The Seligmans’ significance

Charles Seligman was born in 1873. He developed a passion for biology as a schoolboy and went on to pursue medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital, where he became a house physician upon qualification. But a series of chance encounters led Charles to shift his career to anthropology. The most significant of these was the Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition (1898) organised by Alfred Haddon – arguably the single most important expedition in the history of British anthropology that established fieldwork as the methodological bedrock of the discipline.⁷ Charles originally joined as a pathologist and expert in tropical diseases, but the expedition enabled Charles, then aged twenty-four, to acquire a taste for ethnological and psychological investigation as he threw himself into fieldwork among the people of Cape York peninsula and Thursday Island. Captivated by this experience, Charles deepened his new interest through a further expedition to New Guinea (1904), before making a full transition to anthropology in 1910: he took up an appointment as Lecturer in Ethnology at the London School of Economics and became professor three years later. Charles’s reputation has long been overshadowed by that of his student, Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the most charismatic and influential social anthropologists of the twentieth century. But in his own lifetime, Charles was one of Britain’s leading anthropologists, serving as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) from 1923 to 1925.

Charles was assisted in much of his professional work by his wife Brenda (née Salaman) (1883–1965). Brenda gave up her study of pre-medical biology upon her marriage to Charles, and thereafter became his collaborator, accompanying her husband on all his expeditions and co-authoring the resultant works. Most notably, they conducted an ethnological study of the Veddas, Sri Lanka’s remaining aboriginal culture (1907–8), and undertook a major survey of Sudan based on multiple field trips, the latter culminating in the publication of The Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan (1932). The Seligmans’ approach to the study of these so-called ‘primitive’ communities was multifaceted (and transcended the conventional lines of intra-disciplinary rivalry), covering physical anthropology, material culture, ethnography, cultural history and the prehistory of the region.⁸ As his close friend, the psychologist C. S. Myers, was later to note, Charles stood ‘unrivalled in the breadth of his interests’.⁹

At first sight, the Seligmans’ tour of the Far East in 1929–30 – a visit to the ‘non-primitive’ societies of Japan and China – appears to sit outside even their wide-ranging set of anthropological interests. Rather, a recurrent explanation for the trip, as provided in the numerous biographical sketches of Charles and Brenda in their obituaries, highlighted the fact that the couple were keen collectors of Far Eastern (especially Chinese) art, and that it was this passion for an ‘aesthetic hobby’ that drove them to the region.¹⁰ This explanation, however, is insufficient. A closer inspection of Charles’s intellectual output preceding the 1929–30 trip reveals a broader and deeper engagement with the Far East that extended beyond aesthetics.

Most significantly, Charles’s presidential address to the RAI in 1924 included an extensive discussion of the difference between the characters of the Japanese and the Chinese. The broader subject of his lecture was ‘Anthropology and psychology: a study of some points of contact’, and Charles’s intention in discussing the Japanese and Chinese ‘dispositions’ (Charles’s own term) was to highlight – in front of an anthropological audience – the utility of C. G. Jung’s theory of ‘psychological types’ (what may now be familiar to us as ‘personality types’).¹¹ More specifically, Charles deployed Jung’s distinction between ‘extravert’ and ‘introvert’ types to claim that the Japanese were a nation of extraverts, while the Chinese were a nation of introverts.

Charles had not yet visited the two countries at the time of his presidential address; nor is there any indication that he had ever encountered any Japanese or Chinese individuals in person. But he justified these categorisations by quoting at length passages from books on Japanese and Chinese cultures written by Japanese and Chinese authors (which were available in English), relying on their insights as if such authors fulfilled the function of ‘native informants’. In these books, the natives themselves had reflected on their differing national dispositions, contrasting Japan’s readiness for adopting foreign learning to China’s more reserved attitudes (Liang Qichao), and characterising the Japanese as a people who ‘as a whole are not a people with much aptitude for deep metaphysical ways of thinking’ (Yoshisaburō Okakura).¹²

What is perplexing about Charles’s discussion here is not so much the specific conclusions he reached about the Japanese and Chinese types, as his choice to speak on such a subject at length in his presidential address to the RAI. After all, the overarching aim of the lecture was to advance the field of anthropology – and to do so by bringing his colleagues’ attention to ‘a little-known borderland where social anthropology, psychology and genetics meet in common biological kinship’.¹³ In the same lecture, Charles did also apply his Jungian typology to a number of ‘tribes’ – the more familiar subject of anthropology – whom he discussed under the heading of ‘the types among savages’.¹⁴ The Japanese and Chinese were conversely classified under ‘the types among civilized people’.¹⁵ Charles’s lecture, then, not only advanced the cross-fertilisation between anthropology and psychology for thinking about human character, but effectively extended the scope of anthropological analysis to include modern non-Western societies.

