The intercultural challenge of Stanner's first fieldwork.

Hinkson, Melinda

W.E.H Stanner is a key figure in the history of Australian anthropology and Aboriginal affairs. Born in 1905, he was among the first group of undergraduate students to be educated by Radcliffe-Brown at Sydney University in the late 1920s. He wrote his PhD at the London School of Economics under Malinowski in the mid-1930s. Firth was a considerable influence throughout Stanner's professional life as teacher, friend and mentor, as was Elkin to a lesser extent. Stanner's anthropological research was carried out in the Daly River region of North Australia over four decades, with shorter periods of research conducted in Kenya in the 1930s, and the Pacific in the 1940s.

Like many of his contemporaries, Stanner was by no means straightforwardly an academic. Throughout his working life he traversed quite different arenas--he was a journalist, government adviser, public administrator, army man, university-based anthropologist, public intellectual. Stanner's corpus of writing reflects the strongly-held view of many of his generation, that anthropology should engage a wide audience and be useful to society at large. Many of his writings in turn attempt to engage diverse audiences: the general public, ministers and bureaucrats, and his academic colleagues.

Stanner's anthropological works reveal a desire to contribute to anthropological theorising in the tradition of Radcliffe-Brown, his most formative intellectual influence, cut across by a keen awareness that anthropology's greatest challenge lay in the conceptualisation of social transformation, and more specifically, the interplay between the creative and innovative actions of persons and abstract notions such as structure. Writing to his student and friend T.N. Madan in 1962, Stanner put his endeavour in characteristically evocative perspective: I respect both A.R-B's and BM's memories: they taught me much, but neither ever really satisfied me. We have to use the natural science approach--but we have to avoid A.R-B's effort of making human, man-made facts seem non-human; and we have to grasp more of the creative and aspirational side of man than BM did. How odd the scheme of 'primary and derived needs' now seems! What 'derived needs' prompt me to write poetry in my private moments? (cited in Barwick, Beckett and Reay 1985:27).

In his writings on Aboriginal religion and a small number of other papers written in the 1950s and 1960s Stanner attempted to develop a theoretical approach that could take account of human agency in a way that structural-functionalism could not (see Stanner 1963, 1967, 1985). While regarding his work as ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, the subsequent generation of anthropologists working in this field have observed that Stanner was not successful in this endeavour, never managing to provide an adequate theory of action (Keen 1986:41, cf. Morphy 1988). Others have suggested that his failure to comprehensively transcend the limits of structural-functionalism owes much to his abiding intellectual commitment to Radcliffe-Brown's ideas (see Beckett 1985, Ernst 1985).

In this paper I trace Stanner's attempt to wrestle with the conceptual framework imparted to him by Radcliffe-Brown, on the ground, as it were, during his first field research. My interest in doing so is threefold. Firstly, Stanner has left behind unpublished materials which are revealing of this process on a number of counts. These materials are of clear historical and public interest and deserve to be brought to light. Secondly, it is a truism to observe that the process with which this paper is concerned--the anthropologist's attempt to take a set of conceptual approaches learned and distilled in the classroom and apply these to the practical circumstances encountered in the field--is a key process through which anthropology reproduces itself. It follows that our consideration of the challenges faced by anthropologists in the past can bring important perspectives to bear on those we wrestle with in the present. As historians of anthropology such as Stocking (1968, 1992) and Kuper (1977) have reminded us, there are multiple pitfalls to be encountered in approaching the past from the perspective of the present. In what follows I attempt to be mindful of these. My third and final interest in considering Stanner's early fieldwork from this perspective is for the light it can shed on the long and steady process by which anthropology's object has itself been reformulated intergenerationally. Since its inception the discipline has been continuously redefined as its practitioners and theorists have encountered a steady stream of controversies and 'crises' (see for example Asad 1973; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Hymes 1969; Leach 1961). The preoccupation of this volume is with the conceptual honing of the notion of intercultural engagement. Lest it be thought that this is a peculiarly late modern or postmodern concern, in reading the early work of anthropologists such as Stanner we identify some early attempts to sketch the contours of such a concept. (1)

A selective reading of the notes Stanner made in Radcliffe-Brown's lectures in 1929 and 1930, (2) the field diaries associated with his 1931 research and his subsequent Master of Arts (M.A.) thesis which was submitted at Sydney in 1934, provide the primary materials for this discussion. Access to this thesis remains restricted. Stanner himself denied the requests of anthropologists in the 1970s to read this work for the purpose of land claims research, as he did not feel confident of having mastered the complexity of social organisation on the Daly River and thought the work likely to be shot through with inconsistencies and errors. In recognition of his ambivalent regard for his M.A. thesis the identities of most individuals and places have been disguised. My interest in the thesis is not at the level of data it presents but rather what it reveals about the challenges of anthropological engagement in frontier contexts. In what follows it is not my aim to provide a summary of this thesis, nor to distil the knowledge Stanner acquired in the field. What I am interested in doing is constructing a picture--necessarily fragmentary--of what 'the field' was like, the kinds of constraints Stanner experienced in undertaking his research, and to consider how he attempted to make sense of this field in terms of the conceptual framework he inherited from Radcliffe-Brown.

