Comment on Mulvaney et al. 1997 My Dear Spencer and Review of it in Oceania by Diane Austin-Broos.

Rumsey, Alan

I am writing with some thoughts stimulated by my reading of Mulvaney, Morphy and Petch (eds) 1997 My Dear Spencer; the Letters of F.J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, and Diane Austin-Broos' recent review article of it in this journal (Oceania 69:209-216). Austin-Broos performs a valuable service by placing Spencer and Gillen's work in the context of near-contemporaneous work among the Aranda by Carl Strehlow, and subsequent work by Geza Roheim and T. G. H. Strehlow. While praising the editors for the book's documentary value and for their contribution to Australian social history, Austin-Broos contests Morphy's revisionist attempt to establish Spencer and Gillen's work as 'the seminal ethnographic corpus for modern Australian anthropology' (Austin-Broos, p. 211). Judgements about the latter point of course depend upon what we mean by 'modern' anthropology, and this is the crux of her disagreement with Morphy and Mulvaney. While they stress the importance of systematic, regionally circumscribed, first-hand data co llection, Austin Broos regards 'the distilling of a socio-cultural logic ... [as] a better hallmark of "the modern" (p.212). On this score she thinks that Spencer and Gillen do not qualify, whereas Roheim and the younger Strehlow do. For each achieved an 'ethnographic synthesis' -- different as between the two, but each involving 'land, environment, and the nature of the person' (p.212).

I myself would not want to rely upon any single criterion as definitive of 'the modern', and will not be concerned here with whether Spencer and Gillen qualify as exemplars of it (merely noting in passing, that, according to Austin-Broos's criterion, Malinowski probably doesn't qualify either). Rather, I would like to elaborate a little upon the kind of synthesis achieved by Roheim and Strehlow, which I think was truly 'seminal ... for modern Australian anthropology'. These two ethnographers were not the first to develop accounts which seemed to reveal a kind of inner coherence between apparently disparate aspects of Aboriginal social life. Radcliffe-Brown (when he was still just 'Brown') did that as early as 1913 in his 'Three tribes of Western Australia'. But they were among the first -- perhaps the first -- to give central importance in those accounts to Aboriginal people's beliefs about -- and bodily experience of -- living, mythically inscribed landscape.

Morphy claims that 'the key concepts and themes that subsequently became associated with Aboriginal religion [including] the network of ancestral tracks that intersect the landscape ...were all established in Spencer and Gillen's writings' (Morphy 1997:37). While I agree that many aspects of later anthropological understandings of 'the dreaming' were foreshadowed by Spencer and Gillen, there was at least one crucial one that was not. Spencer and Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia includes a good deal of very valuable and suggestive information about the wanderings of totemic ancestors, the routes they are said to have travelled, and what they are said to have done at various places along the way. But there is an important difference between the way Spencer and Gillen understood what was believed to have happened at those places and the way the Strehlows did. This can be seen from the following juxtaposed quotes:

Either where [the Alcheringa ancestors] originated and stayed...or else where, during their wanderings, they camped for a time, there were formed what the natives call Oknanikilla, each one of which is in reality a local totem centre. At each of these spots...certain number of the Alcheringa ancestors went into the ground, each one carrying his Churinga [board] with him. His body died, but some natural feature, such as a rock or tree, arose to mark the spot, while his spirit part remained in the Churinga (The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 123).

...the native does not regard the various physical objects in the landscape which figure in his myths as mere monumental mounds or as signposts which 'mark the spot' where the important events in the lives of his ancestors took place at the beginning of time. He sees in them rather the actual works of their hands as they themselves fashioned them, in the same way as he looks upon the rocks and trees pointed out to him by the elders of his group as the actual bodies of his ancestors (Aranda Traditions, p. 28; cf. the quote in Austin-Broos review p. 213-4 regarding the elder Strehlow's similar construal of the matter).

This difference is crucial because it allows the younger Strehlow and Roheim to shift the emphasis from what most fascinated Spencer and Gillen -- the nexus of person-Churingatotem -- to the nexus of person-myth-place, and thence to develop the powerful 'ethnographic syntheses' to which Austin-Broos refers. It is this shift which makes it possible to understand the profound sense of connectedness among places associated with a given totemic ancestor, and lays the groundwork for later understandings of totemic landscape as central to the temporal unfolding of subject-object relations in Aboriginal life-worlds.

From the viewpoint of current Aboriginalist anthropology -- and indeed, the broader late-twentieth-century context that includes popular works such as Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, Sally Morgan's My Place, exegesis of Aboriginal art; and the Native Title Act of 1993 -- we tend not to realize how recently it has been that mythically-inscribed landscape has come to be regarded as the central axis of Aboriginal culture and social organization. It played almost no part, for example in the classic, long-dominant synthesis developed by Radcliffe-Brown, or in Levi-Strauss's account of Australian 'totemism'.

But now, having become established through the influence of ethuographers such as Stanner, Munn and Myers, and resonating as it does with the recent more general rethinking by anthropologists of the importance of place and the localization of knowledge, the Aboriginalist emphasis on mythically-inscribed landscape has even begun to have an impact in other ethnographic regions. In a forthcoming work (Chapter 1 in A. Rumsey and J. Weiner (eds) Emplaced Myth: The Spatial and Narrative Dimensions of Knowledge in Australian and Papua New Guinea Societies) I trace the recent emergence of this motif in ethnography from three widely scattered locales in Melanesia (South-coast New Guinea, Middle Sepik, and Tanna in Vanuatu) and show how a conceptual synthesis along the lines achieved in Central Australian ethnography has allowed scholars working in those locales to make sense of important aspects of social life that had remained obscure in previous ethnography of the same peoples. I also show how an emphasis on mythic ally-inscribed landscape has come to figure centrally in the politics of landedness, not only in Australia, but in parts of Melanesia as well.

Aranda ethnography does indeed have a seminal status with respect to these developments, but not through the work of Spencer and Gillen alone. The amount of empirical detail they provided concerning 'totemic geography' (and much else as well) was unprecedented in its day (1899), and no doubt provided a stimulus to the further work which was done along those lines by Roheim and the younger Strehlow. But it was the latter pair who in the 1920s and 30s (Strehlow's Aranda Traditions having been written in 1934) most clearly anticipated the more recent emphasis on living landscape as a key aspect of Aboriginal tradition.