ANTHROPOLOGY SEASON
BBC4
Alan Bennett once said that Denis Mitchell’s 1959 documentary Morning in the Streets started a process “whereby we began not only to learn how the other half lived, but how they talked, and so the nation was introduced to itself”. Television makes anthropologists of us all, and Mitchell’s film undoubtedly followed in the footsteps of Mass-Observation, the sociological survey that ran from 1937 to the early 1950s and treated ordinary British citizens as if they were some remote tribe – as indeed to many of the observers they were.
One of the founders of M-O was Tom Harrisson, who applied the anthropological methods he had learned among the headhunters of Borneo to the people of Bolton. He returned to Borneo during the Second World War, parachuted into Japanese-occupied territory with a small group of Australian special operatives, and recruited the local people to hunt down the enemy with blowpipes. He would subsequently spend much of his turbulent life in that country, and made a series of documentaries about it for the BBC, extracts from which were shown in Tom Harrisson: The barefoot anthropologist. Making use of a wealth of archive footage and authoritatively narrated by Harrisson’s former editor, David Attenborough, this was the best of the programmes in BBC4’s brief but rewarding Anthropology Season.
Three further documentaries, given the umbrella title of “Tales from the Jungle”, looked at the lives and careers of Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead and Carlos Castaneda. Since Castaneda’s tales derived from his researches in the Sonora Desert, he seemed an odd inclusion, but the programme-makers were on the lookout for dramatic stories, as the occasionally over-excited commentaries confirmed. Malinowski provided “one of the greatest tales in anthropology”; the supporters of Mead and her debunker, Derek Freeman, were “locked together in a battle for the very heart and soul of anthropology”; while Castaneda was declared “the most controversial figure in the history of anthropology”.
It is perhaps appropriate that those whose careers are spent examining the lives and habits of others should come under similar scrutiny, and this biographical approach managed also to provide a sketchy but useful overview of the history of anthropology. The programmes, which mixed archive footage, talking heads and dramatic reconstructions, were in fact as much about reputation as they were about anthropology. Malinowski was credited with starting a revolution in the discipline, although his decision to work in the field rather than in libraries was undoubtedly influenced by earlier pioneers the programme overlooked, such as W. H. R. Rivers (now chiefly remembered as the psychologist who treated Siegfried Sassoon at Craig-lockhart). Fortuitously trapped in Papua by the outbreak of the First World War, Malinowski spent four years immersing himself in the life of the Trobriand islanders, and writing Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), an account of the practice known as kula, whereby islanders undertook hazardous sea voyages simply in order to exchange necklaces. He showed that these apparently worthless objects had a power conferred on them by previous ownership, and drew a striking analogy between them and the Crown Jewels. The book also championed the role of the “participant observer”, nicely defined by a modern anthropologist as “deep hanging out”. Malinowksi was a difficult, obsessive, hypochondriacal man, and the publication in 1967 of his personal diaries, in which he seemed to express some of the imperialist attitudes of those he had set out to confound, damaged his reputation. As the programme pointed out, however, he castigated himself for his own failings even more than he criticized the indigenous people among whom he was living.
Had Margaret Mead heeded Malinowski’s warning that anthropologists have to rely not on what people say they do but on what they are seen doing, her own reputation might not have suffered. Much of early anthropology addressed the nature-versus-nurture argument, and Mead’s study of South Seas teenagers, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), led to the attractive conclusion that their American counterparts (represented here in delightful archive footage of girls clambering out of windows and boys drinking hooch) were not predestined to delinquency. Equally attractive was Mead’s picture of the carefree, virtually prelapsarian sex lives of Samoan youth, which more than half a century later was dismissed by an Australian anthropologist called Derek Freeman as “the most widely propagated myth of twentieth-century anthropology”. It may be true that the girls Mead interviewed made up stories about their sex lives, but Freeman took no account of the period in which Mead did her work, and he came over as a vindictive man, whose regular appearance in a knitted cap-and-jacket ensemble somehow undermined his authority.
Even Freeman seemed preferable to Castaneda, an anthropology graduate from UCLA who in 1960 went to Mexico, where he supposedly found a Yaqui Indian shaman called Don Juan who offered to take him on as an apprentice. In accepting, Castaneda overstepped the academic boundary between observer and participant. Not that Castaneda cared: The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), with its accounts of using peyote to induce altered states of awareness, became a bible of the counterculture and made him a millionaire. Whereas the other two programmes were even-handed, this one concluded that Castaneda was a dangerous fraud, who not only made up most of his book but was also responsible for the deaths of five of his female disciples. Given that one of his chat-up lines was “You have the same vagina as my daughter, that’s why I love it so much”, it is perhaps surprising he had any disciples at all, but that’s the counterculture for you.
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Peter Parker was an associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, and has written lives of J. R. Ackerley, 1989, and Christopher Isherwood, 2004.
