When the German anthropologist Hermann Klaatsch visited Australia to undertake research into the origins of the human race, he developed a reputation among the settler colonial population as a humanitarian defender of the rights of Australia's Indigenous people, prone to presenting uncomfortable truths about the effects of settler colonialism to the white settler population.Footnote 1 This portrait of Klaatsch, however, is somewhat at odds with his reputation and the legacy of his research among Indigenous Australians.Footnote 2 Indeed, not only did his research methods lead to an Aboriginal war party attempting to kill him, but he remains most acutely remembered by the Ngadjon-Jii people as the cause of an intergenerational trauma that has only recently been addressed, more than one hundred years after his death.
Addressing the apparent disparity between the accounts of two different communities – Indigenous Australians and settler Europeans – and how they have represented the historical legacy of anthropological fieldwork under settler colonial conditions appears to be an example of where a ‘decolonizing’ historiographical methodology might come into its own. Revising the history of frontier relations by foregrounding indigenous source materials might also be seen by some as a ‘decolonizing’ move. Given, however, the cogency of arguments prioritizing the material imperatives of indigenous peoples engaged in decolonizing struggles and projects grounded in the recovery of indigenous territorial and political sovereignty, such assumptions should be treated with caution.
Via an interrogation of the ‘decolonizing turn’ in historiography, the following illustrates how recent contrasting representations of colonial anthropology have revived tensions between advocates of metropolitan scientific progress and those focused on the fate of the indigenous communities upon which this science was enacted. By studying the short, medium, and long-term resonances of Klaatsch's anthropological research, conducted under settler colonial conditions, this article suggests that histories of the frontier, even those written in consultation and conjunction with indigenous peoples, while indispensable to deeper understandings of the history of colonialism, should not be confused with decolonization itself.
I
History, it has recently been declared, must be decolonized. No lesser journal than the American Historical Review has announced its intention to ‘rectify decades of exclusionary practice, during which women, people of color, immigrants, and colonized and indigenous people were effectively silenced as producers of scholarship and subjects of historical study’.Footnote 3 In Britain too, those at the forefront of advocating the decolonizing turn have argued that a decolonized methodology consists of ‘pointing out discursive Orientalisms, deconstructing historical myths of European development, challenging Eurocentric historiographies, rearticulating subaltern subjectivities, diversifying political subjecthoods and re-imagining the social-psychological subject of world politics’.Footnote 4
Such a reorientation of scholarship is certainly welcome, although whether it constitutes a decolonizing agenda is open to debate, given Eva Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's contention that ‘decolonization is not a metaphor’ for other scholarly objectives.Footnote 5 Indeed, these metropolitan decolonizing priorities sound quite similar to the core preoccupations of postcolonial research undertaken in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. For at least a generation, the demand issued by figures such as Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Homi Bhabha that European perspectives and history be decentred has been integral to the historical training of aspiring historians.Footnote 6 For their part, these postcolonial figures had built their critiques upon the pivotal works of earlier anti-colonial figures such as Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire.Footnote 7
Beyond metropolitan conceptualization of decolonization as a retooling of postcolonial studies for the twenty-first century, however, there is a far more thoroughgoing challenge occurring under the rubric of decolonization, particularly within settler colonial successor states such as New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, and Canada. Here decolonization is primarily understood as a material project, aimed at recuperating indigenous political and territorial sovereignty, at the same time as it seeks to alleviate the material and cultural privations experienced by the colonized. In Australia, the 2017 ‘Uluru statement from the heart’, signed by more than 250 Indigenous leaders, makes clear that the central issue remains ‘sovereignty … never ceded or extinguished’,Footnote 8 while in Canada Taiaiake Alfred has also argued that ‘it's all about the land’.Footnote 9 Tuck and Yang, too, have made clear that decolonization looks well beyond a theoretical reorientation:
Decolonization in exploitative colonial situations could involve the seizing of imperial wealth by the postcolonial subject. In settler colonial situations, seizing imperial wealth is inextricably tied to settlement and re-invasion … [Decolonization], in direct terms, means repatriating land to sovereign Native tribes and nations, abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, and the dismantling of the imperial metropole.Footnote 10
Decolonization, under this reading, is a return to Fanon's central insight that ‘for a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread, and above all, dignity’.Footnote 11 It reflects, too, Cabral's position that decolonization is in essence material, and hinges on a reclamation of ‘the material and human wealth’ of the colonized.Footnote 12
This material project of decolonization does have an important theoretical counterpart, but it is one that is similarly resistant to attempts by non-indigenous scholars to adopt the term for their purposes. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has described this as an ‘epistemological decolonisation’. This ‘liberation of reason itself from coloniality’, he argues, is an indigenous-led ‘recovery of self’ undertaken to reverse ‘epistemicides’, the ‘killing of indigenous peoples’ knowledge’.Footnote 13 For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, entirely new modes of thought grounded in indigeneity and its material conditions are not merely a theoretical correction but a new foundation for material decolonization.Footnote 14
Ndlovu-Gatsheni is not alone. His work rests on a careful reading of Linda Tuhiwai Smith's foundational work on decolonizing methodology. Smith, too, makes clear that decolonization requires more than a new inclusivity or better contextualization of research. As she points out, ‘from the vantage point of the colonized … the term “research” is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, “research”, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary.’ On the question of whether non-indigenous scholars could do research in a decolonized fashion, Smith is similarly forthright. The notion that non-indigenous researchers could serve ‘a specific emancipatory goal for an oppressed community’ is illusory, a ‘reflection of ideology’.Footnote 15 Instead, Smith suggests, decolonization rightfully consists of ‘indigenous attempts to reclaim land, language, knowledge and sovereignty’.Footnote 16 If research is to be salvaged at all, what is required is a retrieval of space for indigenous researchers, not only to reconceptualize research priorities, but also to reconceptualize what research actually is.Footnote 17 As the final section of this article makes clear, these frontal challenges to Europe-derived academic practices are too serious (and should be taken too seriously) to be simply accommodated and defanged by an improved and more inclusive historiographical treatment of empire and its legacies by non-indigenous scholars.
