'There would be a number of reasons to pass briefly over this posthumously published second volume of Geza Roheim's Children of the Desert. As Morton notes in his excellent introductory essay, anthropologists have long had a negative disciplinary 'take' on R6heim's psychoanalytic work because of 'his cavalier attitude towards his material' (p xi), a view that is rightly skeptical of the broad narratives of universal humanity in which he embedded most of his interpretations of Aboriginal culture. Roheim is deficient, as Morton (p xxii) says, in lacking 'any close appreciation of ho w the symbolic forms he uncovers relate to larger social processes in any thorough way' W e are certainly not provided with any information, for example, about the indigenous contexts or occasions in which folk tales or dreams, the subject of the present volume, are presented. Social analysis is not Roheim's forte. One might well ask, too, whether the time has passed for considering the significance of Roheim for the understanding of Aboriginal people when the trend is towards themes of historical contact, of the hegemony over Aboriginal people and their local aggregations by the State and by the universalising discourses of development, civilisation, citizenship, and improvement.' (Introduction)