It follows that the trip to Japan and China in 1929–30 provided Charles with a welcome opportunity to make empirical observations about societies that he had already considered as an armchair anthropologist. And indeed, the visit stimulated Charles’s intellectual interests in numerous ways. For instance, Japan, as a largely ‘derivative’ civilisation founded on borrowed ideas from China and more recently the West, stoked his (quasi-diffusionist) curiosity. He was later to declare in a lecture, ‘as a study in cultural contact Japan is an astounding place to the anthropologist’.¹⁶ But as one might expect, a key topic of investigation to which many of his empirical observations were directed was the question of ‘types’. Charles’s first-hand encounter with the natives of Japan enabled him to validate his Jungian hypothesis that the Japanese were ‘extravert’, a type now defined as a person whose ‘interest goes out immediately to surrounding objects and people … there is little tendency to abstruse the mediation or desire to transcend the experience by abstract reasoning or to substitute for it ideal constructions’.¹⁷ Charles’s formal justification for his classification (given in his lectures on Japan after the trip) remained modern Japan’s recent displays of its exceptional readiness to adopt Western civilisation.¹⁸ The trip, after all, had exposed him and Brenda to abundant examples of Japan’s Westernisation, from the country’s industrialisation to the apparent popularity of European food and clothing.¹⁹ But in his private travel journal, he provided an additional reason: the Japanese were a ‘careless, happy go-lucky people’.²⁰

Yet the same trip also newly exposed Charles and Brenda to the empirical complexity of Japanese ‘culture contact’ which, in turn, demanded theoretical fine-tuning. Based on what he had previously read about the Japanese character, it appears that Charles had originally conceptualised Japanese modernisation in linear terms – that Japan’s ‘extravert’ willingness to adopt Western culture must necessarily imply the decline of its pre-Western, local custom. But his trip challenged this a priori assumption. Once in Japan, both Charles and Brenda were struck by the fact that the Japanese were ‘above all a ritualist’ people and remained so even after their extensive importation of Western ways of life.²¹ To be sure, Charles was already familiar with Japan’s famously ritualistic tea ceremony from his reading of two English-language classics on Japanese culture: the art critic Kakuzō Okakura’s The Book of Tea (1906) and the British Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain’s Things Japanese (1890). But he had previously assumed that such an ‘introvert’ practice amounted to a bygone culture, found once upon a time among the ‘upper classes of Japan’.²² Yet what he observed in the country newly revealed to him the continued centrality of ritualism in modern Japanese life: the emphasis on correct posture, correct arrangement of objects in the household, and (the most perplexing for Brenda) the need to take one’s shoes off even to see a garden, were all cases in point.²³ In Japan, Charles consequently wrote (directly adopting an observation originally made by Brenda in her travel journal), there was not so much a ‘blending of cultures’ as a ‘kaleidoscopic mixture’ of Japanese and foreign elements.²⁴ And he linked this, too, to questions about the Japanese disposition. Among a ‘less hardy people’, Charles speculated, such a civilisational incoherence might produce ‘an almost intolerable strain’ – so what was special about the Japanese? Jung, again, seemed to offer the answer, as Charles saw promise in the Jungian notion of ‘compensation’. Charles postulated that Japan’s relentless ceremonial behaviour, far from representing a contradiction of their ‘extravert’ disposition, amounted to an instance of a ‘consciously arrived at compensation’ – a deliberate attempt by the Japanese to provide some sort of ‘correction’ or counterbalancing to their psychological disposition by means of custom and tradition.²⁵ Clearly, then, the field trip to Japan deepened Charles’s appreciation of Jungian psychological theory and its applicability to understanding modern national characters.

Likewise, Charles’s experience in China enabled him to refine his thinking. As we saw earlier, Seligman had previously classified the Chinese as ‘introvert’ based on what he had read about their reluctance to adopt foreign cultures. But his first-hand encounter suggested that the Chinese were at least as extravert as the Japanese.²⁶ His empirical evidence for this was the fact that the Chinese seemed ‘more loquacious than the Japanese … they talk more in their streets and railway carriages’.²⁷ Underpinning this seemingly mundane observation was a renewed recognition of plurality within a given national group and, in particular, the relevance of ‘class’.²⁸ His original mistake, as he subsequently noted, had arisen from viewing the elite ‘literary or Confucian man’ as ‘the representative’ of the Chinese attitude to life, when in fact such a man was the ‘result of a special tradition and training’ and ‘never adopted by more than a small proportion of the population’.²⁹

Importantly, in both orientation and substance, Charles’s analysis of the Japanese and Chinese ‘types’ anticipated the intellectual concerns of the (much better-known) ‘Culture and Personality’ movement that was to emerge in the US in the 1930s. Like Charles’s approach, culture and personality studies were born out of a cross-fertilisation between anthropology and the psychological sciences. Its proponents saw as their main task the interpretation of ‘character structures’ that underpinned any given social (national) group. They did so by searching for psychological uniformities among individuals in the same social group, an approach that enabled development by the 1940s of what came to be distinctively known as ‘national character studies’.³⁰ A leading figure within this movement, alongside other notable anthropological luminaries such as Margaret Mead and Edward Sapir (both students of Franz Boas), was Ruth Benedict. Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) laid a foundation for the movement by advancing the idea that a ‘culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action’.³¹ To demonstrate this point through a comparison of four ‘primitive’ cultures (the Plain Indians, the Zuni, the Dobu and the Kwakiutl), Benedict adopted Nietzsche’s opposition between ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’ tendencies, an opposition not unlike that which Charles made between introverts and extraverts. (Charles himself thought Benedict’s terms referred to the same differences in temperament as his own Jungian typology.³²)

