Erhard Eylmann’s Missionary Position

ABSTRACT

The German anthropologist Erhard Eylmann relied heavily on assistance provided by missionaries when he undertook fieldwork in Australia. During two periods at the Hermannsburg mission he developed a strained relationship with Carl Strehlow. In his major work Eylmann wrote a damning critique of missionaries. While there was a level of personal animosity between Eylmann and Strehlow, at the heart of the antagonism were fundamental differences concerning the nature and function of the discipline of anthropology. The missionaries sought anthropological knowledge to promote mutual understanding, above all through language, as a prelude to conversion to Christianity. They proceeded from the assumption that the future of Indigenous Australians would be within the context of the adoption of Christian belief systems. Eylmann in contrast took the view that the differences between Europeans and Indigenous Australians were physical, essential and insuperable. Sceptical about the possibility of achieving mutual understanding, he devoted his fieldwork primarily to describing, recording and collecting for the purpose of assembling a detailed record of a population he believed destined for extinction. Eylmann and German missionary anthropologists such as Strehlow had in common that they stood outside the paradigm of British social evolutionistic thinking which dominated Australian anthropology around the turn of the century at the time. At the same time, the differences in the anthropological endeavours of Eylmann and Strehlow indicate the great breadth of approaches opening up within German anthropology. In particular they point to the emergence of an ‘antihumanist’ turn at the end of the nineteenth century.     

The riddle of Tasmanian languages

Recent work which combines methods from linguistics and evolutionary biology has been fruitful in discovering the history of major language families because of similarities in evolutionary processes. Such work opens up new possibilities for language research on previously unsolvable problems, especially in areas where information from other sources may be lacking. I use phylogenetic methods to investigate Tasmanian languages. Existing materials are so fragmentary that scholars have been unable to discover how many languages are represented in the sources. Using a clustering algorithm which identifies admixture, source materials representing more than one language are identified. Using the Neighbor-Net algorithm, 12 languages are identified in five clusters. Bayesian phylogenetic methods reveal that the families are not demonstrably related; an important result, given the importance of Tasmanian Aborigines for information about how societies have responded to population collapse in prehistory. This work provides insight into the societies of prehistoric Tasmania and illustrates a new utility of phylogenetics in reconstructing linguistic history.     

The Politics of Reintegrating Australian Aboriginal and American Indian Indigenous Knowledge into Resource Management: The Dynamics of Resource Appropriation and Cultural Revival

As the United States and Australia struggle with contemporary crises over competing uses of rapidly depleting natural resources, there are striking parallels between American Indian and Australian Aboriginal communities demanding a place at the management table and offering culturally based understandings of and solutions for the ecosystems at risk. These efforts to integrate indigenous knowledge into mainstream natural resource management are part of larger legal and political debates over land tenure, the locus of control, indigenous self-governance, and holistic ecosystems management.     

Indigenous Media Gone Global: Strengthening Indigenous Identity On- and Offscreen at the First Nations/First Features Film Showcase

For 12 days in May 2005, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), as well as several other screening venues in Washington, D.C., hosted a group of renowned indigenous filmmakers from around the globe for the groundbreaking film showcase, "First Nations/First Features: A Showcase of World Indigenous Film and Media." This film showcase highlighted the innovative ways in which indigenous filmmakers draw on indigenous storytelling practices to create cinematic visions that honor their long-standing indigenous cultural worlds while reaching local and world audiences. In this essay, I highlight the onscreen impact through an analysis of several films featured in First Nations/First Features, as well as the offscreen impact emphasizing how the indigenous directors used this opportunity to strengthen social networks and share experience in this industry, which may develop into future collaborative film projects.     

An intellectual legacy of the past: The reception of sociobiology in the East-European countries

Sociobiology has not been well received in Eastern Europe. Reasons for this are listed and discussed. It is suggested that times are changing and that sociobiology will have more success in the future.     

News & Analysis

ABSTRACT

One tenant of folk psychology is that people tend to select or form a preference for pet dogs that have a similar appearance to themselves. A sample of 261 women judged the desirability of four breeds of dogs. Two breeds had lopped ears (English Springer Spaniel, Beagle) and two had pricked ears (Siberian Husky, Basenji). Long hairstyles in women produce a facial framing effect similar to lop ears while short or pulled back hairstyles produce a facial configuration more similar to prick-eared dogs. Consistent with this interpretation, women with long hair tended to prefer the lop-eared dogs while women with the short hairstyles preferred the prick-eared dogs, consistent with the folk belief. These results are interpreted in light of social psychological principles, namely the effects of familiarity and mere exposure on affect and interpersonal attraction.     

"And This Is How You Shall Ask": Linguistics, Anthropology, and Education in the Work of David Smith

This article celebrates the life and work of David M. Smith, former Council on Anthropology and Education president and founder of the University of Pennsylania Ethnography in Education Research Forum, tracing his contributions to the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and education through the dual lens of his ten research principles and Walt Whitman's life advice. David Smith's pioneering efforts helped push disciplinary boundaries and generate innovations in sociolinguistics, pidgin and creole linguistics, ethnography and education, sociocultural studies of literacy, and Indigenous studies.     

