Chicanery: Senior Academic Appointments in Antipodean Anthropology, 1920–1960

By Geoffrey Gray, Doug Munro and Christine Winter

Academic appointments can bring forth unexpected and unforeseen contests and tensions, cause humiliation and embarrassment for unsuccessful applicants and reveal unexpected allies and enemies. It is also a time when harsh assessments can be made about colleagues’ intellectual abilities and their capacity as a scholar and fieldworker. The assessors’ reports were often disturbingly personal, laying bare their likes and dislikes that could determine the futures of peers and colleagues. Chicanery deals with how the founding Chairs at Sydney, the Australian National University, Auckland and Western Australia dealt with this process, and includes accounts of the appointments of influential anthropologists such as Raymond Firth and Alexander Ratcliffe-Brown.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: May 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800739710

Geoffrey Gray

Geoffrey Gray is Adjunct Professor at the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland.

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CHICANERY

Methodology and History in Anthropology

Series Editors:

David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford

David Gellner, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford

Nayanika Mathur, Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford

Volume 44

Chicanery: Senior Academic Appointments in Antipodean Anthropology, 1920–1960

Geoffrey Gray, Doug Munro and Christine Winter

Volume 43

The Social Origins of Thought: Durkheim, Mauss, and the Category Project

Edited by Johannes F.M. Schick, Mario Schmidt and Martin Zillinger

Volume 42

Franz Baermann Steiner: A Stranger in the World

Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

Volume 41

Anthropology and Ethnography Are NOT Equivalent: Reorienting Anthropology for the Future

Edited by Irfan Ahmad

Volume 40

Search After Method: Sensing, Moving, and Imagining in Anthropological Fieldwork

Edited by Julie Laplante, Ari Gandsman and Willow Scobie

Volume 39

After Society: Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford

Edited by João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman

Volume 38

Total Atheism: Secular Activism and the Politics of Difference in South India

Stefan Binder

Volume 37

Crossing Histories and Ethnographies: Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste

Edited by Ricardo Roque and Elizabeth G. Traube

Volume 36

Engaging Evil: A Moral Anthropology

Edited by William C. Olsen and Thomas J. Csordas

Volume 35

Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa

Koen Stroeken

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website:

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CHICANERY

Senior Academic Appointments in

Antipodean Anthropology, 1920–1960

Geoffrey Gray, Doug Munro and Christine Winter

First published in 2023 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2023 Geoffrey Gray, Doug Munro and Christine Winter

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gray, Geoffrey, author. | Munro, Doug, author. | Winter, Christine, author.

Title: Chicanery : senior academic appointments in antipodean anthropology, 1920-1960 / Geoffrey Gray, Doug Munro and Christine Winter.

Description: First edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Methodology & history in anthropology ; 44 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022054548 (print) | LCCN 2022054549 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800739703 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800739710 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: College teachers--Selection and appointment--Case studies. | Anthropologists--Australia--Scholarships. | Anthropologists--New Zealand--Scholarships. | Anthropology--Study and teaching (Higher)--Australia. | Anthropology--Study and teaching (Higher)--New Zealand.

Classification: LCC LB2331.7 .G73 2023 (print) | LCC LB2331.7 (ebook) | DDC 378.1/20994--dc23/eng/20230201

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054548

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054549

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-970-3 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80073-971-0 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800739703

Where in the anthropology we write do we deal with those high realities of academic actuality: the smear, the careful silences, the well-placed knife, the packing of panels of selectors, and the arts of prearranged judgement?

—W.E.H. Stanner

CONTENTS

Prologue

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. Establishing Social Anthropology in the Antipodes

Chapter 2. Anthropology at Sydney: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and A.P. Elkin

Chapter 3. Australasian Anthropology during the Second World War

Chapter 4. ‘A Matter of Reproach to New Zealand’: Auckland University College, 1949

Chapter 5. ‘The Brightest of His Generation’: Siegfried Frederick Nadel, Foundation Professor of Anthropology, the Australian National University