The history of anthropology offers a useful site to interrogate the possibilities for a ‘decolonized’ (as opposed to a ‘postcolonial’) historiographical methodology. Anthropology is a discipline historically entwined with empire,Footnote 18 dedicated in its formative years to studying human social, material, spiritual, and (more controversially) biological diversity by drawing on empirical materials garnered on the colonial frontier. The central canon of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropological works rests on the fruits of ‘field work’, the collection of intellectual, spiritual, and material culture gathered during periods observing and interacting with non-Europeans in various stages of colonization.Footnote 19 Yet the precise effects of the work of anthropologists on indigenous peoples remains a matter of some dispute, as does the extent to which anthropologists were complicit in the violence that afflicted non-Europeans. Current attempts to assess the legacy of colonial-era anthropology based on fieldwork undertaken in imperial contexts have seen a global debate emerge about the enduring legacies of anthropology in settler colonies.Footnote 20 Not all have seen the relationship between anthropology and the colonized as intrinsically problematic. Describing the highly influential German anthropological tradition in their collection of essays, Worldly provincialism, H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl characterized nineteenth-century German anthropology as ‘a self-consciously liberal endeavor, guided by a broadly humanistic agenda’. Defending German anthropologists before the First World War, Penny and Bunzl stressed that ‘the majority were not racist, but strongly opposed to biologically based theories of human difference’.Footnote 21 It was only with the post-war period, they argued, that German anthropology took a biologically racist turn.
In the same volume, however, Andrew Zimmerman argued forthrightly against precisely this narrative, which he called the ‘liberal to racism historiography in physical anthropology’. For Zimmerman, ‘both colonialism and anthropology tended toward a similar treatment of the colonized as pure body, pure objectivity’. One of the hallmarks of this approach was what Zimmerman called ‘the skin trade’: the practice of collecting human remains from cemeteries, hospitals, and battlefields in a manner that, he argued, saw German anthropologists become complicit, or at the very least accomplices after the fact, in colonial massacres.Footnote 22
A more heated version of this debate has also played out in Australia between the historian Paul Turnbull and the anthropologist Peter McAllister. In 2008, Turnbull published a short piece entitled ‘Theft in the name of science’, which in many ways echoed Zimmerman's sentiments regarding the role of anthropology in obtaining human remains. Here Turnbull argued that ‘there is ample evidence that scientists and museum curators had few qualms about being knowing beneficiaries of the violence and killings occurring with the spread of Queensland's pastoral and mining frontiers’.Footnote 23 This judgement raised the ire of McAllister, who very publicly accused Turnbull of depicting colonial anthropology as ‘a monstrous, racist conspiracy’ and Turnbull of a tendency towards ‘confirmation bias’.Footnote 24 One month later, Turnbull replied, denying both that he was inimical towards anthropology as a discipline and that his reading of the primary material was anything other than scholarly.Footnote 25
The debate did not end there, however, with a further exchange taking place in 2015. Alongside Shawn Rowlands and Michael Westaway, McAllister reiterated his earlier claims that Turnbull's thesis amounted to the charge that ‘colonial anthropology provided a theoretical rationale for the abuse and dispossession of Indigenous Australians’, a position they viewed as a ‘disturbing analysis carrying strong moral implications both for Australian colonial history and the modern practice of scientific disciplines such as bioanthropology and physical anthropology’. In their eyes, these disciplines had actually helped ‘increase understanding between different ethno-political groups, militating against the abuse of subordinate by dominant groups’ and mitigating ‘the violence of colonial dispossession’.Footnote 26 Exercising his right of reply in the same issue, Turnbull restated his claim that he had not depicted anthropology as ‘a monstrous conspiracy’, adding, however, that he viewed McAllister's narration of ‘anthropology as an engine of moral enlightenment’ as ‘an unabashedly “Whiggish” interpretation of the history of science … heroic history’. He underlined that, while individual anthropologists might have been keen to ameliorate specific abuses, it was still necessary to study the history of anthropology, not least because of ‘its disclosure of connections with colonial ambitions and frontier violence’.Footnote 27
Notwithstanding the fact that Turnbull offered a critique rather than a wholesale repudiation of anthropology, the contours of this debate suggest a lingering incommensurability between those who view the history of anthropology as entwined with the history of settler colonial violence and those who see it as a discipline having acted to mitigate this violence.Footnote 28 Assessing the veracity of these claims is critical, particularly in light of the current scholarly attempts to decolonize the humanities and social sciences. This is not merely because the debate on the role and status of anthropology as a colonial science offers divergent views of the history of a discipline, but because it also illustrates how rival understandings of the practices of settler colonialism, the nature of indigenous agency in the face of imperial encroachments, and, more broadly, conceptualizations of causality in colonial history coalesce around examinable frontier situations.
