After Society: Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford 9781789207699

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AFTER SOCIETY

Methodology and History in Anthropology Series Editors: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford David Gellner, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford Nayanika Mathur, Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford Recent volumes: Volume 39

Volume 34

After Society: Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford Edited by João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman

Who Are ‘We’? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology Edited by Liana Chua and Nayanika Mathur

Volume 38

Volume 33

Total Atheism: Secular Activism and Politics of Difference in South India Stefan Binder

Expeditionary Anthropology: Teamwork, Travel and the ‘Science of Man’ Edited by Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris

Volume 37

Crossing Histories and Ethnographies: Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste Edited by Ricardo Roque and Elizabeth G. Traube

Volume 32

Returning Life: Language, Life Force and History in Kilimanjaro Knut Christian Myhre

Volume 36

Volume 31

Engaging Evil: A Moral Anthropology Edited by William C. Olsen and Thomas J. Csordas

The Ethics of Knowledge Creation: Transactions, Relations, and Persons Edited by Lisette Josephides and Anne Sigfrid Grønseth

Volume 35

Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa Koen Stroeken

Volume 30

Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology Edited by Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Hilary Callan

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/methodology-and-history-in-anthropology

AFTER SOCIETY Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford

Edited by

João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2020 João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pina-Cabral, João, editor. | Bowman, Glenn, editor. Title: After Society : Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford / Edited by João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman. Other titles: Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2020. | Series: Methodology and history in anthropology ; Volume 39 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020015864 (print) | LCCN 2020015865 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789207682 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789207699 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Anthropology. | Anthropology--Study and teaching (Graduate)--England--Oxford. | University of Oxford. Classification: LCC GN25 .A32 2020 (print) | LCC GN25 (ebook) | DDC 301--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015864 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015865

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-768-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-769-9 ebook

The contributors to this book wish to dedicate it to Marion Berghahn as a small gesture in recognition of her tireless efforts to foster anthropology globally.

CONTENTS

Introduction. After Society João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman

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Part I. The Oxford Experience and Beyond Chapter 1. Plodding towards Prosopography: Oxford Anthropology from 1976 on Jeremy MacClancy Chapter 2. Amor Fati and the Institute of Social Anthropology Glenn Bowman Chapter 3. The Lucky Anthropologist? Becoming an Anthropologist of Japan at Oxford Dolores P. Martinez

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Chapter 4. Lost and Found at Oxford Roger Just

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Chapter 5. Is Necessity the Mother of Invention? A. David Napier

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Part II. Ethnography as a Vocation Chapter 6. Changing Questions? Reflections on Social Anthropology in and out of Oxford since the 1980s David N. Gellner

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Chapter 7. The Fieldwork Tradition and the Quest for Essential Perplexities Signe Howell

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Chapter 8. Journeys of an Ethnographer: From Oxford to the Field and on to the Archives Sandra Ott

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Contents

Part III. Why Anthropology? Concluding Remarks Chapter 9. Why Anthropology? Structuralism and Since Timothy Jenkins

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Chapter 10. From Oxford to Cambridge: Chasing the ‘Aka’ 177 Maryon McDonald Chapter 11. Mediterranean Equivoques at Oxford João Pina-Cabral

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Index 219

INTRODUCTION AFTER SOCIETY João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman

Introductory Remarks This book brings together a group of scholars who were shaped by Oxford anthropology in the late 1970s and early 1980s, each reflecting on their academic trajectories. This was a period of major political and academic change in Great Britain and, more generally, around the globe. A decade earlier, the student revolts had had a profound effect on the way the social sciences saw their role in society. Yet, it is only with the impact of the neoliberal reaction, at the time of Mrs Thatcher’s first government, that the full implications of the earlier crisis made themselves felt in anthropology. These implications were both internal, in theoretical terms, leading to a deep questioning of the central tenets that had shaped the social sciences throughout the twentieth century; and external, in academic terms, when scholarly discourse was suddenly treated by those in power as being largely irrelevant to the economy and to society – a kind of perverse luxury. Those of us who started our anthropological careers at the time faced the need to respond to a further set of aspects of intellectual decentring: (a) a second wave of psychoanalytic feminism was making important theoretical inroads; (b) poststructuralist critique was upturning the dominant individualist consensus that had dominated since the Second World War; (c) postmodernist dispositions were challenging traditional modes of ethnographic writing; and (d) a new Marxist-inspired postcolonial historiography was affecting the assumed perspectival roles of anthropological research, proposing radically new approaches to the very meaning of power. Our period as postgraduate students, then, was a moment when something new was about to emerge but had not quite yet arisen.

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These contributions look back on that moment, and on our responses to it. As a whole, they challenge the discontinuist approach to the history of anthropology that became dominant in our discipline after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A number of authors came to prominence in the United States who were more likely to claim influence from some distant (French) philosophical mentor than from their own training as anthropologists. This approach blanked out past debates, treating all that went before 1984 as, basically, theoretically irrelevant. A whole generation of young anthropologists the world over were never even taught the conceptual underpinnings that marked the work of their predecessors, simply being told that ‘structural-functionalism’ (whatever that meant) was a bad thing, so they did not need to know about it. The contributors to this volume believe that such a discontinuist view has had profound and damaging effects in our discipline, cutting it off from its central fountains of disciplinary inspiration. Furthermore, the discontinuist approach fails to see that the ethical concerns that characterize anthropology today have always been a preoccupation of all schools of anthropology – even those marginal groupings of the past that, to our contemporary judgement, appear abhorrent. As an approach, discontinuism is deeply imperialist and chronocentric, shutting us off from the history of anthropological thinking – all anthropological thinking, not only ‘Western anthropology’. Worst of all, it hides the fact that anthropological debates and anthropological evidence gathering do not sit outside or beside the world’s globalization and the emergence of the Anthropocene, but sit squarely within it, as central aspects of its historical occurrence. It is enough to look in a minimally informed way at the role that scholars like Monica Wilson, Jomo Kenyatta, Z.K. Mathews, Eduardo Mondlane and Max Gluckman played in the modern history of Africa to see how our world has been shaped by anthropology. Today, the postimperialist anthropology that the contributors to this volume aim to build sees itself as an heir not only to the twentieth-century anthropologies of empire, but to all the traditions of anthropological thinking that came before – as many as we can manage to encompass. In our globalized world, we can (indeed, we must) embrace all traditions of the past (Pina-Cabral 2017a). In the chapters of this book, the contributors engage their own professional histories in order to examine how the impact of the poststructuralist critique that characterized our passage through Oxford in the late 1970s and early 1980s can make a decisive contribution to the theoretical changes that are, once again, reshaping our discipline

Introduction3

(see Chapter 9 by Timothy Jenkins for a historically informed discussion of ‘breaks’).

Society Anthropological dissatisfaction with the very notion of ‘society’ is an old and recurrent strain within a discipline that defines itself as ‘social’. The critique of the theoretical implications of neo-Kantian sociocentrism was not a new invention of the 1990s (Ingold 1996); it has always smouldered quietly within the discipline. After all, Arthur M. Hocart was ostracized and his work systemically marginalized (Needham 1967 and 1970), largely for his denial of the sociocentric consensus. Hocart’s younger companion in Cairo, Evans-Pritchard, was also a lifelong disbeliever. In 1962, after the death of Radcliffe-Brown, he was now finally free to wonder out loud whether there was an entity [that] can be labelled ‘society’ and [whether] such an entity has something called a ‘structure’, which can be further described as a set of functionally interdependent institutions or sets of social relations. These are analogies from biological science and, if they had their uses, they have also proved to be highly dangerous. (Evans-Pritchard 1962: 55)

This was revolutionary stuff in those days, on a par with Edmund Leach’s first Malinowski Lecture (delivered in 1959) in which he proposed rethinking anthropology’s epistemology (Leach 1961: 1–27). Evans-Pritchard’s preferences had always inclined more towards the phénomèniste1 vision of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Mauss than towards the positivist inspiration of Durkheim’s earlier writings. As Durkheim openly admits, his last work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life ([1912] 1915: 235 fn. 733) opens up new perspectives, responding directly both to the impact of Lévy-Bruhl’s Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures ([1910] 1951), whose title he debated with the author, and to his nephew Marcel Mauss’s never-completed doctoral thesis on prayer – a thesis whose second half the author never wrote, as it largely merged into his uncle’s final work (Weber and Sembel 2019; see also Keck 2008). In the years that followed Durkheim’s death in 1917, both Lévy-Bruhl and Mauss would further develop this phénomèniste strain of thinking (which they called ethnologie), distancing themselves progressively from Durkheim’s earlier more scientistic visions of ‘sociology’ (see Lévy-Bruhl 1949).2 In contrast, Radcliffe-Brown’s primary source

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of inspiration was Durkheim’s earlier and more positivist The Rules of the Sociological Method ([1895] 1982), as is patently clear in his now canonical Structure and Function in Primitive Society (a book actually edited posthumously by Fred Eggan and Evans-Pritchard in 1952). In the 1950s and 1960s, Evans-Pritchard worked consciously and explicitly at deconstructing this positivist heritage. He did this in three principal ways: firstly, he encouraged his disciples to translate into English most of the works of Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl (see LévyBruhl 1952[1934]), and those of their close collaborators;3 secondly, he encouraged the digging out of important anthropological thinkers that had not followed the sociocentric observance;4 and thirdly, he undertook a revisitation of the philosophy of history of his former Oxford teacher, Robin Collingwood (see Pina-Cabral 2017b: 37– 42). In turn, this was encouraged by intense dialogue with Michael Polanyi, the philosopher of science, to which the latter explicitly refers (e.g. Polanyi 1959: 100–101; and 1952).5 In fact, doubts concerning positivist reifications of society were no new thing with Evans-Pritchard. In the theoretical essays he published in Cairo in the early 1930s (1933, 1934, 1936), we can already identify the first signs of the critique of knowledge that would eventually set him against the disciplinary project represented by Radcliffe-Brown (see 1950 Marett Lecture: Evans-Pritchard 1950). Mary Douglas’s book on Evans-Pritchard (Douglas 1980), in which she presents him as a strict follower of Durkheim’s sociocentric inspiration, would most likely have been rejected by the Oxford master himself. In the late 1960s, for a brief while, Lévi-Straussian structuralism seemed to Oxford anthropologists to promise a natural succession to the Maussian strain of the Année Sociologique that they had always favoured. However, Lévi-Strauss’s response to Needham’s translation of The Elementary Structures of Kinship put an end to that brief romance (Lévi-Strauss 1965, 1969), leaving no doubt among the Oxford poststructuralists that their own critique of positivist social science was epistemologically far more challenging than anything Lévi-Strauss would ever condone. This critique found its canonical expression when Rodney Needham (1972) published Belief, Language, and Experience, a book revolutionizing the epistemological assumptions of the sociocentric consensus that had dominated the Classical Period (1920s to 1950s). At the same time, in essay after essay, his colleague in Oxford, Edwin Ardener, was unpacking the securities of that classical moment

Introduction5

(2006), as Tim Jenkins and Maryon McDonald so lucidly expound in their chapters in this volume. By the late 1970s, and particularly among those of us with an interest in history, the impact of the neo-Marxist approach of E.P. Thompson (1978) was as profound as that of the writings of Bourdieu (1977), themselves inspired by the late Marcel Mauss (see Glenn Bowman in this volume). Oxford was, after all, the place where historicist anthropology would continue to be practised right up to the mid-1980s. John K. Campbell, for instance, spent his life working at the intersections of anthropology, history, and political studies, and guided many of us in that direction (see Mazower 2008). According to Peter Rivière (2007), the immediate postcolonial period – stretching from 1962, when the old diploma for colonial administrators was interrupted, to the mid-1970s, when EvansPritchard died – was a boom period in Oxford anthropology. By the end of the 1970s, however, Evans-Pritchard’s death, a series of setbacks in the appointment of professors, and a schismatic crisis in the administration of the Institute of Social Anthropology gave rise to the atmosphere of unease identified by many of the contributors to this collection (see Jeremy MacClancy in this volume). Oxford poststructuralism’s profound challenge to established epistemological certainties was not accompanied by clear guidelines from either Ardener or Needham, the two leading thinkers, as to how the discipline should be reconstituted. Indeed, when the young James Fox asked Needham what the future of anthropology should look like now that the old paradigms had collapsed, he famously replied ‘the future will look after itself ’.6 Those of us who came to social anthropology as graduate students in that period, each with his or her own personal intellectual motivations, experienced this sense of theoretical and disciplinary unsettlement in very different ways. We were all, as the various chapters in this book detail, quite conscious of the need to find new ways out. Yet, we could hardly have known that the critique of the positivist notion of society that we were undertaking academically was in fact a more central aspect of our era – with implications that all of us profoundly rejected. By September 1987, when Margaret Thatcher replied to the journalist Douglas Keay, ‘you know, there is no such thing as society’ (Woman’s Own, 31 October 1987), the conceptual undermining of classical social anthropology had found deep resonance in politics, to an extent that none of us had even minimally foreseen. Whilst we critiqued positivist sociocentrism in order to better understand social life, neoliberal politicians abhorred the very notion of

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collective responsibility; whilst we saw individualist ideology as part of the sociocentric approach, they mostly wanted to get rid of human co-responsibility. Neoliberalism imposed itself politically in the early 1980s in direct opposition to the ideological consensus that had been established at the end of the First World War. The latter had focused centrally on collectivist values. Fascism and communism, as political ideologies, both grew out of this sociocentric ideology. Social democracy, the democratic version that won the day in Western Europe after the Second World War, was based on these same tenets. The prescient declaration of this victorious sociocentrism, embracing both political and social theory, is the fascinating closing passage of Marcel Mauss’s classic, The Gift, first published as a series of articles in 1925: In certain cases, one can study the whole of human behaviour, and social life in its entirety. One can also see how this concrete study can lead not only to a science of customs, to a partial social science but even to moral conclusions, or rather, to adopt once more the old word, ‘civility’, or ‘civics’, as it is called nowadays. Studies of this kind indeed allow us to perceive, measure, and weigh up the various aesthetic, moral, religious, and economic motivations, the diverse material and demographic factors, the sum total of which are the basis of society and constitute our common life, the conscious direction of which is the supreme art, Politics, in the Socratic sense of the word. (Mauss [1954] 1990: 107, our emphasis)

By the 1980s, however, this ambitious programme was being questioned both by the poststructuralist thinkers and by the radical individualism that is best represented by Margaret Thatcher’s assertion in 1987 that, rather than something called ‘society’, ‘there are individual men and women, and there are families’ (Woman’s Own, 31 October 1987). Thatcher’s statement, in shaping British society and, in time, much of Western and Central Europe through the politics of ‘austerity’, created the conditions for its own validation – the systematic neoliberal undermining of the central institutions of the state that we are still experiencing today in Britain at the hands of successive Tory governments. The sort of philistinism that came to dominate British politics under the guidance of Mrs Thatcher and her successors had an immediate impact on university administration, and presented a central challenge to those of us who, having begun our careers as anthropologists in the mid-1980s, found that grants had been reduced, whole departments had been extinguished, and new posts as professional anthropologists were no longer available. Indeed, the ecumenical engagement with alterity that characterizes the anthropological

Introduction7

tradition was abhorrent to those in power at the time, as was to become evident in the 1990s. The implications of the critique of the collectivist ideals that we had inherited from the belle époque remained an unresolved intellectual puzzle for a very long time. As Emmanuel Lévinas has noted, in ‘Reagonomics’ (the bastard offshoot of the Thatcherite ‘revolution’) the traditional values of égalité and fraternité were derided, the first as being communistic, the second as being contrary to the prosperity of all (see Caygill 2002). Instead, there was an overzealous focus on liberté, interpreted as the individual’s liberty to procure economic gain. The socially deleterious effects of this form of moral blindness are plain to see today when inequality in the distribution of resources has reached levels previously unheard of in human history (Piketty 2014). Indeed, with the excitement caused by the end of the dictatorial communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the expansion and growth of the European Union, it was not until the mid-1990s that, both in anthropological theory and in the theory of democracy, the full implications of what had been happening started to become apparent. In social anthropology, it was only then that the theoretical and ideological implications of postmodernism and its association with neoliberal ideologies became explicit to most European anthropologists, prompting a rethinking of the notion of sociality (Strathern 1988; Ingold 1991). This opened the path to a new social anthropological project based on a dialogue with the sciences, on the one hand, and with radically distinct modes of conceiving the ethnographic gesture, on the other (see Pina-Cabral 2011). Indeed, as Jonathan Benthall (2007) declares in his inspired history of that period in Oxford anthropology, the central project of articulating a new conception of anthropology proposed at the time, that bypasses Cartesian epistemological assumptions, is only now starting to gain ground within world anthropology. We are today ‘after society’, therefore, in two senses. On the one hand, we no longer take the unitariness of ‘society’ as a given; but, on the other hand, we have not stopped searching for what, throughout the twentieth century, we meant to describe by means of it.

Trajectories In the early to mid 1980s, after the collapse of ‘society’, the hegemony within anthropology was turning to North America. At the same time, in politics, the relevance of studying society underwent profound delegitimation. Those of us coming out of postgraduate

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studies in Oxford had to ask ourselves seriously whether social anthropology was really our vocation. There were no jobs to be had and there were too many voices telling us that our fascination with what social anthropology stood for was wrongheaded. The profound epistemological and theoretical advances that had emerged in the poststructuralist work of our teachers in the late 1970s and early 1980s had found little echo elsewhere. International forums were dominated by the North American ‘semiotic turn’, which largely ignored Wittgensteinian-inspired poststructuralist critique. At the same time, the increased size of the audiences was fuelling a stardom system at loggerheads with previous styles of scholarly engagement. This was particularly the case at AAA meetings, whose size grew exponentially due to the net growth in the number of university students worldwide and the greater ease of international travel. Mid-century European values of intellectual debate and empirical innovativeness were no longer the distinguishing factors that made academics stand out among their peers. The mid-1980s were days of change, theoretical doubt, political delegitimation, and professional unsettlement. They left a mark on the professional trajectories of those of us who entered our professional careers at that time. Thirty years later, what has come of that generation? What happened to those of us for whom anthropology never lost its fascination and who persisted in making careers as researchers and teachers in our chosen discipline? How did our personal professional trajectories reflect the momentous changes that social anthropology in particular, and the social sciences more generally, underwent in the 1980s and 1990s? These were some of the questions we put to a group of colleagues who carried out postgraduate training in Oxford at the same time as we did, in the late 1970s. We invited them to come to Canterbury to tell us about their anthropological trajectories. The resulting seminar was fascinating in that it brought out the complexity of people’s professional careers and, at the same time, their personal engagements in the forms of scientific life that make up our discipline. We met again later in Oxford under the auspices of David Gellner and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in the company of local colleagues like David Zeitlyn, Joy Hendry and Renée Hirschon, who enriched our discussions. Of course, the papers we gather as chapters in this book do not necessarily constitute a representative sample of our discipline or even of the anthropological work of the Oxford graduates of our generation; we are certain that others could have made invaluable contributions to the study. Considering, however, the inevitable limitations of such

Introduction9

an exercise, we believe that we have brought together a set of documents concerning the history of social anthropology that is quite unique. As the reader will find, each contributor has brought their own personal take to the issue, tracing distinct trajectories and varied perspectives on events. Each one has chosen a different angle from which to approach the questions – some more personal, some more political, some more theoretical, some more methodological. In fact, they provide a fair sample of the pluralist modes of debate that have come to characterize contemporary anthropology.

