® Incorporated Genre and Gender: Elsie Masson, Her Writings, and Her Contribution to Malinowski’s Career Daniela Salvucci INTRODUCTION ‘This chapter aims to give an overview of the works by Elsie Masson (1890-1935), including her book, newspapers articles, reports, and letters. It draws on bibliographical and biographical sources, and refers to postmodern and feminist theories on anthropological writing. In rela- tion to genre, it underlines Masson’s originality in writing, and her politically engaged point of view, stressing the multiple connections in-between literature, journalism, and anthropological sensitivity. With reference to gender, it highlights Masson’s ‘writerly incorporation’ as a ‘hidden scholar’ in the work of her husband, the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), according to a ‘two-person, single career’ model based on gender asymmetry. Thereby, the article introduces the main themes of my two-direction ongoing rescarch on Elsie Masson’s whole work and on her contribution to Malinowski’s career. D. Salvucei (2) Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy e-mail: danicla salvucci@unibyit © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 189 Switzerland AG 2021 E, Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_8190 D, SALVUCCT Exsrz Masson’s TRAVELS, WRITINGS, AND Work AS Mrs. MALINOWSKI ‘The following enthusiastic review of the book An Untamed Territory: The Northern Territories of Australia, authored by Elsie Masson in 1915, appeared in the Geographical Journal of the British Royal Geographical Society in March 1916: ‘This book, short as it is and dealing mostly with the personal experiences of a visitor to the Northern Territory of Australia, is a really valuable addition to the literature on that territory. It is so because the writer has an excellent gift of description and a power of avoiding tivialities, Her accounts of a motor journcy into the bush — a pioncer journey by car - of the deserted station of Port Essington, of the trip up the Roper River, and of the trial of natives for the murder of a white man, are admirable of their kind, and these are only a few examples of a series of vivid pictures. (...) the book is both well written and well constructed, and if it be the first the writer has put forth, it may be hoped that opportunities for further work of this character will not be denied to her. (The Geographical Journal, March 1916, vol. 47 (3), p. 215) Although Elsic Masson was a talented journalist and writer, and one of the first women to take part in the scientific explorations of the Australian North,” she did not have many opportunities to farther this kind of work. It is probably because she started helping Bronislaw Malinowski with his own work, and contributed to his career as his wife and intellectual supporter. The following sections will give an overview of her writings, suggesting that her labour as a writer and as a wife was ‘incorporated’ in her husband’s career according to an asymmetrical gender pattern. Elsic Masson was born in 1890 in Melbourne to Mary and Orme Masson; the latter was a Scottish chemistry professor who had moved to Australia to hold a position at Melbourne University. Although Orme Masson had been promoting women’s admission to university, neither he nor his wife encouraged their two daughters to attend public school and university (Young 2004, 450-51). Like many other girls of their time and social class, Elsie and her sister Marnie were educated at home, while their brother went to grammar school. The two girls had trained in languages and literature and visited Europe as teenagers together with their mother to study music and art (Selleck 2013; Young 2004)INCORPORATED GENRE AND GENDER: ELSIE MASSON, HER WRITINGS 191 In 1913, as a young woman in her carly twenties, Elsic Masson moved to Port Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia to work as a tutor and companion of the daughters of the new Administrator of the Northern Territory, John Gilruth, an academic friend of her father. Living there for a year and a half, and travelling through this still ‘untamed’ region of the country, Masson had the opportunity to observe and describe different aspects of the local social life, publishing her notes first in several regional newspapers and subsequently in the book An Untamed Territory: The Northern Territories of Australia (Masson 1915), During World War I, she was politically involved in supporting the ‘humanitarian principles of socialism’ (Young 2004, 454) and, as a nurse trainee, highly engaged in the struggle for better working conditions for nurses, as well as for women’s suffrage (Wayne 1995, I; Young 2004) When young Bronislaw Malinowski was living in Melbourne, from April 1916 to October 1917—between his two long field stays in the ‘Trobriand