Chapter 6. Finding a Successor to A.P. Elkin, 1955

Chapter 7. Expansion: Anthropology at the University of Western Australia

Chapter 8. A Successor to S.F. Nadel

Chapter 9. Sydney Again

Conclusion

Epilogue

References

Index

PROLOGUE

As a professional field of inquiry, social anthropology emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, though it had many progenitors. It evolved from a field of sister disciplines and developed complex relationships with these. A racially informed psychology and colonial-experienced Christian mission are two to mention. Some of our cohort had an interest in or studied psychology, such as Ralph Piddington, who was awarded a Master of Arts in anthropology and Master of Arts in psychology at the University of Sydney; in 1931 he studied under S.D. Porteus in Hawai`i on how to conduct psychological tests for his fieldwork (Gray 1994b; Anderson 2014). Reo Fortune, studying dreams at Cambridge, completed his doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University. In New Zealand Earnest Beaglehole regarded himself primarily as a psychologist, though his legacy as an anthropologist persists. S.F. Nadel in turn tried to establish anthropology combined with sociology and psychology at the Australian National University (ANU). Others came out of active church service and entered anthropology as a second career. This was more widespread in German-speaking Europe, with the Catholic Father Wilhelm Schmidt occupying a chair in anthropology in Vienna, and Protestant missionary Diedrich Westermann, Professor of African studies in Berlin. Thus, while Anglican priest A.P. Elkin’s double career in his church and in anthropology – he remained active in the New South Wales Anglican church all his life – seems unusual within our cohort, other anthropologists also remained active in their respective religion, such as Camilla Wedgewood’s engagement in Quaker politics.

Anthropology in the Antipodes, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was wide-ranging in its interests, driven by a belief that ‘native’ peoples were doomed to extinction; its focus was on the ‘examination of the intellectual and material progress of man from the earliest ages down to the present’ (J.J. Wild, in Mulvaney 1988: 196). As a separate discipline and as a formal programme of study, social anthropology did not emerge in the Antipodes until after the First World War, although there were resolutions passed by learned societies and associations, especially the British Association for the Advancement of Science, its Australasian counterpart, the Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, and at various Pan-Pacific Science congresses for the creation of academic appointments in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (Mulvaney 1988; Peterson 1991; Gray 2007a; Anderson 2019). This was driven in part by the perceived needs of colonial administrations in Oceania. Anthropology, it was argued, could assist in uplifting colonized peoples through a better understanding of their cultural, social and political lives. Initially, there were calls for the appointment of government anthropologists in the Australian territory of Papua and the territory of New Guinea, a League of Nations ‘C’ Mandate, as well as the training of field officers in anthropology, suggesting an enlightened and humane colonialism. As the newly founded League of Nations underlined: ‘the preservation, progress and welfare of the native population’ was a ‘sacred duty’ – a clear although problematic role for the new discipline of anthropology (see, for example, Bourmaud et al. 2020; Gordon 2021).

When Australian governments made these appointments, it was British anthropologists from whom they sought advice.¹ Robert R. Marett at Oxford University recommended Francis Edgar Williams for the position of assistant government anthropologist in Papua; the position of government anthropologist was held by William M. Strong, the chief medical officer, until his retirement in 1928, when Williams took over. In 1924, Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon recommended Ernest W.P. Chinnery as government anthropologist in New Guinea. Both Williams and Chinnery had diplomas of anthropology, from Oxford and Cambridge respectively. Despite various recommendations, the Aotearoa/New Zealand Government rejected such positions for Samoa and the Cook Islands (Ross 1959: 221–33). In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the establishment of the Maori Ethnological Research Fund was enthusiastically supported by the Anthropological and Ethnological Section of the 1923 Pan-Pacific Science Congress, held in Sydney and Melbourne. The participants were gratified in finding support from ‘one of the native races of the Pacific’ (Skinner 1923; McCarthy and Tapsell 2019). Indeed, the Board of Maori Ethnological Research (BMER) sponsored the research of select anthropologists, such as Roger Keesing, with a view to better governing New Zealand’s Pacific colonial dependencies.

It was during the interwar period that Australian social anthropology became a recognized academic discipline with the accoutrements of professionalization: specialized and specific qualifications and training, specific funding for research problems, a growing body of specialists, a journal devoted to publishing the results of research, and various attempts to ‘control a market for their expertise’ (Larson 1977: xvi; Wright 2005: 4–5). Those years saw the demise of the amateur ethnographer, who was usually associated with museum anthropology. However, the primary journals Mankind and Oceania (in Australia) and The Journal of the Polynesian Society (in Aotearoa/New Zealand) underwent a gradual shift to privilege the writing of professional anthropologists over amateurs.

