Hermannsburg, 1929: turning aboriginal "primitives" into modern psychological subjects.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 50(2), 127–147 Spring 2014 View this article online at Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.21649

C 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

HERMANNSBURG, 1929: TURNING ABORIGINAL “PRIMITIVES” INTO MODERN PSYCHOLOGICAL SUBJECTS WARWICK ANDERSON

In 1929, the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg (Ntaria), central Australia, became an extraordinary investigatory site, attracting an array of leading psychologists wishing to define the “primitive” mentality of the Arrernte, who became perhaps the most studied people in the British Empire and dominions. This is a story of how scientific knowledge derived from close encounters and fraught entanglements on the borderlands of the settler state. The investigators—Stanley D. Porteus, H. K. Fry, and Géza Róheim—represent the major styles of psychological inquiry in the early-twentieth century, and count among the vanguard of those dismantling rigid racial typologies and fixed hierarchies of human mentality. They wanted to evaluate “how natives think,” yet inescapably they found themselves reflecting on white mentality too. They came to recognise the primitive as an influential and disturbing motif within the civilised mind—their own minds. These intense interactions in the central deserts show us how Aboriginal thinking could make whites think again about themselves—and forget, for a moment, that many of their research subjects were starving. C 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

INTRODUCTION Reporting on the “Aboriginals and Half-Castes” of central Australia in 1928, the Queensland government’s chief protector of Aborigines, J. W. Bleakley, demanded urgent anthropological study of the remaining “full-bloods” or “myalls.” “It is certainly important, from a scientific point of view,” he wrote, “that the records of this fast dying race should be saved while the field for research still exists” (Bleakley, 1929, p. 31). Bleakley expected pure Aborigines to die out, and he feared that mixed-race people instead would proliferate in the territory. “Perhaps the most difficult problem of all to deal with is that of the half-castes,” the protector reported, “how to check the breeding of them and how best to deal with those now with us” (p. 27). Already they numbered close to 1,000 in the red center. That left another 20,000 or so full-bloods available for scientific research. As it seemed their numbers were dwindling, these people presented no insuperable problems for white Australia, unlike the half-castes. Observing their decline, Bleakley assumed that some would continue their traditional way of life, remaining inviolate, while others converted to Christianity, performed basic tasks in the frontier economy, and subjected themselves to scientific research. And then, finally, they would be no more. On the matter of making Aborigines scientifically serviceable, Bleakley concurred with Frederic Wood Jones, professor of anatomy at the University of Adelaide and a keen physical anthropologist. In the 1926 presidential address to the anthropology section of the Australasian

WARWICK ANDERSON is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. His books include The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne 2002; Duke 2006); Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Duke 2006; Ateneo de Manila 2007); and The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins 2008). With Deborah Jenson and Richard C. Keller he edited Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Duke 2011). Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Warwick Anderson, Department of History, SOPHI, Quadrangle A14, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; [email protected].

127

128

WARWICK ANDERSON

Association for the Advancement of Science, Wood Jones pointed to the neglect of the “study of the aborigine from the purely scientific view” (Wood Jones, 1928, p. 516). “Although a great deal has been written concerning the ceremonials and the tribal organization of the Australian native, we are still profoundly ignorant concerning him as a distinctive psychical and physical type . . . . In 1926 it is true to say,” he continued, “that in all fundamental things we are still profoundly ignorant concerning the Australian native” (pp. 516–517). On other matters, the chief protector and the liberal anatomist may have disagreed. “We have taken his lands,” Wood Jones told the anthropologists, “we have used his hunting grounds as pastures for sheep and cattle, we have dispossessed him, we have doomed him to a lingering but certain death wherever we have come in any prolonged contact with him” (p. 498). He dismissed the “shallow humbug” (p. 500) of those who talked of civilization while “filching a whole vast continent from its rightful owners” (p. 497). “Blankets will not save the Australian race,” he thundered, “flour will not provide the panacea that will render those who singed their wings in the flame of degenerate civilization whole again” (p. 505). In the meantime, before white settler society exterminated them, these people should be measured and tested, so anthropologists like Wood Jones could know who they really are, or were. Before long, scientists and psychologists were thick on the red, dusty ground of central Australia. At times, the number of visitors rivaled the scanty resident white population, especially after the railway to Alice Springs, the Ghan, opened in 1929. Mostly they came up from Adelaide around August, when the weather was dry and cool. They quickly decamped from Alice Springs, seeking the desert full-bloods, the myalls, in distant communities, stations, and missions. Barry Hill (2002, p. 8) claims the local Arrernte became “the most studied people in the British Empire.”1 By 1936, geologist C. T. Madigan, who explored the MacDonnell Ranges, could observe cynically that “large and expensive parties, with camels and all complete, have gone up on expeditions of a few weeks duration, and done every conceivable thing to groups of natives previously ‘yarded up’ for them, including, I understand, counting their hairs” (pp. 2–3). It seemed preposterous and excessive to him. “They are providing the bushmen with material for stories that will be told round camp-fires up and down the Territory for years after the anthropological explorers are forgotten farther south” (p. 3). Anthropologist Herbert Basedow also deplored the great scientific muster that began in the late 1920s. “Modern scientific investigators,” he fumed in 1935, “as a method of study send agents in advance to ‘round up’ as many of the nomadic subjects as possible at a convenient depôt for the purpose of facilitating the work of a dozen or more experts who overhaul them en masse” (pp. 13–14). It contributed to a “speedy demoralization of primitive ethics” (p. 14). In contrast, Basedow boasted he could study Aborigines “intimately, without allowing my presence to disturb them in the slightest degree” (p. 16). In this essay, I focus on three scientific studies of Aboriginal mentality that took place in 1929 at Hermannsburg—or Ntaria as the Arrernte call it—the headquarters of the Lutheran Finke River Mission, a few days’ camel ride west of Alice Springs. For Adelaide neurologist Henry Kenneth Fry, it was his first visit to Hermannsburg and the start of a long involvement with expeditions of the Board for Anthropological Research at Adelaide University, which Wood Jones had established (Jones, 1987). Having studied anthropology at Oxford before the war, Fry was eager to apply to native Australians some of the tests of mental capacity and function devised by his idol W. H. R. Rivers, a fellow physician-anthropologist. The Adelaide expedition overlapped the visit of Stanley D. Porteus, an Australian psychologist who was 1. See, for example, Spencer and Gillen (1899 and 1927). See also Kuklick (2006) and Lloyd (2010). Povinelli (2002) suggests that the impact of studies of the Arrernte means all modern social science ultimately is Australianist.

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

HERMANNSBURG, 1929

129

making a name for himself in the United States with his special evaluations of “primitive” and “feeble” minds. In the company of R. H. “Bob” Croll, the conservative Melbourne bookman and bushwalker, Porteus also set out to test the intelligence and evolutionary status of the Hermannsburg full-bloods. Joining Fry and Porteus in 1929 was the Hungarian (later American) psychoanalyst Géza Róheim, who used Hermannsburg as his base, venturing into the western deserts to track down true primitives whose minds he could analyze back at the mission. Róheim’s goal was to test ethnographically Sigmund Freud’s theories of totem and taboo, to develop a richly psychoanalytic anthropology. Patiently, the local people spent 1929 wandering from one psychological encampment to the next, submitting to a battery of puzzling experiments and inquiries. Sometimes the psychologists found time to take tea together with the Hermannsburg pastor and chat about the quality of the primitive mind. It was a year of strange comings and goings, of ambiguous encounters and perplexing meetings between psychologists and Arrernte. In one way or another, these investigators were trying to assess how “natives” think; to engage critically with what French ethnologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called “primitive mentality.” In a series of books, translated into English in the 1920s, Lévy-Bruhl pondered “the orientation peculiar to this type of mind, what data it has at its command, how it acquires them, and what use it makes of them—in short, what the limits and content of its experience are” (LévyBruhl, 1966 [1922], p. 12). He argued that primitives live in a closed world, a mystical reality to which individuality, logic and abstract thought are foreign. While trained observers might see Aboriginal Australians, for example, as “like ourselves, sometimes even better than ourselves, it is hard for us to believe that, from other points of view, they should be almost inexplicable enigmas, and that a world of difference lies between their mentality and our own” (p. 444). Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of a distinct primitive mentality functioned in the 1920s as a sort of shibboleth for more skeptical investigators.2 Even when they found his theory implausible, it stimulated psychologists to explore, and frequently to question, the mentality of the inhabitants of the Australian central deserts. Some chose to represent Aboriginal people as psychologically undeveloped, deficient in abstract and complex reasoning, constrained by environment and tradition. For other investigators, these people dramatized an Arcadian primitive, as they led a more authentic, less alienated life, a psychologically integrated mode of existence (Kuper, 1988; Lucas and Barrett, 1995). On occasion, the students of primitive mentality—that convenient touchstone—would shift perspective and alternate between these views. The three distinct investigations of primitive mentality that converged at Hermannsburg in 1929—representing psychophysical testing, psychometrics, and Freudian analysis—reveal the multiple valence and manifold confusion of the category of the “primitive” in this period. They therefore help us understand the muddled and untidy origins of cross-cultural psychology. As they gathered at Hermannsburg in 1929, psychologists inescapably found themselves defining and deconstructing white mentality even as they went about testing the Arrernte mind. Their conceptions of primitive mentality would produce a counter image, a more complex portrait, of civilized mentality too. Primitive lack affirmed white civilization as rational and ordered, whereas primitive bucolic simplicity revealed the alienation and pathology of modern societies. Moreover, many of these investigators recognized the persistence of the primitive as an influential and disturbing motif within the civilized mind: indeed, one might be the corollary of the other. This research excelled in animating unstable dichotomies of culture contact: savage 2. Strangely, the contrasting views of Franz Boas (1911) and F.C. Bartlett (1923), while more compatible with the sensibilities of most of the central Australian investigators, are rarely cited—perhaps because they did not serve as a straw man.