The Ethnographic Wager The wager that we took on in this book was to ask people to write about their anthropological trajectories as ‘self-ethnography’ in the hope that what they produced would provide readers with a unique entry into the historical contours of the professional experience of a cohort of academics and anthropologists coming out of Oxford at a time when anthropology in Europe had fallen under a cloud. The chapters are both declarations and examinations; they respond to a view of ethnography that sees it as both rooted in everyday living experiences and as analytically universal. In applying the ethnographic mode of narration and analysis to ourselves we are, in a sense, prolonging the long-established tradition of writing about our informants (e.g. Casagrande 1960). The chapters fall naturally into three parts: the first deals with the Oxford experience and beyond; the second reflects on the varied conditions of ethnography as a vocation; and the third asks ‘why anthropology?’, and looks at the theoretical implications of the poststructuralist legacy and its equivocal implications.

The Oxford Experience and Beyond The book opens with Jeremy MacClancy’s attempt to give an ethnographic response to the question of how professional trajectories reflected the momentous changes that social anthropology underwent in the 1980s and 1990s. He compares two cohorts of postgraduate students with whom he was associated at the Institute of Social Anthropology in 1976 and 1988, and unveils new material concerning the process that led to the institutional troubles that happened between these two dates. In reading through his chapter, one is struck not only by the extraordinary robustness that institutions can

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display in the face of internal and external challenge but also by the emphasis that ex-students’ responses place on intellectual and scholarly achievement. Even as higher education was being transformed into an industrial activity and scientific research was made to be profitable, the old attitudes of scholarly learning based on antiquated humanitarian ideals seem to have remained resilient. It would appear that this is why people still want to be academics and are willing to give up more remunerative alternative career paths. Fascination with the broader anthropological project survived the challenges posed to it through the troubled 1980s and early 1990s, even when confronted with the serious doubts that anthropologists entertained throughout that period concerning what precisely was the anthropological project (see Benthall 2007). The considerable changes and renewed vigour that we witnessed in the discipline in the late 1990s and early 2000s were only made possible by that resilience. Glenn Bowman contributes a reflexive piece inspired by Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati, that is, how one comes to love one’s fate. His sometimes painful memories of the lack of guidance he experienced at Oxford accord with his equally strong enjoyment of the scholarly freedom and experimentation that the university allowed and encouraged. Here a fundamental interdisciplinarity is shown as both millstone and lodestar, and, in a manner echoed in David Napier’s chapter, demonstrates that the ability to wander intellectually in a context rich with academic resources allows one, in time, to discover that to which one has always unwittingly aspired. Again, the theme of intellectual fascination comes up as a strong guiding impetus in a career initially marked by uncertainty and doubt. In a similarly confessional chapter, Dolores Martinez reflects upon the way in which hers was a vocational career, and what drove her to carry through with it in the face of oppositions and disappointments. The central impact on her of the Oxford tradition seems to have been the kind of inspired empiricism (nothing to do with positivism, note) that turned the study of anthropology from a bookish activity into a lived attempt at understanding conjointly all known human forms of life. In this way, her experience meets with Bowman’s, whose roundabout path to the field was, in the end, the door to a lifetime of academic activity. Martinez’s description of the changes to academic life happening at SOAS during the early 1990s is particularly illustrative of the profound transformations taking place in British universities. Roger Just’s brief but intense chapter is about how he managed to obtain his degree in spite of serious financial difficulties, becoming a professional anthropologist in the face of significant doubts and

Introduction11

challenges. Just’s assessment of the fate of the cohort of students that surrounded him there addresses a topic largely left out of this book, and indicates that a social anthropological training not only prepares one for an academic career but also opens the way to a multitude of ways of being ‘conscious’ in the world. David Napier provides an intimate phenomenology of being in Oxford during the period, which brings to the fore the themes of adventure and impediment also evident in other chapters. The latter part of his text explicitly analyses the impact of the Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite agendas on academia and the intellectual life, arguing that innovation within fixed parameters has come to replace invention and creativity, and lamenting the impact of this on teaching and research in anthropology. He echoes some of the concerns that Martinez explores, and constitutes a hinge between the more introspective chapters of the first part of the book and those of the following part.

Ethnography as a Vocation Part II investigates how our generation has experienced its vocational engagement with the discipline. David Gellner’s chapter explores the roots of his vocation as an anthropologist of South Asia in light of his inspiration by the work of Nick Allen and Louis Dumont, underlining the latter’s association with Oxford and the Institute. The profound comparativism of this current of anthropological thinking is highlighted, while the historical impact of Weberian thought in post-war Oxford is interestingly revealed. The comparativism that impelled Allen and Dumont as well as David Gellner’s attention to European scholars who significantly shaped the Institute, calls to mind the recent rediscovery of Franz Baermann Steiner’s influence in Oxford long after his early death. Not only did he inspire a large number of his students and colleagues in the immediate aftermath of the war, but he also opened the door to forms of fieldwork that distanced themselves from the primitivist paradigm of mid-century African ethnography (see Fardon and Adler 1999). Signe Howell addresses ethnography as a central aspect of the anthropological vocation, and shows how this practice has been transformed in her work over the past decades. She introduces her two large-scale fieldwork experiences (among the Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia and among the Lio of Central Flores, Indonesia), illustrating how the conditions for the practice of ethnography have changed over the years. She is particularly interested in the experience

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of ‘returning to the field’ that is now increasingly possible due to changes in modes of travel and has indeed become a hallmark of the discipline, distinguishing it considerably from the mid-twentieth-century experience of our teachers. The challenges and advantages of multitemporal fieldwork are explored in the light of an evolving tradition of ethnographic research. The relation between ethnography and time takes on another guise in Sandra Ott’s chapter. Here, she reflects on her own evolving relation with her supervisor (Rodney Needham), giving us a picture of how her life as a researcher was moulded by academic relations as well as by successive encounters in the field. After a distinguished career as a field ethnographer, Ott has recently been following her field experience backwards, as it were, in trying to understand some of the central traumatic events that lie behind the contemporary history of the French Basque region. She engages directly with the issue of how ethnographic methodology and anthropological theory can come to inform archival work in the area of contemporary political history. The close and necessary link between history and anthropology, seminally explored by Evans-Pritchard (1961) in his essay on ‘Anthropology and History’, is demonstrated in the work of many social anthropologists of our generation – highlighting how the past shapes the present as well as how the present continually reshapes the past.

Why Anthropology? Beyond Postructuralism As concluding remarks, Part III brings together three chapters that present a broader view on the period in which the contributors to the volume developed their careers as academics. Tim Jenkins argues that anthropology has changed much less than one often thinks and that it has retained its essential strengths in the face of the other disciplines of the humanities. He provides us with a lucid account of the trajectory of the thought of his teacher, Edwin Ardener, identifying the way in which the latter’s early version of structuralism slowly moved to the poststructuralist stance that continues to constitute a valuable ground for the way in which we question our ethnographic evidence today. That perspective is grounded on the essential notion that anthropologists can only do ethnography because they are like their subjects in fundamental ways. Maryon McDonald engagingly describes her itinerary through the process of unmaking structuralism as it occurred in Oxford in the early 1980s, and sets out the theoretical discoveries she made in that

Introduction13

course. Her subsequent career through Cambridge, Brunel and back to Cambridge provides a fascinating intellectual history of the evolving British social anthropology milieu. Through her experience of fieldwork in EU institutions, McDonald was confirmed in her commitment to a blend of ethnography and epistemologically sophisticated anthropological analysis. The book ends with João Pina-Cabral’s discussion of his lifelong need to contend with a series of deeply equivocal attributions of Mediterraneanness elicited by his personal and familial history, by the people he studied in Portugal, by how Europe is constituted in its changing shapes, and most of all by how anthropologists are usually incapable or unwilling to go beyond the media-validated categories of geopolitical comparison, which are ethically suspect and analytically invalid. His engagement with the ambiguities of definition which have haunted his career take him from South Africa, through Oxford, and out into the wider British and European anthropological world. The chapter calls for an ecumenical anthropology (see Pina-Cabral 2017a) that responds to the politically relevant questions of the day, not by adopting politically constituted comparative categories but by questioning them both ethnographically and analytically, and by understanding the inherent multipolarity of the task of de-ethnocentrification that is ours (see Pitt-Rivers 1992).

Why Anthropology, Then? One answer to that question might be anthropology’s ability to investigate and demonstrate the complexities and genealogies of those commonsensical modes of classification that divide the world into essentialized antagonistic entities. The drive for de-objectification, which originally impelled Evans-Pritchard and his colleagues to query ‘society’, is a vital project today in a world in which another assault on ‘society’, that launched under the aegis of neoliberalism, has produced images of a world divided into carefully delineated and fundamentally incompatible ‘cultures’. Ethnographic practice and anthropological theory have variously demonstrated to us that these constructs are artifices behind which often lie dangerous political agendas meant to efface the awareness of our shared and common humanity. Mauss’s early engagement with the Dreyfusian events, and their ethical impact on his view of social sciences, remains with us to this day. Fortunately, there are many of us who still see the need to learn

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from this history: his seminal The Gift has recently been retranslated and the works of critical thinkers like De Martino, Needham, Pitt-Rivers and Van Gennep are once again being brought to light. Mauss’s heritage constitutes a constant humanist echo that must forever accompany the very notion of possibility of an anthropological practice. A concern with politically validated walls and the way they are both deeply unsubstantial and deeply violent (Bowman 2007) brings us together as editors of this volume. In the end, it is probably an apt symbol of the sort of poststructuralist critical legacy that, in one way or another, under the wing of one or another mentor, we all brought out of Oxford. João Pina-Cabral is Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Conservation of the University of Kent, and Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. He was co-founder and president of both the Portuguese Association of Anthropology and the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He has published extensively on matters related to kinship and the family, personhood, and ethnicity in postcolonial contexts. Glenn Bowman is Professor Emeritus in Sociohistorical Anthropology at the University of Kent. The mix of research classically deemed ‘humanities’ (in history, literature, philosophy and even theology) with that termed ‘social sciences’ (anthropology, politics) has marked his work, leading him in 2014 to set up the University of Kent’s new BA degree in Liberal Arts.

Notes   1. This is how Mauss qualified the essence of his thought in the inaugural lecture to his chair in the École des Hautes Études of Paris in 1902 (see Leenhardt, in Weber and Sembal 2019: 44), thus distancing himself from the positivist inspiration.  2. The unicity of the Durkheimian orthodoxy that Florence Weber so strongly defends from a Parisian perspective (see Weber and Sembel 2019: 1–42) never seemed quite so unitary when approached from a British angle. For example, Evans-Pritchard tells us of ‘an excellent lecture on Mauss delivered recently (1952) at Oxford by one of his former pupils, M. Louis Dumont’, where the later ‘pointed out that though Mauss, out of loyalty and affection, studiously avoided any criticism of Durkheim, such criticism is nevertheless implicit in his writings, which

Introduction15

 3.

 4.

 5.

 6.

are so much more empirical than Durkheim’s that it might be said that with Mauss sociology in France reached its experimental stage’ (EvansPritchard 1966: vii). E.g. Hertz (Needham) 1960; Durkheim and Mauss (Needham) 1963; Hubert and Mauss (W.C. Halls) 1964; Mauss (Cunnison) 1967; Cazeneuve on Lévy-Bruhl (Rivière) 1972; Mauss (Bain) 1972; LévyBruhl (Rivière) 1975; Mauss (Fox) 1979. Judging from the introductions to the volumes and to Needham’s own personal account, the latter’s exploration of a series of authors marginalized by the sociocentric orthodoxy was largely inspired by EvansPritchard – we have in mind a series of re-editions and analytical comments on the works of Hocart, Hertz, Van Gennep, Andrew Lang, Carl Nikolai Stracke and Charles Staniland Wake. We are grateful to Stephan Palmié for calling our attention to the impact of Polanyi’s philosophy of science on British anthropology in the 1950s (see also Gordon 2018: 362). At the end of a filmed interview that Alan MacFarlane has made available on his site – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi1xmCdc7XU. Last accessed 16 February 2020.

References Ardener, Edwin. 2006. The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays. Malcolm Chapman (ed.). Oxford: Berghahn Books. Benthall, Jonathan. 2007. ‘Oxford Anthropology since 1970: Through Schismogenesis to a New Testament’, in P. Rivière (ed.), A History of Oxford Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 155–70. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Price (trans). Cambridge: University Press. Bowman, Glenn. 2007. ‘Israel’s Wall and the Logic of Encystation: Sovereign Exception or Wild Sovereignty?’, Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology 50: 127–36. Casagrande, Joseph (ed.). 1960. In the Company of Man: Twenty Portraits of Anthropological Informants. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Caygill, Howard. 2002. Lévinas and the Political. London: Routledge. Cazeneuve, Jean. 1972. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. P. Rivière (trans). Oxford: Blackwell. Douglas, Mary. 1980. Evans-Pritchard: His Life, Work, Writings, and Ideas. New York: Viking Press. Durkheim, Emile. (1912) 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. J.W. Swain (trans.). London: Allen & Unwin.  . (1895) 1982. The Rules of the Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method. W.D. Halls (trans.), Steven Lukes (ed.). London: Macmillan.

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Durkheim, Emile, and Marcel Mauss. 1963. Primitive Classifications. R. Needham (trans.). London: Cohen & West. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1933. ‘The Intellectualist (English) Interpretation of Magic’, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts 1(2) (Farouk University, Cairo): 282–311.  . 1936. ‘Science and Sentiment: An Exposition and Criticism of the Writings of Pareto’. Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts 3(2) (Farouk University, Cairo): 163–92.  . 1950. ‘Social Anthropology: Past and Present, the Marett Lecture, 1950’, Man 50: 118–24.  . 1961. Anthropology and History. Manchester: University Press.  . 1966. ‘Introduction’, in The Gift. London: Cohen & West, pp. v–x.  . (1934) 1970. ‘Lévy-Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive Mentality’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 1(2): 39–60. Fardon, Richard, and Jeremy Adler (eds). 1999. Franz Baerman Steiner: Selected Writings, 2 vols. New York: Berghahn Books. Gordon, Robert J. 2018. The Enigma of Max Gluckman: The Ethnographic Life of a ‘Luckyman’ in Africa. London: University of Nebraska Press. Hertz, Robert. 1960. Death and the Right Hand. Rodney and Claire Needham (trans.). Aberdeen: Cohen & West. Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. (1898) 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. W.D. Halls (trans.). Chicago: The Chicago University Press. Ingold, Tim. 1991. ‘Becoming Persons: Consciousness and Sociality in Human Evolution’, Cultural Dynamics 4(3): 355–78. (ed). 1996. Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge. Keck, Frédéric. 2008. Lévy-Bruhl: Entre philosophie et anthropologie. Paris: Éditions CNRS. Leach, E.R. 1961. ‘Rethinking Anthropology’, in Rethinking Anthropology. London: Athlone Press, pp. 1–27. Lévi-Strauss, Cl. 1965. ‘The Future of Kinship Studies’, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1965: 13–22.  . 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer (trans.), Rodney Needham (ed.). Boston: Beacon Press. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. (1938–39) 1949. Carnets. Paris: PUF.  . (1910) 1951. Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris: PUF.  . (1934) 1952. ‘A letter to E.E. Evans-Pritchard’, British Journal of Sociology 3(2): 117–23.  . 1975. The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality. P. Rivière (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Ian Cunnison (trans.). London: Cohen & West.  . 1972. A General Theory of Magic. Robert Bain (trans). London: Routledge.

Introduction17

 . 1979. Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology. James J. Fox (trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.  . (1954) 1990. The Gift. W.D. Halls (trans.). London: Routledge. Mazower, Mark (ed.). 2008. Networks of Power in Modern Greece: Essays in Honor of John Campbell. New York: Hurst & Co. Needham, Rodney. 1967. A Bibliography of Arthur Maurice Hocart (1883– 1939). Oxford: Blackwell for the Institute of Social Anthropology.  . 1970. ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Arthur M. Hocart, Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society (1936). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. xiii–xcix.  . 1972. Belief, Language, and Experience. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twentieth-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pina-Cabral, João. 2011. ‘Ethnography as Tradition’, Etnográfica 15(2): 379–407.  . 2017a. ‘An Ecumenical Anthropology’, American Anthropologist 119(2): 342–43.  . 2017b. World: An Anthropological Examination. Chicago: Hau Books. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 1992. ‘The Personal Factors in Fieldwork’, in J. PinaCabral and J. Campbell (eds), Europe Observed. London: Macmillan/St Antony’s, pp. 133–47. Polanyi, Michael. 1952. ‘The Stability of Beliefs’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3(11): 217–32.  . 1959. The Study of Man. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses. E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Fred Eggan (eds). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Rivière, Peter. 2007. ‘Introduction’, in P. Rivière (ed.), A History of Oxford Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–20. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, E.P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. New York: The Monthly Review Press. Weber, Florence, and Nicolas Sembel. 2019. ‘Présentation. Une étape méconnue dans l’oeuvre de Mauss’ in Marcel Mauss, La prière, F. Weber and N. Sembel (eds). Paris: PUF Quadrige, pp. 1–42.

PART I

The Oxford Experience and Beyond

Chapter 1

PLODDING TOWARDS PROSOPOGRAPHY OXFORD ANTHROPOLOGY FROM 1976 ON Jeremy MacClancy

My aim is to introduce prosopography to the history of anthropology, by comparing the trajectories of two cohorts of taught anthropology postgraduates who started at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Oxford in the mid-1970s and the late 1980s. My objective is to see what this comparison tells us about any gap between these students’ initial hopes and their subsequent career paths. This should give us an at least reasonable idea of what effect, where relevant, the Thatcherite cuts of the 1980s had, or did not have, on the fulfilment of their aspirations. As far as I am aware, this is the first attempt to apply prosopography, even a rudimentary version, to a department of anthropology. *** Senior British anthropologists have already produced departmental histories (e.g. for Oxford, Rivière 2007; Benthall 2007). But these ‘top-down approaches’ tend to focus on administrative and bureaucratic concerns, and on departmental development within their particular university context. At the same time, overviews of UK anthropology have been grand surveys that lose value as they shed detail (e.g. Akeroyd, Grillo and Tapper 1980; Kappers 1983; Mills 2003). The benefits of statistics are clear: in particular, the easy generation of much information, ready for analysis. The resulting data appear precise, accurate and precategorized for productive

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comparison. To the quantitatively inclined, numbers seem less open to idiosyncratic interpretation than what one Economic and Social Research Council reviewer of a grant proposal of mine classed as ‘yet more woolly-minded, impressionistic ethnography’. Nevertheless, historians of UK anthropology are well aware that ‘statistics can be used to tell many a tale’ (Mills 2003: 19). Qualitative researchers have no monopoly on ‘woolly-mindedness’. If this is not quite Marx and Engel’s proclamation of ‘All that is solid melts into air’, it is at least a reminder that the seemingly solid may well provide less secure purchase than at first appears.1 In contrast to the ‘top-downers’, I strive to provide the worm’s point of view, as I was a student in 1976, and in 1988 spent more time with the students and fellow postdocs than with the staff. Unlike the statistically minded, I focus on individuals (within cohorts) and their lived experiences. Instead of predetermining my ethnographic categories, I scrutinize the events and attitudes that the people I interviewed chose themselves to rank as important. Throughout I concentrate on the students: the one exception is my brief account of what I term the Institute ‘Difficulties’, as this historically important conflict remains untold, so far. My method was to contact as many people as possible who had taken the one-year graduate crash-course offered by the Institute in 1976 (‘the Diploma’), and in 1988 (by then, a Master of Studies, or MSt). The year 1976 was during the time when the Institute was experiencing an Indian summer of activity before the years of decline, and it was when I took the diploma. The year 1988 was close to the nadir of the Institute’s fortunes, the last year for which it kept records of its MSt students, and the date of my return from extended postdoctoral fieldwork. I rely on multiple sources of information: interview scripts, my own memories, interviewees’ comments on drafts, university documents. I regard the resulting text as not academic autobiography (e.g. Worsley 2008), collective biography or intellectual genealogy, but as prosopographical in aim, as I strive to execute a comparative study of the career paths of two cohorts in contrastive periods. There were some limitations. First, in 2013 and 2017 I requested, from the Oxford University Archives, material on the university committee that assessed the management of the Institute in 1977, and on students’ planned complaints in 1979 about the supervisory practices of one particular don. Archival staff told me the complaints could not be found, and that committee minutes remained confidential since some of those involved were still alive. When I responded

Plodding towards Prosopography23

that a key participant in those events would by now be over 110, I was told to provide a copy of her death certificate, and that if I filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to see committee documents, I would be shown only heavily redacted versions. In April 2019, I filed an FOI request to the Oxford University Compliance Team. Five months later, after a protracted series of email exchanges, phone calls and apologies, I was emailed a 116page e-sheaf of relevant documents. Figure 1.1 gives an idea of how heavily redacted some pages are.