Islands—Baldwin Spencer, Orme Masson, and other profes- sors on Trobriand culture introduced him to their academic milicu, and to Elsie Masson. At that time, Malinowski was examining ethnographic data from his first Trobriand fieldwork expedition (March 1915—March 1916). Being interested in Australian indigenous life himself (Mali- nowski 1913), and having read and appreciated Masson’s book, he asked her for help in processing his material and revising his manuscript on Trobriand culture. During Malinowski’s second fieldwork expedition in the Trobriands (October 1917-October 1918), Masson corresponded with him, commented on his fieldwork accounts and discussed novels and literature they both were reading in their spare time. They got married in 1919 and moved to Europe a year later, making South ‘Tyrol their home, where Masson lived and raised their three daughters while Malinowski taught in London. Although Masson continued to write short stories and newspaper articles from Oberbozen-Soprabolzano and Bozen-Bolzano in South Tyrol, she mostly devoted herself to family care after marriage, and supported her husband’s career. As carly as 1925, she discovered the symptoms of a serious illness, later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, which progressively robbed her of her mobility and led to her death in 1935. The letters Masson and Malinowski exchanged, collected and edited in 1995 by their younger daughter Helena Malinowska Wayne (1925- 2018), show that Masson assisted Malinowski as a copyeditor and discus- sant in the most important period of his career (Wayne 1995, I, II). Her role seems to have been particularly important in the long gestation of192, SALVUCCT Malinowski’s masterpicce Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (Malinowski 1922). With reference to their Melbourne period, Malinowski’s biographer Michael Young (2004) points out that Masson worked together with Malinowski at Victoria Library in Melbourne already in 1917, helping him to process his ethnographic material for a manuscript from which Argonauts and further anthropological mono- graphs were elaborated. Young defined Masson as Malinowski’s ‘chief editor’, cmphasizing that her influence allowed him to usc a very appealing style—one that is both academic and popular (Young 2004, 467). Helena Malinowska Wayne highlighted that Masson actively assisted Malinowski in writing Argonauts as ‘aide and critic, not least with his style? (Wayne 1985, 535). Raymond Firth, Malinowski’s assistant and friend, stated that although Masson did not influence Malinowski’s theo- retical thought, ‘she was an acute appraiser and critic of it, and helped him much with it in draft’ (Firth 1988, 27), and Malinowski ‘relied very greatly upon her judgment’ (Firth 2004, 79). In her travelogue on the Northern Territory of Australia, Masson (1915) developed a young, fresh, usually ironic and humorous style, collecting personal impressions and descriptions of people, situations, and landscapes. According to Lydon (2016, 77-96), on the one hand Masson’s book contributed to popularize the evolutionist theory promoted by her mentor and family friend, Baldwin Spencer. On the other hand, she proposed a humanitarian approach to the aboriginal question, which showed her independent mind and her more demo- cratic attitude compared to that of her parents’ generation and of the middle-class milieu in which she socialized (Lydon 2016; Richardson 2016; Young 2004), During his career, Malinowski, too, was concerned with popularizing his work—and social anthropology as a new disci- pline—by writing books that sold well, publishing in both academic journals and newspapers, participating in public debates, and promoting, applied anthropology. The key to his success in cultivating large popu- larity was a less abstract and more narrative writing approach, according to MacClancy (1996, 11-15, 30). Historian Payne (1981) considered Argonauts to be Malinowski’s first experiment with a new, captivating style, which features vivid descriptions of characters, actions, and land- scapes, uses the rhetoric of the travelogue, and applies a literary imagina- tion that recalls Sir James Frazer’s bestseller (Frazer 1894), and above all, Joseph Conrad’s novels (Thompson 1995; Thornton 1985; Young 2018).INCORPORATED GENRE AND GENDER: ELSIE MASSON, HER WRITINGS 193 Malinowski, in fact, referred directly to the Polish (naturalised English) novelist in his intimate private diary (Malinowski 1967), as anthropol- ogists within the postmodern turn have remarked (Clifford 1986). He shared with Masson a veritable passion for adventure novels and especially for Conrad’s work to the point they used to apply the adjective ‘con- radesque’ to the many picturesque situations they encountered within, as well as to their own writings, such as in the