130

WARWICK ANDERSON

FIGURE 1. Children at Hermannsburg, 1929. H.K. Fry papers, AA 105. Courtesy of the South Australian Museum.

and civilized, purity and hybridity, and primitive and modern. It demonstrated repeatedly how each of these poles implied the other—and yet how tenuous and unsustainable was the distinction between them. Even as the psychologists postulated a difference in mentality, they were dissolving the opposition, denying any real incommensurability, recognizing the coconstitution of its separate constituents. Ostensibly concerned with Arrernte minds, these psychologists really wanted to understand white mentality, thus to make sense of themselves.3 This is additionally a story of how psychological knowledge derived from close encounters and fraught interactions on the borderlands of the settler state. A form of internal colonialism made possible the collecting of pliant, susceptible research subjects at Hermannsburg and other Aboriginal communities (González Casanova, 1965; Hind, 1984). Yet, the relationships created in this fieldwork could not be contained in a simple framework of dominance and submission. Colonial authority, even coercion, remained a fact of life, but it was never hegemonic. At times, the investigators felt entangled in local society, embedded in complex relationships with their erstwhile research subjects. Fieldwork performed diverse functions: an arduous means of obtaining valuable knowledge; a test of masculinity and character; a touristic jaunt in the outback; and for some, a sentimental education (Beckett, 1998; Gray, 2002). Yet there was always, too, a perceived need to abstract oneself from these encounters, to find the objective correlative to affective engagement. THE MISSION AS RESEARCH SITE AND DEATH SPACE Arriving in Alice Springs in August 1929 on the first train to the center, Norman B. “Tinny” Tindale saw a “country desolate after years of drought.” Along with other members of the Adelaide University anthropological expedition, including Fry, he joined the celebrations of the rowdy crowd that greeted them.4 After three years without rain, the inhabitants had 3. On the primitive as a means of recognizing what is forbidden or taboo in modern societies, see Torgovnik (1990), Price (1989), and Clifford (1990). 4. The members of the expedition included T. D. Campbell, J. B. Cleland, E. Harold Davies, H. K. Fry, and N. B. Tindale. Fry replaced anatomist H. H. Woollard, who was unable to come. For more on the Adelaide anthropological


HERMANNSBURG, 1929

131

few such excuses for revelry. The following morning, Fry and Thomas D. Campbell, the party’s dentist, performed some minor procedures and operations, before the team set off for Hermannsburg in one of the few cars available in the outback. They turned up at dusk, receiving a warm welcome from the Lutheran pastor and teacher, and cheers from scores of excited children. Over the next two weeks, the amateur physical anthropologists from the south compiled genealogies, measured bodies, performed basic psychological tests, collected tjuringas and other sacred objects, and took photographs and moving pictures. Some members encouraged a corroboree, which normally was forbidden, and recorded songs and stories. Since it was unusually cold, many of the Arrernte objected to stripping off their clothes and exposing themselves to the investigators, but mostly they were patient and cooperative. While at Hermannsburg, the Adelaide team also encountered a couple of pioneering tourists, Sydney relatives of the geographer T. Griffith Taylor, and together they crammed into the first car to visit Palm Valley. Late in August, after overhauling the local people, the anthropologists reluctantly said goodbye to their “numerous tribal relations.” “The consequences of our being drawn into their subclass system, one man to each subclass,” Tindale reflected, “have been most interesting and have indeed helped a great deal in winning their confidence.” A sand storm blew up as they left, and “the whole place seemed blotted out by red dust.”5 A week later, Tindale was interviewed for the Adelaide Advertiser, telling readers “the spirit of research is applying itself vigorously and with excellent results to the interest of our still too little-known continent.” Recent psychological studies at Hermannsburg, for example, had demonstrated “the greater approximation of the Australian native to the Caucasian stock compared with the Mongoloid and Red Indian.”6 The Evangelical Lutheran Synod had established the Finke River mission at Hermannsburg in 1877, planning to convert the Aborigines of central Australia to Christianity. It assumed that when the Lord took over the minds of these heathen, they might become revitalized as a race, or Volk. The Lutherans hoped Christianity would give form to the Aborigines’ Volkstum, or national soul (Winter, 2012). But by 1926, when German pastor Friedrich W. Albrecht took control, after the death of Carl Strehlow, the mission was struggling, burdened with debt, enduring drought, and suffering neglect from government authorities. Albrecht and his family settled into the dusty compound of whitewashed stone buildings, not far from the wurlies (shelters) of the Aboriginal camp, all of them surrounded by plains of mulga and spinifex. The few whites, including Albrecht, teacher H. Adolph Heinrich, and the farm manager, lived in separate houses, while boys and girls slept in segregated dormitories. The boys learned skills for handling cattle, and the girls took on domestic tasks and made simple curios and artifacts—“fancy work”—for trade. With no motor vehicles, they relied on camels; without a radio, they tapped out messages in Morse code. It was a tough life for everyone. Albrecht concentrated on evangelizing the Aborigines drawn to the mission, with the help of blind Moses Tjalkabota, who preached in Arrernte (Albrecht, 1977; Henson, 1992).7 By 1929, the Lutherans had been waiting three years for the Lord to give rain. “Perhaps never before has the mission run been in a state like during 1929,” Albrecht later wrote. “Even expeditions, and the unusually close links between the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide, see Jones (1987). 5. N. B. Tindale, Journal of an Anthropological Expedition to Hermannsburg, Central Australia, August 1929, in Journals: Diary of Researches, 1922–1930, AA338/1/2, South Australian Museum Archives, Adelaide, SA [SAMA]. 6. Anonymous “More light from the Far North,” Advertiser (August 27, 1929). 7. Albrecht was probably proficient in Arrernte after 1927. On Hermannsburg during this period, see Albrecht (2002), Radford (1992), Brock (2007), and Austin-Broos (2009). Rowse (1998, p. 80) describes the “rations-based evangelism” at Hermannsburg, and how “through food issue, the Lutherans sought to develop the souls and psyches of Indigenous people” (p. 81).