Figure 1.1. Statement by the Anthropology and Geography Board, Oxford University, about the proposals of the ad hoc committee, 10 January 1978 (Oxford University Archive, UR 6/ANT/1, file 4). Published with permission.

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I then asked four former Institute students of that time and one then active member of its staff to assess my reading of the documents. All were polite but said they had either been away on fieldwork at that time, or had been marginal to the Difficulties: ‘Sorry, Jeremy – these events were always a bit of a mystery to me’; ‘Crikey!’ (Anon A, B). Perhaps the most revealing responses were: from a then student, ‘All very interesting in retrospect but no doubt really painful for some’ (Anon A); from a former member of staff, ‘That’s a period we’d all like to forget’. Sangren portrays university-based anthropologists as highly resistant to investigation of disciplinary knowledge practices: ‘etiquette’, he states, is a key mode of ‘systemic defence’ (Sangren 2007: 15).2 His argument has weight; for example, the fact I have to use ‘Anon’ for the quotes above from former students. But I was still surprised that former staff and maybe at least one student were not very forthcoming when I asked about the Difficulties, ‘really painful’ though it might be; for, of course, there are manners of writing up painful episodes that are not painful in themselves. Yet, if anthropologists have been prepared to state how they have manipulated interlocutors to impart information they were reluctant to give (e.g. Metcalf 1982; Gell 1993), surely it behoves us, as members of an academic anthropological community upholding contemporary versions of research ethics protocols, to expect and accept potentially awkward questions posed by analysers of our own disciplinary behaviour? If we are engaged in producing critical ethnography of people’s predicaments, what worth an account that avoids the unpleasant? In 1984, Leach confessed in a piece on the history of British social anthropology that he could not be too open about his peers; they would have found his comments too offensive (Leach 1984). I have no wish to be gratuitously hurtful, but nor do I wish to avoid discussing a historically important process. Otherwise we self-cramp our understanding of the history of our own discipline. Thus, while relating events as fully as possible, I avoid personal detail about any of the surviving, and make no comments about the social background of any member of the teaching staff. But it is already very well known that the world-class academies of Oxford have long acted, and continue to act, as vehicles of social mobility for both students and staff. I wish to be non-sexist without committing grammatical infelicities, so use ‘she’ and ‘her’ as gender non-specific pronouns for the pseudonymized. In the first pair of sub-sections, I give a flavour of the teaching environment, characterize the cohorts and place them in their starkly

Plodding towards Prosopography25

different historical contexts. Next, I analyse and compare the aims and achievements of students from both cohorts. I then proceed to evaluate the grand surveys in the light of my analysis; and finally edge towards a conclusion.

51 Banbury Road, 1976 A dank mid-October Monday, 11 am: like new pupils at the school gates, we await the recently appointed professor. At least one of us, transformed by the closing chapters of his Belief, Language and Experience, is expecting a brilliant but eccentric man, with a slightly distracted air and wispy, long grey hair. A man with deliquescent eyes, roundish face, dark blue pork-pie hat and mac to match, turns up. He wears a suit, has a military bearing, short combed hair, and clipped vowels. Rodney Needham introduces himself, and Oxford ways, to us. Diploma graduates quickly teach us that life in the department is not calm. The nature and substance of these tensions are easy to caricature, more difficult to specify. Being exact here is tricky. Some, among both staff and students, object to Needham’s style. He is energetically promoting his vision of the Institute as a lively concourse of anthropological debate. Some take his energy as directiveness, and shy away. Uninterested in the analysis of power, he would later acknowledge that he was not the most skilled at deploying it (MacClancy 2006). In departmental seminars he chaired, his rapier-like ability to openly put down the arguments of some of his colleagues did not win him friends. The leader of the alternative appears to be Edwin Ardener. A short man with a Guy Fawkes moustache, he is reputed to be brilliant but his conversation, which may tend to the obscure and to recondite reference, can be hard to follow. As one of our cohort, a student of Ardener’s put it, ‘I had the greatest difficulty understanding any sentence he uttered, but somehow the effort was rewarded in unmeasurable ways’ (Taylor 2004: 21). Ardener’s relations with Needham are so bad that the former holds his own seminars away from the Institute, in his own college. Attendance, it seems, is by invitation. Some underline the intellectual differences between these two. Needham’s research develops neo-Lévi-Straussian themes: analyses of kinship and empirically oriented comparison about cognitive structure. Ardener has taken what would now be called a poststructuralist turn, and opened up new kinds of field sites in rural Western

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Europe. Politics here melds with anthropology, for Ardener’s most active students see themselves as an intellectual vanguard, assessing critically whatever new approaches they hear of, and wish to be seen as associated with the left. By contrast, Needham’s frequent self-enclosure within neo-structuralist confines is made to appear conservative, though he himself regards his projects as radical. The division between Needham and Ardener can make for a tidy story, but it is easy to exaggerate their differences, for both may be regarded as critical inheritors of structuralism, given their common, heightened concern with language and with classification. Both revered Mauss and the Année Sociologique. Both liked to scrutinize critically key cross-cultural concepts: ‘belief ’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘kinship’, ‘remote areas’ (Benthall 2007: 158). Also, Ardener was ready to praise Needham’s earlier work in print (Ardener 1971: 451, 454–55). Yet Needham and Ardener are but two of a department staffed, it emerges, by a rainbow-like range of different, clear-cut personalities. The sharpness of their profile is matched by that of several veteran students and an array of Institute graduates, who would visit from time to time: colourful characters, some with famed surnames from the financial elite or the intellectual aristocracy. The most distinctive personality of all, however, is the librarian, June Anderson, whose office is directly opposite the main door of the building. This allows her to command the entry and exit of all at the Institute. She doubles her control by confining the most popular books to her room. Needy diploma students are thus obliged to pay her obeisance. As she once replied to me, with her high-pitched voice and striking make-up, ‘I’ve only two copies of Nadel’s Theory of Social Structure, and you can’t have either!’ My point is that, to us fledglings, she seems of a piece with the place. Diploma graduates also teach us that, to a significant degree, the department’s great history is history; that it is trading on its fading glory, rather than living up to its legacy. Some members of the Institute staff would repeat the observation that its present circumstances were a consequence of the policy of Evans-Pritchard (E-P as he was called) of not selecting a dauphin from the former students he had appointed to his department. Instead he had created a court of competing aspirants or jostling pretenders to his post. Some argued that this competition had generated an unhealthy level of internal division, as well as premature departures for promotion elsewhere, and was a direct cause of the Institute’s predicament. It could be counter-argued that E-P’s supposed strategy was in fact highly productive, stimulating debate and advancing theoretical discussions,

Plodding towards Prosopography27

albeit at the cost of personal relations between some protagonists. A colleague, who had experience of both Oxbridge departments, said the domineering style of Jack Goody lent a very different ambience to Cambridge anthropology, but not a more likeable one. There are benefits to divisiveness. This academic tale of intellectual ferment amidst dispute could take unattractive, even miserable turns. Two examples (I could include more): the in-house Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO), which was viewed by many as Ardenerian in style, included one paper by a student whose opening pages were a sustained, though indirect attack on Needham; a student of Needham’s wrote a rejoinder, but the JASO editors refused to carry it in the following issue, one of them telling me it was ‘too personal’. The denouement came that summer, when several members of the Institute made a formal complaint about Needham’s behaviour. He immediately packed his books and left for his college, All Souls. He never returned. This unsettled period of the Institute should not be seen as exceptional within the history of Oxford. The collegiate structure of the university has long led to a near-obsessional focus on teaching its undergraduates at the expense of its postgraduates, who are, after all, a very twentieth-century population within British academe. That historically grounded pedagogical bias, plus Oxford’s entrenched, institutional lack of governance, meant that graduate departments could survive with remarkably little oversight of their management. Even within that context, it is still important to underline how much of an outlier the Institute was within the university. There had been two bids to establish an undergraduate programme in anthropology, one in the late nineteenth century, another by E-P in the 1950s: both were unsuccessful. To an important extent, the Institute was financially viable thanks to the postgraduate training programmes it ran for colonial officers, which continued well into the 1960s. But the Institute staff only held university appointments; as they did not tutor undergraduates they were not made tutorial fellows of traditional colleges, and their salaries were thus considerably lower. This financial disadvantaging created some bitterness and increased the sense of distance from the rest of the university that some members of the Institute staff felt. This impression of relative isolation was compounded by the repeated physical moves the Institute had to make: from an underground section of the Bodleian to, successively, Mansfield Road, South Parks Road, Keble Road and then Banbury Road. It was as though the university did not know what to do with its anthropologists, but shifted them around whenever it suited.3 This

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qualified insulation of the Institute is also manifest by the then lack of contact between its staff and other anthropologists in the university. For instance, there was surprisingly little collaboration, of whatever kind, between the Institute anthropologists and Clyde Mitchell, fellow of Nuffield College, Kenneth Kirkwood, Rhodes professor of race relations, and John Campbell, fellow of St Anthony’s. One former member of staff recently told me he had not even known that Mitchell was in Oxford until several years after his arrival.

The View from the Proctors’ Office The redacted documents give an overlapping but different picture of those times. Instead of students’ perceptions, they provide some detail about several manifestations of the underlying dispute, and informed opinions from academics outside the Institute about the goings-on there. In March 1977 the proctors, who oversee university management and ensure the statues are upheld, commented on ‘a general feeling of confusion’ at the Institute, and the ‘collective unhappiness’ of its ‘non-professorial members’. Needham’s ‘temperamental incompatibility’ with the Institute administrator was one focus for this abreaction, with Needham not seeing ‘why the administrator should get her way … by displays of emotion’. Those opposed to Needham had further worries. They were concerned he was trying to let lapse the lectureship of Peter Lienhardt, brother of Godfrey, to be replaced by one in Mediterranean studies, with John Campbell as its first incumbent. They were also worried that Needham wished to control the future direction of Oxford anthropology by exercising his authority to select which students would be recommended for Social Science Research Council (SSRC) studentships (at that time, the Institute enjoyed six or seven of these government-funded grants a year). Further, they opposed Needham’s wish that the Institute assistant become a research assistant for the professor (i.e. himself). On top of that, it seems he could also be domineering over new Institute appointees. When Ardener voiced concern about Needham’s query over certain members’ teaching hours, the proctorial comment was, ‘This may be another area in which Professor Needham is going to cause us trouble’.4 Kenneth Kirkwood, then chair of the Faculty Board of Anthropology and Geography, and several members of the Institute made repeated representations to the proctors. For example, on 12 July 1977 several said they were

Plodding towards Prosopography29

outraged that a professor could behave as they hold Professor Needham has and there be no way of redressing the injustice or preventing further harm … They feared that if all attempts to right matters were frustrated, some of the students might carry out a threat to take some of the professor’s letters to the press.

On 4 August matters came to a head, but not an end. The senior proctor wrote to Needham that a ‘number of lecturers in the Institute’ had made a formal complaint ‘against you concerning your conduct (there) over the past year’. The same day Needham, who had long complained about his lack of time for research, responded: ‘I therefore readily accept, with immense relief, the consequences that according to the Statues and decrees I am not responsible for the Institute’. In the following months, the opposed continued to jostle for position. On 1 December, Needham complained about Ardener’s ‘officious’ interventions in the ‘delicate negotiations’ of securing a college fellowship for a recent appointee. On 10 January 1978, some members of the ad hoc committee overseeing the transition to a committee of management for the Institute were ‘resistant’ to the idea that the professor should be an ex-officio member; the proctors disagreed. Ten days later Kirkwood, who chaired the committee, reported that Ardener was ‘impatient’ and wished the new body to endorse summarily the plans Ardener and his colleagues had already formulated. On 24 January, Kirkwood complained that the committee, which in his opinion was too weighted against Needham, had excluded him from a meeting by holding it before the agreed date. In a bid to overcome what the senior proctor termed the ‘bickering’ over the Institute, Kirkwood, who was from South Africa, tried to play the role of conciliatory intermediary: There can be no doubt that the international status of social anthropology at Oxford at present owes a very great deal to Needham, and that teaching and research at advanced level will be impoverished if his special contributions are not encouraged and provided for. Many outstanding students come to Oxford to work with him, … and many of the best … apply to transfer to him for his meticulous, exacting teaching at the highest level … Many of his astringent obiter dicta in his letters have been unnecessary, and offensive, but there have also been a great many nuggets and large grains of gold in the rich paydirt of his voluminous correspondence and memoranda. Yesterday’s meeting of the Applications Committee provided many constructive examples, and I fear that some at least of his strictures were well founded and indicated what might happen if his ‘input’ is not available. (Kirkwood to Senior Proctor, 24 January 1978, Proctors’ Annuals, Vol. 9, orig. emphasis)

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Battle lines were drawn but unstable. For example, although Godfrey Lienhardt was adamant that reconciliation was not possible, in early December 1977 he did side with Needham in arguing against support for students whose research proposals ‘were an unacceptable departure from Oxford social anthropology’. Two weeks later it was reported that Needham had again highlighted ‘the danger of a large proportion of SSRC awards going to students of whose subjects he did not approve’. In other words, the disputes within the Institute could be as much ideological, about the future shape of the discipline, as administrative, about who controlled what or whom.

Institute Life beyond the Difficulties It is tempting to overstate the internal divisions of those days – after all, it makes for a more lively story. In fact many students observed the tumult with a distanced eye and the odd ironic comment. Most of them got on with their work, and the more long-sighted with the early development of their careers. Those students who did get involved in the division tended to be British. Some students, to their displeasure, found they were involuntarily given places within this dispute: at least one of Needham’s students did not take well to the suggestion that she was automatically an uncritical supporter both of the man and his ideas. This dispute lent edge to student group discussions about theory, which could act as indirect commentaries on Ardener and Needham. As many participants recognized at the time, these informal student-run seminars were especially important, as the lecture courses were relatively uncoordinated: occasionally brilliant, but usually patchy rather than systematic. Only two years before, Godfrey Lienhardt had openly repeated in print E-P’s old boast that, come the beginning of each term, he did not know what lectures his staff were going to give (Lienhardt 1974: 302). Weekly tutorials were our core learning opportunity. But even here little was taught directly. This appears to have been long established: according to Lienhardt, E-P made the Institute a centre more for learning than teaching, for ‘his pupils were not very conscious of being tutored’ (ibid.: 301; also Shankland and Stirling 1999). Students of previous Institute generations have corroborated this point to me. Needham followed suit: the essays he set us were oriented towards topics, not theories. We had to learn to assess modes of explanation for ourselves.

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This indirect style of teaching was buttressed by alcohol: a major means of picking up anthropological knowledge and forms of argument was drinking with the staff in local pubs. In particular, Lienhardt was famed for what was termed his ‘ongoing symposium’ in a pub close to the Institute. Anyone was welcome to his table, which also served to connect students with one another. Indeed, several students and members of staff regarded Lienhardt, who held a personal readership, as the centre of the Institute, to the extent that there was one. For them, the Difficulties were a sideshow. Whether in tutorials, student-run seminars, or pub backrooms, we were, in sum, being socialized into an Oxford-centred vision of the discipline in which commentary on the past greats (RadcliffeBrown’s meanness, E-P’s quirks) was leavened with gentle but sharp-eyed evaluation of anthropological points of view. It was like being invited to join an exclusive club: if you could not work out its rules of entry for yourself, you were not fit for membership. A few members of staff exploited this privileged ambience by indulging in irresponsible behaviour, which at times went beyond benign neglect, and would not, today, be tolerated. This gentlemanly culture of leaving students alone suited some incomers. One Oxford graduate on the diploma, now a professor, judged the Institute ‘a bit chaotic’: ‘Apart from the weekly tutorial, it all seemed pretty unstructured’. Another Oxford graduate in the same 1976 cohort regarded the mode of teaching at the Institute as of a piece with pedagogy at the university in general: lectures took ‘second place to tutorials’ and ‘students were there to learn, under guidance, yes, but very much under their own steam and at least partly on their own initiative’. He found this approach ‘liberating and life-enhancing’ (Parkin n.d.) Some felt very differently. Over the years several of my British and American friends from different diploma years, some now distinguished scholars, have spontaneously complained to me, with vehemence, about the lack of direction in the formal teaching they received. One freethinker of the 1976 cohort praised the emancipatory potential of the ethnographic challenge to mundane Western reality, but criticized his tutor (Ardener) for the restrictive range of his tutorial topics: critical analysis of great theorists whom, it was hoped, the most gifted students, if carefully coached, might come to emulate (Taylor 2004: 21). One non-European student recalls her time at the Institute in a slightly different manner:

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In [my country] we were used to an American-style lecture, and a credit-based system. At first it was rather difficult to adjust to the tutorial system in which you meet mostly one particular scholar. It was hard, especially for a non-native speaker, to get information regarding the overall trends of the discipline … It was only after some years that I gradually got used to the independent research system.

In 1977, when a recent appointee to the Institute and her spouse listened to a diploma student criticizing the haphazard teaching, their reaction was laughter: ‘It was the same in our day here!’ In other words, for better or for worse, students were in effect being forced to teach one another more than being taught by the dons. Freshly appointed lecturers accepted that as the status quo; as one revealed to an administrator in 1988, ‘I don’t rock the boat’. The cumulative effect, on me, of this particular style of teaching in a divided but very lively department was that 1976 was the most intellectually exciting year of my student times. A now very well-established curator, and member of my age-set, remembers similarly: [The training at the Institute was] spectacular. My own philosophical interests were indulged. The faculty included towering, inspiring figures (some rather frightening), and the place was open to what was happening elsewhere in Europe and America. Since Oxford I have never found such methodological openness … No other university has given me the deep intellectual conversations we had at Oxford. Openness to other disciplines; the importance of literature, film and music. It was exhilarating.

