, to argue that the “civil” impulsewas still ascendant around 1898.

Quite abruptly, In then changes tackto describe headhunting incidents as “actsof murder and assault” (ky k ) to explain

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the government’s expansion of policeforces (keisatsu) along the Aboriginal bor-der in 1898. The new intolerance of “as-sault and murder” can be read asheadhunting’s redefinition from “custom”to “crime”. This reconsideration was war-ranted, according to In , by a “fear thatheadhunting would stop plans for Abori-ginal-territory development dead in theirtracks”. Curiously, In neglects to mentionany specific commodities or economicactivities that might have been connectedto headhunting at the time (though hesurely knew, as we shall see below).

As violence became unmanageable onthe Aboriginal frontier in 1898, the Gov-ernment-General lacked a unified plan.The argument over whether to considerheadhunting as a custom in need of reformor as crime in need of punishment fo-mented a “clash of opinions” within thebureaucracy. Still maintaining the Con-fucian perspective, In called the “moralsuasion” emphasis of Bukonsho civil ad-ministration the “positive policy” and re-ferred to “punishments” as the “negativepolicy”.

Then, in what In called a “Great Re-volution”, in June 1898 the Government-General dissolved the Bukonsho, for al-legedly leaning too far in the direction ofleniency/attraction to the neglect offorce/punishment. Henceforth, AboriginalAffairs was put under the rubric “severitytempered with leniency” (on’i narabiokonawaru), a dignified locution for “car-rot and stick”. Subsequent narrativescharacterized the dissolution of theBukonsho as a necessary response to Ab-original savagery. In , however, intimatedthat perhaps it might have been made ef-fective if given more time. Such a hypo-

thesis would explain why In switchedback to the vindicationist mode in thisnarrative, now casting the northern Abori-gines as history’s victims. Halfwaythrough In ’s account, the Han are trans-formed from “ry min” (good people) into“Chinamen”. Temporarily abandoning therhetoric of privation that explainedheadhunting in terms of “savagery”, Inimplied that both Han and Aborigineswere to blame for the mayhem that wasimpeding Japanese development in thehighlands. Recalling an early staple of Ja-panese official rhetoric before the Kodama-Got era, In now claimed that Taiwan’sChinese settlers provoked Aboriginalbloodlust by taking advantage of their ig-norance and stupidity (gum ) to perpetrateland swindles.

Ostensibly acting as an impartial brokerto stop the revenge cycle, the Govern-ment-General decreed that all non-Abori-gines (Chinese) obtain permits to reside in“Aboriginal territory” in February 1900.At this point in the narrative, In ’s confu-sion and discomfort become palpable.Even after situating Aboriginal-initiatedviolence within a context of Han perfidy,In back-tracked to describe Aboriginal“assault and murder” as irrational beha-viour. In a tortured locution that I read asa concession to the preferences of the ad-ministrators above him, In wrote: “As thenumber of people entering the Aboriginaldistricts increased, the ignorant Abori-gines harboured suspicions of invasion,prompting the Aborigines to perpetrateoutrages on an immeasurable/dispropor-tionate scale.”

Accordingly, from 1902 onward,heavily armed and staffed guardlines (Ja-panese: aiyū; Chinese: aiyong) were exten-

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ded to physically separate Aboriginal ter-ritory from the rest of Taiwan. In January1903, all of northern Aboriginal countrywas placed under police jurisdiction, in acomplete concession to the “expedient” ofpolice rule. Bringing his narrative up tothe present (1905), In wrote that the Ab-original population north of Puli in Nantouprefecture was now governed solely underthe rubric of “force and intimidation”(iatsu ky sei), while the southern Abori-gines would be governed under the bannerof “education and largesse” (keihatsusuibu). In this perplexing document, Inhas the northern Aborigines commit atro-cities because they are provoked by cun-ning Chinese invaders who take advantageof their ignorance. And yet the Japanesegovernment responds by ruling these his-torical victims under the banner of “forceand intimidation”. At the same time,readers are to believe that by 1905 the“southern Aborigines” were willing ob-jects of non-coercive policies of tutelageand guidance. In concluded this reportwith an unconvincing assurance that theGovernment-General’s two-pronged ap-proach would likely produce good resultssometime in the future.

For students of the Taiwan Banjin jij, as well as for Japanese administrators atthe time, there could be little doubt thatthe choice of Puli, Nantou prefecture, asa dividing line in In ’s narrative meantthat In was defining the “northern tribes”as the Atayal. In In ’s taxonomy of 1899,all tribes south of Puli, which is the geo-graphic centre of Taiwan, do not practisethe art of facial tattooing (although limbtattoos were found throughout the island).Other than this single distinguishing fea-ture, there was no ethnologic basis for bi-furcating Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples

into southern and northern halves. Thisdivision was, instead, political. While In ’ssurvey anthropology of the late 1890sdemonstrated internal diversity and awelter of varied political conditions inrural Taiwan, his narratology, like the oldQing paradigm he once tried to overturn,employed a typology that sorted Abori-gines into “good” (southern) and “bad”(northern) imperial subjects. In did notinvent this Manichean nomenclature; hemerely reappropriated it from the “ama-teurs” he once ridiculed as unfit to per-form ethnological analysis.

From as early as 1896, Japanese offi-cials, notably Nagano Yoshitora, foundthat Bunun warriors in the environs ofPuli could be persuaded to bear arms forthe government in its skirmishes againstvillages north of Puli, who fell under thebroad rubric “Atayal”.42 From this timeforward, the “southern tribes” becamesymbols of compliance in official docu-ments, while the Atayal became stock vil-lains in Japanese rhetoric. It is importantto note here that Bunun were also knownas headhunters and, in fact, could be in-duced to take heads at the behest of theJapanese state. We can thus conclude thatIn ’s 1905 narrative located savagery notin the act of murder, but in the act of non-compliance with government demands.

According to several contemporarysources, the Atayal tribes clustered aroundWushe (“Musha” to the Japanese) madethemselves odious to the Japanese whena few villagers murdered 14 Japanese roadsurveyors in February 1897, the ill-fatedFukahori expedition. The long saga of in-vestigation, recovery of remains, and eco-nomic blockades to punish those respons-ible is indeed a central thread in the area’s

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history under Japanese colonial rule.43

Probably more important, though, is thefact that many of the settlements just northof Puli abutted rich stands of camphor.Several “northern tribes” were active inthe lumbering trade, charging outsiderslike the Japanese fees for access to theforests in the early years of colonial rule.Disputes with a particularly powerfulSaisyatt entrepreneur-chief named Ri Aguierupted into a large-scale war in late 1902.Like the Atayal, the Japanese subsumedthe Saisyatt under the term “northerntribes” in later discourse, again suggestingthat “northern tribes” was really short-hand for “non-compliant” villages.Mochiji Rokusabur is considered bymany to have been the brains behindGot ’s Aboriginal policy. In his famousposition paper of late 1902, he proposedthat the Aboriginal Territory be dividedinto northern and southern sectors, withthe former earmarked for military con-quest, the southern for “moral suasion”.44

And thus, the rough-and-ready demarca-tion of operational zones in the war to in-crease the empire’s wealth obliterated finedistinctions made by survey anthropolo-gists like In Kanori, who wrote in 1899that “the disparities in cultural attainmentwithin tribal divisions is often just as var-ied as the disparities between tribesthemselves”.45

The image of the north/south divisionamong Aborigines was cemented in arather grisly affair on October 5, 1903.Then, Japanese officials induced theirBunun allies from Kantaban to entrap,ambush and slaughter more than 100Atayal men (from Palaan and Hogo) in asingle morning near Puli. These so-calledsouthern tribesmen actually redeemed theheads at a Japanese outpost, and were

photographed doing so. Thus, by 1903,Japanese administrators began to defineall Aborigines north of Puli, who weredistinctive because of their facial tattoos,as a problem population as a result of eco-nomic disputes over rights to camphorstands and local resistance to Japanese at-tempts to survey remote areas. The empir-ical poverty of this conceptual apparatusis laid bare when we observe that Japanesearmy and police forces fought a numberof pitched battles with villages of “south-ern tribesmen” (Paiwan and Bunun espe-cially) well into the 1930s.46

BIOPOWER AND NECROPOWERIN COLONIAL TAIWAN

Public intellectual, journalist and parlia-mentarian Takekoshi Yosabur visitedTaiwan in 1904 to write a book celebratingJapan’s colonial achievements. A commit-ted Whig historian, Takekoshi was theembodiment of progressive thought inMeiji Japan.47 In his largely hagiographicportrait of Got ’s reforming administra-tion, Takekoshi cited In Kanori as his au-thority on conditions in Aboriginal coun-try, while praising Got Shinpei’s broadervision for developing the island.Takekoshi’s ambivalent report on indigen-ous administration, I believe, is evidencethat In was still articulating a vindication-ist rhetoric in his face-to-face dealingswith other Japanese, even if his ethnolo-gical and historical writing under theauspices of the Government-General de-ployed the “trope of the savageheadhunter” as an explanatory device.Takekoshi’s view of the situation as it ex-isted around 1904 is more candid and lessreticent than In ’s 1905 digest as to whythe “northern tribes” had been singled out

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for the policy of “intimidate and coerce”after 1903:

Almost everybody who has comein contact with the savages de-clares that they are all quite cap-able of being raised from theirpresent state of barbarism…But itis a question how much longer theJapanese authorities will be will-ing to pursue their present policyof moderation and goodwill, andleave nearly half the island in theirhands. If there were a prospect oftheir becoming more manageablein ten or even in twenty years, thepresent policy might possibly becontinued for that length of time,but if the process should requirea century or so, it is quite out ofthe question, as we have not thatlength of time spare. This does notmean that we have no sympathyat all for the savages. It simplymeans that we have to think moreabout our 45,000,000 sons anddaughters than about the 104,000savages [emphasis added].48

In Takekoshi’s analysis, “the policy ofmoderation and goodwill” is none otherthan the Bukonsho ideal of ky ka, or“moral suasion”. The Bukonsho’s charterstated that officers should learn Aboriginallanguages, study their customs and enactthe policy of ky ka in accordance with thishard-earned knowledge. In fact, thewording of the Bukonsho’s charter (March1896) resembles Got ’s 1901 rationale fora survey of customary law: good policy isbased on accurate knowledge of localconditions. But as the Bukonsho projectwas launched, the enormity of the task asoutlined became apparent. The variety and

difficulty of local languages, the complex-ity of the “late imperial frontier eco-nomy”49 in the borderlands, and the res-istance of armed Taiwanese all revealedthat the enactment of “moral suasion”would be a long-term approach. Japaneseofficials, with few exceptions, did not un-derstand Aboriginal languages, and evenlacked accurate information about thelocation of many northern villages. Tolearn these languages, and map this ter-rain, local alliances would be required,and these were always slow in the for-ging.50

For officials in Taipei, however, therhythms of compound interest on publicbonds, Japanese election cycles and thechallenges of international diplomacy setthe timetable for action. Despite protesta-tions that severity was required as a re-sponse to “headhunting”, it is clear thatthe “metropolitan clock” indeed tickedloudly in Got ’s ears as the Japanese pub-lic grew weary of colonial debts to themother country and stories of rampantcorruption in the management of the is-land. To solve the fiscal problems of em-pire, Got instituted a camphor monopolyin 1899, and it began to pay quite hand-somely by 1901. As the Government-Gen-eral became addicted to this new incomestream, policy indeed tipped away fromthe ky ka faction and towards the ch batsufaction. As Antonio C. Tavares hasdemonstrated, harvesting and processingof camphor under the old system of tradi-tional fees to indigenous strongmen wastoo slow and complicated to accommodatethe high-velocity commodity flows thatwere now required to balance the colonialbooks. Thus, the Government-Generalbegan to support, rather than restrain, Ja-panese camphor companies who flouted

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local conventions and thereby exacerbatedfrontier skirmishing over access to re-sources.51

Takekoshi’s blunt statement of an “usor them” mentality indicates a way out ofa key dilemma posed by Japanese surveyanthropology under the Got regime. Thatis, it clarifies how Got and his chosen co-terie could at once be the very emblemsof Foucauldian “governmentality” in theirzeal for colonial research, infrastructureprogrammes and public health policywhile, at the same time, remaining ignor-ant and even hostile to survey anthropo-logy, even if done in the name of the state.Yao Jen-to argues that post-colonial criticsare off the track when they study literat-ure and fiction to understand colonialistdiscourse as a series of misreadings, errorsand silences. Instead, Yao insists, the stat-istical-bureaucratic-legal machine that wasthe Taiwan Government-General is betterunderstood in terms of what it did knowabout the population it constitutedthrough its statistical compendia, surveysand development projects. In this analysis,the Taiwan Government-General was thequintessential biopolitical regime, becauseit “forced the Taiwanese to becomehealthy”; not for humanitarian reasons,but to grow a large labour force of “docilebodies” as the engine of a colonial eco-nomy.52

Interestingly, Yao considers the 1905census of Taiwan to have been a preco-ciously detailed and fine-grained exampleof surveillance, an example of how far theJapanese state reached into the lives of thepopulace. However, Yao fails to mentionthat 60% of Taiwan’s territory, the abodeof the Aborigines, was excluded from thecensus because of its sparse population,

poor infrastructure and unsettled politicalconditions. How can we consider a regimeas the essence of “biopower” and “govern-mentality” when it avoids surveying 60%of its territory? The answer lies inTakekoshi Yosabur ’s summary remarkson indigenous administration around 1904.If the “biopolitical” body, the populationwhose increase and health the governmentseeks to further, is construed as the wholeempire, the home islands of Japan (naichi)and all of Taiwan, then the government’swillingness to confine, embargo andslaughter Atayal villagers is logical withina governmental framework. That is to say,from Takekoshi’s perspective, the north-ern tribes were jeopardizing the increase,wealth and survival of Japan’s “45 mil-lions”.