At the London School of Economics (LSE), Bronisław Malinowski supervised and encouraged a generation of anthropologists. He did what he could to support some of his students, such as Raymond Firth, for the few academic appointments of the period. This did not stop him from interfering in placements such as a replacement for A.R. Radcliffe-Brown at the University of Sydney. Radcliffe-Brown, a key theorist of the time, likewise was rarely consulted by either the academy or the government. Haddon, a generation earlier, possibly had greater influence: he recommended Malinowski for work at the LSE, and he was consulted over both the Cape Town (1920) and the Sydney (1925) chairs and supported Radcliffe-Brown for both positions (Hammond-Tooke 1997; Young 2004: 168; Gray 2007a: 1–29; Mills 2008: 29–48). He supported Henry D. Skinner for the Otago University position (1919). This is not to say, however, that within the limitations of a fledgling discipline, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown did not support their students in obtaining positions. Cambridge and Oxford were marginal to the expansion of social anthropology – Oxford less so than Cambridge.² However, with the appointment of Radcliffe-Brown (and E.E. Evans-Pritchard in 1935 as research lecturer in African sociology), postwar Oxford became a centre of influence in the development of British anthropology.³

The paucity of academic positions – both teaching and research – meant a career in anthropology was largely dependent on the goodwill and patronage of senior scholars.⁴ Without the support of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial’s funding of research, the expansion of anthropology would have been severely limited. The University of Sydney was initially the primary recipient of funds for anthropological research. As a result, Sydney became ‘a center from or through which field research was carried on, not only in Australia, but throughout’ Oceania (Stocking 1995: 340; see also Gray 2007a, 2010). Once Malinowski engineered Rockefeller funding for the LSE’s International Institute of African Language and Culture (IIALC), the emphasis was on Africa, especially the British colonies. Rockefeller funding in Australia ceased in 1935.

British-trained anthropologists who had established themselves before the Second World War are referred to as ‘pioneers’.⁵ Anthropologist and historian of British social anthropology Adam Kuper regards this small group of anthropology professors as dispensers of patronage: they held ‘key positions on government grant-giving committees’ and ‘the decisive voice in the appointment of staff and often in the choice of … graduate students’. They could ‘effectively withhold or grant promotions, leaves and other privileges, and [their] recommendation was crucial in any application for a research grant or for a position elsewhere. [They were] generally the only effective channel of communication with the university authorities and grant-giving bodies’ (Kuper 1983: 125). Of those, Evans-Pritchard, Raymond Firth and Daryll Forde stand out in postwar anthropology. Firth seems to have exercised the greatest influence and his recommendations for senior appointments were most likely to be accepted. He, above all others, was most entangled, but he claimed he was able to – and it was generally accepted that he could – stand apart from personal friendships and make a decision that reflected the needs of the university. Firth’s influence and advice extended from Australasia to South Africa and Canada (Gray and Winter 2021). Evans-Pritchard and Forde were consulted over senior positions within the United Kingdom as well as the Commonwealth of Nations (the renamed British Empire), but Evans-Pritchard seemed somewhat uninterested at times, such as the appointments to the ANU and the University of Sydney (see Goody 1995: 81–83).⁶ The expansion in teaching and research and the establishment of new positions and institutions across the dominions enabled Firth to become the most influential anthropologist of the postwar period.

Notes

1. The University of New Zealand sent examination papers for assessment to UK scholars.

2. Edmund Leach is scathing in his assessment of Cambridge anthropology before the Second World War. In his view, despite the history propagated at Cambridge that the field started in 1901 with the appointment of Haddon and Rivers, ‘[t]he most remarkable feature of Cambridge anthropology during this period was that Haddon and Rivers failed to establish anything at all’ (Leach 1984: 4). Haddon’s successors were former Indian public servants. Anthropology was revived by the appointment of Meyer Fortes to the William Wyse Chair in 1951.

3. ‘The electors were inclined toward Malinowski, who excluded himself in favour of Radcliffe-Brown’ (Stocking 1995: 360–66; see also David Mills, in Riviere 2007: 85–87). Mills, however, seems to ignore Radcliffe-Brown’s experiences in establishing anthropology at Cape Town, Sydney and Chicago; rather, he emphasizes Malinowski’s experiences at the LSE as the template for Oxford. See also James (2007).