51 Banbury Road, 1988 Twelve years later, the ambience at the Institute was very different. Peter Lienhardt had died in 1986, Ardener in 1987; Needham was still holed up in All Souls; and Godfrey Lienhardt had long retired to the local pub. In the early 1980s, the government had offered New Blood Lectureships in new subfields of anthropology (e.g. visual, digital, and of Britain) – the Institute had failed to gain any. The Hebdomadal Council of Oxford (the chief executive board of the university) had suddenly increased the number of years necessary to complete a doctorate, while the government both jacked up the fees for overseas students and reduced the number of Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studentships by at least half, permanently. Between 1979 and 1981 the diploma intake shrank from seventeen to eight, and it remained worryingly close to single figures

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until 1987. In 1988 the number of incomers was still only fourteen. The research student cohort had declined similarly. In telling contrast, numbers on the renamed Masters in Museum Ethnography were rising prodigiously; this was the first sign of the Pitt-Rivers’ renaissance, which continues today. Rivière gives the staff view of the Institute for the professorial interregnum of 1977 to 1990 (the year Needham retired, to be replaced a year later by John Davis): ‘the Institute operated well, both administratively and socially’ (Rivière 2007: 19, n.18). One 1988 student, not from Europe, concurred: ‘The Institute was fantastic, I enjoyed the various classes and teachers. It was an amazing place for learning and meeting people from all over the world’. Others, both staff and students, thought differently. Because there was no professor, no one, not even the chair of the management committee (a three-year term of office, held in rotation), pushed the Institute in any particular direction, whether intellectual or pedagogical. Members of staff, then under no obligation to form into teams or research groupings, regarded themselves as individual researchers. Others saw this lack of leadership and coordination as stasis. In 1989 a recent appointee told me she thought the Institute was like an old tree: moribund at the core but with a few young shoots protruding from its outer bark. (I told her not to flatter me.) The then Institute secretary was more pungent in her assessment: ‘What this place needs is not a breath of fresh air, but a gale’. Students of the 1988 cohort could be as damning as this pair. In the words of one, not from Europe: It became apparent to me early on that the Institute was dying, falling behind the curve. I learned nothing, for instance, of the superb and imaginative work being done in [the] ethnohistory and history of [her regional interest], of great importance for anthropology. I am grateful to have had the chance to meet and know Rodney Needham, a solitary figure who was trying to engage with wider concerns and other disciplines.

One American had come because her undergraduate college tutor, a product of the Institute, convinced me it would be worthwhile because Needham was still there, but also cautioned it was a place greatly degraded … [The Institute was] a tired old place full of wonderful history, but now focused only on itself and little else … That most readings … tended to end by the early 1970s was a constant reminder of how uncurious, unengaged and unambitious many of the tutors were. Coming out of the US educational system where professors take an interest in their

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students’ ideas and careers, … I was struck by how little the tutors were interested in the students or [in] helping them to forge a path into academic anthropology. This was particularly felt by the international students who, the Institute made clear, were viewed as cash income and not [as] an investment for the future.

Perhaps the most balanced comment came from an East Asian student, who also had some experience of other leading UK departments of anthropology. At the end of each tutorial, she was filled with feelings of relief and anxiety … Yet, thinking back, weekly tutorials were the best methods I could ever expect. [My tutor’s] selection of literature was excellent. Towards the end of my second year, however, I asked to add a few more ‘up-to-date’ topics to my liking, such as gender and urban anthropology, because his repertoire tended to be more classical … [The Institute] at that time was far from thriving, because it still had organizational problems and students were rather isolated, at least in my impression. I think the overall atmosphere at Cambridge or LSE was far better, at least on the surface. Nevertheless, I do believe I obtained a very fine training at the Institute and I appreciate it. I loved being around there, got friends with the Institute’s secretary, and still maintain contact with a few good friends from that time.

Jobs In a 1976 class, Rivière told us, ‘Everyone gets a job, in the end’. Several British students in our cohort, including myself, were already regarding anthropology as a viable and attractive career option. We were concerned but not put off by the fact that the drawbridge was being raised behind us. The number of ESRC studentships available was set to decline; there would be fewer openings in UK departments of anthropology. In 1983, while finishing our doctorates, we knew that Rivière, speaking at the ASA Decennial conference that year, had calculated there would be about thirty jobs in British anthropology over the next decade; we also learnt that his carefully derived predictions were so gloomy that they depressed further discussion at the gathering (Rivière 1984: 13; also Akeroyd, Grillo and Tapper 1980). Yet, as far as I could judge, that coming shrinkage did not seem to discourage any of my academically inclined British peers. I have tried to track the career of everyone who joined the diploma class in 1976, and almost succeeded. Of the twenty-one who enrolled that year, several had no intention of proceeding much further. One

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was keeping herself active and fulfilling an interest, while her spouse was spending a sabbatical year in Oxford; another was a psychiatrist with a passing interest in the subject; a third was an engineer taking a year’s break from the mathematical rigours of her profession; a fourth, an American, came for two years, got her BLitt, then went home; a fifth was a rugby international, spending a year playing for the varsity team; and a sixth, dazzled by alternative systems of perception and taken by poetic approaches to the interpretation of cultures, such as Castañeda’s, became a well-known environmental activist, of mystical disposition (Taylor 2004). Another I have failed to trace. Some were discouraged from proceeding further than a BLitt: a former publisher in her late thirties was told that she was too old to consider an academic career (she returned to the book trade); another said to me she had given up her thesis because her supervisor (Ardener) was so slack in reading her drafts; a third turned her hand to a succession of occupations – IT, reliability engineering, defence, stock trading – before settling in advertising: ‘a ton of fun’. The remaining eleven were more committed to academically furthering themselves. Four are American, and are now tenured academics – two of them full professors. One of the eleven is Asian, and is now a full professor in her home country. Six Britons held ESRC studentships: one used hers to further her career in TV anthropology, which she did very successfully before moving into popular science programmes. Another fieldworked in Melanesia, got her doctorate, and then became an Anglican priest. The four others (which include me) became tenured academics, although one of them returned to her first discipline, human geography, immediately after the diploma, because funding was available. In sum, out of a group of nine with dedicated academic interests, all managed to get jobs, eventually. The key is ‘eventually’ – or, as Rivière had said, ‘In the end’. Some of us got jobs remarkably quickly; others took much, much longer. One American, who moved to Cambridge for her second year in the UK, got a tenure-track position at Harvard a year before finishing her doctorate. Another American, within a year of finishing her doctorate, got a job at the same New England liberal arts college where her spouse was already employed (in a different department); in the 1990s, she fulfilled a long-held dream by returning to UK academia, and she is now a full professor in a leading department. A third American moved to Paris for the sake of supervisory expertise, and got a permanent job there. Of the three Britons who went on to become academic anthropologists, one took two years after her doctorate before she gained a postdoc fellowship in Japan, where she

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remained until her premature death, receiving the title of ‘professor’ in her last year. Another had a series of postdoc positions on the Continent; it took her more than two decades after gaining her doctorate to secure a permanent position at a major UK university. As for myself, it took me two years after my doctorate before being granted a three-year ESRC postdoc fellowship to work in a new fieldsite. It was a further seven years and a series of temporary contracts until I gained a permanent position; I was made professor within six years of being employed full-time. It seems this tendency for Institute graduates to wait, albeit industriously, for a job was recognized, indeed stereotyped, elsewhere. In the late 1980s, when I phoned a then non-prestigious department within London University about a one-year post, the professor who answered was polite at first, but then commented caustically, ‘Oh! You’re not one of those absurd Oxford types who hang around forever, are you?’ Several of us, as fresh postdocs, gave hourly-paid tutorials to gain teaching experience and a little income. Oxford academics, not just in anthropology, argued to me at the time that the university’s dependence on graduate tutors was both widespread and very long standing: Oxford would not have survived without it. My point here is that even if this academic economy of precarity was not a distinctively modern phenomenon, it was particularly acute in the years it affected my cohort. Two students in the 1976 cohort came to study for the BLitt (now entitled MLitt), being graduates of anthropology who had already chosen an academic career path. The Canadian of the two gained a job shortly after gaining her doctorate; the Briton took a number of postdoc positions, both in the UK and abroad, before securing a fulltime museum position. Both are now full professors in Canada, and well-established scholars. If we compare these four American and four British students, all the Americans bar one readily found relatively secure employment. Those three Americans all obtained full-time teaching positions on multi-year contracts, before finishing their doctorate or within a year of doing so. All of those jobs were in the USA. By contrast, all four of the Britons had to wait years before gaining a permanent position. Each of us chose to endure straitened circumstances, or a state close to that, for a sustained period in order to find the academic security they desired. As I stated in the introduction to my first ethnography: Much of the manuscript was written while I gave hourly paid classes in six different departments in three universities. On two occasions

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during this difficult period, when I thought I might sink, my parents threw me a financial lifeline. I am deeply grateful for their unsolicited generosity, and well aware of my privilege. (MacClancy 2000: xix)

All four of us were on the dole for extended periods, while writing up our doctorates and surviving our first postdoctoral years. Both the aspirant curator, who gained a postdoctoral position in America, and her peer, who went to the Continent, endured near-penury at times, the latter for one two-year period by surviving on money she had saved while on a one-year teaching contract. In our dedication to remain as anthropologists, it seems we were not alone. When the Institute advertised a Demonstratorship in 1988, one member of the interview panel expressed to me their surprise, on looking through the CVs of the applicants: ‘You wouldn’t believe how many people out there are just managing to hang on in there. They just don’t want to give up’. None of my diploma cohort cut an activist path, except for the environmentalist. Of the two who took the Pitt-Rivers Diploma in Ethnology that year, one had failed the course the previous year, retook it, but then became a cookery writer; the other one fieldworked among the Yanomami, worked postdoc for Survival International, and after six years with them, left to establish her own indigenous rights organization. The Forest Peoples Foundation is now considerably larger than SI, and she the holder of an honorary doctorate. Of the fourteen who joined the 1988 Masters course, I have been able to contact or have learnt of twelve. Three students were British women, the rest from beyond Europe. Three of the latter each did a two-year stint of Oxford anthropology and then either returned home and/or to their original profession (medicine, journalism). Of the other eight, two became and have remained full-time academics in their home countries, one as an anthropologist, the other as a professor of educational planning. One member of this cohort returned to the American museum she had previously worked in but, like other curators there, had to raise her own salary, while holding down an adjunct teaching position at a nearby university. Another chose to raise her children rather than enter full-time academia; she is now a freelance researcher and co-founder of an NGO assisting the people of the area she studied for her doctorate. Yet another, a Jesuit, taught in a home university, then left academia and the Church; he is now married and a social activist in his own country. A further member of this cohort fieldworked in Africa, then worked as a consultant for the World Bank, and is today employed as an anthropologist, at the Asian Development Bank.

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The three Britons in this group all held ESRC studentships and all became full-time academics. All three quickly got positions, either in the last year of their doctorates or immediately afterwards. To my knowledge, only one of this trio has ever been unemployed, and that for a brief period. Two are now professors at Russell Group universities, and the third is a well-established scholar who has held visiting professorships in Continental universities. Of the professorial pair, one got a contract position in the UK two years before submitting her thesis, then obtained tenure in Australia; seven years later, she came home for a job at the leading university of her natal city. The other, after submitting her thesis, gained a one-year postdoc, during which she turned her thesis into a book; she then applied for positions in sociology, and went on to obtain a series of posts of increasing seniority at evermore prestigious universities. The third one of this trio had to spend half a year on the dole after her ESRC studentship ended, in order to complete her thesis. It took her six years between her viva and her first full-time post, and she felt she only got that by stepping sideways into tourism and planning: I think if I’d stayed in anthropology it would have been ten years more, as I managed to get some interviews in the late 1990s in anthropology departments, when I was informed that I was lucky to get an interview as all the other candidates were ten years older than me.

In other words, two of this trio got full-time jobs by moving sideways, out of anthropology into allied disciplines; the third got tenure by moving to the country where she had done her fieldwork.

1976, 1988: Criss-Crossing the Classes What does comparison of these two cohorts, separated by a dozen years, suggest? A variety of things, which I shall try to connect. First, there seems to be more career awareness among the British in the 1988 cohort. I and other British members of the 1976 group appear to have been among the last cohorts to have still believed in the near inevitability of us getting academic jobs, despite growing evidence to the contrary. All of us wanted jobs but were, on reflection, either naive about how to be offered a post, or else arrogantly resistant to the new criteria for getting one. When in the late 1980s I applied for a post at a Russell Group university, I was offended at having to provide a statement of ideological persuasion. I wrote what I considered to be a clever but very tongue-in-cheek piece which, I

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hoped, displayed both my intelligence and my mockery of the need for such statements. Even though Needham told me he had written a particularly glowing reference, I was not shortlisted for interview. Another member of this cohort, when she belatedly failed to get her doctorate accepted by a publisher, was told by an older colleague to start publishing as much as possible. She spent the next two years doing exactly that, producing an extraordinary number of papers, albeit of variable quality, in a diverse range of journals, from the very well known to the less prestigious. I suspect this initial resistance to accommodating the new criteria was among the last gasps of an old-style academic culture in the UK, which had particularly flourished in the fifties and sixties, especially in Oxbridge, sometimes now referred to as ‘the golden age of British academia’. I refer to a class-grounded facade of cultural eminence, where many did not feel obliged to conceal their patent sense of privilege. And for the most talented or most pretentious, the style was to be one of effortless superiority, as though their claimed intellectual distinction were not the result of secret hours in the library, but the logical consequence of one’s genes and upbringing – in a phrase, one’s class-blessed birthright. My impression is that the student unrest of the mid to late 1960s, based on emulation of their American counterparts, modified and masked but did not fundamentally alter such mannerisms. These remarks apply directly to British social anthropology, whose class-biased membership was perceived by its own practitioners and by colleagues in allied disciplines. I think it revealing that in 1977 the London events weekly Time Out could carry, in its ‘Lonely Hearts’ columns, adverts beginning ‘Oxford graduate of social anthropology seeks …’ Such classifieds were almost unimaginable in the late 1980s, as the discipline had lost so much of its extramural prestige by then. Structuralism was no longer trendy. From the late 1970s on, Thatcherism and its subsequent derivatives imposed a series of new criteria on academic performance. Her politicians and disciples profoundly changed university culture by introducing increasingly burdensome measures, which progressively reduced the autonomy of academics. This cumulative process continues today. Freedoms achieved by tenured scholars a century previous were successively lost, as a much-praised tradition of productive freethinking slowly gave way to a constricting sense of academics being little more than highly monitored public servants labouring in the higher education industry. In this emerging context of intellectual and financial constraints, where a narrow-minded pragmatism was becoming the order of the day, doctoral students keen for a job

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could no longer presume their virtues spoke for themselves, but had to learn how to present themselves in a self-promoting manner in an evermore competitive market. Little wonder, then, it took some of us in the 1976 class so long to get permanent jobs, compared to our equals twelve years later. In the intense socializing between staff and students, which still characterized Institute life into the 1980s, we were informally taught the value placed on resourcefulness. The example was held up to us of the penniless ex-Commando who had hitched a berth to Scandinavia, where he funded his fieldwork by herding for the Saami, and then went on to a glorious career (Cohen 2010). We also knew of a student who had returned precipitately from her fieldsite for psychological reasons; her supervisor did not support her later application for money to get back there. Not surprising then, that the one of our coevals who did come back for a few weeks because of a local love affair gone wrong did not mention this home trip for years. This expectation of field-based resourcefulness dovetails with the independence of thought that our distanced Institute training was meant to inculcate. Whether intended or not, this expected style of self-help very likely enabled some to withstand the years before they got a permanent job. Stamina was esteemed. The emphasis on self-education was pervasive, enduring, across the years covered here. We were repeatedly told that E-P openly scoffed at the idea of classes in fieldwork; ‘careers advice’ was a concept never mentioned in our time. What our years at the Institute did provide, however, no matter the date we started, was the opportunity to make friends with fellow students, which would later turn, unwittingly or not, into the rudiments of our individual anthropological networks. As a personal example, one day in 1988, while a postdoc fellow, I was in the Institute office when the phone rang. It was a friend, several years senior to me, now in a well-regarded department in the north of England. He said he was looking to appoint for a one-year teaching position, and immediately offered me the job. The size and reputation of the department is crucial here: the larger and more renowned it is, the greater the chance of building a broad and powerful network – and that web, of course, includes the staff. Shortly after getting my doctorate, I dropped by the room of one member, who was putting down the phone as I entered: ‘Ah Jeremy. I was just talking to an old student of mine. Like to teach in Minnesota for a year?’ Cross-cohort comparison also exposes the continuing importance of fieldwork as a qualification. My coeval compatriot who went to the

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Continent did not get even a short-term teaching contract at a British university until 1998, a whole twenty-two years after starting out in anthropology. She strongly suspects she had had no luck until then because she had not done any major fieldwork (for medical reasons during her doctorate), and that she had only managed to get a job in 1998 because the year previous she had actually spent a few, sparse months doing funded fieldwork in India. The story is the same, but even more extreme, for one mature member of the 1988 cohort. She chose to write her thesis on the history of anthropology. After applying for two hundred positions but not being interviewed once, she became a freelance writer and an hourly-paid lecturer in pre-university anthropology. Four years later she started work as an anthropologist at a software company in her native Canada. But the company soon went bankrupt; her subsequent consultancy did not prosper, so she went back to her first profession: gambling. She dealt blackjack at a casino, and rose to manage the poker room. At the same time, she taught courses in anthropology and business at two local universities. Within five years, she was teaching ‘anywhere from ten to fourteen courses a year, which brought in enough to quit the casino’. In 2010, after nine years as a sessional instructor, one university converted her post into a permanent tenure-track position: ‘I will probably get tenure when I am ready to retire. I’m still trying to convert my thesis into a book and am in the process of writing a text on business anthropology’. For any budding anthropologist, the moral is clear: if you want a job, even eventually, make sure you do some fieldwork first, if only for a token stretch. Scrutiny of the 1976 cohort shows how anthropology was still attracting people interested in the subject but with no particular inclination to turn that interest into a lifelong academic commitment. These fellow travellers, to give them a term, are precisely the people who are not included in the career statistics compiled by analysts. To say they have ‘drifted away from the subject’ (Rivière 1984) is a statement overly oriented to the development of academia. Just as there are more varieties of anthropology than that taught to budding lecturers, so we should not dismiss those who wish to be informed by anthropology and perhaps spread the anthropological message in a more diffuse or popular manner, in non-university settings (MacClancy 2013). The medic in the 1976 cohort was open that she only did the diploma in order to inform her psychiatric practice. In reply to my question about any lasting effects from her year in anthropology, she stated that it was ‘a way of understanding human behaviour, especially perhaps of my colleagues in multidisciplinary

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teams, and the evolving and changing role and status of doctors in health care. It was a good preparation for marriage and having children too!’ The environmentalist of that cohort took the diploma because it combined knowledge of other societies and varying ecologies with a critical attitude towards modern society and the role of science. As well as assisting various campaigning NGOs and government advisory groups, she continues to work at bridging the gap between the scientific and the shamanic. A superficial comparison of the two cohorts suggests that these disseminatory or self-educatory functions of anthropological training have diminished, but not disappeared. In the 1976 group, ten out of twenty-one did not pursue anthropology beyond the BLitt; in the 1988 group that ratio had dropped to four out of fourteen – a decline from just under half to just over a quarter. Comparison also shows that commitment to activism remains at a remarkably low level. The one member of the 1988 cohort who became a full-time development anthropologist was quite clear about her reasons: ‘What changed my mind about staying in academic anthropology is how navel gazing the discipline can be, the dithering jargon-ridden drivel that passes as contributions, and my desire to work with a wider range of topics and people’. Only two of the 1976 group clearly fit the activist category, the one above in environmentalism, the other (a Pitt-Rivers product) in indigenous rights. However, a few among this cohort who are now academics sometimes do undertake socially committed research, whose ultimate aim is pragmatic or policy-oriented. Indeed, some Institute graduates may end up aiding each other’s efforts: one member of the 1976 diploma class co-founded a charity to assist the work of a coeval and close friend, who had returned to her fieldsite in order to fight the good fight for those who had accommodated her earlier. The charity’s efforts have been financially assisted by two other graduates of the Institute, also friends of the campaigner.5 It is yet another example of the network that active centres of a discipline may enable. Further, comparison reveals the gender shift in the discipline. Only seven of the twenty-six entrants to the Institute in 1976 were women; one of those held an ESRC studentship. By 1988 the female ratio of the intake had risen to nine out of fourteen, with all three of the ESRC studentships held by women. To my knowledge, this gender shift continues through career trajectories: of the 1976 group two have gone on to become full-time academics; of their 1988 successors four are today tenured academics, one a part-time one, and one working as an anthropologist at an international development

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agency. Indeed the proportion may be even higher, as the only five people whom I have failed to learn anything about are, with one exception, all women, possibly because they have changed their surnames. This shift at the Institute mirrors national trends in the discipline.

