From around 1915, the idea o f diffusion and devolution briefly offered an alternative to evolutionary theory Sim plified, the idea saw that culture diffused throughout the people o f the world from Egypt or

allowed Europeans to perceive that it was not their own actions that created the outcomes that followed, but the natural order o f things. As Kabbani (1986:4 in Thomas 1994:37) concludes, ‘the forging o f racial stereotypes and confirmation o f the notions o f savagery were vital to the colonialist world view ’. The first way o f thinking was applied to groups lowest in the hierarchy such as Aboriginal people in Australia, and has been explained by McGregor (1998) as the ‘doomed race theory’. It was proposed that because the state o f their social and material culture lacked any ‘accoutrements o f civilisation’ they appeared to be still in a state o f ‘savagery’, and were unlikely to be capable o f withstanding the forces o f civilization (McGregor 1998:48-9). It was believed therefore that prolonged contact with Europeans and European civilization would bring about the demise o f not only Aboriginal culture, but the entire ‘race’. This view was used to justify a great range o f horrific actions committed by colonists and the colonial government in Australia that saw the near­ annihilation o f Aboriginal people in some parts o f the country. This view only changed slowly (a process that might be considered to still be taking place) upon the realisation that Aboriginal people were not becoming extinct.

On a more positive note, the evolutionary paradigm was also used to justify the claims o f ‘protection societies’ who argued against some o f these actions, specifically as applied to education o f children, and working and living conditions. While their claims were couched in paternalistic attitudes, the actions o f ‘protection’ or ‘friendly’ societies were to seek protection and respect for Aboriginal people (McGregor 1998:8, 13, 60-61, Reynolds 2005:76). The experience o f Aboriginal people at the hands o f the Australian colonies before Federation was also one o f the reasons Britain used to deny approval for Queensland’s annexation o f New Guinea (Jinks, Biskup and Nelson 1973). It is possible that this rebuke, along with the burgeoning growth o f concern for the ‘European duty to assist the natives’ that emerged after World War One, was one o f the things that inspired M urray’s humane take on the administration o f Papua (Murray 1920:22).

Mesopotam ia (evidence for this being, for example, the presence o f m egalithic monuments, and sun cults in Oceania that were perceived to be similar to the pyramids, and cults in Egypt). From this, som e anthropologists such as Elliot Smith and W illiam Perry saw not evolution standing still, but the devolution or the degradation o f the original cultures as they diffused from one area to the next (Stocking 1995:217, Trigger 1995). Thus, places like Papua and Australia, being a great distance from Egypt, demonstrated greater devolution than areas such as Europe.

The Papuan Official Collection

Chapter Three

Another view allowed that societies that were discovered in a stage beyond ‘savagery’ had progressed in the evolutionary hierarchy and were therefore not beyond salvation. This view was applied to the Indigenous inhabitants o f places like New Guinea. It was believed that Papuans might never be equal with white Europeans, but that contact with appropriate classes o f Europeans might be a positive step in hastening them along the path to civilization (Murray 1920:9-29). One negative result o f this was seen to be the inevitable loss o f ‘prim itive’ material culture or ‘barbaric’ social practices. Papuan society as an example o f ‘primitive tribes’ constituted ‘interesting and scientifically important human fossils’ and along with similar societies provided evidence o f the lives o f the predecessors o f civilised peoples (Reynolds 2005:74, Phillips and Steiner 1999, Trigger 1995). As colonisation became entrenched and changed the ways in which Papuan people’s lives were lived, it became important that these ‘evidences’ (i.e., their material culture and social practices) were not lost. From the late 1880s a scramble in many colonies across the world ensued to salvage a number o f cultures through collecting and recording what remained before it was too late. It is at this point that collecting became most competitive among museums, and anthropological information became most important to colonial administrations. Anthropology as a discipline that provided applied solutions to colonial problems began to come into its own among the administrations.

This chapter and the one before it go some way towards describing the generation o f the events which helped to generate the racist and paternalistic orthodoxy that operated in the 19th and 20th century colonial practice regarding the place o f non- European peoples. This information forms the context o f Chapter Four, which deals in part with M urray’s opinion of, and use o f anthropology as a tool o f government. As Stocking (1995:339) has mentioned, Murray was ‘a paternalistic lieutenant- governor... whose “Murray System” encouraged the protection o f traditional village life within a policy o f controlled economic developm ent’. M urray’s outlook stemmed directly from many o f the developments described above, and from his generally humanitarian and liberal outlook (for his time). The rest o f this section will look at the events that are usually acknowledged as the beginning o f the professionalisation o f anthropology, and how anthropology was set to become incorporated into M urray’s administration o f Papua. It will then briefly review developments in

anthropology post 1940, in order to place the POC in its current context at the NMA in terms o f trends in anthropological research.

Practical anthropology: the link between anthropology and colonial administration.

Until the 1880s, anthropology in Britain (and therefore in British colonies such as Australia) was not a coherent discipline in that it was not yet a professional, or recognisable subject taught in universities for which a degree could be taken (Urry 1998). There were, and had been for quite a while, people conducting anthropological research. Looking back through anthropological history, the divisions between anthropology, ethnology, and ethnography were rather blurred. To some degree they still are. While early in the 20th century meetings were held in British universities to distinguish between the terms - ethnography becoming responsible for the observation and description o f non-literate peoples, and ethnology (and archaeology) being concerned with reconstructing the history o f them (Kuper 1996) - many people, like Murray and other colonial administrators used the terms interchangeably. As explained by Kuper (1996:2)

The subject matter o f anthropology was fairly clearly defined in the early twentieth century, although it was called by various names - social anthropology, cultural anthropology, or ethnology, ethnography and sociology. Its core was the study o f ‘prim itive’ or ‘savage’ or ‘early’ man, and by the last third o f the nineteenth century the study o f ‘culture’.

In today’s terms, anthropology in its broadest definition is the study o f humanity. As a result o f the differences in the development o f the discipline worldwide, depending on the nationality o f the person defining the word9, anthropology includes three or four distinct fields o f research: physical (or biological), cultural and linguistic anthropology, and archaeology (Erickson and Murphy 2003, Renfrew and Bahn 1993). Archaeology is considered a subset o f anthropology in the United States of