Worlds Within and Worlds Without: Field Guide to an Intellectual Journey

By Michael Jackson

Anthropologist Michael Jackson predicates his intellectual autobiography, Worlds Within and Worlds Without, on the view that works and lives are intimately entangled. Through a skillful interweaving of personal and ethnographic descriptions, he focuses on the imaginative and practical ways human beings negotiate the space between worlds they call their own and worlds they regard as lying beyond their immediate purview.

Whether the worlds that elude our empirical grasp are identified with divinities or the dead, ether or earth, history or myth, the Internet, or the nation state, we experience them ambivalently, as potential sources of wellbeing and as possible threats to our very existence. Closing ourselves off from the world is not an option, for our humanity depends on the ties that bind us to significant others, and others to us. As Jackson shows, the relationship between the familiar and the foreign is not only an existential issue that all human beings address in one way or another. It is a methodological issue for anthropologists concerned with the complementarity of individual and collective perspectivesethnos and anthropos, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501768514

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson is Senior Research Fellow in World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

Book preview

I

AS THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

In the eyes of this small boy, the world lacks depth. People move like shadow puppets against a backlit screen, acting in a play in which he has no role or interest. He lives in a world of his own thoughts and feelings, though these are mercurial and curiously detached from the feelings and thoughts of others.

On Anzac Day, his school assembles at the cenotaph in the center of town. The marble soldier with bowed head is as ethereal as the sentiments to which the mayor and ministers pay lip service. What does it mean to remember them when he does not have the faintest idea who they were? How can he reconcile the frozen figure on his plinth with the old men in suits and campaign medals trudging past in improvised platoons? What does his school motto mean—Service before Self—when he does not know who he is and what service he could possibly render anyone?

In retrospect, I wonder whether it was my innocence or the culture in which I was immersed that made everything seem so one-dimensional.

On the rare winter days when the mountain was not camouflaged by raincloud and stood, snow-covered, against a cobalt sky, I thought it was a mirage. Years would pass before I clambered over its basalt slopes, crossed the Razorback, and identified Hongi’s Bluff where four nurses and two mountain guides plunged to their deaths on July 26, 1953. Sixty years later, Marie Mallett, who survived the accident only to be haunted all her life by the thought that it could have been her and not her friend who died, confessed that there was no healing for those involved, because they were not able to talk about it. Indeed, the survivors were told never to talk about it—just get on with your work.¹ As for my father, who was a member of the search and rescue party called out that day, he never spoke of the tragedy either. To spare his children’s feelings, I suppose. To protect us.

Those old soldiers with red poppies in their lapels also were tight-lipped about what they had seen and suffered, even though the price of their reticence was often marital misery or madness.² I was four when my uncles came home from the war. I remember the rough serge of their uniforms against my skin and the smell of crushed laurel leaves. In my teens, I asked them about their time in a POW camp in the Libyan Desert and their desperate rearguard actions in Crete, only to sense that my questions touched raw nerves or demanded answers they could not give. When my uncle Jack took his own life, the tragedy was hushed up. Battle fatigue, shell shock, and trauma were never mentioned.

What lay behind these conspiracies of silence, those adult injunctions to be good, meaning be quiet and don’t upset anyone? Were they unique to the provincial world in which I was raised or a legacy of the Protestant Reformation with its distrust of feeling and physicality, its obsession with sin?³ Was this cloying preoccupation with respectability born of a belief that in not talking about the things one feared they would magically go away? Like my grandmother’s mantra, Least said soonest mended. Keeping up appearances, whatever the cost, our violent colonial past was swept under the rug of history.

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My hometown was physically and socially divided by a railway line. While the eastern and oldest part of town was mainly working class and Catholic and the western part was predominantly Anglo and more affluent, these categories only roughly mirrored reality. Despite our Protestant background and newly-built state house, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks. Our neighbors were descendants of ethnic Poles who fled enforced Germanization and persecution in Northern Prussia in the 1870s and, through one of those tragic coincidences that defines the course of human history, the dispossessed in one hemisphere became the dispossessors in another.