A brief word on the constraints on our access to this past world: in his lectures Radcliffe-Brown had gone to some lengths to spell out to his students what the scientific approach to anthropology did not include: paramount here was 'the observation of society on the basis of everyday life'. Descriptions of the everyday, Radcliffe-Brown told his students, had no place in scientific inquiry (3) This directive highlights one of the key methodological differences between Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski's approaches. The latter identified the description of everyday practices ('the imponderabilia of everyday life') as the third tier in his methodology. (4) Radcliffe-Brown insisted that the most important task of anthropology was to look beyond the flux of everyday life, to establish the regularities of social structures. As Kuper has observed, in Radcliffe-Brown's scheme social structure had nothing to do with empirical reality (Kuper 1977:4). Such a conceptual model had clear implications for ethnographic method.

Stanner's 1932 notebooks suggest he was an attentive listener. Unfortunately the everyday of his time at Daly River was not documented. Nor is there a Malinowskian diary that might reveal with gritty realism Stanner's experience as a field worker. (5) But aspects of the everyday necessarily intrude on the process of data collection and certain moments are recorded in his field diaries. Among other things, these moments reveal the slow, grasping, often frustrating process by which Stanner took key concepts from his education and attempted to apply them to the unexpected complexity of the situation he found himself in. And while he fell short of actually throwing into question the framework of analysis he inherited from his anthropological forebears, there are instances in which we observe Stanner straining against the structural-functionalist logic of his time, in an attempt to make sense of a set of circumstances that clearly could not be interpreted within this analytical frame. In considering the challenge he faced, let us keep in mind that while social transformation was an articulated concern of early twentieth century anthropology, a central plank in Radcliffe-Brown's teachings was that change could not be grappled with until culture itself had first been explained. (6)

Stanner chose the Daly River as a field site after being advised by linguist Gerhardt Laves that the area was home to 'half a dozen unstudied tribes, and scores of myalls ... who spoke no English' (Stanner 1979:80). There was a widespread perception that this part of the country remained 'uncontaminated by outside influence', a view reinforced by the government officials Stanner interviewed in Darwin en route to the field. However, in Stanner's account these men also give some sense of contradicting themselves on this matter; they told him the Daly was a 'dangerous area' and he was advised to 'carry guns and medicine'. None of this advice prepared Stanner for the situation he found on his arrival, where 'English was understood by nearly every native on the river, many of them speaking it with a fluency that makes pidgin a misnomer', and where many Aboriginal people were working for white and Chinese peanut farmers who had settled there in the previous two decades. (7) Stanner had intended to make a study of regional social organisation. Yet the situation on the Daly River proved to be much more conducive to an account of 'culture contact', and this became the title of his M.A. thesis. This thesis constitutes an attempt to transcend some fundamental aspects of anthropological theorising of the day, and to produce a new conceptual model for taking hold of social transformation. In reading these materials we gain a glimpse of an early attempt to develop an intercultural analysis of Aboriginal Australia.

IN SEARCH OF THE 'UNSPOTTED SAVAGE'

Stanner travelled to the Daly River settlement on board the Maroubra in April 1932, on its first voyage from Darwin after the wet season. The boat docked at the landing that had been built some 50 years earlier by Jesuit missionaries, and Stanner's mountain of stores was off-loaded and left in a great pile at the base of a huge banyan tree. The Maroubra departed the same afternoon. I was alone with night falling and had no idea where to go. Voices in the nearby jungle told me natives were coming and soon a half dozen aborigines appeared and came towards me. They spoke in a pidgin English I had not yet mustered, but with a little difficulty I soon found that the police station was within a mile and I set off with the blacks as escort. (8)

Stanner established his camp adjacent to the local police station. He did not record how he went about introducing himself and his researches to his Aboriginal hosts, (9) but it seems he had little trouble doing so; his notebooks reveal the almost immediate commencement of discussions with a number of men about kinship terminology. For six weeks Stanner concentrated on the collection of genealogies, working every day with men who camped close by, at least two of whom were employed as police trackers. On his first day of 'proper work', Stanner wrote, 'they appear to know nothing of totemism and section names, or indeed if sections or moieties exist.' As Stanner sat on the ground questioning the men about their social organisation he observed 'a failure of memory': 'Old D- and B- cannot name father's mother's brother or father's father's sister'. Yet he observed that what he interpreted in terms of social decay, proved a source of great amusement to his new acquaintances. 'I was impressed', Stanner wrote, 'by their genuine bewilderment and the comical expressions they wore when they found, after a vain attempt to work out the terms by clear marks in the soil, that they could not remember'. (10)