With this in mind, the following argues that, in a scholarly environment in which historians and anthropologists are scrutinizing their disciplines for signs of unaddressed colonial legacies, history offers an indispensable means for both indigenous and non-indigenous scholars to assess the paradigmatic assumptions of these disciplines. Close investigation of the historical terrain underlying rival interpretative paradigms offers a methodology for what Homi Bhabha called ‘transforming the conditions of enunciation’ in a way that is ‘inimical to binary boundaries’.Footnote 29 This historical recasting has been described by Dirk Moses (following Ilan Pappe) as the creation of ‘bridging narratives’ between communities on either side of a settler colonial frontier,Footnote 30 and dovetails with the demands of Indigenous elders in Australia for ‘Makarrata … the coming together after a struggle’, predicated upon a mutual ‘truth-telling about our history’.Footnote 31 Notwithstanding the reality that settler colonial struggles have not necessarily ended, such an approach can accommodate postcolonial and even anti-colonial research paradigms undertaken in a spirit of agonism, but is less capable of meeting the epistemic and material demands of decolonization. As Tuck and Yang have pointed out, ‘an anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonizing framework’.Footnote 32
Testing historically the competing claims made by those participating in the anthropological debates detailed above is possible, given that many of the individual anthropologists whom Turnbull and McAllister have discussed stemmed from precisely the same German anthropological milieu that Zimmerman and Penny scrutinized in their differing histories of German anthropology. Studying the actions, professed intentions, and interpersonal networks of these frontier scientists enables a broader prosopography of settler colonial anthropology built on microhistories that, when knitted together, might offer a firm foundation for the ‘mutual truth-telling’ of Makarrata.
One such frontier scientist, of particular interest to Turnbull and McAllister, was Hermann Klaatsch, whose primary area of expertise was anatomy, but who gradually transferred his medical skills to become one of Germany's most prominent physical anthropologists. Scrutinizing Klaatsch's time as an anthropologist working in the field in Australia offers a way to assess the rival understandings of the colonial legacies of anthropology. By virtue of his connections to both important European anthropological circles in metropolitan Germany and those of the frontier zone of Australasia, Klaatsch stands as an important linchpin between the two zones. More closely examining Klaatsch's experiences and conduct in Australia also offers important insights into current debates on the provenance of anthropological knowledge. Finally, the abundance of sources on Klaatsch – both written metropolitan and oral Indigenous Australian – offers a basis for assessing attempts to decolonize history and historiography.
II
Klaatsch arrived in Australia in 1904 to test the theory of his fellow German anthropologist Otto Schoetensack that Australia was the site of the origins of the human race.Footnote 33 At the time of his arrival, he was nominally committed to the dominant theoretical position of his discipline: monogenism, which posited a common and unifying ancestry of all humans. Just three years after his departure from Australia, however, Klaatsch confessed that he had come to see human evolution differently, proffering a highly idiosyncratic, polygenist theory of human evolution that saw humans as emerging from differing, geographically discrete ancestral origins. In this post-fieldwork phase, he linked orangutans, Indigenous Australians, and Aurignacian Europeans (which, for him, included Germans) in one evolutionary cluster; and gorillas, Africans, and Neanderthals within an entirely different one.Footnote 34
As a result, Klaatsch has long been represented by those postulating a dramatic shift from liberal humanism to biological racism in German anthropology as the ‘missing link’ between the putatively humanist anthropology of Rudolf Virchow and the hard-edged racial theory of Eugen Fischer.Footnote 35 The East German anthropologist Lothar Schott argued in 1973, for example, that, in comparison to what he (somewhat misleadingly) called the ‘pugnacious anti-racist attitudes of the bourgeois humanist Virchow, who consistently opposed any form of racial discrimination’, Klaatsch was akin to Ernst Haeckel, in that both ‘followed racist deliberations’.Footnote 36 Perhaps most damningly, the notorious Fischer praised Klaatsch's racially oriented evolutionary theory in his obituary for him. Fischer also used this obituary to disparage Virchow and his followers because of their scepticism towards such racial approaches.Footnote 37
Yet, while in Australia, Klaatsch was viewed by the settler population as anything but a hardliner on questions of race. During his time there, not only did he study the culture and physiology of Indigenous Australians, but he also commented publicly on their general condition. Often, his blunt pronouncements on the immiseration of Indigenous peoples and his suggestion that a genocidal frontier war was continuing in Western Australia elicited consternation among the European colonizing population, many of whom saw him as a foreign visitor overstepping the mark.
By far the most obvious example of the effects of his remarks was the fallout of his participation in a conference held in Adelaide on 10 January 1907. This conference, the meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, saw Klaatsch stir up a nationwide controversy, when, in a ‘men-only’ lecture, he commented directly on the cruel treatment of Indigenous peoples in Western Australia, which had been the recent subject of a hotly disputed royal commission conducted by his friend, the anthropologist and chief protector of Aborigines in Queensland, Dr Walter Roth.Footnote 38 In front of an august and influential scholarly audience, Klaatsch corroborated Roth's most scathing findings and presented a series of photographs that made it unmistakably clear that the horrific abuses that Roth had described were indeed taking place in northern Western Australia.
