James McElvenny and Floris Solleveld, "Australian Languages and Cultures: Histories of Documentation"
This session features two papers about the study of Australian Aboriginal languages in the 19th century, how the cultural and natural environment was entailed in that study, and the colonial/missionary/scientific networks of which it was part.
Colonial science between Kleinstaaterei and the Word of God: The 1838 Lutheran mission to South Australia
James McElvenny (University of Siegen)
In this talk, I present a case study of the first Lutheran mission to South Australia and look at the entanglements it reveals between scientific data collection in the colonial field, Protestant missionary efforts, and the political jockeying and pursuit of prestige among the German states of the nineteenth century. The focus lies on Christian Gottlob Teichelmann (1807–1888) and Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann (1815–1893), sent in 1838 by the Dresden Missionary Society to proselytize the Aboriginal inhabitants of Adelaide. Their ordination in the small central German duchy of Altenburg led them into an association with the local Naturforschende Gesellschaft des Osterlandes and the nobleman Hans Conon von der Gabelentz (1807–1874), senior government official in the duchy and renowned gentleman scholar. Through this association, Teichelmann and Schürmann sent back to Altenburg natural scientific specimens and linguistic and ethnographic documentation from South Australia. I will examine how typical this arrangement was in the scientific landscape of the time and the place of the data and specimens collected by the missionaries in the circulation of knowledge between the colonial field and European metropole.
Holy Echidnas: The McCrae-Lloyd correspondence on Aboriginal and San language and culture
Floris Solleveld (University of Bristol)
In May 1875, Australian poet George Gordon McCrae sent a letter to German philologist Wilhelm Bleek in Cape Town, responding to a request for information about Aboriginal languages and cultures in Australian newspapers. By the time McCrae’s letter arrived in November, Bleek was dead. However, Bleek’s sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, with whom he had been working in his final years to record a massive corpus of San [Bushman] oral literature from |Xam narrators, kept up the correspondence.
With the ensuing letters, McCrae sent Lloyd a collection of essays on shamanism and food taboos among the Kulin Aboriginal people of Port Philip Bay (near Melbourne) as well as several vocabularies. One essay, about the food taboos regarding the holy parts of the ‘porcupine ant eater’ (echidna), inspired Lloyd to draw comparisons with a |Xam tale about a man who turned into a porcupine and talked to the rain but said something wrong that made the rain turn to hail. This correspondence has only recently come to light and narrowly escaped destruction in the 2021 fire at UCT libraries. I will discuss it against the background of colonial-age cultural and linguistic comparisons, and in relation to the theories of Wilhelm Bleek about the origin of language and grammatical gender in particular.
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