case of Masson’s authored tales in this sense (Wayne 1995, I, II) Although Young (2004) remarks on the strong interests in litera- ture and art of young Malinowski, in his early writings Malinowski scems absorbed more by philosophical, sociological, and anthropolog- ical theoretical questions (Thornton and Skalnik 1993, 2) rather than stylistic issues. Despite Malinowski’s interest in literature and his talent in writing, he apparently chose a more scientific writing approach in his carly academic works written before Argonauts (e.g. Malinowski 1913, 1915). Thornton (1985, 8) highlights that, when writing on his masterpiece, ‘Malinowski thought of himself as a writer’, struggling between science and art, drawing on both Frazer and Conrad to develop an evocative literary imagination through the rhetoric of a travelogue. ‘The intensive labour on his Kula manuscript, from which Argonauts took form (Young 2004, 468), was made in close collaboration with Elsie Masson, and this partnership probably fostered him to switch towards a more literary style by combining narrations and descriptions, and by applying the writing strategies of travelogues to make his work more appealing to a wider audience, In the following sections, I will first discuss concepts from the post- modern and feminist anthropology on the relations among literature, journalism, and ethnography, as well as on genre and gender exclusion in the history of anthropology. I will then underline the originality of Elsie Masson’s gaze on social change in colonized indigenous Australia with the main focus on her book by highlighting her anthropological sensi- tivity as well as her political engagement. I will finally highlight Masson’s interest in South Tyrolean politics and society with reference to her corre- spondence with Malinowski and introduce some extracts from Masson’s article on fascism in South Tyrol. Throughout the chapter, I suggest that Masson’s appealing writing approach, based on a very personal narrative style, could have influenced Malinowski’s own writing style.194 D, SALVUCCT WritING GENRE AND GENDER Since the 1980s, postmodern scholars have underlined the strong connection among ethnographic-anthropological writing, travel litera- ture, and journalism (Clifford 1996; Pratt 1986). Even though profes- sional modern anthropology was defined as a new discipline, precisely by establishing a rigid border between the scientific ethnographic method and writing when compared with all the other genres dealing with travels and sociocultural life, some authors claim that ‘blurred genres’ (Geertz 1980) and experimental ‘artistic ethnographies’ (Behar 2007) have chal- lenged such a frontier. Scholars even tend to recognize that professional ethnography itself evolved from travel writing (Stagl and Pinney 1996). With reference to literature, Craith and Kockel (2014), literary critics in search for connections between British literature and anthropology, have stressed that Victorian social novelists, such as the authors Masson and Malinowski read, were themselves interested in describing the socio- cultural customs of their time: Many Victorian Writers in the XIX century Britain engaged with anthropo- logical themes. (...) Like anthropologists, Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Meredith and William Makepeace Thack- eray endeavored to describe life authentically and without idealization. ‘These authors regarded their novels as objective (i.e. scientific) accounts of human behavior. (Craith and Kockel 2014, 690) To this argument, Salomon (2005) adds the connection with journalism, as some of these authors, such as Thackeray and Dickens, had previously trained as journalists: (Journalism rather than poetry, can be seen as the ‘precursor’ of the Victo- rian novel, both in terms of the formative professional experience of many novelists and the formal development of the genre. (Salomon 2005, 140) Several hidden interconnections, reciprocal influences, and intertextual relations can be traced in line with these scholars that link travelogues, journalism, and social and adventure novels to the ethnographic and anthropological writings in the epoch of the rise of the discipline. ‘The so-called ‘Imperial romance’, which refers to British adventure novels in colonial settings written between the 1880s and 1920s (Jones 2004, 406)—including, among others, Conrad’s, Stevenson’s, and Kipling’sINCORPORATED GENRE AND GENDER: ELSIE MASSON, HER WRITINGS 195 novels—is considered to have been directly influenced by the new anthro- pological and ethnographic knowledge of the time. These works often show a critical approach to colonialism and seem to have had a recip- rocal influence on travelogues and journalistic reportages as well as on ethnographic and anthropological writings, promoting narrative rhetoric and