The association hosting the Adelaide conference did their best to mute the controversy when it published a sanitized version of Klaatsch's lecture on frontier relations in Wyndham, Western Australia, as observed during his two-month stay there. The conference proceedings recorded Klaatsch as saying:
I am sorry to have to sustain the correctness of Dr Roth's allegations, for, during my stay there of two months, I found the relations between the whites and the blacks so unfavourable that it was impossible for me to get into friendly contact with the numerous wild tribes around Wyndham, every white person being regarded with the dread that the natives attached to police officers, who, in their mind, were likened to dangerous animals. Excellent material for investigation, however, was found in the prison, where 70 to 80 aborigines were confined. I measured over 70 of them very exhaustively, taking a much greater number of measurements of the body and of the head, combined observation of the complexion and structure, than have been made before. I also secured a very fine material for pictures of the living bodies.Footnote 39
This still notably critical, published report also included seventeen of the photographic plates that Klaatsch had shown at the Adelaide conference. Yet it omitted the striking pictures he presented of Indigenous prisoners in neck chains, as well as the photo of three Indigenous women who had been victims of rape.Footnote 40
Press reports from the day of the conference, however, noted Klaatsch's more strongly worded criticisms of Western Australian frontier conditions.Footnote 41 By the following day, an almost verbatim report of Klaatsch's intervention had reached Perth, where the Daily News reported that he had ‘expressed himself very pointedly and very strongly on the treatment to which the black population is subjected at the hands of the white’. In this report Klaatsch was presented as an impartial man of science and an outsider who was ‘an absolutely independent authority … neither interested in attacking whites nor in defending blacks’. The version of his remarks here were far more condemnatory than those of the conference proceedings. After noting that Klaatsch had corroborated the findings of Roth, the paper recounted Klaatsch's blunt assessment that ‘Relations between the whites and the blacks could be compared only with the terrible state of affairs which prevailed in Tasmania from 1820 to 1830, and which largely resulted in the extinction of the blacks in that island.’
Thereafter, however, Klaatsch noted the ‘excellent material for investigation’ he had found there ‘in the prison cells, where 73 aborigines were confined’. Only after noting the usefulness of the prison as a receptacle for anthropological specimens did he return to the theme of police mistreatment and frontier violence:
He had witnessed the arrival of fresh prisoners, chained by the neck, in which condition they had been made to travel from 300 to 400 miles, including the crossing of rivers from the Sturts Creek and Halls Creek country, where alleged cattle-spearing had taken place. There was no doubt that cattle-spearing had been indulged in, but there was little or no justification for the course of retribution taken, for arrests were indiscriminately made. The police were paid by those interested to get as many blackfellows as possible, and they also captured young women, ostensibly for the purpose of evidence, but for what real reason everybody knew.Footnote 42
The differences here are substantial, not least in Klaatsch's pointed description of frontier conditions as a ‘war’, and the stark, telling comparison to Tasmania's exterminatory Black War of the 1820s. Similarly striking is his confirmation of the practice of neck chaining (including during dangerous river crossings), the indiscriminate arrests of men, and the rape of captured Indigenous women who had been collected as ‘witnesses’: practices that had all been detailed and condemned in Walter Roth's 1905 royal commission report.Footnote 43
A month later the Brisbane Courier offered a slightly different version of Klaatsch's opinions, portraying him as generally sympathetic towards Indigenous suffering. The article also added that Klaatsch adjudged the position of Aborigines in Queensland to be in fact more dire, because, unlike in northern Western Australia, they had lost their independence and had become economically dependent on Europeans. Klaatsch's criticism of the absence of due legal process in Wyndham was also mentioned, when he complained that ‘no investigation was made as to whether or not those particular aboriginals killed the cattle. There was no trial – the aboriginals were taken straight away to gaol.’Footnote 44
In the interview, Klaatsch repeated his opinion that frontier conditions in Western Australia were genocidal. ‘Innocent blackfellows’, he argued, ‘had been shot and their countrymen had exacted revenge. Neither race now gave any credit to the other and a similar condition existed to that which had prevailed in Tasmania before the black race died out.’ Yet Klaatsch's professed objection to genocide was far from humanitarian. In the context of explaining his theory that Indigenous Australians were ‘the last relic of primitive humankind’, he offered his professional evaluation of why Indigenous people required protection:
It is a great pity that the Tasmanian natives were allowed to die out, because they were different in some respects from the Australians – especially in the formation of their skulls, and in their hair. To my mind it is a proper thing from a scientific standpoint to preserve the Australian native. We preserve our natural scenery, our natural beauty, and it is our duty to preserve this beautiful document in the development of mankind.
Having offered this rationale for halting genocidal attacks on people whom he saw as a resource for historically minded scientists rather than a beleaguered community requiring support in their own right, Klaatsch added, somewhat patronizingly, that ‘personally he liked the blackfellows very much. They were a very kind people when properly treated, and in their native state they divided all they had amongst their fellows.’Footnote 45
Klaatsch's corroboration of Roth's charges was also discussed in both Australia's German-language pressFootnote 46 and German-language anthropological literature. In 1907, from the geographic and linguistic safety of the German Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Klaatsch gave voice once again to his assessment of the genocidal conditions around Wyndham:
The relationship between the whites and the blacks are so tense here that it is completely impossible to come into friendly contact with the still free savages. One can hardly be surprised by this. I could confirm all of the reports that Dr W. E. Roth as Royal Commissioner made about the poor treatment of the natives, with the addition that Roth was only in the area for 24 hours, while I was there for two months, and that I had the opportunity to receive privately the most intimate details. The question of guilt is a completely irrelevant matter. The natives were to be intimidated, displaced and exterminated, in order to make room for herds of cattle. Every wrong committed by one side triggers another from the other side. The situation is no better than it was once in Tasmania.Footnote 47
That Klaatsch knew of Roth's withering 1905 report was no accident, given his close, two-month-long collaboration with Roth in Brisbane between mid-March and mid-May 1904. As Corinna Erckenbrecht has made clear, upon Klaatsch's arrival in Australia, he and Roth had quickly become friends, with Klaatsch going to Roth's Sherwood home every day to study the chief protector of Aborigines’ personal collection of Indigenous remains.Footnote 48 At this time, despite the scandal that had enveloped Roth regarding what Helen Pringle has called his ‘ethno-pornographic’ photography of an Indigenous couple,Footnote 49 he was just months away from being appointed to head the royal commission in Western Australia. Klaatsch also returned to Brisbane for two weeks in early March 1905, at which time the outcry over Roth's Western Australian report was at its peak.Footnote 50
Even prior to Klaatsch's intervention, Roth was fast becoming regarded as persona non grata in settler society,Footnote 51 but his strongly worded royal commission findings reporting neck chaining, mass arbitrary arrests, forced confessions, systematic fraud, and unchecked sexual violence made him few friends in the settler population.Footnote 52 Not long after Klaatsch's firm statement of support in Adelaide, Roth was forced to resign his post in Queensland and accept a position in British Guyana, where he would continue his anthropological work.Footnote 53
Given Roth's deep unpopularity among settler colonists, Klaatsch's blunt support for his findings was not without cost to the German's reputation in Australia. His pointed remarks in Adelaide were received in awkward near-silence, prompting him to write in a letter to Germany:
I have won some friends, but also some enemies by my uncompromising presentation of the poor treatment of the natives in East Kimberley. I have only now seen, that here in the south no-one had believed the reports of Roth. After my presentation with photographs of prisoners chained by the neck no further denial was possible. The uproar was enormous and I hope that it will have been so lasting that a true change to the treatment of the blacks results.Footnote 54
III
The portrait of Klaatsch that most obviously emerges from sources stemming from the white settler community of Australia is that of an outspoken humanitarian, a portrait that accords with McAllister's and Penny's understanding of the mitigatory role played by anthropology on the frontier. Certainly, within the discursive norms established within Australian frontier society, which either rationalized, denied, or actively approved of the devastating impact of pastoralist expansion, Klaatsch does seem like a critical voice, notwithstanding the fact that some of his objections appear to have been professional rather than humanitarian ones.
