Chicanery: Senior Academic Appointments in Antipodean Anthropology, 1920–1960

Academic appointments can bring forth unexpected and unforeseen contests and tensions, cause humiliation and embarrassment for unsuccessful applicants and reveal unexpected allies and enemies. It is also a time when harsh assessments can be made about colleagues’ intellectual abilities, their body of work and their capacity as a scholar and fieldworker. The assessors’ reports were often disturbingly personal, laying bare their likes and dislikes, allegiances and enmities that were used to assist in appointments and hence determine the futures of peers and colleagues. Chicanery deals with how the founding Chairs at Sydney, the Australian National University, Auckland and Western Australia dealt with this process.