Pleistocene peopling of the Americas

Our species colonized North and South America last of all the major land masses, thereby ending the spread that began a million years earlier when ancestral members of the genus Homo first ventured out of Africa. But who were the first Americans? When did they arrive? Did they come in one migration or many? How quickly and by what adaptive strategies did they move across the environmentally diverse and trackless New World? How do they relate to contemporary native Americans? We have plenty of answers to these questions. Unfortunately, we can't agree which ones are right. This much is certain: the first Americans were Homo sapiens who came from northeast Asia via the Bering Straits (Fig. 1). They may have walked from Siberia to Alaska across Beringia, the land bridge formed when vast Pleistocene glaciers froze 5% of the world's water,¹ lowering global sea levels and exposing the shallow continental shelf between Asia and America. These hunter-gatherers were present throughout the Americas by 11,500 years ago, in time to witness the climatic and ecological changes, including the extinction of thirty-five genera of megafauna, that signalled the end of the Pleistocene. Beyond those bare facts there is controversy. Here, then, is a brief summary of the state of the argument over the peopling of the Americas.     

中国人与澳大利亚人的颏孔高度

In Chinese specimens, sexual differnces of the height of mental foramen and mandibular body are significant; no significant sexual differnce shown in relative height of mental foramen. In Australian specimens, absolute and relative height of mental foramen no significant differnce is shown between these series. Data are shown in the tables of the Chinese text.     

中国人与澳大利亚人的颏孔高度

吴新智在1961年研究山顶洞人头骨时曾指出,下颌骨颏孔的相对高度在人类进化上有着一定的意义。尼人的这一指数比新人的低,新人化石的则比现代中国人的低。现代人这一方面的种族间比较则未见报道。本文提供资料以填补这方面的空缺。 本文所用材料是收藏于南京铁道医学院解剖教研室的,出自华东的现代中国人下颌骨和收藏于澳大利亚国立大学的采自木莱河流域的澳大利亚土著人下颌骨。中国标本的性别系根据同一个体的骨盆来判断;澳大利亚标本则由澳大利亚国立大学的人类学家桑恩博士参考同一个体的头骨来判断,作者在此表示感谢。     

A Sea Change in Anthropology? Public Anthropology Reviews

ABSTRACT  In this article, we introduce the inaugural issue of the \"Public Anthropology Reviews\" section. We suggest that the new section reflects significant changes underway in the discipline, including an expansion in the kind of work valued among anthropologists, new ways in which anthropological knowledge is being produced and disseminated, and an acknowledgment that anthropologists have a responsibility to dedicate their skills to issues of broad public import. The section will, thus, expose AA readers to some of the new anthropological work appearing in a wide variety of media and nontraditional academic formats that aims both to communicate primarily with nonanthropological audiences and to have an impact on critical issues of wide social significance. We here present the reviews in this issue, identify additional contemporary issues likely to be addressed in future reviews, and welcome submissions and critical feedback for the section.     

‘Anthropological Investigation has Very Little Interest for Me’: Notes from Moravian Missionaries in Australia

ABSTRACT

As some of the first people to spend extended amounts of time with Indigenous peoples, missionaries were well placed to provide information to European and colonial audiences on non-European peoples. Moravian missionaries arrived in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century and over the next six decades worked amongst numerous Indigenous groups in the south-eastern part of Australia, in the interior, and in northern Queensland. This paper will trace the contributions made by German Moravian missionaries to anthropological and ethnographical knowledge both in the colonies as well as in Germany. It will particularly focus upon the connections forged in religious and scientific networks through anthropological work. The paper contends that a unified German identity was forged through scientific work that transcended denominational boundaries. Moreover, the ability to disseminate ethnographical knowledge within secular circles, both in the colonies and in Germany, provided legitimisation to missionary work and embedded missionaries within global knowledge networks. Through examining the work of one individual missionary, Friedrich Hagenauer, the fragility of these global knowledge networks is explored.     

‘Black and white,a significant contrast’: Race,humanism and missionary photography in the Pacific

Taking the example of ‘Studies in black and white’, a genre of photographs taken around the end of the nineteenth century by Methodist missionaries in the Pacific, this article seeks to go beyond conventional analyses that scrutinize colonial photography for forms of domination. I argue that these photographs, and the context in which some of them were published, reveal a complex interplay between two contradictory principles: on the one hand, a Christian humanism, articulating a vision of commonality and equality, and on the other, paternalism, articulating a vision of superiority and inequality .      

梅花和蜡梅被西方世界认识的历史考证

文中收集、整理了自17世纪至20世纪共22位西方学者(包括西方化的日本学者)认识、命名、收集、培育梅花Prunus mume、蜡梅Chimonanthus praecox的文献资料及其历史贡献,并比较两种植物被西方世界认识的历史差异,分析成因。最后探讨梅花、蜡梅在世界范围内推广的困境及原因。     

A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries

For the past 30 years, anthropology's critics have repeatedly questioned the notion of "cultural boundaries," arguing that concepts of culture inappropriately posit stable and bounded "islands" of cultural distinctiveness in an ever-changing world of transnational cultural "flows." This issue remains an Achilles' heel—or at least a recurring inflamed tendon—of anthropology. However, in the conception of boundaries, we still have much to learn from Boasian anthropologists, who conceived of boundaries not as barriers to outside influence or to historical change, but as cultural distinctions that were irreducibly plural, perspectival, and permeable. In this article, I retheorize and extend the Boasians' open concept of cultural boundaries, emphasizing how people's own ideas of "the foreign"—and the "own" versus the "other" distinction—give us a way out of the old conundrum in which the boundedness of culture, as conceived in spatial terms, seems to contradict the open-ended nature of cultural experience.