At the far end of the street, opposite the Sacred Heart Church, the eight boisterous Kuklinski children were scarcely contained by the walls of their small worker’s cottage, while across from us lived the Fabishes, whose grandparents had been close friends of the Kuklinskis in Kokoszkowy, Prussia. The families emigrated together on the Fritz Reuter in 1876. The Fabishes’ garden was filled with camellias and chrysanthemums that Mrs. Fabish distributed within her Catholic community on All-Soul’s Eve. Her husband Mate was in his sixties and still as strong as an ox. Twice a year, he trimmed our gnarled and unruly holly hedge with a long-handled slasher while I raked up the leaves and carted them in a wheelbarrow to my father’s compost bin. A ramshackle and unpainted garage, housing an ancient Oldsmobile, separated the Fabishes’ home from the Murrays’ cottage where I surreptitiously read Eddie’s latest Marvel comics (which my mother preferred me not to read, arguing that English comics like Chick’s Own and Rainbow were more wholesome).

These ethnic, religious, class, and cultural distinctions ran like fault lines through Inglewood, surfacing in the ugly taunts I would hear as I crossed the tracks on my way to school: Catholic wogs, stink like dogs.

There were tensions, too, between the poor and the petty bourgeoisie, that found outward expression in the two streets that ran parallel on either side of the railway line. While Matai Street was lined with flourishing businesses, Moa Street—aptly named for an extinct and flightless bird—was a graveyard of derelict buildings, abandoned shops, and ghostly interiors.

Retracing my steps along Moa Street after the passage of so many years is not unlike descending into Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass world, where playing cards all bear an identical image on one side and disclose their real value only when flipped over.

The Inglewood Hotel stands at the corner of the street. Advertisements for Taranaki Ale and Dominion Breweries have been painted over the windows, and all the colors of the rainbow fall obliquely into the smoke-filled bar as if through the stained glass of a church. On the sidewalk, a sulfur-crested cockatoo in a cage squawks, Pretty Polly. Do I owe it an answer? Or do I ignore it, together with the men who stumble out of the pub and call me Snow, though they do not know me from a bar of soap?

Dommett’s Furniture Showroom is a shadow of what it once was. Second-hand couches and armchairs, iron frame beds, and antiquated dressing tables weigh heavily on the floorboards that creak and sag beneath my feet. From his dingy office at the back of the shop, Mr. Dommett peers out at another customer who is just looking.

When I ask my parents why all the other shops in Moa Street are vacant, I am told it is because of the Great Depression. The words suggest a catastrophe of which Frank Dommett appears to be the sole survivor, and it will take me many years of remembering the armless mannequins and faded advertisements of women in siren suits collecting dust in the building next door to realize that the boy who pressed his face against the unwashed windows of these dingy rooms was looking into his own soul. The abandonment was within him. There was something missing in his life that he could not identify but longed to find.

Nowadays, I interpret this experience in the light of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, in which a dim interior space is rendered even more impenetrable by the dirty glass through which the observer peers, the reflections of his face in the glass, and the reflections of the buildings, telegraph lines, and lowering sky behind him. In this Gestalt, no one element is stable or determinant, and this is equally true of memory and the imagination.

But I digress. I am forgetting that I am a child.

Until the 1960s, most children’s books in New Zealand were imported from England. During the war years, and for some time after, these imports were restricted, so the few books we did acquire were precious. Among these were the faraway tree novels by Enid Blyton.

The tree grew in an enchanted forest. Its upper branches were lost in the clouds, and small houses were built in its enormous trunk. When, as an adult, I read Italo Calvino’s philosophical fable, Il Barone Rampante (The Baron in the Trees) and saw Rene Magritte’s surrealist painting, La Voix du Sang (The Voice of Blood), I again felt the presence of an archetypal image that obliquely answered my yearning to be transported to a realm beyond the mundane one I actually inhabited. By dozing off on a summer’s day, lapsing into reverie, falling down a rabbit hole, walking through the back of a wardrobe into a land of ice and snow, or being lulled into a trance by a parent reading a bedtime story, we instantly cross a threshold into another, more nourishing world.