While he remained camped at the police station, Stanner's interactions with Aboriginal people were restricted to daylight hours, and usually to conversations held in the vicinity of his camp, or on short expeditions into country that lay within a day's walking distance of the settlement. He honed his approach to information gathering in response to a series of confused interactions with informants: for example, Stanner had been in the habit when taking genealogies of depicting ego's father's line on the left of his diagrams, whereas he found the men he worked with invariably placed the father's line on the right. And again, he wrote, '[a]ny discussion of genealogy and kinship had always worked with infinitely greater smoothness by the use of a diagram starting from two brothers, and working downwards from them, generation by generation. There is an actual functional justification for this: it is the way the Daly natives depict kinship. I did not introduce the method: it was introduced by an informant after we had reached a deadlock in my method. (11)

Stanner found the collection of genealogies by no means a straightforward exercise. His notebooks reflect many moments of frustration and uncertainty about the reliability of his data. I have taken M- carefully through the genealogies and chart of kinship terms with results not entirely satisfactory. He has had over a week since my last session with him, and in that time has talked over many points with old K-, the only other native on the Daly whose evidence is at all trustworthy. I am convinced that B- is entirely untrustworthy upon kinship matters. (12)

This issue of the trustworthiness of informants emerges early on as a key concern for Stanner, one that he returns to regularly in his notes and indeed reflects upon in his published work (see especially Stanner 1933a:379, 1979:72-4). The 'scarifying honesty' as Sutton (2002) has put it, of Stanner's portraits of Daly River personalities, calls to mind Clifford Geertz's (1973:22) observation that 'anthropologists don't study villages ... they study in villages', and consequently, that anthropological research is carried out not with 'groups' or 'societies', but in interactions between individuals. Of course this was not the model of society and social process that Stanner and his contemporaries were working with, but as I discuss below, Stanner seems to implicitly recognise the critical interplay between personality and cultural process, and in so doing, he faces a major challenge of a conceptual kind.

CULTURE CONTACT AND A 'COMPLEX SET OF ATTITUDES TOWARDS WHITES'

Stanner quickly learnt of the complex layers of interaction and violent history that pre-dated the establishment of the Daly River settlement. Just a week after his arrival, he wrote that he was 'already convinced' that the Daly will prove to be 'a most valuable key area for intensive enquiry into cultural contacts and dislocation, from both native and white points of view'. As Stanner's relationships with certain individuals strengthened, more and more was revealed of a violent and bloody past. The first explorers had named the Daly River in 1865 and a subsequent party mapped its course in 1876. Chinese agriculturalists established the first farm in the area soon after. In the early 1880s copper was discovered in significant quantity by five fossickers who set up a mine and permanent camp for themselves. In September 1884 four of them were speared dead. (13) Daly River Aborigines were collectively blamed for the deaths, and the reprisals that followed were brutal and merciless. Stanner records local accounts of a large group of men, women and children being rounded up, driven into a lagoon and shot (Stanner 1934b:27). The then Protector of Aborigines, Dr. R.J. Morice, estimated that 150 men, women and children were killed in this incident (Pye 1976:7). In the following decade Jesuit missionaries failed in separate attempts to establish a viable mission at three different locations, before finally quitting the Northern Territory altogether in 1899 (Pye 1976:9; Stanner 1934b:38). A series of agricultural experiments followed. In 1908 a government farm of 560 acres was established on the Daly. This development brought the first significant number of settlers to the area. Dairy, pigs, fruit trees and other crops were tried. There were few successes (Richards 1982:12-18; Stanner 1934b:43-44), although a notable exception saw local Daly growers presented with first prize at the Paris Exhibition for their tobacco harvest. The government farm was declared a failure in 1912. Thirty-four settlers were granted free blocks and a one off payment of $200 each. In the following years the first peanuts were grown commercially. But this was far from fertile land and the world wide recession only served to deepen the dire circumstances of the Daly settlers.

By 1932 when Stanner arrived, the twelve settlers that remained were all growing peanuts (Stanner 1934b:45), and most of them were deeply in debt. Hostilities between farmers and Aborigines had been intensifying as the worsening financial situation meant paying workers was becoming increasingly difficult. Aboriginal labour had been integral to all of the agricultural enterprises attempted in the region. Stanner (1979:79; cf. Richards 1982:28) notes a 'mutual dependency' had developed in light of Aborigines' growing addiction to tobacco, sugar and tea. As the economic crisis deepened, settlers found they had barely enough to feed themselves, let alone the large numbers of Aboriginal people who had become attached to their farms. There had been a number of incidents of thefts of supplies and two settlers had been killed by Aborigines in the past twelve months (Pye 1976:9-14). There were reports of many quarrels over Aboriginal women, and many antagonisms to do with maltreatment and underpayment of workers. This situation appears to have reached crisis point in the lead up to Stanner's arrival. He documented several cases of thefts of food from settlers' houses: one settler was so determined to prevent his precious supplies being taken that he planted dynamite under the boards around his hut so that any person entering the house during his absence would trigger the charge (Stanner 1934b:55).

