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JOHN B. CARMAN (1987)
Revised Bibliography
SSU-MA CH’ENG-CHEN SEE SIMA
CHENGZHEN
STANNER, W. E. H. William Edward Hanley Stanner
(1905–1981) was born in Sydney, Australia, and spent much
of his childhood playing on the shores of Sydney Harbor and
the surrounding bushland. On leaving school Stanner
worked as a bank clerk, a job he tired of quickly, before train-
ing as a journalist. In 1926 a life-changing encounter with
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, the newly appointed foundation
chair of anthropology at Sydney University, saw Stanner re-
turn to school to matriculate, eventually enrolling in a degree
program with a major in anthropology and economics.
After completing his degree with first class honors, Stan-
ner was encouraged by Radcliffe-Brown to consider a career
in anthropology. He undertook his first fieldwork in the
Daly River region of north Australia in 1932, and he re-
turned to this area from 1934 to 1935 to undertake more
lengthy research for his Ph.D. He would return to the Daly
River region throughout his life, in the 1950s undertaking
the work that would most fully inform his writings on Mur-
rinh-pata religion.
On completing his Ph.D. at the London School of Eco-
nomics under the supervision of Bronislaw Malinowski and
Raymond Firth, Stanner joined an anthropological survey
team in East Africa. On the outbreak of war he returned to
Australia. His most noted wartime contribution was as leader
of the North Australia Observer Unit. He also worked on
a series of postwar reconstruction programs in Europe and
the Pacific. In 1949 Stanner was appointed reader in com-
parative social institutions in the Research School of Pacific
Studies at the newly established Australian National Univer-
sity, Canberra, where he remained for the rest of his working
life. In the 1960s and 1970s Stanner rose to public promi-
nence as a government adviser, and his engagements in Ab-
original affairs became more consciously political.Stanner’s works on religion, the most important being
a series of essays republished in 1963 as the monograph On
Aboriginal Religion, simultaneously serve as a broad critique
of structural-functionalist approaches to the study of society
and culture. He was extremely critical of earlier anthropolog-
ical accounts of Aboriginal religion influenced by the work
of Émile Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown that categorized re-
ligion as merely one of a series of elements in a bounded so-
cial system. These writers had overlooked the experiential
and emotional sensibilities associated with religion. Stanner
argued that religion was significant in its own right, not as
a subset of society or anything else. Murrinh-pata religion
contained objects and symbols “beyond egotism, beyond so-
cial gain.” The great symbols he observed, were “valued for
their own sakes.” As he sought to elucidate Murrinh-pata re-
ligious systems as “expressions of human experience of life;
as essays of passion, imagination, and striving,” Stanner con-
currently sketched the frame of a new theoretical approach
to the study of society (Stanner, 1965, p. 222). He saw
human affairs not in terms of persisting social structures and
enduring relations between persons in role positions, but
rather as “a structure of operations in transactions about
things of value.” His “operational anthropology” would
study real relations—“giving, taking, sharing, loving, be-
witching, fighting, initiating”—and “make human sense of
their cultural varieties” (Stanner, 1963, p. ii).
While seeing the definition of religion as beyond the
task of anthropology, Stanner argued that Aboriginal religion
must be grasped as a rich and multilayered entity: it was at
once an ontological system, a moral system, a “contemporary
form of thought and feeling toward the whole of reality,” and
“content for a devotional life” (Stanner, 1963, p. vi). He re-
jected Durkheim’s dichotomy of secular and sacred as a
framework for comprehending Aboriginal religion, arguing
that it necessarily was both. Where the functionalists had of-
fered up a desiccated view of Aboriginal religious systems as
lacking imaginative and intellectual substance, or as reduc-
ible to the study of totemism, magic, and ritual, for Stanner,
Murrinh-pata religious belief and practice provided a win-
dow onto all manner of aspects of Murrinh-pata being. It was
in Murrinh-pata rites that one witnessed “a genius for music,
song, and dance applied with skill and passion” (Stanner,
1963, p. 18). Moreover, Murrinh-pata religion was not a
“dead plane of uniform changelessness” but a dynamic sys-
tem, its content being enacted and articulated variably bySTANNER, W. E. H. 8729