4. Of the interwar Australians who completed their doctorates in London, only A.P. Elkin and H. Ian Hogbin were employed in Australia. Ralph Piddington (Aberdeen, Edinburgh), Phyllis Kaberry (Yale, University College London), W.E.H. Stanner (Oxford, Makerere) and C.W.M. Hart (who had not completed his doctorate; Toronto, Canada) were employed outside Australia. University of Melbourne anthropologist Donald Thomson received his doctorate from Cambridge. Of the pre-war New Zealanders, only Raymond Firth did anthropology at the LSE; Felix Keesing on the other hand remained in New Zealand, being awarded his D. Litt in 1934. Ernest Beaglehole briefly attended the LSE but not to do anthropology. Reo Fortune went initially to Cambridge, and later to Columbia University, where he completed his PhD. I.L.G. Sutherland obtained his PhD from the University of Glasgow. Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa), although a medical practitioner, developed an interest in anthropology and was appointed director of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Hawai`i.

5. For a detailed account of the interwar students funded by the Rockefeller Foundation at the LSE, see Goody (1995: 26–28, ff.).

6. Audrey Richards and Phyllis Kaberry never had a chair; Lucy Mair had to wait until 1963.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Always in a project like this, which has extended over many years, we hope we have forgotten no-one who provided assistance and support.

We would like to acknowledge numerous archivists who went out of their way to be of assistance: Julia Mant and Tim Robinson at the University of Sydney Archives; Libby Nicholl, Records Management Programme Manager, Office of the Vice-Chancellor, University of Auckland; Sarah Walpole, Royal Anthropological Institute; staff at the LSE archives; staff at the ANU Library and the Noel Butlin Archives. A blanket thank you goes to the staff in the Manuscripts Section of the National Library of Australia and the archives of the University of Vienna. We also want to thank Jan Borrie for once again doing a splendid copy edit and index and Rachel Evans for her final edit.

We thank Tim Causer (then at King’s College London) for his inspired research assistance among London archival repositories. At various times, Michael Young, Cyril Belshaw and Jeremy Beckett commented on earlier versions. Andy Pawley, Jack Golson, Steven Webster, Caroline Thomas and the late Anthony Hooper assisted by reading some aspect of our work, simply talking with us or suggesting archival material. We would like to thank Terrence Hays, Lamont Lindstrom and Stephen Foster, who also commented helpfully on earlier material and our interest in writing a book on senior appointments. Michael Young encouraged us to make this material into a book. We would also like to thank the late Raymond Firth and the late John Barnes for discussions on some of these matters; Hugh Firth for quotation rights from his father’s papers; and Rory Barnes for discussing his father and allowing us to repeat what he said. We are grateful for their encouragement, comments and observations, but any shortcomings rest with us.

We have used material from our jointly and singly authored articles (see References), modifying our earlier perspectives and judgements on the events and drawing them into wider argument on academic appointments which shaped Antipodean anthropology.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Academic appointments can bring forth unexpected and unforeseen contests and tensions, cause humiliation and embarrassment for unsuccessful applicants, and reveal unexpected allies and enemies. It is also a time when harsh assessments can be made about colleagues’ intellectual abilities, their body of work, capacity as a scholar and fieldworker, effectiveness as a departmental administrator, qualities of leadership, the extent of their collegiality and so on. Rarely do such events bring to the fore disputation and disagreement over theoretical orientation or empirical approaches. That is left to debates and disputes within the university department or faculty and other academic venues, such as conferences and scholarly journals.

Judgements by colleagues are typically expressed in more or less private contexts – in personal correspondence and conversation. But in the matter of academic appointment, and under the expectation of confidentiality, assessments are stated with greater deliberation – sometimes with greater caution and at other times with greater candour – which are every so often preserved in the relevant university files.¹ Notwithstanding, at an institutional and disciplinary level, the choice of a new professor is implicitly a judgement about the past, and opens contested visions for the future. Settling on one candidate, moreover, can alter the direction of a department, sometimes renewing or even reinvigorating it, at other times continuing (or even hardening) old cleavages and disputes within a discipline and department. Or, in the case of a new chair, such as those at Auckland and the Australian National University (ANU), they can create different challenges: appointing new staff, establishing a coherent approach, and settling on new directions in anthropological practice and theory.

