PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 495 



institutions is of wider application; but I have time only to deal, and that very 

 briefly, with one other region. 



No part of the world has attracted more attention in recent anthropological 

 speculation than Australia, and at the bottom of these speculations, at any rate 

 in this country, there has usually been the idea, openly expressed or implicitly 

 understood, that, in the culture of this region, we have a homogeneous example 

 of primitive human society. From the time that I first became acquainted with 

 Australian sociology, I have wondered at the complacency with which certain 

 features of Australian social organisation have been regarded, and especially the 

 combination of the dual organisation and matrimonial classes with w T hat appear 

 to be totemic clans like those of other parts of the world. This co-existence of 

 two different forms of social organisation side by side has seemed to me the 

 fundamental problem of Australian society, and I confess that till lately, 

 obsessed as I see now I have been by a crude evolutionary point of view, the 

 condition has seemed an absolute mystery." A comparison, however, of Australia 

 and Melanesia has now led me to see that probably we have in Australia, not 

 merely another example of mixture of cultures, but even another resultant of 

 mixture of the same or closely similar components as those which have peopled 

 Melanesia, viz., a mixture of a people possessing the dual organisation and 

 matrilineal descent with one organised in totemic clans, possessing either patri- 

 lineal descent, or at any rate clear recognition of the relation between father and 

 child. This is no new view, having been already advanced, though in a different 

 form, by Graebner 10 and P. W. Schmidt. 11 If further research should show 

 Australian society to possess such complexity, it will at once become obvious 

 that here also ethnological analysis must precede any theoretical use of the facts 

 of Australian society in support of evolutionary speculations. 



It may be objected that we all recognise the complexity of culture, and 

 indeed in the study of regions such as the Mediterranean, where we possess 

 historical evidence, it is this complexity which forms the chief subject of discus- 

 sion. Further, where we possess historical evidence, as in the cases of the 

 Hindu and Mahommedan invasions into the Malay Archipelago, all anthropolo- 

 gists are fully alive to the complexities and difficulties introduced thereby into 

 the study of culture ; but where we have no such historical evidence, the 

 complexity of culture is almost wholly ignored by those who use these cultures 

 in their attempts to demonstrate the origin and course of development of human 

 institutions. 



I have now fulfilled the first purpose of this address. I have tried to indi- 

 cate that evolutionary speculations can have no firm basis unless there has been 

 a preceding analysis of the cultures and civilisations now spread over the earth's 

 surface. Without such analysis it is impossible to say whether an institution 

 or belief possessed by a people who seem simple and primitive may not really 

 be the product of a relatively advanced culture forming but one element of a 

 complexity which at first sight seems simple and homogeneous. 



Before proceeding further I should like to guard against a possible miscon- 

 ception. Some of those who are interested in the ethnological analysis of culture 

 regard it not only as the first but as the only task of the anthropology of to-day. 

 I cannot too strongly express my disagreement with this view. Because I have 

 insisted on the importance of ethnological analysis, I hope you will not for a 

 moment suppose that I underrate the need for the psychological study of cus- 

 toms and institutions. If the necessity for the ethnological analysis of culture 

 be recognised, this psychological study becomes more complicated and difficult 

 than it has seemed to be in the past, but that makes it none the less essential. 

 Side by side with ethnological analysis there must go the attempt to fathom 

 the modes of thought of different peoples, to understand their ways of regarding 

 and classifying the facts of the universe. It is only by the combination of 

 ethnological and psychological analysis that we shall make any real advance. 



I may note here that Mr. Lang, after having considered this problem from the 

 purely evolutionary standpoint (Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Ti.lor. 

 p. 203), concludes with the words, 'We seem lost in a wilderness of difficulties.' 



10 Zeitsch. f. Ethnol., 1905, xxxvii., 28, and ' Zur australischen Religicnsgeschichte,' 

 Globus. 1909, xcvi.. 341. 



II See especially Zeitsch. f. Ethnol, 1909, xli., 340. 



