Tom Harrisson Research Articles

The Sarawak Museum and Usun Apau, with a list of mammals collected by the Oxford University Exploration Club Expedition of 1955-1956

Tales of Usun Apau attracted Tom Harrisson in 1932, when he led an Oxford University Exploration Club expedition. In 1951 Harrisson (Curator of Sarawak Museums 1947-1966) with the Director of Lands and Surveys and Museum staff, crossed Usun Apau from the Tinjar river to the Plieran and Murum tributaries of the Belaga river. In 1955 Harrisson encouraged a further Oxford University Exploration Club expedition to revisit Usun Apau. Mammals were collected by Tom C. Chavasse and Gaun ak Sureng. After being sorted at the Sarawak Museum, the collection was donated to the Chicago Natural History Museum (now Field Museum). Table 1 combines the list made at the Sarawak Museum and the Field Museum digital catalogue. It also charts the collectors’ progress from Long Luar, on the Plieran river, across Usun Apau to the upper Selio, a tributary of the Baram, ending at Long Akah on 2nd February 1956. Diurnal tree squirrels form the largest ecological group, most numerous being endemic subspecies of Prevost’s squirrel Callosciurus prevostii, together with seven Bornean endemic species in the genera Sundasciurus, Dremomys and Rheithrosciurus. Also in the collection are six endemic treeshrews (Scandentia) and three endemic primates. Ten carnivore species include the endemic Hose’s civet Hemigalus hosei; ungulates include the endemic Bornean yellow muntjac Muntiacus atherodes. The Usun Apau National Park has already attracted new scientific investigations. This mammal collection of 1955-56 offers a historic baseline. New technologies, including live trapping (and releasing) and photography, will add to the list of mammals.

Mammals of Mt Dulit, Sarawak, an important type locality: with An Annotated List of Species Collected by Charles Hose

In 1932, Tom Harrisson, later Curator of the Sarawak Museums (1947-1966), first visited Sarawak as leader of the Oxford University Exploration Club, on an expedition targeting Mt Dulit, type locality of several endemic Borneo mammal species. Supported by Rajah C.V. Brooke, the expedition was initially led by E. Banks, current Curator of the Sarawak Museum. On 27th July, the party reached Base Camp, prepared by the Museum on the bank of the Tinjar river. A ‘High Camp’ was built on the Dulit ridge at 4000 ft (1219 m) and, in September, a subsidiary camp at 2500 ft (760 m) by the Koyan river on the southwest flank of the Dulit range. Banks, with A. W. Moore and two Museum collectors, made an excursion to Gn. Kalulong, 1573 m. The expedition closed in November. The subsequent output amounted to 29 publications, including a report by Harrisson and Hartley on 1050 bird skins presented to the British Museum (Natural History), 10 botanical papers and 15 on insects. Mammal skins were also deposited at the British Museum, but remained unrecorded until John Edwards Hill finally registered the collection. Hill’s list is reproduced here with annotations. In recent years, the Dulit forest has been logged up to about 900 m. Access provided by logging trails has already benefited local naturalists, and is likely to encourage others to investigate this landmark mountain ridge. The mammal collection of the 1932 Sarawak Museum and Oxford University Exploration Club provides historic baseline data.

The Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient - Sarawak Museum Department Archaeological Project in Santubong

Archaeological research in Sarawak began just after the Second World War under the leadership of Tom Harrisson. As Curator of the Sarawak Museum since 1947, he began exploring the Sarawak River Delta, a 600 km area between Telaga Air in the northwest, Tanjung Sipang in the north, Tanjung Po in the northeast, Samarahan in the southeast and Kampung Makam in the southwest. It is the village of Santubong at the mouth of the Santubong River, one of the branches of the delta, that first caught Harrisson's attention because of observations and chance finds made there since the middle of the nineteenth century. Mention should be made of the famous Batu Gambar, an anthropomorphic sculpture in high relief on a rock at the Sungai Jaong site, rediscovered by a local in the 1880s, and near which was found a "Hindu" terracotta figurine, of carved stones reported at the beginning of the twentieth century on the neighbouring site of Bongkissam, "Indian character" pottery, as well as various objects in gold, Chinese coins and a few residues from ironworking (cf. especially Evans 1929).

Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire. By Montgomery McFate (New York, Oxford University Press, 2018) 487 pp. $45.00

McFate came to prominence as an early advocate of U.S. military engagement with anthropologists in order to grapple with “adversary culture” after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She was an architect of the “Human Terrain System” that embedded social scientists within the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2006 and 2014. She has deplored and sought to reverse what she sees as a historical anomaly of estrangement between the military and academia in the post-Vietnam era. She continues to advocate for this approach as a professor at the Naval War College and as an author of books like this one, which seeks to develop practical lessons for military anthropology from various historical episodes—ranging from Donald Barrows’ ethnographic work for the U.S. military in the Philippines from 1901 to Don Marshall’s in Vietnam in the 1960s and a half-dozen other examples drawn mostly from British imperial experience. In this way, this book resembles a more sober and extended version of John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago, 2002), which sought counterinsurgency lessons from Malaya and Vietnam; Nagl and McFate were in fact both contributors to David Petraeus’ Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago, 2007), another quasi-anthropological product of the Iraq War.Although McFate’s avowed intent is to build bridges between academia and the military, she admits that this book, as “written primarily for a military audience,” is unlikely to contribute much to the bridge-building goal (11). The book is peppered with military acronyms and insider observations; it is also full of capsule lessons in basic social science for those presumed to be unfamiliar with, or indeed hostile to, such an enterprise. It has a military tone, too, given McFate’s technocratic approach to social science, which often feels decidedly less anthropological than reminiscent of economics or quantitative sociology. She regrets anthropology’s failure to develop “a scalable, adaptable theory of society that could be used operationally by the military” (38, 328). In an essay on Ursula Bower’s “military leadership” of the Naga during World War II, she yearns for a neat formula such as Fisher’s “fifty-seven key findings pertaining to cross-cultural military leadership” (106–107).1 She commends Gregory Bateson’s highly scientistic ideas about the manipulation of cultural pattern as he applied them in service of the Office of Strategic Services. She even inscribes Tom Harrisson’s idiosyncratic unconventional warfare in Borneo as a sophisticated species of “qualitative, inductive pattern recognition” (172).More comfortably for most anthropologists, McFate acknowledges that these unified field theories nearly always break down in practice and that there is no replacement for deep cultural knowledge, a necessary complement to, or often replacement for, “firepower,” and thus alien to the American “way of war.” But although McFate, like any good ethnographer, pays close attention to this kind of context, she gives relatively little credence to the radically different contexts in which military ethnography takes place. She equates anthropologists’ feelings of responsibility for their subjects with the military’s concern for the “host nation,” without taking much account of what being the “host” of a violent military intervention by another nation actually means. When she says that “the social conditions of the host nation must be considered as part of national strategic objectives,” readers can only wonder which nation’s objectives are in question (323)—assuming that a unitary nation is to be considered in the first place. Because she deliberately eschews case studies of Iraq and Afghanistan, though constantly seeking lessons for those enterprises, McFate is not able to reflect much upon U.S. military intervention in deeply divided societies.McFate may or may not be correct to imagine that the military’s objectives would be better achieved with more anthropological awareness. It is at least arguable that deeper cultural engagement in a complex and fractured (not to mention war-torn) society might exacerbate rather than resolve the “morasses” to which recent U.S. military interventions have led. But what is even more puzzling is why she imagines that anthropologists outside the military ought to embrace these objectives. In her view, anthropologists have a role “analogous to that of professional soldiers”; they have “an obligation as citizens to reduce the errors caused by a lack of socio-cultural knowledge and thereby improve their execution” (39–40). Her book shows some anthropologists behaving in just such a way. But apart from the major changes in the culture and politics of academia since the 1960s, which have driven academia and military further apart, her own narrow, technocratic account of what “socio-cultural knowledge” can do, without a proper consideration of the military and political contexts of its application, is unlikely to draw them back together. Quite the contrary.

Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire by Montgomery McFate

Reviewed by: Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire by Montgomery McFate David H. Price Montgomery McFate, Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 352 pp. Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire provides historical summaries of ten 20th century anthropologists' engagements with military operations. Montgomery McFate's telling of this history seeks to identify positive outcomes of these anthropological contributions and argues for increased future uses of anthropology by the military. Each chapter evaluates the effectiveness with which anthropological knowledge was incorporated into operations and analyzes recent military situations where US forces used, or could have used, anthropology in similar ways. With each historical vignette, McFate champions militarized forms of anthropology that connect the discipline to campaigns of violence and occupation, advocating for the development of a type of militarized anthropology which will trouble many anthropologists. McFate is perhaps best known to many anthropologists as the architect of Human Terrain Systems (2007–2014), the almost three-quarters of a billion-dollar failed Pentagon program that tried to embed ethnographers with soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Human Terrain System was widely condemned by the international anthropological community, and by the American Anthropological Association, for not considering basic ethical principles of anthropological engagement (CEAUSSIC 2009). Beyond these ethical concerns, many anthropologists also critiqued the political project of militarizing anthropology (NCA 2009). Military Anthropology was written for a military rather than an anthropological audience (11), but because this book is published as an academic book, drawing upon anthropological knowledge, it deserves [End Page 969] anthropologists' critical attention. Written at the Naval War College, funded by a Department of Defense Minerva Fellowship, Military Anthropology exemplifies the sort of work many critics of the Minerva Program predicted these fellowships would produce. It draws on a limited subset of social science and includes little substantial engagement with the critical peer reviewed literature found in mainstream academic writings. McFate's reading, and writing, of this history differs from the work of many anthropologists (including my own), most significantly in her refusal to address the political and ethical issues raised by using anthropology for warfare, but also in the simplification of these complex relationships. Where many scholars find cautionary tales, McFate finds blueprints for improved means of using anthropology for militarized ends. I suspect that most anthropologists will find this book not only highly problematic in its historical representations, but also fundamentally flawed in its claims about the ease with which culture can be weaponized and for refusing to engage with the core political and ethical issues raised by military anthropology. But anthropologists are not the book's target audience. Its representations of how culture can be instrumentalized for conquest provides much for its military audience to like, and Military Anthropology may well become a classic work within military circles as a foundational text for the military training their own "anthropologists." The ten anthropologists whose stories are recounted in individual chapters are: Gerald Hickey, Robert Sutherland Rattray, Ursula Graham Bower, Gregory Bateson, Tom Harrisson, John Useem, Jomo Kenyata, Louis Leakey, Don Marshall, and David Prescott Barrows. The military engagements discussed range from colonial occupations, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Mau Mau Rebellion. The operations include a mixture of combat, counterinsurgency, insurgency, and occupations. In order to advocate for specific types of future anthropological collaborations, McFate shapes the telling of these incidents in very specific ways. She simplifies the complexities of the military anthropologists' stories appearing in her pages. Her Gregory Bateson has fewer reservations than the Bateson other scholars have found in archival and FOIA documents; and her version of Hickey writes RAND reports that had a greater impact than other scholars have found. Ursula Graham Bower's World War II success in directing Naga warriors' military and intelligence operations is shown to reveal key traits of successful transformational leadership skills. Robert Rattray's early 20th century use of anthropological knowledge to [End Page 970] help impose indirect rule in west Africa frames arguments for adapting similar tactics in other post-conquest situations. Many anthropologists will likely not share the general admiration of the effectiveness of Rattray...

Philip Arthur Dominic Hollom (1912-2014)

Philip Arthur Dominic Hollom (1912-2014)

‘Mass Gambling’ from 1947 to 2011: Controversies and Pathologies

This paper explores the relationship between Mass Observation and sociological method. It will demonstrate that often this relationship has been an uneasy one with the detailed, deeply qualitative and broadly ‘unstructured’ data elicited by Mass Observation frequently positioned as posing problems for sociologists particularly in terms of data analysis and interpretation. The paper will explore these debates by focusing on two case studies drawn from Mass Observation directives. The first will draw on the 1947 gambling study which was commissioned by the social reformer Seebohm Rowntree and his collaborator Commander G.R. Lavers and the second will draw on the 2011 ‘Gambling and Households’ directive. These case studies have been chosen because they help to illuminate the complexities of the concerns surrounding the sociological uses of Mass Observation. The paper will draw on correspondence between Rowntree, Lavers and co-founder of Mass Observation Tom Harrisson in 1947 which uncovers fascinating detail about Harrisson and Rowntree's shared commitment to revealing information about the everyday experiences and practices of working class life, but also some interesting disparities about what ‘sociological data’ might look like and what its purpose ought to be. The second case study draws on findings from the 2011 Gambling and Households directive. This directive offers an interesting historical comparison with the 1947 data. It flags up similarities particularly in terms of the moral framing of gambling, social attitudes to gambling pathologies and addictions and discourses about spending and winning money but also some notable differences particularly with regards to class identification and gambling. Each of these similarities and differences will be explored with the intention of demonstrating the particular uses of Mass Observation in uncovering the frequently overlooked and subjective patterns of intimacy.