In the appointment process, personal attributes such as a readiness to get along with colleagues, temperament, leadership qualities, teaching abilities or, as the Sydney selection committee pithily put it, ‘intellect, character and personality’, are sought – insights that only colleagues and peers close to the candidates can provide. What we found often disconcerted us. The assessors’ reports were often disturbingly personal in nature and lay bare the likes and dislikes, allegiances and enmities, as well as unexpected contests and tensions, in international (largely British-based) anthropology that were used to assist in appointments and hence determined the futures of peers and colleagues. Accessing public and private correspondence enables an insight into what people say about each other – some of it incisive, some bitchy and much of it of value for a historian trying to make sense of events and people.

Writing disciplinary history can expose anxieties in some practitioners of the discipline. Making the contents of correspondence public has brought forth comment from disciplinary practitioners, some of whom trace their intellectual lineage to figures about whom we are writing. There is a misunderstanding that the decision-making was taken by a body of academic staff broader than simply anthropologists interviewing and assessing other anthropologists. Some of our articles have received reviews that expressed deeply personal opposition, often verging on the abusive. We wonder whether a tendency to emphasize academic lineages brings forth gatekeeping or, rather, a desire to control the way the past is constructed and presented. History as we detail it disrupts personal narratives of origin, and subsequently some rejections relied on claims that the readers knew a different story that was ‘true’.

We have had comments from some colleagues that we provide an institutional and organizational history of the discipline of anthropology through painstaking and detailed archival research. We have also received criticism from other quarters along the lines that this type of history of anthropology is ‘history for history’s sake’, presenting a ‘sardonic view of the squabbles and jealousies of what was until the 1970s a very small profession’ (see Goody 1995: 25). We have been accused by some of concentrating excessively on personal enmities, alliances and appointment details, of making public the private opinions and evaluations of the work and competence of people now dead but well known to many living anthropologists. These opinions, we are told, were never intended to enter the public domain. One commented despairingly that ‘if this is social science, God help the enterprise’. In contrast, we have been acknowledged as providing ‘a welcome addition to the recent upsurge of interest in the history of universities, the tracing of academic connections and networks across the globe and the development of academic disciplines. Let us hope that further studies of Australasian intellectuals during this period will enrich this emerging historical field’ (Darian-Smith 2015: 129; see also Darian-Smith and Waghorne 2019).

Many senior anthropologists view writing on academic appointments as trespassing; we are frequently accused of inquiring too insistently in what is considered a private domain, which should be kept under very tight wraps. We have even been informed that our work attacks the reputations of individual anthropologists.² One referee’s report, for instance, kept referring to ‘the author’ (Geoffrey Gray) despite it being clearly stated that the paper was co-authored:

Some will see in this the continuing attempt by the author to attack the reputation of Professor Berndt, in particular, by making public the low evaluation of his work by some of the people consulted about the applicants for Elkin’s position … The author does not help the situation by interpreting everything to do with Ronald Berndt in the worst light.³

This criticism reveals an anxiousness, a fear that such research may unearth details best left hidden, or reveal secrets hitherto held closely within the domain of personal memory. Jack Goody, for example, insists that anthropologists’ acrimonious relationships did not affect their professional behaviour. The nearness of the past further complicates this anxiety.⁴ It is much like family history – so many toes waiting to be trodden on. What may appear to be in the past for the historian often remains in the present for colleagues of some of the scholars under discussion. In addition, in some branches of anthropology, the lineage of training and affiliation of an anthropologist is part of a professional and personal identity. This can impact directly on their sense of themselves, their colleagues and their place (reputation) in the present. It seems to us these are calls for a steam-cleaned history of the discipline. Besides, on the matter of confidentiality, these records are in the public domain, as are government records.

