Abstract
William Halse Rivers Rivers was the man who, more than any other, diverted the attention of British anthropologists from the evolution of religious thought to the synchronic functionings of single societies. This he did primarily by making kinship studies central to anthropological theory and practice. Rivers is, thus, the missing link in the quasi-historical account of the emergence of British Social Anthropology given in Ian Jarvie’s The Revolution in Anthropology. Jarvie makes it sound as though Malinowski, with no help from anyone else, was reacting directly against the work of Frazer. In fact, Rivers and his colleagues A. C. Haddon and C. G. Seligman, were decisive in bringing about the change-over from nineteenth-century style social evolutionism to twentieth-century style structural-functionalism. A number of the major points generally associated with the names of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown can be clearly found and repeatedly stated in the work of Rivers, and much of what remains of the alleged Malinowski—Radcliffe-Brown contribution can be interpreted as a direct reaction against certain aspects of the teachings of their distinguished predecessor.1
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Notes and References
For a discussion of Malinowski’s debt to, and divergence from Rivers, see the present work Chapter V, pp. 171–177. For a statement of the case for regarding Radcliffe-Brown as a disciple of Rivers, see ibid., , pp. 271–282.
As an indication of Rivers’s international standing, let me point out that in 1926, Margaret Mead, who had been educated as a disciple of Boas in America, and Reo Fortune, a young New Zealand psychologist who later became a noted anthropologist, discovered that they had independently concluded that Rivers “was the man under whom we would like to have studied — a shared and impossible daydream, since he had died in 1922”. Mead, Blackberry Winter (New York, 1972), p. 158.
As an indication of his standing with his closest British colleague, let me point to the statements of Haddon which I have quoted in Chapter II, p. 67.
As an indication of his influence during the formative war years on one of British anthropology’s young Turks, let me point to the fact that Malinowski’s New Guinea diaries contain many references to Rivers, of which I have quoted the most pertinent in Chapter V, pp. 172, 173.
As an indication of his interdisciplinary standing in the United States, let me point out that, after Rivers’s death, the American Ethnological Society and the Psychological and Anthropological Sections of the New York Academy of Sciences staged a “Rivers Memorial Meeting”, at which a number of prominent personages paid tribute to Rivers’s work in experimental psychology, ethnology and psychoanalysis.
A. C. Haddon, “Report to the Percy Sladen Trustees on the Expedition to Papua”, Haddon Collection, Envelope 25.
Joseph Ben David and Randall Collins, “Social Factors in the Origins of a New Science: The Case of Psychology”, Am. Soc. Rev. 31, 451–456 (Aug. 1966).
Items giving biographical information about Rivers, and/or analysis of his work, are listed below in approximate order of usefulness: Richard Slobodin, W. H. R. Rivers (New York, 1978), 295 pp. This book contains an assiduously researched “Life” of Rivers running to 85 pages, a series of evaluations of key aspects of Rivers’s work, a representative selection of Rivers’s writings, and a bibliography of works cited by Slobodin by and about Rivers.
Ethel S. Fegan, “Bibliography” [of Rivers], Man 61, 100–104 (1922).
Charles S. Myers, “The Influence of the Late W. H. R. Rivers (President Elect of Section J) on the Development of Psychology in Great Britain”. Address to Section J (Psychology) by Charles S. Myers, President of the Section. Rep. Brit. Ass. Adv. Sci. (1922), pp. 179–192.
Edmund R. Leach, “W. H. R. Rivers”, International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), Vol. 13, pp. 526–528.
L. E. Shore, “W. H. R. Rivers”, The Eagle [Magazine of St John’s College Cambridge], 1922, pp. 2–12.
Arnold Bennett, “W. H. R. Rivers: Some Recollections”, in Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me (2nd Ser., London, 1923), pp. 1–7.
Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress (London, 1936) Part I, pp. 13–89.
A. C. Haddon (a), “The Late Dr W. H. R. Rivers, F.R.S.”, Nature, 17 June 1922, pp. 786–787.
A. C. Haddon (b), “William Halse Rivers Rivers… ”, Man 22 97–99 (1922).
Henry Head (a), “W. H. R. Rivers, M.D., D.Sc, F.R.S. An Appreciation”, Brit. Med. J.,17 June 1922, pp. 977, 978.
Henry Head (b), “Obituary for W. H. R. Rivers”, Proc. Roy. Soc. Ser. B, 95, xliiixlvii (1924).
F. C. Bartlett (a), “William Halse Rivers Rivers… ”, Man 22 99–100 (1922).
F. C. B [artlett] (b), “W. H. R. Rivers”, The Eagle [Magazine of St John’s College Cambridge], 1922, pp. 12–14.
Frederic C. Barlett (c), “Cambridge, England — 1887–1937”, Am. J. Psych. 50 102–107 (1937).
Frederic Bartlett (d), “W. H. R. Rivers”, The Eagle [Magazine of St John’s College Cambridge] 62 156–160 (1968).
Walter Langdon-Brown, Thus We Are Men (London, 1938), pp. 62–67.
H. D. S [kinner], “Obituary, Dr W. H. R. Rivers”, J. Polyn. Soc. 31 87–88 (1922). J. L. Myres, “W. H. R. Rivers”, J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. 53, 14–17 (1923).
C. G. Seligman, “Dr. W. H. R. Rivers”, pp. 162, 163 [source unidentified], Haddon Collection, Envelope 12081.
Morris Ginsberg, “The Sociological Work of the Late Dr W. H. R. Rivers”, Psyche 5 33–52 (1924–25).
Anonymous obituary in Brit. Med. J.., 10 June 1922, pp. 936, 937.
Erwin H. Ackerknecht, “In Memory of William H. R. Rivers 1864–1922”, Bull. Hist. Med. 11, 478–481 (1942).
The Times, assorted items for 7 June, 14 June, 15 June, 16 June, 9 Sept. and 12 Sept. 1922.
Interesting biographical snippets about Rivers are also contained in the following: T. H. Pear, “Some Early Relations Between English Ethnologists and Psychologists”, J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. 90, 227–237 (1960).
Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey 1916–1920 (London, 1945). See especially pp. 64, 98,118 ff, 186.
D. E. Broadbent, “Frederic Charles Bartlett 1886–1969”, Biog. Mem. Fell. Roy. Soc. 16, 1–4 (1970).
C. H. Rolph, Kingsley. The Life, Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin (London, 1973). See especially p. 88.
Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (Unwin Paperbacks, 1977), p. 13.
Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. II, 1914–1944 (London, 1968), p. 115.
Bertrand Russell, “Science and Life”, The New Leader, 3rd November 1922, p. 12.
For a descriptive account of Rivers’s Cambridge as it was in the last few years before his death (and a mention of Rivers) see Kingsley Martin, Father Figures. A First Volume of Autobiography 1897–1931 (London, 1966), Chaps. 5 and 6.
Seligman, ibid.
John Layard, The Times (non-Royal edition), 16 June 1922, p. 7.
For reasons which, if they could be revealed, would be seen as perfectly understandable and proper, I am duty bound not to reveal the source of the suggestion, which was advanced as a clear and confident statement of fact, that Rivers was a closeted homosexual. Nonetheless, this information seems far too important for the understanding of Rivers’s scientific career to be entirely ignored.
John Layard, personal communication, 2 July 1973.
Myers, op. cit. (note 4), p. 187.
Shore, op. cit. (note 4), p. 9.
Sassoon wrote two poems acknowledging his debt to Rivers — “To a Very Wise Man”, which was included in the collection Picture Show, privately printed by the Cambridge University Press in 1919, and “Revisitation” (1934). The former poem begins: Fires in the dark you build; tall quivering flames In the huge midnight forest of the unknown.
In the latter poem, written twelve years after the death of Rivers, Sassoon states that he still feels Rivers’s influence “undiminished”, and “his life’s work, in me and many, unfinished”. Graves’s acknowledgement occurs in his book Poetic Unreason (London, 1925), pp. 99–101, 127–131 and passim.
Myers, op. cit. (note 4), p. 187.
Shore, op. cit. (note 4), p. 10.
Bennett, op. cit. (note 4), p. 1.
Myers, op. cit. (note 4), p. 187.
Bartlett (b), op. cit. (note 4), p. 14.
Arthur Marwick, The Deluge. British Society and the First World War (London, 1965), p. 297.
W. H. R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious (Cambridge, 2nd edn. 1922), p. 12. See also W. H. R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream (London, 1923), pp. 94, 95.
G. Elliot Smith, Introduction to W. H. R. Rivers, Psychology and Ethnology (London, 1926), p. xii.
Head (a), op. cit. (note 4), p. 977.
Elliot Smith, op. cit. (note 19).
W. H. R. Rivers, Article on “Vision”, in Edward Sharpey Schafer (ed.), Textbook of Physiology, Vol. 2 (New York, 1900).
Myers, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 181, 182.
W. H. R. Rivers, “General Account [of contributions to comparative psychology resulting from the Torres Straits expedition] and Observations on Vision etc.” J. Anthrop. Inst. 29, 220 (1899).
W. H. R. Rivers and Henry Head, “A Human Experiment in Nerve Division”, Brain 31, 324 (1908).
Ibid., p. 429 ff. For a slightly different account see W. H. R. Rivers, James Sherren and Henry Head, “The Afferent Nervous System Considered From A New Aspect”, Brain 28,104 (1905).
Rivers and Head, op. cit. (note 25), p. 345.
Gordon Holmes, obituary for Head in Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 10 (Dec. 1941), p. 671.
W. H. R. Rivers, James Sherren and Henry Head, “The Afferent Nervous System Considered From a New Aspect”, Brain 28, 102 (1905).
Rivers and Head, op. cit. (note 25), p. 342.
Ibid., p. 345.
Ibid., pp. 342, 343.
Ibid., pp. 412–419, 441 ff. Rivers, Sherren and Head, op. cit. (note 29), p. 105 ff.
Ibid., pp. 419–422. Rivers, Sherren and Head, op. cit. (note 29), p. 107 ff.
Ibid., pp. 442, 443.
Ibid., p. 448.
Ibid., pp. 388–392.
Rivers, Sherren and Head, op. cit. (note 29), pp. 112–114.
Ibid., p. 115.
W. H. R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1922), p. 148. See also Jonathan Miller, “The Dog Beneath the Skin”, The Listener, 20 July 1972, p. 74.
Rivers and Head, op. cit. (note 25), pp. 405, 406.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 40), p. 27.
See Rivers, op. cit. (note 18), pp. 22–29, 31, 50, 51. See also W. H. R. Rivers, “Dreams and Primitive Culture”, Bull. John Rylands Library 4, 393 (1918). For an indication of the way in which Rivers used the word “protopathic” in everyday conversation with his colleagues, see Pear, op. cit. (note 4), p. 228.
Gerald Geison, “Keith Lucas”, in C. C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York, 1973).
Dictionary of National Biography (1931–40), pp. 410, 411.
L. S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology 1840–1940, p. 172. Myers, op. cit. (note 4), p. 181. Gerald Geison, “Michael Foster”, in C. C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York, 1972).
Rev. William Ridley, “On the Kamilaroi Tribe of Australians ”, J. Ethnol. Soc. Lond. 4, 287 (1856).
W. S. Lilly, “The New Naturalism”, Fortnightly Review 38, 251, 252 (1885). The lines of poetry within the quotation come from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” CXVIII.
Jonathan Miller, “The Dog Beneath the Skin”, The Listener, 20 July 1972.
That there was a rigid split in Rivers’s psyche between the controlling forces of rationality and discrimination, on the one hand, and the suppressed forces of sensuality and emotion, on the other, was suggested to me by John Layard, oral communication, July 1972. Head (a), op. cit. (note 4), p. 977, describes Rivers in terms which suggest that, in later life, Rivers’s emotions, while normally held under tight control, were capable of breaking through to the surface, especially if his canons of scientific discourse were violated: “He was endlessly patient with an honest expression of personal opinion. His charity was boundless; but unsuspecting persons who expressed some mischievous view were often startled by the vehemence of the reaction they evoked from this modest man of science.” See also Myers, op. cit. (note 4) p. 187.
That Rivers suffered from some degree of sexual repression right up until the end of his life may be seen from Conflict and Dream (published posthumously in 1923). In this book he analyzes a number of his own dreams, but scrupulously avoids any dreams which involved sex conflicts, since “the analyzes would probably have been full of passages which a natural reticence would have driven me to withhold or garble” (p. 111).
See, for example, Gerald Geison, “John Newport Langley”, in C. C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York, 1973).
