Melbourne
Sept 10.97
My dear Balfour
Many thanks for your letter & offer of help.
I am afraid that there will be a good deal of difficulty in persuading any publisher to take our work. Much of it is of such detailed description that it will be of interest to anthropologists pure & simple only. There are of course parts of general interest & the photo. illustrations will some of them, be rather striking.
I have read a good deal of anthrop. but really doubt if the
customs & organisation of any one tribe or rather group of tribes has been dealt with before in such detail. It is hard to know what to leave out. With copious illustrations without which we shall not publish ^ it means a book at least half as large again & in the same type as Jevon’s ‘Introd. to the Hist. Of Religion’. I have just been through this & like it very much in many ways more especially till I came to the last chapter which some how or another doesn’t seem to me to fir on to the rest of the book.
It is astonishing how, when once you have spent any time amongst savages you divide Anthop. writers up as you read them into those who understand savages & those who don’t. Tylor pre-eminently does, so does Frazer, Jevons does to a large extent, Westermarck does not & though it sounds like heresy I don’t think McLennan does. Lang is a mystery to me. His ‘Myths Ritual & Religion’ strikes me as being really good so is ‘Customs & Myths’ though both are very sketchy & rather give one the idea of an able man who doesn’t really take a deep interest in the work but has a wonderful knack of getting hold of the leading features. His ‘modern mythology’ though it smites Max Muller hip & thigh is disappointing. of all English works Tylors ‘Primitive Culture’ stands out as a masterpiece.
Now a days we can hardly get any one to record his experiences unliassed by a theory. Ellis in his Eure-speaking & omba & Isli people is simply talking the language of McLennan, of course I can only judge the latter as regards his Australian section but after having read & reread & again reread this I must confess to not being able to understand it though I think
that I know the Australian pretty well. However as he deliberately declined to take any notice of recent work (which in the case of Australia would have upset his own theory) this is not perhaps to be wondered at. It need hardly be said that we owe a great deal to him but we should owe still more if he had not been so prejudicial against people whose theories did not accord with his own.
A short time ago I read through Miss Kingsley – it was just as much as I could do to get through it - & after expecting much was greatly disappointed. It is simply waste of time for a woman to attempt to find anything out from men. What she should do is work exclusively amongst the women. I am quite sure that there are many things pertaining to women which we men have no more chance of finding out than has a woman of discovering the things which are held sacred by men.
Melbourne.
Sept 20/97
If an Australian black for example had the slightest idea that either Gillen or myself were attempting to get information from the women they would tell us nothing. There are secret customs amongst the women just as amongst the men but whilst (white) men can find out ‘sub rosa’ from the women, women cannot find out anything from the men & for this reason the information of a woman like Miss Kingsley is only valuable in regard to secret or sacred ceremonies amongst the women. What the men tell her with regard to their sacred or secret ceremonies are just the same ‘fairly-tale’ as they tell to their own women. A man may, if he knows the savage tribe well enough, find out ^some of the women’s
secrets but a woman will never find out the men’s wherefore from this point of view Miss Kinsley might as well stay at home.
In your letter you speak of certain ‘schools’ in regard to Australian ‘art’. Such undoubtedly exist and when once Gillen & myself have got through our present work I will try & see if we can do anything with them. My present idea is that we have an Eastern Central & Western ‘school’, but this idea may be upset. The great difficulty is that we have no good collection to work upon. In Melbourne we have nothing at all & in Western Australia less still. Sydney even is very poor in Australian things while Adelaide has a good deal the best Aust. Coll. & is especially well of in South & Central things. Still taking everything into account the remarkable feature of Aust. Collections is their poverty in Aust. things.
I have just been reading a small pamphlet by a man named Squires on the “Ritual, Myth & Customs of the Aust. Aborigines”. The name & certain internal evidence suggests the influence of Lang & his information is not I fancy at first hand but he says distinctly that the consummation of the initiation rites consists in bleeding a man to death & then cooking ^ & eating the flesh. He says the man is “of high caste & without blemish” & this & one or two other things make me very suspicious indeed. I have written up to him
asking for his evidence in as polite a way as I can and hope from the tenor of his letter if he deigns a reply to be able to judge somewhat of his reliability for unfortunately we suffer much from odd statements being regarded as true & finding their way into a text book & then being copied ad. lib. until people come to forget on what a slender basis of proof they really rest.
I hope that things go well with you in Oxford & before long I hope also to be able to send you a few odd things.
It was very kind of Horn to promise you the Anthrop. photos. but they don’t belong to him but to Gillen who handed them over on the distinct understanding that copies were not to be given away without his permission. However we can let you have some much better ones now.
I hear that a “Dr Roth” has been working amongst Queensland natives in the far north & that he has a work of ‘very great value’ concerning their customs in the press. I fancy it is the celebrated Roth of our times.
Yours very sincerely
W. Baldwin Spencer.
