Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage is also a book about photography and it pivots on Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ or social documentary photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. I argue that this led to an experiment in cinematography in the Torres Strait in 1898 and, given his radically anticolonial attitude and subversive intent, these four minutes of film stand as a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology. I also argue against that Haddon’s slideshows about the Aran Islands were a form of anticolonial activism that provided an ethnographic baseline for cultural nationalists like Hyde and literary modernists like Synge. Academic publishing severely limits the scope for photography as an alternative to text and this aspect of Haddon’s work was explored in ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’, an exhibition of twenty five photographs at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage is the first in depth study of Haddon’s contribution to modern anthropology since Alison Hingston Quiggin published her memorial ‘sketch’ of Haddon The Head Hunter in 1942. I reinterpret her title in line with Haddon’s adoption of the persona of an English savage in slideshows he performed with the intention of humanising the victims of colonialism and combatting ethnocentric racism. Unlike Quiggin, I had access to ‘lost’ material from the Aran Islands and I use this to re-evaluate Haddon’s work as an ethnologist in Ireland, a topic usually regarded as irrelevant in the historiography of disciplinary anthropology. I argue that Haddon, the grandson of anti-slavery activists whose daughters were socialists and feminists, set out to revolutionise anthropology in the 1890s in association with a network of anarcho-utopian activists and philosophers. The result is a painstaking reconstruction of a culture war that divided Anglo-Irish anthropology in the 1890s. That war has been ‘forgotten’ by disciplinary historians who focussed instead on evolutionary science bracketed by race and colonialism. However, it is being replayed in the current stand-off between a humanitarian tradition of engaged anthropology and an academic discipline of political utility that became controversial in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. In short, Haddon’s long battle with a liberal academy provides an interesting perspective on attempts by academics to reposition anthropology within a neoliberal academy.
A Very English Savage is also a book about photography and it pivots on Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ or social documentary photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. I argue that this led to an experiment in cinematography in the Torres Strait in 1898 and, given his radically anticolonial attitude and subversive intent, these four minutes of film stand as a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology. I also argue against that Haddon’s slideshows about the Aran Islands were a form of anticolonial activism that provided an ethnographic baseline for cultural nationalists like Hyde and literary modernists like Synge. Academic publishing severely limits the scope for photography as an alternative to text and this aspect of Haddon’s work was explored in ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’, an exhibition of twenty five photographs at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage is available at Books Upstairs | Dublin’s Oldest Independent Bookshop.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage has gone on sale on the Berghahn website with a time-limited discount of 25% available with the code WALS9840.