Against this backdrop of considerable tension, Stanner observed that cross-cultural misunderstandings and particularly an absence of reciprocity were significant causes of conflict between Aborigines and white settlers. The failure of settlers to make a final payment to workers at the end of season when both work and rations abruptly came to an end, and most Aborigines were forced back into a subsistence lifestyle, was cause for bitter resentment. 'There can be very little doubt that the temper of the natives in 1932 was dangerous', he reflected (Stanner 1934b:53). 'The natives are mistrustful of any close approach', he wrote, 'only a handful of them camp on the riverbank. Others live at the peanut farms permanently, and some only temporarily while the picking is going on ... the extent of white influence seems to be very [much] greater than I supposed at first'. (14)

This history of 'culture contact', or series of 'contact complexes' as Stanner puts it, laid the ground for his interactions with Aborigines and settlers alike. How were these circumstances to affect his ability to carry out his anthropological brief'? In what follows I will suggest that they affected him on two levels that go to the very heart of anthropological praxis. The first of these was interpersonal: in this field that was constituted through much intercultural complexity Stanner found many of his interactions with Aboriginal people highly circumscribed. In the cultural melting pot of the Daly River, Stanner was to encounter marked contrasts in attitude toward him. He learnt that these attitudes reflected a range of different experiences of colonial history, which in turn had given rise to varying degrees of interest and engagement with non-Aboriginal settlers and the wider world which their presence signified. In the most extreme circumstances, individual Aboriginal people who were drawn to work with him encountered conflict within their camp, and Stanner's presence became a source of considerable tension.

The second, interrelated, level at which the intercultural circumstances of the Daly River shaped Stanner's anthropological praxis would have a lasting and profound influence on his work, an influence which is arguably reflected in the fact that he never wrote a full-blown anthropological account of Daly sociality, despite more than four decades of ongoing research in the region. Stanner himself articulated this in terms of what he saw as his failure to solve the problem of Daly social organisation. We might rephrase this in terms of the impossibility of disentangling Aboriginal social organisation from the colonial context in which he found it--or, to put it in Radcliffe-Brownian terms, the impossibility of sketching culture prior to tackling change. It is at this conceptual level that the restrictive nature of the structural-functionalist frame, and Stanner's attempts to wrestle with it, is brought starkly to the fore. (15)

The intensive 60-year period of upheaval that predated his arrival had coincided with major transformations at the level of Aboriginal social organisation in the region. This reorganisation appeared to have occurred most particularly in the wake of one group's aggressive conquest and dispossession of a number of others. Stanner learnt of recent and ongoing aggression between 'tribal groupings', major shifts in putative territorial boundaries, and fluid group membership which expanded and contracted to incorporate 'remnants' of other 'groups' as their own number diminished. He became aware of the complexity and flux of territorial organisation early on, writing on May 18, 'not one native I have yet met can be specific on this question.' In relation to the current patterns of residence, 'they know that it is not the country of their forefathers: but they show no great regret at living in this new land'. (16) In the midst of this field there was one group that stood out--a group whose members demonstrated the greatest hostility towards whites, exhibited the strongest tendencies to maintain relative autonomy from other Aboriginal groups and the peanut farms, and inspired fear in both settlers and other Aborigines alike, a group Stanner identified at the time as the Brinken. (17) In what follows I briefly consider Stanner's attempts to establish meaningful contact with members of this group, as a way of highlighting something of the texture of Daly sociality and the constraints it posed for Stanner's ethnographic engagement, before moving to consider his attempts to make conceptual sense of this field.

IN PURSUIT OF THE BRINKEN

Six weeks after his arrival Stanner relocated to the southern bank of the Daly River, about seven miles east of the police station. (18) A good part of the motivation for this move was to get closer to the Brinken with whom he had a growing fascination. Other informants had told Stanner that decades earlier the Brinken had been driven out of their own country by plagues of mosquitoes, and in turn, in their conquest of new territory and hunting grounds had driven other groups from their own lands, so that they were now all 'boxed up' together around the Daly settlement. (19) The response of these dispossessed groups had been a 'furtive creeping out under police protection to reclaim some land'. Stanner observed that 'the natives take care, however, never to venture beyond H-, which lies about fifteen miles from the fiver I think, and seems to be the tacitly accepted Brinken boundary.' Stanner was struck by the 'very real terror' that the Brinken invoked in other Aborigines, a terror born of a combination of the Brinken's apparently remarkable territorial conquests over the past several decades, combined with a widespread belief that they were stealers of kidney fat, and thus murderers. (20) But making contact with them was proving challenging. On June 14, he wrote, A number of blacks are camped within a mile of this point, but they are timid and possibly tricky. An experience last week has taught me caution in going among them alone, or unheralded. I am convinced that two white men are necessary if one is to do intensive fieldwork in safety and confidence'. (21)