From In ’s, Torii’s and Mori’s centreof calculation, Aboriginal territory loomedlarge; it was a treasure-house of ethnicabundance and a forbidding terrain thatmight require decades to survey properly.For the survey anthropologist, space waseverything. For Got and Takekoshi,however, population was more importantthan space; from their centre of calculationin Tokyo, biopolitical considerationsdoomed the ethnologist’s vindicationistrhetoric to the dustbin of history. And yet,as Kobayashi Gakuji has perceptively ar-gued, In ’s taxonomic work was not acompletely innocent exercise. In Kobay-ashi’s analysis, it was In and the surveyanthropologists, with their modern theor-ies of race and ethnicity, who drew thesharp conceptual line between “Chinese”and “Aborigine” in Taiwan.53 This epi-stemic operation, to use Nicholas Thomas’slanguage, indeed “partitioned the humanspecies” in such a way as to enable theJapanese officials analysed above to treat

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camphor-related violence as a distinctcategory of trouble; namely, the “Abori-ginal Problem”.

ENDNOTES

1 For recent scholarship, see Liao Ping-Hui & DavidDer-Wei Wang, eds., Taiwan under Japanese ColonialRule, 1895–1945: History, Culture, Memory (ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2006), and the special colonialTaiwan issue of the Journal of Asian Studies 64,2(2005). Other exemplary monographs, dissertationsand articles include: Paul R. Katz, When ValleysTurned Blood Red: The Ta-pa-ni Incident in ColonialTaiwan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005);Robert Tierney, Going Native: Imagining Savages inthe Japanese Empire (Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford:Stanford University, 2005); Faye Yuan Kleeman, Un-der an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature ofTaiwan and the South (Honolulu: University ofHawai'i Press, 2003); Chang, Lung-chih, From IslandFrontier to Imperial Colony: Qing and Japanese Sov-ereignty Debates and Territorial Projects in Taiwan,1874–1906 (Ph.D. Dissertation. Harvard University,2003); Ming-cheng M. Lo, Doctors within Borders:Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in ColonialTaiwan (Berkeley: University of California Press,2002); Leo T.S. Ching, Becoming ‘Japanese’: ColonialTaiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 2001); Wang Tay-Sheng, Legal Reform in Taiwan under Japanese Colo-nial Rule, 1895–1945: The Reception of Western Law(Seattle and London: University of Washington Press,2000); Michael Stainton, “The Politics of TaiwanAboriginal Origins” in Taiwan: A New History, ed-ited by Murray A. Rubinstein (Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 2000).2 “Taiwan Aborigines” is a translation of the Chineseword Yuanzhumin, or Japanese Genjūmin. Otherstranslate it as “Formosan Aborigines”. The propernoun Yuanzhumin was adopted as the official desig-nation of Taiwan’s indigenous population in the thirdrevision of the Taiwan constitution (1994), in re-sponse to organized efforts by indigenous rightsgroups. The proper noun “Taiwan Aborigines” willbe used interchangeably with “Indigenous Peoplesof Taiwan” throughout this essay.3 This phrase was coined by Bruno Latour, ScienceIn Action: How to Follow Scientists and EngineersThrough Society (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1987); in this essay, I am following MatthewG. Hannah, who applied the concept to populationinventories in Governmentality and the Mastery ofTerritory in Nineteenth-Century America (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000), pp.131–41.

4 Matsuda Ky ko, “Ry tai Shoki no Taiwan SenjūminCh sa: In Kanori o chūshin ni” (Taiwan AborigineSurveys During the Early Period of Japanese Rule:A Focus on In Kanori), Taiwanshi kenkyū, no.14(1997): 135–48; Kobayashi Gakuji, “Inô Kanori noTaiwan Genjûminzoku Kenkyû”, Gakushuin shigaku37 (1999): 71–87; Paul D. Barclay, Japanese andAmerican Colonial Projects: Anthropological Typific-ation in Taiwan and the Philippines, (Ph.D. Thesis,University of Minnesota, 1999).5 Descriptions of Got ’s career, thought and policiesare well documented; see: Takekoshi Yosabur , Ja-panese Rule in Formosa, trans. George Braithwaite(New York and London: Longmans, Green, and Co.,1907. Reprint: Taibei: Southern Materials Center,1996); E. Patricia Tsurumi, “Taiwan under KodamaGentaro and Goto Shimpei” in Papers on Japan, editedby Albert Craig (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East AsianResearch Center, 1967); Hayase Yukiko, The Careerof Got Shinpei: Japan’s Statesman of Research,1857–1929 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Florida State Univer-sity, 1974); Edward I. Chen, “Goto Shimpei, Japan’sColonial Administrator in Taiwan: A Critical Reexam-ination”, American Asian Review 13, no.1(1995):29–59; Yao, Jen-to, Governing the Colonised:Governmentality in the Japanese Colonisation ofTaiwan, 1895–1945 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Universityof Essex, 2002).6 This phrase taken from Bruce Kuklick, Blind Or-acles: Intellectuals from Kennan to Kissinger (Prin-ceton: Princeton University Press), p.40, who de-scribed George Kennan as “someone with an interestin ideas and with a knack for conveying them to aless scholarly audience”.7 I base this following thumbnail sketch of anthro-pology’s early history on the following authorities:Fredrik Barth, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin andSydel Silverman, One Discipline, Four Ways: British,German, French, and American Anthropology, TheHalle lectures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2005); Shimizu Akitoshi, “Colonialism and the Devel-opment of Modern Anthropology in Japan” in An-thropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania, editedby Shimizu Akitoshi and Jan van Bremen (Richmond,Surrey: Curzon, 1999), pp.115–71; Henrika Kuklick,The Savage Within: The Social History of British An-thropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1991); Adam Kuper, Anthropology andAnthropologists: The Modern British School (Londonand New York: Routledge, 1983); Curtis M. Hinsley,The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making aMoral Anthropology in Victorian America (Washing-ton, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981).8 George W. Stocking Jr., “The Dark-Skinned Sav-age: The Image of Primitive Man in EvolutionaryAnthropology” in Race, Culture, and Evolution: Es-says in the History of Anthropology (New York: The

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Free Press, 1968); Johannes Fabian, Time and theOther: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York:Columbia University Press, 1983); Robert J.C. Young,Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race(London and New York: Routledge, 1995).9 Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropo-logy, Travel and Government (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994), pp.71–2.10 These terms have extremely pejorative connota-tions and have been replaced in official and populardiscourse with the general term “Yuan-zhumin/Genjūmin”, which I will translate as “Indigen-ous Peoples of Taiwan” or “Taiwan Aborigines”.11 Takigawa Miyotar , ed., Shinry chi Taiwant (OurNew Territory: The Island of Taiwan) (Tokyo:Kokond , June 12, 1895), pp.160–202.12 Ueno Sen'ichi, “Taiwant jissen roku (A PracticalGuide to Taiwan)”, Tokyo chigaku ky kai h koku 13,11(February 1892): 21–48; Sanb honbu, ed., Taiwanshi (Taiwan Gazetteer) (Tokyo: January 1895).13 For examples, see Hashiguchi Bunz , “Taiwan jij(Conditions on Taiwan)”, Tokyo chigaku ky kai h koku(Journal of the Tokyo Geographic Society) 17, 3(1895): 313–8; Tokyo Asahi Shinbun 9/29/1895; IriyeTakeshi and Hashimoto Shigeru, “Taiwan banchizatsuzoku”, Fuzoku gah 130 (1896): 29–30.14 Terada Kazuo, Nihon no jinruigaku (Japanese An-thropology) (Tokyo: Shis sha, 1975); The JapaneseSociety of Ethnology, ed. Ethnology in Japan: Histor-ical Review (Tokyo: K. Shibusawa Memorial Fundfor Ethnology, 1968); Oguma Eiji, A Genealogy of‘Japanese’ Self-Images, trans. David Askew (Mel-bourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002); Donald Hoon Ko,The History of Japanese Anthropology from 1868 to1970s (Ph.D. Dissertation, Washington University,St. Louis, 2003); Sakano T ru, Teikoku nihon to jin-ruigakusha: 1884–1952 (Imperial Japan and Anthro-pology: 1884–1952) (Tokyo: Keis shob , 2005).15 Kasahara Masaharu, “Inô Kanori no Jidai: TaiwanGenjûmin Shoki Kenkyûshi e no Sokuen (Inô Kanoriand His Research Activities in Taiwan, 1895–1906)”,Taiwan genjûmin kenkyû 3 (1998): 54–78.16 All translations of Japanese sources are by theauthor. In Kanori, “Yo no sekishi o nobete sendatsuno kunshi ni uttau” (I Declare My Sincere Intentionsto the Honorable Gentlemen who Have Gone Before),originally published in the November 3, 1895 issueof the Ky iku h chi and the December 5, 1895 issueof the Iwate gakuji ih , according to Ogino Kaoru,ed., In Kanori: Nenpu, shiry , shoshi (In Kanori:Chronology, Materials, and Writings) (T no, Iwate:T no Monogatari kenkyūjo, 1998), p.158; 224; thedocument itself is reproduced on pp.115–7 of thisvolume. Moriguchi, also an Iwate-ken scholar whohas worked with In ’s papers, thinks the paper was

written not too long after the Treaty of Shimonoseki(4/17/1895); the text is also reproduced in: MoriguchiKazunari, ed., In Kanori no Taiwan t sa nikki (InKanori’s Taiwan Expedition Journals) (Taipei: Taiwanfūbutsu zasshisha, 1992), p.306; In himself repro-duced this document as the preface his pioneeringpolitical history of Taiwan: In Kanori, “Sh in”(Preface) Taiwan Shi (Taiwan Chronicle) vol.1 (Tokyo:Bungakusha, 1902), pp.1–5.17 In Kanori and Awano Dennoj , Taiwan Banjinjij (Conditions among Taiwan’s Aborigines) (Taibei:Ministry of Civil Affairs, Records Division, 1900).18 The men stationed along the border between thehills and plains to facilitate diplomacy, gather inform-ation, regulate forestry and license trade. See PaulD. Barclay, “‘They Have for the Coast Dwellers aTraditional Hatred’: Governing Igorots in NorthernLuzon and Central Taiwan, 1895–1915” in TheAmerican Colonial State in the Philippines: GlobalPerspectives, edited by Julian Go and Anne Foster(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),pp.217–55.19 Robert Tierney has argued that “at the height ofaboriginal resistance to Japanese subjugation cam-paigns, the aborigines came to be defined by thesingle custom of headhunting”, precisely the typeof crude stereotyping In , at least in his pluralistvoice, was trying to work against: Tierney, “GoingNative”, p.36.20 A classic example is Edward B. Tylor, “On aMethod of Investigating the Development of Institu-tions; Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent”,The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of GreatBritain and Ireland 18 (1889): 246, in which Tylor isable to draw on “roughly 350 peoples”, “rangingfrom insignificant savage hordes to great culturednations” to conduct his analysis.21 In , Taiwan Banjin jij , p.3.22 Ibid, p.112.23 Emma Teng, “Taiwan as a Living Museum: Tropesof Anachronism in Late-Imperial Chinese TravelWriting”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59, no.2(1999): 448.24 In Kanori, “Shinajin no Taiwan doban ni kansurujinshu teki kansatsu”, Taiwan kanshū kiji 5, 8 (Au-gust 1905): 52.25 Douglas Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization:Geography and History at Empire's End, Asia-Pacific(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), p.13–5;Thomas, Julia Adeney, Reconfiguring Modernity:Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology,Twentieth-Century Japan, 12 (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2001), pp.4–42.