style, but also fostering skepticism towards imperialism. In the case of Malinowski’s Argonauts, as already noted, scholars have emphasized the several connections with Conrad’s novels (Thompson 1995; Thornton 1985), an author with whom Malinowski himself identificd (Malinowski 1967) Postmodern anthropologists consider the ethnographer and anthro- pologist specifically as an author, looking at ‘works and lives’ (Geertz 1988), and arguing that anthropological toil consists ultimately in ‘writing culture’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Thereby, they have suggested putting aside the scientific epistemology of the discipline and decon- structing the politics and poetics of classical anthropological texts, among which Malinowski’s bestsellers; at the same time they have promoted experimenting with more explicitly subjective and dialogic ethnographic writings Feminist anthropologists, however—although there have been many differences within feminist anthropology (Strathern 1987, 284-85)— have critically highlighted the fact that this postmodern approach has neglected gender in dealing with ethnographic-anthropological writing as a genre (Abu-Lughod 1990; Behar and Gordon 1995; Lewin and Silverstein 2016; Reed-Danahay 2001). They emphasize that many female scholars have produced experimental ethnographic writings and anthro- pological accounts that were unfortunately deemed too narrative, i.e. not sufficiently scientific, at the beginning of modern anthropology. These ‘hidden scholars’ (Parezo et al. 1993) were marginalized and excluded from the oft-cited genealogy of the male founding fathers of the disci- pline (Applegarth 2014; Lamphere 2004; Parezo et al. 1993; Tedlock 1995). It also happened where the pioncers of the field were almost all women, as is the case in South Africa (Bank 2016) The same previous contribution of women travelers and social observers who popularized an anthropological sensitivity through trav- elogues and journalism, as Elsie Masson did by disseminating among a wider audience the scientific and political endeavours of her mentor Baldwin Spencer, has never been considered pertinent to the history of the discipline.196 D, SALVUCCI As the historical rescarch in rhetoric has pointed out, profcssionaliza- tion in early modern anthropology went hand in hand with strategies of control over genre, producing a regime of rhetorical scarcity (Apple- garth 2012), which artificially reduced the range of rhetorical tools deemed appropriate for the writing of a proper ethnographic account Through this process of definition and production of modern anthro- pology as a professional, scientific, academic, and therefore bounded discipline, ethnographic-anthropological writing became a more specific and controlled genre. Although Malinowski, likely supported by Masson, clearly gave both a narrative and descriptive literary inflection to his masterpiece Argonauts, thereby promoting and popularizing anthropology, after him, even most of his students opted for a more abstract and theoretical writing approach. As MacClancy puts it: Until the 1930s, most anthropological articles and books could be read by any educated person with a sense of dedication. But within two decades the language of university-based anthropologists had become sufficiently abstruse and their analyses sufficiently arcane as to bar the majority of readers who had not been trained in the subject. (1996, 14) Scholars disseminating cthnographic-anthropological knowledge through a narrative writing style started being devaluated and marginalized. It is relevant that the majority of them were ‘those female graduates of anthro- pology who did not enter the university hierarchy’ (MacClancy 1996, 34-35) ‘The increasing valorization of theory within the academy was thus one of the many mechanisms of the institutionalisation of gender asymmetry within the discipline, as male scholars were associated with highly valued theoretical work, while female scholars with less prized descriptive tasks (Lutz 19 In the several husband-wife anthropological couples, this ‘sexual divi- sion of textual labor’ (Tedlock 1995, 267) was at work, producing a general misrecognition of the labour of women in anthropology. Many of the hidden scholars of the discipline were indeed anthropol- ogists’ wives who—without public recognition—helped their husbands with both fieldwork and anthropological writing, as Tedlock (1995) pointed out mocking Geertz, and focusing on ‘works and wives’, rather than ‘lives’INCORPORATED GENRE AND GENDER: ELSIE MASSON, HER WRITINGS 197 From the beginning of the discipline, anthropologists’ co-working wives have done their fair share of the work by taking fieldwork notes, discussing, copyediting, and proofreading their husbands’ texts (Mead 1986; Tedlock 1995), according to a ‘two-person, single career’ model. This concept, formulated by Papanek (1973), refers to the multiple, non- remunerated, and publicly unacknowledged contributions of wives to the work and career of their husbands, above all in middle-class professions and academic employment. Before the struggles of the women’s move- ment for gender equality began in carnest in the 1970s, this ‘two-person, single career’ pattern pushed women to interrupt their own careers in order to devote themselves to those of their husbands. Wives were supposed to take charge of domestic duties and raise their children, as well as to manage public relations and even work as ‘incorporated wives’ (Callan and Ardener 1984) to the benefit of the institutes, among which there were many universities that employed their husbands (Ardener 1984; Sciama 1984). Within anthropology, although these invisible and silent wife workers have generally accepted a ‘writerly incorporation’ in their husbands’ books (Tedlock 1995, 271), many of them, such as Rose- mary Firth (1972), Edith Turner (Engelke 2000; Turner 1987), and Elizabeth Fernea (Fernea and Fernea 1989), among others, started their own careers as anthropologists, led their own fieldwork research, and wrote their own books. Nonetheless, collaboration in anthropolog- ical “wife-husband-teams’ (Parezo ct al. 1993, 352-54) has rarely been publicly recognized and even less investigated (Ariéns and Strijp 1989; Gottlieb 1995). The ambiguities of this ‘academic intimacy’ (Gottlieb 1995, 21) mirror the contradictions of both academia and intimacy. Although Malinowski and Masson developed their relationship as ‘pure love” (Giddens 1992) according to the modern idcology of intimacy and family (Richardson 2016), their work collaboration seems to be a good example of the ‘two-person, single career’ model, as Bauer (1998) suggested when reviewing Wayne’s book (Wayne 1995, I-Il). UNTAMED TERRITORY: MAsson’s GAZE ON INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA Elsie Masson’s book An Untamed Territory: The Northern Territories of Australia (1915) is a travel account of her stay in Port Darwin and her excursions in the region. It is mostly composed of texts from different198 D, SALVUCCI articles she had previously published in regional newspapers in 1913, such as the Melbourne Argus, the Wellington Evening Post, the Auck- land Herald, the Christchurch Press, and the Otago Daily Times (Masson 1915, viii). Masson dedicates the book to Mr. and Mrs. Gilruth, who hosted her in Port Darwin, making it possible for her to travel and take part in several exploratory missions. In the preface, she thanks Professor Baldwin Spencer, who facilitated her to move to Darwin and fostered her publications with his editor, MacMillan. Spencer was a Darwinist biologist and anthropologist who had carried out research on Australian aborig- inal groups; he promoted an evolutionist perspective and supported the claim for the protection of indigenous people in reserves (Stocking 1995). Masson’s book contains some pictures taken by Spencer, as well as by Masson herself,? and by Mervyn Holmes, who was at that time Chief of the Health Office in Darwin, and two maps In the introduction, Masson presents the Northern Territory as an ‘untamed’, exotic, and fascinating space that resists civilization. She summarizes the history of the region, from the ancient presence of Malaysian fishermen and trepangers (fishermen of trepang, or sea cucum- bers) on the Northern coast, to the several failed historical attempts to explore and colonize this area by Europeans. With some humour, she recalls the steps of the slow, uncertain English colonization of the Australian North in the second half of the XIX century, underlining the lack of infrastructure and productive activities that had affected this region until that moment. Because of this, in 1907, the federal government of the Commonwealth took over the responsibility of such an ‘underdevel- oped? territory, sending scientists and politicians, such as Spencer and Gilruth, to promote colonization in a region where no more than 1500 Europeans, a similar number of Chinese people, and approximately 40,000 Aborigines lived at the beginning of the XX century (Masson 1915, 23). Although Masson supports the political efforts of her mentors, sharing mainstream opinions from her parents’ social milicu about the value of colonization as civilization, she seems to openly enjoy the resistance of the northern territories to colonization and its romantic appeal made of ‘indifference and mystery’ (Masson 1915, 3). She argues that ‘the official and political side is not the only one of interest; from the picturesque point of view the Territory is endlessly fascinating’ (Masson 1915, 24). Her presentation of places aims to transport the readers, allowing themINCORPORATED GENRE