Crucially, the recognition that a given community might be held together by a ‘culture pattern’ (consisting of shared norms, values and practices, including psychological characteristics) also raised the possibility for Benedict and her colleagues that such a perspective might even be usefully applied to the study of ‘non-primitive’ societies – including their own. They debated the intellectual potential of such a seemingly experimental research agenda in the 1930s before the international-political events of the 1940s brought a new urgency to its undertaking: the need to understand America’s enemies – the Germans and the Japanese. As a study of the Japanese national character, Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) – based on her wartime research conducted for the US Office of War Information – was a direct outcome of this timely intersection between the intellectual fertilisations and the political expediencies of mid-century America.³³

What clearly drove the intellectual convergence between Charles and his American counterparts was the growing trans-disciplinary influence of psychology on both sides of the Atlantic. US anthropologists such as Mead and Benedict were able to deepen their appreciation of psychological theories by coming into contact with ‘neo-Freudians’ (including Jewish émigré analysts) in the 1930s.³⁴ In Charles’s case, like many British anthropologists and other academics of his generation, he furthered his interest in psychology through his work treating shell-shocked soldiers during the First World War, becoming acquainted with Freudian and Jungian theories.³⁵ The result of this trans-Atlantic parallel was that from 1924 onwards and especially following his trip to Japan and China in 1929–30, Charles was effectively making the same analytic moves as the US pioneers. And to start with (until the mid-1930s when he began discussing the works of Mead and Benedict), he was doing so independently – in the absence of any significant trans-Atlantic diffusion of knowledge.³⁶ Charles was, in this sense, a (the) true pioneer. But where he diverged from the Americans was that he demonstrated virtually no self-reflexivity as to how his application of psychological anthropology to ‘non-primitive’ societies might be pushing the boundaries of his discipline. By contrast, Benedict and her collaborators were deeply conscious of the ways in which extending their research to complex, modern societies would disrupt, and innovate, the core premises of the discipline of anthropology.³⁷ This difference in attitude, as we will see, amounted to a key fault line that led the Americans to disseminate their insights more proactively than Charles.

His lack of reflection notwithstanding, Charles not only anticipated the broad orientation of the culture and personality movement, but also anticipated certain specific observations about Japanese culture that would later be made by Benedict. Most notably, he noted the relative absence of a ‘sense of sin’ among the Japanese. His point was not that the Japanese were irreligious; rather, morality in Japan appeared to him to be ‘predominantly of the group’ and largely a ‘matter of aesthetics’.³⁸ (The Japanese proclivities for admiring suicide to him suggested an excessive ‘sense of decorum’.³⁹) Here, Charles’s suggestion of an externally sanctioned morality in Japan (‘morality of the group’), together with his focus on guilt as a criterion for distinguishing between Japan and his own culture, demonstrate a significant congruence with Benedict’s subsequent interpretation of Japanese morality. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword became globally well known and widely debated for the seemingly original dichotomy it proposed between Japan’s ‘shame culture’ and America’s ‘guilt culture’.⁴⁰

Where Charles’s analysis differed from Benedict’s, as well as culture and personality studies more broadly, was in his approach to questions of race and class. With regards to race, the culture and personality approach rested on a firm rejection of biological determinism.⁴¹ Culture, in this context, replaced (and became the functional equivalent of) race as the key to understanding human difference.⁴² This move against biological determinism is unsurprising given that many of the movement’s leading figures, including Benedict herself, were students of Franz Boas. By comparison, Charles’s relationship to biological determinism was more ambiguous, for he never rejected the possibility of innate genetic differences in temperament between different human groups (or ‘races’ as he referred to them). This remained the case, even as he increasingly acknowledged the ‘difficulty’ of proving such genetic differences in practice, and became more cognisant over time of the role of social ‘environment’ (such as Confucian training in the case of Chinese elites) in cultivating introvert or extravert dispositions.⁴³

For Charles, as we have seen, his increasing recognition of the role of social environmental factors was closely linked to his growing sensitivity to the relevance of class. Benedict, conversely, was more inclined to assume that a given psychological characteristic would be uniformly present across the whole of a modern complex nation. This was certainly true of her analysis of Japan. One of the major criticisms of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword – including those levelled by Japanese scholars at the time of the book’s publication – was that she mistook a ‘shame culture’ that was really restricted to the samurai class for the culture of the entire Japanese nation.⁴⁴ Such an analytical divergence between Charles and Benedict was unlikely to have been coincidental. Whereas Charles was able to refine his understanding of the internal plurality of the Japanese and Chinese characters by travelling to the Far East, Benedict wrote her 300-page study of the Japanese by relying exclusively on secondary sources, some Japanese films she had watched, and interviews she had conducted with Japanese immigrants living in America.⁴⁵ Because Benedict was undertaking the research at a time when her country was at war with her research subjects, she was denied the opportunity to conduct what was surely the core business of anthropology: fieldwork.