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26 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedyof Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-sity Press, 2004), p.79. The term “vindicationism”usefully avoids imputing a precocious “relativism”to In and his compatriots.27 Barclay, “Japanese and American Colonial Pro-jects”, chapter 4.28 In ’s voluminous correspondence has been pre-served in the T no, Iwate-ken municipal library;letters from famous men like Tsuboi and YanagitaKunio are prominently displayed in several memorialalbums of In exhibits; a search of the registers inT no and my study of these albums has turned upnot one single surviving letter from Got Shinpei, acurious circumstance indeed.29 Tsurumi, “Taiwan”, pp.107–8.30 Got Shinpei, “Taiwan keieij kyūkan seido noch sa o hitsuy to suru iken”, (Tokyo: T a kenkyūjodai roku ch sa iinkai, 1930) [Reproduced from TokyoNichinichi shinbun nos.8771–3, 1901] p.27.31 Ibid, p.13; Fabian, Time and the Other.32 Got , “Taiwan keieij ”, pp.29–30.33 Matsuda, “Ry tai shoki”.34 Moriguchi Kazunari, ed., In Kanori no TaiwanT sa Nikki (In Kanori’s Taiwan Expedition Journals)(Taipei: Taiwan fūbutsu zasshisha, 1992), pp.138,360–61; In , Taiwan Banjin jij , preface, p.3.35 Barclay, “Japanese and American Colonial Pro-jects”.36 Matsuda, “Ry tai Shoki no Taiwan”.37 Matsuda Ky ko, “In Kanori’s ‘History’ of Taiwan:Colonial Ethnology, the Civilizing Mission andStruggles for Survival in East Asia”, History andAnthropology 14:2 (2003):179–96.38 In Kanori, ed., Ry Tai jūnenshi (A Ten-Year His-tory of the Japanese Occupation), (Taibei: Shink d ,1905).39 Hayase, “The Career of Got Shinpei”.40 The concept is taken from Julia Adeney Thomas,Reconfiguring Modernity, p.38.41 Susan Naquin & Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Societyin the Eighteenth Century (Yale, 1987), p.117.42 Fred Y.L. Chiu, “Nationalist Anthropology inTaiwan 1945–1996: A Reflexive Survey” in Anthro-pology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania, editedby Shimizu Akitoshi and Jan van Bremen (Richmond,Surrey: Curzon, 1999), p.95.43 See my “Cultural Brokerage and InterethnicMarriage in Colonial Taiwan: Japanese Subalternsand Their Aborigine Wives, 1895–1930”, Journal of

Asian Studies 64, 2 (May 2005): 323–60 for detailsand sources.44 Mochiji Rokusabur , Taiwan shokuminchi seisaku(Colonial Policy in Taiwan) (Tokyo: Fuzanb , 1912),p.37045 In , Taiwan Banjin jij , p.112.46 The Government-General’s Bureau of Police issueda map in 1912 that indicates clearly the island-wideintensity of anti-Japanese activity among Taiwan’sIndigenous Peoples throughout the so-called Abori-gine territory, Taiwan s tokufu minseibu banmuhon-sho, ed. Riban gaiy (Taihoku, December 1912).47 Peter Duus, “Whig History, Japanese Style: TheMinyûsha Historians and the Meiji Restoration”,Journal of Asian Studies 33, no.3 (1974): 415–36.48 Takekoshi Yosabur , Japanese Rule in Formosa,George Braithwaite, trans. (London, New York,Bombay & Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907),p.230.49 Antonio C. Tavares, “The Japanese Colonial Stateand the Dissolution of the Late Imperial FrontierEconomy in Taiwan, 1886–1909”, Journal of AsianStudies 64, no.2 (2005): 361–85.50 Barclay, "Cultural Brokerage".51 Tavares, “Japanese Colonial State”.52 Yao, “Governing the Colonised”.53 Kobayashi, “In Kanori”.

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THE GESTATION OF CROSS-CULTURALMUSIC RESEARCH AND THE BIRTH OF

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

P. G. TONER

INTRODUCTION

This article examines the development ofcross-cultural music research, from itsearliest days in the collection, notation andanalysis of "primitive music" and "folksongs" to the first annual meeting of theSociety for Ethnomusicology in 1956. Thegestation period was long, and the birth,like all births, was largely unheralded andwas most significant to the immediatefamily. Now that ethnomusicology is en-tering middle age, its true significance canperhaps be better appreciated.

The history of cross-cultural music re-search parallels the history of cross-cultur-al research more generally, with some in-teresting and significant differences. Asin anthropology, the evolutionist perspect-ive of early ethnomusicology gave way tofunctionalism and then to more interpret-ive approaches, but it has been suggestedthat the discipline has dragged its feettheoretically and theoretical change hasbeen slow.1 Ethnomusicology has beeninfluenced throughout its history by itstwo parent disciplines, anthropology andmusicology,2 a process that has at timesbeen harmonious and, at other times, likea custody battle. And, more than many

other disciplines, the development of eth-nomusicology has been closely tied totechnological changes such as the inven-tion of the phonograph. There are, then,unique and distinctive lessons to belearned by historicizing cross-culturalmusic research. In this article, I will at-tempt to take stock of these lessons, andto consider the impact this field of researchhas had on cross-cultural research morebroadly. I will also consider in some detailhow the development of ethnomusicologyhas influenced Australian Aboriginal eth-nography, specifically in northeastArnhem Land, and the early developmentof Australian Aboriginal studies.

This article will also consider the placeof two pioneering ethnomusicologists whowere concerned with the study of Australi-an Aboriginal music, and whose researchrepresents the end-point of the trajectoryto be described below. The American eth-nomusicologist Richard Waterman was notthe first to make field recordings of Abori-ginal music in Arnhem Land, nor was hethe first to analyze recordings of Aborigin-al music. He was, however, the first eth-nomusicologist to conduct long-term,primary research in the region, and tomake a substantial number of field record-ings. Waterman was a student of MelvilleHerskovits, who was himself a student of

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Franz Boas, and so Waterman is firmlyplaced within the anthropological branchof ethnomusicology. The Australian eth-nomusicologist Alice Moyle probably didmore in her distinguished career for thediscipline’s development in Australia thanany other scholar. She was a prolific re-cordist, although her periods in the fieldwere relatively brief. Moyle began herstudies of Aboriginal music under DonaldPeart, the first professor of music at theUniversity of Sydney, and her researchreveals a firm grounding in the musicolo-gical branch of ethnomusicology.

These two scholars began their researchon Australian Aboriginal music in theearly- to-mid 1950s, roughly coincidingwith the formation in the U.S. of the Soci-ety for Ethnomusicology. In late 1952 themusic scholars David McAllester, AlanMerriam, Willard Rhodes and CharlesSeeger met to discuss how to facilitatecommunication between scholars withcommon interests; in 1953 they sent out aletter to 66 people to solicit interest, which10 people signed (including Waterman).The first Ethno-Musicology Newsletter ap-peared later that year. The first annualmeeting of the Society occurred inSeptember 1956.3 For the purposes of thisarticle, I take the foundation of this societyas formally marking the birth of the discip-line known as “ethnomusicology”, eventhough the academic study of non-West-ern musics is much older.4

So what do we have? We have theformation of a scholarly society from anumber of diverse origins, whose member-ship is roughly split between anthropolo-gists and musicologists with a commoninterest in non-Western and/or folk mu-sics. And we have two scholars of Australi-

an music who began their research on thattopic during the same formative period,each representing fairly clearly one of thetwo orientations which are still with ustoday — although I will demonstrate thattheir complex research paths cannot becharacterized in a simplistic way. In thisarticle I want to examine the intellectualtrajectory that led to that formative period,to examine an unusual and lengthy periodof gestation which led to this peculiar andhybrid birth.

EXPLORERS ANDPHILOSOPHERS

Attention to music in situations of cross-cultural contact occurred very early in therecord of European exploration. TheCalvinist missionary Jean de Léry visitedBrazil for 10 months in 1557-58, and hisbook History of a journey made into the landof Brazil, otherwise called America, firstpublished in 1578, includes numerous de-scriptions of musical performance, as wellas music notations in the third edition of15855 — surely among the first studies ofnon-Western music. Léry describes nativeBrazilian instruments, dancing that accom-panied musical performances, and thesinging style of the "savages",6 and hisaccount was incorporated into Montaigne’s1580 essay "Des cannibales".7

Another early work to consider non-Western music was Charles de Rochefort’sThe history of the Caribby-Islands. Trans-lated in 1666 by the Englishman JohnDavies of Kidwelly, de Rochefort’s bookincludes a number of passages relating tothe music of the Caribbean, including thefollowing:

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To divert themselves they alsomake several Musical Instruments,if they may be so called, on whichthey make a kind of harmony:Among others they have certainTabours or Drums made of hollowTrees, over which they put a skinonly at one end…To this may beadded a kind of Organ which theymake of Gourds, upon which theyplace a cord made of the string ofa reed which they call Pite; andthis chord being touch’d makes asound which they think delight-ful. The concerts of divers otherSavages are no better than theirs,and no less immusical to their earswho understand Musick. In themorning, as soon as they are up,they commonly play on the Fluteor Pipe; of which Instrument theyhave several sorts, as well polish’dand as handsom as ours, and someof those made of the bones of theirEnemies: And many among themcan play with as much grace as canwell be imagin’d for Savages.8

John Barrow’s 1806 tome An account oftravels into the interior of Southern Africain 1797 and 1798 includes the followingpassage:

It has frequently been observedthat a savage who dances and singsmust be happy. With him theseoperations can only be the effectsof pleasurable sensations floatingin his mind: in a civilized state,they are arts acquired by study,followed by fashion, and practisedat appointed times, without havingany reference to the passions. Ifdancing and singing were the tests

by which the happiness of a Hot-tentot was to be tried, he wouldbe found among the most miser-able of all human beings.9

Although amusing when examined retro-spectively, passing references to music donot make an important contribution to thedevelopment of ethnomusicology as a fieldof study, any more than old maps with"there be monsters here" attributed tounknown regions made an importantcontribution to the development of geo-graphy. These passages merely give us ataste of the European mindset which waspresent as the colonizing powers expandedtheir grasp around the world.

One early thinker, however, does standout as having delineated at a very earlystage some of the key orientations thatwould come to define the field of eth-nomusicology, and that was Rousseau inhis A Complete Dictionary of Music of 1779.The ethnomusicologist Anthony Seegerhas interpreted Rousseau’s work as ad-dressing some of the same questions thathave occupied those working in the fieldever since. One of these issues is that thetranscription of musical sounds is a meansto understand the physical laws of music;as Seeger writes, "musical transcriptionsreveal certain similar sound processesgoverned by laws of acoustics",10 and hepoints out that careful transcription hasbeen a characteristic feature of most eth-nomusicological studies. Rousseau’s studyitself included transcriptions of Chinese,Persian, Native Canadian and Swisssongs.11

A second pervasive ethnomusicologicalissue identified by Seeger in Rousseau’swork is his emphasis on the cultural inter-pretation of music, exemplified by a cer-

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The Gestation of Cross-Cultural Music Research

tain Swiss air which provoked such astrong reaction among Swiss troops thatit was banned, although Rousseau statesthat the transcription itself reveals nomusical structures which could be respons-ible.12

In other words, Rousseau identified inhis eighteenth-century writing the twodominant orientations of ethnomusicology,a discipline that did not begin to take formfor another century: the first gearedaround careful transcription and musicalanalysis as the basis for understanding themusic of the Other; and the second gearedaround an interpretation of music basedon its cultural context. These sometimes-opposed, but never entirely exclusive,approaches have been a feature of eth-nomusicology down to the present day,and are well exemplified by the work ofWaterman and Moyle, of which more later.

COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY

Ethnomusicology, as it is now known, wasfirst manifested as an organized academicfield of study under the rubric "comparat-ive musicology" in the late-nineteenthcentury. A common view is that one of itsfounders was the tone-deaf13 Britishphysicist A. J. Ellis, whose best-knownwork was his 1885 article "On the musicalscales of various nations". As a physicistand musical enthusiast, Ellis’ interest wasin using the methods of acoustics tomeasure the characteristic pitches and in-tervals of musical scales of different music-al cultures with the aim of comparingthem. Ellis’ starting point, however, washis understanding (as a physicist) that theinterval between any two notes:

…is measured properly by the ra-tio of the smaller pitch number tothe larger, or by the fractionformed by dividing the larger bythe smaller. When these ratios areknown for each successive pair ofnotes, the scale itself is known, formeans then exist for tuning thewhole scale when one of its notesis given.14

As Jaap Kunst explains in a discussion ofEllis’ paper, an octave is represented by a2:1 ratio, a perfect fifth by a 3:2 ratio, anda perfect fourth by a 4:3 ratio. When thetwo pitches have no lowest common de-nominator, the ratios become very un-wieldy and a logarithmic table is used.15

His long paper was originally a talkgiven to the Society of Arts with manyaccompanying illustrations on various in-struments, including a dichord, a numberof English concertinas specially tuned todifferent scales, a sitar, a koto and a set ofChinese bells. The research on which thetalk was based was done with instrumentsobtained privately or through museumcollections, some of which had fixed tun-ing (and therefore which could be invest-igated independently), and others whichhad to be played by native musicians;these included the Arabic oud, the Scotshighland bagpipe, the Indian sitar andvina, Chinese flutes, mouth organs, gongsand stringed instruments, the Japanesekoto, and both slendro and pelog gamelanorchestras. His treatise is full of tables andcharts showing the exact frequency meas-urements and intervals of all of these in-struments, as well as scales derived fromthem. Ellis reveals an ethnomusicologicalsensibility that is somewhat ahead of histime when he writes that it is necessary to

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be a native musician is to hear the realpitch of a musical scale, that there mightbe considerable variation of such a scalefrom musician to musician, and that, atany rate, there is a significant differencebetween knowing the notes used in a pieceof music and the musical theory whichunderpins it.16

In Ellis’ conclusions, he compares theprincipal intervals used in these differentscales from all over the world, proposinghow particular intervals were altered toproduce distinctive scales, and even sug-gesting how particular musical featuresfrom one region of the world influencedanother. For his final conclusion, however,Ellis writes: "the Musical Scale is not one,not 'natural,' nor even founded necessarilyon the laws of the constitution of musicalsound, so beautifully worked out byHelmholtz, but very diverse, very artifi-cial, and very capricious."17

So, even though Ellis’ starting pointand methodology were based on theWestern conception of the physics ofsound, there is also an explicit recognitionthat the musical practices of different cul-tures might be based on quite differentprinciples. Most importantly, it has beenobserved that his work provided the em-pirical foundations for comparative musi-cology.18

Perhaps the most important aspect ofEllis’ work was his development of a sys-tem of "cents" for the study of intervalsbetween pitches. To measure non-tempered intervals in terms of ratios of thetwo pitches in question is cumbersome inthe extreme, and to use a logarithmic scaleis only somewhat less so. Ellis’ most endur-ing contribution to ethnomusicology wasto propose the division of each semitone

in the equal-tempered scale into one hun-dred equal increments which he called"cents"; although a difference of one centis impossible to discriminate, Ellis felt thatmost sensitive ears could register a differ-ence of five cents.19 By freeing comparat-ive musicology from the need to negotiatecomplex logarithms, Ellis provided amethodological tool that not only facilit-ated the comparison of different tonalsystems, but also maintained a strong ori-entation around tonality as a primaryconcern of the discipline.

A prominent influence on early schol-ars of non-Western music like Ellis waspsychological theory — the idea that thestudy of various aspects of music, likerhythm or tonality, could reveal principlesof the functioning of the human mind. In-deed, comparative musicology and psycho-logy were very closely integrated in thelate-nineteenth and early-twentieth centur-ies,20 and many early research problemswere oriented around the investigation ofthe origins and development of music anduniversal musical principles.21 CarlStumpf’s Tonpsychologie (1883 and 1890)was particularly influential, developing atheory of tone sensation based on individu-al cognition: for instance, examining theperception of similarity and difference intonal stimuli, which led to a major focuson tonal distance and scale formation ad-vanced by Ellis and many others.22

As Dieter Christensen has pointed out,Stumpf "believed in the unity of the hu-man mind",23 and required musical datafrom all cultures to substantiate his theor-ies. Toward this end, and under his direc-tion, a large collection of phonograph re-cordings — which eventually became thefamous Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv —

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were amassed that would be analyzed forthe purpose of psychological research.24

The Phonogramm-Archiv also became thebasis for the development of a unique formof evolutionary theory focusing on musicand, in particular, on pitch and intervallicorganization.25 As Eric Ames notes,Stumpf and his colleagues used recordingsof non-Western music to emphasize music-al evolution. However, evolutionarythought at the turn of the twentieth cen-tury took a variety of forms beyond astrict linear model, and Stumpf was ableto construct an evolutionary discourse thataccommodated notions of both develop-ment and geographical diffusion.26

Stumpf’s colleagues, notably Erich vonHornbostel and Otto Abraham, continuedto investigate psychological aspects ofmusic, based primarily upon the examina-tion of tonal systems, scales, intervals, andthe like. Regardless of their commitmentto the intricacies of psychological theory,other comparative musicologists certainlymaintained a dominant interest in scalesand melodies well into the twentieth cen-tury. As Stephen Blum notes, for manycomparative musicologists "'musical sys-tem' was in effect synonymous with 'tonesystem'".27 Blum quotes Robert Lach asan example:

How does a scale originate? Howdid the human spirit — in variouslands, various times, among vari-ous peoples and races — succeedin constructing its musical system,i.e., the sequence of individualscale degrees, according to variousspecific schemata, or “systems oftonal crystallization”, so to speak,which differ so fundamentallyfrom one another — as is evident

from the various scales and tonesystems?28

This emphasis on scales, melody, pitch,heterophony and polyphony — all aspectsof music associated with pitch or tone —was prominent in much comparative musi-cology, particularly in the work of Horn-bostel.

A well-known example is his theory ofthe cycle of blown fifths, discussed in de-tail by Jaap Kunst. Hornbostel’s theoryhas it that an ancient Chinese tone-se-quence or scale was developed as follows:a tone of 366 Hz (the so-called huang chong,or "yellow bell") was produced on a lengthof stopped bamboo 230 mm in length and8.12 mm in diameter. When this tube isoverblown, it produces a tone a twelfthabove the fundamental, which is thentransposed down an octave to give thesecond tone of the sequence, a fifth abovethe fundamental; an overblown twelfthabove this second tone, transposed anoctave down, produces the third tone, afifth above the second tone; and so on. Acycle produced in this way using purefifths (702 Hz, a "Pythagorean" intervalbased on string-measurement) would ar-rive back at the same note from which itstarted after 12 jumps. However, Horn-bostel noted, since the blown fifth isroughly one-tenth of a tone flat, the cycleis not completed until 23 jumps. Horn-bostel postulated that before the Chinesebegan to construct scales based on Py-thagorean principles, they must have de-veloped their scale based on this cycle ofblown fifths. Hornbostel and others dis-covered scales from around the worldwhich could be derived from this prin-ciple.29 Hornbostel’s complex theory hasbeen criticized since its inception, but it

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reveals two key concerns of the comparat-ive musicology of his day: first, a concernwith the origins of musical features; andsecond, a belief that such origins may berevealed through the study of tones, scalesand intervals.

Another example is Hornbostel’s ideasabout the concept of pure melody. UnlikeEuropean music, which since roughly 1600has been based on harmony, all other mu-sic is based on pure melody. Hornbostelbelieved that harmony was superimposedon "natural" traits rooted in the "psycho-physical constitution of man": a naturalmelodic movement downward ("likebreathing or striking, from tension torest"); small melodic steps of at most amajor third; a "melodic unity" with a dis-regard for fixed scale steps; and a concernwith the "distance" between notes — "thesize of steps" —rather than their conson-ance.30

As with Stumpf, there is an undercur-rent of evolutionism in Hornbostel’s spec-ulation on melody.31 He states that short,repetitive melodies of a few notes less thana fourth apart are indicative of "an earlystage of development" and are due to "anarrow range of consciousness",32 andthat the natural evolution of melody isfrom this level to a larger number of notes,a greater range, and longer phrasing.33

Furthermore, in his study of African mu-sic, Hornbostel believed that polyphonywas a natural development from antiphony(the alternation of solo and chorussinging), probably by accident when thetwo parts unintentionally overlapped.However, he is clear that this polyphonyis the result of a melodic, rather than har-monic, principle.34

Hornbostel’s theoretical orientation iswell-revealed in a 1933 article called "TheEthnology of African Sound-Instruments".Hornbostel was an advocate of a form ofevolutionism, but one which was com-bined with the geographical diffusion ofcultural traits.35 In fact, at certain pointshe seems to deny the validity of evolution-ary theory for the purpose of understand-ing cultural phenomena. Of the idea thatwe might reconstruct the history of cultur-al phenomena, such as musical instru-ments, by arranging them according todifferential features which would revealtheir relative ages, Hornbostel writes:"Plausible as this reasoning sounds, itsutility as a guide to method is doubtful,and theories of evolution, however ingeni-ous, can contribute little to the classifica-tion of cultural phenomena in chronologic-al order, which has always been acceptedas one of the most important problems ofethnology."36

In support of this critique of evolution-ism, Hornbostel cites two instruments fa-miliar to the Australian ethnographic liter-ature: "the bull-roarer and the boomerangimpress us by the subtlety of their tech-nique, yet they belong to the Australianaborigines"37 - which certainly qualifiesas a case of damning with faint praise.

And yet, a chronological or develop-mental approach, whether or not we callit evolutionism, is present throughoutHornbostel’s work. He states explicitlythat if one phenomenon belongs exclus-ively to a "primitive" culture and a secondbelongs exclusively to a "higher" culture,then the first phenomenon is chronologic-ally earlier38 — which seems like a caseof circular reasoning. Hornbostel also givescautious approval to Tylor’s concept of

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"survivals", but does not agree with thefull extent of Tylor’s reasoning. Horn-bostel writes that Tylor felt that "inorganicand uncomprehended phenomena belongto an earlier stage of development",39 buthe is more cautious: "[I]norganic and un-comprehended phenomena are thereforemerely an indication that we have to dowith older cultural phenomena, but inwhat connexion, and to what culture theymust be assigned, can only be decided onits merits in each individual case."40

On the subject of monogenesis vs.polygenesis, Hornbostel is unambiguouslyclear: it is highly unlikely that any special-ized cultural phenomenon could developindependently in two different locations:41

"[T]here has never, so far as I know, beenan historically verified instance of polygen-esis in different cultures."42 Instead,Hornbostel advocates what he calls "thedespised 'diffusion theory'",43 arguingthat some cultural phenomena may survivefor a long time and may travel great dis-tances. Any specialized cultural phenomen-on, according to Hornbostel, must onlyhave developed in one place at one time— as he famously tried to demonstratethrough his theory of the "cycle of fifths".Subsequent distance of the phenomenonfrom the central point of origin indicatesrelative age.44

This leads us fairly directly to Kul-turkreise theory, of which Hornbostel wasan advocate. The idea is that cultures maybe defined by a collection of individualcharacteristics (architectural, ritual, music-al, social, etc.); complexes of characteristicsshared by several cultures, called "culture-circles" (Kulturkreise), must have a com-mon origin. These culture-circles havemoved outwards from their points of ori-

gin, have mixed, overlapped and de-veloped, resulting in the current situationof cultural diversity.45

Another prominent figure in comparat-ive musicology, Curt Sachs, betrayed amore obvious evolutionist stance thanHornbostel. In his The Rise of Music in theAncient World: East and West, Sachswrites from the outset of "the plain truththat the singsong of Pygmies and Pyg-moids stands infinitely closer to the begin-nings of music than Beethoven’s symphon-ies and Schubert’s lieder".46 He continuesby stating that "the only working hypo-thesis admissible is that the earliest musicmust be found among the most primitivepeoples".47 Later, Sachs writes that:

The songs of Patagonians, Pyg-mies, and Bushmen bring home thesinging of our own prehistoric an-cestors, and primitive tribes allover the world still use types ofinstruments that the digger’s spadehas excavated from the tombs ofour Neolithic forefathers. The Ori-ent has kept alive melodic stylesthat medieval Europe choked todeath under the hold of harmony,and the Middle East still plays theinstruments that it gave to theWest a thousand years ago…Theprimitive and Oriental branch ofmusicology has become the open-ing section in the history of ourown music.48

Some of Sachs’ writing seems almost com-ical in its evolutionism by today’s stand-ards, but he was by no means alone in histhinking among some scholars of his day.What is somewhat more remarkable is thatthis evolutionist line persisted into the1940s, long after it had met a timely de-

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mise in mainstream anthropology. How isit that comparative musicology laggedtheoretically behind cultural anthropologyby at least two decades, when the twodisciplines dealt with such similar subjectmatter?

