Dividing Oceania: Transnational Anthropology, 1928-30

In the first decades of the twentieth century Oceania was a site of international ethnographic interest (Stocking 1995; Kuklick 1991; Morphy 1997; Penny and Bunzl 2003; Buschmann 2008; McDougall and Davidson 2008). As part of this interest there were multi-disciplinary ethnographic expeditions to the Torres Strait islands, Papua and New Guinea, as well as the Australian mainland. It is interesting to reflect on the importance for a history of anthropology, the fact that "the crucial fieldwork experience that shaped the theoretical stance of the two founding fathers of British social anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, was undertaken in this region" (Mulvaney 1988:205). The imperial nations, Britain, Germany, France and the USA implicitly divided Oceania into areas of national interest. After World War I there was further elaboration of these areas and the introduction of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand as part of the imperial family taking on responsibility, under a League of Nations "C" mandate, for the ex-German colonies of Micronesia, New Guinea, Samoa, Nauru. This chapter illustrates the transnational intersection and accommodation of Australian, American, and British ethnographic interests in Oceania as expressed through some of the correspondence between A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and H. E. Gregory.

In the decade preceding the appointment of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown as Foundation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, Australian scientists, along with some of their British counterparts, urged the Australian government to establish a chair of anthropology in an Australian university. Such calls began with the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting held in Sydney and Melbourne in August 1914. Before this meeting many of its members were of the opinion that anthropological teaching should be expanded not only in British universities but in key imperial universities as well. In fact a committee had been formed at the previous meeting to report to the 1914 meeting on the expansion of anthropology in British universities. War intervened and it was not until 1921 that interest was resumed at the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science conference; this was followed by the Pan Pacific Science Congress of 1921, which had also expressed the need for anthropological research in Oceania, and the second Pan Pacific Science Congress held in Australia in 1923. The previous year the Australian National Research Council (ANRC), made up of one hundred eminent scientists, supported the need for "the endowment of systematic scientific research in the Pacific Islands under Australian Control."¹ The resolutions supporting the establishment of a chair and systematic research in Oceania were aimed primarily at the Australian government and its colonial administrations in the Australian controlled Territory of Papua and the Australian-administered League of Nations Mandate of New Guinea.²

The Congress, in A. P. Elkin's view, was a key event in the formation of a Chair of Anthropology. A. P. Elkin, who attended the conference, argued that the Congress was a key event in the formation of a chair of Anthropology, its "initial success arose from the standing of . . . Congress, the status of the [ANRC], and the calibre of the individual scientists concerned" (Elkin 1958:230-231). Such a view minimizes the "systematic international policy pursued by the Rockefeller Foundation" and undervalues the persistence and contacts of the ANRC executive, as well as the role of the British anthropologist A. C. Haddon, whom David Orme Masson, President of the ANRC, thanked: "we owe it [the chair] to you" (Mulvaney 1988:220).

The calls for a chair were driven by two arguments: first that training in anthropology was crucial to enlightened governance in the colonies; and, second, a belief that Aboriginal people were close to extinction and that all should be recorded about these "very interesting people" before it was too late. It was also decided at the Congress that the University of Sydney was the most suitable site to house the chair. Sir Baldwin Spencer, the most eminent anthropologist in Australia in the first decades of the twentieth century, when asked why the University of Sydney and not the University of Melbourne was chosen, told his questioner, "Sydney had always...