Since many of the books I read as a child were English, it was inevitable that I would fantasize England as a land of hedgerows, friendly animals, and fabulous cities. One particular illustrated book, given to me on my seventh birthday by my mother and father, perfectly captured this mystery of elsewhere. Mr. Mole’s Tunnel, told by Douglas Collins and illustrated by G. W. Blackhouse, begins with the dilemma of Mrs. Mole, whose shopping expeditions to a town on the sunny side of an enormous mountain took four hours to go, and five hours to come back.⁴ The first illustration in the book shows Mrs. Mole setting off from Shrew Hall to the train station. Four arms of a signpost point to Station, Faraway, Nowhere, and Someplace. Mrs. Mole decides that a move to Milesaway, on the sunny side of the mountain, is the only way of resolving the situation, but Mr. Mole is unwilling to move and devises an ingenious plan for staying put and enabling his wife to travel to Milesaway in no time at all. He will build a tunnel under the mountain.

In this simple tale is captured one of humanity’s oldest quandaries—how to be rooted in some dear perpetual place yet, at the same time, be able to tap into the resources of the wider world.

As a child listening to the story of the Billy Goats Gruff, it never occurred to me that the risks they took in crossing the ogre-protected bridge to greener pastures would not pay off. Though the story ends with the reunited family trotting happily toward a lush meadow studded with wildflowers, it is possible that, within a day of reaching this utopia, one of the goats looked back to the other side of the river and noticed that the pastures they had abandoned now looked greener than the pastures they had risked their lives to reach.

This was certainly the case for my grandmother, who came out to New Zealand in 1906 to marry my grandfather but never overcame her nostalgia for England. And what of the people these Anglo settlers overwhelmed and supplanted? What of the lands and connections they lost?

The Ngāti Maru were the tangata whenua (literally people of the placenta) of the densely forested lands on which Inglewood was built, and in pre-European times, their lands extended along the Upper Waitara River and its many tributaries. In the early nineteenth century, Ngāpuhi and Waikato taua (war parties), armed with muskets, caused untold havoc throughout this region. Then, three years after the first Taranaki Land War of 1860, Ngāti Maru lands were seized by the colonial government to punish the insurgent Taranaki tribes, help defray the costs of the military campaign against the Te Āti Awa chief Wiremu Kingi, and provide land for European settlement. Though Ngāti Maru had not actively waged war against the British, they had given refuge to Wiremu Kingi, who remained with his allies for twelve years before moving to Parihaka in 1872 to live under the protection of the pacifist leader Te Whiti-o-Rongomai.

When I was a boy, it never occurred to me that my friend Edward Te Mira Ngeru was heir to this traumatic past.

Eddie’s family lived in a barely furnished villa at the bottom of our street. The couch was threadbare, and the linoleum on the floor was scuffed and torn. Yet I was drawn to the homeliness of this poverty, the coal range on which Mrs. Ngeru baked sweetbreads, the endearing way she spoke to me. As for Eddie’s tribal affiliation, I only learned of this years later, when Eddie became a schoolteacher and contributed vital information to the 1995 Waitangi Tribunal report on which the $30-million-dollar treaty settlement of the Ngāti Maru land claim was based.

For most Pākehā kids growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, Māori were reviled as dirty and diseased or regarded as exotic Others whose culture could be appropriated to enhance Pākehā images of national identity. Condescendingly referred to as our Māoris, their language was suppressed in schools, their grievances ignored, their presence scarcely remarked. I remember the black-clad kuia (senior women) who would appear as if out of nowhere and peddle whitebait from door to door. They wore moko (tattoos) on their chins and smoked pipes. On autumn afternoons, they sat, shawls around their shoulders, flax kits at their feet, on benches outside the post office or on the curbs. At night, they vanished. Invoking Māori myth, my grandparents gave me to understand that Māori did not live in Inglewood because they believed Mt. Egmont would one day move back to join its kith and kin in the central North Island.⁵ I would come to see that this was a Pākehā ruse for ignoring the fact that Māori lands had been stolen or seized. It also was my introduction to how those in power derive spurious legitimacy from lambasting the powerless as creatures of irrationality and superstition. In Savage Club concerts, parodies of haka by white men with cocoa rubbed into their skin, minstrels in black-face with banjos, men in tutus, ventriloquists with obscene dolls, and an aging prostitute in garish makeup clutching a battered tuba and singing Roses in Picardy belied the club’s ostensible aim of providing rational entertainment under the motto of Tact—Talent and Tolerance.