132

WARWICK ANDERSON

large stretches of mulga and other bushes died out.”8 The harsh, salty conditions drove many Aborigines from different groups in the western deserts to seek refuge at the mission, where they at least could get water and basic rations. The construction of the railway line to Alice Springs displaced others from their traditional lands. In 1929, almost 400 Aboriginal people congregated at Hermannsburg, many of them starving. Scores of children were dying from some mysterious illness. “Some of the little creatures are nothing more than skin and bone,” Albrecht noted.9 Most of the cattle had died. Government interest and support dwindled with the onset of the great depression. Mission staff hoped for the appointment of a medical officer in central Australia—until 1930 the nearest resident doctor was in Cloncurry, Queensland, 400 miles away—but the federal authorities were dithering. “The possibly natural view of the department officers,” wrote Pastor Johannes Riedel, the chairman of the mission board, “seems to be: What do these damned niggers cost us?”10 A massacre at Coniston station the previous year farther strained relations between whites and blacks in central Australia. Riedel observed that after “black heathens” had shed the blood of two whites at Coniston, “the guardians of the law in Central Australia” sought retribution, killing more than 31 “natives.” Only God, he reflected, knew if this was justifiable.11 Albrecht felt the killings were “disagreeable” [unangenehm], causing “unrest” [Unruhe] in the community. “What can one do now?” he asked plaintively.12 It was a tense, miserable time at Hermannsburg. “I have had some trouble at the station,” Heinrich complained, “through the young natives getting cheeky and disobeying orders.” The teacher deplored Albrecht’s lenience and longed for the “strict regime” of his predecessor Strehlow. He recommended a return to corporal punishment and the establishment of a police post at the mission.13 Riedel observed that Albrecht “has amidst much vexation and disappointments found out that the Arundas are only a group of children, much more difficult to handle than small children.”14 Indeed, Albrecht lamented that a “dark cloud” had come over the community. Even the supposed Christians were thieves and liars; they stole food and fought with one another. A few of his flock had sinned against the Sixth Commandment. The Aborigines gathered at Hermannsburg were really a “modernised Heathendom” [ein modernisiertes Heidentum], their conversions mostly opportunistic and insincere.15 “It is commonly known how low the Aborigines are standing,” Albrecht wrote in frustration. “Their bluntness and their dullness in every respect, especially when they grow older, can hardly be undercut.”16 Under stress, the Germans on the mission began to bicker and to slander one another too. Heinrich publicly called Mrs. Albrecht an 8. Albrecht to government resident, Alice Springs, August 15, 1930, J. B. Cleland Papers, AA 60/1/5, SAMA. 9. Albrecht to J. Riedel, March 22, 1929, Box 4, Finke River Mission, Lutheran Archives, Adelaide, South Australia (FRM, Lutheran Archives). 10. Riedel to J. Moses Gabb, December 5, 1929, Folder: correspondence with the Australian Government, Box 5 (correspondence, Board Reports), FRM, Lutheran Archives. Riedel was based in South Australia. He noted that if there were no mission, then Aborigines would be left to starve at no government cost. When the appointment of a medical officer to Alice Springs was announced in 1929, Riedel noted in his letter to Gabb: “I think it is safe to say that he has not been appointed mainly for the natives but for the Whites.” 11. Riedel, Report of the Finke River Mission on the Year 1928, p. 4, Folder 1928, Box 5, FRM, Lutheran Archives. 12. Albrecht to Riedel, September 7, 1928 and November 2, 1928, Box 4, FRM, Lutheran Archives. 13. Heinrich in Evidence Taken at Hermannsburg Mission Station, January 4, 1929 [typescript], Folder 1929, Box 7 (Riedel correspondence), FRM, Lutheran Archives. 14. Riedel, Report of the Board of the Finke-River-Mission on the Period 1925–1928, Folder 1928, Box 5, FRM, Lutheran Archives. 15. Albrecht, Jahresbericht der Missionsstation Hermannsburg, Centralaustralien [ca. 1928], Box 4, FRM, Lutheran Archives. 16. Albrecht, Report of a Journey, Hermannsburg, October 30, 1930, p. 15, Correspondence 1916–1930, F. W. Albrecht Papers, AA662, SAMA.


HERMANNSBURG, 1929

133

exhibitionist and “old witch,” and he claimed the station manager could not even distinguish a cow from a camel.17 Sometimes the pastor despaired. “Satan does not want to lose his sphere of influence,” Albrecht thought.18 Hermannsburg in 1929 would prove a difficult place to study anything, let alone primitive mentality. Conditions at Hermannsburg that year greatly perturbed the medical men on the Adelaide expedition. Even cursory observation convinced physicians John Burton Cleland and Fry that many of the Aborigines were suffering from scurvy—lack of vitamin C—and general malnutrition. During 1929, over 40 of them had died, including 15 infants—the children mostly succumbing to scurvy, it seemed. The Lutherans were glad to have at last a diagnosis of their flock’s affliction. “The doctors have made a lot of measurements on the blacks,” Albrecht wrote, “and they told me . . . the lack of fresh plant food is the cause of the sickness.”19 He had never heard of the illness before. With the assistance of the Adelaide team, the mission launched a national campaign for fresh fruit and vegetables, which probably saved scores of lives.20 “Thus can scientific parties perform a very practical purpose,” the anthropologists reported, “and do something in return for the kindness and help extended by the mission workers.”21 “I hope the scurvy will be eradicated,” Campbell later wrote to Albrecht. “I have no doubt the natives enjoyed our holiday almost as much as we did,” he continued.22 Cecil Cook, the chief protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, soon was railing against the interference of the Adelaide anthropologists. Their claims of medical neglect had embarrassed him. Late in August 1929, Cook drove into Hermannsburg accompanied ¨ by police, to everyone’s surprise. “It nearly gave me the impression of a raid [Uberfall],” Albrecht wrote to his superior. As a medical officer, Cook demanded to see the autopsy reports and to examine Aborigines for signs of scurvy. “The air was heavy and muggy [schwül],” Albrecht continued, “and the tone was prickly [kratzig]. Someone obviously was looking for a scapegoat.” Cook told them that they “shouldn’t look on him as though he had come to spy—but only as an advisor, to lead us onto the right track.” The next morning, when Cook brusquely tried to examine some locals, few could be found. “I had sent everyone I could into the bush,” Albrecht wrote.23 Indignant, Cook reported, “There is a moral obligation upon any mission which disturbs the natural life of the aboriginal to substitute an adequate and well-balanced diet for that of which he is deprived by the new order of living.” The facilities at Hermannsburg, he continued, “after half a century of mission work can only be regarded as disgraceful.” He concluded that Pastor Albrecht was “too prone to rely on Government

17. Albrecht, Transcript of Meeting, December 27, 1929, Folder General Correspondence 1929, Box 5, FRM, Lutheran Archives. 18. Albrecht, Finke River Mission: The First Half-Year 1928, Box 4, FRM, Lutheran Archives. 19. Albrecht to Riedel, August 17, 1929, Box 4, FRM, Lutheran Archives. See also Van Gent (2003). 20. Albrecht, “Hermannsburg.” See Cleland and Fry (1930) and their Statement as Regards Nutrition and General Health of the Natives at Hermannsburg, Central Australia, 1929, Folder 1929, Box 7, Riedel Correspondence, FRM, Lutheran Archives. In April 1929, a doctor from the railway construction company had visited and incorrectly diagnosed beriberi. Albrecht was grateful for the medical intervention but regretted the team’s efforts to arrange a forbidden corroboree, since “sexual filth” was always associated with dancing (Albrecht to Doktor [Campbell], June 23, 1931, Board of Anthropological Research Correspondence 1930–1933, AA52/2/4, SAMA). 21. Board for Anthropological Research: Hermannsburg, 1929, Board for Anthropological Research Papers, AA 346/3/E, SAMA. 22. Campbell to Albrecht, August 29, 1929, Correspondence 1916–1939, Albrecht Papers, AA662, SAMA. 23. Albrecht to Riedel, September 11, 1929, Box 4, FRM, Lutheran Archives. Cook was at Hermannsburg August 30 and 31, soon after the Adelaide expedition had left.


134

WARWICK ANDERSON

FIGURE 2. Hermannsburg 1929. H.K. Fry papers, AA 105. Courtesy of the South Australian Museum.

assistance and advice for the solution of problems properly his own.”24 Cook washed his hands of Hermannsburg. CAST IN THE SAME MOLD These were the circumstances in which Fry performed psychological tests on Aboriginal people. While some colleagues took fingerprints, hair samples, photographs, and blood, and others measured bodies, recorded songs, and enquired into sexual practices and ancestry, Fry concentrated on assessing the mental capacity and character of those gathered at Hermannsburg. Deliberately, he repeated many of the physiological tests that Rivers had performed on the 1898 Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Strait, which initiated psychological fieldwork (Haddon, 1901; see also Kuklick, 1994; Richards, 1998). Fry, who was in his mid-forties, found the conditions trying and the exercises inadequate and frustrating, yet, he omitted any description of his circumstances in reports and articles, forgetting, in particular, to mention that some of his listless and inattentive research subjects were starving. The psychological testing often proved wearisome and unrewarding. When Fry asked Aboriginal subjects to make lines of equal length, they seemed uncertain what he meant by “equal.” To assess ability to discriminate numbers, Fry assembled a set of cards with spots on them, and instructed people to arrange them in serial order from one to 21. His first subject was confused. “No amount of explanation could make this man understand what was required of him,” Fry wrote (1930, p. 76). Others just ordered the cards randomly. “The state of affairs at this stage was most unsatisfactory,” the anthropologist complained (p. 83). Heinrich tried in vain to translate the task as distinguishing between a “little mob” and a “big mob.” “The natives in our series showed they were not familiar with numbers,” Fry recorded. “The idea of a sequence, in the absence of knowledge of figures, is too abstract to 24. Cecil Cook to minister, November 13, 1929, Folder 1929, Box 7, Riedel Correspondence, FRM, Lutheran Archives.