Yet an important counter-narrative to this picture emerges both through the collective memory of Indigenous Australians and through a contrapuntal reading of Klaatsch's own writings. Through this source material, Klaatsch less obviously resembles the humanist frontier anthropologist who ‘increased understanding between different ethno-political groups’ and mitigated ‘the violence of colonial dispossession’.Footnote 55 Instead, when his personal conduct and research methods rather than his public statements are scrutinized, it becomes clear that he prioritized his own research goals over the welfare of the communities he visited.
This is already partially visible in the statements that he made in Adelaide, in which he noted the unique research opportunities that mass incarceration presented.Footnote 56 Beyond this, however, it is the legacy of Klaatsch's procurement of Indigenous remains (both by negotiation and by outright theft) that requires scrutiny, particularly given that it was on these grounds that Turnbull (and indeed Zimmerman) had originally called anthropologists to account. While in Australia, Klaatsch spent time not only studying Roth's personal collection of Indigenous remains,Footnote 57 but also sourcing his own, which he then removed and shipped back to Europe for his and other physical anthropologists’ later professional use. Here McAllister's sanguine view of the effects of anthropology stumbles over Indigenous Australian accounts of Klaatsch, which support Turnbull's concerns about the provenance of human remains collected as part of what Zimmerman has described as ‘the skin trade’.Footnote 58
Notwithstanding his stance on the violent dynamics of the Australian frontier, Klaatsch was unapologetic about his removal of human remains from Indigenous communities and burial sites, even when doing so jeopardized his life and clearly outraged, distressed, or purposively divided an Indigenous community. One key incident in June 1904 offers a clear sense of his attitudes towards the collection of Indigenous remains and his interactions with the families of those whose remains he took. As explained by Vera Ketchell, a present-day elder of the Ngadjon-Jii people, when passing through north Queensland, Klaatsch was alerted to the fact that Ng:tja (a Ngadjon-Jii elder from the Atherton Tablelands also known as King Narcha and Barry Clarke) had died and that his youngest grieving widow had been carrying his mummified remains on her back for eight months as part of ceremonial women's business. Had the process been completed, Ng:tja would have at a later time been handed over to Ngadjon-Jii men to be ritually laid to rest in a cave, hollow log, or tree.Footnote 59 Instead, Klaatsch took the remains before mourning could be completed.Footnote 60
Klaatsch offered several versions of his story of how he procured Ng:tja's remains. In the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, he wrote:
It was really a great stroke of luck that it was possible for me to remove the mummy of the blacks in exchange for an abundant gift of tobacco, clothes and food. I followed the entire camp group into the small, primitive store of the gold prospectors and allowed them to choose as much of the alluring artefacts of the whites as they wanted, rightly viewing the expense as irrelevant in comparison to this success. They gave me the mummy, after each of the relatives had kissed the bald skull … The next morning they wanted the mummy back, with the remorse-plagued women in particular wailing, while the men showed a more materialistic attitude. Naturally I declined to surrender the mummy. At which point the blacks made a special offer to give me two skulls of relatives that they carried around in their dilly bags as a substitute for the mummy. I pretended to show an interest, but only so as to claim the red-painted skulls they had brought out as well and, as solace to the grieving relatives, once again tobacco, clothing and flour to the value of a few pounds sterling. The danger that the blacks would steal the mummy from me or take it in other ways was great: I moved on the next morning, with the dead ‘king’ as the spoils of victory bound on the packhorse, and me guiding it over the bush track made slippery by the rain.Footnote 61
The general tone of condescension apart, the reference to Ng:tja's remains as ‘the spoils of victory’ (Siegesbeute) offers a clear sense that Klaatsch was aware of the power differentials that had structured the transaction. In the privacy of a letter to his friend and fellow anthropologist Otto Schoetensack in Heidelberg, however, he offered an even more vivid depiction of his encounter, which reveals how he used both material and religious enticements to secure the body. Klaatsch sought to divide and bribe members of the Ngadjon-Jii community. He also described his collection of human remains for a museum as a religious journey to a European ‘sacred house’:
I explained briefly they had to give me the mummy that was their father, who would wish that his children would be well fed, have plenty of tobacco and fine clothes. They should come with me to the small store and they could choose whatever they wanted! I would, however, take their father to a sacred house, where he would be better preserved than in the camp. A short discussion followed. The women were against it but the boys won out. They circulated the mummy and each one spat or kissed the bald skull! … I was moved by this scene. The mummy was carried to the shop and then the blacks bought up! I encouraged them to take ever more, happy to sacrifice a couple of pound sterling. Finally they had enough and the deal was closed … The next morning the boys came to me and explained that they had to have the mummy back, they had no peace because the women had howled all through the night in their camp. In any case they had pangs of remorse! Naturally I refused, and said they'd have to give me the ‘tucker’ (food and clothing) back. At that they undertook to give me two skulls from young relatives painted red and carried around by them … They brought the skulls as a replacement for the mummy. I saw that these skulls would again be a good catch and explained that I'd take them too. They should just go back to the shop and take as much as they wanted. A strange conflict was mirrored in the ugly faces of the old women – materialism won out over religious misgivings.Footnote 62