Goody, after initial concerns, had few qualms about using personal papers when writing The Expansive Moment, which traces the development of social anthropology in Britain and Africa through ‘its key practitioners’. He did wonder

about the propriety of using personal correspondence … since it seemed like a breach of confidence. Some of this is distasteful enough to lead some readers to want to leave it out. But I have used nothing … that does not appear in a public archive … it would be a mistake to bowdlerize their contents by selecting some extracts and deliberately avoiding others … What I have done is to try and place such remarks in a wider context of understanding, the verstehen of the anthropologist … I have not been concerned with aspects of their personal life except in so far as I considered that it affected ‘the history of social anthropology’. By this I mean not only the intellectual history but their relations with organisations and colleagues, as these influenced the course of events. (Goody 1995: 6)

Closer to our interests is an observation by the Australian anthropologist William Edward Hanley (Bill) Stanner, who revealed the brutal and, in his perception, at times very personal side of the selection process, heightened by his disappointment at missing out on the Sydney chair in 1955 and again in 1958, and the ANU chair in 1957. He was critical of the process and wrote to Raymond Firth, his mentor. It was a time of considerable stress and overwhelming disappointment: ‘Curious, isn’t it: where in the anthropology we write do we deal with those high realities of academic actuality: the smear, the careful silences, the well-placed knife, the packing of panels of selectors, and the arts of prearranged judgement?’⁵

It is a damning indictment of the selection process but one that reflects some of the, at times, sheer chicanery we have seen revealed in the archival record. Stanner’s comments contain the kernel of the problem we seek to examine and explicate: was the choice based on theoretical knowledge, academic status, a fit for the organizational and institutional needs of the university or even the collegial preferences of fellow professors of sister disciplines? Or a combination of these?

Based on detailed documentary evidence, we show how senior academic appointments were handled – the vagaries, the quirks and processes, questions of good faith and bad faith – and how filling a chair brought in wider academic networks, as senior figures within the anthropological fraternity became involved as referees for the various candidates, not to mention the lobbying for a preferred candidate or on behalf of oneself. Appointment decisions are also important in terms of their consequences, whether it be to continue a line of descent or theoretical orientations or as the catalyst for change, as well as in terms of relationships within a department. It is, however, more than a matter of personal alliances and enmities, although these are integral. Rather, we are mindful of the interplay of the four ‘is – individuals, ideas, identities and institutions’ (Mills 2008: 3, 11). That is, academic networks and the relationships between individuals are mediated through institutional prisms that, in turn, have a bearing on the directions and orientations of an academic discipline (Gray 2001, 2007a; Stocking 1995). The appointing of senior academics brings these interrelationships into sharp focus. One main (although not surprising) difference between Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand in these past appointment processes also became apparent to us – namely, the unevenness of the inclusion of Indigenous peoples, as candidates, advisors or selection panel members.⁶

As well as epistemological and institutional issues, there is a methodological question. The present study, as we stated above, is firmly based on the documentary record, with a leavening of oral testimony, although we recognize that memory fades and transmutes with the passing of time. We are also aware that documentary evidence has its own problems, not least in creating an illusion of fixed evidence. Jack Goody makes a pertinent observation:

Participants do not make the best historians, nor do practitioners make the best historians of science. But historians too are at a disadvantage. In the first place they are dependent on the written record, or … on recollections about the past … the written record is very partial in a number of ways. Not simply because much is left out, much destroyed. (Goody 1995: 191)

Importantly, he acknowledges that the written record ‘of an incident covers a greater span than the understanding of any one of the participants, perhaps all of them’ (Goody 1995: 191; cf. Stocking 2010: 111–13). Contrast this with Stocking (1995: xviii) on the transmission of anthropological ‘oral traditions’ of the recent past by ‘certain elder anthropologists [who] used to take fledglings on rural outings, in which they would indoctrinate them in the authorized version of the discipline’s mythistory’. In short, no single set of documents and no single memory concerning a university appointment are likely to yield other than a partial and sometimes misleading version. Even those most closely involved will necessarily have an incomplete (sometimes mistaken, other times nuanced) understanding of events, will repeat a trope generated by stories within a department that are favourable to a failed candidate, or perhaps simply be deceitful, or any combination of these.

Overall, it is a small group of people who weave in and out of the accounts – some as applicants, others are referees, most connected in some way as students, teachers or colleagues. Internationally, with the exception of the United States, which saw an increase in the number of anthropologists during and after the Second World War, anthropology was a small group, many of whom attended university together, shared teachers and so on (see, for example, Price 2008). As Goody (1995: