An Indignant Anthropologist Replies

That Honolulu Education Conference Again!

Letter to the Editor MY attention has been drawn to a letter in your June issue (P. 48). Its subject is anthropologists, and it is signed, “Educationalist of 20 Years’ Standing.”

I must apologise for asking you to publish so belated an answer as this. The immediate controversy (if it can be called one) may be dead; but the anthropolo gy sts aren’t. However regrettable that must seem to your correspondent, and as one of them. I feel sufficiently outraged to offer a reply in print.

Since the letter was written from Port Moresby, I have mentally ticked over my neighbours in the hope of discovering its author. But, while it is conceivable that some of them might write so splenetically on other subjects, I cannot imagine that the letter in question emanated from any one whom I know as an educationalist.

I dare not risk offending my friends by suggesting that any of them could have written in such a manner. In fact I am quite at a loss to know who the irritable old gentleman may be. But that is no matter.

The recent Conference on Education in Pacific countries, held at Honolulu, made no “recommendations.” It merely dis cussed problems. Though if it had made recommendations, one feels sure, from the consensus of opinion among its

members, that they would have been just the sort of thing to make your corres pondent wilder than ever.

He writes as if the Honolulu Confer ence were composed of anthropologists.

As a matter of fact they numbered about a dozen in a total membership of over 70.

The pernicious modern doctrines of which he complains as disseminated by the Conference cannot be attributed solely to this small minority. The 60 accredited educationalists who were also present must have had something to do with them.

It may also be remarked, incidentally, that in Honolulu educationalist and an thropologist hit it off very well together.

One is sure that even “E. 20 Y. 5.,” had he been present, would have melted a lit tie.

There are, it is sure, many aspirants in the anthropological lists, and one is bound to agree with your correspondent in his implication that some of them sometimes talk rubbish. What anthro pologist is there who does not often think this way about his colleagues? But then, so do we all, including educationalists of many years’ standing.

It is surely rather severe, however, to speak of anthropologists as a “frantic band of job-hunters,” and of their pub lications as “frantic efforts for pub licity.” Most would perhaps agree that a man who happens to have no job may be excused for seeking one; while, as f or publication, a man need not be called a publicity-seeker because, in writing what he thinks, he signs his name to it. The written word is the main weapon in a campaign which certain anthropologists, who are in league with a great many advanced educationalists, see fit to wage against old-fashioned and, as they think, mistaken methods in native education.

Anthropologists seldom fill more than an advisory capacity, and their advice may be taken or left.. But they can hardly be blamed if, in the interests of a cause, they give it. They do not wish as “E. 20 Y.S.” implies, to bolster up “obsolete practices and customs” in native life.

Neither do they have any sympathy for obsolete practices and customs in native education.

I am, etc..

F. E. Williams,

Government Anthropologist of Papua.

Pt. Moresby, 23/8/37.