Shuffling towards Conclusion I can hear the number-crunchers crowing in the back row: ‘Pretty prose, poverty of insight. What generalizations can he make? His sample size is ridiculously small. And what correlations? His themes are too vague, the informants’ comments too inexact. “Woolly minded, impressionistic ethnography”? Absolutely!’ For fellow anthropologists, my response is obvious. Some contemporary prosopographers might rely on electronic analysis of large data sets, but even a fieldwork-grounded analysis of a limited number of people may yet be of high prosopographic value. For by giving people an opportunity to speak for themselves, we may learn what their priorities were: their aims, disappointments and unexpected pleasures. Rather than deploying tick-box questionnaires, confined by their compilers’ own pre-set categories, we fieldworkers wish to move towards the lived experiences of participants, and their claimed reasons for action. Further we hope, against hope, that their words will tell us something we really had not anticipated, and so suggest avenues of future work that we had not even thought of travelling down. Of course, the chances of that happening in this chapter are low, as I am, after all, an integral member of the cohort I examine. For some, the problem is not just that my sample size is small, but that my ethnographic focus is peculiarly sharp: one postgraduate department in one university. ‘What’s the point?’, a sceptic can legitimately ask. The point, as I see it, is that specific local histories may illuminate larger stories, giving reason to nuance otherwise black-and-white generalizations. If anthropology is the practice of taking people seriously (MacClancy 2002), then a limited study like mine, no matter how seemingly narrow, aims to return a rounded sense of humanity to the usually dehumanized products of quantitative analysis. Trying to collate and take account of people’s variety of reasons may make any eventual attempt at understanding more complex and difficult to edge towards, but that methodological resistance, at the same time, promises to forestall premature, ignorant

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generalization. Better a richer but messier portrait than a sharpedged delineation, which really only tells us about the quality of our lens. On top of that, single-sited fieldwork educes local particularities, which a discussion of national trends may not evince. Indeed, examination of other departmental trajectories may display just how very different some were: especially in those days, when professors with self-inflating personalities still strove to put their stamp on what they regarded as their fiefdoms. In this way we could edge towards a comparative prosopography of British anthropology. Moreover, what happens at a once-great department, such as the Institute, may well have ramifications beyond, and may be taken as a litmus test for contemporaneous anthropology elsewhere. The released documents, despite their redaction, demonstrate that the Difficulties were partly a product of different visions about the direction of the discipline: over the years, at conferences and symposia outside the UK, I have been repeatedly quizzed by other anthropologists about the nature and outcomes of this Oxford dispute. As Kirkwood put it, with a little exaggeration, in a January 1978 missive to the senior proctor: There can be no doubt about the reality of past ‘bickering’ – your word – and I fear it is openly talked about throughout the world, with protagonists on both sides. Social anthropologists are eager to see Oxford giving Needham, who has a considerable international reputation, both as scholar and teacher, full scope for his talents, as well as due place for his colleagues.

Finally, I underline the need for us anthropologists to uphold the same values for all those whom we interview, including fellow practitioners. Within the discipline there are ever-increasing calls for a critical, engaged anthropology, which just might make a difference to the way we conduct our lives, wherever (e.g. MacClancy 2019). This kind of critical investigation may lead us into tricky terrain, uncovering the unpleasant in our urge to expose the unjustifiable. If we carry this point over to our own historiographical context, Sangren’s identification of a restrictive etiquette acting as a systemic defence is a key corrective. No anthropologist wants colleagues in neighbouring disciplines, such as the history of the social sciences, to accuse us of hypocrisy. It would be as though, having worked so hard to resolve accusations of neocolonialism, we were saddling ourselves with another unwanted ethical position – one very hard to explain away.

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*** It would be nice to speak of the future. But what is the point of prognostication, when it is so easy to guesstimate badly, because of factors we cannot control or ones we do not even think worth considering? Past practice reveals just how wrong one can be. In the early 1960s, Institute staff thought the discipline was in danger because the training course for the colonial service was closing down. The opposite happened, as new universities were built and the SSRC set up a studentship scheme. Similarly, in the late 1970s many took the rise of Thatcherism to mean the decline of social sciences; in fact, the staffing cuts at the Institute ‘were not severe, and the 1980s [was] a period of stability rather than contraction’ (Rivière 2007: 8–9, 15). The rise in fees turned out to have only a temporary effect on numbers of overseas students: they were back up to pre-1980s figures by the beginning of the 1990s. According to Rivière, the shift of anthropology from a gentleman’s club to a discipline with a gender bias towards women was not foreseen. We could speak of the ever-increasing threat to university finances, generated by a government obsessed with the bottom line, and a host of other dangers to the future of Oxford anthropology. One problem is that we only learn with hindsight which dangers are real, and which fantasized. Another way to put that: we can attempt to weight the known unknowns, but cannot assess, in any way, the unknown unknowns.6 Either way, and to my honest surprise, the Institute, to a truly remarkable extent, is managing to retain much of its attraction to potential recruits. Today it has at least three times the number of staff compared to the tally in E-P’s heyday. Current assessment of their research environment and collective list of publications now places them at the top or second top position on global university rankings for the discipline.7 E-P and his epigones may now all be gone but, as a recent Institute retiree argues, a distinctive ‘Oxford anthropology’ style remains: one of open-ended analysis that shies from the formulaic and does not allow an obsession with theory to overwhelm incisive ethnography (Dresch 2019). The ideal is a well-written account, penned without pretension, which opens our eyes anew to ways of thinking and acting in this world – and this is much valued. As a friend and colleague, at a now prestigious London anthropology department, spontaneously said to me in 2014: ‘We get great research students. But if they get an offer from Oxford, they go. You cannot beat Oxford as a brand’.

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Acknowledgements A big thank you to all members of both cohorts who responded to my email queries, some with lengthy, considered responses for which I am sincerely grateful, and to Peter Rivière. Also, my gratitude to David Mills and Paul Dresch for their generous comments on a late draft, and to the members of the Oxford University Information Compliance Team, whose workload, given their numbers, appears overwhelming. Also, big thanks to the editors, for their patience. All opinions and interpretations in this chapter are mine: if you disagree with any of them, blame me, not any of the above. Jeremy MacClancy teaches at Oxford Brookes University, where he has acted as Professor since 2001. He has written books of popular anthropology and history, as well as more academic ones on Iberian ethnography, histories of public anthropology, and early Westerners’ appreciation of non-Western art.

Notes   1. The famous line comes in Section 1, paragraph 18, line 12 of The Communist Manifesto, 1848.  2. For a critical foray into the ‘unmentionables’ of British departmental anthropology, see Mills and Berg 2010.  3. The only other department within Oxford University whose status was at all close to the Institute was the Mathematical Institute, which was then also a postgraduate-only institution.  4. The reference for this file in the central archives of Oxford University is: UR 6/ANT/1, file 4.   5. www.chacolinks.org.uk (last accessed 13 January 2020).  6. My phrasing is inspired by the now-famous statements of Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld on 12 February 2002, in a US Department of Defense news briefing.  7. See, for example: https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2018/anthropology; https:// www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/feb/28/ qs-world-university-rankings-2018-anthropology; https://cwur. org/2017/subjects.php#Anthropology (all last accessed 7 October 2019).

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References Akeroyd, A., R. Grillo and N. Tapper. 1980. ‘Training and Employment of Social Anthropologists’, RAIN 41: 5–7. Ardener, E. 1971. ‘The New Anthropology and Its Critics’, Man 6(3): 449–67. Benthall, J. 2007. ‘Oxford Anthropology since 1970: Through Schismogenesis to a New Testament’, in P.G. Riviere (ed.), A History of Oxford Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 155–70. Cohen, A. 2010. ‘Robert Paine: 1926–2010’, Anthropology Today 26: 24. Dresch, P. 2019. ‘Experience and Its Modes’, in J. Scheele and A. Shryock (eds), The Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology: Form, Duration, Difference. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 235–49. Gell, A. 1993. Review of Intimate Communications: Erotics and the Study of Culture, by Gilbert Herdt and Robert J. Stoller, Man n.s. 28(4) (December): 838–40. Kappers, R. (1973) 1983. ‘Appendix’, in A. Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. Revised edition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 206–10. Leach, E. 1984. ‘Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 1–24. Lienhardt, R.G. 1974. ‘E-P, A Personal View: Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, 1902–1973’, Man 9(2): 299–304. MacClancy, J. 2000. The Decline of Carlism. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press.  . 2002. ‘Taking People Seriously’, in J. MacClancy (ed.) Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1–14.  . 2006. ‘Rodney Needham’, Obituary, The Independent, 13 December.  . 2013. Anthropology in the Public Arena: Historical and Contemporary Contexts. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.  . (ed.). 2019. Exotic No More: Anthropology for the Contemporary World. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Metcalf, Peter. 1982. A Borneo Journey unto Death: Berawan Eschatology from Its Rituals. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mills, D. 2003. ‘Quantifying the Discipline’, Anthropology Today 19: 3, 19–22. Mills, D., and M.L. Berg. 2010. ‘Gender, Disembodiment and Vocation: Exploring the Unmentionables in British Academic Life’, Critique of Anthropology 30(4): 331–53. Parkin, R. n.d. ‘Teaching Anthropology through Tutorials’. Unpublished paper. Rivière, P.G. 1984. ‘Changing Shapes and Directions: The Decade Ahead’, ASA Newsletter 4: 9–19.  . 2007. ‘Introduction’, in P.G. Rivière (ed.), A History of Oxford Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–20.

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Sangren, P.S. 2007. ‘Anthropology of Anthropology: Further Reflections on Reflexivity’, Anthropology Today 23(4): 13–16. Shankland, D., and P. Stirling. 1999. ‘An Interview with Professor Paul Stirling’, Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 23(1): 1–23. Taylor, P. 2004. Shiva’s Rainbow. Oxford: Ethos-UK. Worsley, P. 2008. An Academic Skating on Thin Ice. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Chapter 2

AMOR FATI AND THE INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY Glenn Bowman

One interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ‘willing the eternal recurrence’ is that it is an expression of amor fati – the love of one’s fate. In Nietzsche’s formulation there is, in certain lives, a moment at which a person looks at their life and affirms that all that they have gone through, as miserable as moments – or years – of it may have been, is redeemed by the place to which it has brought them. At that moment they embrace the entirety of their life and all its entailments and say ‘Yea’ to it, avowing that they would be willing to live it again and again into eternity. Thinking back on my years at the Institute of Social Anthropology I am not so sure I would be willing to live them over and over again, but I must acknowledge that they played a very substantial role in getting me to the place I am currently in, which is one I find stimulating and fulfilling. So, despite the fact that my normal response to the question ‘how did you like Oxford?’ is ‘I hated it’, I will here attempt a yea-saying even to those years, and acknowledge that Oxford and the Institute played a very real role in making me what I am today. *** I did not aspire to go to Oxford. What I did, during the summer of 1975 while cycling in France and England, was to ‘drop in’ at UCL and ask if I could meet Mary Douglas, whose Purity and Danger I had found inspiring. After an hour or so’s wait, during which I fell asleep head down on a table in a seminar room I would later teach in, I was awakened by the lady herself who, after a generous but

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probing discussion, decided I was not proper grist to the Douglas mill (a ground down Nigel Barley told me a couple of days later that I was extremely lucky not to pass muster) and recommended that I go up to Oxford and present myself to Edwin Ardener. I did not manage to meet Edwin at that time but did spend a fascinating evening talking anthropological theory with Drid Williams, Malcolm Crick and a fast-diminishing bottle of bourbon. The next day, my head throbbing and my saddle bags stuffed with copies of JASO, I cycled out of town. On my return to New York I found a letter from someone at the Institute (probably not Edwin) telling me I would be welcome to apply to join the diploma programme, and asking me to submit an application and some written work. I was not, however, interested at the time, as I had already been accepted onto the small programme in Comparative Literature at the State University of New York in Buffalo, where I was to be supervised by René Girard, a scholar whose work in the border zone between literary criticism and anthropological theory resonated strongly with what I wanted to do. *** My undergraduate degree was in English Literature from the College of William and Mary, but in the course of it I had become acquainted with, and excited by, anthropology. One of the most inspirational courses I took in that field was taught by Stephen Reyna, himself newly out of Columbia University and teaching in the first year of his first post-PhD post. I was convinced, through my encounters with literary theory, anthropology and, of course, the cultural-political ferment of the late sixties and early seventies, that I wanted to engage in social analysis, particularly of what we now term discourse, but I was unaware and unadvised of the fact that I could apply for graduate work in anthropology with a literature degree. Instead I applied to, and spent a year and a half at, the Folklore and Folklife Department of the University of Pennsylvania. There I encountered the work of Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, both Victor and Terence Turner, Nancy Munn and a host of what were then called ‘symbolic anthropologists’, as well as that of René Girard, Kenneth Burke, Fredrik Jameson, Hayden White and others who interrogated the links of the social and the expressive. It was an intellectually rich experience, augmented by being taught by scholars such as Dell Hymes and John Szwed, but it was made very clear to me that the sort of research I wanted to carry out was not appropriate for a PhD in Folklore and Folklife. I wrote a long (lost) MA thesis on the structural parallels of ritual passages and Classical Greek tragedy and

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comedy entitled Rites of Transformation: Records of Redemption, and moved to Buffalo. René Girard, who died in November 2015 aged 91, had produced an exciting amalgam of structuralism, literary analysis and anthropological thinking in his radical conception of the relations of mimicry, violence and the sacred. I found his mobilization of Freudian theory, particularly in his analysis of doubling and mimetic rivalry, particularly stimulating, and his work may have been my introduction to the psychoanalytic theorization that has shadowed much of my anthropological work. He also, through the curious medium of Anthony Wilden’s System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, recalled me to the gnomic work of Jacques Lacan, prompting me to scrabble through a stack of mimeographed copies of JASO for Martin Thom’s ‘The Unconscious Structured Like a Language’, an essay I remembered reading with utter bemusement at the side of the road somewhere between Oxford and Bristol. I might well have worked on a PhD in Comparative Literature under René despite my growing awareness both of his theory’s integral conservatism (I referred to it at the time as ‘Jesuitical monarchism’) and of the fact that, as a model, the constellation of mimicry, violence and sacrifice was tending to straitjacket René’s creativity. That possibility, which would have made me a very different thinker if not person today, was forestalled within a year of my arrival by René’s being ‘purchased’ by Johns Hopkins (he was the first humanities scholar in the United States to earn a salary in excess of $100,000). René offered to take me with him to Baltimore but, having heard of the viciousness of the competition between postgraduates for funding at Johns Hopkins, I declined and remained at SUNY Buffalo for another year. One of my reasons for remaining was a growing excitement about late medieval European literature, particularly that of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. At the University of Pennsylvania, I had taken a course with Robert Lumiansky on Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and its relation with earlier Arthurian romance, and Malory’s darkness had introduced me to the fascinating problematic of the dissolution of the medieval world order under the corrosive impact of, among other things, developing mercantilism. At Buffalo this concern, which fed my dual fascination with Marxism and with theories of historical transformation, led to an odd but productive mixing of modules on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American literature, Derrida and poststructuralist theory with those treating Dante, Chaucer, medieval drama, and the milieu out of which Shakespeare’s late plays (in particular The Tempest) emerged.

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Derrida, as it was taught by Eugenio Donato, his local standard bearer and head of the Comparative Literature programme, consistently proved ungraspable for me – and part of the problem, as I learned later when I encountered the ‘European’ Derrida rather than the ‘American’ one, was that Derrida had effectively been reworked in (and for) the United States by lifting the texts he analysed out of the context that generated them so as to provide continuity with the ‘New Criticism’ tradition (see Cusset 2008: esp. 17–32 and 54–106). I should have taken the hint when Donato, responding to a query about using Marx as a means of thinking Flaubert, responded acidly ‘I don’t read Marx’. Foucault, who hovered in the supplemental readings sections of the core theory modules’ reading lists, was an altogether different matter, as it was impossible, even with the perspective provided in the mid to late 1970s by the relatively limited number of his texts available in translation (often with substantial abridgement), to encounter his discourse analyses without attending to his intertwining of historical periodization and his attention to power. Foucault’s L’Archéologie du savoir (1969; trans. Archaeology of Knowledge, 1972) suggested the possibility of coexistent epistemes in particular historical periods, and I, being concerned with the late medieval clashings and occasional interactions of theological worldviews and those linked to the pragmatics of mercantile trade, was drawn to his work. The project in which I, perhaps naively, tried to engage Foucault’s theories was the analysis of two modes of medieval travel narrative: on the one hand, the spiritual journey, of which the exemplar would have to be Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308–21) but along with which would have to be considered pilgrim narratives; and on the other, the mercantile voyage, exemplified by Marco Polo’s contemporary Livres des merveilles du monde (Book of the Marvels of the World, a.k.a. The Travels of Marco Polo) as well as by a number of other travel narratives of roughly the same period, such as The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253– 1255; or, in the fictional realm, Mandeville’s Travels (1356). There were intriguing intersections between the two discursive fields – some explicit and some all but accidental. Dante’s condemnation of Ulysses in the 26th Canto of the Inferno to an eternity of wandering in flames is explicitly punishment for the fraud of the Trojan horse; but implicitly, it is a consequence of his venturing beyond the boundaries of the known world in search of (godless) knowledge.1 Marco Polo, on the secular side, notes with stunning brevity in Chapter 10 of his Travels that on his first voyage to China he and his uncles visited the

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papal legate in Acre and ‘asked his permission to go to Jerusalem to get some Oil from the Lamp on the Sepulchre, to carry with them to the Great Kaan, as he had enjoined. The Legate giving them leave, they went from Acre to Jerusalem and got some of the Oil, and then returned to Acre’. Here a relic of great value in spiritual narratives and pilgrimages becomes a commodity serving to maintain relations with a trading partner, while Jerusalem itself is no more than the site where that commodity is picked up. *** In 1977, I decided that if I was going to get some proper training in social anthropology, and take advantage of the opportunity to spend time in the UK, I should do so before taking my doctoral examinations (at Buffalo a pre-dissertation viva of sorts based on three hours of interrogation by a departmental panel on a reading list of around a hundred literary and theoretical texts). I felt a particular draw to social, as opposed to cultural, anthropology as I was increasingly coming to see the way that social and economic formations gave rise to and impacted upon expressive forms; and I assumed, in light of my experience with then contemporary American anthropology, that those ‘infrastructural’ issues would be understated in cultural anthropology. Despite my Derridean impasse and the political problems it raised for me in the Comparative Literature programme, I had also been intrigued by encounters with Althusser and Lacan in ‘French Theory’ readings, and knew that both Tim Jenkins and Martin Thom had already engaged them in the pages of JASO. That, and memories of the topics of passionate discussion during a night on the tiles with Drid Williams and Malcolm Crick, made me think that a year in Oxford would be a good break, but not a rupture. In early October I flew from Kennedy to Heathrow on the third flight of the new Freddie Laker ‘Skytrain’. I was registered for the diploma under Edwin’s supervision, and with the supervisor had come lodgings in St John’s, his college. Along with bicycle and books, I carried with me, as intangible baggage, what several other contributors to this volume have pointed out was enjoined by E-P on entrants to the study of Social Anthropology – namely, undergraduate (and in my case some postgraduate) training in other disciplines. There may, in that, be a problem for non-UK students – a problem that, I will argue later, may in the long term prove a boon. UK undergraduate students, at least over the last few decades, are trained in a single discipline, and with that discipline comes the discipline of disciplinary focus. As E-P expected, that honed focus can productively and creatively

