Tracks

We began the class by looking at the frontispiece to Hobbes’s ‘The Leviathan”. We looked closely at the King’s body, and we compared the images along the left-hand side with those on the  right. Than we looked at Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII. As Derek Wilson argues in the piece linked to here, it can be seen as a work of blatant propaganda. We compared that with a portrait of François I painted by Clouet in 1540.

A striking difference between French and British royalty is that the latter permits women to reign as sovereigns in their own right. This poses particular problems for the portraitist, who must represent someone who was considered by her nature as inferior as a supreme being. We first looked at a portrait of Mary Tudor by Athonis Mor. Then we looked at a portrait of her sister Elizabeth, painted while her half-brother, Edward, was on the throne. After both Edward and Mary died without leaving children, Elizabeth came to the throne. We looked at her coronation portrait. We then saw several portraits of Elizabeth – some of which you will find here – paying particular attention to the Armada portrait, and comparing it to the illustration to the Leviathan.

After leaving Elizabeth, we leaped over the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution to the time of the Hanovers. We looked at this portrait of George III, with it’s echoes of Holbein’s Henry. We then moved on to the 19th Century when, once again, a woman occupied the throne. Victoria is often seen as bringing the image of the monarchy into its modern form as constitutional and as a part of the newly emerging celebrity culture. Look at this portrait by Winterhalter. We compared this with James Stack Lauder’s photo of the widowed Queen in 1887.

For 20th Century portraits, we looked at a portrait of Prince George, painted in 1929, when he was not expected to become King. We also saw a photo of George as King, with Queen Mary, taken in 1945 while he was visiting an RAF base in Ireland. Finally we looked at some portraits of Elizabeth II – a photograph by Dorothy Wilding taken in the year of her coronation, a photo by Annie Lebovitz, taken in 2007. (Despite the photographer’s attempt to invoke mortality, I think this is kitsch). We rounded it off with Lucien Freud’s portrait, which you all hated.

As a first approach, I’m going to suggest that we can discern three broad phases in the development of ethnological observation. During the first phase, of which I will take Frank Gillen’s sojourn among the Arrernte at the end of the 19th Century as an example, the field-worker is an enthusiastic amateur. Gillen was the a line manager of the transglobal telegraph system that linked Australia with London. Based at Alice Springs, he seems to have very quickly become interested in the life and the beliefs of the local people, then known by the colonisers as the Arunta. When the area was visited by a scientific expedition, part of whose remit was to collect information on the local tribes, he came to know a number of Australia’s scientists very well. Among them was Baldwin Spencer, a biologist at the University of Melbourne. It was with Spencer that Gillen was to write the books that made his reputation. His reports of Aborigine customs were taken up by Frazer in ‘The Golden Bough’, by Durkheim in his work on Religion, by Freud in his anthropological fantasies, and by  Lévi-Strauss in his work on Kinship structure.

Gillen was a man of considerable power in the region where he carried out his observations. He was the local magistrate, covering a vast area of the Central Desert. This gave him considerable leverage over the Arrernte, for whom, along with his close friend, the police officer Charles Cowle, he was the visible face of the British state. He had the power to have people arrested and taken to prison, a power which he used against the young men who persisted in acting as if any large animal on their territory was fair game. On occasion, he would have them whipped, although this was, in fact, illegal. During times of hardship, he might intervene to succour the hungry or the sick, for he was also officially ‘Sub-Protector of the Aborigines’ and so responsible for their welfare.

Gillen did not hesitate to make use of his official powers in the pursuance of his anthropological interests. On one occasion he describes in a letter to Spencer how much he is looking forward to Cowle’s bringing in a prisoner from the outback, for he suspects the man of having valuable knowledge concerning initiation ceremonies. It is clearly because he is perceived by the Arrernte elders as being a man of power that they reveal their secrets to him.

The fieldworker in such a case is firmly anchored in the colonial system, and firmly anchored in his own career which runs at a parallel to his ethnographic interests. Although Gillen came more and more to identify himself with the academic world represented by the Royal Society, he already had a well-constructed professional identity outside the academy. Gillen’s insertion in the field, like that of many of his contemporaries, was contingent upon his prior engagements within the colonial enterprise.

While trudging my way down the route of the ancient pilgrimage, I invented the following myth, which seems to me far more fun than the idea that James the disciples remains made their way from Jerusalem to Compstello, floating for most of the journey in a stone coffin, there to be bedecked in a large
basque beret decorated with scallops.

In fact, as everyone with an ounce of imagination knows, the scallop, for obvious iconic reasons, is dedicated to Aphrodite, goddess of lust and fornication. When the seed-sack of Uranus was unceremoniously dumped in the sea, the powerfully fecund juice was washed by the many currents from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, and then through the Straits of Gibraltar and up the coast of Portugal, causing a myriad of identical goddesses to pop up all along the coast-line, appearing to the astonished and delighted natives whenever and wherever she pleased.

Among her many appearances, one upon the Galician coast later caused great consternation to the priests of the cross-broken god, who were at their wits end as to how to do away with this pagan cult. In the end, they used the tried and trusted method of intellectual robbery, taking over the signs and insignia of the goddess and weaving them into a tale so hair-raisingly unlikely as to appeal to humankind’s innate thirst for the fantastic.

Hence it is that the good Catholic christians of Europe today make their way down the long trail from Paris to Compostelle with, sewn upon their back-packs, the sacred pudendum of Aphrodite. The Church sees this as a fitting rite of passage for their young. Perhaps it is.