We never learn the details of the experience Stanner refers to, but he alludes to a number of hostile interactions with members of this group. Eventually Stanner meets a Brinken 'boy' whom he regards as a satisfactory informant, and commences work with him on matters of kinship, social organisation, and language. However, Stanner's record of the tensions his arrival sparked among members of this group provide us with some insight into the restricted and highly mediated nature of his interactions with them: My boy, M- is much upset and off-balance because he was not told that the Brinken were moving camp, nor when they would return to the river. He was so upset this morning that I had to let him go to find his people, to see just when they would return. His coming daily to me puts him somewhat outside the course of camp life. Several recent incidents show this, and show also that he, as well as others, recognise that his position has been somewhat altered. Another incident last Tuesday: M- returned to the camp on this night after having had tea with me at my camp. Some other natives returned to his camp shortly after he did, one with a large barramundi caught during the afternoon. A dispute arose regarding whether M- was to have any of the fish. It broke into a big fight which lasted hours, M- did not have any fish. (22)

Stanner was all too aware of the 'altered status' his informant had gained in agreeing to work with him, and the interference to 'the normal functioning of camp life' caused by his arrival. In reflecting on such matters Stanner also gives us insight into the challenging nature of his field experience.

Part of Stanner's fascination with the much feared Brinken was to do with the separation, both geographic and cultural, they seemed to maintain from others--both Aborigines and settlers. They seemed to Stanner a 'distinct bush type' with very different physiques from the 'river boys'. They also seem to have affected a unique (in the context of local circumstances) response to white settlement--a keenness for the highly prized consumption goods but a reluctance to work that drove them to organise themselves differently from other groups. They had a number of 'working boys' who acted as a conduit for their nonworking kin accessing the desired items. For Stanner the Brinken come to signify the complexity of Daly social transformation. They mark important points of disjuncture with the wider social dynamic of Daly life Stanner observed--the relative accommodation of a new mode of life revolving around the seasonally ordered agricultural cycle. There is every sense in Stanner's M.A. thesis that it is making sense of this intercultural transformation that he views as the most difficult yet compelling challenge facing him and the discipline of anthropology.

GLIMPSES OF THE PROBLEM OF CULTURE

In reflecting on the difficulty of making sense of culture contact when no technique for studying such phenomena had yet been developed, Stanner wrote: The responsibility on the field worker is thus a heavy one, and the strain upon his judgment is severe, to a degree probably not met in the naive search for uncontaminated aboriginal cultures which is so often wrongly assumed to be the main function of the anthropologist (Stanner 1934b:9).

In such reflective comments we glimpse Stanner's awareness of the limitations of the conceptual tools at his disposal, as well as the extent to which he has been gripped by the problems of social transformation on the Daly River. In peering through the small and restricted window provided by his notebooks onto the nature of his interactions with the Brinken we simultaneously gain insight into the constraints on ethnographic engagement Stanner experienced in this complex social field. As he moves from camp to camp, attempting to construct a picture of the multiple and cross-cutting layers of social organization in the region, Stanner reveals a great diversity of Aboriginal circumstances and temperament, both between and also notably within groups. It is through the richly evocative portraits he paints of individuals, most particularly through his search for satisfactory informants, that Stanner best depicts this diversity for us. In the life stories that he pieces together Stanner also arguably conjures up a major limitation in Radcliffe-Brown's formulation of structural-functionalism--personality and the life history through which it is shaped, was a significant factor to consider in sketching the parameters, content and substance of social situations.

The suspicion and hostility Stanner encountered in his attempts to establish fruitful working relations with the Brinken lies in marked contrast to the interested responses of other Aborigines, most notably those camped in the vicinity of the police station, and the man who would become a key informant and close friend, memorialised by Stanner in his celebrated essay, 'Durmugam: A Nangiomeri' (Stanner 1979 [1959]). In this piece of writing, with its richly textured and incisive portraits of Aboriginal personalities, Stanner produces some of his most compelling and insightful accounts of Aboriginal peoples' lives. It is through coming to know something of the substance of these individual lives that Stanner is able to grasp the multiple forces that have given rise to the contemporary situation in which Aboriginal people collectively find themselves. Many of these life histories traverse considerable geographic and cultural ground, and illustrate the difficulty of conceptualising social situations fully within the frame of structural-functionalism with its emphasis on integration and synchronic analysis.

When Stanner describes his Brinken informant as 'nearly useless' on kinship questions, 'having been too long with whites', such comments, as well as the very fact of M-'s preparedness to work with Stanner in the face of a wider collective refusal to engage with him, take us to larger issues. By virtue of his life history it would appear that M- is an unusual, non-representative member of the Brinken. In this sense Stanner reminds us that research--in 1932 as much as in 2002--is carried out through the prism of particular interpersonal relationships, and that it is common for anthropologists to be drawn to the most cross-culturally savvy individuals as informants. It would appear that in the case of the Brinken Stanner had chosen an informant whose own relative marginality meant that he was unable to facilitate Stanner's access to other members of the group or the key principles of their social organisation.

After six frustrating weeks Stanner moved camp again, having finally resigned himself to the explicit statements made by his informant, that the Brinken simply did not want to talk to him. (23)

GRAPPLING WITH CULTURAL CHANGE

In tracing what he saw as the key features of the 'new anthropology' in 1931, Radcliffe-Brown argued: The ethnographer's task remains the same, that of learning all that is possible to discover about the culture as it was originally ... Only after that has been done with some measure of completeness is it possible to understand the changes that European influence brings about ... (Radcliffe-Brown 1958[1931]:72-3).

