‘The Pencil and the Mouth’: Anthropology, Orality, Literacy, and Modernity

Abstract

Literate or illiterate, we are our memories.1Xen(ography) and the art of cultural maintenanceIN LATE 1995, WHILE CONDUCTING COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH in south-east Queensland for a project on New Age discourses of Aboriginal culture,2 I spent some time in the officially designated Murri3 Camp of the Woodford-Maleny Folk Festival. Waiting for a project participant to become available for an interview, I became transfixed by a tee-shirt worn by one of the Murri festival coordinators at the Camp. The tee-shirt was emblazoned with the legend Traditional Aboriginal Family; below this appeared a cartoon-style illustration of an iconic family group of five, identified as mother, father, daughter, son, and anthropologist.4 The anthropologist (who looked more like an ornithologist, decked out in safari hat, tape-recorder, and binoculars) was a rather hunched masculine figure, in height and breadth about the same size as the children.Not being an anthropologist myself, I was struck by several things. The first was a short-lived surge of professional Schadenfreude. The second was the complexity of the discursive terrain invoked by the tee-shirt's economical but richly layered economy of representation. On one level hostile and derisive towards anthropology as an invasive and historically embedded structure of knowledge, power, and social relationships visited upon Indigenous peoples by settler ideology, the tee-shirt's image also resonated, I thought, as a figure of genuine, if ironic, intimacy. It gestured towards a history of lengthy and pervasive familiarity with the workings of anthropologists, who perforce become members of an extended family and community structure through their attenuated presence in the 'field' (that is to say, in the lives of others). I was especially struck, however, by the way in which a number of foundational tenets of 'classical' anthropology were picked up and turned on their head by the tee-shirt's strategies of inversion and irony.Anthropology and ethnography emerged in the nineteenth century as closely related branches of knowledge concerned with the (often comparative) study of human cultures across time and space, and particularly with the study of so-called 'savage' or 'primitive' societies defined as pre-modem. As Joy Hendry observes, the emergence of social anthropology in particular - which she glosses as the study of other people's worlds - is linked to the more general rise of European interest in the organization of social life when travellers' tales began to show striking similarities between societies found in different parts of the world,5 and has its parallel in the matrix of metropolitan interests in conceptual and empirical models of 'primitivity' as colonial adventurism and 'scientific' expeditions reached their peak. The orientation of these early approaches to 'the study of man' was markedly evolutionist, in line with the discipline's development as a tributary of late-nineteenth-century Darwinian thought. In particular, these new branches of inquiry into comparative forms of social life across cultures and epochs sought to legitimize not merely differences but also hierarchies of superiority and inferiority, by schematizing such differences within a framework of 'natural' taxonomies of species development indebted to biological modes of classification.Anthropology's own location in modernity was largely defined by its measuring of the distance - cognitive, epistemological, genetic, economic, philosophical, physiological, and social - between 'other' cultures and its own, as early proto-anthropological studies of religion and political institutions in the eighteenth century suggest.6 The category of 'otherness' produced by such lines of inquiry was variously defined temporally, as evinced by a focus on Europe's own 'pre-historicaP past; spatially, as demonstrated by the swell, for example, in Orientalist and Africanist studies; and epistemologically, by comparing and contrasting systems of knowledge, belief, and socioeconomic organization across cultures in ways that contributed to the development, in the first half of the twentieth century, of the structuralist/structural-functionalist schools of social anthropology. …