Nineteenth century anthropology and its impact on Lieutenant-General Pitt Rivers
Extract from W. Chapman's unpublished D.Phil thesis 1981, 'Ethnology
in the Museum'
(p174 and on)
(Note: throughout this thesis Chapman calls Pitt Rivers 'Fox')
The Ethnological Society of London
Fox's commitment to an expanded scope and programme for his collection can be traced most clearly to his association with the Ethnological Society of London, an organisation to which he was first elected in 1861, or shortly after his move to Ireland. He was present at meeting by the autumn of that year, or just prior to his Canadian assignment, and apparently resumed his involvement in the following spring. His appointment in Ireland again disrupted his activities to a certain extent, but he obviously managed to keep abreast of developments through the Society's journal as well as through occasional return visits to London. His initial commitment, however, was by all indications a tentative one, with Fox declining a life membership, as well as what was called a 'Composition Fee', and opting instead to pay the minimum subscription rate of £2 per annum. By the mid-1860s, however, it was clear his attachment was more firmly established and that the Ethnological Society and its attendant activities were to become a principal focus of his interests.
... First founded in 1843, essentially as an offshoot of the Quaker dominated Aborigine's Protection Society, the Society has assumed a relatively open attitude towards recruitment from the first. ... At the time Fox joined, in fact, the Society was particularly eager to gain new members, the organisation's total numbers having declined significantly over the course of recent years so that by the late 1850s there were rarely more than three or four members present at official functions. Often meetings had to be cancelled entirely. Efforts to offset the decline were evidently successful, however, for by 1863 the total number had risen to 211 from less than 40 just three years before.
The most striking aspect of the Society during the period of Fox's early association was the relative youth and vigour of its membership. A large percentage were, like Fox, still in their twenties or early thirties. Most too were relatively new to the practice of organised science. ... As a result, the newer members, again Fox among them, would have considerable opportunity to redirect both the aims and functions of the Society ... In 1863, meetings began to be held fortnightly rather than monthly, as they had been before, and a new journal published by Trübner, had been established to provide for an ever-increasing outpouring of essays and other notices.
As among most other scientific societies of the period there was a considerable amount of overlap in terms of membership and interest .... But [of the members of the Society] most of those with a military connection fell under the heading of what might be termed travellers or adventurers, rather than professional soldiers ... More typically in attendance were veterans of land and naval expeditions such as Admiral Fitzroy (1805-1865), previously of the Adventurer and Beagle or Clements Markham, of the HMS Assistant's famous Arctic voyage. Geographers were present in force. ...
The most important factor in terms of Fox's involvement, however, was the large attendance on the part of antiquarians or archaeologists. That community had been active in ethnology since the mid-century. ... Other noted archaeologists within the society included ... Henry Christy ... John Evans, John Lubbock and A.W. Franks ... Fox himself would be elected a member of the Council by 1867, and by the following year was serving as a vice-president.
The ethnological and archaeological communities were, as Fox's own efforts suggest, almost natural allies. ... That, of course, was precisely the interest that Fox reveals in his study of Ogham inscriptions with his suggestion of a racial connection between the primitive inhabitants of Ireland and the modern Eskimo [Inuit]. Again, like so many other archaeologists, he was merely interested in gaining some better understanding - or a 'few glimmerings' as Mosley put it - of the 'primeval race' which once covered Europe and from which modern man has descended (Oswald Mosley, 'Inaugural Discourse ...' Journal of the British Archaeological Association 7 (1851) 180).
As with many other members of the Society, Fox's initial interest in ethnology was sparked in part by the controversy over what he called 'the long ridiculated discoveries of the Relics of Prehistoric Man by M. Boucher de Perthes' (Pitt Rivers, Presidential Address 1887 p271) and by a broader interest in the questions of race and racial characteristics. ...
To some degree, Fox's initial interest might be characterised as a technical one. Ethnology, with its long-standing emphasis on descriptions of physical characteristics, provided many of the more specialised answers to Fox's questions regarding human remains discovered in the course of excavations ... The Society itself was well-appointed with anatomists and physicians familiar with the evidence of the kind Fox was seeking ...