The radical promise of early twentieth century anthropology to reject the speculative search for origins in favour of the documentation of cultures as they are in the present was given a significant rider. Culture was assumed to have an original form that had to be explained before transformation could be taken hold of. There was of course a fundamental flaw in this model. Everywhere anthropologists went cultures were already in the process of being transformed by colonialism (Asad 1973; Kuper 1988). It is telling to read Radcliffe-Brown's directive against some of Stanner's observations: Natives of today not only live differently, but probably think differently. We have given them new concepts, new groups of sentiments, new working ideas, new emotional attitudes, in addition to giving them a new way of social life ... Alien influence has changed the spirit as well as the face of aboriginal institutions and ideas (Stanner 1934b:48, original emphasis).

Contact has permanently modified [the] local basis of aboriginal life, its daily and seasonal pattern, its system of concepts and ideas and sentiments, many of its institutions, so that the aborigine of today is far removed from aborigines even of 1890. He is a different social personality. He is a different individual (Stanner 1934b:59, original emphasis).

At every turn Stanner found it impossible to reconstruct an 'original form' of Daly society. A section of his thesis entitled 'Tribal Society Before Settlement' is posed but then immediately dismissed as having set 'an impossible task' (Stanner 1934b:21). 'The entire structure of native society', he wrote, 'has been disrupted and mutilated' (Stanner 1934b:24).

Three decades later Stanner rebuked himself for having 'treated Radcliffe-Brown's conception [of horde], not as a general type, which he had intended it to be, but as a stereotype' (Stanner 1965:7). Yet while structural-functionalism provided the conceptual framework through which much of the rich social material of cultural difference might be grasped and rendered, it was not geared towards the interpretation of post-colonial realities. The entire thrust of early twentieth century anthropology was towards the reconstruction of cultures in their pre-contact form. The situation Stanner observed on the Daly River was not amenable to such a reconstruction. So Stanner made the focus of his study the history of culture contact. He wrote evocatively of the 'successive waves' of intensive and, in most cases, violent and bloody interaction, as well as the intimate and long-standing relations formed between Aborigines, Euro-Australians and, to a lesser extent, Chinese. Yet as Stanner understood the job of anthropology to be about more than mere description, he went further, attempting to sketch the beginnings of a 'scientifically grounded' anthropological model for analysing cultural change. He spells out four areas for enquiry:

i effect of culture contact on specific institutions

ii effect upon general pattern of life

iii effect on population

iv [effect on] general social context (concerning both alien and Indigenous cultures) in which changes are taking place.

Point (iv) he observes to be of a different order and more difficult to define than (i), (ii) and (iii). I mean to apply [this latter point] to general social relations built up between the two cultures. These can legitimately be considered an "effect" of the contact. They are, however, something more. They are in fact the milieu in which the change in primitive society goes on. What I am attempting to define seems to be in one way a region of "interplay" between the two cultures, which cannot be satisfactorily dealt with in (i), (ii), or (iii) (Stanner 1934b:52, emphasis added).

Stanner's field notes and M.A. thesis are scattered with observations that go towards exploring this intercultural milieu. For example, he remarks on the desire of Aborigines to be seen as knowledgeable about whites: On first acquaintance, many natives try to make whites understand that they know all about white ways ... [There is a] [d]esire to be understood as well as to understand ... to demonstrate that they are not 'wild natives' (Stanner 1934b:52-4).

He reflects on the range of activities which point to the increasing yet uneven entanglement of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ways. Perhaps Stanner's most interesting observation of the intercultural nature of Daly life is revealed in his attempt to comprehend local social organisation. Towards the end of August Stanner wrote, 'probably I have erred throughout [my time on the Daly] in not ridding my mind of ordinary [i.e. Radcliffe-Brownian?] Australian local and territorial concepts'. He wrote of what he observed to be an emergent form of organisation on the Daly, in which each 'group' 'holds' a certain roughly defined section of the river. 'These sections', Stanner observed, 'tend to centre largely on local farms where employment is possible.' It seems Stanner later became aware he was onto a way of conceptualising post-colonial social transformation in a manner well before its time--in his notebook these lines are underlined with red pencil, and in the margin alongside them appears the comment 'August! 1932!'. (24)

When he attempts to explicitly work with structural-functionalist concepts his writing becomes much more stilted. 'Aboriginal culture decays', Stanner wrote, because it is 'unable to absorb certain alien traits into its system'. The interrogative thrust of his project becomes that of determining the prospects of Aboriginal society surviving the brutal impact of colonisation: So when an aboriginal society is found with some aspects of its former culture intact, and some broken down or completely extinct, we should try to discover what substitution or modification has taken place. As well as being an essential part of the investigation of the manifest results of contact, [it will also provide] a valuable leaf to understanding ... what part of aboriginal life might be possible to retain. Partial assimilation of alien traits implies blending with traits of the more primitive culture. Complete substitution of alien traits for other traits of primitive culture shows another method of adjustment to alien influence. These processes seem to be of great significance ... Study of what I have termed the 'resistances' of aboriginal culture ... will probably clarify some of these points (Stanner 1934b:49, original emphasis).

