Cirrus@Austlit

'Of all the celebrated anthropological classics penned about Australian Aborigines, Carl Strehlow's Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral Australien is probably the most paradoxical, for it is at once famous and obscure. In her preface to The Aranda's Pepa, Kenny (xv) informs us that Marcel Mauss referred to Strehlow's early volumes as ‘a kind of Australian Rig Veda’. The work was also cited by Durkheim, Lang, Lévi-Strauss, and others, and continues to be regarded as integral to the corpus of ethnographic material that any scholar of Central Australia needs to cover. Kenny describes the five volumes (seven parts) of the work, published in German between 1907 and 1920, as Strehlow's ‘magnum opus’ and as ‘a masterpiece of classical Australian anthropology’ (1), yet underlines the fact that, astonishingly, it has never been republished, either in its original German or in either of the two English translations that have sat quietly and largely immobile in Australian libraries – in one case since the 1930s, in the other since the 1990s. Hence, while many anthropologists know of Carl Strehlow's writing, few Anglophone scholars know it in the round.'  (Introduction)