Listlessness in the Archive

Listlessness in the Archive

Photographing the Everyday Surreal: Julian Trevelyan's Portrayals of British Ritualistic Behaviour 1937–39

The British Surrealist painter, collagist and photographer Julian Trevelyan became involved during 1937 and 1938 with Tom Harrisson's anthropological research organisation ‘Mass-Observation’. The images he created during his short periods of observational study in Bolton and Blackpool – or ‘Worktown’ and ‘Worktown on Holiday’ – are powerful in their suggestions of the levels of unease repressed at this tumultuous time within the British psyche. The artist achieves these evocations of the unconscious mind, which, according to Freudian theory, was the director of behaviour, through an amalgamation of documentary and Surrealist visualities – in essence, through repeated portrayals of the ‘everyday surreal’. The narrative scrutinises Trevelyan's attention to the psychological impact of the nation's material decline upon those believed by Mass-Observation to be most directly affected: the population of Northern England's industrial towns. This he pursues through a systematic visual registration of working-class behavioural patterns during ‘spare time’, a time when human beings were reasoned by the organisation to be most true to themselves. Ritualistic behaviour associated with the consumption of food and drink is considered. So too is the pursuit of leisure in Worktown, as well as the religious rituals to which its population adhered. The contribution made by Julian Trevelyan to British art and letters during the interwar period constitutes a fantasmic social psychology of that contemporary crisis.

Another Place in Time: Documenting Blackpool for Mass Observation in the 1930s

This article contextualises documentary photographs taken of working-class holidaymakers in Blackpool by Humphrey Spender in the late 1930s. Working for Tom Harrisson's northern branch of Mass Observation, Spender recorded how the residents of ‘Worktown’ (Bolton, Lancashire) spent the ‘fifty-second week’ or summer holiday period of each year. Harrisson recruited Spender for this task because his camera was an ideal apparatus for recording the most mundane details of average British lives. Yet these images (indeed, all the photographs taken by Spender for Mass Observation) were used only sparingly by the organisation at the time of their creation. This article examines reasons for this, suggesting that Harrisson's understanding of photographic realism in combination with his perception of national identity served to highlight photography's ability to undermine rather than affirm the goals of Mass Observation as Harrisson had conceived them.

Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (review)

Reviewed by: Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self Marina MacKay (bio) James Hinton. Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. 254 pp. ISBN 978-0199574667, $45.00. Nine Wartime Lives is a fascinating collection of biographical sketches of men and women who kept diaries during the Second World War for Mass-Observation, the pioneering British social research project founded in 1937 by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet Charles Madge, and the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. Hinton includes a feline nine lives, precisely, in homage to the eighteenth-century cat massacre famously analyzed by the cultural historian Robert Darnton; like the domestic cat, writes Hinton in his conclusion, the ordinary lives archived in Mass-Observation are “‘good to think’ with” (199). The book supports this claim abundantly and engagingly, using a sample of otherwise obscure lives to explore a wide and often surprising range of topics—among others, mid-century marriage and the origins of women’s empowerment in later decades; the thoroughly mixed motives driving civic engagement in wartime; the earnest intellectual and artistic culture of provincial England; and the idiosyncratic shapes taken by religious belief and other forms of spiritual transcendence in times of historical crisis. It is, admittedly, a small sample from a vast archive, and Hinton explains that representativeness is neither possible nor, for that matter, desired (17); he adds, furthermore, that these are “biographical essays” and emphatically not “case studies” in the service of a systematic or totalizing theory (20). Yet, as a study of the lived experience of Britain in the 1940s, this book is no less illuminating than it is absorbing. The main thing Hinton’s Mass-Observers have in common is a degree of public participation, and everyone writing about Britain’s home-front culture [End Page 868] must reckon with the tenacious cliché of the “Blitz spirit,” when, as the familiar story had it, Britain attained a democratic national unity, a classless solidarity never seen before or since. Hinton’s handling of this cliché is exemplarily measured, alert to its convenient utility as a stick to beat Britain’s disappointing present (selfishly individualistic, atomized, antisocial), but alert, too, to its actuality as one among many operative forces on wartime consciousness. In this respect, Hinton’s treatment of the familiar narrative of wartime public-spiritedness is entirely characteristic of the book as a whole, resistant to the ritual scholarly demythologizing of the war that too often amounts to the effort to break the butterfly of popular cultural fantasy on the wheel of academic cultural history. This is a more searching and generous-minded inquiry into the relationship between subjective experience and public memory. It eschews the easy target. A compelling imaginative receptivity is the central quality of the essays that form the main part of the book. Seen from one angle, Hinton’s material is, among other things, a record of bad faith, even hypocrisy—from the apparently open-minded woman whose homophobia drives away her beloved gay son, to the war-industry chemist whose very livelihood reflects perplexingly on his declared Quaker and pacifist convictions. And it is also a compendium of middle-class and lower-middle-class snobbery in its variously toxic forms, from an embarrassingly smug and overweening assumption of cultural superiority among the suburban aficionados of Edward Elgar through to its manifestations in racism, anti-Semitism, and a fastidious shuddering at the horrid accents and foul odors emitted by working-class women. And yet, to focus on those aspects of 1940s culture is to read the essays against their grain, giving them an emphasis that Hinton, whose own liberal and democratic priorities are nonetheless everywhere apparent, does not. What I have called hypocrisy reflects for Hinton the extraordinary complexity of any life when it is examined at close quarters; and what I have dismissed as snobbery looks, in Hinton’s sensitive and sympathetic handling, more like a reflection of the inevitable anxieties and insecurities attendant on modern self-understanding. Hinton takes palpable pleasure in the sheer contrariness of his subjects: the social-climbing Conservative housewife with surprisingly progressive hopes for the postwar peace; the...