HERMANNSBURG, 1929

135

be grasped by the unenlightened” (p. 86). But the investigator experienced greater success in testing spatial perception and recognition of perspective, especially among those with some schooling. Additionally, he confirmed that visual acuity, tactile sensation, and color sense were similar to those of white men. “The high order of black was a surprise,” he wrote. “It is, of course, in good taste.” Fry made an “algesimeter” to assess pain sensation: he put a drawing pin through a piece of cardboard placed on a spring balance and told his research subjects to press until it hurt. Unlike whites, most Aborigines pressed until the pin penetrated the skin, but Fry assumed this simply demonstrated a stoic temperament, rather than deficient pain sensation (Fry, 1930, p. 90; see also Fry and Pulleine, 1931). Evaluation of intelligence was perhaps most irksome. “The problem of estimating the intelligence of the Australian aborigine in terms of intelligence standards accepted by European peoples bristles with difficulties,” Fry lamented. “The natives have so few social characteristics in common with our civilisation” (Fry, 1930, p. 93). His effort to apply the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, with teacher Heinrich as interpreter, failed completely. He tried to persuade his research subjects to complete the standard maze tests devised by Porteus, before realizing that in his haste to leave Adelaide he had copied incorrectly the 14th-year maze. It all seemed futile. Fry attempted to use jigsaw puzzles and games, to no avail. He distributed crayons and paper to the ailing children and got them to draw animals—but he struggled to evaluate the results (p. 97). In the end, Fry resorted to conventional estimates of Aboriginal intelligence. He claimed most Aborigines developed only to the standard of intelligence of a white adolescent. They seemed to lack “ability to formulate propositions of a generalised nature,” and rather to indulge in “image thinking,” like poets or mystics (Fry, 1935, p. 359). But “the natives are apt to take little interest in formal tests,” Fry reflected, “and in consequence do not shew to their best advantage.” All the same, he concluded, “their minds in spite of their primitive state of culture are cast in the same mould as our own.”25 In his published work, Fry repressed far more than the conditions of life at Hermannsburg. Like Rivers, Fry had become enthralled by a bowdlerized version of Freudian theory, but the Adelaide physician hesitated to make public his advanced enthusiasms. In field notes, Fry speculated that indulgent mothering made the typical Aboriginal man “an oral optimist, the sort of person who is sure he will find someone to give him what he wants.” Fry discerned little of the Oedipus complex and no anal fixation at Hermannsburg. “Without particular boweltraining he is not an anal character, and is little troubled by dirt, flies, time, or thought for tomorrow,” the would-be analyst asserted. “His self-esteem is based on a healthy narcissism,” Fry continued, “which is symbolised in his belief in his two selves, a real self in his body and a hidden self in the storehouse [of tjuringas and other sacred objects].”26 But as an amateur, Fry evidently decided not to compete with Róheim, a psychoanalytic adept, whom he met this time in the field. Even as he was diagnosing malnutrition and infectious disease, Fry (1935, p. 353) still insisted “the chief factor in the present process of extermination is psychological.” According to Fry, Hermannsburg vividly illustrated the psychological perils and mental stresses of the civilizing process. He perceived white civilization as toxic to primitives. “In Australia,” Fry 25. H. K. Fry, Lecture, n.d., H. K. Fry Papers, AA 105/3/4/1, SAMA. The future painter Albert Namatjira went camel driving in 1928 and was away from the mission when the psychological testing took place. 26. H. K. Fry, Notes, n.d., H. K. Fry Papers, AA 105/3/3/3, SAMA. In 1951 at Yuendumu, Fry attempted to use Rorschach inkblots for projective testing but was disappointed when the images were mostly interpreted as dingoes and bullocks—although one 35-year-old man discovered an anus in almost every picture (Fry, 1953). By the 1950s, Fry was devoted to Róheim’s psychoanalytic theories. Fry’s tendency to publish only in Australian journals perhaps explains his absence from conventional scholarship in the history of psychology.


136

WARWICK ANDERSON

(1936, p. 40) argued, “instruction in religion and in European ways are bridges not to a higher form of civilisation but to extinction.” He believed the “determination of the white man to uplift the savage from his degraded state is in part a subconscious reaction to a sense of guilt for robbing him of his territories.” Such misguided benevolence threatened to overload and imbalance the primitive mind. Rather than make na¨ıve and abortive efforts to assimilate Aborigines, it would be preferable to establish inviolate reserves where they could maintain psychological integrity and determine their own future, free from white influence. THE PLACE OF DESIRE For the Melbourne literary figure and bushwalker Bob Croll (1939, p. 95), central Australia “was long a place of desire.” So, when his friend Stanley Porteus, then based in Hawaii, suggested an expedition to Hermannsburg, Croll was eager to participate. Over the years, these conservative, bookish mates had hiked together on Wallaby Club outings in the hills around Melbourne—now they would venture into the central deserts on a scientific expedition. As Croll (1937, p. 103) remarked, “this work was to throw us into . . . intimate association with the Arunta tribe.”27 As a schoolteacher in Melbourne, Porteus had become obsessed with the feeble-minded white child, the product of urban degeneration. Distrustful of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, he devised a series of maze tests, based on the laneways of Fitzroy, the poor neighborhood in which he taught, designed to assess “initiative and purpose” (Porteus, 1969, p. 38). Within a few years, psychologists around the world were using the Porteus maze as a means to evaluate intelligence, supposedly free of cultural bias. The maze became the first technology specific to cross-cultural psychology. Before leaving for the United States, Porteus had collaborated with the Mendelian anatomist and eugenicist Richard J. A. Berry, trying to correlate maze test results with head size, but in the late 1920s the psychologist—exposed to the influence of the Lamarckian Wood Jones—came to dismiss these earlier findings as meretricious (Porteus, 1917; Berry and Porteus, 1920). Instead, as professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, Porteus (1969, p. v) dedicated himself to gauging “the effect of environment on mental and cultural evolution,” traveling the world with his mazes, investigating the mental capacities of primitives and other human isolates. While still organized within a racial framework, his analysis came to assume a Lamarckian dynamic, whereby racial deficiencies might be corrected after several generations in more stimulating circumstances. In 1928, the Australian National Research Council asked him to assess, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Aboriginal mentalities in the Kimberley, in the northwest of the continent, and in the central deserts. For Porteus (1969, p. 257), Aboriginal Australians represented a “rather miraculously preserved primitive prototype, exemplifying a stage in our own evolutionary development.” This was an opportunity for comparative study of “the wider psychological patterns of social adjustment” of primitive humans (Porteus, 1969, p. 97; Turtle, p. 1997). On the advice of Wood Jones, Porteus approached the Adelaide expeditioners, but they rebuffed him, preferring to enlist Fry, one of their own.28 Therefore, he turned to Croll, his old bushwalking mate, for companionship. “My venture into the interior of Australia was undertaken with zest,” Porteus (1969, p. 117) recalled. Yet, “as the train rattled and clanked northward all signs of life disappeared.” 27. On the central Australian obsession of many Melbourne antiquarians, see Griffiths (1996), chapter 8. 28. Porteus to T. D. Campbell, March 19, 1929, T. D. Campbell Papers. AA 52/2/1, SAMA. Wood Jones and Porteus had been collaborating on The Matrix of the Mind (1929).


HERMANNSBURG, 1929

137

FIGURE 3. Porteus going outback. R.H. Croll papers, MS 8910. Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

Sandstorms often covered the railway lines. “The hills looked as if they had been staked out for torture under the unpitying sun,” Porteus wrote, “but whether it were brown slope, shallow valley, or ‘gibber plain,’ a stony brown expanse of rocks, like a pavement, flattened by the wind, everything alike gasped for rain” (p. 118). Porteus and Croll arrived in Hermannsburg just as the Adelaide expedition was packing up, soon after the scurvy was treated, and before Róheim returned from his wanderings further west. In the Hermannsburg storeroom, their improvised “laboratory,” Porteus performed the psychological tests and Croll ascertained each man’s height, chest capacity, and arm strength. Soon though, they tired of the semi-civilized Arrernte and set forth on camels and horses. In the bush they encountered a “tribal horde,” as Porteus called them, of Pitjantjatjara, exhausted and starving, led by “Lame Woppity.” The psychologist was delighted, “otherwise I would never have seen a completely primitive set of Aborigines existing in their original way of life” (Porteus, 1969, p. 120). And so, day after day, the investigators’ data set expanded. Porteus determined that so-called full-blood adults in central Australia on average could manage only tests easily accomplished by 12-year-old white boys. He interpreted this result as an indication of their “planning capacity and prudence” (Porteus, 1931, p. 360; see also Porteus, 1937; Kearney, 1973). Such low intelligence, he argued, was “not markedly inferior to some of the other racial groups” (p. 363), and some individuals he tested even had met white adult standards. Although currently incompatible with civilized status, his research subjects had proven well adapted to the struggle for existence in their own harsh environment (p. 376). Over many generations in a more stimulating milieu, the race might improve greatly. But Porteus’s findings would receive mixed reviews. On reading Psychology of a Primitive People (1931), T. G. H. “Ted” Strehlow, anthropologist son of Carl Strehlow, recorded in his journal, “the author, one feels, appreciates natives in the mass and he has brought himself to a sympathetic understanding of their mentality through a study of books aided by a superficial acquaintance JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

