Obituary.(Kenneth Maddock was an authority on Australian Aboriginal social structure)(Obituary)

KENNETH JAMES MADDOCK, 1937-2003.

KEN MADDOCK is sometimes described as an anthropologist of the "old school", but in fact e was something much rarer--a man who took the questions raised by the old school of anthropologists seriously, who thought their evidence and arguments worth study, and who took just as seriously their attitude towards the truth. Scholarship was to establish facts as well as meanings. It was not just a literary game.

He was born in 1937 in Hastings, New Zealand. After obtaining a BA in Law he went on to receive a Master of Arts in Anthropology at the University of Auckland in 1964. His interests then led him to Australia, where he obtained a PhD under the supervision of Dr L.R. Hiatt in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1969. He then began a career which would mark him as one of our most distinguished authorities on Aboriginal life.

What did it mean to take the classical questions seriously? It first meant analysing the social structure of Aboriginal society and seeing why it possessed the form and logic it did. I think it was W.E.H. Stanner who once said that there are problems here to "stretch the sinews of the finest mind", and Ken doubtless agreed, but as he said in The Australian Aborigines, although the mysteries of what is called "the eight-class system" were complicated, "the Aboriginal world view cannot be appreciated unless they are understood". Those surprised to learn that generations of anthropologists strained their brains to the limit studying traditional Aboriginal social structure might profitably read his chapter "The Order of the World". They will there see why.

Second, it meant taking the world of hunters and gatherers seriously, a world we all lived in 10,000 years ago, but which by the 1960s represented an economic regime found only among 0.001 per cent of the earth's population. To understand this world was not to falsely idealise it. He praised some of its attributes under the title "The Defensibility of Aboriginal Society", but as a disciple of the libertarian philosopher John Anderson he realised that there were deep problems in any social order which vetoed, in principle, the questioning of everything that order ordained. Thirdly, it meant trying to understand the religious life of the Aborigines, and the role of "the world-creative powers" in their beliefs. Not religious himself, he seems to have had at least some sympathy for the view once expressed by Malinowski. There the great pioneer asserted that "sound social life must be based upon a truly religious system of values, that is, one which reflects the revelation to us of the existence of spiritual and moral order". But I suspect a sympathy for the moral logic of ...