The Building of British Social Anthropology: W.H.R. Rivers and his Cambridge Disciples in The Development of Kinship Studies, 1898–1931

428 Pages·1981·14.71 MB·English

by  Ian Langham (auth.)

THE BUILDING OF BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
STUDIES IN THE HISTORY
OF MODERN SCIENCE
Editors:
ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University
ERWIN N. HIEBERT, Harvard University
EVERETT I. MENDELSOHN, Harvard University
VOLUME 8
IAN LANGHAM
History Department, University of Sydney, Australia
THE BUILDING
OF BRITISH SOCIAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
W. H. R. Rivers and his Cambridge Disciples
in The Development
ofK inship Studies, 1898-1931
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
DORDRECHT: HOLLAND / BOSTON: U.S.A.
LONDON: ENGLAND
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Langham, Ian, 1942-
The building of British social anthropology.
(Studies in the history of modern science; v. 8)
Bibliography: p.
Includes indexes.
1. Rivers, W. H. R. (William Halse Rivers), 1864-1922.
2. Kinship-Study and teaching (Higher)-England-History.
3. Ethnology-Study and teaching (Higher)-England-History.
I. Ti tIe. II. Series.
GN21.RS3L36 306.8'3'071142 81-10638
ISBN-13: 978-94-009-8466-0 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-8464-6
001: 10.1007/978-94-009-8464-6 AACR2
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.
Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada
by Kluwer Boston Inc.,
190 Old Derby Street, Hingham, MA 02043, U.S.A.
In all other countries, sold and distributed
by Kluwer Academic Publishers.Group,
P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland.
D. Reidel Publishing Company is a member of the Kluwer Group.
All Rights Reserved
Copyright @ 1981 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
To Kathie,
who understands better
than anyone else the
reasons for my
gratitude to her
CONTENTS
list of illustrations ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xxxi
I. Prologue 1
II. Rivers, Severed Nerves and Genealogies 50
III. Rivers and Ambrym 94
N. Rivers and Diffusionism 118
V. The Diffusion Controversy 160
VI. Ambrym - The Test Case 200
VII. Radcliffe-Brown 244
VIII. Conclusion 301
Notes and References 329
Index of Names 381
Index of Subjects 385
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
(Between Pages 192 and 193)
Lewis Henry Morgan, circa 1870.
Alfred W. Howitt.
Howitt with Lorimer Fison, Sale, Victoria, 1882.
W. Baldwin Spencer, circa 1905.
F. J. Gillen.
Members ofthe Torres Straits Expedition, 1898.
Rivers and Henry Head engaged in their experiments on the cutaneous nervous
system, circa 1903.
John Layard engaged in fieldwork in the New Hebrides, circa 1915.
A. Bernard Deacon in the New Hebrides, circa 1926.
"Shell-shock Psychotherapists" at the Military Hospital, Maghull, 1915.
Brenda Seligman towards the end of her life.
Daisy Bates.
Daisy Bates and her Aboriginal charges, Peak Hill, Western Australia, 1908.
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown.
ix
PREFACE
The nature of that transition to maturity [a transition involving "The acquisition of the
sort of paradigm that identifies challenging puzzles, supplies clues to their solution, and
guarantees that the truly clever practitioner will succeed") deserves fuller discussion
than it has received in this book, particularly from those concerned with the development
of the contemporary social sciences. (Thomas S. Kuhn, 1969, Postscript to The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions.)
The fIrst two or three decades of the twentieth-century represents a shadowy
period in the history of science. For most contemporary scientists, the period
is a little too far away to be the subject of a fIrst-hand oral tradition; while
at the same time it is not suffIciently remote to have acquired the epic and
oversimplifIed contour of history which has been transformed into mythol
ogy. Historians of science, by contrast, who want to free themselves from the
mythology which is used to legitimize the present state of the discipline,
are interested in discovering what really happened, and how it was regarded at
the time. For them the nature of science in the early twentieth-century is
obscured by what they regard as its proximity in time, and they are disturbed
by a general lack of depth in scholarly work in the area, which makes it diffI
cult to see the period in proper perspective. Moreover, by the beginning of the
present century, most branches of science had progressed a goodly distance
along the exponential curves which typically mark their rates of growth. This
entails that the number of scientists involved in the various modern disciplines
is so great that it is diffIcult for the historian to encompass the material and
to sort out the grain from the chaff. Even Charles C. Gillispie's multi-volumed
Dictionary of Scientific Biography, which gives a usefully documented
encapsulation of the careers of a very large number of important fIgures from
almost all eras in the history of science, breaks down badly in its coverage of
all but the most eminent of twentieth-century scientists.
One scientist from this period, who has to some extent been lost in the
crowd, is W. H. R. Rivers, who made substantial contributions to experimental
physiology and neo-Freudian psychology, and who played a pivotal role
in ushering the infant science of anthropology into the twentieth-century.
More specifIcally, Rivers and his students laid the foundations for what was
eventually to become known as British Social Anthropology.
xi
xii PREFACE
If one suIVeys the anthropological section of a large research library, a
