Assembling an Anthropological Actor: Anthropological Assemblage and Colonial Government in Papua

Abstract

This paper traces the networks through which particular practices of collecting cultures became imbricated in new relations governing colonial populations. It investigates the socio-technical arrangements associated with “practical anthropology” as they were enrolled in the Australian administered territory of Papua. The paper follows the assemblage of a new kind of anthropological actor: one which is framed in relation to new articulations of the administrative, academic and museum networks associated with a programme of “scientific administration” and the doctrine of “humanitarian colonialism”. In particular, it focuses on the office of the Government Anthropologist and the ways in which “native culture” emerged as an administrative surface.

Keywords:

• Colonial Governmentality
• Collecting
• Government Anthropology
• Materiality

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was conducted as part of Museum, Field, Metropolis, Colony: Practices of Social Governance, an Australian Research Council Discovery project (Award Number DP110103776). I thank Joshua Bell, Tony Bennett and Rodney Harrison for helpful comments on an early draft of the paper.

Notes

1 British New Guinea was renamed Papua on its transfer to Australian administration in 1902. Following the outbreak of World War One, German New Guinea fell to Australian forces, after 1919 it was administered first as a League of Nations Mandated Territory and later as a United Nations Trust Territory.

2 Foucaultian scholarship on colonialism is well advanced, for example, see Scott (1999), Stoler (1995), Bennett (2004), Pels and Salemink (1999) and Thomas (1994).

3 Throughout this essay I use the term “native culture” in the singular. While this reflects how the term was used in the historical literature, in that usage it does not foreclose on the tremendous diversity in cultural practices across the colony that were registered by the administration and whose distinctions were consequential for questions of rule. In using this term, I am primarily concerned to designate a “style of thought” of the governors, than an existent, particular lived experience of the governed.

4 For an account, see Bell (2009b).

5 Haddon brought John Layard who travelled with Rivers to Vanuatu (Geismar and Herle 2010).

6 See correspondence in National Archives Australia (NAA), A 453 1959/4708.

7 See NAA, A 453 1959/4708. For statements on anthropology and colonial government see Murray (1921, 1926, 1929b).

8 NAA, A 453 1959/4708. This established a pattern, as Denoon argues: “The Australian Commonwealth often saw Melanesian affairs through an African lens” (1999, 285). Later, Murray followed the development of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (IIALC) Malinowski forwarding him issues of its journal Africa. See NAA CRS G69 16–14. On the IIALC see de L'Estoile (2007).

9 On the Macgregor Collection, see Quinnell (2000).

10 On the Papuan Official Collection, see Schaffarczyk (2006, 2011).

11 For discussions of this aspect of Haddon's work, see Herle and Rouse (1998), Edwards (1998) and Bell (2009b, 151–152).

12 NAA, A 453 1959/4708.

13 In an unattributed quote, Murray cites Hartland (1911, 24): “[A Government Anthropologist] may be difficult to find—he must have the capacity to acquire the art of ‘thinking black’ or ‘brown’, which, it is said, ‘requires more sympathy and insight than is given to most men’” (NAA, A 453 1959/4708).

14 NAA, A 453 1959/4708.

15 Murray to Minister of State, For External Affairs, 23 February 1915, NAA, A 453 1959/4708.

16 Murray negotiated with Robert Etheridge, the Director of the Australian Museum for the collection's accommodation. When the Museum withdrew its offer Murray organised, with Williams' assistance, for the collection to move to Canberra's Institute of Anatomy. NAA, A 453 1959/4708.

17 For commentaries, see Bell, Brown, and Gordon (2013), Dixon (2001, 2011), Specht and Fields (1984) and Specht (2003).

18 Williams' posting was remarkable for his duration in the field. Young and Clark note: “During the two decades of his Papuan career, Williams spent more than a quarter of his time in the field   …   more than any anthropologist before and, with a few modern exceptions, by any since” (2001, 35).

19 For accounts of Williams, see Bell (2006, 2009a, 2009b, 2010), Schaffarczyk (2011), Schwimmer (1976) and Young and Clark (2001).

20 NAA, CRS G69 16–17.

21 Williams spent time at London School of Economics with Malinowski on a Rockefeller Scholarship in 1933–1934, and was in regular correspondence with other luminaries, such as Haddon, Seligman and Marett.

22 For accounts of patrolling, see Humphries (1923) and Schieffelin and Crittenden (1991).

23 Stocking contends Williams, along with his counterpart in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, Ernst Chinnery, were “gate-keepers to the New Guinea field” (1996, 386). On Beatrice Blackwood, see Knowles (2000), Larson (2011) and Gosden, Larson, and Petch (2007, 165–117). On Fortune, see Gray (1999).

24 For Murray, this situation was in contrast to Temple's (1918) Northern Nigeria on whose text he drew.

25 The acephalous problematic, however, did not correspond universally with Papuan socialities. For example, within the Purari Delta, there was a system of hereditary chiefs, similarly in Orokolo, in the Trobriand Islands and among the Mekeo. Mosko (2012) has detailed the translation between these chiefly positions and those of village constables established by the Murray regime.

26 While the indirect method was desirable, it was not always deemed the most expedient exercise of power. Should cultural power fail Murray had little hesitation in turning to the judicial, enforcing laws enacted in 1919 on housing, sanitation, food production, burial, with prison sentences for offenders.

27 On this direct link between cultural production and the biopolitics of population decline, see the contemporary debates, Murray (1923, 1932/1933), Rivers (1922), Pitt-Rivers (1927) and Williams (1932). Murray was involved in public debate over Pitt-Rivers criticisms of his administration. See NAA, CRS G69 16-19, Folios 1-1.

28 Williams to Murray, 13 March 1937, NAA, CRS G69 16-14.

29 Murray to Williams, 30 March 1937, NAA, CRS G69 16-14.

30 See Young and Clark (2001) for an assessment.