Barrenness and Abjection? : The Iconography of the Wasteland in the Photographs and Collages of Julian Trevelyan, 1937–1938

British artist Julian Trevelyan (1910–1988), during 1937 and 1938, went to work for a series of short periods in Bolton, Whitehaven, and Blackpool, three northern English towns where scenes of urban, industrial, and even corporeal decay appear to have surrounded him on every side. Having been plucked from his southern middle‐class background and installed within this deprived geographical area by Tom Harrisson (1911–1976), founder of the anthropological research organization Mass‐Observation, this strangely neglected surrealist figure produced numerous photographs, collages, paintings, and texts that almost always explore, as their central theme, the aesthetic category of decline. This he achieves in visual terms through an amalgamation of surrealist and documentary techniques and methods, and the results are powerfully reflective of Britain’s seriously depressed interwar economic climate. In this article, I examine one aspect of Trevelyan’s visual output in Bolton: the iconography of the typically barren and abject territory that is the urban and industrial wasteland. I consider, for example, his interpretation of the physical and metaphorical impact upon this indeterminate site of electricity. This is represented visually by proliferating chains of looming pylons, which ultimately are seen to throw into question Blackpool’s adoption of electrical energy as its most proudly boasted modernizing force. Visual evocations of Britain’s thriving class divide, made possible by this radical artist’s picturing of the wasteland as a particular kind of void, are also probed here.

Past Human Activity and Geomorphological Change in a Guano-Rich Tropical Cave Mouth: Initial Interpretations of the Late Quaternary Succession in the Great Cave of Niah, Sarawak

This paper presents initial interpretations of the processes and events responsible for the late Quaternary sequence in the West Mouth of the Great Cave of Niah, in the hot and humid lowland rainforest and swamp forest of Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo. It evaluates the geomorphological context of the site within the known pattern of rapid late Quaternary climate change. Attention is given to the proximity to the sea and the likelihood of humid tropical or cooler drier conditions. The stratigraphic succession is described and four units or lithofacies (2C, 2, 3 and 4) are recognized as being of particular geomorphological and archaeological importance. The key processes operating within the site are the accumulation and subsequent failure and flow of bat and bird guano, hillslope colluviation, and ephemeral stream flow and pond development. Units 2C and 2 contain the critical archaeology, including the Deep Skull from an anatomically modern human, discovered by Tom Harrisson. These were formed by colluviation from a complex cave-mouth rampart and stream flow from within the cave. The stream transported fine-grained sediment to a shallow pond, and both the stream and pond deposits show evidence for prolonged desiccation. Human activity is associated with these surfaces. The human remains and related archaeology are preserved because a mudflow (Unit 3) plowed into and overrode the land surface upon which the humans had lived, resulting in the deformation and burial of the surface and the preservation of the archaeological material. Provisional radiocarbon dates indicate that Units 2C and 2 accumulated from before ca. 45,000 B.P. until ca. 38,000 B.P. Dates bracketing the Deep Skull give this an age of ca. 45,000 B.P. to ca. 43,000 B.P. Overlying the mudflow, Unit 4, a silty diamicton with a relatively high carbonate and organic content, appears to have formed by a mix of natural colluvial and human transport processes, and is associated with human cultural material. Unpublished radiocarbon dates indicate that this deposit formed from before ca. 19,500 B.P. to ca. 8500 B.P. (uncalibrated).This interpretation of the site and its finds has required detailed reconstruction of the changing palaeogeography within and beyond the cave entrance and the nature and rate of geomorphological processes operating within the region, which have been placed within models for rapid Quaternary environmental change. The results suggest that during the earlier period of human presence in the Great Cave of Niah(earlier than ca. 45,000 B.P. until ca. 38,000 B.P.), the climate was episodically wet with much longer periods of relative dryness. During the later period of human occupancy (ca. 19,500 B.P. to ca. 8500 B.P. [uncalibrated]), the evidence is less secure and a slightly moister climate is suggested.