Sachs’ interpretive framework revealsnot only an underlying evolutionist con-ceptualisation of music and its develop-ment, but also how the evolution of musicis revealed through particular musicalstructures. As with Hornbostel, melodyfeatures prominently as one key to under-standing the contemporary music of so-called "primitive" people as representingthe precursors to European music. Al-though, "[t]o the evolutionist, one-tonemelodies as a first step before the rise oftwo- and three-tone melodies would almostbe too good to be true",49 Sachs acknow-ledges that the best available informationsuggested that two-note melodies are theearliest that can be traced.50

Sachs refers to these basic melodieswhich alternate between two notes a shortdistance apart as logogenic, or word-born.He considers them to be "a mere vehiclefor words",51 and they evolved in an ad-ditive way; that is, certain other notes be-came added to the central core.52 Opposedto logogenic melodies were pathogenicmelodies, which are due to "an irresistiblestimulus that releases the singer’s utmostpossibilities";53 these are characterizedby great force and passion at the begin-ning of a phrase, only to diminish andweaken toward the end. "Descendingmelodies", Sachs writes, "recall savageshouts of joy or rage, and may have comefrom such unbridled outbursts".54 Inpathogenic melodies, evolution proceedsin a divisive way; that is, the larger vocal

range resulting from savage outburstsleads to the octave and larger intervals likefourths and fifths creating a skeleton formelodic development.55

Between these two extremes is melogen-ic music, which represents a kind ofmiddle ground characterized by elementsof both logogenic and pathogenic. At thismore developed melogenic level, wheremelodies tend to have a range greater thana third, particular intervals tend to crystal-lize, "determined by simple proportionsof vibration numbers":56 the 2:1 ratio ofthe octave, the 3:2 ratio of the fifth, andthe 4:3 ratio of the fourth. Sachs’ reasoningis sometimes far from convincing, as whenhe writes: "The strongest magnetic poweremanates from the fourth — for physiolo-gical reasons it is here best to acceptwithout attempting discretionary explan-ations."57

This "magnetic attraction" results inthe development of tetrachords andpentachords, and ultimately the complexmelodic structures of "highly civilizedpeoples".58

In a further extension of evolutionistprinciples, Sachs asserts that the earlieststages of music, represented by contempor-ary "primitive" people, also appears in thebabbling songs of European toddlers.Sachs concludes: "Thus we cannot but ac-cept their babbling as an ontogenetic reit-eration of man’s earliest music and, in-versely, conclude that the music of today’smost primitive peoples is indeed the firstmusic that ever existed."59

This was in 1943. It would be easier todismiss such speculative thinking if Sachswas not so influential on others in compar-ative musicology — including, as will be

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discussed below, the early thought ofAlice Moyle.

Ellis, Hornbostel and Sachs are onlythree, albeit quite influential, figures incomparative musicology, and it would beseriously misleading to suggest that theirviews are completely representative of anentire emerging discipline. Like any discip-line, there was a great deal of internal di-versity, which is suggested by the diversebackgrounds of the early practitioners:musicology, composition, physics, chem-istry, phonetics. And yet, in their thoughtwe can see some of the broad outlineswhich would come to characterize the"musicological" half of ethnomusicology.I have already commented on an underly-ing evolutionist stance, although this wasnot equally prominent among all scholars.Another feature was a unitary approach,viewing "the world’s musics as a group ofseparate units, stylistically distinct andinternally homogenous",60 and thereforeable to be characterized as wholes on thebasis of very small samples which reflecta single set of principles.61

The focus on melody, polyphony,scalar structures and other similar musicalfeatures has been interpreted by BrunoNettl as reflecting some of the dominantvalues of Western music in the late-nine-teenth century. In Germany and CentralEurope, where many of the early compar-ative musicologists were based, standardmusical training tended to stress intellec-tually difficult musical structures, such asmelodic development and the simultaneousinteraction of various parts. When theearly scholars of non-Western music begantheir study, we see particular attentionpaid to these same features.62 Nettl contin-ues:

And if normal music, to us, ispolyphonic, in the broad sense,the concept of polyphony wasused to show on the one hand thatthe non-Western music wasworthy of attention because it didhave, one said rather defensively,polyphony, with people perform-ing together in incomprehensiblefashion, nevertheless knowingwhat they were doing; but on theother hand, most of this exoticmusic was worthy of study pre-cisely because it was so different,had no polyphony…The idea of asystematic polyphonic practice —and of systematic music making ingeneral — was high on the list ofvalues among our forebears…earlyethnomusicologists wanted toshow that non-Western musicswere systematically organized ingood part because they hadlearned their own music with thisvalue in mind.63

Another feature of early comparative mu-sicology, also related to the "musicologic-al" half of ethnomusicology, was an em-phasis on the transcription of non-Westernmusic as an end in itself. Transcribingmusic onto the Western staff, even afterthe invention of recording technology,was and still is an important aspect ofethnomusicological training and prac-tice,64 although the necessity and accur-acy of transcription has always been sub-ject to questioning and debate. Exactnotation was not even a feature of Westerncompositional practice until the late-eighteenth century,65 and of course thecompression of an entire musical systemonto five lines and four spaces represent-ing 12 semitones per octave tends to mould

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non-Western music to our own image.Any understanding of a non-Westernmusic which is based on a transcription inWestern notation will necessarily encodeour own musical values.66 Nevertheless,if we think of the transcription of musicas itself an interpretive orientation, it mustbe one of the most pervasive in comparat-ive musicology through its first 50 years.

So, if early comparative musicologycame substantially to inform the "musico-logical" half of ethnomusicology, what wasthe intellectual trajectory that led to thesometimes-opposed, but always inter-twined, "anthropological" half?

Two prominent features of comparativemusicology as it developed in late-nine-teenth-century Europe are an overall lackof contextualization and a universalizingcomparative perspective.67 This was im-plicit in Ellis’ large-scale comparison ofscales, in Hornbostel’s meticulous analysisof recordings from around the world, andcertainly in Sachs’ assumption of a singledevelopmental framework for all theworld’s musics. These two features alsoproved to be a key rift within the schol-arly study of non-Western music, and ledto the development of a distinctive per-spective within American cultural anthro-pology.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OFMUSIC

What must be one of the earliest substan-tial references to music within anthropo-logy appears in Franz Boas’ 1888 mono-graph The Central Eskimo,68 which con-tained transcriptions and some analysis oftwo-dozen Eskimo songs, within the con-text of a comprehensive ethnography. Not

only did this set the stage for an anthropo-logical approach to the study of non-Western music, but it represents a schol-arly effort almost as early as Ellis andStumpf in comparative musicology. In-deed, Boas and Stumpf worked togetherin collecting and analyzing NorthwestCoast indigenous music, subsequentlypublished by Stumpf in 1886 in Vier-teljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, oneof the earliest journals in comparativemusicology.69 So it would be a mistake toassume that comparative musicologists andanthropologists operated in isolation fromone another. Nevertheless, their overallapproaches to the study of non-Westernmusic were very different in many ways.The comparative musicologists were mo-tivated by theories about the origins andstructure of music, and analyzed theirmaterials accordingly. Boas’ work on mu-sic lacked a theory of this type,70 and in-stead fitted into a framework of meticulousdetail and ethnographic salvage work.

In addition to the music contained inThe Central Eskimo, Boas published articleson Kwakiutl, Chinook, Eskimo and Siouxmusic between 1888 and 1925. Each ofthem, while focusing on music, containsthe elements that have come to be associ-ated with Boasian cultural anthropology.The article "On Certain Songs and Dancesof the Kwakiutl of British Columbia"71

contextualizes several musical transcrip-tions of songs (presumably done by Boashimself) by including accounts of ritual,song texts, and a very lengthy version ofmythology relevant to the songs. His art-icle "Chinook Songs"72 contains threebrief notations along with 38 song textsand a glossary of several dozen words.Two articles, both entitled "Eskimo Talesand Songs",73 present song texts along

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with explanations of dozens of words usedin them. His article "Teton Sioux Music"74

addresses issues of musical form, includingrhythm, phrasing, and structure, and in-cludes 11 quite detailed musical transcrip-tions. Although he does not approach thetechnical and analytical detail of the workof some comparative musicologists, Boaswas on par with many, and his work onmusic is under-recognized, probably dueto the enormous volume of work on othersubjects.

Boas’ impact on the cross-culturalstudy of music is felt most strongly not inhis own research and publications, but inthose of his students and their students, alegacy which has led to a number of themost significant ethnomusicologistsworking today. Edward Sapir, the ethno-grapher, linguist and poet, was also a mu-sician and grew up in a musical family (hisfather was a professional cantor).75 Hisfirst in-depth work on songs was in 1910,when he transcribed over 200 Paiute(northern Arizona/southern Utah) songtexts76 and recorded 120 songs on waxcylinders.77 Along with this material,much of it unpublished, was copious con-textual information on the performances,people and places associated with thesongs.78 Sapir’s recordings were tran-scribed by his father, Jacob Sapir.79 Thisresearch led to Sapir’s article "Song Recit-ative in Paiute Mythology",80 which in-cluded his own musical transcriptions andmusical analysis focusing primarily onrhythm. This represents a notable differ-ence, given the strong emphasis in compar-ative musicology on matters of melody,scales and intervals.

Some of the fundamental differencesbetween comparative musicological and

cultural anthropological approaches to thestudy of non-Western music can be foundin a 1912 review Sapir wrote of a publica-tion by Carl Stumpf (Die Anfänge der Mu-sik). Sapir offers a précis of Stumpf’s beliefthat, in primitive music, notice was takenof "the unified effect of tones sung atconsonant intervals", while other intervals"dissonant or relatively so, would in timearise by giving the voice free play withinthe fourth, fifth, and octave".81 Sapir cri-ticizes this approach as being difficult toprove or disprove, and as not being basedon historical data.82 As Sapir writes:

In the nature of things any suchtheory must be purely speculative,as the use of musical tones is fartoo ancient a heritage of humanityto yield its genesis to historical re-construction. Failing historicalevidence, a theory of origin can befully convincing only when sowell grounded in psychology asnecessarily to exclude all otherpossible theories. This is hardlythe case here.83

Sapir is also critical of Stumpf’s over-em-phasis (which could be extended muchmore broadly in the comparative musico-logy of the day) on "the purely intervalic[sic] side of music":

Music is neither purely tone norpurely rhythm. Would it not bemore suggestive to think of it interms of an association of toneproduction, however it mightarise, with the rhythmic impulsemanifested in all of man’s artisticactivities? Granted this impulseand the possession of vocal chords,adjustable for changes of pitch,various forms of musical expres-

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sion might be expected to arise.Several paths seem possible, theactual course or courses traversedlie beyond our ken.84

And in a similar vein, critiquing Stumpf’shandling of melodic structure and musicalform, Sapir writes:

I am inclined to doubt whether apurely musical study of this prob-lem would be as fruitful as whentaken in connection with song-texts, dance forms, and other fea-tures as musical execution is wontto be associated with in practice.The peculiarities of melodic formsare often due to factors that haveno direct relation to musical prob-lems as such, as witness ourmasses, lullabies, and bugle calls.These remarks are meant to indic-ate the necessity of studying themore complicated problemspresented by primitive music inconnection with associated cultur-al features. Stumpf’s relative neg-lect throughout the book of allfeatures that are not strictly music-al in character is naturally to alarge extent unavoidable, but wemust not fail to realize that suchone-sidedness may lead us astrayin our interpretations.85

Overall, Sapir’s review is quite favourable;these comments, however, indicate certainmatters of interpretation and emphasis thatdifferentiated comparative musicologistsfrom anthropologists, matters that still, tosome extent, characterize ethnomusico-logy.

Another of Boas’ students who wasvery influential in the development of

ethnomusicology was George Herzog.Herzog is an interesting character in thisnarrative, as he really stands with one footin each of the two camps that I am discuss-ing. He first studied at the Royal Conser-vatory in Budapest, and was heavily influ-enced by the folk music research of BélaBartók and Zoltán Kodály.86 From 1923until 1925, Herzog worked under Horn-bostel at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv,the most important archival institution forcomparative musicology until the SecondWorld War, and thus was part of the so-called Berlin School of Comparative Musi-cology.87 In 1925 he emigrated to theUnited States and studied anthropologyunder Boas.88 Thus, in one individual wehave the intellectual descendant of a vari-ety of important approaches to the cross-cultural study of music. Bruno Nettl,Herzog’s most prominent student, wrotethe following about Herzog’s letters,which give an interesting insight into hisplace in the development of ethnomusico-logy:

Throughout the correspondenceone sees the hand of Hornbostel,the comparativist and the archive-builder, of Bartók the careful pro-cessor and analyst concerned withauthenticity, of Boas the methodic-al fieldworker, of the confluenceof folkloristics, linguistics, andethnography…The multidisciplin-ary nature of American eth-nomusicology is in part due to hismany-sided reach.89

Another prominent student of Boas’ whowas greatly influential in the developmentof the anthropological approach to non-Western music was Melville Herskovits,whose interest in the relationship between

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African and African-American culture wasstimulated by the role of music.90 Al-though Herskovits did not publish extens-ively on musical topics, he supervised thedoctoral dissertations of both RichardWaterman and Alan Merriam (who wouldboth be very prominent in the new fieldof ethnomusicology), and he made fieldrecordings of music in Dutch Guiana,Haiti, Trinidad, Brazil, Dahomey, the GoldCoast and Nigeria.91

WATERMAN AND MOYLE:CONTRASTING SCHOLARSCOMPARED

In this section, I would like to examine theparticular theoretical and methodologicalapproaches of two of the earliest scholarsof Australian Aboriginal music, RichardWaterman and Alice Moyle. As well asany two ethnomusicologists, their workclearly represents the mixed parentage ofthe discipline, one anthropological andone musicological — although it is diffi-cult to characterize their work in asimplistic way. Their distinctive ap-proaches to the study of music revealmuch of the discipline’s past, and also thedirections it came to take in the sub-sequent five decades.

Richard Waterman is best known as ascholar of African and African-Americanmusic, and had a distinguished anthropo-logical pedigree through Herskovits toBoas. His doctoral research, completed in1943, looked at African patterns in themusic of Trinidad, which he pursuedthrough a clearly anthropological frame-work.92 He later worked with Herskovitsat Northwestern University in Chicago,becoming the founding director of theNorthwestern University Laboratory of

Comparative Musicology and supervisingthe doctoral research of Alan Merriam,who was to become one of the leadingfigures in ethnomusicology.93 Merriamlater wrote of Waterman’s work: "overrid-ing all else is a basic orientation towardanthropology; [Waterman] was an anthro-pologist first and foremost, and his eth-nomusicological specialization was almostalways handled within the anthropologicalframe of reference."94

This orientation is most clear in Water-man’s consistent theoretical interest incultural dynamics, examining how culturalpatterns, especially musical ones, are re-tained, reinterpreted, or fused over time.95

His best-known work in this regard ex-amined the degree to which African-American musics maintained African mu-sical elements.

Waterman was most interested inrhythmic styles and their cultural context;this in itself differentiates him from a greatdeal of comparative musicology which hada primary focus on tonality, melody andharmony, and the analysis of music in itsown terms. His 1948 paper entitled "'Hot'Rhythm in Negro Music" examined thevarying tenacity of West African rhythmicpatterns in a variety of African-Americanmusics in the New World. Waterman de-scribes "hot" as "one of those subliminalconstellations of feelings, values, attitudes,and motor-behaviour patterns"96 whichmanifests itself in mixed metres, percus-sion polyrhythms, off-beat melodicphrasing, and an overall prominence ofpercussion instruments.97 The degree towhich these West African musical charac-teristics were syncretised with musics inthe New World, and the particular natureof the syncretism, depended on the music-

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al styles to which they were exposed and,crucially, on the cultural context. In NorthAmerica, where whites discouraged anddisparaged African music and culture,African-American music is largelyEuropean in nature, with significant butsubmerged African features. In contrast,in Central and South America, in whichthere was a more accommodating culturalcontext, African musical elements weremore evenly blended, or even dominantlyWest African.98 A place like Trinidadexhibits the full range of possibilities, withdominantly British and Protestant areasfeaturing European-derived religious andfolk music with a more subtle African fla-vour in some areas, and music of Africanreligious cults in others.99 From the out-set, then, Waterman’s work on musicpertained directly to understanding thebroader cultural patterns of which musicwas a part.

Waterman’s work on African andAfrican-American music was also criticalof some of the prevailing attitudes in theacademic study of non-Western music. Hetook issue, for instance, with the notionthat Africans were not developed enoughculturally to have harmony, and that anyinstances of harmony in recorded sampleswere purely the accidental result of over-lapping polyphony of different vocalparts. He also lamented the methodologythat facilitated such an interpretation,where analysts relied on poor-quality re-cordings made by others, where true har-monic features may have been masked,rather than on recordings they madethemselves.100 Waterman writes: "That ahypothesis concerning the absence ofharmony in African music could have beenframed on the basis of early data presen-ted, then, is completely understandable;

how the hypothesis came to be acceptedas fact and how it managed to persist tothis day are less readily understood."101

In his work on Australian Aboriginalmusic, Waterman retained his overridingtheoretical interest in cultural dynamicsand social context, even to the extent thatany focus on particular musical featuresis limited. He made around 15 hours ofrecordings of Yolngu music during a year’sfield research in Yirrkala in 1952/53. Forthe most part, they were elicited record-ings of short sequences of songs, perhapsa half-dozen to a dozen, by single patrifili-al groups. There are several recordings oforal narrative, and at least two sequencesof songs recorded in their ritual context.

Waterman’s only published workdealing specifically with Yolngu musicwas an article in 1955 entitled "Music inAustralian Aboriginal Culture — SomeSociological and Psychological Implica-tions". Waterman’s primary focus was inexamining Yolngu music as an enculturat-ive mechanism, and he drew upon func-tionalist theory in his interpretations.102

Much of the article examines how musicis learned in childhood, adolescence, earlyadulthood, and late adulthood, and thefunctions of music are described asproviding recreation, improving morale,increasing and relieving emotional ten-sion,103 strengthening kin-group solidar-ity, acting as textbooks of natural history,history and cosmology, and affirming tiesbetween social groups and totemic spe-cies.104

In terms of musical features, it is curi-ous that Waterman’s interest in rhythm,as detailed in his African-American re-search, does not replicate itself in hisYolngu research (despite considerable

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rhythmic complexity). Instead, Watermanturns his attention to subject matter closerto the heart of comparative musicology:melody, scales and intervals. Even here,though, his primary interest is to demon-strate the relationship between melodyand sociality, by demonstrating the patri-filial identity of various melodic intervals.Thus, he can assert that: "[a] karma cycleof the ridajigo-speaking lineage uses thefirst, the flatted second, and the flattedthird of scale; a cycle of the komaitt-speak-ing lineage uses the natural second andflatted third of scale, and one of themagkalili-speaking lineage the flatted thirdand the fourth."105

If the shift to a focus on melody overrhythm is somewhat surprising, the focuson social context is not. At any rate, thearticle as a whole does not deal with anymusical feature in great detail, concentrat-ing on matters of social function and encul-turation.

Waterman’s interest in cultural dynam-ics is more obvious in a paper, co-writtenwith his wife, called "Directions of CultureChange in Aboriginal Arnhem Land",106

a chapter of a book co-edited by him onthe subject of cultural change in Aborigin-al Australia. The paper is a critique of theview, widespread at the time, that Abori-ginal culture is essentially conservativeand unchanging under conditions of cul-tural contact, leading to cultural break-down instead of accommodation. TheWatermans advance the position that, al-though certain areas of Yolngu culture,such as their experience of missionaryeducation and religion, demonstratedconsiderable resistance to change, in otherareas of culture Yolngu people were re-markably innovative and willing to accept

new things.107 In support of this position,the Watermans point to Macassan-derivedmaterial culture and cosmology, and thediscovery of "new" songs in the Yolngumusical repertoire.108 The authors con-clude:

…that Australian Aboriginals, asexemplified by the people ofYirkalla [sic], have earned theirreputation for resisting changeonly in connection with changeswhose motivations they do notunderstand, changes detrimentalto their well-being, and changesthat would involve behaviour inopposition to their values and tothe principles of their world-view.

Actually, in their own terms,the Aboriginals of Yirkalla arepeople with open and questioningminds, continually making use ofevery source of good and valuablesuggestions for the modificationof their behaviour and willing toconsider any innovation on itsown merits.109

In his only other publication on the sub-ject of Aboriginal music, Waterman againadopts a stance reminiscent of comparativemusicology in two senses: first, througha focus on melodic structures (although hedoes pay attention to melodic rhythm);and second, by analyzing a collection ofmusic made by Mountford on GrooteEylandt. In both senses, Waterman wouldseem to contradict the interpretive stancewhich he took vis-à-vis African andAfrican-American music in the 1940s and1950s.

Waterman’s focus is to draw sometentative conclusions about Groote Eylandtmusic based on his melodic analyses of a

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small sample of songs. The language whichhe uses and the style of analysis arestrongly reminiscent of early-twentieth-century comparative musicology, andmark something of a departure from hisother ethnomusicological work. There isa general interpretive assumption that theanalysis of melodic structure, in the senseof counting notes and measuring the inter-vals between them in terms of Westernmusical theory, can provide material forgeneral conclusions about the music andits place amongst the musics of the world.Thus, to give but one example, Watermanwrites about one particular song in thesample:

Its basic materials are two tonelevels, scored G and A. In the firstmeasure the initial notes of thehalf-measure figures rise to B, butI suspect that this is either a spe-cies of beginning formula or thesinger using a few notes to find hisbest pitch. A peculiar featureabout this song is the “rise” inmeasure 12, which is echoed by ahigh note at the beginning ofmeasures 13 and 14. This intrusivehigh note — intrusive because itis unique in this particular collec-tion, and because it breaks theconsistent pattern of alternatingand balancing figurations using Gand A, of which the present songis almost entirely composed —reaches to a major seventh abovethe low note, then slides down ahalf-tone for its other two appear-ances.110

What is surprising here is not the natureof the analysis itself, which was commonenough in the mid-1960s when the paper

was written, nor the value of such ananalysis. What is surprising is that itcomes from the pen of Waterman, whoseother published work is based so stronglyupon an anthropological method, copiouscultural context, and a much broader ap-proach to the analysis of musical features.

Waterman himself comments on this inthe paper, noting that, although he isgenerally in the "anthropological" campof ethnomusicology, one may follow thelead of Kolinski — amongst the most"musicological" of ethnomusicologists —in using other people’s recordings, analyz-ing musical structure, and ignoring thecultural context111 — an approach whichhe had previously characterized as "unfor-tunate for the development of ethnomusico-logy as a branch of cultural anthropo-logy".112

Waterman’s conclusions in this paperalso situate it within a well-establisheddiscourse of comparative musicology.Given that Groote Eylandt music (at leasthis small sample) uses a small number ofnotes, he suggests that melody is betterunderstood in terms of pitch levels ratherthan scales. He writes:

…this is a way of making musicsomewhat different from the cre-ation of melodies using an array ofnotes drawn from a series that canbe arranged in a scale either by thesinger himself or at least by somemusically trained investigator…Ishould like to suggest that, withregard to tonal materials, thereexists a hitherto unrecognisedmusical culture area to go with thescale-type areas generally recog-nized. To the South Asian-NorthAfrican microtonal area, the

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European-African diatonic area,and the Far Eastern-American Indi-an pentatonic area (which, incid-entally, should be divided and re-characterized), I should like to addan area of Oceania characterizednot by scales, but rather by thetechnique of forming songs out ofa very few established levels ofpitch.113

Thus, here we have one of the mostprominent "anthropological" ethnomusico-logists, a student of Boas and Herskovits,shunning the investigation of culturalcontext and addressing himself to thekinds of questions which had dominatedcomparative musicology since the mid-1880s. It is obvious that, despite being ableto characterize different approaches to thestudy of non-Western music, some schol-ars cannot be completely tarred with onebrush.

What, then, of Alice Moyle? In manyways, she was as good an exemplar of the"musicological" side of the discipline asWaterman was of the "anthropological"side. But, like Waterman, she cannot beentirely tarred with one brush either.