Head published two books of his own poetry, Songs of La Mouche and Other Verses (London, 1910) and Destroyers and Other Verses (Oxford, 1919). A critical discussion of Head’s poetry by Frederick Peterson may be found in the Charaka Club Proceedings, New York 6, 108–113 (1925).
Rivers and Head, op. cit. (note 25), pp. 405, 406.
A. Hingston Quiggin, Haddon the Head Hunter (Cambridge, 1942), p. 81.
Ibid., p. 97.
Ibid., pp. 88, 89.
Downie, Frazer and the Golden Bough (London, 1970), pp. 25, 112.
Ibid., p. 112.
The most detailed account of the Torres Straits expedition and what it meant to the men involved is contained in A. C. Haddon’s Headhunters, Black, White and Brown (London, 1901). A brief but informative account, which places the expedition in the context of the history of British psychology, may be found in A Short History of British Psychology 1840–1940, by L. J. Hearnshaw (London, 1964), p. 172 ff. Further material about the expedition is given in the introductions and prefaces to the six volumes of the Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (Cambridge, 1901–1935), and in the biographies of Haddon, Rivers and Seligman in the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968).
The occasion was a speech made after Haddon had been presented with the first Rivers Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute on 27 Jan. 1925. Quoted in Quiggin, op. cit. (note 54), p. 97 n.
A. H. Quiggin and E. S. Fegan, “Alfred Cort Haddon 1855–1940”, Man 40 98 (1940).
G. Elliot Smith, Introduction to Psychology and Ethnology by W. H. R. Rivers (London, 1926), p. xi.
Shore, op. cit. (note 4), p. 5.
See, for example, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, Vol. I (Cambridge, 1935), p. xii, and “A Genealogical Method of Collecting Social and Vital Statistics” by W. H. R. Rivers, J. Anthrop. Inst. 30, 74 (1900).
Head (a), op. cit. (note 4), p. 977.
“Haddon’s Private Journal for the 1898 Torres Straits Expedition”, pp. 201, 202 (Haddon Collection, Envelope 1030).
A letter from one Henry Jones to one I. E. Harting dated 19 Nov. 1889 (Haddon Collection, Envelope 21), reveals that Harting and Haddon were interested in cat’s-cradles at this early date. Jones remarks that he “should like to know whether the natives of the Torres Straits have improved on our game, and should like to meet you and Professor Haddon to discuss and try it”.
Quoted in Quiggin and Fegan, op. cit. (note 61), p. 100.
See, for example, letter from E. Hornbostel to Haddon dated 1st December 1922 (Haddon Collection, Envelope 24).
Quoted in Quiggin and Fegan, op. cit. (note 61), p. 100.
In a note to Rivers from Government House, Ootacamund, where Rivers apparently stayed during his fieldwork among the Todas, one Edgar Thurston writes “Your cat’s-cradle performance is a treasured memory”. The date on the note is 9th August 1905 (Haddon Collection, Envelope 12040).
W. H. R. Rivers, review of String Figures by Caroline Jayne, Folklore 18 (1907).
Haddon, op. cit. (note 66), p. 251.
Rep. Brit. Assoc. Advanc. Sci. (1899), p. 879.
J. Anthrop. Inst. 30 (1900). The same volume of the journal reveals that C. G. Seligman, McDougall and Wilkin were also elected as fellows of the Institute in 1900. Haddon, Ray and Myers had been fellows of the Institute since before the 1898 expedition.
Haddon was already a member of the council. See ibid., pp. 6, 8, 10, 11.
W. H. R. Rivers, “A Genealogical Method of Collecting Social and Vital Statistics”, J. Anthrop. Inst. 30, 82 (1900).
Ibid., p. 76.
The levirate is a practice requiring or permitting a man to marry the widow of his real or classificatory brother.
Between 1877 and 1893 Galton had delivered over half-a-dozen addresses to the Anthropological Section (or, prior to 1884, to the Anthropological “Department”) of the British Association, and each of these addresses had been concerned, in some way, with emphasizing the importance of quantification for the study of man.
Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, Vol. 5 (Cambridge, 1904), p. 126.
W. H. R. Rivers, “Primitive Colour Vision”, Popular Science Monthly 59, 48 and passim (1901).
Miller, op. cit. (note 49), p. 74.