Although Fox might be said to be originally attracted to ethnology for the expertise that he lacked, perhaps of even more immediate interest to him at the time was the general question of comparison or 'analogy', as it was commonly known. Fox had for many years been interested in the way in which weapons and other implements of 'modern savages' (or 'savage races' in Fox's terms) could be said to represent those of ancient races. His collection had expressed such a preoccupation from the beginning, with exotic weapons serving ... as an explicit substitute for ancient ones. But during the early sixties, in the aftermath of the Somme evidence [Boucher de Perthes], Fox's assumption tended to take on an expanded significance. Modern weapons and implements offered to Fox perhaps the single, most important key to understanding prehistoric ones and the ancient races that made them. Correspondingly for Fox, along with many other ethnologists, the tools of ancient man provided a kind of barometer of intellectual and social development - a scale against which the growing catalogue of 'modern races' or 'nations' could be measured. ...
Fox's understanding of the comparative value of the ethnographical evidence varied only slightly over the years. ... exotic materials were always understood as what might be termed 'approximations' of prehistoric ones, not their true equivalents. Nonetheless, most of his early writings on the subject suggest a more outspoken position, if only for effect. As he explained in 1867:
The existing races, in their respective stages of progression, may be taken as the bona fide representatives of the races of antiquity; and marvellous as it may appear to us in these days of rapid progress, their habits and arts, even to the form of their rudest weapons, have continued in many cases, with but slight modifications, unchanged through countless ages, and from periods long prior to the commencement of history. They thus afford us living illustrations of the social customs, the forms of government, laws, and warlike practices which belonged to the ancient races from which they remotely sprung, ... (Pitt Rivers, 'Primitive Warfare' I: 618)
... Over twenty years late he still characterized 'ethnology' as the discipline which 'was to enable us to appreciate the social and material condition of the aborigines of our country by a comparison of their relics with the arts of the modern savages'. That his final allegiance was always to prehistory can be little doubted; the evidence derived from ethnology merely helped to fill in the background.
Fox apparently first became interested in accounts of exotic peoples as a means of understanding his other sources of record during the early 1860s, or at the time when he first began to put his collection together. His earliest writings are filled with references to travellers' accounts, histories of naval voyages and memoirs of consular officers and missionaries. The record of Fox's research offers an interesting parallel to his collection, both consisting of isolated 'facts' gleaned from often disparate sources and brought together for the purpose of illustrating a single theme - the progress of technology. Historical context or chronology were only rarely considered. Herodotus's descriptions of the interior of Africa ... or ... Sir Henry Blount's Voyage into the Levant of 1636 ... were referred to in the same way as contemporary descriptions and were treated as of equal value. ...
Consistently, Fox's main - and indeed almost exclusive - interest remained with weapons and their uses. ... Burton [Sir Richard Burton] and Petherick were similarly cited for their eyewitness accounts of native practices. Sources of that kind, after all, were Fox's only means of access to the people's represented through his collection. ... [Chapman here refers to the limited amount of time Pitt Rivers spent abroad]
Nevertheless, it would be misleading to suggest that Fox felt himself barred from what later anthropologists would call the 'field experience'. He clearly saw his role as a synthesising one, that is as bringing together material collected elsewhere. There was nothing unusual in such a view, and, indeed, Fox's understanding of the ethnologist's task was, if anything, typical. Few of Fox's fellow ethnologists were travellers themselves ...
For the most part Fox was to remain dependent on the word of others. Nonetheless, his only real criticism concerned the accuracy of such accounts, not of the accounts themselves, and Fox soon attempted to ameliorate their inconsistencies through the provision of a more systematic guide for the recording of practices, particularly those touching upon the use of native weapons. Eventually, his recommendations would take shape in his contributions to the material culture segment of the Anthropological Institute's Notes and Queries for Travellers and Ethnologists, first published under the auspices of the British Association in 1872-3. Until then, however, he had to accept whatever information was available.
