Review by:  
M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo
Universidad de Alcala
May - June 2008
© Copyright 2006-08 British Scholar. All rights reserved.
Book of the Month
Writing, Travel and Empire:  In the Margins of Anthropology
Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall, eds. (London:  I. B. Tauris, 2007), 256
pages

Mexican philosopher José de Vasconcelos wrote that both books and travels begin
with anxiety and finish with melancholy. This reflects what the writers analyzed in
Writing, Travel, and Empire must have felt in their being sent to the faraway British
imperial colonies they would later describe in their works. As the subtitle of the
volume already “warns,” in the introduction Hulme and Russell caution that this is
not a conventional book on professional anthropologists but, rather, on literary
scholars. The variety of authors analyzed in the book makes readers realize that
the stereotypical vision of the nineteenth century globetrotter, invariably a man in
the popular imagination, could be a woman too, as was often the case. Women also
had a say, though their fathers’ or husbands’ contributions may have obscured
their contribution to the field. The men and women who populate these pages went
to the overseas British colonies for a number of reasons.  One of the most
frequently quoted justifications for going overseas was to escape “disgrace or
responsibility,” but these varied men and women cannot be easily reduced to this
stereotype.

Because they were the first in describing places and peoples previously unknown,
their credibility was often questioned. George Grey, British colonial governor in
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa was either “perhaps the greatest liar the
British Empire ever spawned,” in the words of Rutherford, or “one of the more
perceptive ethnographers of his day.” The differing visions offered by Grey’s
biographers illustrate the way in which the writers in this book were regarded by
their contemporaries.

Though Grey drew on his first-hand experience with indigenous peoples, not all
authors based their studies on actual observation. Henry Ling Roth’s landmark
description of the aboriginals in Tasmania is remarkable because his subject of
analysis was an extinct race. A representative of those armchair anthropologists
who wrote of people they had never seen, his writings were incredibly influential
and remained the reference work on the Tasmanian aboriginals for almost seventy
years, after which they were ignored or bluntly rejected.  Only now are they
experiencing a renaissance in importance and Ling Roth’s pivotal contribution to
anthropology is being recognized.

Far from basing her writings on hearsay or second-hand information, Flora Annie
Steel, different from most memsahibs, learned the vernacular languages and got
deeply involved with the indigenous women of the subcontinent. Committed to
improving their lives, she organized the schooling system in the Punjab while
questioning the way Britain ruled India. With her fictional writings, intended to bring
the Indian reality closer to the British audience, she became as popular as Rudyard
Kipling.

Pedagogy was also central to Gertrude Lowthian Bell’s theories but with a goal
altogether different from Steel’s.  British Middle Eastern policies, even well after the
First World War, owed much to her theories that “the Oriental is like a very old
child.” Seeing the indigenous peoples of Mesopotamia as children needing
discipline, she proposed applying the pedagogical methods used with British
children to deal with colonial subjects. For her, nomadic societies were primitive
and infantile forms of government and used these claims to justify British rule on
these child-like nations.

Hugh Clifford, who held posts in several places, like Steel, used his writings to
advance his ideas. A versatile and prolific author, his writings include, among
others, journals and reports, private diaries, novels, and a Malay dictionary. Clifford
wanted to go beyond a superficial description of the natives and like his colleague
Frank Swettenham he looked for “the real Malay.” For him, his novels were just as
powerful as his scientific reports for the spread of knowledge among the British.

If Hugh Clifford peopled his fictional writings with characters strongly resembling
himself, the life of Everard im Thurn inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s very popular
novel, The Lost World. In real life, Thurn combined the various posts he held in the
Atlantic islands with his ethnographical, anthropologic, botanic, and photographic
interests.

Certainly, places like the Pacific or Malaya appeared very exotic to nineteenth
century British readers but the borders of the British Empire went far beyond its
Asian, Pacific, and Middle Eastern possessions. Ireland was still a British colony
and Irishman Roger Casement saw the problems of the empire in the Amazon and
Congo as well as in his homeland. Joseph Conrad called him a new Las Casas for
his denunciation of the inhuman treatment of the Amazonian Putumayo Indians.
Influenced by the Irish literary revival, Casement determined that Ireland, when it
came to colonial exploitation, was not too different from the Congo or the Amazon.

Tom Harrisson shared with Casement the view that events taking place closer to
the metropolis deserved the same kind of attention as exotic colonies. A media
phenomenon in the first days of television because of his ethnographical work on
the natives of the New Hebrides, Harrisson next moved to Bolton, England. Using
the same mass-observation methods he had employed while living among the Big
Nambas, he discovered that the variation between being an anthropologist at home
or abroad was not all that different.

Vast was the extension of the British Empire and this volume’s scope reflects it
accurately. This book shows that being an anthropologist was not a question of
studying remote tribes, for one could be an anthropologist in New Zealand or
England, Malaya or Ireland. Imperial concerns, literary aspirations, and a thirst for
knowledge come together in these writers’ accounts. The collection is attractive and
well-rounded and offers an accurate portrayal of the lives, research interests, and
works of those whose hearts remained forever in the places they described.