138

WARWICK ANDERSON

with a few individuals.” Strehlow found much of Porteus’s book “awful, however—full of inaccuracies and actual lies,” and showing “a surprising inability to probe deeply into the mind of a native.”29 Strehlow believed the psychologist had betrayed the beloved Arrernte. From Sydney, anthropologist A. P. Elkin attacked Porteus for basing his conclusions on small sample sizes, hidden cultural biases, and ignorance of Aboriginal social life and habits. Elkin maintained, in contrast, that Aboriginal Australians possessed ample mental capacity to adapt rapidly—within a single lifetime—to white civilization (Elkin, 1932–1933; see also Piddington, 1932–1933; Porteus, 1933–1934). Often Porteus felt that his patient Aboriginal research subjects regarded him as “feebleminded.” His apparent ignorance of classificatory relationships—or indifference to the rules— puzzled and disturbed his Arrernte interlocutors. Porteus, who was almost 50, claimed he was assigned to the Punjata subsection, meaning only Mbitjana women were eligible wives. Accordingly, he was supposed to avoid any woman the Mbitjana called “mother,” as a “prospective mother-in-law,” and to respect any potential Mbitjana “father-in-law.” “Even the place I occupied at the campfire was pre-determined,” Porteus (1969, p. 126) observed. But “as I was too busy to concern myself with social amenities,” he recalled, “I went blithely on my way, speaking to anyone regardless of the rules” (p. 125). His allotted totem was ilya (emu); while Croll’s was achilpa (wild cat). This pleased the psychologist, if only because it might give a romantic gloss to his research reports. Croll took local obligations more seriously. It was clear to him that “everyone knew exactly his or her relationship to us.” Croll enjoyed engaging with the people of the central deserts, whether around the campfire in the evenings, when the children, “shrill as cicadas,” sang Abide with Me and the Adelaide University War Cry, or taking measurements through the mornings. “All day long,” he noted, “babble of tongues, singing, laughter.”30 He recorded his encounters: “What name?” I ask my first victim, and I put down Georg, which is what I think he says. “Arunta.” “What skin?” “Bultara, your brudder.” His eyes watch with apprehension the steel pointer I maneuver over his head to get his height, and he has to be told “No hurtem!” when the professor [Porteus] places his nickel points in his ears to secure his head measurements.31 “I felt a great liking for these, my own people of another colour and another Age,” Croll (1937, p. 110) reflected. The children were especially appealing. “These helpless babes of the Stone Age, thrust as they have been without any preparation into a world in which they have no place . . . . How close are tears and smiles! Sentiment is strong within me as I stoop towards the dark head” (p. 109). Though cloying and patronizing, the emotion was deeply felt. “My reaction to the Aboriginal each time that I meet him in Central Australia,” Croll (1939, p. 103) wrote, “is always one of disgust with my own kind.”

29. T. G. H. Strehlow, April 5, 1932, Field Diary 1, 1932, p. 10 [8–9], Strehlow Papers, Strehlow Research Centre, Alice Springs, Northern Territory (original emphasis). 30. Croll, Records of Trip, folder 4, box 1221, R. H. Croll Papers, MS 8910, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria [SLV]. 31. Croll, Testing our Dark Brother, folder 4, box 1221, R. H. Croll Papers, MS 8910, SLV.


HERMANNSBURG, 1929

139

FIGURE 4. Croll with his “Relatives” at Hermannsburg. R.H. Croll papers, MS 8910. Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

PSYCHOANALYTIC DREAMING “I have arranged an analytic men’s ceremony out in the bush, with yet unknown tribes,” Géza Róheim wrote to Sigmund Freud from Hermannsburg early in October 1929. “I call it analytic because everyone who dreamt something recounts the dream to me the morning of the ceremony. Thus rite and dream provide reinforcing enlightenment [Aufklärung] and the results are unambiguous, very clear.”32 The previous year, Freud had encouraged the Hungarian anthropologist and psychoanalyst to travel to central Australia to confirm his speculations on the psychological significance of totem and taboo, the repressive beginnings of civilization. Additionally, he urged Róheim to visit a matrilineal society in Papua and New Guinea and gather materials to dispute Bronislaw Malinowski’s recent claims that Melanesians lacked anal eroticism and the Oedipus complex. The challenge to the universality of psychodynamic theory had irritated Freud. “What, have these people no anus?” Freud asked Róheim. They were talking in Berlin, after Róheim, who was in his late thirties, delivered a paper on the death of the primal father. “It would be nice if you made it into a movie,” Freud said, rather enigmatically. Róheim saw the great man, his primal father, was unwell and having trouble speaking after the cancer operation. Yet, Freud still made sure that Princess Marie Bonaparte provided funds for Róheim’s quests in central Australia and Normanby Island.33

32. Róheim to Freud, October 6, 1929, box 40, General Correspondence, Sigmund Freud Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC [Freud Papers]. 33. Róhiem interview, 1952, folder 6, box 121, Freud Papers. Róheim had met Freud previously in Budapest and Vienna, soon after World War I. In the interview, Róheim notes, “After the expedition, I never went to see him, because I was told he was sick and his time was limited. And I didn’t want to push.” Normanby Island is near the Trobriand Islands, where Malinowski conducted fieldwork, and shares many cultural features. Malinowski (1927) had challenged the universality of the Oedipus complex, or at least recognized its deformation in matrilineal societies.


140

WARWICK ANDERSON

Trained in anthropology and geography in Leipzig and Berlin, Róheim was analyzed in Budapest during World War I by Sándor Ferenczi, a member of Freud’s inner circle (Vikár, 1996). Henceforth, he demonstrated unswerving devotion to Freudian orthodoxy—unlike Ferenczi.34 As a biographer put it, Róheim was a “ruthless leveler, subjecting all cultural artifacts to the most uncompromising sort of psychoanalytic reductionism” (Robinson, 1969, p. 6). He became notorious for the “imperiousness and categorical quality of his adult personality” and for “his intransigent and well-nigh Talmudic Freudianism” (La Barre, 1966, pp. 272, 275). Like most conventional anthropologists, Clyde Kluckhohn (1944, p. 605) found Róheim’s writings “both violently irritating and simply opaque.” As a pioneer of psychoanalytic anthropology, Róheim enjoyed the company of “primitives” and relished denouncing the necessary repressions of white civilization (La Barre, 1958; Damousi, 2011). In his 1925 monograph on Australian “totemism,” Róheim reviewed any published work he could find in Hungary and Germany on central Australian ritual and custom.35 In particular, he sought to give further anthropological weight and complexity to Freud’s explanation of totemism, the intimate relation between a group of kindred people and another species. Róheim wanted to fill out Freud’s perfunctory ethnological reasoning, which had relied on James Frazer’s compilations (Frazer, 1910; Freud, 1950 [1913]). According to Freud, identification with a totemic ancestor reveals the underpinning horror of incest, as it renders taboo many relations within the horde. Where there is a prohibition of this sort, there must, he inferred, be gripping desire. For Freud, Oedipal longings and conflict determine libidinal development. Therefore, he postulated the totem as a substitute for the hated father, the figure forbidding the desired union with the mother. Remorse for killing the primal father, for the sacrifice of the totemic object or father surrogate, gave rise to totemic taboo, the origin of religion and the social contract. Thus, civilization emerged from acts of atonement for Oedipal desire and renunciation of violent wishes (Freud, 1950 [1913]).36 After exhaustive study of others’ observations of totemism, Róheim proposed that the projection of a totem, indicating initially a sense of affinity with the environment, was a repetition of the narcissistic attitude of the embryo in its womb. But after the presumed victory of “the Brothers over the Father of the Primeval Horde,” as Róheim put it, echoing Freud, the “Father-Imago” additionally was projected into the totem. That is, the totem became the ghost of the murdered father, “the animal which haunts his grave.” Mourning for the murdered father led to closer identification with the totem and repression of desire for the mother, calling forth a “secondary narcissism” (Róheim, 1925, p. 438). Later, Aboriginal efforts to adapt to the inhospitable desert environment disturbed this equilibrium of repression and libido, causing tribes to exaggerate repressive structures, or taboos. Thus, in central Australia “seven out of eight women are taboo, seven out of eight copulations are incestuous, seven out of eight women are mothers” (p. 437). Such repression against the Oedipus complex touched all elements of sexuality, leading even to fantasies of “nescience,” the denial of natural explanations of human birth (see also Hiatt, 1996). Like Freud, Róheim could discern in the incestuous libido the prototype of all other erotic relations. Until 1929, the premise of Róheim’s analysis was that “cultural phenomena must be studied . . . in isolation from their cultural environment . . . in order to obtain a general insight into their psychic structure” (Róheim, 1925, p. 439). This implied an exiguous and 34. Róheim fled Budapest in 1938 and eventually established himself as a psychoanalyst in New York City. 35. Róheim depended on Strehlow (1907–1920), Spencer and Gillen (1899), Mathew (1899), and Mathews (1907). 36. While Róheim was preparing to visit central Australia, Freud was completing Civilisation and its Discontents (1973 [1929]).