See, for example, Rivers’s article on “Methodology” in B. Freire-Marreco and J. L. Myres (eds.), Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 4th edn. (London 1912).
W. H. R. Rivers, “Dreams and Primitive Culture”, Bull. John Rylands Library 4, 393 (1918).
Ibid., pp. 393, 394.
Elliot Smith’s preface to The Threshold of the Pacific by C. E. Fox (London, 1924).
Elliot Smith quotes Fox as saying the he (Fox) had written some “chaffing rhymes” about the genealogical method for Rivers in 1908, and had later discovered that Rivers was keeping them in his study at Cambridge. Slobodin, op. cit. (note 4), having missed this reference, speculates (p. 44) that the author of the verse might have been William Sinker, the captain of the Southern Cross.
Haddon Collection, Envelope 12051.
Reports of the Camb ri dge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, Vol. 6 (Cambridge, 1908), pp. 64, 65.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid.
Freire-Marreco and Myres, op. cit. (note 84), p. 129.
Reports of the Camb ri dge Anthropological Expedition to To rr es Straits, Vol. 5 (Cambridge, 1904), p. 139. Also op. cit. (note 89), p. 92.
W. H. R. Rivers, “On the Origins of the Classificatory System of Relationships”, in Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor (Oxford, 1907), p. 312.
Op. cit. (note 89), p. 98.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 95), pp. 312, 313.
Ibid., pp. 313, 314.
Ibid., p. 320.
Ibid., pp. 321, 322.
Op. cit. (note 94). Rivers’s section on “The Functions of Certain Kin” occurs within the chapter on kinship. He had previously published a summary report on this topic in the 1901 volume of Man.
Op. cit. (note 94), p. 146.
Ibid., p. 150.
Ibid., p. 149. In describing this explanation, and the previously mentioned one about the role of the mother’s brother, as characteristic of the nineteenth-century, I do not intend the term “nineteenth-century” to be understood in a derogatory manner, as synonymous with `old-fashioned“. That this type of explanation was, in fact, inferior to the type which the twentieth-century was to produce, even when both types are considered as historical products of the centuries in which they appeared, I would not deny for a moment. What I do wish to deny is that there is any necessary connection between theoretical novelty and theoretical merit — that there is any built-in law of improvement which automatically renders yesterday’s mode of scientific explanation inferior to today’s.
W. H. R. Rivers, “The Marriage of Cousins in India”, J. Roy. Asiatic Soc. NS 39 612 (1907).
Ibid., p. 623.
W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas (London, 1906), p. v.
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid., p. 2.
Ibid., p. 483.
R. L. Rooksby, “W. H. R. Rivers and the Todas”, South Asia 1, 113 (1971). This article, which I came across only during last-minute revisions to my book, covers a good deal of the ground traversed in the final section of the present chapter.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 107), pp. 494, 483.
M. B. Emeneau, “Language and Social Forms. A Study of Toda Kinship Terms and Dual Descent”, in L. Spier, A. I. Hallowell and S. S. Newman (eds.), Language, Culture and Personality (Menasha, 1941), pp. 158, 159, 161.
Ira R. Buchler and Henry A. Selby, Kinship and Social Organization (New York, 1968), p. 221.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 107), pp. 488, 486, 487.
Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity… (Washington, 1870), pp. 155–161.
Man 7, 90–92 (1907).
A. E. Crawley, “An Anthropologist Among The Todas”, Nature, 14 Mar. 1907, pp. 462, 463.
Introduction to Rivers, Kinship and Social Organization (New York, 1968, reprint of 1914 original), p. 20.
Haddon, op. cit. (note 59), pp. 123, 124.
The passage in question is pp. 155–161. In the 1904 volume of the Tones Straits Report, Rivers cites this passage (and also Ancient Society, pp. 437–440) in a footnote.
See the dedication to John Layard’s Stone Men of Malekula (London, 1942).
See for example Rivers, “Some Sociological Definitions”, Rep. Brit. Assoc. Adv. Sci. (1907), pp. 653, 654.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 107), p. 466.
Ibid.
Reprinted in Slobodin (op. cit., note 4), pp. 187–193.
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Langham, I. (1981). Rivers, Severed Nerves and Genealogies. In: The Building of British Social Anthropology. Studies in the History of Modern Science, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8464-6_2
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