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be shifted to a new field. Students from outside that system, and perhaps I speak mainly here of US students coming out of the multidisciplinary liberal arts system, have had a more ‘scattered’ education that is probably not appropriately described as a ‘training’. They most likely graduate with a ‘major’ in a particular field but have, in the course of earning their degree, taken a number of modules in other disciplines, often constituting a ‘minor’. This enables graduates to project an appearance of relatively broad cultural literacy, but it also necessitates rigorous disciplining and oversight in postgraduate studies via two or more years of assessed discipline-specific coursework and a close process of doctoral supervision. Certainly, at the time, that structured environment was not available at the Institute for research students, and this posed – as it did in time for me – a substantial hurdle for overseas students to cross. The Diploma in Social Anthropology was meant, however, to provide for both home and overseas students the knowledge of the discipline’s foundations that an undergraduate degree would normally have proffered. It was extremely rigorous and stimulating and I find, in my notes from my first week in October 1977, that I was not only reading all of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (albeit the 1976 abridged version, although with substantial additional sections from the unabridged 1937 volume) but as well Douglas’s introduction to Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations along with – from that volume – Keith Thomas’s ‘The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study of English Witchcraft’, Alan Macfarlane’s ‘Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex’, Robert Brain’s ‘Child Witches’, Thomas Beidelman’s ‘Towards More Open Theoretical Explanations’ and, of course, Edwin’s own ‘Witchcraft, Economics and the Continuity of Belief ’. At the end of the week I stumbled into Edwin’s office, exhausted from writing for most of the night, and (my notes read) ‘instead of discussing witchcraft and my essay we drank beer (?) and he sort of incoherently rambled on in a “restricted code” about Needham and departmental politics. Rather confusing…’. The Ardener–Needham ‘war’ ran on throughout my time at the Institute, but frankly I do not remember being particularly tormented by it. There was a good community amongst the students, regardless of affiliation (Jeremy MacClancy and Andrew Duff-Cooper of the Needham crew, and Maryon McDonald and Malcolm Chapman of the Ardener gang, were supportive friends throughout), and lectures and seminars were solid and occasionally brilliant. What really made the diploma valuable, however, was the intensive reading, both directed and exploratory. I have three large notebooks in tiny

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handwriting (amazing how our script both bloats and loses form as the years pass), and these not only incorporate the wide range of ethnography and theory we were pushed to read but also the side reading that associations raised by the core reading demanded we attend to. JASO, which had played a significant role in drawing me back to the Institute after my initial visit, provided further stimulus. Early in the year I joined Roger Rouse, Malcolm Chapman and Maryon McDonald in working on its editorial/production team, and in the last issue of Volume 8 published an analysis of kinship and exchange in Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific titled ‘Symbolic Incest and Social Intercourse: Kula and Community in Kiriwina’. The experience both of early editorial work and of preparing and seeing published an academic paper was a real boost to self-confidence as well as an incentive for my subsequent editorial roles with Critique of Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, Focaal and, of course, the JRAI. Lola Martinez, in her chapter in this volume, writes of the ‘intellectual freedom of being expected to work very much on my own’, and that freedom, for a person with a wandering intellectual eye, was both a blessing and, in some ways, a curse. Not only was Oxford full of wonderful bookstores – new and, better yet, second-hand – but it also had a stunning panoply of specialist libraries which a registered student could easily access. Anthropology had a good library, full of the traces of departed lecturers, but it was guarded by a rather fierce Cerberus. Easier sites for reading, full of alluring distractions, were the Duke Humphrey’s Library, the English Faculty Library, the Radcliffe Camera, the now displaced Geography Library and, of course, St John’s own library, reportedly haunted (at night) by Archbishop Laud. Holing up in these sanctums to read anthropology, one was tempted by the surrounding texts, and breaks from reading inevitably led to Blackwell’s, Thornton’s and other bookshops with their own textual diversions. I well remember reporting to Edwin during one of our sessions that I was reading George Steiner’s small book on Heidegger, and having him retort ‘you’re on your own’. Despite that I did well enough in the end of year exams to have Godfrey ask me at the close of the viva what I planned to write my DPhil on. With that question alluringly echoing in my ears I returned to Buffalo for an academic year to prepare for and successfully take my doctoral exams, following which I promptly returned to Oxford to begin research on an anthropological assessment of late classical and medieval pilgrimage texts.2 This is where my problems with Oxford

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began to make themselves manifest. There was no one at the Institute capable of, or interested in, supervising such an admittedly peripheral topic, and after three or so months of indecision I was assigned Douglas Gray, the newly appointed J.R.R. Tolkien Professor at Lady Margaret Hall, as a supervisor. After that the Institute left me ‘to work very much on my own’ – as, frankly, did Professor Gray. I spent the next four years engrossing myself in late Roman and medieval history, early Christian theology, the narratology of travel literature, the Palestine Pilgrim Text Society corpus and a multitude of Marxist, post-Marxist and anthropological theories that might help me to draw the diversity of those materials together. St John’s generously released me from paying college fees (as only St John’s could), and I scraped by over that seemingly endless period by tutoring A-level students – mostly retakes – at private tutorial colleges, as well as by occasional lecturing for US universities with year abroad programmes in Oxford. At one point I wrote an eighty-page ‘upgrade’ text, which passed me into full DPhil candidacy status, but I think that just confirmed for me that the thesis was unwritable and that I, by then in my early thirties, was on a ‘hiding to nowhere’. Salvation came via a rather roundabout route. Somehow, I had learned that Alan Morinis, a recent recipient of an Institute DPhil on Hindu Pilgrimage, was organizing a conference entitled ‘Pilgrimage: The Human Quest’ at the University of Pittsburgh in the spring of 1981. I volunteered a paper (Bowman 1992) for it, which was accepted; but lacking the money to attend the conference, I motorcycled it down to Heathrow where I found a stranger willing to drop it in the post there for delivery to Alan. That was the last I heard of it until, several months later, I received a letter from Erik Cohen of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, who, having heard the paper read in Pittsburgh, asked if I would like ‘to turn my attention from the texts to the place itself ’ by taking up a Lady Davis Fellowship at its Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology. A year or so later, in October 1983, I drove a ten-year-old Renault 4 from Oxford to Piraeus, from where I picked up a car ferry to Haifa and then drove up to Jerusalem. There has perhaps already been too much autobiography in this account, and so I will not trouble the reader with the details of my twenty-two months of fieldwork in the Old City, other than to say it was, if I can use theological terminology, ‘redemptive’ (see my ‘At Home Abroad’, Bowman 2008). That fieldwork and the publications it fuelled launched my career as an anthropologist, and prompted theoretical and political concerns that led to further work on the

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West Bank, in Former Yugoslavia and in Divided Cyprus. Ironically, it did not feed into an Oxford DPhil. Although I was formally under Rodney Needham’s light touch supervision while in the field, and on returning to Oxford was taken under the wing of Michael Gilsenan, newly arrived from UCL, I did not complete it, and spent the next twenty-nine years as a ‘Mr’.3 During that time, I taught Theology for a year at Kent, drawing on my knowledge of early Christian history, Social Anthropology for a year and a half at UCL, interdisciplinary ‘Image Studies’ for four years at Kent, and finally, from 1998, Social Anthropology at Kent. Paul Stirling once told me, before I had been brought into the Anthropology Department he had founded at Kent, that ‘you know too much about too many things’ to be a professional anthropologist. That – blessing or curse – is one of the core legacies of the way I was taught, and taught myself, at Oxford. At the beginning of this chapter I claimed that Oxford and the Institute ‘played a very substantial role in getting me to the place I am currently in’. This is not, I would assert, primarily because of the potency of its name in academic circles – I would like to think that Morinis would have accepted my paper proposal and Cohen would have invited me to Jerusalem regardless of what university I was affiliated with – or because of its notorious networks. Michael Gilsenan did recommend me to Bruce Kapferer for the temporary post at UCL, but neither of them have the least bit of ‘old boy’ about them. I think it is actually because, miserable as that interregnum was, it allowed me to stay in a liminal space and nurture myself on the rich resources of its wonderful libraries, the departmental seminars, the visiting lectures (Dumont’s 1980 ‘A Modified View of Our Origins’ presented at Wolfson was a particular high point) and the vibrant discussions with fellow students. I grant you mine may be an exceptional case; I came into the Institute with a thesis idea that did not mesh with its expertise, and I spent far longer in its limbo than most. I would not, frankly, want to live through the anxiety of that period again, but it did provide the opportunity of self-teaching, which earlier and far greater academics such as Walter Benjamin and Kenneth Burke had ‘enjoyed’. This, as David Napier and others suggest in their chapters, is an opportunity that the current structuring of postgraduate work does not allow. *** The knowledge collected was, however, pretty much supine until it was brought into relation with data (and by this I mean conversations, observations, unforeseen encounters, etc.) gathered in

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the field. I had quite a diverse ‘toolbox’ when I arrived in Jerusalem and, when applied to situations I either brought about (interviews with priests, travels with pilgrims, etc.) or stumbled on (the tightly packed ‘souvenir’ shops in which selling and sex were closely imbricated [Bowman 2008]), textually derived facts encountered contexts that brought them to life. Theories were tested and often found to be either wanting or straightforwardly wrong – but even when they were wrong or wanting, they proved useful. An example that retrospectively appears quite central to the development of my own concerns was Jonathan Webber’s ‘Religions in the Holy Land: Conflicts of Interpretation’ (Webber 1985), in which he argues that local residents of the Old City are insulated from others of different religious affiliations by their respective affiliations to different interpretive communities. Watching foreign pilgrim groups (Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, often with significant subgroups within each of those categories) as they moved through the streets of the city and through the crowded internal spaces of the shrines, I could see a striking indifference to those of other religions4 – and this, plus the proud disregard of Orthodox Jews for the crowds they pushed through on their ways to and from the Western Wall, seemed to confirm Jonathan’s thesis. What clashed with it, however, was the strong community of shaba¯b (‘youth’) on the streets who were directly or indirectly involved in the tourist and local markets. These were not only from numerous sects, Muslim and Christian, but also from different parts of Palestine; while their sectarian or natal differences played roles in the banter between them, they constituted an interpretive community – not only in their mutual interactions but also, in their occasional shared response to Israeli police or settler harassment of members of that community, coagulated into an entity that articulated itself socially and politically as ‘Palestinian’ (a term subsuming all the differences of those who made it up). In formulating a response to Jonathan Webber’s paper (Bowman 1986) I was pushed to begin articulating means of understanding the contexts that lead people to collect in tightly bounded ‘communities’ and, discursively and literally, wall themselves off from ‘others’. I also needed to understand situations in which they (usually temporarily) dissolve those boundaries and constitute ‘mixed’ communities. This initially brought into focus the question of how a multitude of people of different confessional and territorial allegiances could simultaneously be drawn to a place – ‘Jerusalem’ – by a name, yet find when they arrived that they were effectively visiting different Jerusalems because of radical differences in their diverse

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interpretations of that name, the way it articulated with their beliefs and practices, and the community they imagined peopling the place it denoted (Bowman 1991). Subsequent examinations of contexts in which different communities differentially constituted themselves around what Saul Kripke terms a ‘rigid designator’(Kripke 1980),5 involved me in situations in which identical signifiers conjured up different signifieds for the communities using them, and therefore led, when these encountered each other, to recognitions of substantial, often unsurmountable, incommensurabilities. Work on Palestinian communities in ‘exile’ (my case studies were Lebanon, the United States and West Bank Palestine) brought into play the question of what forces operated in ‘home’ situations to shape the different concepts of Palestine that motivated the various constructions of the ‘ideological experience’ of the place. It was here that the concept of ‘antagonism’ drawn from the work of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (1985), proved salient insofar as the ideal of Palestine, as a site of redemption, was precisely articulated as an antidote to an antagonism in the home context perceived as actively denying what Palestinians thought was their identity. This antagonism is seen to deny the Palestinian in exile the possibility of being a Palestinian6 – and the different antagonisms in different sites of exile shape different conceptions of Palestine and the future realized Palestinian identity. I was later able to demonstrate that, for Jews and Arabs alike, identities and strategies developed to overcome antagonisms experienced in exile were imported on ‘homecoming’ and imposed on populations that were made to stand in for the exilic antagonists (Bowman 1999, 2010b). This argument drew on my Oxford readings in biblical and pre-biblical history as well as research on Herzl and the elaboration of Zionism, on PLO cadres in Lebanon and Tunis, and on both the actions of Ashkenazi Jews in settling in post-Mandate Israel and those of fedayeen returning to the West Bank and Gaza after Oslo. The question of how different communities live together, and occasionally amalgamate into collaborative unities, was also latent in the paper I wrote in response to Jonathan Webber’s ‘Religions in the Holy Land’. Observations of communicative and practical commensality on the street as well as at religious festivals foregrounded the issue of ‘sharing’ or, as I would prefer, ‘mixing’. A 1995 piece in JRAI entitled ‘Nationalizing the Sacred’ considered the ways identities shifted situationally around a Christian shrine attended by local Muslims as well as within a mixed Muslim–Christian town active in the first intifada (Bowman 1995). Later work at both sites (Bowman

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2012), as well as in Southern (now Former) Yugoslavia (Bowman 2009b, 2010a), demonstrated the lability of identity formations and put me into an intriguing, if somewhat frustrating, debate with Robert Hayden, of the University of Pittsburg, who argues for an underlying primacy of identities which renders all tolerance of alterity a masking of a fundamental antagonism (Hayden 2002; Hayden et al. 2016). That debate has brought into play issues of locality and habitus as well as conceptions of property (both places owned and the properties of communities), which I have attempted to investigate both through looking at the ways communally differentiated groups interact in everyday life in a locale and at its religious sites, as well as the ways institutionally distinguished groups – like the priests and monks inhabiting the Holy Sepulchre (Anastasis) or the Israeli settlers occupying Rachel’s Tomb – claim and fortify place (Bowman 2011, 2014, 2016, 2019). All of these issues come together in my work on the Israeli ‘Security Barrier’, known by others as either ‘The Wall’ or ‘The Apartheid Wall’. Here I show that the Israeli strategy of ‘encysting’ Palestinian communities not only works to enforce separation but as well simultaneously promotes its opposite, as Palestinians and Israelis who depend on and value intercommunal relations find ways of clambering over or burrowing under the barrier (Bowman 2009a, 2015). *** I have constructed a narrative detailing how I think Oxford made me what I am today; but in closing I am quite aware that, in line with the amor fati association I opened with, Oxford may simply have been part of a more complex past that I am now willing to embrace. Nonetheless, things I learned at Oxford – some from my lecturers, some from my compatriots, and some from my own solitary readings – have been both enriching and enabling, and I am grateful for a context that enabled me to ‘lay dormant’ and read widely for four or more years without forcing me through university regulations and financial desperation to ‘finish’. I would not wish the anxiety and frustration I imposed upon myself by so long delaying pulling all the heterodox interests I entertained into a thesis (Bowman 2013), but at the same time I must assert that social anthropology, as a discipline that aspires to study, and engage with, human life and its vicissitudes, must range widely across our accumulated knowledges of that, and find ways, perhaps better than mine, of encouraging its practitioners to browse.

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Glenn Bowman is Professor Emeritus in Sociohistorical Anthropology at the University of Kent. The mix of research classically deemed ‘humanities’ (in history, literature, philosophy and even theology) with that termed ‘social sciences’ (anthropology, politics) has marked his work, leading him in 2014 to set up the University of Kent’s new interdisciplinary BA degree in Liberal Arts.

Notes   1. The 26th cantos of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso confirm this reading insofar as the Purgatorio’s circle contains those poets who wrote of love but misdirected it through carnal lust, whereas the Paradiso’s 26th canto challenges Dante to tell what directs his love towards God and then introduces him to a redeemed Adam who asserts that his sin was violating the boundaries God had set for him. The structure links damnation with unconstrained wandering in pursuit of knowledge and redemption with a natural love which holds God as its object of desire.   2. I think I was drawn by Edwin’s brilliant discussion of ‘rose-like shaped slime fish’ and coconuts in his 1975 Munro Lecture, ‘The Voice of Prophecy’ (Ardener 1989) to think that the analysis of travel literature would be an acceptable topic for his supervision.   3. I submitted a selection of my publications for a PhD in Social Anthropology by Publication and was awarded my doctorate in July 2014 from the University of Kent, where I have taught since 1989.   4. I have used Edgar Allan Poe’s description of an uncanny stream of something like water found flowing in the negative utopia which provides the setting of the final pages of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) to describe the non-commingling of crowds in the tight confines of the Holy Sepuchre: ‘the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; … these veins did not commingle; and … their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighboring veins. Upon passing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify’ (Poe 1960 [1838]: 151, and see Bowman 2011: 376).   5. Slavoj Žižek defines the rigid designator as ‘the word which, as a word, on the level of the signifier itself, unifies a given field, constitutes its identity. It is, so to speak, the word to which “things” themselves refer to recognize themselves in their unity .... It is not the real object which guarantees as the point of reference the unity and identity of a certain ideological experience − on the contrary it is the reference to a “pure”

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signifier which gives unity and identity to our experience of historical reality itself ’ (Žižek 1989: 95–97, see also Volosinov 1973 [1929]: 79–80).   6. ‘in the case of antagonism … the presence of the “Other” prevents me from being totally myself … (it is because a peasant cannot be a peasant that an antagonism exists with the landowner who is expelling him from his land). Insofar as there is antagonism, I cannot be a full presence for myself ’ (Laclau 1985: 125, and see Bowman 1994).

References Ardener, Edwin. 1989. ‘The Voice of Prophecy’, in Malcolm Chapman (ed.), The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 134–54. Bowman, Glenn. 1986. ‘Unholy Struggle on Holy Ground: Conflict and Its Interpretation’, Anthropology Today II: 3, 4–7.  . 1991. ‘Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land: The Place of Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Various Christianities’, in John Eade and Michael Sallnow (eds), Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. London: Routledge, pp. 98–121.  . 1992. ‘Pilgrim Narratives of Jerusalem and the Holy Land: A Study in Ideological Distortion’, in E. Alan Morinis (ed.), Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 149–68.  . 1994. ‘“A Country of Words”: Conceiving the Palestinian Nation from the Position of Exile’, in Ernesto Laclau (ed.), The Making of Political Identities. London: Verso, pp. 138–70.  . 1995. ‘Nationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories’, Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute XXVIII: 3, 431–60.  . 1999. ‘The Exilic Imagination: The Construction of the Landscape of Palestine from Its Outside’, in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Roger Heacock and Khaled Nashef (eds), The Landscape of Palestine: Equivocal Poetry. Birzeit: Birzeit University Publications, pp. 53–78.  . 2008. ‘At Home Abroad: The Field Site as Second Home’, Ethnologia Europaea XXXVII: 1–2, 140–48.  . 2009a. ‘Israel’s Wall and the Logic of Encystation: Sovereign Exception or Wild Sovereignty?’, in Bruce Kapferer and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen (eds), Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 292–304.  . 2009b. ‘Processus identitaires autour de quelques sanctuaires partagés en Palestine et en Macédoine’, in Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli (eds), Religions traversées: Lieux saints partagés entre chrétiens, musulmans et juifs en Mediterranée. Arles: Actes Sud, pp. 27–52.