HERMANNSBURG, 1929

141

desiccated program for anthropology—or any cross-cultural research, for that matter. But over many years Róheim slowly came to appreciate that further analytic progress would require, in fact, extensive ethnographic engagement with the Aborigines of the central deserts, “the classic representatives of Totemism and the hunting mode of life” (Róheim, 1932, p. 2). The anthropological narratives he read so assiduously in Budapest all lacked psychoanalytic rigor. Róheim wanted to create a thoroughly psychoanalytic anthropology, which he predicted would be “the only anthropology of the future” (p. 6).37 Between March and November 1929, he conducted fieldwork in the central Australian deserts, accompanied by his wife Ilonka, who took photographs and did the domestic chores. His method mixed participant observation with psychoanalytic technique. Róheim (1932, p. 21) tried “to find the latent wish-fulfillment formula in each specific type of social organization.” He analyzed dreams, the portals to the unconscious; enquired into sexual activity; studied children at play; and gathered myths, ceremonies, and customs. He deprecated those “extrovert” anthropologists who merely arranged and documented ceremonies, and dismissed the “introvert” method of simply conversing with the natives (p. 20). Above all, Róheim sought to be “good friends” with his informants, to get, as he put it, a “transference,” in which their feelings would be transferred or projected onto him (p. 8). He believed that all human relations are based on displaced libidinal trends, and such transference helps to “understand the original libidosituation and the character of a people” (p. 12). But Róheim resisted any counter-transference, in which the analyst projects his desires and wishes on the patient, and, in effect, cannot let go of the patient. He refused to view Aboriginal people as “untrammeled by the cares and conventions of civilization, innocent children who lead a happy life where all is love, play and good-fellowship” (p. 17).38 In guarding against counter-transference, however, he was risking failure of empathy. Róheim claimed he was the first fieldworker actually to collect dreams and to ask for free associations. Each day, he spent no more than an hour interrogating an informant, using interpreters, usually “natives (or half-castes) of exceptional intelligence and a perfect understanding of English” (Róheim, 1970, p. 140). His dream obsession derived from Freud’s earlier demonstration of the tight connection between the wish fulfillment, or latent meaning, of individual reverie and the unconscious (Freud, 1954 [1911]; see also Rivers, 1918). It also resonated with growing anthropological interest in the dreamtimes, or mythic pasts and founding dramas, of the people of the central deserts. In the late 1890s, Frank Gillen, noting that the northern Arrernte word for “dream” and for “creative period”—alchera or altjira—is the same, had coined the term “dreamtime” (Spencer and Gillen, 1904, p. 145). Only in the 1930s, did it gain currency (Stanner, 1979; Dean, 1996). Róheim frequently observed the similarity of the dreams he was analyzing and the recorded narratives of the dreamtime. In the dreamtime, “the endless repetition of rituals and wanderings and hunting are indeed not very different from a dream; but when we probe deeper we find that they are overlaid by ceremony and perhaps also by history. The essential point in the narratives as in the ritual is that man makes the world—as he does in sleep” (Róheim, 1945, p. 217). Róheim argued that “the typical mechanism of all dream formation becomes the nucleus of the natives’ mythology 37. “Before Freud,” Róheim (1940, p. 255) wrote, “no anthropologist understood the importance of the infantile period of development, of sexuality, of the interrelations between the individual and society, of dreams or even of the emotional life and ideals of human beings.” 38. On returning from the western deserts, Róheim told Albrecht that he had witnessed cannibalism, with hungry fathers consuming their infants. For Albrecht it confirmed that these people were “all in the service and under the leadership of the devil” (F. W. Albrecht, “To the friends of the Finke River Mission,” Lutheran Herald [February 17, 1930]: 57–58).


142

WARWICK ANDERSON

and ritual,” and later this ritual “overlaps the dream element in the myth so completely that it becomes difficult to recognize” (p. 223). Elkin recalled that in the late 1920s, close to when Róheim was asking for dreams, Aborigines in central Australia began to refer in English to their special “Dreaming” (Elkin, 1974, p. 210; see also Elkin, 1932; Swain, 1993). The Lutheran missionaries enjoyed conversing in German with Róheim, but they found many of his ideas quite peculiar. “The essential theme,” Róheim explained, “is the relation of the individual to the object-world, and libidinal cathexis [investment] as the defense used by human beings to bear the deprivation of object loss or separation” (Róheim, 1945, p. 17). That is, initiation of a boy into adulthood marked a repudiation of the bonds with his mother, a transition in love object from mother to wife, in which “the penis becomes the hero of the drama” (p. 16). The initiation is thus an abreaction to the primal scene, the conflict between son and father: subincision of the penis represents the cathartic attempt of old men to castrate the young. Attachment to the totem provides a substitute for object loss, allowing restitution after subincision and renunciation of Oedipal conflict. “Totemism as a social institution,” Róheim wrote, “is a defense against the separation anxiety” and a denial of death and decay (p. 249). In a society so lightly repressed, everything was near the surface—especially the Oedipus complex. “The Oedipus-castration complex,” Róheim concluded, “forms the nucleus around which all other human strivings are crystallized” (Róheim, 1932, p. 94). The analyst also was impressed with the distinctive character formation of Aboriginal society, its intense narcissism, weak super-ego, sublimated homosexuality, exaggerated masculinity, impulsiveness, and lack of anal libido: these people were dirty, generous, with no care for tomorrow, and no sense of urgency. They showed, he asserted, “an absence of the anal sphincter function” (p. 85).39 At times, Pastor Albrecht wondered if he misunderstood the Hungarian. Róheim’s psychoanalytic anthropology displaced the contemporary trauma that the Arrernte suffered onto the development of infantile sexuality. For the analyst, “object-loss” meant frustration of Oedipal desire. Yet, the Arrernte were more concerned with the loss of other objects, whether land, livelihood, or family members. Even as Cecil Cook planned the removal of mixed-race Aboriginal children from their families, Róheim was insisting their separation anxieties were internal manifestations of the universal family drama, thereby exonerating the settler state (McGregor, 1997; Anderson, 2006). In overtly sexualizing Aboriginal infants and adolescents, he ignored their sexual molestation by white men and others. Striving to make a general argument against the psychic cost of “civilization,” Róheim had turned a blind eye to the real damage it wrought in central Australia. Rather than a costly defense against object loss, civilization might be its cause.40 CONCLUSION: PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ITS EVASIONS In different ways, Fry, Porteus, and Róheim were relocating “primitive mentality” to the modern world. They sought to relate the minds of the people of the central deserts to the psychology of moderns like themselves. They postulated a common mental apparatus, or biological matrix, that developed differently in dissimilar circumstances—in so doing, they chose to emphasize shared complexity and expressive or functional diversity, not inherent structural limitations. The comparability of primitive and civilized minds, their affinity and 39. In contrast, Róheim found distinct anal character in the people of Normanby Island. They are, he wrote to Albrecht, “a moody, nervous, very vain people” (Róheim to Albrecht, July 6, 1930, General Correspondence, Box 5, FRM, Lutheran Archives). 40. For later more critical and contextualized psychoanalytic engagements with Aboriginality and the settler state, see Gelder and Jacobs (1998), Rutherford (2000), and Povinelli (2002).