Happily, it is not only Klaatsch's version that exists. There is also a strong oral history of the removal of Ng:tja, handed down through the Ngadjon-Jii community's families for more than one hundred years, which has entered the public domain in the wake of the repatriation of Ng:tja's mummified remains from the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory to Australia in 2017. As explained by the community spokesperson Vera Ketchell, many of the details of Klaatsch's report on the removal of the remains are not contested by the community:
In his documentation papers he says he acquired the mummified body by bartering and offering food and tobacco and things like that, bits of clothing, and that was also what was handed down to us. That's what did happen. The old people told me that.Footnote 63
What Klaatsch's account did not discuss, however, was the enormous weight of authority that he brought to bear on the Indigenous community with which he was negotiating. Ngadjon-Jii memory insists that he was a ‘very strong man … we knew that when he was in the tribes, he was very like with a stern face, and he showed that this was [within] his authority … With his face, expressions and that he'd show his authority.’Footnote 64 Not only did he present himself as an immensely important man from the wider world, but he had also enjoyed stable and trusted relations with the community. He was both a trusted and a feared figure, negotiating with a community that was cajoled into giving up the remains of their deceased elder, Ng:tja.
That the community's consent was less than complete is also revealed in its account of events, which records that they actually took Ng:tja's remains back while Klaatsch slept, whereupon Klaatsch took them back again. It was at this point that the community attempted to plead with Klaatsch, bargaining with the skulls of individuals whose remains had been through a complete mourning process. Instead, he took these skulls as well as his ‘spoils’ and, as Ketchell relates the story, ‘around midnight … he loaded up his pack and horsepack and took Granddad [Ng:tja] on it down the ranges into Cairns and put him in a corrugated iron tin box and sent him to Germany’.Footnote 65
When asked about the community's attitude to these events, Ketchell argued that, even after the return of his remains, many ‘in the community still feel a bit angry that he was what they consider to be stolen’. She made clear the community's enduring commitment to finding and repatriating their ‘granddad’, reporting that ‘our elders said take him back home to where he come from, take him back to country’. As another twenty-first-century Ngadjon-Jii elder expressed herself on the question of Germany's repatriation of Ng:tja's remains, ‘they stole him, they can bring him home for burial’.Footnote 66 In a process led by the Ngadjon-Jii people, in collaboration with the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville and the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory, Ng:tja's remains were finally repatriated to Australia in April–May 2017.Footnote 67
The discrepancies in the accounts of the Ngadjon-Jii and of Klaatsch are revealing. At the very least they make clear that Klaatsch used his authority and position of trust in the community to exploit gender divisions within the Ngadjon-Jii, taking the remains against the will of still-mourning women. From the community's perspective, Klaatsch stole Ng:tja's mummified remains and it was not until 2017 that Ngadjon-Jii women were able to complete the mourning ceremonies in preparation for Ng:tja's return to Ngadjon-Jii country, where he was to be placed in an ‘aboveground vault representing a cave’ in sight of the sacred site of Choorechillum, ‘so his spirit can return’.Footnote 68
That Klaatsch did not hesitate to steal Indigenous remains against the will of the community is evidenced by another, even more extreme example of grave robbing described by Klaatsch himself after he visited Normanton, Queensland, in September 1904, where ‘he was nearly killed by local Aboriginal people … in his determination to acquire skeletal remains’.Footnote 69 As Erckenbrecht has argued, Klaatsch went from being ‘well known’ by the region's Indigenous population for paying good money to buy their weapons (primarily boomerangs and woomeras) as materials for European collections, to almost losing his life for removing Indigenous human remains without consulting the affected community.
Indeed, Klaatsch admitted that he was ready to ‘risk everything’ to collect these human remains, despite being warned against it. Passing a camp of Indigenous people on his way, he went to the bank of the Norman River and dug up some skeletons. Unsurprisingly, this provoked a strong reaction among those for whom this was the cemetery of their ancestors. In his account, Klaatsch reported:
We met a number of blacks that did not appear to be paying attention to us, but an old and ugly woman came up to me, grabbed the sack with the bones and lifted the skinny pointer finger of her right hand at me and said, ‘Devil Devil’. It sounded like a declaration of war.Footnote 70
The next day, Klaatsch's hotel was surrounded by an armed party of Indigenous men, waiting to spear Klaatsch, who was warned not to go outside on any account. In his diary, he wrote:
That evening one of the men in the hotel said to me, ‘Professor we fear for your life’ and then he explained to me how at midday he found a group of blacks on the street, animatedly gesticulating, with one of them shaking the spear in his woomera in his right hand that was ready to throw. The man asked him what they wanted, to which the spear-shaker replied: ‘We speak of Devil Devil! Devil Devil dug out my brother, me spear him.’Footnote 71
Thereafter, Klaatsch was forced to stay for three days in his hotel, revolver at the ready, before being smuggled out of Normanton. The incident was so notorious among the Indigenous people of the Gulf country that a missionary, Reverend Gribble, living more than 300 kilometres away on the Mitchell River, had heard about it from those living around his mission.Footnote 72
IV
As a physical anthropologist who widely published his view that Indigenous Australians were atavistic specimens of human types that would later evolve into Europeans, it is entirely uncontroversial to declare that Klaatsch was a racist. Whether in his monogenist or polygenist period, he believed that human diversity could be explained and mapped through the study of corporeal (particularly cerebral and cranial) difference. He argued that the different races of humans that populated the globe were actually exemplars of humans in various stages of evolution. For him, Indigenous Australians were remnants of an earlier stage of human development that would elsewhere find its later full expression in Europeans.