The Seligmans’ insignificance

Charles Seligman broke new ground with his psycho-anthropological analysis of Japanese and Chinese national characters. And yet his engagement with the subject also amounted to a missed opportunity. He only ever gave two lectures on this subject after his Far Eastern tour – both of which were delivered to a somewhat narrow audience: the Japan Society in London (upon the society’s invitation) and the Midland Medical Society. The lectures were subsequently published in the two societies’ dedicated journals. Charles never developed his research on Japanese and Chinese national characters any further.⁴⁶ Neither of his two papers on Japan (or any other work by Charles, for that matter) was cited in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword despite their obvious relevance, and it seems unlikely that Benedict ever came across his perspectives on Japan.⁴⁷

Charles died in September 1940, depriving him of the opportunity to read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Nor did he have the chance to put his knowledge of the Japanese national character in the service of the Allies’ war efforts, unlike his American counterpart. But even during the 1930s when Japan was already in the public spotlight following its invasion of Manchuria (1931) and still more the outbreak of Japan’s full-scale war with China (1938), Charles never ventured to offer his views in the public domain. One might imagine that an intellectual of a different persona, if equipped with the same knowledge and experience as Charles, might have viewed the geopolitical developments of the 1930s as a timely opportunity to disseminate the idea of the ‘extravert’ Japanese; they might have speculated publicly on what such a ‘psychological type’ might have to do with militarism and territorial expansion. But this was not the path Charles chose. Instead, on those limited occasions after the trip when he did address the subject of modern Japan, he did so hesitantly, refusing to claim any expertise in the subject matter. Why was this the case? And what might his reluctance reveal about the conditions of (im)possibility for the democratisation of academic knowledge?

A cursory comparison with the roads taken by other British academic travellers of the time suggests the dissemination channels that might have been open to Charles, had he had the intention of making his insights accessible. A common practice among intellectuals visiting the Far East during this period was to contribute travel accounts of their trips to leading periodicals, and then publish them as travelogues. Thus when Arnold J. Toynbee visited Japan and China in the same year as the Seligmans, he wrote essays recording his impressions for the Contemporary Review and the Nation and Athenaeum, which eventually formed the basis of his travelogue, A Journey to China or Things Which Are Seen (1931). We might, moreover, draw a direct connection between such dissemination efforts and the idea of ‘democratisation’, for linking the two was the growing commitment to liberal internationalism (and the League of Nations as its embodiment) that emerged in the wake of the devastations of the First World War. An important ideal in this context was that of the ‘New Diplomacy’, a move towards the democratisation of foreign policy by promoting open discussion and, most importantly, the power of public opinion.⁴⁸ Liberal intellectuals like Toynbee, and historians in particular, were at the forefront of this movement. One direct consequence of this burgeoning democratic-internationalist consciousness was a vogue for a public education in ‘World History’ that emphatically incorporated histories of the non-West.⁴⁹ In Toynbee’s case, his insights from his Far Eastern tour fed directly into his multi-civilisational A Study of History (first volume published in 1934).⁵⁰ Eileen Power, another historian, visited Japan and China in 1920–21 and shared her views (especially her admiration for China) in a radio broadcast on world history.⁵¹ As for H.G. Wells, he wrote his best-selling The Outline of History (1920) as an armchair intellectual. But as a correspondent attending the Washington Naval Conference (1921–22), he made first-hand observations about the (non-democratic) temperament of the Japanese delegates for a special series in the Daily Mail.⁵² There was, then, fertile ground in interwar Britain for disseminating public intellectual observations concerning non-Western – and not least Far Eastern – cultures, and it is not difficult to imagine that Charles, had he been so inclined, could have complemented the stream of historical contributions by presenting an anthropological alternative.

Charles, after all, was not entirely averse to media engagement. It is certainly true that he wrote largely for an academic audience; he was also a shy personality, not naturally inclined to embrace the public spotlight. He did not, in this sense, exhibit a ‘democratising’ impulse to the same extent as the above-mentioned historians. But even Charles was an occasional commentator for the BBC, who most notably delivered an ‘interactive’ radio broadcast on dreams and the unconsciousness in 1931 (having asked audience members to mail descriptions of their dreams in advance).⁵³

Taken together, it seems fair to assume that Charles did not more widely disseminate his observations of Japan, not because he could not, but rather because he chose not to. And indeed, not only did he refrain from communicating those insights directly to the public, he showed reluctance even in sharing them within more closed, academic circles. The most likely reason for this exceptional diffidence was Charles’s ideas about the professional expectations of his discipline, and his resultant refusal to claim expertise in Japan.

