‘Donald Thomson’s Hybrid Expeditions: Anthropology, Biology and Narrative in Northern Australia and England’ in Expeditionary Anthropology: Teamwork, Travel and the ‘Science of Man’, Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris (eds). Oxford, NY: Berghahn Books, 2018 and 2021
Donald Thomson belongs to a lineage of biologists-turned-anthropologists tracing back to his mentor Alfred Cort Haddon and to Baldwin Spencer. He was also a trained journalist and prolific and gifted photographer. Thomson’s anthropological expeditions to Arnhem Land in northern Australia in the 1930s hark back to recognizable characteristics of ‘cultures of exploration’ of the nineteenth century. While on expedition, he pursued anthropology, zoology, photography, cinematography, natural history collecting, journalism and other sorts of writing—a range of activities that enabled him to operate both within and apart from the conventions of functionalist anthropology, dominant during his lifetime. Through his journalistic skills and literary flair he used the idea of the expedition to engage public audiences beyond the strictly anthropological or academic.