CHAPTER 8

It's Other People Who Are My Old Age

Since the lived is…never entirely comprehensible, what I understand never quite tallies with my living experience, in short, I am never quite at one with myself.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty

 

 

In a series of interviews with Benny Levy in 1980, Jean-Paul Sartre—then seventy-five and in the last year of his life—asserted that he did not experience himself as an old man. Everyone treated him as an old man. But for himself, he was not old. “It's other people that are my old age,” he said.¹

The moment is poignant, because in the eyes of others Sartre was old—blind, unable to write, unable to be alone, almost completely dependent, and not always lucid in speech or in thought. But those who spoke of Sartre in this way seem not to have realized that even in dying a person's humanity is still alive, and their remarks suggest how difficult it is for us to accommodate the view that a person's identity is as various as the people who encounter or purport to know that person, including herself or himself. “We live…lives based upon selected fictions,” writes Lawrence Durrell. “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time—not by our personalities as we like to think.”²

This relativity of viewpoints was complicated, in Sartre's case, by the quarrel that followed the publication of the Levy interviews—debates over whether Levy had imposed his own views on the older writer, over who knew Sartre best, the man and the thinker, and over who should be allowed the last word on what he thought in his dying days.

One of the arresting facts of growing old is that the young see us, as we in turn see them, as inhabiting absolutely different worlds. If aging is a process of forgetting, then the first symptom of this amnesia is forgetting what it was like to be young. The converse is more forgivable, for the young cannot be blamed for having little inkling of what it is like to be old. Still, I have been haunted for many years by my inability to see past the superficial appearance of age, and my failure to ask my elders to share with me the fruit of their accumulated experience. Did it remain true for Sartre to the end of his life that a human being “is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he succeeds in making of what he has been made”?³ Is it as true of the old as of the young, of men and of women, that one never simply conserves or straightforwardly reproduces the world in which one finds oneself thrown, that we surpass, in some small measure and in often indiscernible ways, the situation that is visited upon us as a result of the accident of our birth, our history, our biology? For Sartre, understanding a person or a life requires a double perspective—a regressive movement in which we examine the cards we are dealt; a progressive moment in which we see how we play our hand. “This is the limit I would today accord to freedom,” Sartre said in a 1969 interview, “the small movement which makes a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him.”⁴

These questions haunted me during the hours I spent in the Piddington Reading Room at the University of Auckland, leafing through old anthropology theses in the hope of deepening my understanding of “the people of the four winds.”⁵ Though I had gone there to research the trope of firstness in the social imaginaries of Mori, what claimed my attention was the room itself, the views it afforded of Auckland harbor, the islands in the gulf, and memories of my freshman year, particularly the classes I took with Professor Ralph O'Reilly Piddington.

Though only fifty-two, Piddington seemed ancient to me—rather as Sartre was described in the last years of his life.⁶ With his thinning hair, rheumy eyes, and palsied hands, I found it impossible to believe my professor had ever been young, yet alone as idealistic and adventurous as I imagined myself to be. His dogged defense of Malinowski's functionalism, and the rumors that circulated about his parkinsonism and fondness for whiskey, only added to my blighted and unsympathetic view. And though his textbook An Introduction to Social Anthropology, already in its second edition, contained abundant evidence of his fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia, I was blind to it. All I could see was the frail, florid-faced man who, week after week, stood behind the lectern in a faded academic gown and conducted us on a Cook's tour, as he called it, of primitive peoples, reciting his litany of ethnographic facts, native terms, and formal definitions.

Yet had I possessed even a modicum of discernment, I might have read between the lines of his text and divined a hidden biography. I might even have seen that his Malinowskian preoccupation with needs and functions referred not only to remote societies but obliquely and intimately to himself.

In his first volume he observes that “it is easy enough, on the basis of superficial and one-sided observation, to caricature primitive man as a fiend or as a saint. It requires the discipline of patient scientific observation to see him as a human being not essentially different from ourselves, capable of brutality and kindness, of greed or altruism, of obedience or defiance toward the social order, according to the culture in which he is born, his individual temperament and the particular circumstances in which he finds himself.”⁷

This view is reiterated in his second volume, where Piddington reminds us that “the anthropologist in the field is a human being dealing with other human beings, and that the personal relations which he establishes and maintains with his informants are vital.”⁸ But instead of advocating closeness and collaboration between ethnographer and informant, Piddington suggests that the “personal bias and distortion” entailed by such intimacy should be circumvented by “a thorough training in the scientific methods of social anthropology.”⁹ One safeguard, he avers, is to avoid interviews and to place greater emphasis on observation, though there are dangers even here, he adds, for participant observation risks identifying the observer “too closely…with a particular social class,” embroiling him in factional disputes, and creating bias in his data. “At all costs, the field-worker must retain his objectivity,”¹⁰ Piddington concludes, underscoring the power of stranger value to maximize neutrality, maintain distance, and guarantee access to restricted knowledge.

The irony is that, despite these caveats against engagement, this lip service to objectivity, Ralph Piddington's nine months of fieldwork among the Karadjeri in 1930 and 1931 were characterized by a passionate concern for the plight of Aboriginal people and fervent advocacy on their behalf.

