Between 1894 and 1903, outback postmaster Frank Gillen wrote to the Melbourne University academic Baldwin Spencer. Gillen, a self-educated enthusiast, died in 1912, having partnered Spencer in pioneering fieldwork to record the culture and beliefs of the Aboriginal people. These letters provide a background to their books, which profoundly influenced theories on the development of human society. The letters shed light on race relations, social conditions and Aboriginal culture in Central Australia. They also document a poorly-understood period in the history of anthropology.
Teenage Simone's diaries for 1917 and 1918 reveal her experiences as a carefree member of New York society, then as a "Hello girl," a volunteer switchboard operator for the Army Signal Corps in France.
My Apprenticeship has long been cited as an important and fascinating source for students of social attitudes and conditions in late Victorian Britain, and this new paperback edition makes it once more generally available. Beatrice Webb, the eighth of the nine daughters of the railway magnate Richard Potter, was an exceptionally able person, with a zest for observation, a knack for pointed comment, and a habit of self-examination - all of which gifts she put to good account in the private diary she kept all her life and in this brilliant volume of autobiography which she based on that diary. It tells the story of a craft and a creed, of a withdrawn but talented girl, growing up in a prosperous household, who turned to social investigation and social reform, moving between the two starkly contrasted worlds of West End smart society and East End squalor. She served a hard apprenticeship, as a woman as well as a professional worker, and in a new introduction to this edition Norman MacKenzie describes the severe personal stresses which lay behind her life of dedication to social improvement, particularly her frustrated passion for Joseph Chamberlain and the troubled courtship which preceded her marriage to Sidney Webb. This volume ends on the eve of that marriage, when she was about to begin her famous and astonishingly productive collaboration with her husband. As historians, publicists and Fabian politicians the Webbs were pioneers of the modern age. The ensuring volume, which chronicles their mature career and was appropriately titled Our Partnership, is also published by the Cambridge University Press in collaboration with the London School of Economics and Political Science.
The Cunning of Recognition is an exploration of liberal multiculturalism from the perspective of Australian indigenous social life. Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with their colonizers but by demanding that they identify with an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture. Povinelli draws on seventeen years of ethnographic research among northwest coast indigenous people and her own experience participating in land claims, as well as on public records, legal debates, and anthropological archives to examine how multicultural forms of recognition work to reinforce liberal regimes rather than to open them up to a true cultural democracy. The Cunning of Recognition argues that the inequity of liberal forms of multiculturalism arises not from its weak ethical commitment to difference but from its strongest vision of a new national cohesion. In the end, Australia is revealed as an exemplary site for studying the social effects of the liberal multicultural imaginary: much earlier than the United States and in response to very different geopolitical conditions, Australian nationalism renounced the ideal of a unitary European tradition and embraced cultural and social diversity. While addressing larger theoretical debates in critical anthropology, political theory, cultural studies, and liberal theory, The Cunning of Recognition demonstrates that the impact of the globalization of liberal forms of government can only be truly understood by examining its concrete—and not just philosophical—effects on the world.
The German missionary Carl Strehlow (1871-1922) had a deep ethnographic interest in Aboriginal Australian cosmology and social life which he documented in his 7 volume work Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien that remains unpublished in English. In 1913, Marcel Mauss called his collection of sacred songs and myths, an Australian Rig Veda. This immensely rich corpus, based on a lifetime on the central Australian frontier, is barely known in the English-speaking world and is the last great body of early Australian ethnography that has not yet been built into the world of Australian anthropology and its intellectual history. The German psychological and hermeneutic traditions of anthropology that developed outside of a British-Australian intellectual world were alternatives to 19th century British scientism. The intellectual roots of early German anthropology reached back to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), the founder of German historical particularism, who rejected the concept of race as well as the French dogma of the uniform development of civilisation. Instead he recognised unique sets of values transmitted through history and maintained that cultures had to be viewed in terms of their own development and purpose. Thus, humanity was made up of a great diversity of ways of life, language being one of its main manifestations. It is this tradition that led to a concept of cultures in the plural.
