The Intercultural Challenge of Stanner's First Fieldwork

Abstract

W.E.H. Stanner is a key figure in the history of Australian anthropology and Aboriginal affairs. A student of both Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, Stanner undertook anthropological work from the 1930s in north Australia, Africa and briefly in the Pacific. This paper traces Stanner's attempt to wrestle with the conceptual framework he inherited as a student of structural-functionalism, on the ground, during his first field research in north Australia. A selective reading of the notes Stanner made in Radcliffe-Brown's lectures, his field diaries and unpublished master's thesis provides the main materials for my discussion. Prior to travelling to the Daly River Stanner had intended to make a study of regional social organisation. The situation he encountered proved to be much more conducive to a description and analysis of 'culture contact'. The unpublished writings Stanner produced in his attempt to make sense of this complex social field reveal an attempt to transcend some fundamental aspects of anthropological theorising of the day, and to produce a new conceptual model for taking hold of social transformation. The argument is presented that in reading these materials we gain a glimpse of an important early attempt to develop an intercultural analysis of Aboriginal Australia. W.E.H Stanner is a key figure in the history of Australian anthropology and Aboriginal affairs. Born in 1905, he was among the first group of undergraduate students to be educated by Radcliffe-Brown at Sydney University in the late 1920s. He wrote his PhD at the London School of Economics under Malinowski in the mid- 1930s. Firth was a considerable influence throughout Stanner's professional life as teacher, friend and mentor, as was Elkin to a lesser extent. Stanner's anthropological research was carried out in the Daly River region of North Australia over four decades, with shorter periods of research conducted in Kenya in the 1930s, and the Pacific in the 1940s. Like many of his contemporaries, Stanner was by no means straightforwardly an academic. Throughout his working life he traversed quite different arenas - he was a journalist, government adviser, public administrator, army man, university-based anthropologist, public intellectual. Stanner's corpus of writing reflects the strongly-held view of many of his generation, that anthropology should engage a wide audience and be useful to society at large. Many of his writings in turn attempt to engage diverse audiences: the general public, ministers and bureaucrats, and his academic colleagues. Stanner's anthropological works reveal a desire to contribute to anthropological theorising in the tradition of Radcliffe-Brown, his most formative intellectual influence, cut across by a keen awareness that anthropology's greatest challenge lay in the conceptualisation of social transformation, and more specifically, the interplay between the creative and innovative actions of persons and abstract notions such as structure. Writing to his student and friend T.N. Madan in 1962, Stanner put his endeavour in characteristically evocative perspective: