Introduction by Janette Bulkan

Senior Urban Anthropology Manager, The Field Museum,Chicago and Associate Researcher, Institute of Development Studies, University of GuyanaThe centenary of Dr. Walter E. Roth’s compendium, An Inquiry into the Animism and Folklore of the Guiana Indians can be commemorated from 2013 (the date of Walter Roth’s Preface) to 2015, a century after its first

publication. An Inquiry into the Animism and Folklore was reprinted by Johnson Reprint Corporation in 1970. The reissue of this annotated compendium in time for the centenary, under the Guyana Classics Series, honours a landmark compilation of the cosmology and beliefs of three of Guyana’s indigenous peoples – Arawak, Carib and Warau. It was not the first such published collection—preceded by, for example, the publications of

Anglican missionary, William Henry Brett, also based in the Pomeroon River District (1880) and Sir Everard Im Thurn (1882) — and others would follow. Among the merits of An Inquiry into the Animism and Folkloreis the scrupulous care which Roth characteristically brought to the task of recording the words of his interlocutors. A century later, there are radically different analytical exegeses of indigenous cosmology elaborated by linguists and ethnographers, Amerindian and non-Amerindian (Viveiros de Castro 1996, 2000). Fortunately, contemporary indigenous peoples, scholars and the reading public all benefit from Roth’s separation of his comments from the text, which permits each reader to experience a story directly.

Walter Roth arrived in British Guiana in 1907 to take up a combined appointment as the government stipendiary magistrate, medical officer, and Protector of Indians in the Pomeroon District. He was 45 years old at the time, and the new post was to all intents and purposes a lateral transfer from one British colony to another. By then, Roth had amassed a distinguished record of publications on Australian Aboriginal ethnography and languages dating from 1897. He had certainly not exhausted the possibilities for research in Queensland or in Australia. However, Roth served in an unrelentingly hostile atmosphere, in the end hounded out of office and vilified by white settlers and the Queensland government alike, united in their dislike of Roth’s anthropological and public policy work. Australia’s loss was Guyana’s great gain. Walter Roth’s pioneering and voluminous researches over a quarter of a century would be hard to replicate in any generation. His written records, skillful illustrations and ethnographic collections are a bequest to our nation.
Walter Roth’s early life
Walter Edmund Roth (1861-1933) was one of nine children (seven sons and two daughters) of Dr. Mathias Roth, a Hungarian-born physician and his English wife, Anna Maria Collins. Mathias Roth had sought and secured asylum in England in 1849 after the failed Hungarian revolution of 1848. He was 31 years old then and would build a flourishing medical practice as a homoeopathic doctor, specializing in orthopaedics. Four of his sons, including Walter, followed in his footsteps and also trained as medical doctors. Walter was the fifth son. Mathias Roth was reputedly a stern disciplinarian, who also harboured some eccentric ideas, including that his children should run around bare footed even in winter. Incidentally, the naturalist Charles Waterton (1782 – 1865) who made four long journeys of exploration through the Guiana interior from 1812 to 1824, famously travelled everywhere in bare feet. Waterton’s best-selling account of those trips – Wanderings in South America (first published in 1825)–is credited with inspiring young British schoolboys like Charles Darwin
and Alfred Russell Wallace whose pioneering insights in the natural sciences and evolutionary history were likewise catalysed by their travels in the pan-tropics. Mathias Roth was Jewish by birth but “a non-believer [who] did make concessions for his wife’s sake and occasionally sent his brood to church: whatever church happened to be in the neighbourhood” (Brody 2008: 36). The Roth boys attended University
College School in London, their education supplemented by private foreign tutors in mathematics and the physical and natural sciences. They also attended boarding schools in Germany and France, and Walter was literate in French, Dutch and German. He would later put his linguistic skills to use in translating seminal historical and ethnographic works on British Guiana and the Guiana area more generally, including Koch-Grunberg (1917), Netscher (1929), Schomburgk, M. R. (1922-23), Schomburgk, R.H. (1931), and Van Berkel (1948). It was perhaps due to his influence and persistence that some of his translations were published in British Guiana. His proficiency in Latin is displayed by his switching from English to Latin in those parts of the stories in An Inquiry into the Animism and Folklore that describe sexual relations.
The remarkable and distinguished contributions of Walter and his siblings in medicine, anthropology and public service in the far-flung British Empire are the subjects of a recent volume (McDougall and Davidson 2008). The Roth family could not fit easily into the conventional English class structure. Both their foreignness and broad education would likely have contributed to a sense of marginality: “In an atmosphere of pluralistic religious pragmatism, and a household that provided the focus of a cosmopolitan society of liberal-minded people from all over Europe, the Roth family ‘made otherness a norm’” (ibid.: 13).

Walter Roth’s corpus (Collins 1971, Plew and Forte 1998, list his Guiana-based publications, translations and reports) may partly be credited to that sense of being an outsider, coupled with broad and rigorous academic training, discipline and application and a lifelong interest in the marginalised conquered indigenous peoples. Overlapping interests with Henry Ling Roth Walter Roth studied biology at Oxford University from 1881 to 1884, and upon graduation began medical training at St Thomas Hospital in London. In 1886 he enrolled as a law student also, but a year later, in 1887, suspended his studies in both law and medicine, and moved to Australia. Walter and his older brother Henry (1855-1925) had at least three overlapping interests – ethnology, Australia and British Guiana. In 1878, Henry left England for Queensland, Australia where he had been commissioned by English businessmen to investigate the sugar industry. Three brothers, Felix, Reuter and Walter, would follow him there, although Henry himself returned to Europe in 1888. Henry’s influential ethnological publications, including on the indigenous peoples of Tasmania (1890), Sarawak (1896) and Benin (1903), were based on other people’s fieldwork.
In contrast, Walter was a lifelong enthusiastic and indefatigable fieldworker, first in Australia and, from 1907 until his death, in British Guiana. Interestingly, Henry had also preceded Walter in British Guiana when in 1875 he accepted an offer to help manage a sugar plantation there. However, Henry left after six months as his employer failed to honour their agreement. Walter would serve for 26 years in British Guiana, finally dying here in 1933.
Teacher and medical doctor in southern Australia In Australia, Walter held a number of posts, including teaching at grammar schools in Brisbane and Sydney, before returning to London in 1891-2 to complete his medical training. Thereafter he worked in a medical partnership in Young, a small town in New South Wales, and embarked upon his life-long dedication to writing scholarly articles on a variety of subjects for publication.
To the killing fields of Queensland Walter soon grew bored with a routine job and after a stint as a ship’s doctor in 1893-4 he accepted an appointment as government surgeon attached to hospitals in far western Queensland in 1894. Four years later, in 1898 Walter became the state’s first Northern Protector of Aborigines. He served in that position until 1904 when he was made Chief Protector. In 1904 he was seconded to head Australia’s first Royal Commission into the condition of Aborigines in northwest Western Australia. After twelve years of service in Queensland, Walter Roth resigned on 10 June 1906 from the post of Chief Protector, and headed for the “mosquito-cursed district of the Pomeroon” in British Guiana. Over the preceding century, the vast Queensland territory had been turned into killing fields as its Aboriginal owners were brutally pacified by white settlers, covertly sanctioned by state and national governments (Evans et al. 1988). Queensland became a separate colony in 1859. The slaughter of Queensland’s Aboriginal peoples replicated the tried and tested pattern of extermination of their hosts played out over the entire continent that followed the British claim of sovereignty in the newly discovered ‘New South Wales’ in 1788. The northern Queensland frontier was only distinguished by the fact that this unequal war against at best spear-wielding Aboriginal people continued into the 20th century, and under Walter Roth’s watch.
The British invaders used sovereignty as the basis of possession, asserting that the Aborigines ‘ranged over the land’ like animals, rather than resided on it, so could not claim ownership. Although the British position contradicted the doctrine of possession in international law developed in the 17th century, a full two hundred years would elapse before
the preexisting rights to their homelands of the original aboriginal owners would be seriously considered by the Australian judiciary in the Mabo case (Reynolds 1987, 1996). Resistance by Queensland Aboriginal peoples to the enclosures of their ancestral lands, forced labour, and rape of their girl children and women was systematically met with ‘musketry and terror’, massacres and raids, the poisoning of entire ‘camps’ by distribution of poisoned flour, strychnine-laced milk and countless other unspeakable atrocities. Walter Roth once noted in passing:
“As for arsenic only experience the poor devils had of it was when mixed purposely with station flour” (Letter of 6 August 1915, Queensland Museum Inward Correspondence Archive 15/1043, cited in Robins 2008: 174). As the historians Robert Evans et al. explained, the Queensland and national authorities stuck to “a complex pattern of evasion and denial. Declaring war would mean recognizing Aborigines as an invaded people rather than, as they were legally defined, ‘British subjects’, whose resistance against the British system of law became logically a ‘Criminal Act’ and the resisters, automatically, ‘outlaws.’ On the other hand, undeclared war, if pursued cautiously, was largely unpublicized war, and conflict could be effected without regard to war’s conventions: the treatment of prisoners, the signing of treaties, the making of territorial settlements, indemnities and the like. Native Police sorties, therefore, proceeded without witnesses – for Aboriginal ‘subjects’ were not regarded as entirely competent until after 1884 – without body counts – the dead being incinerated rather than enumerated – and without the taking of prisoners or any complications over land rights. And without open declarations, there could, of course, be no recognised truces and no official armistice, only a repetitive pattern of ‘a little wholesome correction’ and ‘well-merited chastisement’ until the blacks were ‘pretty well shot down and got rid of’ and the district was ‘quiet’” (1988: 62).

The holocaust perpetrated on the defenceless Aboriginal peoples of Queensland was especially remarkable as it extended throughout the 19th century, and over 300 years after similar exterminations of their hosts by Europeans during the post-1492 contact in the Americas, and long after the abolition of slavery in 1834 in the British Empire. Walter Roth, Protector of Aborigines By 1898, the year Walter Roth was appointed the state’s first
Northern Protector of Aborigines, the remnant Aborigines of Queensland had been reduced to a traumatised, stunned, terrorized and broken rump, rounded-up and herded into in- hospitable reservations far from their customary homelands.
Diseases, including syphilis, were widespread, countered by little in the way of humanitarian or social services. According to Evans et al., “When one studies the early development of reserves… evidence of effective medical treatment, hygienic care, balanced diet, education and training is notable by its absence. In providing inadequate food, primitive shelter and occasionally, some medicine for Aboriginal inmates, the Government seems to have been more concerned about effecting ‘strict economy’ than anything else” (1988:119).
Walter Roth subscribed to the prevailing view that Aborigines were on their way to extinction, and his compendia (e.g. Roth, W.E. 1897, 1901) were in the tradition of salvage anthropology. As the Worker, a local newspaper, noted on 26 March 1904:
“Nothing can save the aboriginal race, and the Government is killing them
quicker, and acting cruelly by taking them away from their own country, for they are like animals, and would sooner go home and starve than live on the best in a strange country” (cited in Evans et al. 1988: 118).

Protector Roth set out his own guiding principles thus: “I look upon [mission] stations rather as workhouses, no work no food!– And am always impressing upon the superintendents the danger of over-educating the blacks under their charge. I am basing and organising all my work up here on the belief that –
(a) In the struggle for existence, the black cannot compete with the white
(b) It is not desirable that he should mix with the white
(c) With advancing civilisation, the black will die out
(d) While he lives, the black should be protected from the abuses to which he is subjected by the white” (Roth to Spencer, 6 October 1902, cited in Mulvaney 2008: 117-8).
Protector Roth trained a kindly but clinical eye on the abject and forlorn survivors entrusted to his care. He travelled extensively in Queensland, cataloguing Aboriginal material culture, collecting specimens for museums and recording as much of the languages, belief systems and former ways of life of the diverse peoples as possible. His enforcement of the 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium
Act, which included prohibitions on common law unions between White or Chinese males and Aboriginal females (‘gins’), and the removal of mixed race children from their families
(the later ‘Lost generation’) aroused great animosity on all sides. Evans et al. wrote: “For decades a marked feature of the bechede-mer and pearling trade, which recruited around the entire coastline and adjacent islands of Cape York peninsula, was the enslavement of groups of natives, for both forced labour and sexual services. This recruitment, commonly referred to as ‘shanghai-ing’ or ‘press-gang system’ was execrated by Protector Roth in 1898 as ‘one long record of brutal cruelty, bestiality and debauchery’” (1988:105).
Protector Roth had few supporters in or out of government. He was so vilified in the national Press that he sent his son, Vincent, accompanied by his wife, Vincent’s stepmother, to continue his schooling on the island of Tasmania. Faithful recording of indigenous languages Walter Roth’s prodigious output includes the only remaining record of some of the now extinct aboriginal languages of Queensland. Contemporary linguists like Gavan Breen credit Roth with a good ear and faithful transcription. According to Breen : “A Revised Linguistic Survey of Australia (Oates & Oates 1970) gives the name ‘Roth’ in connection with 37 languages/dialects (and misses a few more). In some cases Walter Roth simply mentioned the language name, but he collected word lists (mostly of 150 to 200 words) for about 20 different languages (and for two or more dialects of some of these)…”(2008: 133). Breen also commended Roth’s brilliance in recording sign languages, “whose work has not been and will not be superseded,” given the extinction of so many of the Aboriginal peoples and their cultures (p. 146).
It is this facility with languages and his disciplined approach to fieldwork which can inspire confidence in the fidelity of Roth’s transcriptions in An Inquiry into the Animism and Folklore in British Guiana. The historian Bernard Cohn, writing on India, has noted the unforeseen consequences of colonial compendia, whose purpose was to provide a roadmap through local mores to aid the governing authorities. In later centuries, these texts are often key sources for use by erstwhile colonial subjects in refashioning identity and culture:
“The argument of this essay is that the production of these texts and others that followed them began the establishment of discursive
formation, defined an epistemological space, created a discourse(Orientalism), and had the effect of converting Indian forms of knowledge into European objects. The subjects of these texts were first and foremost the Indian languages themselves, re-presented in European terms as grammars, dictionaries, and teaching aids in a project to make the acquisition of a working knowledge of the languages available to those British who were to be part of the ruling groups of India.
The vast social world that was India had to be classified, categorised, and bounded before it could be ordered. As with many discursive formations and their discourses, many of its
major effects were unintended, as those who were to be the objects produced by the formation often turned it to their own ends…” (Cohn 1996: 21-22).

Protector of Indians in British Guiana Roth’s new posting as Protector of Indians in British Guiana in 1907 was in an entirely different social context. British rule was already over a century old, following on two centuries of Dutch rule (from the 1600s to 1803). Over those centuries, Europeans had gradually asserted sovereignty over Amerindian subjects and their lands, skirting the issue of preexisting Amerindian land rights. The reservations that were created in 1902 in British Guiana were at least located in indigenous homelands, in contrast to the displacements experienced by Australian Aborigines. As Arif Bulkan and I have written elsewhere:
“The impulses behind the pan-colonial move to protectionism (including spatial and racial segregation of indigenous peoples),ranged from concern over demographic decline and the often catastrophic impact of cultural contact to blatant appropriation of indigenous homelands by interest groups backed by the power of the State. Local experiences tended to reflect the desirability of indigenous lands to powerful interests. The mainstay of the British Guiana economy was plantation production of agricultural commodities located on the coastal plain. Over time, resource-extractive industries – minerals, principally bauxite, gold and diamonds; and timber and non-timber forest products – led to penetration of indigenous homelands by elements of the dominant society. However, resource extractive enterprises occurred in waves, were seldom associated with permanent settlement by outsiders and were framed by colonial rules and regulations relating to mining, forestry, balata latex extraction and so on. In contrast, indigenous people fared worse in the more aggressive context of settler societies like the US and Australia, characterised by capitalist penetration and more permanent settlement in indigenous homelands” (Bulkan and Bulkan 2008: 258).