When he arrived at the position of polygenism, Klaatsch was quite prepared to countenance a shared ancestry between Australian Aborigines and Europeans, but only along clear, biologically demarcated lines of hierarchy that positioned Europeans as a more evolved version of the ostensibly atavistic Australian type. Yet even this limited recognition of a shared origin was more than he would offer others. Unlike the case with Indigenous Australians, in his opinion there was no shared biological heritage between Europeans and the peoples of Africa. For Klaatsch, this had clear consequences for Europeans’ treatment of Africans. While he argued that Indigenous Australians ‘deserve our sympathy far more than the African Negro’,Footnote 73 some of Germany's African colonial subjects were not so lucky:
Modern science cannot support the exaggerated humanitarianism that wants to see our brothers and sisters in every lower race of humans and accordingly grant them rights. One must judge the various types differently. To be sure, the Australian natives stand close to us, as do the Samoans and the Singhalese, but not a Zulu or a Herero.Footnote 74
This statement has a clear, particularly German, political context. It is more than coincidental that the Herero nation whom he explicitly mentioned as undeserving of humanitarian consideration were also the victims of Germany's genocidal colonial war in the first decade of the twentieth century. Klaatsch was by no means ignorant of this colonial violence in Southwest Africa, having personally petitioned for the skulls of the Herero dead to be sent to him in Breslau in 1908.Footnote 75
Klaatsch was not simply a dispassionate scientist, nor was he personally predisposed towards seeking a fundamental understanding between European colonizers and the colonized based on anything approaching a principle of equality. Rather, as Andrew Evans has argued, he ‘accepted imperialism and the aggressive tenor of Wilhelmine nationalism as a matter of course’.Footnote 76 Far from being a consistent critic of settler colonial violence, Klaatsch's declaration of a fundamental racial divide between Indigenous Australians and the Herero of German Southwest Africa allowed him to critique the British mistreatment of the former and remain unmoved by Germany's genocidal warfare against the latter. For him, Europe's humanitarian responsibilities extended only so far as its biological, racial heritage, a position that coincided with Germany's determination not to allow an ‘exaggerated humanitarianism’ forestall its colonial objectives in Southwest Africa. In the context of the politics of the Kaiserreich, Klaatsch's anthropological position offered ex post facto support to colonial genocide in Africa, at the same time as it moved him to protest against genocidal conditions on the Australian frontier.
Notwithstanding his condemnation of the frontier abuses committed against Aboriginal Australians – whom he regarded as the embodied biological pre-history of Europe – Klaatsch's priorities in defending Indigenous Australians were clearly not identical with theirs. Unlike many within the settler colonial community of Australia, Klaatsch was a supporter of the minimal rights of Indigenous Australians to exist free from arbitrary imprisonment and extra-judicial murder. This consideration was, however, framed as a desire to preserve Aborigines as the living prehistory of Europeans. Their preservation was important for science, and their destruction was for him a deliberate attack on the cultural and biological heritage of Europe's pre-history in a way that genocidal attacks on Africans were not.
As a German and a transitory scientific sojourner, Klaatsch felt no particular need to defend the pastoralist expansionism of the settler colonial project in Australia and its larger scale project of displacing, murdering, or helotizing Indigenous people. This status as a colonial outsider afforded him the social space to present uncomfortable truths to Australia's settler society. Yet his interest in Australia was always primarily anthropological, and his critique of Australian frontier violence reflected his anthropological priorities. As his later work demonstrates, it was these priorities that led him to contend that, unlike Africans, Indigenous Australians should be preserved.
V
The historiographical line between those who view anthropologists as deeply implicated in the abuses of settler colonialism and those who view them as having mitigated these abuses can only be convincingly tested through careful, close analysis of specific case studies that offer the necessary detail for an informed assessment. The case of Hermann Klaatsch is one such microhistory. What it reveals is that, as an anthropologist, Klaatsch was capable of speaking out clearly against the systematic violence of police and settlers on the frontier at the same time as his research methods demonstrated his complete disregard for the clearly articulated preferences of the Indigenous people he encountered.
It is not only Klaatsch's writings which report the reactions of earlier generations of Indigenous Australians to his research. Rather, it is the living historical account of a twenty-first-century Indigenous community that has clarified the long-term effects of his collection methods. By paying attention to this Indigenous record, it is possible to offer a revised understanding of the significance of Klaatsch's interactions with the communities he was studying.
Methodologically, it is well understood that the amplification of such indigenous perspectives by scholars working within a university context is important historiographical work. Incorporating indigenous accounts into research dealing with settler colonialism assists not only in expanding the available empirical data on a particular period, but also in redrawing the boundaries of what constitutes historical knowledge. Indigenous histories, such as that offered by Vera Ketchell on behalf of the Ngadjon-Jii, assist in reassessing the earlier knowledge claims made by scholars. In this case, it has taken the seemingly unproblematic narrative of a ‘humanitarian’ anthropologist and confirmed the suggestions of Turnbull and Zimmerman that anthropology (and anthropologists) participated in and profited from some of the abuses committed on the colonial frontier.
