Review essay: folklorists and anthropologists

Needless to say, this is a very good book, but what is especially pleasing to a folklorist is the author's familiarity with folklore theory and history, his perspicacity about the characters and issues, and his appreciation of the way the history of the two subjects was intimately connected for upwards of fifty years. One of the most enlightening treatments of the formative years of the folklore movement can be found, for instance, in Stocking's brief discussion of the move "From Popular Antiquities to Folklore" in Victorian Anthropology (Stocking 1987, 53-62), which surveys the work and influence of Bourne, Brand, Scott and Thorns, among others.

In After Tylor, the great interest is in seeing the intellectual history of the period from the 1870s to the 1920s from a completely different perspective than the familiar one derived from Richard Dorson's The British Folklorists (to date the only history of the early days of the FLS). Dorson's "Great Team" of Andrew Lang, George Laurence Gomme, Edward Clodd, E. Sidney Hartland and Alfred Nutt - who, thanks to Dorson's work, we see as the giants of our discipline and prominent in anthropological debates too - take the backstage in Stocking's work. Hartland gets about a dozen mentions, Clodd gets nine, Gomme four and Nutt only two. Lang shares a chapter with William Robertson Smith, and is frequently invoked elsewhere, but Stocking sees him as a minor player on the anthropological stage, an apostate from Tylorian orthodoxy, a disciple who turned spiteful critic and who perhaps cherished regrets that, but for an early marriage, he, too, might have become "a really big swell at anthropology" (p. 52).

Among the characters that step centre-stage in After-Tylor are A.C. Haddon, R.R. Marett and W.H.R. Rivers. Though these three men between them held the Presidency of the FLS for nine years (1913-22), they are shadowy figures to us. This is largely because they are not adequately covered in Dorson's books. Of the three, Marett is the only one represented in Dorson's two-volume collection of folkloristic writings, Peasant Customs and Savage Myths. In The British Folklorists, Dorson includes Marett (inappropriately) in the hold-all chapter "Society Folklorists"; Haddon is mentioned only three times in passing (twice in quotations from other people's work, once in a footnote as the author of a critique of J.G. Frazer's The Golden Bough), and Rivers is not mentioned at all. Yet they wrote quite extensively on folklore matters (between them accounting for thirty-five essays and notes in early volumes of Folk-Lore [see Bonser 1961]) and were leading figures in the anthropology of their day, as Stocking makes clear.

Gomme, at least, knew the score, announcing exuberantly in his Presidential Address of 1890: "I must, however, just point out that the society is entitled to congratulate itself upon a veritable capture it has achieved during the present year. Professor Haddon went out to the Torres Straits on an expedition on behalf of natural science; he returned an ardent folklorist, and immediately joined us" (Gomme 1891, 13).

A.C. Haddon was indeed, as Gomme had noted, a "catch" for the FLS. He joined the Society in 1890 and was immediately elected to the Council. He was Vice-President from 1903 and President 1919-20. He had begun his professional life as a natural historian (he was Professor of Zoology at Dublin from 1881), but his trip to the Torres Straits exposed him to other cultures. An unusually receptive man for his da); he "joined the natives round the campfire ... and when groups of them came later to his house ... they talked on into the night about what life had been like" before the missionaries came. Though the ethnographic work he undertook on this trip had "a definite ring of anthropological naivete," he returned, as Gomme said, a convert to folklore and anthropology, and "at a time when an academic man with ethnographic experience overseas was a rarity in British anthropology, he quickly moved to the front ranks" of his new discipline (p. 101).

Obviously an enterprising person, almost as soon as he was drafted on to the FLS Council, Haddon suggested a general ethnographic survey of the British Isles to be jointly undertaken by the FLS, the Anthropological Institute and the Society of Antiquaries; Haddon's own contribution would be an ethnography of the Aran Isles. Edward Brabrook, a former FLS President (1901-2), who played a major role in the other organisations too, took the lead in gaining sponsorship from the British Association and a committee was set up to work out the details. Stocking does not say what happened to this scheme and I can find no further reference to it in the FLS minutes. Reports were published in the 1890s by the British Association (see Olson on p. 117, col. 1, this issue), but the FLS does not appear to have played an active institutional role in the project. Haddon himself, rather than setting out for the Aran Isles, mounted a second field-trip to the Torres Straits. Presumably the FLS as an organisation either was squeezed out, or withdrew from the project, or lost interest in it. It is interesting to speculate what might have happened if the FLS had become involved. If the Society's energies had been put into ethnographic fieldwork instead of into the misguided "County Folklore" series designed to gather together items of folklore from written sources, it may well have been able to break free of the "gleaner's vision" so rightly deplored by W. EH. Nicolaisen in a recent issue of this journal (Nicolaisen 1995; see also Bennett 1996).