A contemporary overview
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies was twenty-five years old in 1986, and to mark this event a special conference was held during the Institute’s Biennial Meeting. The conference, ‘Social Anthropology in Aboriginal Studies: Selected Themes, 1961-1986’, was organised by the Institute’s Social and Cultural Anthropology Committee, under the chairmanship of Professor Robert Tonkinson. There were three symposia: one on the issue of inequality in Aboriginal societies, chaired by Dr Les Hiatt; one on Aboriginal identity, chaired by Dr Jeremy Beckett; and, under the chairmanship of Professor Ronald Berndt, one entitled ‘Topical Overviews’, on which the present volume is based. Professor John Barnes was invited to be the discussant at the conference, and his observations are included in this volume.
The organising committee selected five major topics for the symposium concerned with overviewing the field. These were not intended to provide an exhaustive coverage, since certain areas, such as territorial organisation and land tenure, have already been the subject of a great deal of debate and published work. Five anthropologists were then invited to write papers on ‘the state of the art’, their brief being to summarise the main contributions and trends in the chosen area since the 1961 conference on Aboriginal studies, and to offer critical comment on past work as well as possible future trends. Their task was daunting, partly because most found it necessary to go back well beyond the 1961 baseline in order to set their papers into an adequate historical perspective, but mainly because of the wealth of published data that has appeared in the past two and a half decades.
It was hoped that this volume, in addition to demonstrating the nature and value of the contribution made by anthropology to Aboriginal studies since 1961, would also reflect the major role played by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in funding research and exerting a strong, positive influence on developments in the discipline. The organising committee was also concerned to see developments in the Australian Aboriginal field related to major theoretical trends in anthropology globally, in the hope that contributors would offer comment as to why certain of these trends failed to gain favour among Australianists. Because the overviews provide a major synthesis derived from a huge and diverse corpus of writings (published and unpublished), it was also anticipated that this volume would prove useful as a resource for teaching and discussion, relevant not only to professional anthropologists and other scholars of Aboriginal studies, but also to a much wider readership, which we hope will include many interested Aboriginal people.
The 1961 conference, which was an event unique in the history of Aboriginal studies in this country, resulted in the publication in 1963 of an edited volume, Australian Aboriginal Studies, which provided an overview of what was known about Aboriginal society and culture at the time, along with suggestions for future research. The fifty-five members present, who represented a variety of academic interests, assembled under the guidance of Mr WC Wentworth (whose idea it was to create the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies) and under the chairmanship of the late Professor WEH Stanner. The conference evolved into an exciting and informative happening that not only steered a course for Australian Aboriginal studies but seemed to set it firmly in place for the foreseeable future. Only sixteen of those present were professional social-cultural anthropologists and only eight of them presented papers or formal comments on such papers, but there was general participation in the discussions that followed each paper.
The focus of the 1961 conference was avowedly general; it did not permit any detailed examination of specific topics, in contrast to the present volume. Topics considered were: ecology and economics (FD McCarthy); social organisation (JA Barnes, MJ Meggitt and RM Berndt); and religion and aesthetics (EA Worms, TGH Strehlow, CH Berndt, TA Jones and AM Moyle). The session on the social position of women (M Reay and CH Berndt) came under ‘special problems’, as did tribal distribution and population (NB Tindale). A section on what was termed the ‘contemporary’ Aboriginal scene was virtually separated from others that emphasised ‘traditional’ aspects of Aboriginal Australia.
Nonetheless, issues of changing Aboriginal perspectives appeared in several of the contributions, which Included some discussion of Aborigines with various degrees of involvement in European Australia. As would be expected, there are some marked differences between the treatment of the various subjects discussed in 1961 and approaches in the 1980s. Today, for example, an earlier concern with notions of salvage (ie ‘getting it all down before it disappears’) is largely absent as processes of change and cultural transformation take centre stage.
In the period following the 1961 conference, two publications attempted to provide what were to some extent different kinds of overviews of the field. The first, Australian Aboriginal Anthropology, a volume edited by Ronald Berndt, was published in 1970. Its aim was to show, via the fourteen papers presented, the range of topics that social anthropologists were working on at the time, and how they were dealing with their data. Professor Berndt intended that the contributors would call attention to significant ethnographic problems and would carry further some of the issues that had been raised, but not in his opinion treated adequately, at the 1961 conference. In 1973, KOL Burridge published Encountering Aborigines: Anthropology and the Australian Aboriginal in an attempt to explain why Aborigines have been for so long a major focus of anthropological attention, and to contextualise research on Aboriginal culture within a more general framework and perspective. He wished to ‘go over old problems and try to pose new ones by filling in some of the historical and intellectual background to Aboriginal studies’ (Burridge 1973, x). Although his scope was more general, Burridge’s book shares many of its aims with the overviews presented in this volume.
The five topics chosen for review in these pages are: gender, kinship, economics, law and religion. The authors have set out to provide as comprehensive an overview as possible while focusing on certain crucial areas that have received concentrated research attention or have been topics of significant debate. No attempts were made by the conference committee to point contributors in certain directions or require them to take particular stances in their treatment of the material. Their biases, declared and implicit, are their own.
The overviews presented here reveal considerable evidence of clear shifts—as well as considerable continuities—in anthropological approaches, and of a steady accretion of knowledge rather than dramatic disjunctions or radical reconceptualisations of the Aboriginal data. Whether because of the Australianists’ relative isolation from the intellectual ferments of the European and American scenes, or because of an Antipodean scepticism concerning new theoretical trends or ‘schools’, there has not been any rapid and collective embracing of new models by the Australianists in this country. There are still no signs, for example, that either phenomenology or transactionalism has had a major impact, and despite Sherry Ortner’s prediction that the 1980s in anthropology will be the decade of praxis, Australianists have yet to clasp the works of scholars such as Bourdieu or Giddens to the collective bosom. The preferred attitude has been one of ‘wait and see’, a caution that is admittedly conservative but has often proved to be justified in view of the short lived prominence of certain approaches (cognitive anthropology and cultural ecology, for example).
Within the last decade, in particular, the eclecticism that is at once the great strength and the bedevilment of anthropology—at least in its pretensions to the status of social science—has been reflected in Australian Aboriginal studies, and it evidences a new vitality. Much of the impetus has come from overseas, but certain developments within this country for example, the inception of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, have prompted major re-examinations of existing models and the promulgation of new ones. Anyone who attended the Fourth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Peoples, held in London in September 1986, could not have failed to notice the major contribution made by the Australianists present to the intellectual debate. The London conference reinforced the status of this country as a focal, rather than peripheral, centre for hunter-gatherer studies. It is probably true that social anthropology in Australia, in spite of the fact that Its research interests embrace Australian society at large and a number of neighbouring regions, is still evaluated within and outside this country largely in terms of research and publications on Aboriginal Australia.
Dr Francesca Merlan’s review of gender related studies demonstrates more dramatically than any of the other reviews the impact of a suddenly raised anthropological consciousness on the study of Aboriginal societies. The feminist movement, and in particular its manifestations in American anthropology, gave rise to a strong and much-needed corrective to earlier androcentric biases in the anthropology of sex roles and gender. In some of the earlier feminist anthropological writings there was evidence of an overcorrection, such that women’s autonomy and status relative to men were depicted as much greater and higher than an evenhanded consideration of the data would grant. The Australian Aboriginal literature, as reviewed by Merlan, provides ample evidence of both kinds of bias. The level of sophistication in anthropological conceptualisations of gender has risen markedly in recent years, and some very fine studies have emerged, particularly from research carried out in Melanesia. Major works of comparable standard have yet to emerge from research done in Aboriginal Australia, but Dr Merlan’s superlative overview points the way forward.
Earlier studies, most particularly those of the Berndts, have revealed a marked degree of complementarity and mutual dependence between the sexes. Their voluminous data on the stated opinions of members of one sex about the other, on topics as diverse as menstruation, childbirth, sexuality, initiation and ritual activities—and on the gap between stated opinion and praxis—suggest the value of studies that focus on these dimensions of gender. Another fruitful research direction indicated by their recent work on myth (The Speaking Land: Australian Aboriginal Myth and Story, Methuen 1988) is the symbolic imagery of femininity and masculinity that abounds in the non-secret myth-telling and ritual of both sexes. In Merlan’s view, advances in our understanding of gender will come from a higher level of analysis than that which concerns itself with either the complementarity of male-female relations or their depiction in hierarchical terms as superior-inferior. The focus should be broadened so that the elucidation of gender issues generates insights into other dimensions of social life, and vice versa, via a thorough-going examination of the relation between structure and practice. For Merlan, it is essential that the parameters of comparison be carefully and concretely spelled out, so that, for example, one can discern at what level and in relation to what other sociocultural features is women’s ‘equality’ being depicted in a given Aboriginal community or society.
Merlan is rightly critical of a tendency among Australianists to concentrate on reconstructions of ‘traditional’ situations to the detriment of attempts to study the complex articulation of Aboriginal societies embedded within European-Australian society. To this end, she offers an independent assessment of how the ‘traditionalist’ literature can be re-read in order to locate sexuality and reproduction within a much broader sociocultural context, and to throw new light on such topics as the instrumental uses of sexuality and the importance of sexual polarity as a generative source of symbols. It is hoped that Australianists will heed Francesca Merlan’s call for more fine-grained ethnographic study and analysis of gender relations in contemporary Aboriginal societies. Her thought-provoking review marks out in detail a path that can be productively followed.
Dr Ian Keen faced a difficult task in undertaking to review kinship—a complex and often controversial topic. Sensibly, he has widened his perspective to include social categories (sections, etc) as well as local organisation, descent, marriage and alliance, so that he outlines and discusses some of the more significant debates in the literature that have an important bearing upon the nature of Australian Aboriginal social organisation. The existence of several major works devoted to overviews of the topic (eg those of Scheffler, Shapiro and Turner) provides Keen with much material for critical comment and comparison, and he uses his own extensive research into Aboriginal social organisation to support his contentions. Most of Ian Keen’s fieldwork has centred on Arnhem Land, which is precisely the region of Australia where a great deal of controversy in matters relating to social organisation (eg the now-famous and perhaps never-ending Murngin debate) has centred, and he is thus able to offer an informed and insightful analysis of these issues.
Keen’s overview is framed by the ‘hopes and fears’ regarding anthropological studies of Aboriginal social organisation that were expressed by the presenters and discussants at the 1961 conference session devoted to this topic. He begins with a discussion of the legacy of Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss, both of whom proved to be major influences on the shape and direction of Australian Aboriginal kinship studies. Keen offers, through his treatment of the abundant literature, a demonstration that there have been important advances in our understanding of Aboriginal kinship and social organisation. As predicted in 1961, there has been a diminution in attention to formal analyses of kinship categories and rules, but the interest has continued, and Keen sees considerable value in the examination of the logical properties of these categories and rules, for the light thus shed on their logic of application in everyday life.
In several places, as during his treatment of descent and of local organisation, Keen points to advances in understanding that are linked to the advent of land rights legislation in the Northern Territory and subsequent land claim research. These advances have further undermined Radcliffe-Brown’s model of the patrilocal horde, as well as notions from Tindale and Birdsell of the bounded ‘tribe’—although in the latter case, major onslaughts (cf RM Berndt’s 1959 paper on the concept of the tribe in the Western Desert, and most of the contributions to the volume Aboriginal Tribes and Boundaries, 1976, edited by Nicolas Peterson) had already occurred. Certainly, in the period since 1961, land tenure is the one area of Aboriginal social organisation where the greatest advances in our understanding have taken place, and the current emphasis on flexibility in land tenure systems goes beyond causal explanations phrased only in term of post-contact changes.
One of the major conclusions reached by Keen closely parallels that of Merlan concerning gender studies: the need to undertake broader based studies, which will replace hitherto uni-dimensional comparative studies by relating the various types of kinship systems to social and economic organisation; and certainly, the need to pay much more attention to the politics of kinship, land tenure, and other issues. The need for a knitting together of structure and process, as proposed by Merlan, exists in the realm of studies of Aboriginal social organisation. In Keen’s view, provided that formal analyses are not based on spurious assumptions, they can provide structures on which to base more far-reaching comparative studies that are at the same time historical and synchronic.
The comprehensive overview provided here by Dr Christopher Anderson could not have been written in 1961. The raw material was lacking, although more data were available than FD McCarthy’s treatment of ecology and economics covered, and the discussion that followed his presentation pinpointed some of the broader economic implications of the extant literature. Anderson notes that in the first half-century of Australian anthropology there was little interest in the Aboriginal economy—its ‘simplicity’ rendered it unproblematic, especially when contrasted with the perceived complexities of kinship and religion. Anderson’s focus is on major trends in the anthropological treatment of economy, and on their connection to contrasting conceptual and methodological approaches to the topic. The result is an enlightening and well argued review of how Aboriginal economy has been conceptualised by succeeding generations of anthropologists, and of how theoretical models derived from outside Australia have been variously applied, or misapplied, to the Aboriginal data.
Predictably, much of this overview is concerned with the impact of ecological anthropology on both anthropological and archaeological approaches to Aboriginal economies. It has had considerable influence at the level of research methodology as well as conceptually. As Anderson notes, it has heightened awareness of regional variations in economic systems while generating a more refined and integrated view of economy than earlier approaches. On the negative side, the dangers of reductionism, determinism and the down-playing of cultural factors are spelled out—the social relations of production should feature prominently in any analysis worth its salt.
Another major section of the review concerns the more macroscopic perspective, often embodied in studies made by non-anthropologist scholars, whose aim is to locate Aborigines and economy within Australian society at large. Here, the thrust of Anderson’s argument is that many contemporary studies have failed to appreciate the continuing influence of indigenous cultural values on Aboriginal economic systems. The relative neglect of distributive processes, for example, distorts some of these economic analyses since they overlook a vitally important aspect of contemporary Aboriginal economies. Anderson notes the increasing attention now being paid by anthropologists to Aboriginal participation in the Australian economy, and reviews some of these recent studies, which he sees as providing a much-needed ‘anthropological corrective’ to macroscopic studies that are insufficiently sensitive to cultural factors and their interplay with economic behaviour.
Anderson concludes his review with a description of new directions in analytical approaches to Aboriginal economy, noting the emergence of more theoretically and methodologically sophisticated syntheses of micro and macro perspectives. He looks to approaches based on historical materialism and world system theory as the ones likely to produce the most fruitful studies, both of pre-contact and post-contact Aboriginal economies. Yet again, it is clear that there are parallels between this review and all the others in the call for broader based definitions of the topic and for a focus on the articulation of what can be narrowly defined as ‘economic’ with other major sociocultural institutions.
The task of attending to the fascinating and often controversial area of the Aboriginal polity has been most ably taken up by Dr Nancy Williams, who offers a balanced view of the many debates that have raged—and continue to rage—over the nature of Aboriginal political life. Many of the threads of argument that weave through the other four contributions come together in this topic, which is in some senses therefore central to the volume. Nancy Williams has long had a major interest in the study of Aboriginal law, as her two recently published books indicate, and her familiarity with the Australian sociolegal literature, particularly as it pertains to Aboriginal topics, has enabled her to include a large number of references that may be unknown to many anthropologists.
The point of departure for Williams is the 1961 conference, where, in the study of law as in other sociocultural aspects, analyses that had been predominantly concerned with structure and function were subject to scrutiny. As with Aboriginal economy, very few systematic studies of the nature and content of Aboriginal law existed, and problems of definition loomed large. Williams notes the rise in Interest in the study of law and social control, and the analytic shift toward the explanation of process since that time. She outlines the trend toward the study of contemporary Aboriginal society, paying particular attention to the consequences of land rights legislation in the Northern Territory and the reference on recognition of Aboriginal customary law given to the Australian Law Reform Commission in 1977—two developments that have proved quite significant for studies of law.
Williams makes an analytical distinction among several major aspects of the study of Aboriginal law in order to clarify historical connections and the salient anthropological issues. She considers first the problematic relation between politics and administration, by focusing on the notion of government, where markedly contrasting depictions (from anarchy to gerontocracy) have engendered much debate. This leads her to an examination of rules of law and procedures of dispute settlement, where the extent of control exerted through the operation of kinship has been a point of contention among Australianists, and where, in Williams’s opinion, the reporting of disputes has generally been inadequate for analytical purposes. Another important field of interest covered in this overview is the relationship between customary law and Aboriginal religion. Here, all studies must take account of the embeddedness of concepts of law within pervasive religious conceptions, and of law’s sacred, as differentiated from secular, dimensions. Williams’s discussion includes the problematic notion of ‘traditional’ and ‘secret-sacred’ laws and their accommodation within the wider Australian legal system.
The penultimate section broadens the scope of discussion by relating developments in the study of Aboriginal law to changing theoretical concerns in anthropology. Williams traces the transition in conceptual emphases from structure to function to process, and shows how these changes have altered our notions about what constitutes adequate ethnography. This leads her, in conclusion, to a review of several recent studies which embody the kinds of approach that in her view are needed to meet contemporary criteria of adequacy in anthropological research and analysis concerning Aboriginal law. Valuable Insights are possible from a variety of sources, including feminist anthropology, sociolinguistics and ethnohistory. Williams sees the way forward as being via greater attention to relations of power and inequality and their grounding in historical processes. These critical considerations have been all but ignored in much of the anthropology of Aboriginal law, and yet, as Williams points out, they are amenable to observation and analysis within the existing frameworks of enquiry.