From his standpoint, more specifically, his observations of the Japanese likely did not meet the required standards of what constituted ‘fieldwork’ in academic anthropology. It is worth recalling here that Charles’s most foundational experience as an anthropologist was the Torres Strait Expedition. It was this experience of fieldwork that had captured the young Charles’s imagination, altering the course of his life. For the members of the expedition more broadly, their ethnographic experience in the Torres Strait defined the methodological identity of what came to be known as ‘The Cambridge School’. Charles was one of the School’s chief active representatives, and it is therefore unsurprising that he has been retrospectively described as a scholar with a ‘strong sense of “field-work”’.⁵⁴ Charles once even avowed that ‘field research in anthropology is what the blood of martyrs is to the Church’.⁵⁵

If his faith was so unfaltering, what exactly were the requirements of professional anthropological fieldwork to which he was so devoted? W.H.R. Rivers, another alumnus of the Torres Strait Expedition with whom Charles trained younger generations of fieldworkers, provided a programmatic systematisation of the Cambridge School’s approach.⁵⁶ Among the key ideas was the insistence that the investigator’s ‘first duty’ was to ‘acquire as completely as possible’ a knowledge of the native language; linguistic access was what distinguished ‘intensive study’ from mere ‘survey work’.⁵⁷ The Seligmans’ expeditions ordinarily fulfilled this requirement: Brenda, for instance, applied herself to learning Arabic when the couple undertook their study of Sudan. Judged by the Seligmans’ standards, then, their trip to the Far East most certainly failed to meet the criteria for fieldwork. Neither Charles nor Brenda learnt the native languages during their six-month tour, and it is telling that Charles subsequently referred to his experience making first-hand observations in the region as ‘a very little practical experience’.⁵⁸

If inadequate research methods likely contributed to Charles’s reservations about disseminating his insights, is it possible that he viewed the subject matter as inappropriate too? Put differently, was Japan too ‘modern’ and too ‘advanced’ a society to constitute a proper subject of anthropological research? There is lingering ambiguity on this question across his texts. On the one hand, as we have seen, his visit led him to comment explicitly on the ‘astounding’ value of modern Japan as a case study for anthropological research, and for investigating ‘culture contact’ in particular. Earlier, he had also chosen to speak at length on the Japanese character in a presidential address to the RAI. And yet unlike Benedict and her colleagues who clearly saw that applying an anthropological approach to modern, complex societies would amount to a paradigm shift that would change the very identity and utility of their discipline, at no point did Charles write self-reflexively about what it might mean for him, as an anthropologist, to be taking an interest in Japan. Instead, he modestly denied expertise in the country when speaking publicly, even as he was ironically simultaneously advancing psycho-anthropological analyses that were innovative – and would be recognised as such when the same analyses were later proffered by culture and personality studies.⁵⁹ Is it possible, then, that Charles simply did not (fully) believe he was practising his own discipline when commenting on Japan? For him, did the boundaries of anthropology stay intact around the study of ‘backward’ peoples, with the Japanese remaining outside?

A similar demarcation of disciplinary boundaries is also evident from his attitudes to policy engagement. Just as he was not entirely averse to making media appearances, Charles was not dismissive of policy work. He was, in fact, explicitly supportive of ‘Applied Anthropology’, recommending that ‘every government should appoint trained anthropologists’.⁶⁰ But in the same context, he also categorically stated that these experts’ task was to ‘save the backward races from extinction and enable them to adapt to new circumstances’.⁶¹ Such a confined, specifically colonial, conception of the discipline’s utility was likely reciprocated by British government officials. To understand Japanese politics and culture during the interwar and wartime years, the Foreign Office and the War Office routinely relied on the first-hand insights of British foreign correspondents as well as academic analyses by historians and economists (sometimes through the facilitation of Chatham House). But the idea of enlisting the service of a professionally trained anthropologist for the study of a rival ‘advanced’ nation appears to have lain beyond the scope of their imagination.

The Japanese would have no doubt been reassured by Charles’s drawing of his disciplinary boundaries, had they known. After all, one of Japan’s utmost concerns since the mid-nineteenth century was to defy European perceptions of the Japanese as ‘backward’: gaining Western recognition of Japan’s ‘civilised’ status was viewed as a sine qua non of the country’s struggle for sovereign survival in a Western-dominated world of empires. Under these circumstances, from the turn of the twentieth century, Japan developed a particularly uneasy relationship with anthropology. Because anthropology was understood as a Western discipline dedicated to the study of ‘primitive’ races (and practically and ideologically linked to colonialism), Japan’s own engagement with the discipline was driven by one overarching imperative: the Japanese must become the observer, not the observed.⁶² It is thus telling that when the Seligmans interacted with Japanese anthropologists during their visit, the subject of their exchange was not contemporary Japanese culture, but the Ainus – the indigenous people of northern Japan – who formed the object of the Japanese’ own anthropological gaze.⁶³

