South Seas Encounters

Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain, and America

Richard Fulton, Peter Hoffenberg, Stephen Hancock, Allison Paynter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138606753
• eBook ISBN: 9780429885006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

South Seas Encounters examines several key types of encounters between the many-faceted worlds of Oceania, Britain and the United States in the formative nineteenth century. The eleven essays collected in this volume focus not only on the effect of the two powerful, industrialized colonial powers on the cultures of the Pacific, but the effect of those cultures on the Western cultural perceptions of themselves and the wider world, including understanding encounters and exchanges in ways which do not underemphasize the agency and consequences for all participating parties. The essays also provide insights into the causes, unfolding, and consequences for both sides of a series of significant ethnographic, political, cultural, scientific, educational, and social encounters.

This volume makes a significant contribution to increasing scholarly interest in Oceania's place in British and American nineteenth-century cultural experiences. South Seas Enc ounters investigates these significant interactions and how they changed the ways that Oceanic, British, and American cultures reflected on themselves and their place in the wider world.

Part I

Ethnographic Encounters

1 “The natives have
a decided feeling for form”

Oceania, “Primitive Art,” and the Illusion of Simplicity

Amy Woodson-Boulton

In 1895, zoologist and anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon published Evolution in Art, As Illustrated by the Life-Histories of Designs, based on his first visit to the Torres Strait in 1888–1889 and his interpretation of Oceanic objects in a variety of ethnographic collections. In one assessment of “primitive art,” he wrote,

When all the various factors are taken into account, one finds that the aesthetic sense of a savage artist is not so very different after all from that of his civilised fellow-craftsman, and one can see in the disposition or the introduction of certain elements in a design, that both are actuated by the same aesthetic sense of what is suitable,—both are, in fact, artists.¹

Yet about 100 pages later in that same work, Haddon also noted that “Savages, children, and the less intelligent of the civilized races” were essentially “conservative,” resisting change and therefore presenting the slowest “progress”:

The more savage the race the more conservative it is as a rule…It is inconceivable that a savage should copy or adapt a certain design because it promises to develop into a more pleasing pattern. While there is a certain amount of conscious selection, the variation as a whole of any design is an entirely unguided operation so far as the intelligence of the human mind is concerned.²

How are we to understand this contradiction in a work devoted to the detailed study of “primitive art”?³ It is my contention in this essay that Victorian ideas about art, nature, and “primitive society” shaped a particular discourse around something understood as “primitive art” in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This conversation emerged out of anthropological theories of development, evolution, and ethnographic collections, and—as Jane Samson notes in the following chapter—Oceania played a key role in the British anthropological imagination and practice during these decades. The basic premise of such theories, as we will see, was the radical difference between modern British society and the “primitive” societies of British New Guinea and the Torres Strait, even as their mutual humanity made them broadly comparable and turned Island peoples into subjects of scientific study. The underlying logic of the emerging field of anthropology was therefore the relative “simplicity” of “primitive art.” However, despite this logic and the evidence presented in the resulting ethnographic collections, the more that anthropologists studied “primitive art”—including its relationship to broader social, cultural, and religious organization—the more the complexity of “primitive” societies became manifest.⁴ Contradictions such as Haddon’s above appeared even as anthropologists sought to maintain their basic assumptions about the reason for studying these Oceanic cultures: as exemplars of “earlier,” “simpler” societies.

As other historians of anthropology have noted, the discipline that emerged out of the late nineteenth century operated in political, cultural, and intellectual systems created by the New Imperialism and practitioners of this new science developed their ideas, collections, and institutions in a culture increasingly steeped in evolutionary theory and the idea of progress.⁵ As European cultural historians have shown us, such imperial encounters took place in a context of rapid and profound political, social, economic, cultural, and technological change: increasing political representation for the working classes, steel and electricity, telegraphs and cinema, state-funded education, the New Woman, artistic innovation.⁶ Michael Adas has noted the extent to which technological change in Europe shaped imperial encounters, allowing Europeans to judge the societies of Africa, Oceania, and Asia as similarly “backward,” “primitive,” or “static,” outside of history as defined by progress.⁷ The new social and natural scientists took on these explanatory modes and the sense of their own societies’ transformation in ways that affected them profoundly, particularly the idea that cultures and societies, like biological organisms, move from simple to complex forms. What this meant, in part, was the application of biological metaphor, theory, and method to the study of various prehistoric and non-Western societies, what Edward Tylor called in 1871 “the science of culture.” Indeed, the formation of anthropology as a science was precisely the development of systematic methods of studying cultural forms and objects, explicitly based on the model of a natural scientist. As Tylor wrote in Primitive Culture,

The ethnographer’s business is to classify such details [of culture] with a view to making out their distribution in geography and history, and the relations which exist among them. What this task is like, may be almost perfectly illustrated by comparing these details of culture with the species of plants and animals as studied by the naturalist. To the ethnographer, the bow and arrow is a species, the habit of flattening children’s skulls is a species, the practice of reckoning numbers by tens is a species. The geographical distribution of these things, and their transmission from region to region, have to be studied as the naturalist studies the geography of his botanical and zoological species.⁸

Biological metaphor became a potent explanatory mode for studying art and culture.⁹ At the same time, the question of actual, physical biology, embodied in the concept of “race,” remained unresolved; physical and cultural anthropology developed as interrelated sub-disciplines, and early anthropologists vacillated on how to account for physical and cultural difference. Meanwhile, at both the conceptual and the institutional level, a bright line separated modern, civilized, industrial, capitalist societies from anthropological discourse, which took the “primitive” and the “savage” as its field, while distinct disciplines (psychology, sociology, economics, history, art history, Classics) developed their own institutional bases and literatures to study modern and/or “civilized” societies.¹⁰ Yet part of the impulse behind the study of “primitive” culture, imagined to exist amongst “modern savages,” was precisely the comparability and sameness between and among cultures (in space, in time, and in development).