As this passage suggests, Stanner worked with the biological analogies, in particular the notions of equilibrium and resistance that Radcliffe-Brown had drawn from the work of Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim, to explore the possible ways in which Aboriginal society might restore itself or adjust in response to such intense contact (Stanner 1934b:6). Had 'the aboriginal social organism developed "anti-bodies" which might protect it'? Stanner asked. The resilience and adjustment within the kinship system that he observed seemed to suggest it had (Stanner 1934b:66). Resilience and adjustment of the kinship system were 'one of the firmest resistances of Aboriginal society' Stanner observed. I am of the opinion that the social organism of these Aboriginal tribes can recover from certain types of dislocation and even amputation, and function with a certain efficiency at a lower level than formerly. Putting it another way, so long as aboriginal society is left with certain bases of organization, the probability is that it can lose those aspects of its culture which have a low resistance and can reach a new equilibrium at a lower level of integration that [sic] it had formerly. If this is true it is a principle of great importance (Stanner 1934b:10).

The 'base' which Stanner identifies as critical in this regard is kinship.

CONCLUSION

We only have a draft of Stanner's M.A. thesis, much of it written in 'rough note form' which refers the reader throughout to his Australian National Research Council reports and two other papers published in Oceania before the thesis was completed (Stanner 1933a, 1933b, 1933c, 1934a). Whether the thesis was submitted in this form or a subsequent 'complete' version was ever produced remains unclear. On the final page Stanner notes his 'thesis [is] put forward tentatively. [I] wish to avoid being conclusive until further research has been carried out' (Stanner 1934b:73). This was indeed a work in progress he was to return to in 1935 as the basis for his PhD thesis, and then intermittently from 1952 for as long as his health allowed him.

Can it be said that the primary orientation of an anthropologist to anthropological problems is shaped in some fundamental way in the first comprehensive experience of fieldwork? The commitment Stanner maintained throughout his life to articulating the challenges confronted by Aborigines in their incorporation within Australian society, and his ongoing attempts to make sense of the process by which Aborigines were actively 'transforming themselves as well as being transformed by things beyond their control' (Stanner 1979:46) could be clearly seen to have its roots in his early attempts to grapple with the anthropological challenges posed on the Daly River. His most celebrated writings (Stanner 1969, 1979) deal evocatively, and in ways that continue to resonate in the present, with these kinds of issues. Yet while Stanner's ability to descriptively conjure up the failure of European processes to comprehend and accommodate the imperatives and aspirations of Aborigines remains unsurpassed, he fell short of developing a theoretical model that could fully explain and elucidate the interplay between structure and the creative flair of individuals--an interplay with which his descriptive works are very much concerned. His 'operational transactionalism' sketched in outline in On Aboriginal Religion (Stanner 1963) is the closest he comes to producing such a model.

Throughout his career Stanner worked on various versions of what he referred to as 'a big book on Aboriginal Australia', which would distil his four decades of work with Aboriginal people in the Port Keats/Daly River region. One set of incomplete chapters points toward a book aimed at a general audience. Other papers are suggestive of attempts to write a more thoroughly anthropological text. These two unfinished projects in turn reflect Stanner's great legacy as an anthropologist with an exceptional gift for writing--but one who found the job of writing difficult, coupled with a desire to bring an appreciation of the wonder and intellectual richness of Aboriginal cosmology to as wide an audience as possible. Arguably they also reflect a creative force being pulled in two directions--two directions Stanner was ultimately unable to reconcile. Clearly Stanner's ability to write was constrained by various conflicting demands, especially in the last fifteen years of his life as he was diverted more and more into the arena of policy making. (25) In another sense the early unpublished materials considered here reveal Stanner to have been a thinker concerned with issues that would not become fully articulated in anthropology until both Marxist thought and practice theory (Bourdieu 1977) had made their influence felt.

While Stanner's writings on Aborigines' interactions with mainstream society, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) those on Aboriginal religion, continue to capture the imagination of scholars well beyond the discipline of anthropology, his theoretical work has made less of an impact. In his M.A. thesis there is a sense that Stanner is grasping for a model of social process that is at once more dynamic and concerned with intercultural engagement than that which he develops in his later theoretical work. This early work deserves to be recognised as an important attempt to grasp the intercultural context of post-colonial Aboriginal worlds, and in so doing, to problematise and transcend the conceptual models of his time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Mrs Patricia Stanner for granting me access to Stanner's unpublished papers, and AIATSIS Library staff for facilitating this process. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a seminar in the anthropology program at the ANU in mid-2004. Thanks to participants for valuable feedback. Thanks also to Jon Altman, Jeremy Beckett, Ian Keen, Nic Peterson, Alan Rumsey and Oceania's two anonymous referees for helpful comments on an earlier version.