Dismayed by this racist mockery and mystified by Eddie’s sudden departure, I developed a sentimental identification with all things Māori. In the same spirit with which Bob Dylan left Hibbing, Minnesota, to find somewhere he felt more at home, I sought contact with Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) as a way out of the world into which I had been arbitrarily thrown.

After restoring an old bicycle my father had used during the war, I biked to Waitara where, incredibly, many of the streets were still named for men who played major roles in the alienation of Te Āti Awa lands, including the crown’s chief purchasing agent Donald McLean, Land Purchase Commissioner Robert Parris, Governor Thomas Gore Browne, and military officers Charles Emilius Gold and Peter Cracroft. At Ōwae marae, I gleaned information about Te Āti Awa and the great tribal leaders Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitāke and Māui Wiremu Pita Naera Pōmare. I took photos of Pōmare’s Sicilian marble statue, unveiled in June 1936 at the same hui that inaugurated the carved house, Te Ikaroa a Māui. The tekoteko figure atop the painted bargeboards is Māui-tikitiki-a-Taranga, who fished up the North Island from the sea. Below him is the stylized head of Sir Māui, who pushed the government to set up a Royal Commission in 1927 to inquire into Māori grievances relating to the confiscation of Taranaki lands. Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitāke stands at the base of the pole.

From Waitara, I cycled on through a darkening and seemingly deserted landscape to the Te Rangi Hīroa Memorial near Urenui—a canoe prow thrusting from an overgrown hillside toward the sea. Born of an Irish father and Māori mother, Te Rangi Hīroa’s first language was English, but he remained attached to his roots. His stepmother’s mother was his tutor. She taught him his whakapapa (genealogy) and history. When Kapuakore (Cloudless) died in 1908, Te Rangi was twenty-eight. Inside her sleeping hut, he found the canoe paddle the old woman had used when ferrying him across the Urenui River. The paddle remained in his possession for as long as he lived, mounted on the wall of his office at the Bernice Bishop Museum in Honolulu. It hangs on the wall of my study as my most precious family heirloom, he wrote. I have studied under learned professors in stately halls of learning. But as I look at that paddle, I know that the teacher who laid the foundation of my understanding of my own people, and the Polynesian stock to which we belong, was a dear old lady with a tattooed face in a humble hut walled with tree-fern slabs.⁶

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With neither paddle nor guide, I had no way of reaching the Māori world, which, in any case, was more symbolic of my disaffection than socially real, and when I started high school (in another town, to which I traveled by bus every day), I abandoned many of my childhood interests, lost touch with my original classmates, and became something of a loner.

In my sixteenth year, this changed with my discovery of science. Maths was beyond me, but biology spoke to my love of the natural world, and I like to think the collection of local ferns and mosses I painstakingly dried, mounted, and identified for a school project foreshadowed the fulfillment I would find in ethnography, since the adventure of looking for these primitive phyla and the aesthetic pleasure they afforded me far outweighed the scientific knowledge I might have derived from studying their reproductive or adaptive functions.

I also pursued my interest in geography, which had earned me the highest grade in the national (School Certificate) exams, much to the satisfaction of my geography teacher, who congratulated himself on this evidence of talent in a hitherto unpromising pupil. If my botanical fieldwork inspired a more scientific attitude to the natural world, my attraction to geography was probably born of a yearning to broaden my horizons and escape the insular world in which I felt confined.

The movies offered another way out, though I became more enamored of the journalistic realism of John Nesbitt’s Passing Parade (The Ship that Died and This is the Bowery stand out in my memory) than the glitz of Hollywood musicals and romantic dramas. Clearly, however, two parallel sensibilities were beginning to find expression in my life: the first literary, and informed by an escapist tendency to fantasize and daydream; the second scientific, and based on empirical research. Even as I devoured adventure stories (A Town like Alice, Robinson Crusoe, Seven Years in Tibet, The Lost World, King Solomon’s Mines, Exploration Fawcett), I sought to satisfy my appetite for more scientific accounts of exotic societies and foreign environments. Every few weeks, the New Zealand Country Library Service’s mobile van left a new collection of books with our local library, which is how I came to read Darryl Forde’s Habitat, Economy, and Society (An introduction to the ethnography and human geography of non-European peoples) and William Howells’ Mankind So Far (Man’s History: Past, Present, and Probable Future). I still have on file the sixth form essay I wrote, inspired by Forde’s environmental determinism, in which I argued that the difference between civilized and primitive peoples lay in the kinds of intellectual and practical adaptations they had made to very different environments and not intrinsic differences in mental capacity. As for Howell’s riveting account of hominid evolution, this would become another reason why, one year later, I enrolled in anthropology at Auckland University.