Evolutionary thinking permeated these fields and how they structured knowledge.¹¹ This was true not only because of the prevalence of both Progress and Social Darwinism as dominant narratives of the Victorian period, but also because of the disciplinary background of many of the early anthropologists who developed fieldwork, collected materials, and helped to establish the discipline in museums and universities.¹² Trained as zoologists, geologists, and psychologists, these men brought evolutionary metaphors to their studies of culture and society. Viewing “savage” peoples as unchanged and unchanging, men such as Cambridge anthropologist A. C. Haddon, trained as a zoologist, sought to study the “primitive” peoples of Oceania before they disappeared with the onslaught of European civilization. Earlier organizations like the Aboriginal Protection Society (later the Ethnological Society) had sought to save indigenous peoples from physical or cultural extinction for their own sake.¹³ By the late nineteenth century, however, many researchers viewed these as at least equally important for the scientific evidence they would provide for human development, as they understood indigenous cultures as examples of the distant European past.¹⁴

In the generation after Tylor’s work, numerous individuals, learned societies, universities and university collections, and ethnographic museums established “primitive society” as an object of scientific study, the particular purview of anthropology. In doing so, ideas moved from theorists such as Tylor into specific ways of acquiring and organizing both knowledge and forms of evidence: ethnographic surveys, which shaped the information gathered in the field, and ethnographic collections, which then furthered the formulation of anthropological theory.¹⁵ We can see the persistence of certain foundational assumptions and how increased study undermined them, creating texts of increasing complexity and contradiction, by studying how the study of “primitive art” moved from idea, to collections of material culture, to published research on those collections. Theories of culture determined which objects came back to Britain and how these objects got interpreted; these objects, in turn, supported new theories of culture. In approaching the question of “primitive art,” then, we see in the period 1870–1900 a number of key developments: theories about “primitive society” that posited broad comparability among human societies (always remembering that some societies represent a “lower” stage of development); instructions for collectors on what, how, and why to collect; and the articulation and implementation of ideas about evolutionary and typological displays to show “progress” from simple to complex forms, based on the standard of the realistic portrayal of the natural world. Taking just this one concept and investigating how different Victorians engaged with it in one geographical area, Oceania, shows us the extent to which contemporary British debates about “art” and “nature” shaped these early anthropological discussions, but also reveals the unexpected complexity of studying something as seemingly basic as “primitive art.” Indeed, as discussed in the Introduction to this volume, persistent British ideas about Oceania as uniquely “natural” (as in the late-eighteenth-century ideas of Lord Morton) made that region of special importance to these debates and to the development of anthropology. This allows us to use such early debates to find “traces” of the region’s impact on Britain and the social sciences. The emergence of such complexity and contradiction helped move researchers into the field and transformed the discipline in lasting ways.

In the late nineteenth century, “art” functioned across disciplines and institutions as an index of the relationship between the physical and the cultural, nature and culture, the market and morality. Art was not a static category in Victorian society, but under enormous pressure and change, being the subject of momentous debates about education, museums, and public access, over the terms of criticism (e.g., art critical debates about beauty and truth), over the role of morality and narrative (e.g., the display of the nude), over the standards of finish and realism (e.g., Whistler v. Ruskin, 1878), and over the relationship between art and craft. Out of all of these many debates and the concomitant shift in the meaning of capital-A “Art,” and with the proliferation of exhibitions and public collections, art had by the late nineteenth century acquired a profound status and even equation with the idea of “civilization.” (Not least, as I have written elsewhere, because of the museum movement that sought to bring art to the working classes for its “civilizing” effects.)¹⁶ Thus, one of the reasons that “primitive art” posed such a tempting and challenging subject for a biological metaphor as something that had “evolved” was precisely that “art” itself seemed to distinguish the “savage” from the “civilized.” Could “savages” have “art”?¹⁷ The entire premise of anthropology rested, in some measure, on that question. Early anthropologists’ writings, collections, and theories show them to vacillate over this issue, revealing the hesitations and uncertainties in the construction (and mutual constitution) of the categories “race” and “art,” institutionalized concepts that have continued to shape our disciplines through the subsequent centuries.¹⁸

For Haddon, art was an aspect of culture that “evolved” or “progressed,” potentially along knowable patterns of development, and so could form an index or measure of humanity’s stages of civilization. Thus, like other nineteenth-century anthropologists, Haddon saw “modern savages” as subjects of a living laboratory who might allow him to study the historical development of art from a scientific point of view. But the very colonial encounter that revealed these peoples for study also lent urgency to the res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• South Seas Encounters
• The Nineteenth Century Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• PART I Ethnographic Encounters
• PART II Hawai`i and the British Empire
• PART III Hawai`i and the American Republic
• PART IV Science Encounters
• Brief Biographies of Contributors
• Index