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  • An Anthropologist in Papua: The Photography of F. E. Williams, 1922–39
  • Robert L. Welsch and Sebastian Haraha
An Anthropologist in Papua: The Photography of F. E. Williams, 1922–39. Michael W. Young and Julia Clark. New York: C. Hurst & Co., 2002. 320 pp., 9 maps, 235 photographs. ISBN 1-8633-3200-6.

An Anthropologist in Papua is a celebration of the ethnographic field research of Francis Edgar Williams, typically known as F. E. Williams, who served as government anthropologist of Papua from 1922 until his death in a plane crash in 1943. This volume is a rich feast of images and impressions of village people, their daily life, and their celebrations, representing eight of the fifteen or so regions in Papua in which Williams conducted fieldwork. All of these field trips were conducted in Williams' capacity as government anthropologist in the colonial administration of Lieutenant Governor Sir Hubert Murray. Nearly all of the 235 images reproduced here are visually arresting scenes from a very early moment in Papua's history. The majority are published [End Page 414] here for the first time, although readers familiar with Williams' work will find enough familiar images to let them feel at home with the material.

But the authors of this volume have done much more than assemble a collection of interesting photos to illustrate Williams' broad anthropological interests, research topics, and field sites. They have captioned these images with extended quotations from Williams' own writings, both published and unpublished. The volume is divided chronologically into sections that broadly represent the most important communities Williams studied. Each of these eight sections begins with an extremely helpful map identifying most—though not quite all—of the locations referenced in the captions. This is a complex and multi-layered presentation of photos and the context in which they were taken. The captions bring more than a superficial knowledge of Williams' monographs and reports. Where Williams' own words provide few appropriate quotations, the authors have added their own useful comments. We occasionally found captions that missed the point of Williams' writings and probably reflect an unfortunate presentist perspective. For example, when documenting the people of the Purari Delta, the authors consistently refer to the people as "Namau," a term that the authors even tell us Williams never used because of its pejorative meaning. The term had been used by the much less culturally sensitive John Holmes, the LMS missionary based in the Purari, as well as by several subsequent anthropologists and art historians, most notably Douglas Newton. But use of the term seems wholly out of character with the rest of the volume. Such minor criticisms aside, the captions are generally nuanced and sophisticated.

The authors' achievement does not stop here, for Young and Clark's sixty-page introduction provides a detailed biography of the anthropologist and an assessment of how we should view Williams' work in the context of the structural-functionalist paradigms of the day. It also provides an informative discussion of Williams' ambiguous role as government anthropologist. Students of colonialism and of roles that anthropologists have played in support of colonial efforts to control native peoples will find evidence here that Williams' role was a complex one. Anthropologists who worked in colonial territories did not always walk lockstep with higher level administrators. Williams' writing often feels patronizing—and even racist—by early twenty-first-century standards. But as Young and Clark note, Williams was extremely sympathetic to the plight of Papuan villagers, and in his day Williams represented an extremely liberal perspective.

Students interested in the history of anthropology will find Williams an interesting foil for better-known academic anthropologists of the interwar period. The authors pay particular attention to the awkward position in which Williams so often found himself. Drawing on a wealth of field experiences Williams often had opinions not shared by Governor Murray. Williams spent more time engaged in fieldwork in Papua than anyone of his era and produced six monographs and many shorter publications. He often experienced in his fieldwork the inconsistencies and complexity of understanding Papuan culture as lived and practiced by diverse peoples actively experiencing social and cultural change. Williams was not adverse to the...

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