I owe my enthusiasm for university to my elder sister Gabrielle who, in turn, had been inspired by our mother Emily, who had attended some lectures during her years in Wellington as a trainee schoolteacher. Emily always regretted that the gender and class prejudices of the 1920s denied her an opportunity to realize her dreams, and she derived deep satisfaction from seeing her daughter become the first person in our family to attend university.

In January 1955, we gathered on the railway platform to see her off. I recall the cyclopean eye of the K-locomotive bearing down on us and the suddenness with which the coal-black behemoth thundered through the station, brakes shrieking and rods clanking, before it came to a halt in a furious exhalation of steam. As it panted and hissed in its iron harness, my sister clambered up into a second-class carriage, soon to reappear at the window wiping away the grime and condensation with her sleeve and mouthing reassurances to my mother. My father already was at the guard’s van, ensuring that the big red wooden chest he had made for his daughter, bound with rope and addressed on every side, Helen Lowry Hall, Wellington, was safely loaded.

Minutes later, amid tears and stifled cries, with smoke and cinders engulfing us, the train pulled out of the shadows of the station. As I watched the red lanterns of the guard’s van disappear around the last bend before the bridge, I was filled with the exhilarating sense that I might soon be making this same journey.

That winter, Gabrielle brought home a friend from Wellington. Garbed in Gothic black, Jean Watson spoke in a world-weary drawl and entranced me with her Bohemian demeanor. Gabrielle explained that Jean was writing a novel, and she brought Jean’s portable typewriter to the dining table and dumped it in front of us as proof.⁷ It was a solid black Smith Corona. I saw it as a miniature version of the great K-locomotives that hauled the trains through Inglewood in the dead of night, their forlorn whistles holding out the promise of voyages and rebirth.

I begged to be allowed to use the typewriter, and stirred by the feel of metal keys and the authority of typescript on a sheet of white paper, I hammered out some surreptitious ramblings about the evils of racism and the problem of nature versus nurture. Then, on the strength of a few fragments of a conversation I had overheard between Jean and my sister, I wrote a poem.

I idolized Gabrielle. As small children, we were constant playmates, and when she went to university, I read and re-read her letters home, with their descriptions of lectures she had attended, friends she had made, and books that had shaped her thinking. This is how I came to read Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1940) and become fascinated by the paradoxical nature of human freedom, which we will die to defend yet willingly surrender to an autocratic leader or higher power on the strength of his promises to make our lives more existentially meaningful. Yet, at the same time we venerate the rich and powerful who, we imagine, possess absolute freedom, we resent and envy them. Even as we cede our liberty to them, we imagine the day when they will be toppled from their pedestals and we will receive their inheritance. This tension between the will to determine one’s own destiny, whether personal or collective, and the tendency to submit to forces one can neither control nor comprehend would become a leitmotif in all my books.

In the summer before beginning my final year at high school, I traveled to Wellington by train for a week’s holiday with Gabrielle, now married and lecturing in social psychology at Victoria University of Wellington.

As the train threaded its way along the coast near Paekākāriki, I gazed rapturously at waves breaking over black rocks, then the train plunged into a tunnel only to re-emerge into dazzling sunlight, the harbor and city shimmering like a mirage.

Gabrielle’s apartment in Khandallah took my breath away. On the dining table sat a wooden bowl of oranges. In the kitchen, a coffee percolator bubbled on the stovetop. Everything was marvelous: the Indian durries on the parquet floor, Val’s Marxist tomes and trade union histories in the bookshelves, the gramophone with its stack of Weavers and Woody Guthrie albums, the garlic bread Gabrielle served her guests for Sunday brunch, and people the likes of which I had never seen in my life, urbane, wine-drinking, energized, witty. Though utterly intimidated, I was in my element!

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

In the winter of 1957, my father, who had worked all his life as a clerk in the Bank of New South Wales, applied for a transfer to Auckland. I felt out of place in my new school, and as soon as I passed my university entrance exams, I went to work in a poultry mash factory with the intention of saving enough money over the summer months to supplement my university bursary.

It so happened that the Poultryman’s Cooperative had been founded by a distant kinsman, Fritz Jackson, whose grandfather was the brother of my father’s grandfather. Fritz was in his late sixties when I worked in his factory, and we rarely met. That we shared the same Jackson features and the same name were never remarked on. Thirty-seven years later, however, when Fritz’s daughter shared recollections of her father with me, I was struck by the uncanny parallels between his story and the stories of other Jacksons, my father and myself included—particularly our ability, in the face of adversity, to reinvent ourselves. Fritz originally had been a land buyer but lost his fortune in 1928 and 1929, when he became liable, under an archaic law, for the debts of the former owners and mortgagees of all the land he’d ever sold. Instead of declaring himself bankrupt, he elected to honor the law. Pera would remember her father slaving to scratch a living from the small farm he bought near Swanson. My heart used to go out to him, seeing him brought so low, his heart and health broken. But I could do nothing. After the war, when in his late fifties, Fritz established the Poultryman’s Cooperative.

The factory was unventilated and stifling. Beams and rafters were silted with flour and mouse scat. Sweat and dust collected on your skin like scabs. Trundling a handcart, I would go down into the basement for sacks of pollard, maize, bran, and grit. On the factory floor, I would unstitch the sacks and maneuver them to the edge of a steel-lined pit, from which the mixed mash would be conveyed by an augur into a massive overhead hopper. There were three such hoppers, working twelve hours a day, and you had to shout to make yourself heard above the din.

At tea breaks, I would lie among the grain sacks in the basement reading Erich Fromm, enthralled by the idea that one’s first duty in life was the realization of one’s full potential. After reading Notes from Underground, in which Dostoevsky argues that the meaning of life consists in proving to oneself that one is a person and not a piano key,¹ I perversely concluded that my responsibility to create a life for myself absolved me of any obligation to others.

Lew Stewart, who worked the number two hopper, was not impressed. That’s an eighteen-year-old talking, he said. One day you’ll realize it’s got fuck-all to do with creating yourself. You go through a fuckin’ war before you start preaching to me about creation. But Lew wasn’t going to tell me about his war, except to say he’d gone to university before he was called up and returned from the war to find his wife had ditched him for somebody else.

It’s sobering to compare Lew and Fritz. The one whose life had become an ineluctable descent into the abyss, assisted by booze and self-pity; the other who had picked himself up, paid his dues, and begun again.

What would be my fate?

IT’S OTHER PEOPLE WHO ARE MY OLD AGE

As a boy, I was fascinated by what drew people to their various trades.¹ What led Mr. Trigger to take up butchery and his brother to become a chimney sweep? What gratification did Mrs. Peters, our draper, derive from the curiously magnified sound of her scissors on the wooden countertop as she sheered through a yard of muslin, and what, in her European past, presaged the skill with which she pulled a length of baft from a bolt and laid it along the calibrated brass edge of the shop counter? What were the secret links between their invisible and visible lives?

When I enrolled in first-year courses in geography, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and English, I had no idea where this would lead me. Apart from scribbling poetry—which my parents warned could never be a livelihood—I had no sense of and no interest in a career. Though I became inspired by Jack Golson’s lectures on Mesopotamia, Bruce Biggs’s Introduction to te reo (Māori language), Michael Joseph’s anecdotes about Shakespeare’s London, and Harry Scott’s reminiscences of being a human guinea pig in Donald Hebb’s experiments on sensory deprivation at McGill, I never saw myself as a teacher, and would not appreciate for many years the subtle and unfathomable interplay between external influence and inner disposition that gradually gives shape to a particular biography.

First-year social anthropology was taught by Professor Ralph O’Reilly Piddington. Though only fifty-two, he appeared, in my callow eyes, ancient. With his thinning hair, rheumy eyes, and palsied hands, I found it impossible to imagine he had ever been young, let alone as idealistic and adventuresome as I imagined myself to be. His dogged defenses of Malinowski’s functionalism, and the rumors of his Parkinsonism and fondness for whisky, only reinforced my unsympathetic attitude.² While his two-volume An Introduction to Social Anthropology, already in its second edition, contained ample evidence of his fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia, I was indifferent to it. All I could