The Pomeroon District to which Protector Roth was assigned had been one of the early centres of Amerindian-European contacts. The first trading posts established along that river by the Dutch, in 1658 and 1686, did not survive hostile attacks from the French and indigenous war parties. However the Dutch persisted, and over time distinct indigenous peoples would move temporarily, some permanently, to the Pomeroon River area to take advantage of employment or trading opportunities. From the 1840s, the Anglican missionary William Henry Brett set up a mission at the confluence of the Pomeroon and Arapiaco Rivers, actively proselytizing, researching and writing. Walter Roth’s published output from
1908 carried on that tradition.
The Arawak, Carib and Warau languages belong to distinct language families, each governed by different linguistic rules (Bulkan 2009). What these first citizens of Guyana share, however, is membership of what the anthropologist Julian Steward (1948) would later classify as the Amazonian tropical forest culture area in which largely similar social organization, material culture, and systems of kinship and beliefs were encoded in mutually incomprehensible languages. Steward’s classificatory system followed on the organizing framework developed by Walter Roth.

Animism and Folklore
The title of his compendium makes clear that Roth ranked indigenous belief systems as inferior to those of the Indo-European world, and his prejudices are evident in the text. Animism – the belief that non-humans, including animals and even natural phenomena possess souls – was viewed as primitive, lesser, by Roth. Indigenous spirituality is contrasted unfavourably with the monotheism of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The view that indigenous spirituality was rudimentary and unsophisticated – ‘folklore’- paralleled the evolutionist beliefs that ranked peoples and cultures – with Europeans at the apex, and non-Europeans in descending order. The system of ranking, in turn, provided justification for European conquest of the non-Christian, primitive peoples of the rest of the world whose bodies and social organization stood in the way of possession. The belief in those reigning orthodoxies in the fin-de-siecle imperial world was broadly shared by the ruling classes and schools of intellectual thought.
As noted earlier, Protector Roth also chronicled folklore in the Pomeroon, as in Queensland, Australia, as artifacts of a dying people, lately assigned to reservations.
In recent decades, these so-called myths and folklore are being reinterpreted as sophisticated metaphysical systems of belief that take their place in stature alongside those of Western philosophy. As the Brazilian anthropologist, Viveiros de Castro, explains:
“Now, everything has changed. The savages are no longer ethnocentric but rather cosmocentric; instead of having to prove that they are humans because they distinguish themselves from animals, we now have to recognise how inhuman we are for opposing humans to animals in a way they never did: for them nature and culture are part of the same socio-cosmic field. Not only would Amerindians put a wide berth between themselves and the Great Cartesian Divide which separated humanity from animality, but their views anticipate the fundamental lessons of ecology which we are only now in a position to assimilate. Neo-animism reveals itself as the recognition of the universal admixture of subjects and objects, humans and non-humans against modern hubris” (2000:475).
We can read the narratives that Protector Roth so carefully compiled on different levels- firstly, as a window into the fascinating neo-tropical world with its endemic profusion of plant and animal life forms. We, too, like the European explorers and naturalists, can immerse ourselves into this biodiversity through the medium of these stories. Secondly, we can also marvel at this glimpse into the sophisticated cosmology and complex world views of Guyana’s first peoples, even while recognizing that the narratives, stripped from their social context and translated into English, have lost much of their meaning. We can reflect on the ways in which knowledge and instruction about what it is to be human are passed down through the tales – precepts and wisdom and information all encoded in a vast linguistic tapestry. Sadly, only a fraction of indigenous peoples today continue to speak their languages, while the landscapes and the ways of living have changed. But Walter Roth’s labours of love endure in his many publications, which in turn can aid us all in our creation of the imagined community of Guyana. The complex cosmology recorded in An Inquiry into the Animism and Folklore is the patrimony of Guyana’s indigenous peoples. But every reader can share in the imaginative exploration of Amerindian spirituality and symbolism set down in these accounts. For this and for his many other original works and translations into English, we owe thanks to Protector Roth.

(By WALTER E. ROTH)