‘Primitive’ and ‘Modern’ Minds: British Scholars and their work on Australian Aboriginals

Throughout time, people have relied on academic research for truthful accounts into subjects they wished to know more about. Academic work has always thought to be factual and complete, since who can argue against scholarly sources? Unfortunately, looking at some research throughout history, you can see where flawed viewpoints contributed to problematic perspectives that lasted generations. Looking at academic research on the Aboriginals of Australia in the 20th century, you can see how the British perception, especially the academic perception, changed throughout time. With this project I wanted to delve deeper into how the British saw Aboriginal people, and how that reflected not only on the identities of these Australian people, but how it reflected on how the British people saw themselves in relation to others that were different than themselves. When learning about another culture, one tends to learn something about one’s own culture as well.

To look at the earliest accounts of British scholars’ research on Australian Aboriginals, there is a book called The Living Races of Mankind: A Popular Illustrated Account of the Customs, Habits, Pursuits, Feasts, and Ceremonies of the Races of Mankind Throughout the World. This source was considered incredibly thorough and well written when it was first published, going through all visible aspects of daily life and culture, including their research on physical attributes, and so forth. This book, written in 1901, shows that while the scholars who wrote the book looked at aboriginal culture as a something to study and learn more about, they also gave examples as to how they as Brits were more advanced than them, and gave examples to further their ideas of scientific racism. When talking about their ideas on the quality of life for these aboriginal groups, they say, “A low or degraded condition of life is thus definitely shown to be compatible with the high Caucasian type, and the inference consequently is that the Australians likewise belong to that type, of which they are the lowest living representatives,” (Johnston et al, 83). This is just an addition to the argument about other sources that focused on the idea that the European ways are the ‘best ways’ and anything other than that should be considered primitive, outdated, and too simple to function in a ‘modern’ setting.

Many of the authors of this book could be considered something we now call ‘armchair anthropologists’. Many of the authors of this book did not go out themselves in order to do actual research on these cultures they were writing about. Many of them relied on basing their research off other writings of these cultures, especially those from missionaries, and writing their academic papers with that (Friedman). For the majority of the men who wrote about these different cultures had not had firsthand experience with the people they were writing about at all. This book was used in an academic setting, so to the British people that read this this was their scholarly introduction, and possibly only source, on Aboriginal people and their culture. This shows us a better view of not only were these British scholars writing about them in ways that were culturally insensitive and for the most part not fully correct, they also had an enormous influence on their identities and how people throughout the British Empire saw them. Even a hundred years ago, scholarly sources like these were trusted, and if this was their only source, it’s not hard to see why these people would look at these Aboriginal people and treat them as inferiors.

Looking towards another side of British scholar’s work leads us to see how they saw Aboriginals through multiple lenses, including a psychological one. Through ideas promoted through practicing scientific racism and things of that sort, these scholars thought that Australian Aboriginals were of a ‘simpler’ race, and were closer to what they thought was the original human, not fully adapted mentally into what they thought was their own superior mind and thought processes. A source that is very useful in gaining more information about this is called Turning Aboriginal “Primitives” into Modern Psychological Subjects. It focused mainly on this Lutheran missionary site where many psychologists and anthropologists came over a period of a few years to study a group of Aboriginal people living nearby. Interestingly enough, while most people would think that the people who came there would all come to the same consensus about their superiority as white Brits, not everyone did. While many of these scholars who conducted their research at this missionary site did choose to show Aboriginal people as psychologically underdeveloped, lacking abstract and complex reasoning, and reserved by their environment and their culture, it can be agreed that it's unsurprising based on the common knowledge of British sentiments towards people of other cultures during the early 20th century. What is surprising is that a few of the academics showed in their research a more self-awareness of their research, and how that therefore reflected on their own culture and environment, not just the aboriginals.

A few of their published research talks about how they saw their research and their peers mainly as a way to affirm white civilization and their ideas, and they saw that as distancing themselves from the rest of the world. The psychologists who did their research here were then unable to show if their research showed more of the Aboriginals they tried to study, or if their research better reflected on their own minds and mentalities. The author says, “Their conceptions of primitive mentality would produce a counter image…of civilized mentality too. Primitive lack affirmed white civilization as rational and ordered, while primitive…simplicity revealed the alienation and pathology of modern societies,” (Anderson, 129). To sum that up, these people essentially recognized in the end that their research was just to add more fuel to the fire of imperialism and ideas of superiority over these Australian aboriginals. Unfortunately, even with these few self-aware academics, many of these problematic studies did unfortunately add fuel to the fire of imperialism and a sense of superiority over these colonized groups, something that would not change without a widespread social push in the right direction.

Finally, there is an aspect of photography that also had an impact on the image of the Australian aboriginals that these British scholars gave them. With the invention of the camera and its effect on large scale media, it also affected Australian Aboriginals and their identities and the British perception of them. Aboriginal identity and how the rest of the world saw them was greatly taken over by the work that British scholars had published throughout the empire. With the addition of photography to journalism throughout the empire in the 1920’s and 30’s, the aboriginal people were able to add a bit of their own perspective into the world’s perceptions of who they were as Australian aboriginals. A photo of Aboriginal prisoners that is the main photo on this post became the poster for aboriginal activism in the 1920’s and 30’s. It was widely circulated throughout the Empire, showing the treatment of Aboriginal prisoners who were more or less treated as slaves in these prison camps. The social backlash the Australian Empirical leaders got from these images and the social power the Aboriginal people were able to gain because of these images prompted a collective change that wouldn’t have been able to happen without the widespread circulation of images like this one. Images like these were a powerful tool into showing these horrible conditions that their imperialist rulers put them through, and circulating them were some of the first steps in gaining back some of their agency into showing themselves through their own means, not just the scholars that wrote about them in fancy textbooks.

For most of their existence, Australian aboriginals had little control over their identities within the British empire thanks to these British scholars who wrote endlessly on them. Although there were some conflicting views at times, it’s not hard to see that it was a largely negative image bestowed upon them by the British. We can gain a lot of insight into the British empire looking at how these academics looked at Australian aboriginals, and if you look closely enough you can see how the Aboriginal people lived through it too.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Warwick. "Hermannsburg, 1929: Turning Aboriginal 'Primitives' into Modern Psychological Subjects." Journal Of The History Of The Behavioral Sciences 50, no. 2: 127-147.

Sir Harry Johnston, R. Lydekker, Dr A. H. Keane, H. N. Hutchinson, A. H. Savage Landor, Dr R. W. Shufeldt, Professor Longford, The Living Races of Mankind: A Popular Illustrated Account of the Customs, Habits, Pursuits, Feasts & Ceremonies of the Races of Mankind Throughout the World. (London: Hutchinson, 1901): 53-58.

Friedman, P. Kerim. "Armchair Anthropology in the Cyber Age?" Savage Minds. May 19, 2005.

Lyndon, Jane. "Photography and the Recognition of Indigenous Australians: Framing Aboriginal Prisoners." Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 2: 210-232.

Photo credit: Lyndon, Jane. "Photography and the Recognition of Indigenous Australians: Framing Aboriginal Prisoners." Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 2: 227.