Collecting Cultures by May Sally K.;

Author:May, Sally K.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 467169
Publisher: AltaMira Press

NOTE

1. The Berndts first visited Oenpelli in 1947 but their longest period of fieldwork took place from December 1949 to May 1950 (see Berndt and Berndt 1970).

7

Collecting Arnhem Land

Tom Griffiths (1996: 25) has argued that collections suppress their own historical, economic, and political processes of production. This is true of the Arnhem Land Expedition ethnographic collection, and it is one of the underlying aims of this book to address this issue. This chapter, therefore, reviews the processes involved in the shaping of the collection and the contemporary social attitudes that contributed to collection strategies. In other words, this is an exploration of mid-twentieth-century influences on the expeditions’ field collecting. While it could be argued that individual collector preferences were the key factor in the types of objects collected, the influence of society and culture on the views of the collectors cannot be ignored. As stated previously, individual researchers were carrying mandates from their government and their cultural institutions and were, in essence, collecting for humanity.

In Australia, early researchers often collected ethnographic material culture from Aboriginal communities with what could be referred to as a Social Darwinian view. Many believed these Aboriginal cultures (or culture, as they believed at the time) represented an earlier form of Western culture. With a few notable exceptions, until the 1950s, researchers of Australian Aboriginal culture generally collected with the underlying assumption that their study group was an unchanging people with unchanging material culture (Trigger 1989: 141). As Murdoch stated in 1917, “The dark-skinned wandering tribes… have nothing that can be called a history… change and progress are the stuff of which history is made: these blacks knew no change and made no progress, as far as we can tell” (Attwood and Arnold 1992: x).

The result of this belief was that ethnographic collections were formed and used for studying what were assumed to be static, prehistoric cultures. Researchers saw this ethnographic material as providing them with the absent data in the archaeological record. It was believed that the gap resulting from perishable material not surviving in the archaeological record could be filled with modern ethnographic material (McBryde 1978). Though the question of Australia’s static culture prior to European colonization was called into question by researchers such as Norman Tindale in southern Australia, interest in cultural change and regional variation did not mark Australian archaeology until the 1950s, particularly following the advent of radiocarbon dating (Trigger 1989: 143).

With colonization and the significant impact that this had upon Aboriginal cultures worldwide, people began to see Charles Darwin’s predictions of Aboriginal cultures becoming extinct as becoming fact (Darwin 1871: 521). Though at first the devastation of other cultures was accepted as progress, eventually fear of losing something irreplaceable began to enter the minds of the colonizers.

Simpson described the “Australian Aboriginal” as “a patient who years ago was marked down as ‘dying’ and whose treatment since has consisted mainly of pillow-smoothing and doses of pity” (1951: 186). This fear led to urgency in recording and preserving and was the overwhelming

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