REFERENCES

Archival Sources

MS 3752 refers to the W.E.H. Stanner Collection, held in the AIATSIS Library, Canberra. The principle unpublished sources referred to here are Stanner's 1932 field notebooks (MS 3752: Series 3: Items 1-5); the notes he took in Radcliffe-Brown's lectures at Sydney University in 1929 and 1930 (MS 3752: Series 2), and his master's thesis, 'Culture Contact on the Daly River' (MS 3752 Series 1: Item 9) which is referred to in the text as Stanner 1934b.

Published sources

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BARWICK, D., J. BECKETT and M. REAY. 1985. W.E.H. Stanner: An Australian Anthropologist. In D. Barwick, J. Beckett and M. Reay (eds), Metaphors of Interpretation: Essays in Honour of W.E.H. Stanner, pp. 1-52. Sydney: The Australian National University Press.

BECKETT, J. 1985. W.E.H. Stanner and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. Social Analysis 17:126-129.

BOURDIEU, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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GEERTZ, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

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MORPHY, H. 1988. The Resurrection of the Hydra: Twenty-Five Years of Research of Aboriginal Religion. In R.M. Berndt and R. Tonkinson (eds), Social Anthropology and Australian Aboriginal Studies: A Contemporary Overview, pp. 239-66. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

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RADCLIFFE-BROWN, A.R. 1958[1931]. The present position of anthropological studies. In Method in Social Anthropology: Selected Essays, ed. M.N. Srinivas, pp. 42-95. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Culture Contact on the Daly River. Draft for M.A. Thesis, University of Sydney. MS3752: Series 1: Item 9, W.E.H. Stanner Collection, AIATSIS Library, Canberra.

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Melinda Hinkson

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NOTES

(1.) See Sullivan (this volume) for discussion of Malinowski's early attempt to develop such a concept.

(2.) There is a suggestion that these notes constitute a reasonably reliable account of Radcliffe-Brown's lectures: after his abrupt departure from Sydney in 1930, Raymond Firth used Stanner's notes as key reference materials in the courses he stepped in to teach.

(3.) MS3752: Series 2: Item 2: Notes taken in Radcliffe-Brown's Social Anthropology II lectures, March 18.

(4.) To be undertaken alongside statistical documentation of social organisation and the collection of 'ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances' (Malinowski 1922:24).

(5.) The most revealing insights of this kind are likely to have been included in the letters Stanner wrote regularly from the field to his mother. While Stanner's widow, Patricia Stanner, has generously shown me some of these letters, the bulk were destroyed in a fire in the Blue Mountains in the 1950s.

(6.) MS 3752: Series 2: Item 2: Notes taken in Radcliffe-Brown's Social Anthropology 11 lectures, March 24, 1930; cf. Radcliffe-Brown 1958 [1931]:77.

(7.) MS 3752: Series 3: Item 1: notebook 1: 14; Stanner 1933:378-9.

(8.) Unpublished, incomplete manuscript entitled 'Reflective Journeys', in the private papers of Mrs P. Stanner.

(9.) On arrival he contracted malaria and spent some period of days being attended to by local policeman Billy McCann (Unpublished, incomplete manuscript entitled 'Reflective Journeys', in the private papers of Mrs P. Stanner.).

(10.) MS 3752: Series 3: Item 1: notebook 1: 8.

(11.) MS 3752: Series 3: Item 2: notebook 4: 64.

(12.) MS3752: Series 3: Item 1: notebook 1: 103.

(13.) There appears to be no public record of events leading up to this attack.

(14.) MS 3752: Series 3: Item 1: notebook 1: 53.

(15.) I am grateful to Alan Rumsey for this insight.

(16.) MS 3752: Series 3: Item 1: 88.

(17.) Stanner later referred to Brinken as 'a vulgar European" term that 'lumped together a number of tribes' (Stannet 1959:89). For the purposes of this paper it makes sense to retain the original term rather than substituting it for names in contemporary usage.

(18.) MS 3752: Series 3: Item 2: notebook 4: 10.

(19.) MS 3752: series 3: Item 1 notebook 1: 6.

(20.) MS 3752: Series 3: Item 1: notebook 1: 26-8, emphasis added.

(21.) MS 3752: Series 3: Item 2: notebook 4: 10.

(22.) MS 3752: Series 3: Item 3: notebook 6: September 1 entry (no page number).

(23.) MS 3752: series 3: Item 3: notebook 6: September 1 entry, no page number. Stanner restates the difficulty he 'experienced in establishing friendly relations' with this group in his Oceania report (Stanner 1933:378), yet he is somewhat contradictory on this matter, revealing also that he attended 'two complete circumcision ceremonies' staged by members of this group, and that '[l]ater they became more friendly, and even offered to give me information which they had been unwilling to give earlier, but I was forced to leave the field without being able to revisit them'.

(24.) MS 3752: Series 3: Item 3: notebook 5: 60.

(25.) Especially in his work as a member of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs alongside Nugget Coombs and Barrie Dexter (see Rowse 2000).