remarkable fact will become evident. In terms of quantity, but more partic
ularly in tenns of quality, the material written on contemporary aboriginal 1
societies over the past six or seven decades is vastly superior to that written
previously. Such an obseIVation has prompted a modem anthropologist,
who is not prone to hyperbole, to speak of an "Ethnographic Revolution",
perceived as comparable in importance to the Industrial Revolution which
transfonned the Western world in the century following Watt's development
of the steam engine.2 To be more specific, about seventy years ago the
anthropological monograph or "ethnography", constituting a comprehensive
(and usually single-volume) study of one particular society, ftrst entered
the picture and has seIVed as the most clearly 4efmed unit of ethnological
communication ever since. At about the same time as ethnographies made
their appearance, a corresponding change became evident in the pre~xisting
specialist anthropology journals. The proportion of contributions by ethno
logical amateurs began to decline, and their place was gradually taken by
articles written by professional anthropologists. And in both the monographs
and the journals, the same trends were evident: an increasing reliance on
intensive, personally-conducted fteldwork; a growing sympathy, and often
empathy, with the people being investigated; a fmer appreciation of the
subtleties and complexities of preliterate life; a· narrowing of objectives so
that only one society is treated, rather the whole of ''primitive culture"; a
replacement of the typically late nineteenth-century attempt to demonstrate
that societies have evolved over time with the concern for elucidating the
factors which keep a society functioning synchronically; and the emergence
of technical procedures resembling what Kuhn calls "puzzle-solutions" (the
nature of which I shall discuss shortly). Consonant with these trends, the
audience for the subject rapidly narrowed. No longer did the anthropologist
aim at lay-people who had a prurient curiosity about "savages". Rather herl
his contributions were directed at professional colleagues, the fellow anthro
pologists who shared similar aptitudes, educational experiences and scientiftc
value-systems.
In short, the discipline has found its own path to maturity, and the future
historian who wishes to understand fully the process must compare it with a
range of maturation processes exhibited by other disciplines.3 One particular
school, namely British Social Anthropology, has been prominent in the
maturation of world anthropology. After originating at Cambridge and the
London School of Economics in the early years of the twentieth-century, it
rapidly made extensive inroads into academic anthropology throughout the
PREFACE xiii
nations of the British Commonwealth (or British Empire as it then was).
During the second and fourth decades of the twentieth-century, it had a
significant impact upon the discipline in the United States, where it interacted
with the predominantly Boasian tradition of cultural anthropology, the
development of which had, in many respects, independently converged
with that of British Social Anthropology. The Register of Members of the
Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, published in
1969, lists members attached to no less than seventy universities and ten
other teaching and/or research institutions, and residing in some twenty-two
countries in addition to England and Wales. On figures such as these, it would
seem no exaggeration to describe British Social Anthropology as certainly the
most widely dispersed, and arguably the most influential school of anthro
pology in the English-speaking world, over the past half-century. Jairus Banaji,
no friend of the school, has referred to its "quasi-hegemonic role within the
global spectrum of anthropological research".4
Apart from participating in the general trend towards maturation which I
have already mentioned, British Social Anthropology also had some distinc
tive features of its own. One was the specialized deployment of its triad of
crucially important theoretical concepts, namely "society", "function" and
"structure". By the first of these words British Social Anthropologists tended
to mean a self-contained, static and harmoniously operating group of aborig
inal men and women,s bound together by ties of kinship, affInity and/or
economic interchange, and utilizing institutions of a religious, political and/
or legal nature. However, in pointing out that this use of the word was char
acteristic of British Social Anthropology, I do not wish to imply that the
underlying theoretical concept was totally unique to that discipline. On
the contrary, when a British anthropologist used the word "societies", his
meaning would have - especially after the early thirties - approximated
quite closely to that of an American anthropologist employing the term
"cultures". The fact that Americans like Margaret Mead, and people with
British backgrounds, such as Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, could func
tion professionally either in the Boasian "cultural" milieu or in the company
of British Social Anthropologists, like Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski,
provides a nice illustration of the convergence of the American and English
traditions. Indeed, this convergence, which had been aided and abetted by
Robert Lowie's appreciation of the contributions of Rivers and Radcliffe
Brown, was furthered by Mead, Fortune and Bateson themselves, both in
tellectually and maritally.6
The second key term in British Social Anthropology was "function". Used