Finally, one further factor accounts for the limited impact of the Seligmans’ work on Japan: Brenda and her professional marginalisation. Much of this chapter has so far focused on Charles, precisely because the Seligmans’ findings on Japan were communicated solely by Charles, and not co-authored or published separately by Brenda. Only Brenda’s unpublished travel journal provides us with a glimpse of her own thoughts. As we have seen, Charles’s lectures on Japan in fact drew on notes from Brenda’s journal as well as his own – something that he duly acknowledged at the beginning of each lecture. It remains the case, nonetheless, that only Charles was receiving the invitations to speak. This inequality mirrored the fact that whereas Charles held a prestigious professorship at the LSE and became president of the RAI, Brenda, either because of her gender and/or lack of academic training, held no formal academic post.⁶⁴ (The other female anthropologist of our story, Ruth Benedict, completed a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University in 1923 and joined the faculty thereafter.⁶⁵) Although Brenda developed her own expertise (distinct from Charles’s) in kinship studies, her independent research publications amounted only to about half a dozen papers; her single-authored writings were chiefly reviews of other scholars’ work.⁶⁶

As a female participant in anthropological research, Brenda’s experience was not an exceptionally unfortunate one. Quite the opposite, she was successful relative to other female participants in gaining recognition for her work even in the early years – and over the course of her career, outstandingly successful in gaining the respect of her (including male) colleagues.⁶⁷ Those colleagues were unreserved in acknowledging Brenda’s talent as an anthropologist and, above all, the profound impact she made on Charles’s scholarship.⁶⁸ (In Haddon’s words, the ‘most important event in Seligman’s career’ was his marriage to Brenda.⁶⁹) Still, informal recognition is one thing, and formal recognition is another. With no formal academic post and relatively limited opportunities to build her reputational capital by presenting her independent thoughts, it is unsurprising that not only for the 1930s but also the war years once Charles was deceased, there is no record of Brenda publicly proffering anthropological perspectives in response to unfolding global-imperial events.

The postwar years did see some changes, however, as Brenda began a fresh life as a widow. During those years, she grew in prominence, facilitated perhaps by her newly increased independence (and move from Oxford, where she had lived with Charles, to London), as well as broader institutional shifts towards greater integration of women within the academy.⁷⁰ She became more involved in the RAI, and in 1959, succeeded A. R. Radcliffe-Brown as the president of the Association of Social Anthropologists. When she finally published a book of her own in 1962, the subject was none other than the Ainus, the aforementioned indigenous people of northern Japan.

Ainu Creed and Cult (1962) was a book edited by Brenda, and drew not on her own research, but on material written or collected by the then deceased Neil Gordon Munro (1863–1942). Munro was a Scottish physician and a long-term resident of Japan who had developed a keen interest in Ainu culture and history. Brenda and Charles had met Munro during their trip to Japan. Thereafter, the Seligmans, and Charles in particular until his death, proactively supported Munro’s research as an independent scholar, securing funding from the Rockefeller Foundation on Munro’s behalf and providing substantive advice on Munro’s investigations through regular correspondence.⁷¹ In Charles’s view, the indigenous people of Japan clearly represented a subject to which he felt entitled to speak; here, he had expertise worth sharing.

Conclusion

According to his friends and colleagues, Charles Seligman was a ‘modest’ and ‘reticent’ scholar who ‘quietly exerted’ influence; as an anthropologist, he displayed ‘unrivalled … thoroughness, integrity and energy’, but ‘little love – nor perhaps talent – for far-flung speculations’.⁷² These characterisations by those who knew him best are consistent with the quietly pioneering way in which Charles approached his anthropological study of modern Japan. Perhaps, in the end, he was simply not self-enterprising enough. But was his ‘introvert’ disposition a scholarly virtue, or was it a vice? Answers to this question will no doubt vary. There is no denying, however, that Charles and Brenda’s innovative ideas about Japan and national character only had a limited throw within interwar Britain and beyond.

An essential precondition for the democratisation of knowledge is that the intellectuals themselves believe that their knowledge is worth sharing with the world. Charles Seligman, in his refusal to claim expertise on Japan – and in his reluctance to disseminate his thoughts on the subject – was perhaps holding to the highest standards of professional anthropology as they existed at the time. Yet in so doing, he also missed out on an opportunity – to make a paradigm-shifting impact on his discipline, and a timely contribution to the democratisation of knowledge about the world beyond Britain.

Notes

1. 1.  Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013).

2. 2.  Mandler, Return from the Natives, chs 4–5.

3. 3.  Only a few works have cited Charles Seligman’s writings on Japanese national character: Hidetoshi Katō, ‘Bunkajinruigaku ni okeru kokuminsei no shomondai’ [The question of national character in cultural anthropology], Jinbun gakuhō, 7 (1957), p. 56; Bernard C. Hennessy, ‘Psycho-cultural Studies of National Character: Relevance for International Relations’, Background, 6.1 (1962), p. 31. Milton Singer, ‘A Survey of Culture and Personality Theory and Research’, in B. Kaplan (ed.), Studying Personality Cross-culturally (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1961), pp. 11–13, is a rare work that recognises Charles as a British counterpart to the American ‘Culture and Personality’ school.

4. 4.  On the ‘New Diplomacy’ and the democratisation of foreign policy, see Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c. 1918–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).

5. 5.  The phrase ‘democratisation of academic knowledge’ is taken from Peter Mandler, ‘The Language of Social Science in Everyday Life’, History of the Human Sciences, 32.1 (2019), p. 69.