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 . 2010a. ‘Orthodox–Muslim Interactions at “Mixed Shrines” in Macedonia’, in Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz (eds), Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 195–219.  . 2010b. ‘A Place for the Palestinians in the Altneuland: Herzl, AntiSemitism, and the Jewish State’, in Elia Zureik, David Lyon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban (eds), Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power. New York: Routledge, pp. 65–79.  . 2011. ‘“In Dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav’n”: The Politics of Possession in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre’, History and Anthropology XXII: 3, 371–99.  . 2012. ‘Nationalizing and Denationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories’, in Yitzhak Reiter, Marshall Breger and Leonard Hammer (eds), Sacred Space in Israel and Palestine: Religion and Politics. London: Routledge, pp. 195–227.  . 2013. ‘Religion and Identity: An Inquiry into Community, Property and Place in the Constitution of Identity Politics, with Particular Attention to Israel/Palestine’. PhD, University of Kent.  . 2014. ‘Sharing and Exclusion: The Case of Rachel’s Tomb’, Jerusalem Quarterly 58: 30–49.  . 2015. ‘Encystation: Containment and Control in Israeli Ideology and Practice’, Journal of Palestine Studies XLIV: 3, 6–16.  . 2016. ‘Grounds for Sharing – Occasions for Conflict: An Inquiry into the Social Foundations of Cohabitation and Antagonism’, in Rebecca Bryant (ed.), Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 258–75.  . 2019. ‘Shared Shrines and the Discourse of Clashing Civilisations’, in Manfred Sing (ed.), The Changing Landscapes of Cross-Faith Places and Practices. Special Issue of  Entangled Religions 9: 106–36. Cusset, François. (2003) 2008. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hayden, Robert. 2002. ‘Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans’, Current Anthropology 43: 2, 205–31. Hayden, Robert, et al. 2016. Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces. London: Routledge. Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack. London: Verso. Poe, Edgar Allan. (1838) 1960. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. New York: Hill and Wang. Thom, Martin. 1975. ‘The Unconscious Structured Like a Language’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 6:2: 79–105.

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Volosinov, Valentin N. (1929) 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Webber, Jonathan. 1985. ‘Religions in the Holy Land: Conflicts of Interpretation’, Anthropology Today 1(2): 3–10. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology (Phronesis). London: Verso.

Chapter 3

THE LUCKY ANTHROPOLOGIST? BECOMING AN ANTHROPOLOGIST OF JAPAN AT OXFORD Dolores P. Martinez

Evans-Pritchard disliked the kind of anthropological writing which exploits the personality, exotic experience, feelings, and excogitations of the writer himself. —Godfrey Lienhardt, ‘Two Great British Social Anthropologists’

A vocational passion, by the time a person decides to turn it into a career, is not born in the moment of setting foot in any particular educational institution – in this case ‘the Institute’, as we used to call the Institute of Social Anthropology, at number 51 Banbury Road, Oxford – but has deep roots. This merits some detailed autobiographical discussion, in order to help explain why a student, in this case me, would choose to remain at an establishment that has been termed ‘chaotic’ by several of its students and teachers.1 First-person revelations, however, present a few risks. In her collection on anthropology and autobiography, Okely (1992) defends the autobiographical turn against critiques of narcissism, intellectual navel-gazing, and postmodernism gone too far. The anthropologist’s autobiography might well be seen as an example of the confessional, an exposé of our human flaws as in the case of Malinowski’s diary (1989), thus revealing a loss of control. She notes, however, that ‘the concern for an autobiographical element in anthropology is to work through the specificity of the anthropologist’s self in order to contextualize and transcend it’, and to understand their work (Okely 1992: 2). Whether or not we agree with her on autobiography as a genre and its relationship

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to the experience of fieldwork, it should be accepted that any attempt to produce an analysis of anthropology as a vocation – a personal choice that had to survive the crises of funding cuts, lack of jobs and political unease about the discipline that took place in the 1980s – must involve some confession. *** I have written elsewhere of how my own life experiences led me to anthropology (Martinez 2004: 1–16), but will reiterate and briefly expand on this here. I was born in Spain and lived in Morocco, California, Chicago and Mexico before the age of seven. In each of these places I was not quite a proper Spaniard, as my father was American but was not quite American as he had Mexican and Mescalero Apache parents; and in Mexico I was never Mexican, but that most terrible of things, a ‘gringa’ – an American oppressor. I supposedly spoke Arabic, French, Spanish and English by the age of two (parental exaggeration of course), but Spanish was my mother tongue and English, after all these years, is still somewhat of a second language. My childhood holidays were spent in Mexico or Spain, working on being literate in my mother tongue. When we finally settled in Chicago, my family lived in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood2 (Chicago neighbourhoods in that era being mostly defined by ethnicity), and because my Spanish mother remained forever an unwilling migrant, this was my first encounter with ethnographic enquiry. She found much of middle-class Midwestern life bizarre – as only an upper-class and somewhat aristocratic European can. As far as my mother was concerned, she was living amongst mysterious ‘savages’, and everything needed to be explained. As her eldest child, forced to constantly acculturate, I was continuously being asked: Why do people do this? I did not have answers, of course, but I was obliged to look at things very carefully. Although, I must add, whenever I did come up with an explanation it was met with derision – the logic of American nationalism or its alliance of class with ethnicity never made real sense to her. In her opinion, my Spanish forebears counted for more than my having inherited my Apache grandmother’s skin colour. In short, my mother’s construction of status, based on cultural capital, trumped a US obsession with class that masked, in her view, a deeply rooted racism. The disjuncture between her worldview and the life I lived outside our home was such that I was always on my toes, observing in a situation in which I could not have been more different from the people around me. I learned not to accept facile explanations for social behaviour.

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By the time I reached high school – a Catholic school in a predominantly Polish neighbourhood, just for a change – I had read Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age of Samoa (1961) and was certain that I wanted to be an anthropologist when I grew up. This was clearly a case of the stranger choosing to remain a stranger! My mother approved: her father, she claimed, had always been an armchair ethnographer, deeply interested in Spanish customs and in the capacity of humans to believe in religion (he had been thrown out of the Jesuits for admitting he did not believe in God). As a result, she read ethnography for pleasure, and was, in particular, a fan of Oscar Lewis’s anthropology. Thus, early on, I was able to read his books. Lewis’s work engaged with issues of family, class, migration and, in his most groundbreaking work, La Vida (1968), relied on informants’ narratives rather than the anthropologist’s analysis. Lewis’s anthropology also focused on what the neo-Marxists would come to term articulation. He did not just explain ‘cultures of poverty’, a term much associated with his research, but was also interested in how the different worldviews of Mexican peasants or Puerto Rican migrants in New York could continue to exist alongside, and even to become interpellated by, dominant capitalist worldviews. Also, post-1968, everyone was reading Carlos Castañeda’s The Teachings of Don Juan. In the United States, Mead on the apparently guilt-free sexual life of Samoan adolescents, and Castañeda on alternative realities experienced through drug use, were staple reading for the wannabe teen-aged intellectual. Unsurprisingly I chose to major in anthropology at the University of Chicago, which had just been abandoned by Clifford Geertz, Robert LeVine and Victor Turner, but still boasted of having David Schneider, Bernard Cohn, Marshall Sahlins, Terence Turner and Ralph Nicholas (just back from the LSE where he had hung out with Chie Nakane and Veena Das). Paul Friedrich, son of the famous sociologist, Wendy Doniger, just back from working with Lévi-Strauss in Paris, and Valerio Valeri, supposedly one of Lévi-Strauss’s favourite students, were also there. The Comaroffs arrived just as I graduated. It was a heady and interesting time to be an anthropology student – although the university’s Anthropology Department allowed very few undergraduate majors: you had to get an A in Nicholas’s notoriously difficult Introduction to Social Anthropology course, which I duly did. This, however, did not stop all sorts of students from taking anthropology courses as options, and this was my very American experience of studying anthropology. Whenever I asked a student who was clearly pre-med or pre-law why they were taking anthropology

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as an optional course, the answer was always: in my future career I want to be sensitive to, and try to understand, different others. Then on the brink of completing my degree within three years, with my anthropological mentors – mainly Nicholas and Friedrich – expecting me to go onto the Master’s and then the Doctorate, I suffered a crisis. Except for a Theology course on the structural analysis of myth with Wendy Doniger, my anthropology courses were all taught by white, middle-aged men. This came to unsettle me, as did the fact that I was the only ‘ethnic minority’ taking the course at the undergraduate level. Was anthropology just a Western male-dominated point of view? The way in which Mary Douglas, who came to give a guest lecture to a massive audience at the University, was discussed – as if she were a disappointment for looking so grandmotherly – also gave me pause. Did I really want to be an anthropologist? I decided to stay on for the usual fourth year, switching my major to General Studies in the Humanities, which allowed me to combine three subjects and write an honours dissertation. In my case this included anthropology, history and medieval languages. This choice deserves some explication although I have yet to arrive at Oxford. Despite my feminist misgivings about the discipline, I had found real inspiration in the research of the rather unconventional anthropologist Paul Friedrich. He had taught our class Homeric Greek in order to do an anthropological reading of the Odyssey, and had required us to memorize reams of poetry for an anthropology option on oral cultures; but fortunately we did not have to learn Russian to read Anna Karenina for his course on anthropological perspectives on the novel. Aligned with my early admiration for Lewis’s narrative-dominated ethnography La Vida, and definitely speaking to my growing interest in ‘foreign’ film, I had begun to think about the various ways in which societies choose to tell and consume stories about themselves, and the differences between types of narratives. I was also interested in what these stories revealed about their social contexts, albeit not through the structuralism that several of my teachers were, at that point in time, so very keen on promulgating. Thus I found myself torn between following Sahlins’s advice to go to Oxford if I did not want stay at the University of Chicago, as theirs was the only other department that covered the sorts of things I was interested in (and I still don’t know what that meant) and staying but beginning a Master’s in the then very new Film Studies programme under Gerald Mast. In the end I tried to eat my cake and have it too: I decided to go to Oxford to do the one-year Diploma, deferring my Master’s offer, and then return to

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study film. That was 1980, and although I spent a subsequent year working to earn money in Chicago, and later took a job in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), I have remained based in Oxford; marrying an anthropologist who eventually joined the Institute. All of this begs some questions: what sort of place was this Institute in which my vocation, almost lost in Chicago, was renewed and reaffirmed, grounding me in my choice of anthropology as a career? Why Oxford? How did I come to the study of Japan? How was this ‘lucky’? And what happened to my interest in narrative and film? Readers of the other chapters in this collection might now imagine that they know what Oxford anthropology was like in the late 1970s and the 1980s, but here I add the view of someone who – in contrast to many of my fellow students – had studied anthropology as an undergraduate; I had just moved from a very different anthropology department, one in which an inspiring teacher got students to learn ancient Greek, to one that was intellectually divided, had few students (there were just eleven of us in my Diploma year I think) and only a handful of staff – several of whom seemed to have just arrived at the poststructuralism that Sahlins at Chicago was already beginning to leave behind. Despite this rather bleak overview, I relished both the intellectual freedom of being expected to work very much on my own, and the friendship of a student cohort who struck me as being similar to myself. My 1980–81 Diploma, and later 1982 DPhil, cohort included African Catholic priests and nuns writing dissertations as native anthropologists; Britons who had grown up outside the UK; Britons who were the children of post-war migrants and so did not really feel English; as well as Europeans – the category to which my mother had always insisted we belonged – some of whom wanted to be anthropologists and not just ethnographers, while others (the French) clashed with the Lienhardts (Peter and Godfrey) over new modes of theorizing. In fact, the Lienhardts’ standard answer to any mention of Foucault or Bourdieu, or even Lévi-Strauss (yawn), was to respond with the equivalent of ‘been there, done that’, ‘read Evans-Pritchard on this’ or ‘haven’t you read the original Mauss, Durkheim or Weber on this very topic’? This was especially true of my dissertation supervisor, Nick Allen, as David Gellner discusses in his chapter. There were many divisions within the faculty: like Peter Rivière, who understood structuralism as truly an apt tool for understanding Amazonia; and Ardener, Needham and Barnes, who in somewhat different ways thought that poststructuralism could reveal possible general truths

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about human thought; and the more pragmatic Lienhardts, who thought that individual fieldwork revealed different ways of being and existing in the world (positions that were not necessarily very far apart, but which created divides in student loyalties). Yet a student who chose not to pick a side was allowed to freely explore and think for themselves. This was especially true for female scholars, because on the margins there was the women’s anthropology group that met in Queen Elizabeth House, who offered other ways to do fieldwork and analyse data that were not based on the powerful position of being a male authority figure. It is worth thinking a bit here about this ‘chaotic’ situation. Much later in my career I learnt that trying to get anthropologists to agree to anything is akin to trying to herd cats. Social organizations entirely composed of mavericks may be rare phenomena, but in anthropology it once was the norm (see Cohn 1980), and our only remnant of this adventurous past exists in anthropologists’ rather distinctive behaviour once they become members of those routinized institutions known as anthropology departments. Social misfits do not necessarily make easy bedfellows, while teaching set curricula rubs against individual experiences of the field and theoretical stances based on empirical data. Agreeing to agree on what is important for students to learn, has, along with the RAE and REF3 perhaps, forced us to ‘toe’ departmental lines. Idiosyncrasy was a precedent set by our pioneering forefathers, who had to invent the discipline. (I use the term ‘invent’ here in the spirit of Hobsbawm and Ranger (1992): all the raw material may have existed in order to found a subject that studied human beings, but it had to be made into whole cloth.) Following the era of charismatic pioneers, most anthropology departments came to be populated by one or two aspiring prophets and many who were less innovative but who were forced to be observers of a theoretical status quo. Kuper (1973: 121–41) discusses this in a pithy way in his history of the British discipline. For example, Chicago was at the tail end of its high Marxist period (Robert LeVine personal communication), and was turning very much towards poststructuralism when I was a student there. It was also on the verge of a deep split over whether anthropology should be taught as a social science or as a humanities subject, with Sahlins eventually coming to ride astride that divide. More than anything, in my experience, it did believe in ‘a’ method, even if they could not quite agree on what that method should be, and I knew that I would eventually have to sign up as a disciple to someone’s dogmatic approach, no matter where I went in the United States.

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A similar situation existed in many of the anthropology departments in the UK – Manchester was post-Gluckman, the LSE was post-Malinowski, and Cambridge was post-Leach – each espousing their big men’s particular theoretical approaches. While Oxford and SOAS, oddly enough, were equally ‘post-’ (Radcliffe-Brown/EvansPritchard and Haimendorf respectively), they somehow remained free from too much ideological cant. I cannot explain how this came to be in SOAS, where I was eventually employed; but at Oxford my experience was that the existence of all those highly independent personalities (as discussed by others in this volume), who had set up their opposing camps, made it impossible for any single theoretical approach to dominate other than that of fieldwork as the core anthropological experience. In short, the Oxford focus on fieldwork and the data gathered there – a focus different perhaps only in degree from other departments of anthropology – was largely underpinned by the idea that a student would know what to write once their empirical data gathering was complete. The idea that you went out to the field to ‘prove’ something or ‘find out’ something specific evaporated in the face of ‘have you done the fieldwork yet?’ And then: does your ethnographic example support that theory you are so desperately trying to shoehorn it into? This had its basis very much in the person of Evans-Pritchard himself. As others have discussed (see Moore 2012), Evans-Pritchard may be remembered as a structural-functionalist, but he ended his career, as Ernest Gellner observed, not as its prophet, but rather as ‘an intellectually restless ever-questing, sceptical Hamlet’ (Gellner 1981: xv). He had, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 45–47), dismantled structural-functionalism, revealing its constitutive elements which were then reassembled in other ways by his successors. In his ‘restlessness’, Evans-Prichard had become increasingly interested in anthropology as history (Kuper 1973: 132) and, according to Lienhardt (1997: 72) wished he had been a poet or novelist. Perhaps such thoughts underpinned the paradoxical axiom often attributed to Evans-Prichard: ‘there is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method, and that is impossible’. In short, his anthropological legacy was a brilliant albeit hard act to follow, and difficult to categorize. His successors, the lecturers (and Professor) whom I encountered in 1980, had entrenched themselves in opposing camps, building on different interpretations of E-P’s work. However, they all laid great emphasis on the importance of ethnographic data, and shared with Chicago a great respect for the insights into all human nature and society found within the pages

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of L’Année Sociologique. While some had come to support the place of history within the anthropological endeavour – a position I had stumbled into myself while writing my AB Honours dissertation – all were so amusingly (at least to me) at odds with each other that it was entirely possible to forge one’s own way. There were limits to this intellectual freedom, of course. Barley (1986) has discussed in his autobiographical The Innocent Anthropologist how ingrained within Oxford was the sense that real fieldwork could only be undertaken in small-scale societies, amongst people who had not been contaminated by the modern world, and that it should involve considerable hardships – anything else was a sign of weakness. For example, one of my cohort, an Australian, was endlessly teased by the Lienhardts because he was working on sheep farming in Yorkshire; and the handful of students who chose to work on Japan, a modern society full of technology – but surely Benedict (1967) and Nakane (1973) had already explained everything we need to know about the Japanese? – were seen as choosing to do rather uninspiring and tame fieldwork: exactly what a woman would do. Why did I choose to study Japan and why stay in Oxford? First of all, despite that rather old-fashioned view of what was considered to be proper fieldwork, the idea that I was free to pursue my own path remained strong, and I continued to be interested in contemporary societies precisely because so many anthropologists argued that modernized/ing societies were both too homogeneous and too complex to understand. This seemed to me to be experientially untrue: I had spent my childhood trying to explain a modern society. Was sociology really the only way to get to grips with modernity? Also, I had read both Nakane and Benedict and, given my earlier misgivings about the patriarchal nature of anthropology, it mattered to me that they were women – one of them a ‘native’ – writing anthropology. Then someone told me that Japanese was almost impossible to learn and so, perversely, I decided that I would accept that challenge. Moreover, Oxford was just establishing the Nissan Institute for Japanese Studies, so it was able to offer me some institutional support in addition to that of anthropology. Finally, and really the least of my reasons, was that when I discussed the idea with Paul Friedrich, he approved it because ‘jobs are becoming scarcer and your generation of anthropologists can count on being unemployed or differently employed for a long time’ – except that by choosing Japan, he added, I had alighted on one of the few growth areas in social anthropology. In contrast, perhaps, to the narratives of other 1980s anthropologists, many of whom did odd jobs for years or went abroad to find

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work, I finished my DPhil on gender in a Japanese fishing and diving community, combining yet again the traditional idea of anthropology – small-scale, pre-capitalist labour – with more modern ideas like that ‘silly’ gender stuff; and one year into a three-year postdoc (funded by Nissan through their new institute in Oxford), I found a job at SOAS. If I had been strategically planning my career, it could be seen as a gamble that had quickly paid off – or pure luck. In hindsight, thirty-one years later, SOAS was a neat fit to my anthropological training thus far: it too prized empirical data and theory, but theory that grew out of the data rather than data forced to fit a theory. Also, colleagues at SOAS did not pooh-pooh modern or even postmodern theoretical approaches. It should have been a match made in heaven. However, at that time SOAS needed an anthropologist of Japan who could teach more general subjects. It was a post they had had for decades, filled by such luminaries as Ronald Dore, Nakane Chie, Rodney Clark and Brian Moeran – but it had involved very little teaching. It had long been a one-term (9 weeks) course taught as part of the East Asian Anthropology module, including China in term 2, and was aimed mostly at two or three Master’s students who were about to join the foreign service, and perhaps one or two lost undergraduates who had not been put off after being told by a colleague that they were idiots. In 1988/89, it had become a twoterm course, and although student numbers for the regional option had not grown, the number of students doing anthropology as an undergraduate BA course had begun to increase rapidly at SOAS. I was hired, in short, as a workhorse: to teach general theory, as well as on Japan; and, because I had written on tourism, to design a course on that topic. When I began in 1989, everyone was concerned about the ‘large’ year cohorts of about fifteen students. Throughout the 1990s this increased: in one panic-stricken period when the school was short of money, 150 undergraduate anthropology students were admitted each year for three years in a row – more than any other British department at the time. During the same period, we took the development of money-making Master’s courses to a new level – at my last reckoning SOAS had seven anthropology Master’s courses and, in addition, provided teaching for many area study Master’s students. As a result, the department had to develop systems that really worked in order to provide enough personal tutors, to keep tutorial groups small (increasing our workload in the process), and to maintain robust student representation and fair procedures, all the while keeping paperwork to a manageable limit. At the postgraduate level we had to cope with the increasing professionalization of