Prehistoric Foragers and Farmers in South-east Asia: Renewed Investigations at Niah Cave, Sarawak

The paper describes the initial results from renewed investigations at Niah Cave in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, famous for the discovery in 1958 of the c. 40,000–year old ‘Deep Skull’. The archaeological sequences from the West Mouth and the other entrances of the cave complex investigated by Tom and Barbara Harrisson and other researchers have potential implications for three major debates regarding the prehistory of south-east Asia: the timing of initial settlement by anatomically modern humans; the means by which they subsisted in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene; and the timing, nature, and causation of the transition from foraging to farming. The new project is informing on all three debates. The critical importance of the Niah stratigraphies was commonly identified – including by Tom Harrisson himself – as because the site provided a continuous sequence of occupation over the past 40,000 years. The present project indicates that Niah was first used at least 45,000 years ago, and probably earlier; that the subsequent Pleistocene and Holocene occupations were highly variable in intensity and character; and that in some periods, perhaps of significant duration, the caves may have been more or less abandoned. The cultural sequence that is emerging from the new investigations may be more typical of cave use in tropical rainforests in south-east Asia than the Harrisson model.

The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life

The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life

Judith Heimann, The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life

Tom Harrisson, who died suddenly in an automobile accident in Thailand a quarter of a century ago, distinguished himself in various areas, first at an early age as an ornithologist, then soon after as an author of a best-selling book (Savage Civilization) on Melanesian tribal society and change in the New Hebrides, then as one of the founders of Mass Observation studies in Great-Britain. Judith Heimann’s welcome, carefully researched and detailed biography of Harrisson, however, will be of co...

The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life (review)

Reviewed by: The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life Wilhelm Solheim The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life. Judith M. Heimann. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999. vii + 468 pp.; illustrations, maps, index, bibliography. Paperback, $26.95. ISBN: 0-8248-2199-8. Judith Heimann has presented in her book what I feel is a very accurate, well-written and enjoyable picture of Tom Harrisson. This is the first time this has been done for a man who was and will remain a very important person in the development of archaeology in Southeast Asia, even though he was neither a trained nor a good archaeologist. Among other things Tom was an egomaniac. One little indication of this happened, in the Sarawak Museum: when he came across the misspelling of his name using only one "s" you could hear him scream in anger from one end of the building to the other. After a major argument with Harrisson I seem to have been one of the few archaeologists who was a friend of his, admired him, and at the same time recognized the "Offending Soul" that he was. I organized a special issue of Asian Perspectives (Vol. 20, 1977) in memory of Tom and included in it was a bibliography of his writings that we could find concerning Southeast Asian archaeology and related subjects (Solheim and Jensen 1977). We listed 27 different obituary and memorial articles on him, written by 19 different people (Solheim and Jensen 1977 : 19-20). "I feel that the one fairly critical article I have seen on Tom's work has been mine on his treatment of the Niah archaeology" (Solheim and Jensen 1977 : iv). Besides Asian Perspectives, The Journal of the Malaysian Branch Royal Asiatic Society (50[1] 1977) and the Borneo Research Bulletin (8[2] 1976) also published memorial issues in memory of Tom. Many articles published since then have been quite disparaging. Archaeology was only one rather small part of Tom's life and work. This part of his many research interests was primarily concerned with Sarawak, rather less with Borneo as a whole, but also concerned with Sarawak's and Borneo's place in Southeast Asia as a whole. Towards the end of his life he became interested in archaeological subjects concerning the Pacific. This was certainly in part because of his living virtually as a "native" in the Solomon Islands back in the 1930s. Of the 399 pages of text only a small portion of Part Five (Explorations and Excavations, pp. 288-303) and even smaller portions of Part Six (pp. 307-352) had to do with archaeology. These specific pages had little to do with archaeology, but rather were concerned with Tom and his involvement with the archaeology of Sarawak. Both Brunei and Sabah are mentioned, particularly in connection with his activities during the second World War and remarks on ethnographic subjects, but nothing about the archaeology he did there other than that he did a dig in each. [End Page 203] Tom was many different things to many different people, and to most of these he was not only offending but obnoxious. It amazes me how well Heimann is able to present this very offending side of Tom without turning the reader against him. A reader who knows very little about archaeology, or about archaeology in Southeast Asia in particular, would learn virtually nothing about archaeology (not a good source), and only a bit more specifically about archaeology in and on Borneo. I feel that it is of importance for archaeologists and prehistorians who are interested in Southeast Asia to read this book primarily to develop an understanding of Tom as a person. Then it is possible, I believe, to realize that Tom has been important in the early development of Southeast Asian prehistoric archaeology and that for Borneo the specialist must know the work that Tom did in Sarawak, Brunei, and Sabah. For much of the world Tom put Borneo and Sarawak on the map. If only for that alone he should be remembered as having been of major importance for the many subjects he worked and published on, archaeology included...