6. 6.  On the need to think about a text’s impact or ‘throw’, see Peter Mandler, ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, Cultural and Social History, 1.1 (2004), pp. 94–117.

7. 7.  George W. Stocking Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 98–115.

8. 8.  On the period’s theoretical controversies, see Stocking, After Tylor.

9. 9.  C.S. Myers, ‘Charles Gabriel Seligman 1873–1940’, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 10 (1941), p. 637.

10. 10.  Myers, ‘Charles Gabriel Seligman 1873–1940’, p. 636; Meyer Fortes, ‘Charles Gabriel Seligman, 1873–1940’, Man, 41 (1941), p. 5.

11. 11.  C.G. Seligman, ‘Anthropology and Psychology: A Study of Some Points of Contact’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 54 (1924), pp. 13–46.

12. 12.  Seligman, ‘Anthropology and Psychology’, pp. 30–34. The ‘native’ works used by Charles were: Liang Ch’i-Ch’ao (Liang Qichao), ‘The civilization of Japan’, translated by Herbert Giles, in Gems of Chinese literature (1922 [1884]); Yoshisaburō Okakura, The Japanese Spirit (1909 [1905]; and Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea (1919 [1906]).

13. 13.  Seligman, ‘Anthropology and Psychology’, p. 13.

14. 14.  Seligman, ‘Anthropology and Psychology’, p. 26.

15. 15.  Seligman, ‘Anthropology and Psychology’, p. 28.

16. 16.  C.G. Seligman, ‘Japanese Temperament and Character’, Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society, London, 28 (1931), p. 134.

17. 17.  Seligman, ‘Japanese Temperament and Character’, p. 126; C.G. Seligman, ‘Chinese and Japanese, a Study in Temperament and Character’, Birmingham Medical Review, 11 (1936), p. 280.

18. 18.  Seligman, ‘Japanese Temperament’, p. 128.

19. 19.  ‘Brenda Seligman’s Journal of Japan, Korea and China’ (1929), BLPES, London School of Economics, SELIGMAN 5/6, pp. 91, 94.

20. 20.  C.G. Seligman, ‘Japan, Korea and China Journal’ (1929–30), SELIGMAN/ 6/1, p. 35.

21. 21.  Seligman, ‘Japanese Temperament’, p. 135.

22. 22.  Seligman, ‘Anthropology and Psychology’, p. 33.

23. 23.  Seligman, ‘Japanese Temperament’, pp. 127, 134–5; ‘Brenda Seligman’s Journal’, pp. 91–93.

24. 24.  Seligman, ‘Japanese Temperament’, p. 134. Brenda’s original observation can be found in ‘Brenda Seligman’s Journal’, p. 89.

25. 25.  Seligman, ‘Japan, Korea and China Journal’, SELIGMAN/ 6/1, p. 35; Seligman, ‘Chinese and Japanese’, p. 280.

26. 26.  C.G. Seligman, ‘Psychology and Racial Differences’, in J.A. Hadfield (ed.), Psychology and Modern Problems (New York: Longmans Green, 1936), p. 86.

27. 27.  Seligman, ‘Japanese Temperament’, p. 131.

28. 28.  Seligman, ‘Chinese and Japanese’, p. 280.

29. 29.  Seligman, ‘Psychology and Racial Differences’, p. 86.

30. 30.  See Mandler, Return from the Natives; Robert A. LeVine, ‘Culture and Personality Studies: Myth and History’, Journal of Personality, 69.6 (2001), pp. 803–18.

31. 31.  Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934).

32. 32.  Comments by C.G. Seligman, ‘Patterns of Culture: A Symposium between the British Psychological Society (Medical Section) and the Royal Anthropological Institute’, Man, 36 (1936), p. 114. For the suggestion that Jung’s Psychological Types (1921) was a likely stimulus for Benedict’s use of Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian opposition, see George W. Stocking, Jr., ‘Essays on Culture and Personality’, in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 3.

33. 33.  Mandler, Return from the Natives, esp. ch. 4. As Mandler shows, another anthropologist studying Japanese national character for the same reason was Geoffrey Gorer, Benedict’s close colleague.

34. 34.  Mandler, Return from the Natives, pp. 25–8, 54–6.

35. 35.  On Charles’s engagement with psychology, see Erik Linstrum, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), ch. 2.

36. 36.  For Charles’s engagement with ‘culture and personality’, see n. 32 above.

37. 37.  Mandler, Return from the Natives, ch. 4. The 1930s also saw A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (then based at the University of Chicago) spearhead an initiative to extend the study of social anthropology to ‘advanced societies’; see his ‘Introduction’ to John F. Embree, Suye Mura: A Japanese Village (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), p. viii.

38. 38.  Seligman, ‘Japanese Temperament’, pp. 131–2; Seligman, ‘Chinese and Japanese’, pp. 281–2.

39. 39.  Seligman, ‘Japanese Temperament’, and Seligman, ‘Chinese and Japanese’.

40. 40.  Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (London: Secker & Warburg, 1947), ch. 10.

41. 41.  Mandler, Return from the Natives, p. 17.