The question remains, however, to what extent such an amplification of indigenous knowledge by a non-indigenous scholar transcends a postcolonial perspective and constitutes a decolonizing approach.Footnote 77 It seems unlikely that such perspectival inclusivity is enough to warrant inclusion in decolonization's material and epistemic project. As Tuck and Yang make clear, claims by non-indigenous scholars to be decolonizing when this is not warranted can do far more harm than good:
The language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives. Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects … This kind of inclusion is a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonization.Footnote 78
Rightly, Tuck and Yang directly confront the claims of non-indigenous academics to be decolonizing their disciplines from within the existing structures of colonizing nations by merely foregrounding indigenous voices, labelling such claims as ‘settler moves to innocence … an attempt to deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy settler privilege and occupying stolen land’.Footnote 79 Non-indigenous researchers working on the colonial past (and present), particularly those residing in ex or current zones of dispossession such as the Americas, Australasia, Africa, and Israel, therefore face a profound dilemma. They are, according to Tuck and Yang, ensconced within that which is to be placed in question, namely ‘settler colonial futurity’, while what they take to be their own decolonizing efforts merely results in ‘rescuing settler normalcy’.Footnote 80
Other scholars have made the same point. In the Australian context, Evelyn Araluen has recently warned that academic co-options of decolonial theory confuse ‘discursive resistance’ with ‘material political resistance’. Such confusion, she argues, runs the risk of ‘foreclosing decolonization to an academic elite by coding it purely within poetics and academic practice’.Footnote 81 So too Wahbie Long has argued in South Africa that ‘the politics of the decolonization movement is in some respects deeply conservative … the working assumptions of decolonization discourse lead it to endorse rather than interrogate the alienation so characteristic of capitalist social formations’.Footnote 82
Decolonization is not and cannot be conceptualized primarily as a theoretical position or methodological shift, because the push to decolonize is not simply an intellectual ‘turn’ within scholarly inquiry. It is a long-standing material claim. Without denying the immense importance of having the indigenous experience of history properly weighted in any account of their past, the account presented here of the historical experience of the Ngadjon-Jii is only one part of a far broader, ongoing decolonizing struggle centred on the legal recognition of their sovereignty over their land.Footnote 83
Attempting to extend the term ‘decolonization’ beyond the material struggle for indigenous sovereignty and community survival to include a historiographical methodology practised in academic settings by non-indigenous scholars, even one that can answer difficult questions about the nature of empire and colonialism, threatens to defang decolonization's necessarily radical, material reorientation in the interests of making it suit the needs of the academy. Disarmed in this manner, decolonization would, as Long has argued, amount to little more than ‘the ideological superstructure of an identity project that resonates powerfully with the interests of an emerging social elite’.Footnote 84
Critical, postcolonial investigations such as the present one into the role of anthropology in settler colonialism would not be immune to such critique, were they to claim decolonizing credentials, given that the major structuring arguments have been formulated by non-indigenous scholars addressing issues far removed from those of political and territorial sovereignty and community survival. The material project of decolonization and postcolonial investigations of colonial structures and practices are both important, but they are not the same thing. Notwithstanding Edward Said's pointing out that critique is always ‘worldly’ and ‘a part of the social world’,Footnote 85 the preceding might best be seen as a postcolonial study offering some intellectual materials for those pursuing decolonization by laying bare the links between settler colonial science, violence, dispossession, and the loss of indigenous autonomy and sovereignty. It is perhaps most properly seen as a scholarly intervention, a necessary part of Makarrata ‘truth-telling’.Footnote 86
Whether or not non-indigenous scholars might do (or claim to be doing) more when it comes to decolonization remains a vexed question. Long is forthright in urging intercommunal solidarity, arguing that ‘the idea that only the oppressed may speak for the oppressed – is surely one of the most dangerous ideas in circulation today’.Footnote 87 More cautiously, however, Tuck and Yang have warned that, while they want ‘others’ to join them in their efforts to analyse settler colonialism, ‘solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter’.Footnote 88 Araluen, too, has pointed out that ‘there is no protocol for settlers to engage with the enormously confronting notion of decolonisation’.Footnote 89 These caveats are instructive for non-indigenous historians, who might profitably contribute to uncovering the practices of imperial power, and in so doing possibly contribute to the amplification of the voices of indigenous colleagues and communities. Non-indigenous scholars, however, particularly those living and working in sites of settler colonialism, would find it difficult to legitimately make decolonizing claims on behalf of the colonized, when indigenous scholars have so clearly called for the chance to decide and articulate their own material priorities, at both the macro and the micro level. Accordingly, Long's ‘solidarity’ is perhaps best interpreted as ally-ship rather than vanguardism.Footnote 90
With these important caveats in mind, the critical history of Klaatsch's anthropological research figures here as a postcolonial microhistory of imperialism and the practices of settler colonialism, as well as a re-evaluation of the role of anthropology in the age of empire. Methodologically, this history moves between the preserved written record of the colonial frontier and the oral historical record of Indigenous people, offering important insights into the longer-term effects of anthropology and amplifying the historical tradition of those whose experience and knowledge of the past has hitherto been marginalized. Such historiographical reckonings with anthropology's colonial past complement the efforts of indigenous people seeking material recognition of their sovereignty over land. Their amplification of indigenous accounts and re-assemblage of historical knowledge in light of them do not, however, constitute decolonization.