The Ethnological Society of the early sixties was perhaps the inevitable focus for someone of Fox's interests. Indeed, in no other organisation did descriptions of the technology and customs or arts of exotic peoples form so central a feature. ...Often examples were brought to meetings for demonstration purposes, usually remaining on display ... for some time afterwards, where interested members such as Fox, could then view them at leisure.
Probably the single most important presentation of that kind during the period ... was that of Sir Edward Belcher (1799 - 1877), 'On the Manufacture of Works of Art by the Esquimaux', delivered in the autumn of 1861 or shortly before Fox's departure for Canada. ... Whether Fox received any actual objects from Belcher's collection at that early date as well is less clear ...
Belcher's collection was valued by Fox not only for its extent and variety but for its having been obtained in such a well-documented way. ... Fox's collection, despite his claims to the contrary, tended to be built up through chance gifts and exchanges, and as a result often included pieces for which the provenance was less than certain. The many unattributed pieces in his catalogue alone give some indication of the extent of Fox's practice. ...
The interests of ethnologists had traditionally settled on the physical differences among men and upon their origins. ... As with the archaeological community, the ethnologists saw their task as essentially an historical one ... The basic paradigm ... was a kind of genealogical tree ... [t]he founding principle was the determination of whether mankind was 'of one blood' ... most ethnologists had tended to settle on [a] ... programme based not on the comparison of man's artefacts, as in Fox's case, but on the comparative study of language. ... Papers published in the Society's Transactions between 1861 and 1863, again, the period when Fox's interests in ethnology were first being shaped, ranged from discussions of the influence of climate on race through descriptions of racial types to the summaries of recent archaeological discoveries in the Middle East. If anything could be said to have defined the Society during this period, therefore, it was its very lack of definition. ...
The Anthropological Society of London
Another organisation with which Fox was associated during the mid-1860s, and one that eventually helped to define the scope of his ambitions, was the Anthropological Society of London. Founded in 1863, ostensibly to provide an alternative to the Ethnological Society after the latter had allowed the admission of the 'fair sex' to meetings ... the Anthropological Society was, in many ways, less a scientific society than a polemical club. ... The main claim of the Anthropological Society was that it would encompass 'the science of the whole nature of Man', and that was no doubt at least part of its attraction for Fox as well as others. Ethnology itself was considered 'only one of the branches of Anthropology', the latter term suggested by [James] Hunt as a far older one for the subject. Anatomy, physiology, psychology, ethnography, philology, history, archaeology and palaeontology were listed as others. ... however, the Society's air of scientific detachment simply masked the more fundamentally racialist attitudes of its principal figures, as Fox came to realise. ... The last main attraction of the Anthropological Society for Fox was its open espousal of the museum as a potential research tool. ... While the Anthropological and Ethnological Societies have tended to be treated as mutually exclusive entities ... there was in fact a great deal of overlap, as Fox's own dual membership suggests. Other members present in both institutions included Huxley, John Lubbock, Henry Christy, John Thurman and John Evans, most of whom were prominent archaeologists as well. ... by 1866, or just three years after the Society's foundation, it had already entered a decline.
Amalgamation of the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies
(p334 and on)
... The Society has obviously made a number of important advances .. in .. 1870 ... over 30 papers has been delivered on subjects ranging from 'The Chinese Race ...' to several discussions of British archaeological remains. The quarterly Journal itself has been a 'considerable success' .. The question of amalgamation with the less-respectable sister society had also been broached ... Following Hunt's death, the Anthropological Society itself, ... had generally lapsed into disarray. ... Most ethnologists, including Fox, had long since withdrawn their support entirely. ... By way of a preliminary effort both organizations had already agreed to meet that summer as a single subsection called 'Ethnology and Anthropology' at the British Association at Liverpool. ... Fox was present at the British Association meeting, ... where the first steps were taken. ... Final negotiations ... took place in January 1871. The final name, the Anthropological Institute, by which it is still known [actually now the Royal Anthropological Institute], was generally accepted ...