HERMANNSBURG, 1929

143

potential equivalence, impressed these psychologically minded anthropologists. They sought to dissolve Lévy-Bruhl’s absolute distinction between primitive and civilized mentality—though admittedly, Porteus’s Lamarckian solvent would take ages to work. They were in the vanguard of those emerging from the formalism and fixity of “race psychology” toward more flexible, less typological understandings of humanity (Samuelson 1978; Richards 1997). This does not mean they tried to deny contemporary difference: suited to a harsh, unstimulating environment, primitive minds still seemed relatively underpowered and uncomplicated compared to the minds of white intellectuals, if not to those of all whites. The residual contrast could illuminate both the achievements and the shortcomings of white civilization. Psychological studies of central Australian Aborigines thus presented a mirror to the white psyche, an image that in some lights might flatter, in others, reveal disfiguring flaws. In 1924, Ernest Jones, Freud’s English acolyte, predicted the emergence of a “race of anthropologists who are experienced in field-work and also trained in the methods of modern psychology” (p. 48). Such expertise might contribute to “the humanisation of primitive man.” “Much of the supposed deficiency of primitive peoples,” he continued, “in such functions as concentration, reason, powers of discrimination and logic, and so on, is not due to lack of these qualities so much as to a different orientation of emotional interest from our own” (p. 56). The same year, C. G. Seligman (1924, p. 35) urged “the beginning of a purposive investigation of the unconscious among non-European races.” He wanted anthropologists to use dreams to explore the primitive mind and to compare it with the mind of the white race. Whether performing dream analysis or maze testing, the psychological investigators at Hermannsburg were among the first to treat primitives and moderns as mentally commensurable. Yet, their emphasis on psychological equivalence or correspondence—their biologically derived sense of convergent mentalities—soon came to appear outmoded and redundant. Malinowski openly challenged the universal application of formulae, such as the Oedipus complex, and doubted the reliability and value of intelligence testing. He condemned the “lack of anthropological insight” of the psychologists, especially the rigid Freudians (Malinowski, 1923, p. 650; see also Malinowski, 1927; Stocking, 1986). In 1928, in Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead argued forcefully that adolescence presents a different picture under different conditions—it was not biologically predetermined and standardized. Increasingly, anthropologists observed how culture shapes individuals, how socialization creates personality patterns. Though appreciating Freud’s attention to psychosexual development, they vehemently opposed his psychological reductionism, stressing instead human malleability and cultural relativism (Benedict, 1934; see also La Barre, 1958; Stocking, 1986; Kuper, 1990).41 Looking back, it is easy to deplore failures of empathy and to regret the evanescence of bonds between investigators and research subjects. Evidently, the Arrernte were seeking a sort of relatedness with the outsiders, trying to connect them to local kinship 41. As Róheim (1947, p. 29) put it, “while I was trying to offer them [other anthropologists] Freudian wine undiluted, they would not drink it.” However, Róheim did make some concessions to the rising “culture and personality” approach. In the 1930s, he abandoned the phylogenetic determinism of the “primal horde hypothesis” and proposed the “ontogenetic theory of culture.” He agreed the “specific features of mankind are developed in the same way as they are acquired today in every human individual as a sublimation or reaction-formation to infantile conflicts”—yet he still wanted to find “a distinctive feature in the biological makeup of mankind which is also a variation in the infantile situation and does not depend on cultural tradition” (Róheim, 1941, pp. 149, 151). As he wrote to Margaret Mead, “there are still certain differences between your points of view and mine” (Róheim to Mrs. Fortune, November 23, 1935, General Correspondence 1928–1929, folder 6, box C4, Margaret Mead papers, Library of Congress). Nonetheless, Róheim expressed some appreciation for the “culture and personality” school, writing, “we have something new that is in many respects revealing but it is definitely not psychoanalysis” (Róheim, 1952, p. vii). George Devereux was perhaps Róheim’s most important successor in formalist psychoanalytic anthropology. In Australia, Róheim later exerted influence on anthropologists Lester Hiatt and John Morton, but few others: see Morton (1988).


144

WARWICK ANDERSON

structures—they wanted, in Róheim’s term, transference. Many investigators enjoyed this entanglement, this affective engagement, at least for a time. With a degree of ambivalence, they experienced the beginnings of a sentimental education. Mostly, though, they attempted to keep a certain distance, stay respectable, maintain objectivity, and refuse solidarity—to follow, that is, scientific convention. The resistance to counter-transference in these relationships perhaps is more poignant than discreditable. It is much harder to understand the failure to connect psychological studies with the conditions of life in central Australia in this period. These investigators saw Arrernte and others confronting hunger, dispossession, child removal, and family destruction—yet they could not let these struggles intrude on psychological assessment. As critical intellectuals, they did not condone the racist actions of marauding white settlers and petty bureaucrats—nor did they address them directly in their work. It just did not seem relevant. Instead, we find in their reports on primitive mentality the usual inadvertent complicities, pragmatic compromises, convenient deferrals, seductive displacements, and strategic omissions—all the usual pretexts and evasions, all the usual drawbacks and limitations of benevolence and good intentions in a setting extremely hostile to Indigenous people.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Hans Pols collaborated on research in Adelaide and central Australia, and provided helpful advice. For their comments on earlier versions of this essay I thank Vicki Grieves, Cecily Hunter, Emma Kowal, Antje Kühnast, Veronika Lipphardt, Carlos López Beltrán, Peter Read, David Robertson, Alexandra Widmer, and Christine Winter. I am grateful to Antje Kühnast also for assistance with German translation. Additionally, I would like to thank Rena McGrogan at the Fisher Library, University of Sydney; Lea Gardam at the South Australian Museum Archives; Graeme Shaughnessy at the Strehlow Research Centre; and Leonard C. Bruno at the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Research for this essay was supported in part by the Australian Research Council (DP 0881067 and FL 110100243).

REFERENCES Albrecht, F. W. (1977). Hermannsburg from 1926 to 1962. In E. Leske (Ed.), Hermannsburg: A vision and a mission (pp. 42–90). Adelaide: Lutheran Publishing. Albrecht, P. G. E. (2002). From mission to church, 1877–2002: Finke river mission. Adelaide: Openbook Publishers. Anderson, W. (2006). The cultivation of whiteness: Science, health and racial destiny in Australia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Austin-Broos, D. J. (2009). Arrernte present, Arrernte past: Invasion, violence, and imagination in indigenous central Australia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bartlett, F. C. (1923). Psychology and primitive culture. New York: Macmillan. Basedow, H. (1935). Knights of the boomerang: Episodes from a life among the native tribes of Australia. Sydney: Endeavour Press. Beckett, J. (1998). Haddon attending a funeral: Fieldwork in Torres Strait, 1888, 1898. In A. Herle & S. Rouse (Eds.). Cambridge and the torres strait (pp. 23–49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of culture. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Berry, R. J. A., & Porteus, S. D. (1920). Intelligence and social valuation: A practical method for the diagnosis of mental deficiency and other forms of social inefficiency. Vineland, NY: Resident Publication of the Training School. Bleakley, J. W. (1929). The Aboriginals and half-castes of central Australia and North Australia, Commonwealth of Australia parliamentary papers, no. 21. Melbourne: Government Printer. Boas, F. (1911). The mind of primitive man. New York: Macmillan. Brock, P. (2007). Nakedness and clothing in early encounters between Aboriginal people of central Australia, missionaries and anthropologists. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 8. Cleland, J. B., & Fry, H. K. (1930). An outbreak of scurvy with joint lesions in central Australia. Medical Journal of Australia, i, 5–7.


HERMANNSBURG, 1929

145

Clifford, J. (1990). On collecting art and culture. In R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. T. Minh-ha, & C. West (Eds.). Out there: Marginalization and contemporary culture (pp. 141–169). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Croll, R. H. (1937). Wide horizons: Wanderings in central Australia. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Croll, R. H. (1939). I recall: Collections and recollections. Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens. Damousi, J. (2011). Géza Róheim and the Australian Aborigine: Psychoanalytic anthropology during the interwar years. In W. Anderson, D. Jenson, & R. Keller (Eds.). Unconscious dominions: Psychoanalysis, colonial trauma, and global sovereignties (pp. 75–95). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dean, C. (1996). The Australian Aboriginal “Dreamtime”. Geelong: Gamahucher Press. Elkin, A. P. (1932). The secret life of Australian Aborigines. Oceania, 3, 129–138. Elkin, A. P. (1932–1933). The social life and intelligence of the Australian Aborigine: A review of S. D. Porteus’s psychology of a primitive people. Oceania, 3, 101–113. Elkin, A. P. (1974). The Australian Aborigines, 4th ed. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Frazer, J. G. (1910). Totemism and exogamy, Vol. 4. London: Macmillan. Freud, S. (1950). J. Strachey (Trans. and Ed.). Totem and taboo: Some points of agreement between the mental lives of savages and neurotics. New York: W.W. Norton [1913]. Freud, S. (1954). The interpretation of dreams. J. Strachey (Trans. & Ed.). London: G. Allen and Unwin [1911]. Freud, S. (1973). Civilisation and its discontents. J. Riviere (Trans.). London: Hogarth Press [1929]. Fry, H. K. (1930). Adelaide University field anthropology: Central Australia. No. 7—Physiological and psychological observations. Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of South Australia, 54, 76–104. Fry, H. K. (1935). Aboriginal mentality. Medical Journal of Australia, i, 353–360. Fry, H. K. (1936). The problem of the Aborigines. Australian Rhodes Review, 2, 33–42. Fry, H. K. (1953). Psychology and anthropology. Medical Journal of Australia, i, 543–549. Fry, H. K., & Pulleine, R. H. (1931). The mentality of the Australian Aborigine. Australian Journal of Experimental Biology and Medical Science, 8, 153–167. Gelder, K., & Jacobs, J. M. (1998). Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and identity in a postcolonial nation. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. González Casanova, P. (1965). Internal colonialism and national development. Studies in Comparative International Development, 1, 27–37. Gray, G. (2002). Dislocating the self: Anthropological fieldwork in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1934-1936. Aboriginal History, 26, 23–50. Griffiths, T. (1996). Hunters and collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haddon, A. C. (Ed.) (1901). Reports of the Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits, vol. 2: Physiology and psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henson, B. (1992). A straight-out man: F. W. Albrecht and central Australian Aborigines. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Hiatt, L. R. (1996). Arguments about Aborigines: Australia and the evolution of social anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, B. (2002). Broken song: T. G. H. Strehlow and aboriginal possession. Milsons Point, NSW: Knopf. Hind, R. J. (1984). The internal colonial concept. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26, 543–568. Jones, E. (1924). Psycho-analysis and anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 54, 47–66. Jones, P. (1987). South Australian anthropological history: The early expeditions of the Board for Anthropological Research. Records of the South Australian Museum, 20, 71–92 Kearney, G. E. (1973). Early psychological studies. In G. E. Kearney, P. R. de Lacey, & G. R. Davidson (Eds.). The psychology of Aboriginal Australians (pp. 16–28). Sydney: John Wiley and Sons. Kluckhohn, C. (1944). The influence of psychology on anthropology in America during the past one hundred years. In J. K. Hall, G. Zilboorg, & H. A. Bunker (Eds.). One hundred years of American psychology (pp. 589–617). New York: Columbia University Press. Kuklick, H. (1994). The color blue: From research in the Torres Strait to an ecology of human behavior. In R. MacLeod & P. F. Rehbock (Eds.). Darwin’s laboratory: Evolutionary theory and natural history in the Pacific (pp. 339–367). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kuklick, H. (2006). “Humanity in the chrysalis stage”: Indigenous Australians in the anthropological imagination, 1899–1926. British Journal of the History of Science, 39, 535–568. Kuper, A. (1988). The invention of primitive society: Transformations of an illusion. London: Routledge. Kuper, A. (1990). Psychology and anthropology: The British experience. History of the Human Sciences, 3, 397–413. La Barre, W. (1958). The influence of Freud on anthropology. American Imago, 15, 275–328. La Barre, W. (1966). Géza Róheim, 1891–1953: Psychoanalysis and anthropology. In F. Alexander, S. Eisenstein, & M. Grotjahn (Eds.). Psychoanalytic pioneers (pp. 272–281). New York: Basic Books. Lévy-Bruhl, L. (1966). Primitive mentality. L. A. Clare (Trans.), Boston: Beacon Press. Lloyd, J. (2010). On collision course: Sir Baldwin Spencer and the Finke River Mission, 1894-1924. Journal of the Friends of the Lutheran Archives, 20, 5–16. Lucas, R. H. & Barrett, R. J. (1995). Interpreting culture and psychopathology: Primitivist themes in cross-cultural debate. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 19, 287–326. JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