One of Alice Moyle’s first publicationswas a book called Know Your Orchestra,114

but her first excursion into Aboriginalmusic was her 1957 M.A. thesis at theUniversity of Sydney entitled "The Inter-vallic Structure of Australian AboriginalSinging". The subject matter, overall ap-proach and theoretical inspiration placeher squarely within the European traditionof comparative musicology. Moyle’s object-ive was the comparative study of interval-lic resemblances among different musicaltraditions in Aboriginal Australia, with an

eye toward describing them in terms ofdevelopmental stages.115

Moyle draws upon some of the mostprominent figures in comparative musico-logy, especially Curt Sachs, positing a rela-tionship between the number of notes usedmelodically and different stages of singing;that is, fewer notes equals an earlierstage.116 She further uses Sachs’ frame-work of logogenic, pathogenic and melo-genic singing, stating that Aboriginal songbelongs in the last category due to thepresence of well-marked intervals.117

Moyle also refers to Alain Danielou’s "In-troduction to the Study of Musical Scales",in which he states that intervals can eitherbe divided by numbers (like stringlengths), or "by their psychological corres-pondence such as the feelings and imagesthey necessarily evoke in our minds",118

extending such an idea to Aboriginalsinging.

Like so much comparative musicologyin the first half of the twentieth century,Moyle devotes a significant portion of herstudy to the subject of the pentatonicscale, and refers to both Hornbostel andSachs in her analysis. She notes that thesequence A-G-E-D-C is a "typically Aus-tralian" mode of descent,119 and examinesa number of other possible pentatonicmodes.120 She writes, however: "whilethe intention here is not to suggest regularor systematic pentatonism…— the reverseis nearer the truth in Australian singing— the conglomerations of small 'motives'already described do frequently produceresemblances to the above pentatonic se-quences."121

She continues:

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What remains to be said here onthe subject of pentatonism is thatin songs all over the continentboth pentatonic, diatonic (hep-tatonic), chromatic, even microton-ic progressions are demonstrated.And it would seem that all of theseare purely vocal modes of singingwhich can exist side by side. The-ories of “evolution” or develop-ment are probably no more thantheories of emphasis, certain instru-ments emphasising certain scaleprogressions more than others. TheAustralian situation in this regardwould closely parallel that at thebeginning of Western musical his-tory, long before subsequent exper-iments in harmony gave to thediatonics that "advanced" statusthat they had in Western musicaltheory.122

It is obvious that Moyle has not beenswept away by an inordinate focus on thepentatonic scale in so-called primitivemusic, like some of her predecessors.However, her work is clearly marked bya strong concern for scales and intervalsas holding the key to understanding uni-versal principles of musical development.

Tonality — that is, the number of tonesused and the way they are used in partic-ular intervallic sequences — is at thecentre of Moyle’s theory of stages of devel-opment in Aboriginal singing;123 for, asshe writes, "the rise and fall of melody issurely closer to the core of music thanfeatures derived from song-texts or fromdancing rhythms".124 This is combinedwith a corresponding theory of musicaldiffusion in order to speculate on the ori-gins and spread of Australian Aboriginal

music. Moyle refers to Sachs’ belief thatthere was an Asian cradle of music whichcould be demonstrated by attention tomelody, modes and scales.125 She writes:"Having traced — thanks to Sachs — themajor-third-plus-semitone progressionright to Australia’s back door, we are nowable to follow it further into North EastArnhem Land to the popular Wadamiri[sic] song-series which features this inter-val group in a well-established and strik-ing manner."126

And she continues:

…judging by the basic tones andintervals aboriginal singers select,it might well be that here in Aus-tralia, and for contemporary earsto hear, is music which belongs tothe same deep strata as the sourcesof both Eastern and Western mu-sic. In Australian aboriginal musicwe may be hearing the same ger-minating cells from which havecome every known style of mu-sic.127

She then goes on to outline, based onmelodic structure, a series of stages in thedevelopment of Aboriginal music, from asmall range with monotonous repetitionall the way through to polyphonic rudi-ments,128 and states that diffusion ac-counts for similarities between musicalregions across the country.129 It seems tome that the underlying evolutionist implic-ation of Moyle’s thesis was probably im-ported into her thinking by her theoreticalreliance on Sachs more than any othersingle scholar.

Moyle’s primary interest in the inter-vallic features of Aboriginal music contin-ued in subsequent publications. Her 1959

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analysis of Baldwin Spencer’s wax cylin-der recordings, made in 1901 and 1912,concentrates almost entirely on which in-tervals may be heard and in which order.The universal significance of particularintervals is suggested through numerouscomparisons between the intervals sungon Spencer’s cylinders and the ancientmodes of Western civilization: "the tonesof the “Arunji” corroboree…resemblethose of the ancient Greek Hypophrygian,or mediaeval Mixolydian mode"130 or "astructural interval of a fourth…is linkedconjunctly to one of a fifth…after themanner of the ancient Greek Hypomixoly-dian and mediaeval Phrygian modes".131

In 1960, Moyle turned her analyticalear to the earliest recordings of Aboriginalmusic in existence, made in 1899 and 1903of the Tasmanian singer Fanny CochraneSmith. Once again, melodic structureprovides the material for her interpretiveframework, as it had in her earlier work.Comparing these songs with those of theVedda of what was then Ceylon — thehands-down winner of the early comparat-ive musicological prize for "most primit-ive" music — Moyle contends that theTasmanian songs show a much higher levelof organization, based on melodic struc-ture, with "a compass of an octave andseven or eight appreciably different tones"and melodies which "proceed upwards aswell as downwards".132 And, within thesample itself, the legato-style "Birds andFlowers" song is more musically advancedthan the syllabic "corroboree" song, byvirtue of melodic phrases which are "bal-anced above and below a tonal centre".133

In both cases, conclusions regarding mu-sical development and sophistication aremade solely on the basis of melody andmelodic features, with no consideration of

rhythm or timbre, much less cultural con-text.

Moyle’s grounding in the theory ofEuropean comparative musicology alsoleads her to adopt an explicitly comparat-ive approach to her material, as she detailssimilarities and differences between theTasmanian material and songs from thewest coast of South Australia as well asCentral Australia. These comparisons arebased on scale tables, a method advocatedby Hornbostel, which break down a pieceof music into its constituent notes andtheir relative duration; the most frequentlyoccurring note is taken as the tonic of ascale used in the piece.134 Moyle con-cludes that the Tasmanian songs have aclear tonic and an emphasis given to a tri-ad with the tonic in the middle, whereasthe other Aboriginal songs emphasize thefifth note above the triad. These and othermelodic features lead Moyle to comparethe Tasmanian songs with Melanesianstyles of singing135 — which is obviouslydrawing a very long bow.

So, early in her career Alice Moyle wasstrongly informed by some of the charac-teristic features of comparative musico-logy: an overriding interest in melodic andintervallic structures; a negligible interestin rhythmic features; an interest in com-parison, musical origins and development-al stages; a reliance on a "laboratory"method of analyzing field collections madeby others; an overall lack of focus on cul-tural context; and a general belief innotation and musical analysis as thefoundation of methodology. However, asher career progressed she became muchless easy to characterize in each of theseareas. A single example, an article from1968 which was a follow-up on the Tas-

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manian recordings, reveals some subtlechanges in her approach.

One notable change, which reflects anextra decade of thought on matters eth-nomusicological, as well as her first-handresearch and recording, is a re-orientationaway from the scalar arrangement ofpitches toward a focus on melodic contour,which may reveal "significant demarca-tions of musical style".136 To this end,Moyle’s standard transcriptions in West-ern notation are accompanied by graphsoutlining melodic contour, with pitchrepresented on the Y-axis and duration onthe X-axis. Of this method Moyle writes:

…the tonal level (or levels) withwhich the progression of vocal tonesmost often coincides is seen to emergein the length and disposition of thehorizontal lines. Western designationssuch as “tonic”, “dominant” etc. arethus avoided. Vertical lines indicate“broad” (as against “narrow”, or accur-ately measured) melodic steps or inter-vals…Pitch/duration graphs have theadvantage here of directing attentionto tonal movement, rather than toprecise pitch.137

Another notable change is Moyle’smuch greater emphasis on the historicalrecord to provide some relevant culturalcontext; in particular, in examining songtexts and historical reports of polyphonicsinging in parallel thirds. Although shepoints out that, on the Australian main-land, polyphonic singing was producedby accidental overlapping of vocal parts(the same interpretation criticized by Wa-terman with regard to African polyphony),she gives some credence to early historicalaccounts of Tasmanian singing in parallelthirds.138

However, despite these changes in herapproach, and new information therebygenerated, her conclusions remain virtu-ally the same. The innovative pitch/dura-tion graphs depicting melodic contour areused to compare Tasmanian singing notonly with mainland Aboriginal singing,but also with singing in the Solomon Is-lands, again taking melodic features as thesole basis for intercultural musical compar-ison. Examining these graphs, along withthe historical accounts, Moyle is able toconclude:

Compared with songs recorded onthe mainland more differencesthan similarities have been foundin the present study of FannySmith’s songs. Fanny Smith’sSpring Song and Hymn Improvisa-tion show some structural resemb-lance to a style of singing hithertoobserved in parts of Melanesia.And if early evidence for singingin “third parallels” be accepted,further support is thus given to atentative theory of musical connec-tion between Tasmania and placesin the South Pacific.139

So, up to this point in her career Moylecontinues to develop a speculative theoryof musical diffusion, reminiscent of Horn-bostel’s support of diffusion theory andthe monogenesis of cultural phenom-ena.140 Although her thought changedover the many years of her work, it canbe concluded that Moyle maintained aconsistent grounding in the theoreticalframework of her early career, and there-fore is a good representative of the "musi-cological" side of ethnomusicology.

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CONCLUSIONS

And so to return to my titular metaphor:the gestation of the discipline of eth-nomusicology lasted for roughly sevendecades, from Alexander Ellis’ treatise onthe musical scales of various nations in1885 to the first annual meeting of the So-ciety for Ethnomusicology in 1956. Therewas a courting period of at least 300 years,beginning with some of the earliest ac-counts of non-Western music by travellersand missionaries. The period of labourseems to have started between the late1940s, with the formation of the Interna-tional Folk Music Council, and late 1952,when the "founding fathers" of the Societyfor Ethnomusicology first met at theAmerican Anthropological Associationconference to discuss forming a new soci-ety.

Using very broad strokes (and cogniz-ant of the dangers of doing so), it is pos-sible to characterize some of the predomin-ant concerns of comparative musicologyas a focus on the transcription and analysisof musical structures, especially melodic,scalar and intervallic structures, as the keyto an understanding of non-Western musicthat allows for cross-cultural comparison,generalization and speculation about theorigins and development of music. Al-though there is considerable internal di-versity, most of the main figures in com-parative musicology, such as Stumpf,Hornbostel and Sachs, dealt with these is-sues in some detail. This intellectual traject-ory provided the theoretical and method-ological foundation upon which AliceMoyle built her early work on AustralianAboriginal music.

It is also possible to characterize theanthropological study of music in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuriesas primarily concerned with the culturalcontext of musical performance, revealedthrough the process of salvage ethno-graphy. Scholars like Boas, Sapir andHerskovits lacked any grand theory ofmusic, although they did undertake lim-ited transcription and analysis to comple-ment transcriptions of song texts and de-tailed accounts of rituals. When they didfocus on musical detail, they often singledout rhythmic structures for special consid-eration. This approach to the study ofmusic paved the way for Richard Water-man’s work on both African-American andAustralian Aboriginal musics.

This article has many weaknesses. Inorder to cover much ground, I have hadto gloss over each of the scholars men-tioned with undue haste, very likely ignor-ing many of the subtleties of their work.I have left out a great many significantearly scholars of non-Western musics,such as Helen Roberts, Frances Densmore,Jaap Kunst, Robert Lachmann and HughTracey. I have had to ignore the entiremovement of scholars who studied the folkmusics of Europe, including PercyGrainger, Béla Bartók, Cecil Sharp, MariusBarbeau, Maude Karpeles and many oth-ers. Perhaps most grievously, I have leftunexamined, except in a passing way, theimpact of two major developments onethnomusicology: the invention of thephonograph141 and the development ofmusic archives based on phonographicrecordings. Both changed the course ofethnomusicology forever, and must waitfor another article.

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This article has at least pointed back intime to some of the important factorswhich led to the intellectual situation ofboth the founding of ethnomusicology asa discipline and of the earliest significantresearch on Australian Aboriginal music.The intellectual situation then, with asmaller number of musically inclined an-thropologists and a larger number of eth-nically inclined musicologists, continuesto characterize the discipline today. How-ever, as the cases of Richard Watermanand Alice Moyle demonstrate, the intellec-tual history of ethnomusicology is quitecomplex and no individual scholar’s devel-opment can be analyzed in a simplisticway. Waterman and Moyle each begantheir work on Australian Aboriginal musicjust as the scholarly study of non-Westernmusic was in the process of becomingformalized as a discipline, and they weresubject to a wide range of theoretical andmethodological influences. Each went onto become extremely influential on thedevelopment of ethnomusicology in theirrespective countries as they trained futuregenerations of researchers. As a pair, then,they shed some considerable light on theorigins of ethnomusicology and the waysin which it has grown during the sub-sequent half-century. Now that the discip-line is into late middle age, with grown-up children of its own, its intellectual tra-jectory will no doubt continue on a robustinterdisciplinary path for generations tocome.