There are other contradictions. Piddington confides that during most of his stay in the Kimberleys, he “resided at the telegraph station at Lagrange Bay, though…made trips to various parts of Karadjeri country to witness ceremonies.” Yet apart from one or two hunts and fishing trips, he “did not participate in economic life,” and most of his ethnographic information was “obtained by interview,” the very technique in which the ethnographer is, allegedly, most likely to influence “behaviour by the nature of the questions which he asks and the comments which he makes.”¹¹ Moreover, Piddington gathered three-quarters of all his data from a single informant, Yuari—allegedly a “deviant personality”—and much of his remaining data from Yuari's brother Nirmbdi.

While Piddington admits “serious defects” in his fieldwork when it is measured against the general principles he lays down in his text, the fault lies not with the author but with both the functionalist and structuralist assumptions that informed the anthropology of his time, including, as he himself notes, the quest for a conceptually “consistent system” of kinship and the notion that deviations from a norm reflect psychological aberrations rather than quotidian strategizing and variation. But the most compelling omission is his own personal and political involvement in the Karadjeri situation—something of which he makes no mention in his text.

Though considered a distraction in Piddington's time, engagement is now central to the ethics and practice of anthropology. And it was the very thing I was hungry to hear about as a student.

And herein lies a tale.

Shortly after graduating with an MA from A.R.Radcliffe-Brown's Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, Piddington was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship by the Australian National Research Committee to carry out his fieldwork among the Karadjeri.¹²

Some three months after completing his second stint of fieldwork, Piddington did an interview with a journalist from the Sydney newspaper The World. Given his prejudice against interviews, it is ironic that this interview should have such dramatic repercussions. In the interview, Piddington made no bones about the racial discrimination and appalling living conditions that Aboriginal people had to endure in the Kimberleys. “The system of employing aborigines on cattle stations in the North and North-west Australia virtually amounts to slavery,” he observed, and he proceeded to give details of “trafficking in lubras” and the flogging and murder of blacks by whites.¹³ A few months later, Piddington took his indictment of the police and pastoralists to the London press and, on the editorial page of The World, repeated his polemic against the maltreatment of Aboriginals.¹⁴ This time he brought the ire of the Western Australian chief protector of Aborigines down on his head.¹⁵

As a member of the committee that had approved Rockefeller funding for Piddington's fieldwork, the chief protector was in a powerful position, and in September 1932, Raymond Firth, then acting head of the Sydney University Department of Anthropology (following Radcliffe-Brown's departure for Chicago), rebuked Piddington and sought an assurance that he would make no further public statements that questioned government “control and care of Aboriginal people.”¹⁶ After reflecting on this policy of “cautious silence,” Piddington elected to defend and reiterate his views in a detailed statement. The Australia National Research Council (ANRC) then terminated his funding, with Elkin, the new head of the Sydney department, approving the action.

The ANRC dossier on Piddington is revealing. It shows an anthropologist much more involved with the Karadjeri on a day-to-day, face-to-face basis than appears from his textbook account of his life in the field, leaving one to wonder whether he felt embarrassed to admit that he was among Karadjeri on a cattle station and not living nomadically in the desert. At the same time, the dossier inadvertently documents the very racist assumptions against which Piddington was campaigning. D. J. Mulvaney summarizes the file as follows:

Piddington was observed to drive female Aborigines in his vehicle; he was seen to transport liquor; he was “said to be addicted to drink”; he took informants away without consulting authorities; his conduct was “hardly in keeping with the position held.” Generally the tenor of those accusations was petty. For any Broome resident of those times to criticise alcohol consumption was sheer hypocrisy. It also revealed complete ignorance of the nature of anthropological fieldwork, while incidentally illuminating local racial attitudes towards Aboriginal people. One witness even seemed critical that Piddington travelled with his wife. How ever, his most heinous offense, commented on by two officials, was Piddington'presence in Broome “at a convivial evening when the Red Flag and Communistsongs were sung.”¹⁷

Six years after writing his first letters in defense of Aboriginal rights, Piddington completed his PhD in London under Bronislaw Malinowski. Apart from war service, he would return to Australia, his country of birth, only once. And his field of interest would move to action anthropology and to French Canada.

Looking back, I am left with many unanswered questions. Given the brutal realities that Piddington encountered in the field, why did he never challenge Malinowski's tendency to analyze social systems in equilibrium, ignoring the historical stresses and strains that often brought them to the breaking point? And what analogies might he have drawn between the injustices he witnessed in the Kimberleys and the injustices he himself suffered in Sydney? Half a century after taking my first classes at the University of Auckland, I am struck by the coincidence between the rejection Ralph Piddington suffered in his homeland and the case of Vere Gordon Childe, the Australian born and internationally acclaimed prehistorian and archaeologist, who died on October 19, 1957, after falling from a cliff in the Blue Mountains, in all probability a deliberate act, provoked by failing health and a fear of intellectual debilitation.

I have left it too long to express my sense of kinship with these men. For though I too sang “The Red Flag,” marched with a banner for some great cause, and struggled to reconcile the academy with the world, I now ask my self whether I ever risked as much as they did, and I imagine a kind of poetic justice in the possibility that today, in one of my classes, a student will see me as I once so mistakenly saw Ralph Piddington, as past his prime and out of touch with reality.