146

WARWICK ANDERSON

Madigan, C. T. (1936). Central Australia. London: Oxford University Press. Malinowski, B. (1923). Psycho-analysis and anthropology. Nature, 112, 650–651. Malinowski, B. (1927). Sex and repression in savage society. London: Kegan Paul Trench, Trubner and Co. Mathew, J. (1899). Eaglehawk and crow. London: David Nutt. Mathews, R. W. (1907). Notes on the Arranda tribe. Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 41, 146–163. McGregor, R. (1997). Imagined destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the doomed race theory, 1880–1939. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Mead, M. (1928). Coming of age in Samoa: A psychological study of primitive youth for western civilization. New York: William Morrow. Morton, J. (1988). Géza Róheim’s contribution to Australian ethnography. In J. Morton & W. Muensterberger (Eds.). Géza Róheim, Children of the desert II: Myths and dreams of the Aborigines of central Australia (pp. vii-xxx). Sydney: Oceania Ethnographies. Piddington, R. (1932–1933). Psychological aspects of culture contact. Oceania, 3, 312–324. Porteus, S. D. (1917). Mental tests with delinquents and Australian Aboriginal children. Psychological Review, 24, 32–42. Porteus, S. D. (1931). The psychology of a primitive people: A study of the Australian Aborigine. London: Edward Arnold. Porteus, S. D. (1933–1934). Mentality and Australian Aborigines. Oceania, 4, 30–36. Porteus, S. D. (1937). Primitive intelligence and environment. New York: Macmillan. Porteus, S. D. (1969). A psychologist of sorts: The autobiography and publications of the inventor of the Porteus maze tests. Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books. Povinelli, E. A. (2002). The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Price, S. (1989). Primitive art in civilized places. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Radford, R. (1992). Aspects of the social history of Hermannsburg. In J. Hardy, J. V. S. Megaw, & M. R. Megaw (Eds.). The heritage of Namatjira: The watercolourists of Central Australia (pp. 63-96). Port Melbourne: William Heinemann. Richards, G. (1997). “Race,” racism and psychology: Towards a reflexive history. London: Routledge. Richards, G. (1998). Getting a result: The expedition’s psychological research, 1898-1913. In A. Herle & S. Rouse (Eds.). Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition (pp. 136–157). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rivers, W. H. R. (1918). Dreams and primitive culture. London: Manchester University Press; Longmans, Green, and Co. Robinson, P. A. (1969). The Freudian left: Wilhelm Reich, Géza Róheim, Herbert Marcuse. New York: Harper and Row. Róheim, G. (1925). Australian totemism: A psycho-analytic study in anthropology. London: George Allen and Unwin. Róheim, G. (1932). The psychoanalysis of primitive cultural types. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 13, 1–222. Róheim, G. (1940). Freud and cultural anthropology. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 9, 246–255. Róheim, G. (1941). The psychoanalytic interpretation of culture. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 22, 147–169. Róheim, G. (1945). The eternal ones of the dream: A psychoanalytic interpretation of Australian myth and ritual. New York: International Universities Press. Róheim, G. (1947). Psychoanalysis and anthropology. In G. Róheim (Ed.): Psychoanalysis and the social sciences, vol. 1 (pp. 9–33). New York: International Universities Press. Róheim, G. (1952). The Gates of the dream. New York: International Universities Press. Róheim, G. (1970). Dream analysis and fieldwork in anthropology. In W. Muensterberger (Ed.): Man and his culture: Psychoanalytic anthropology after totem and taboo. (pp. 139–175). New York: Taplinger Publishing. Rowse, T. (1998). White flour, white power: From rations to citizenship in central Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rutherford, J. (2000). The gauche intruder: Freud, Lacan and the white Australian fantasy. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Samuelson, F. (1978). From race psychology to studies of prejudice. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 14, 265–278. Seligman, C. G. (1924). Anthropology and psychology: A study of some points of contact. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 54, 13–46. Spencer, B., & Gillen, F. J. (1899). The native tribes of central Australia. London: Macmillan and Co. Spencer, B., & Gillen, F. G. (1904). The northern tribes of central Australia. London: Macmillan. Spencer, B., & Gillen, F. J. (1927). The Arunta: A study of a stone-age people. London: Macmillan. Stanner, W. E. H. (1979). The dreaming. In White man got no dreaming. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Stocking, G. W. Jr. (1986). Anthropology and the science of the irrational: Malinowski’s encounter with Freudian psychoanalysis. In G. W. Stocking Jr. (Ed.), Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and others (pp. 22–28). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.


HERMANNSBURG, 1929

147

Strehlow, C. F. (1907–1920). Die Aranda-und Loritja-stämme in Zentral-Australien, Vol. 5. Frankfurt-am-Main: Veröffentlichungen des Frankfurter Museums für Völkerkunde. Swain, T. (1993). A place for strangers: Toward a history of Aboriginal Australian being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Torgovnik, M. (1990). Gone primitive: Savage intellects, modern lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turtle, A. M. (1997). Péron, Porteus, and the Pacific Islands regiment: The beginnings of cross-cultural psychology in Australia. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 27, 7–20. Van Gent, J. (2003). Changing concepts of embodiment and illness among the Western Arrernte at Hermannsburg Mission. Journal of Religious History, 27, 329–347. Vikár, G. (1996). The Budapest school of psychoanalysis. In P. L. Rudnytsky, A. Bókay, & P. Giampieri-Deutsch (Eds.). Ferenczi’s turn in psychoanalysis (pp. 60–76). New York: New York University Press. Winter, C. (2012). Looking after one’s own: The rise of nationalism and the politics of the Neuendettelsauer Mission in Australia, New Guinea and Germany (1921–1933). Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang. Wood Jones, F. (1928). The claims of the Australian Aborigine. In A. Gibb Maitland (Ed.), Report of the 18th meeting of the Australasian association for the advancement of science, Perth, August 1926 (pp. 497–519). Perth: Government Printer. Wood Jones, F., & Porteus, S. D. (1929). The matrix of the mind. London: Edward Arnold and Co.


Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community governance of health research: Turning principles into practice.

Turning feedback into action.

Turning old into new.

Turning tragedy into opportunity.

Turning conference presentations into publications.

FOP: still turning into stone.

Turning the BMA into print.

Turning rice meiosis into mitosis.

Tribal alchemy: turning lesser into better, together.

Turning nature's inspiration into a production line.

C2c: turning cancer into chronic disease.

Bioinspired ceramics: Turning brittleness into toughness.

Coxiella burnetii: turning hostility into a home.

Dementia: turning fine aspirations into measurable progress.

Chief's seminar: turning interns into clinicians.

PCORnet: turning a dream into reality.

Empathy and attribution: turning observers into actors.

Lessons of War: Turning Data Into Decisions.

Turning big data into personalised diabetes care.

Turning tryptophanase into odor-generating biosensors.

Invited Commentary: Turning guidelines into outcomes.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Public Health: Online and Integrated into Core Master of Public Health Subjects.

Learning and control of exploration primitives.

Otto m. Marx, 1929-2012.