ENDNOTES

1 Timothy Rice, "Toward the Remodeling of Eth-nomusicology", Ethnomusicology, vol.31 no.3, 1987,p. 471.2 The distinction in ethnomusicology between “an-thropological” and “musicological” approaches is

less relevant now than it was in the past, althoughit still persists in a variety of ways. I maintain thedistinction here only as a heuristic device for thepurpose of examining the development of the discip-line from these initially distinct disciplinary bases.3 Charlotte Frisbie, "Women and the Society forEthnomusicology: Roles and Contributions fromFormation through Incorporation (1952/3–1961)" inBruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (eds), ComparativeMusicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on theHistory of Ethnomusicology (Chicago and London: TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1991), pp.245–6.4 The International Council for Traditional Music(ICTM) is the other major international society dedic-ated to ethnomusicological scholarship. Founded in1947 as the International Folk Music Council (ErichStockmann, "The International Folk Music Council/In-ternational Council for Traditional Music: FortyYears", Yearbook for Traditional Music, vol.20, 1988,p.1), the birth of this organization could also havebeen used in this article to mark the beginning oforganized ethnomusicology. In either case, thefounding of these organizations was merely a symbol-ic milestone marking the coalescence of a number ofscholarly trends that had been developing lessformally for decades.5 Frank Harrison, Time, Place and Music: An Antho-logy of Ethnomusicological Observation c.1550 toc.1800, (Amsterdam: Frits Knuf, 1973), p.6.6 Ibid, pp.16–9.7 Philip Bohlman, "Representation and Cultural Cri-tique in the History of Ethnomusicology", in Nettland Bohlman, Comparative Musicology and Anthropo-logy of Music, p.131.8 Cited in Harrison, Time, Place and Music, p.56.9 Cited in Harrison, Time, Place and Music, p.199.10 Anthony Seeger, "Styles of Musical Ethnography"in Nettl and Bohlman, Comparative Musicology andAnthropology of Music, p.347.11 Ibid.12 Ibid, pp.347–8.13 The claim of tone-deafness is made by Jaap Kunst,Musicologica: A Study of the Nature of Ethno-musico-logy, Its Problems, Methods and Representative Person-alities (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Vereeniging IndischInstituut, 1950), p.9. In the published paper, Ellisstates: "I have been assisted throughout by the delic-ate ear of Mr. Alfred James Hipkins…without hisremarkable power of discriminating small intervalsbetween tones of very different qualities…this papercould not have come into existence…The calcula-tions, the arrangement, the illustrations, as well asthe original conception, form my part. The judgmentof ear, musical suggestions, and assistance in every

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way form his.” (Alexander Ellis, "On the MusicalScales of Various Nations", Journal of the Royal Societyof the Arts, vol.33, pp.486).14 Ellis, ‘On the Musical Scales of Various Nations",pp.486–7.15 Kunst, Musicologica, p.10.16 Ellis, ‘On the Musical Scales of Various Nations",pp.490–1.17 Ibid, p.526.18 Alexander L. Ringer, "One World or None? Un-timely Reflections on a Timely Musicological Ques-tion" in Nettl and Bohlman, Comparative Musicologyand Anthropology of Music, p.187.19 Ellis, "On the Musical Scales of Various Nations",p.487.20 In this sense, early ethnomusicology bears a re-semblance to the early anthropology of Franz Boas,whose doctoral dissertation in physics had a definitepsychological angle, examining the psycho-physicsof colour perception.21 Albrecht Schneider, "Psychological Theory andComparative Musicology" in Nettl and Bohlman,Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music,p.293.22 Schneider, "Psychological Theory and Comparat-ive Musicology", pp.294–5.23 Dieter Christensen, "Erich von Hornbostel, CarlStumpf, and the Institutionalization of ComparativeMusicology" in Nettl and Bohlman, ComparativeMusicology and Anthropology of Music, p.204.24 Christensen, "The Institutionalization of Compar-ative Musicology", p.204.25 Eric Ames, "The Sound of Evolution", MODERN-ISM/modernity, vol.10 no.2, 2003, pp.303, 315 andpassim.26 Ibid, p.316.27 Stephen Blum, "European Musical Terminologyand the Music of Africa" in Nettl and Bohlman,Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music,p.10.28 Cited in Blum, "European Musical Terminologyand the Music of Africa", p.10.29 Jaap Kunst, Around Von Hornbostel's Theory of theCycle of Blown Fifths (Amsterdam: KoninklijkeVereeniging Indisch Instituut, 1948), pp.3–5.30 Erich M. von Hornbostel, African Negro Music(London: International Institute of African Languagesand Cultures, 1930), pp.7–8.31 Also see Ames, "The Sound of Evolution", p.316and passim.

32 Hornbostel, African Negro Music, p.11.33 Ibid.34 Ibid, p.13.35 Ames, "The Sound of Evolution", p.316.36 Erich M. von Hornbostel, "The Ethnology ofAfrican Sound-Instruments", Africa: Journal of theInternational African Institute, vol.6 no.2, 1933,p.133.37 Ibid.38 Ibid, pp.138–9.39 Ibid, p.140.40 Ibid, p.141.41 Ibid, p.144.42 Ibid, p.145.43 Ibid, p.146.44 Ibid, p.148.45 Ibid, p.150; also see Ames, "The Sound of Evolu-tion", ff.77.46 Curt Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World:East and West (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,1943), p.20.47 Ibid, p.21.48 Ibid, p.29.49 Ibid, p.31.50 Ibid, p.32.51 Ibid, p.41.52 Ibid, p.52.53 Ibid, p.41.54 Ibid, p.41.55 Ibid, p.52.56 Ibid, p.42.57 Ibid, pp.42–3.58 Ibid, p.43.59 Ibid, p. 44.60 Bruno Nettl, "Western Musical Values and theCharacter of Ethnomusicology", The World of Music,vol.24 no.1, 1984, p.31.61 Ibid, p. 31.62 Ibid.63 Ibid, pp.32–3.64 Ibid, p.35.

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65 cf. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of MusicalWorks: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1992).66 Nettl, "Western Musical Values", p.36.67 Norma McLeod, "Ethnomusicological Researchand Anthropology", Annual Review of Anthropology,vol.3, 1974, p.102.68 Franz Boas, The Central Eskimo (Lincoln: Univer-sity of Nebraska Press, 1964 (1888)).69 Franz Boas, "On Certain Songs and Dances of theKwakiutl of British Columbia", Journal of AmericanFolklore, vol.1 no.1, 1888, p.52.70 McLeod, "Ethnomusicological Research and An-thropology", p.102.71 Franz Boas, "On Certain Songs and Dances of theKwakiutl of British Columbia", p.52.72 Franz Boas, "Chinook Songs", Journal of AmericanFolklore, vol.1 no.3, 1888.73 Franz Boas, "Eskimo Tales and Songs", Journal ofAmerican Folklore, vol.7 no.24, 1894, and "EskimoTales and Songs", Journal of American Folklore, vol.10no.37, 1897.74 Franz Boas, "Teton Sioux Music", Journal ofAmerican Folklore, vol.38 no.148, 1925.75 Robert Franklin and Pamela Bunte, "Edward Sa-pir’s Unpublished Southern Paiute Song Texts", inRegna Darnell and Judith Irvine (eds), CollectedWorks of Edward Sapir, vol.4: Ethnology, (Berlin:Mouton, 1994), p.589.76 Franklin and Bunte, "Edward Sapir’s UnpublishedSouthern Paiute Song Texts", p.589.77 Thomas Vennum, "The Tony Tillohash Wax Cyl-inder Recordings and Jacob Sapir’s Musical Transcrip-tions", in Darnell and Irvine, Collected Works of Ed-ward Sapir, vol.4, p.663.78 Franklin and Bunte, "Edward Sapir’s UnpublishedSouthern Paiute Song Texts", p.594.79 Ibid, p. 589.80 Edward Sapir, "Song Recitative in Paiute Mytho-logy", Journal of American Folklore, vol.23 no.90,1910.81 Edward Sapir, "Review of Carl Stumpf, Die Anf-dnge der Musik", in Darnell and Irvine, CollectedWorks of Edward Sapir, vol.4, p.141.82 Ibid, p.141.83 Ibid, pp.141–2.84 Ibid, p.142.85 Ibid, pp.143–4.

86 Bruno Nettl, "The IFCM/ICTM and the Develop-ment of Ethnomusicology in the United States",Yearbook for Traditional Music, vol.20, p.21.87 Christensen, "The Institutionalization of Compar-ative Musicology", p.206.88 Nettl, "The IFCM/ICTM and the Development ofEthnomusicology in the United States", p.21.89 Bruno Nettl, "The Dual Nature of Ethnomusico-logy in North America: The Contributions of CharlesSeeger and George Herzog", in Nettl and Bohlman,Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music,pp.271–2.90 McLeod, "Ethnomusicological Research and An-thropology", p.102.91 Richard A. Waterman, "“Hot” Rhythm in NegroMusic", Journal of the American Musicological Society,vol.1 no.1, 1948, p.24.92 Alan Merriam, "Richard Alan Waterman,1914–1971", Ethnomusicology, vol.17 no.1, 1973, p.73.93 Ibid, p.74.94 Ibid.95 Ibid.96 Waterman, "'Hot' Rhythm in Negro Music", p.24.97 Ibid, p.25.98 Ibid, pp.26–7.99 Ibid, pp.33–6.100 Richard A. Waterman, "African Influence on theMusic of the Americas", in Sol Tax (ed.), Accultura-tion in the Americas (Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 1952), p.208.101 Ibid, p.209.102 Richard A. Waterman, "Music in AustralianAboriginal Culture: Some Sociological and Psycholo-gical Implications", Journal of Music Therapy, vol.5,1955, p.41.103 Ibid, p.45.104 Ibid, p.47.105 Ibid, p.46.106 Richard A. Waterman and Patricia Panyity Wa-terman, "Directions of Culture Change in AboriginalArnhem Land", in Arnold R. Pilling and Richard A.Waterman (eds), Diprotodon to Detribalization: Studiesof Change among Australian Aborigines (East Lansing:Michigan State University Press, 1970), pp.101–109.107 Waterman and Waterman, pp.103–7.108 Ibid, pp.107–8.109 Ibid, pp.108–9.

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110 Richard A. Waterman, "Aboriginal Songs fromGroote Eylandt, Australia", in Peter Crossley-Holland(ed.), Proceedings of the Centennial Workshop on Eth-nomusicology (Victoria: Provincial Archives of BritishColumbia, 1975), p.105.111 Waterman, "Aboriginal Songs from GrooteEylandt, Australia", p.111.112 Waterman, "African Influence on the Music ofthe Americas", p.208.113 Waterman, "Aboriginal Songs from GrooteEylandt, Australia", p.112.114 Alice M. Moyle (as Alice Brown), Know YourOrchestra (Melbourne and London: F.W. Cheshire,1948).115 Alice M. Moyle, The Intervallic Structure ofAustralian Aboriginal Singing (M.A. Thesis, Depart-ment of Music, University of Sydney), 1957, p.6.116 Ibid, p.27.117 Ibid, p.29.118 Ibid, p.37.119 Ibid, p.54.120 Ibid, p.55.121 Ibid, p.55.122 Ibid, p.58.123 Ibid, p.60.124 Ibid, pp.67–8.125 Ibid, pp.61–2.126 Ibid, p.62.127 Ibid, p.63.128 Ibid, p.64.129 Ibid, p.81.130 Alice M. Moyle, "Sir Baldwin Spencer’s Record-ings of Australian Aboriginal Singing", Memoirs ofthe National Museum, vol.24, 1959, p.20.131 Ibid, p.21.132 Alice M. Moyle, "Two Native Song-Styles Recor-ded in Tasmania", The Papers and Proceedings of theRoyal Society of Tasmania, vol.94, 1960, p.73.133 Ibid, p.73.134 Ibid, p.74.135 Ibid, p.75.136 Alice M. Moyle, "Tasmanian Music, An Im-passe?", Records of the Queen Victoria Museum,vol.26, 1968, p.2.137 Ibid, p.5.

138 Ibid, p.5.139 Ibid, p.6.140 von Hornbostel, "The Ethnology of AfricanSound-Instruments", p.146.141 cf. Erica Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phono-graph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Pressof Mississippi, 1999).

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