42. 42.  Stocking, ‘Essays on Culture and Personality’, p. 5.

43. 43.  Seligman, ‘Psychology and Racial Differences’, pp. 85–7.

44. 44.  Hiroshi Minami, Nihonjinron; meiji kara konnichi made [Theories of Japaneseness: From the Meiji Era to the Present] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), p. 199.

45. 45.  On her research methods, see Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, pp. 5–8.

46. 46.  Charles’s 1932 Huxley lecture referred to his trip but with a focus on Japanese examples of schizophrenia; C.G. Seligman, ‘Anthropological Perspective and Psychological Theory’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 62 (1932), pp. 224–6.

47. 47.  Nor did Geoffrey Gorer cite Charles’s work in his studies of the Japanese.

48. 48.  McCarthy, British People, esp. pp. 15–22.

49. 49.  Chika Tonooka, ‘World History’s Eurocentric Moment? British Internationalism in the Age of Asian Nationalism, c.1905–1931’, Modern Intellectual History, 18 (2021), pp. 95–120.

50. 50.  Toynbee and other British intellectuals’ travel observations are discussed in Chika Tonooka, Rival Civilisations: The Rise of Japan and Ideas of World Order in Britain (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

51. 51.  ‘World History: VI’, 11 June 1936, University Library, Cambridge, Papers of Eileen Power and Michael Postan, MS Add. 8961/18/1.

52. 52.  H.G. Wells, ‘What is Japan?’, Daily Mail, 16 November 1921, pp. 9–10.

53. 53.  On the circumstances of this broadcast, see Linstrum, Ruling Minds, pp. 37, 59–63.

54. 54.  Stocking, After Tylor, p. 115.

55. 55.  Stocking, After Tylor, p. 115.

56. 56.  W.H.R. Rivers, ‘A General Account of Method’, in Barbara Freire-Marreco and John Linton Myres (eds.), Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 4th edn (London: The Royal Anthropological Institute, 1912), pp. 108–27.

57. 57.  Stocking, After Tylor, pp. 121–2.

58. 58.  Seligman, ‘Psychology and Racial Differences’, p. 86.

59. 59.  Seligman, ‘Japanese Temperament’, p. 135; Seligman, ‘Chinese and Japanese’, p. 277.

60. 60.  C.G. Seligman, ‘Applied Anthropology’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information, 13th edn (London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1926), p. 142.

61. 61.  C.G. Seligman, ‘Applied Anthropology’, p. 142.

62. 62.  Makito Saya, Minzokugaku, Taiwan, kokusai renmei: Yanagita Kunio to Nitobe Inazō [Folk studies, Taiwan, the League of Nations: Kunio Yanagita and Inazō Nitobe] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2015), pp. 48–56.

63. 63.  ‘Seriguman kyōjyu no jinruigaku kyōshitsu hōmon’ [Professor Seligman’s visit to the department of anthropology], Jinruigaku zasshi, 44 (1929), p. 571. They met Ryō Matsumura, an anthropologist at the Tokyo Imperial University.

64. 64.  Her notable affiliations were Fellowship of the RAI and membership of the committee of Section H of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

65. 65.  Benedict was appointed associate professor in 1936, and then professor in 1948, two months before her death. On the negative impact of her gender on her career, see Lyn Schumaker, ‘Women in the Field in the Twentieth Century: Revolution, Involution, Devolution?’, in Henrika Kuklick (ed.), New History of Anthropology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 281.

66. 66.  For an overview of her career, see Meyer Fortes, ‘Brenda Zara Seligman, 1882–1965: A Memoir’, Man, 65 (1965), pp. 177–81.

67. 67.  Schumaker, ‘Women in the Field’, pp. 278–9.

68. 68.  Fortes, ‘Brenda Zara Seligman’, p. 180; Myers, ‘Charles Seligman’, p. 638; Meyer Fortes, ‘Charles Gabriel Seligman, 1873–1940’, Man, 41 (1941), p. 3; The Times, 20 September 1940, p. 7; I. Schapera (ed.), Studies in Kinship and Marriage: Dedicated to Brenda Z. Seligman on Her 80th Birthday (London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1963).

69. 69.  A.D. Haddon, ‘Appreciation’, in E.E. Evans-Pritchard et al, (eds.), Essays Presented to C.G. Seligman (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1934), p. 2.

70. 70.  Schumaker, ‘Women in the Field’, pp. 282–4.

71. 71.  Kaoru Tezuka, ‘People Surrounding Munro’, in Umi wo watatta ainu no kōgei; eikokujin ishi manrō no korekushon kara (Sapporo: Ainu Association of Hokkaido, 2002), pp. 103–4. For a representative example of Munro’s correspondence with Charles, see N. G. Munro, ‘NGM to CGS’, 10 February 1931, Neil Gordon Munro Collection, RAI Archive, MS 249/5/1.

72. 72.  Fortes, ‘Charles Seligman’, p. 5; Melville J. Herskovits, ‘Charles Gabriel Seligman’, American Anthropologist, 43.3 (1941), p. 437; Myers, ‘Charles Seligman’, p. 637.

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