AND GENDER: ELSIE MASSON, HER WRITINGS 199 to imagine being there in person to taste the ‘romance of the life’ and the flavour of the tropics: The Australian [the ‘white Australian’]> who visits it [the Northern Terri- tory] is surprised and strangely entranced with this portion of his continent, He is fascinated by the romance of the life and by the varied elements that compose it ~ the crude beginnings of white man’s civilization, the savage state of the Stone Age Aboriginal, and foreign to both, the peculiar flavour of the East, reminding him that he is now within tropic regions. (Masson 1915, 1) In the following three chapters (II, III, IV), Masson proposes to ‘study life in Darwin’, dealing with the colonial town and its mixed population of Chinese, Japanese, Aboriginals, Malayans, Mestizos, and British people. Giving an account of this multicultural society, she focuses on colonial relations and sharply remarks that, even if interconnected, these different sociocultural ‘little worlds’ remain separated: Life in Darwin is made up of many little worlds, each continuing in its own way, impinging on, but never mingling with the others. There is the life of white officialdom, the Eastern life of Chinatown, the life of the pearling fleets and, under all, the life of the native camps. (Masson 1915, 51) In her ‘vivid pictures’ of the colonial life in the town, Masson gives space to the ‘servant question’, presenting portraits of the local working class, remarking on the asymmetrical racial social relations between work employers and labourers. British owners live in their comfortable houses, the most important space of which is the tidy verandah, where ‘the family lives, eats and sleeps’ (Masson 1915, 32). Among them, white traders commercialize tortoiseshells and pearls, employing Japanese divers who are ‘paid according to the weight of (their) catch’, promoting “intense rivalry’ between them (Masson 1915, 52-57). By considering the exploitation of the Japanese divers, Masson emphatically reflects on the ‘social life of things’ (Appadurai 1986), stressing the worldwide connections incorporated even in the most ordinary pearl product: A row of neat pearl buttons on a card — how commonplace, how quietly domestic they are! Nothing could appear more uninteresting than the material of which they are made, yet through what strange scenes of200 D. SALVUCCI romance it has passed ~ calling men from sleepy Eastern villages, gath- ering them together in far-off countries, there to sail upon uncharted seas, to walk the bottom of the ocean, to laugh, to fight, to cheat, and perhaps to die. (Masson 1915, 57) Describing Chinatown, Masson gives a picture of the Chinese migrants’ social position within the local job market as small retail salespeople, fishermen with their sampan-traditional boats, likely opium smugglers, as well as cooks, housekeepers, and door-to-door salespeople in British households. Above all, she seems to be strongly attracted by the ever-present ‘undercurrent’ of the town, the world of the indigenous people (Chapter IV), also called ‘blacks’: the aboriginal migrants who dwell in different camps at the periphery of Port Darwin according to their tribes (Chap- ters II, III, IV). Throughout the book, Masson underlines that these aboriginal migrants come from different regions and speak very diverse languages, often using Pidgin English to communicate with each other (Masson 1915, 57). At the end of chapter IV, Masson describes a ‘cor- roboree’, a nightly aboriginal ritual in which she took part, allowing the readers to encounter the ceremony together with her: (...) all the Borroloola natives who were already in Darwin would collect when the day’s work was over. Every night. As soon as darkness fell, the regular beating of sticks and clapping of hands (...) announced that the corroboree had begun. On the third night the clapping was more insistent than ever (...). We made our way across the road (...), and found ourselves at the scene of a corroboree. (Masson 1915, 62-67) Masson remarks on her attempts to investigate the meanings of this ritual while the ceremony was going on by posing questions, which remained without answers as people she asked were too engaged in the performance (Masson 1915, 63-67) In the subsequent chapters (V, VI, VII, VII, IX), Masson reports on her adventures ‘out bush’ together with her mentors’ group to explore the region and enter the so-called ‘Never-Never”® to “experience to the full the fascinations of the Northern Territory bush” (Masson 1915, 75) In a very appealing writing style, she describes first-person adventures of the small group of explorers. They travel by train and by coach along the Overland telegraph, ride horses, and camp in the forest dwelled in by aboriginals and some ‘solitary man — a miner, a carter or a stockman’