[Linganth] Re : Daisy Bates and Aborigine dialects

[Claire Bowern]

I have no first-hand knowledge of the quality of her Southern Western
Australian work (although from what I've seen and heard secondhand it's
not looked on favourably). I have copies of some of her wordlists from the
Kimberley region and they are (to put it nicely) more than a little
pathetic. Badly transcribed, full of basic errors in meaning, forms
assigned to the wrong language, etc etc. Her ethnological accounts of the
Western Kimberley show evidence of an overactive immagination.

Her claims of baby-eating have been the subject of much controversy and
are (as far as I know) unsubstantiated. I would be very wary indeed of
using Bates' work without corroboration from other sources.

There are books on Daisy Bates which address these issues, but I'm
blanking on details at the moment.

Claire

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Timothy Mason wrote:

> I am wondering whether anyone knows anything about the linguistic
> competence/reputation of the Australian journalist/anthropologist, Daisy
> Bates. Bates claimed to have acquired 120 'Aborigine dialects', and I
> would be interested to discover what this might mean in terms of being
> able to understand what her respondents told her, and so on. Bates
> relays a number of lurid tales of mothers eating their babies, and other
> gruesome tales - could this be due to misunderstandings as Pickering
> suggests it may have been in some other cases in which white observers
> claimed to have discovered evidence of cannibalism.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Timothy Mason
>

-----------------------------
Claire Bowern
Department of Linguistics
Harvard University
305 Boylston Hall
Cambridge, MA, 02138
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~bowern