By far the most influential of the early Australian ethnographers
were †Baldwin Spencer and †F.J. Gillen. In late nineteenth-century
anthropological theorizing, Aboriginal society occupied the place the Caribs
had done in †Rousseau’s philosophy; that is, as the living exemplars of
humankind’s original condition. Spencer and Gillen provided much of the data on
which theories about the nature of such societies were constructed. †Frazer
asserted in his preface to The Native Tribes of Central Australia that Spencer
and Gillen had met ‘tribes living in the Stone Age’, ignorant of metal working,
agriculture and even the physiology of reproduction, whose secrets
Spencer and Gillen had ‘snatched…just before the final decadence of the tribes
set in’ (Frazer, in Spencer and Gillen 1899). Frazer considered that their work
pointed to the belief in spiritual conception, in which the unborn baby is
animated by the spirit of an ancestral being, as the most probable source of
*totemism. He wanted to elucidate the principle of causation that allegedly
enabled a *ritual to increase the numbers of a totemic species. †Durkheim, on
the other hand, found demonstration of his theory of the sociological origin of
religion in the work of Spencer and Gillen and their contemporary, Strehlow.
Durkheim emphasized the social character of increase rites rather than their
instrumental purpose.
Spencer and Gillen also documented the *kinship terminologies of
central Australia. While they committed the error of inferring that
classificatory kinship had its origin in ‘group marriage’, they clarified the
relationship of the eight subsection system to rules of *marriage and *descent.
In later survey work they demonstrated the existence of similar systems in
northern Australia.
Two ideas that pervaded nineteenth-century European thinking about
Aboriginal society were: first, that their structure placed them at a given
stage in a scheme of
unilineal *evolution, rather than displaying an adaptation to the natural *environment; second, that Aboriginal people were about to lose their distinctive culture and either the out or become assimilated to the dominant culture.
unilineal *evolution, rather than displaying an adaptation to the natural *environment; second, that Aboriginal people were about to lose their distinctive culture and either the out or become assimilated to the dominant culture.