First In Their Field by Julie Marcus

Author:Julie Marcus [Marcus, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781987025408
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Press
Published: 2019-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

From the armchair to the field

Fieldwork among Aboriginal Australians in northern Queensland finally enabled Ursula McConnel to test her theoretical knowledge in a real cultural environment. It removed the problems of interpretation inherent in secondary texts which had not covered those aspects of social life in which she was most interested. However, a new obstacle presented itself. McConnel found the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney to be working in the new theoretical framework of functionalism developed by Radcliffe-Brown. It was an approach to the subject diametrically opposed to the diffusionism and psychoanalysis in which she had been trained. Radcliffe-Brown’s new scientific and functionalist anthropology was, in his own words ‘inductive and generalising, antihistorical and antipsychological’.11 Between England and Australia Ursula McConnel found her research methods had been rendered largely redundant.

There was a sense of urgency attached to the practice of anthropology in Australia during this period. The Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney had been founded with the explicit aim of trying to record what was left of Aboriginal culture:

in view of the great and peculiar interest of the Australian Aboriginals. . . and the loss of their primitive beliefs and customs. . . the Pan Pacific Science Congress urges that steps should be taken without delay, to organise the study of those tribes that are, as yet, comparatively uninfluenced by contact with civilisation.12

This salvage rationale emphasised the recording of all aspects of social life, in an attempt to ‘rescue’ information about the cultural life of the Aboriginal Australian people, who were generally perceived as a ‘disappearing race’. It went well with Radcliffe-Brown’s view of culture as comprising separate institutions functioning together in such a way as to regulate social life and meant that, ideally, the ethnographer investigated all aspects of social life in equal depth.

There seems little doubt that Radcliffe-Brown and his new holistic and functionalist anthropology, together with the politics encouraging anthropological salvage work, quickly demolished McConnel’s established research aims. It must have come as something of a shock to her to suddenly find her four years of London work considered not only useless, but reactionary. Despite having been present in London during the period when functionalist anthropology emerged, she seemed unaware of those changes and their implications. While in London she had stopped attending lectures by Bronislaw Malinowski, a co-founder of the ‘new’ anthropology, and held him in profound contempt.13 In contrast, she had deeply admired her supervisors at University College, W. Perry and G. Elliott Smith, both of whom were engrossed in specialised subject areas which were related to her own. McConnel’s London studies of religious symbolism in archaeology reflect the enthusiastic concerns of those two men, and it was not until she established contact with the University of Sydney that she realised the archaic nature of her research.14 It is perhaps indicative of Radcliffe-Brown’s dominating presence in the Sydney school of anthropology that all his graduate students, regardless of previous theoretical background, produced the standard functionalist ethnographic texts which now characterise that period of Australian anthropology.

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