An American anthropologist in Melanesia. A.B. Lewis and the Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition 1909 - 1913, 2 vols.

White, J. Peter

An American anthropologist in Melanesia. A.B. Lewis and the Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition 1909 - 1913.

Edited and Annotated by Robert L. Welsch.

Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1998.

Volume 1: pp. xxii + 632; Volume 2: pp. 287.

The period between about 1870 and World War I is often described as the 'museum period' of anthropology, but Welsch points out that the term 'expedition period' may be more appropriate, at least for Melanesia. Of the scores of expeditions sent out by national museums and private individuals, that of A. B. Lewis of the Field Museum of Natural History was among the longest, most extensive and most systematic. It returned after 4 years with over 14,000 objects from New Guinea, the Bismarcks, the Solomons, New Hebrides, New Caledonia and Fiji, along with many photographs. While the bulk of the book consists of Lewis' diaries of this expedition, the content is much more wide ranging.

Welsch's editing is both an obvious labour of love and an attempt to justify the continuing usefulness of the collection to researchers. His introductions to each of seven 'books' (Lewis' localised area diaries) expand and explicate Lewis' purposes and methods in the various areas. His conclusion sets Lewis' work in the context of the development of anthropology which led to its being seen as a superb contribution to museum display but of very little scientific value for the next 70 years. In addition, Volume 2 contains biographic details on the more than 280 individuals mentioned in the diaries, a list of his collections by nature and locality and a list of photos.

Right from the preface, Welsch's particular interests in the collection emerge. Familiar to us through his articles (with associates) in American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology and Asian Perspectives it is the 'connectedness' of small scale societies, noted by Lewis especially along the north coast of New Guinea (e.g. p. 170). Lewis' material has been used by them ethnologically to analyse the extent of this connectedness and to give a basis for the claims that similar processes are to be expected throughout prehistory, visibly in the archaeological record and to be taken account of by linguists and human biologists. I don't get the impression, however, that Lewis himself saw the documentation of this as any more important than a range of other observations. Indeed, he seems to have been primarily interested in things quotidian, and in collecting material for the Field Museum to 'make its exhibit illustrate that sum total of the daily life and achievments of a people' (Lewis to Director Skiff, 5 Decemb er 1910, p. 351).

Nevertheless, as Welsch points out (p. 424) Lewis' concern was not entirely with collecting things as they were, but with more 'traditional' items, so that he largely avoided articles which included European materials. This leads one to consider, of course, how much material that Lewis collected was or had been really 'in use'? Figure 3.11, for instance, features two stone axes from Solong on the south coast of New Britain, hafted more like Australian Aboriginal hatchets than by any of the common New Guinea techniques.

One aspect of the expedition, which Welsch doesn't explore at all, is how it was that a 'natural history' museum includes anthropology, the study of 'them' not 'us'. The history of this idea is long, bound up with concepts of evolutionary stages in human culture and of 'natural' man. Welsch's contextualising of the expedition, restricted to socio-cultural anthropology, is thus narrower than it might have been.

As with many field diaries, much of Lewis' is fairly dull reading. There isn't the kind of introspection which enlivens Malinowski's, or the kind of commentary which Gammage has used so effectively in The Sky Travellers (MUP 1998). Welsch uses the diaries to discuss the way Lewis' field methods developed in scope and precision, but Welsch's work seems to come as much from knowing Lewis' collections and the man well enough to read much between the lines.

The two volumes are superbly produced, Welsch writes well and presents a thoroughly fascinating account of the expedition and its place in Melanesian history and anthropology. It is, as the jacket suggests, 'an invitation to ... make use of a long-neglected resource'. Welsch and his colleagues, along with others such as Torrence and Thomas, have started to accept this, and he has now provided us with a firm basis for future expansion.