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:Glass Houses. May Woods and Arete Warren. 224 pp., 80 colour photo‐ graphs, 90 black‐and‐white figuresPlants for Problem Places. Graham Rice. 184pp., 40 colour photo‐graphs, 25 line drawingsNatural Man, a Record from Borneo. Charles Hose. xxvi + 284 pp., 127 black‐and‐white photographs, mapBorneo Jungle. An account of the Oxford University Expedition of'1932. Ed. Tom Harrisson. 254 pp.Miniature and Dwarf Geraniums. Harold Bagust. 163 pp., 24 colour photographs, also black‐and‐white drawings and photographsThe Complete Book of Everlastings. Mark and Terry Silber. 214pp., numerous colour photographs. Alfred A. KnopfThe Hosta Book. Ed. and compiled by Paul Aden. 133pp., many photo‐ graphs, mostly in colour. Christopher HelmLilacs, The Genus Syringa. Fr. John L. Fiala. 266 pp., 100 colour plates and 10 1 black‐and‐white figures and drawings

Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Britain by Mass Observation. London: Century Hutchinson-Cresset Press, 1986. 248 pp. 12 photographs. £5.95.

Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Britain by Mass Observation. London: Century Hutchinson-Cresset Press, 1986. 248 pp. 12 photographs. £5.95.

Mass-Observation: Social Research or Social Movement?

details about people's lives, thoughts and feelings, but more tidily sorted and thoroughly catalogued, such as government social surveys, opinion polls and newspapers. Using the Mass-Observation archive presents its own set of problems,3 but at least some of them cannot be resolved without an understanding of Mass-Observation itself. This paper is an attempt to explore possible interpretations of Mass-Observation as an organization in a specific historical and sociological context. Mass-Observation could be understood, as most contemporary accounts of the development of sociology saw it, as an organization pioneering a particular type of social research which some, e.g. Bronislaw Malinowski, saw as a vital new departure in scientific research, and others, e.g. Mark Abrams, wrote off as misguided.4 But it might be more appropriate to regard it as recent historians, like Tom Jeffery, have tended to see it, as a social movement with quasi-political objectives and an active and diverse following. Further to this, Mass-Observation as originally founded, came to an end in 1949. Its demise could be interpreted as the result of the research methods adopted, or of the stresses common to social movements, or as the peculiar product of trying to combine two different objectives: academically respectable research and the creation of social change. The idea of the social research originated with two men, Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge. Tom Harrisson was a somewhat larger-than-life ornithologist-cum-anthropologist, who left his public school to go on an Arctic expedition and left Cambridge, before gaining a degree, to go on a tropical expedition. He spent the years 1931-36 in Central Borneo and the New Hebrides islands of the Western Pacific, in particular Malekula, and published his anthropological findings on the cannibals