Dr Howard Morphy begins his review of this topic with an obligatory journey back to Durkheim, who more than any other scholar set the parameters for what was to constitute the study of Aboriginal religion for almost the next half-century. Anthropological disquiet about extant research, discernible by the time of the 1961 conference, paved the way for subsequent experimentation with a whole range of different approaches, encapsulated, in Morphy’s view, in two themes: the study of meaning and symbolism; and the role of religion in the reproduction of Aboriginal society. A central focus of the review is Morphy’s thoughtful evaluation of the contribution of WEH Stanner, whose shadow looms large over much of the subsequent literature on Aboriginal religion, and whose writings were a major factor in the shift of attention toward content and symbolism and the structural analysis of these aspects of Aboriginal religion. As Morphy points out, however, the employment of structuralist methodology, especially in relation to the analysis of myth, totemism and ritual, owed more to Lévi-Strauss than to Stanner.
In an insightful treatment of the significance of totemism in Aboriginal religion, Morphy draws heavily on his own data from northeastern Arnhem Land to demonstrate the likelihood of any given totemic system being multiply determined and bound up with processes of creativity as well as utility. This discussion leads Morphy to the observation, in common with the other contributors to this volume, that problems of the relationship between structure and action have become a necessary part of the agenda of study. As with the approach favoured by Anderson in his review of economics, Morphy categorises several major conceptual approaches, and groups the anthropological contributors to the literature on Aboriginal religion accordingly. One of us (RM Berndt) disagrees with his designation as one of the ‘ethnographic-exegetical’ crowd, and would plead for separate consideration, because of his emphasis (contra Stanner) on the role of Aboriginal religion(s) in everyday life and therefore of content and belief seen within the frame of the life-cycle. No doubt, other scholars may also wish to be grouped differently, but Morphy’s main concern is to document the range of approaches involved as well as their implications for an adequate understanding of the religious phenomena under study.
Morphy’s discussion of the inter-relationships among religion, politics and economics takes him into the arena of present day Aboriginal society. He discusses Aboriginal Christianity and offers suggestions as to why this dimension of religion has been relatively neglected by anthropologists. He concludes the overview with some suggestions for fruitful, and hitherto relatively undeveloped, lines of enquiry—most particularly, through the examination of the articulation of ritual action with the structures of society (such as relations of domination and subordination, and systems of clan organisation) and by paying much closer attention to the motives of the agents involved.
Again, the thrust of Morphy’s concluding suggestions has close parallels with those of all the other contributors: the call for a broadening of focus, to integrate structure with process by concentrating our attention on the relationships between the more narrowly defined field of study—law or kinship—and the rest of the sociocultural fabric. If, as it is hoped, today’s Australianists turn their attention to such eminently reachable goals, Ortner’s prediction concerning the 1980s as anthropology’s decade of praxis—inasmuch as it entails a focus on the relationship between human action and structural forms—may indeed prove correct for the Aboriginal studies case.
We wish to thank the contributors for the immense amount of work they have put into their reviews. All five have extensive field research experience in Aboriginal Australia and have already made significant contributions to the field of Aboriginal studies. They willingly took on a very difficult task, but the outcome in every case has been highly successful. Our discussant, John Barnes, was an important contributor to the 1961 conference, and has retained a strong interest in developments in the Australian field. We thank him for his participation and for his impressions of trends during the last twenty-five years, which appear as the Afterword to this volume.
We commend this volume, not only for its value as an introduction to five important and closely inter-related topics in the social anthropology of Aboriginal studies, but also because it contains a great deal of provocative comment and criticism and raises important issues for future research as well as current debate. The independent assessments of the contributors exhibit a surprising degree of unanimity as to the most productive direction for future Aboriginal studies, and in so doing they provide many stimulating and noteworthy suggestions. It was never our intention that this volume be a ‘navel-gazing’ exercise directed primarily at disciplinary ends. On the contrary, it was designed for general communication. We are mindful of the fact that in recent years both scholarly and lay interest in Aboriginal studies has expanded remarkably, and that there has also been a heightened Aboriginal interest in and awareness of how their societies, past and present, are being depicted in scholarly writings. These review articles demonstrate that a sound foundation has been laid in the social anthropology of Aboriginal Australia for further significant advances to be made. We hope that the next generation of scholars, including those Aborigines who are now entering academia in increasing numbers, will build on this solid body of knowledge in the service of greater understanding, not only of Aboriginal societies, but of the full range of human social and cultural behaviours.