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anthropology: we had to create methods courses, teach ethics, find statistics courses anthropologists could do, learn to cope with government cuts in funding and scholarships, with caps on the number of years postgraduate research should take, and so on. These changes were in the main both implemented and carried out by those of us hired in 1988 and 1989 – all five of us with some experience of having taught at universities with large student numbers. SOAS is an extreme example of the economic changes in higher education that affected all British universities from the Thatcher era onwards. The School went from being almost purely research led – with staff members regularly leaving for fieldwork, often funded by SOAS itself, free to be absent because undergraduates were few in number and PhD students were even rarer – to one that was teaching driven. Flying off for long-term fieldwork with little notice became a thing of the past. One of the first examples of how this affected staff was when I was asked to teach an option in 1990. I offered to teach a course on narrative – building on the idea of socially constructed ways of explaining and describing the world – in an attempt to move back to my chief interest. I was told, however, that a course on tourism would be more useful, as it would draw in larger student numbers. So it was that I taught one of the first courses on the anthropology of tourism in the UK. To keep myself intellectually happy, I focused not just on the economic elements and the social perils/ changes brought by tourism, but on tourist and travel narratives. My own interest in the mass media or popular culture was seen as rather eccentric until sometime in 1996. Just as being interested in Japan at Oxford had been seen as ‘not quite real’ anthropology, so was my work on Japanese popular culture, even at SOAS. Paradoxically, perhaps, it was my experience of being allowed to pursue my own interests at Oxford that led me to decide that I could do what I wanted, albeit very much on the side. Oxford had left me with another legacy, which I discovered as I moved from teaching one general theory course to another over the years, that is I found myself thinking of the Lienhardt view (reinforcing the general Chicago social sciences line that had dominated my first two years there) that all contemporary theory had real precedents in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorists, whose work was often taken for granted as underpinning contemporary theoretical developments. Sahlins’s own Marxist perspective, of which I had caught the tail end, provided a grounding that allowed me to theorize on what we call postmodernity (see Martinez 2009). Some things I had to learn as I went along – trying to read one step ahead of the students. For example, general

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theories of nationalism, as being propounded by the Professor at Cambridge (as opposed to the ethnic nationalism Maryon MacDonald in this volume was writing on) had passed my generation of Oxford students by and yet they became increasing central to my writing and teaching on Japan. The idea of the imagined community (Benedict 1991), the means through which a shared history was created and promulgated, and the creation of narratives about shared identity/ ethnicity all added to my own continued interest in narrative and the mass media – and my focus, by the end of the 1990s, had returned to film studies, the work I had abandoned to stay at Oxford. How has this all come together? Or rather, in a bow to my Oxford past, how did it have to fall apart in order to come together? I began as a student in an American system that catered to large student numbers taking anthropology courses as an option, and which assumed that this was all to the good: in its then liberal vision, all members of a multi-cultural society (and Americans were beginning to hyphenate their identities in the 1970s) should understand and respect each other’s worldviews – it was very Peace Corps and very Star Trek: seeking out new worlds and new civilizations, even if they were living right next door. Yet there was also an awareness of the political side of anthropology. Chicago was the first place I heard an indigenous person speak about the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest, and all the graduate students used to warn: never answer an advert for NASA looking for anthropologists (yes, we really believed in the new worlds part in some way) because it really was the CIA recruiting. This was just a hint that, increasingly in many parts of the world, ‘American anthropologist’ was assumed to be another term for ‘spy’. US political, economic and military dominance were experienced by many as just a new form of colonialism. I moved to a very postcolonial situation at Oxford. It is important to be clear here: the anthropologists at Oxford had celebrated the end of the British Empire even as some of its more eminent members had managed to do fieldwork precisely because of colonialism. Anthropological research was not seen as a tool that could help people to learn to live in a multicultural environment, but was considered an experience based on fieldwork, which, if you could but survive it, fuelled your intellectual passions. Since anthropology was seen as a vocation – something that not everyone could or should attempt to do. It was also seen as an adventure – shades of Indiana Jones but with a British twist in which Lawrence of Arabia was the role model. The idea of ‘anthropologist as spy’ was not unknown in the UK either. More to the point, fieldwork had to be difficult and

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fraught with danger to be seen as somehow valid, while tools had to be kept to a minimum. My Oxford fieldwork training was basic: ‘Don’t forget lots of cards and pencils to take field notes. Keep two diaries, one for personal thoughts, one for participant observation data; or write the personal comments in a different coloured ink in the one diary’. More ‘practical’ lectures on fieldwork involved Peter Lienhardt teaching us how to saddle a camel and Paul Dresch, just back from the field, asking us to think of basic ethical questions such as: ‘Are you prepared to head out in a war party, armed to kill…?’ The idea that a student needed to be told to take tool kits, first aid kits, and something to read was not considered necessary. Being taught to do Rorschach tests, to use questionnaires (although household surveys were encouraged), or to collate statistics was not even on the cards. While needing an interpreter (an assistant, yes, but learn the language!), permission forms and so on were considered a bit over the top. Trying to understand the worldviews and lives of others was not really possible through questionnaires – it required immersion, sympathy and an openness to other ways of thinking and being. Fieldwork, thus, was a test of wit, self-reliance and stamina (mental and physical), and – this was the SOAS version – once the anthropologist was ‘at ease’ in the field, it should be the site of repeated return visits. This vision of anthropology represents what I now see as a shared position between Oxford and SOAS: one in which anthropologists are not adherents of any particular theory that must be used for analysis, nor are they imbued with a definitive authority, but rather are in conversation with their ‘native’ collaborators – many of whom are long-term friends or fellow academics. Thus, it is an anthropology that might appear fragmented, but is actually one that takes into account history, class, status, gender and even age; it sees the field as complex and myriad, capable of schism and continuity (to invoke Victor Turner, a Chicago but not an Oxford figure); and is never reducible to a single all-encompassing explanation. At its best it is a fluid anthropology that accepts the possibility of multiple visions, diverse explanations, and various levels of access and understanding; in a nutshell, it is an anthropology that respects the complexity of the human experience. Not having an ‘-ism’ may be confusing to the student who wants concrete explanations and easy-to-apply intellectual tools, but this fluidity is necessary if we are to continue to produce work that will stand the test of time. However, the need to turn anthropology into a discipline that makes money has hit small institutions like the Institute and SOAS

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hard – both have found themselves forced to expand. Yet it is one thing to train students to become professional anthropologists and another thing entirely to offer anthropology options to students who see the need for cultural empathy with others in their chosen profession. Thus, in the UK, anthropology has had to make itself relevant to employers across the board. We have had to note how the skills of analysis, critical thinking and general anthropological methods are abilities that will serve our graduates in any form of employment. In short, if I have filled in one form describing why an anthropology degree matters, I have filled in dozens. I do think that the skills that anthropology engenders are equally important for those working outside of the discipline – but where has that pursuit of anthropology as a passionate vocation gone to amidst all the form filling? Where has it gone to in the twenty-first century when grants and research visas are difficult to obtain, when ethics are closely monitored, and when outcomes have to have ‘impact’ in a measurable way? Where has it gone for those of my generation who administered and oversaw the changes in anthropology courses, helping to convert anthropologists from adventurers to professionals with marketable skills? My younger colleagues have learned to work the new system that has grown up around anthropology’s professionalization in the UK: apply for grants, get out of teaching, and go to the field as often as possible. That leaves older colleagues to do the administration and core teaching, and postdocs as Teaching Assistants on fractional contracts. In response, my age grade, it seems to me, have begun to dismantle anthropology as radically as Evans-Pritchard once deconstructed structural-functionalism. We work on ethnicity, nationalism, identity, cosmopolitanism, new forms of communities, the mass media and the visual, food security and food cultures, tourism, post-humanism, the anthropology of human–animal relations, cognitive anthropology, belief (although this has been imbued with post9/11 politics), ontologies, the human imagination – a lot of theory, and a lot of it done at home or in very short fieldwork stints. To do what we love passionately, we have had to work in a way that does not surprise me since I began to do anthropology at home in the most literal of senses. However, it is not anthropology as we first knew it – the immersion in another society, which aimed to produce a good understanding of many of that society’s institutions, beliefs and practices. We are now working at a jigsaw: small bits of knowledge in specialist areas that we then try and put together with the work of others. Again, this is perhaps a more realistic way of understanding human social behaviour, one that considers histories, identities, generations,

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genders and many other factors that create difference in the face of larger discourses that aim to create social similarity. Paradoxically, because we do not share a general concept of a ‘fluid’ anthropology but instead teach it as a series of methods, each appropriate to a particular sub-category of the discipline, we have also made anthropology somewhat harder to do. To return to the purely autobiographical, I have taken early retirement in order to keep working on what I want to work on, without the administrative burden – although I do miss the teaching. I have chosen to follow my vocation and so have tossed aside other forms of duty in the hope of continuing to think freely. Dolores P. Martinez is Emeritus Reader in Anthropology with special reference to Japan at SOAS, University of London and a Research Affiliate at ISCA, University of Oxford, and is the Honorary Reviews Editor for JRAI. Her latest publications include Gender and Japanese Society (Routlege 2014); and with Blai Guarné and Artur LozanoMéndez as co-editors, Persistently Postwar (Berghahn 2019). Her current research is on the anthropology of the imagination, particularly in relation to imaginaries of the future.

Notes  1. I will not reveal my sources here, but will note that they are different from MacClancy’s informants (Chapter 1, this volume), although in some cases they do overlap.  2. This area, known as Pill Hill, has gained some sociological notoriety as an example of 1960s ‘white flight’ (Rosen 1999).   3. Research Assessment Exercise and Research Excellence Framework.

References Barley, Nigel. 1986. The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Benedict, Anderson. 1991 (rev. and extended ed.). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Benedict, Ruth. 1967. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Cleveland, OH: Meridan Books. Castañeda, Carlos. 1968. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Cohn, Bernard. 1980. ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22(2): 198–221. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1981. ‘Introduction’, in E.E. Evan-Pritchard, A History of Anthropological Thought, edited by Andre Singer. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Hobsbawn, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1992. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: CUP. Kuper, Adam. 1973. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Lewis, Oscar. 1968. La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Random House. Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1997. ‘Two Great British Social Anthropologists: Sir James Frazer and Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard’. JASO 28(1): 63–82. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1989. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Martinez, D.P. 2004. Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.  . 2009. Remaking Kurosawa: Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema. New York: Palgrave. Mead, Margaret. (1928) 1961. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: Dell Publishing Co. Moore, Jerry. 2012. ‘Edward Evans-Pritchard: Social Anthropology, Social History’, in his Visions of Culture. Plymouth, UK: AltaMira Press, pp. 146–59. Nakane Chie. 1973. Japanese Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Okely, Judith. 1992. ‘Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge’, in J. Okely and H. Callaway (eds), Anthropology & Autobiography (ASA Monographs 29. Abingdon: Routledge, ), pp. 1–28. Rosen, Louis. 1999. The South Side: The Racial Transformation of an American Neighborhood. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher.

Chapter 4

LOST AND FOUND AT OXFORD Roger Just

I make no pretence of this being an academic paper. Rather, what I attempt to do here is to refer to some of the issues originally raised by the convenors in their call for papers, namely: the difficulties, financial and other, in completing a full course of anthropological studies at Oxford during the 1970s and 1980s; the decline in the number of academic positions available to those who had completed their studies; and in general, a sense that we were in danger of becoming a ‘lost generation’ – and I do this in a more or less autobiographical mode. As the convenors also suggested, if it is worth reviewing conditions in the 1980s it is because however dismal things appeared to be at the time, there are in fact a quite substantial number of survivors, and that may perhaps give heart to the present generation of anthropological students who see themselves facing a similar set of challenges. I should start by saying that I came to anthropology in the 1970s rather than the 1980s, although I did not complete my DPhil until 1982, by which time I most certainly faced, along with my peers, the difficulties I have just mentioned. The 1970s, however, were good times, and I was fortunate enough in 1973 to have been awarded a three-year scholarship that would take me from Melbourne, where I had studied Classics, to the UK. The scholarship was, however, conditional on my securing a place at a suitable UK institution. Here now a little background history, whose relevance will, I hope, become apparent in due course. During the 1960s and early 1970s, my undergraduate years, Australia was quite heavily involved in the Vietnam War for which my generation was being conscripted, based on a lottery system. I was not conscripted, but even if I had been, I would

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have been given a deferment to complete my undergraduate studies. Moreover, in 1973, the year I was awarded my scholarship, Gough Whitlam’s Labor government was elected and Australia immediately pulled out of the war. Nevertheless, for my generation of Australian students – and even more so, I presume, for American students – the Vietnam War was a radicalizing experience. Most of us were, of course, good middle-class boys and girls (and most of us have now, I suspect, reverted to type), but in the 1970s most of us did think of ourselves as left-wing ‘radicals’. And so, at least from afar, Oxford did not seem an appealing place to move to. It was, I thought, too much a bastion of conservatism and privilege for my taste – besides which, I had just finished reading Brideshead Revisited, and I could not imagine myself wandering around the place clutching a teddy bear. With scholarship in hand, I therefore applied to SOAS and the LSE, not Oxford; but neither SOAS nor the LSE would have me, since I did not have an undergraduate degree in anthropology. It looked as if, despite the scholarship, my anthropological career was to be stillborn. At the last moment, however, and thanks to the intervention of my old Melbourne professor, I was offered a place in an anthropology programme, and that place was at Oxford, because (as in so many respects) Oxford was ‘different’. Oxford was different because in 1973 it did not teach anthropology at undergraduate level (anthropology was not introduced until a few years later, when it formed part of the new Human Sciences degree). Technically, therefore, all anthropology at Oxford was postgraduate. This was attributed to the wishes of Evans-Pritchard (who died a few months before I arrived), to whom most features of Oxford anthropology tended to be attributed. He was alleged to have held the view that anthropology was not an established discipline that supplied a suitably scholarly undergraduate training. It was still in its infancy and without real intellectual capital of its own. His idea, therefore, was to take in students who already had ‘good’ degrees in other disciplines (languages, mathematics, history, psychology, etc.) and put them through the one-year Diploma in Social Anthropology. After that, they were required to complete a BLitt in Social Anthropology (a 50,000-word library-based dissertation, which took most students two years), and then, but only then, would they be allowed to go on to DPhil studies in anthropology. Thus, they would bring to the formation of the fledgling discipline the fruits of a rigorous scholarly training gained elsewhere. All this must have seemed rather strange to American students, for whom first year anthropology was standard undergraduate fare,

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and in fact the very few students who were permitted to enter directly into DPhil studies were mostly Americans (and some British students from other UK institutions) who already had full undergraduate degrees and Master’s degrees in anthropology – but usually they too were required to take the Diploma and submit a BLitt before going on to the DPhil. Oxford social anthropology was not, after all, to be confused with American cultural anthropology; nor was anthropology elsewhere in the UK deemed to be the equivalent of Oxford anthropology. According to ISCA’s archives, in 1973/4 (my year) there were twenty-three Diploma students enrolled, and in 1974/5 there were twenty-two, giving a total of forty-five for the two years. Of these forty-five students, seventeen already had an undergraduate degree in Social or Cultural Anthropology. Twelve of those seventeen students were American, two were Canadian, one was Korean and two were British (one from East Anglia, the other from Cambridge). The remaining twenty-eight students had studied a variety of disciplines from Archaeology and Classics through to Psychology and Zoology, but all were still required to undertake the Diploma year, and those who went on would have been required to undertake a BLitt. The upshot was that almost all Anthropology students at Oxford faced a pretty long haul: three years of postgraduate study before even starting the DPhil – but then Evans-Pritchard was also alleged to have said that he did not want young people ‘in the field’ getting themselves into trouble and making a nuisance of themselves. The Diploma year was intensive. Most students attended only about four lectures a week plus the weekly guest seminar, but everyone had a one-to-one tutorial a week for which they had to present an essay of about 1,500–2,000 words, for which, incidentally no credit was given in terms of marks, and, depending on one’s tutor, this usually meant trying to read four or five books a week. In the end, everything went on the examinations: four 3-hour papers over two days, but with a weekend intervening, plus a 5,000-word take-home essay (an innovation in 1974) due in a week later, followed by a viva with an external examiner. It was, however, a wonderful year – in fact the most intellectually stimulating year of my life. Nor in social terms did Oxford turn out to be at all as I had feared. And, with the Diploma under my belt, in the mid-1970s, everything in academe looked pretty rosy and I looked forward to going on to the BLitt and DPhil, for it should be remembered that the Robbins Report had been published in 1963, and, following its recommendations, the UK had seen a massive expansion in the tertiary education sector,

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with the founding of eight new universities and the granting of university status to another eleven existing educational institutions. In a more minor manner, Australia had followed suit with new universities established in the 1960s and existing polytechnics similarly upgraded in the early 1970s. In short, by the time of my Diploma year at Oxford, everything looked pretty good for aspiring academics both in the UK and in my native land, with plenty of jobs to be had in both places. Of course, nothing lasts, and by the early 1980s prospects were looking decidedly worse. Thatcher had come to power in 1979, and financial cuts were made to tertiary education in 1981 (these were followed by even more severe cuts in 1988). Moreover, most of the people who had obtained their academic positions in the heady days of the early 1970s were still quite young, and unlikely to retire for some time. I also faced quite particular problems. My scholarship was a generous one, but it was for three years only. Given the three-year haul of the Diploma followed by the BLitt, I did not see how I was going to go complete a DPhil. At the time the problem was not so severe for British students. If they had done sufficiently well in the Diploma, then their fees through the ensuing BLitt and DPhil would be paid for by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). As a foreign student, however, I was not eligible for ESRC funding. I had funding to get me through the BLitt, but after that … At a party given after the Diploma examinations, Professor Wendy James (and I trust she will not be offended by my naming her) congratulated me on my results and asked whether I intended to carry on with my studies. Rather unwisely, I started to bleat about not being sure, and only having a three-year scholarship. Wendy gave me a stern look and said very firmly, ‘Roger, if you want to go on, you will; if you don’t … well, you won’t’. I promptly decided to carry on, and to face the future in due course. Over the following two years I completed my BLitt thesis (which was published many years later as a book), but at the end of the BLitt I was, indeed, high and dry: no more scholarship, no more money. And then, just when I thought things could not get much worse, they did. In almost all other disciplines, no one actually completed and submitted a BLitt. For other disciplines, enrolment in a BLitt was the provisional status for going on to a DPhil, and, provided their studies were considered to be satisfactory after a year they transferred status from BLitt candidate to DPhil candidate. Alternatively, some people who did not wish to go on took out a BLitt, or were awarded a BLitt as a more or less failed DPhil. But anthropology, as I have explained, was different. The cursus honorum,

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allegedly sanctified by Evans-Pritchard, was definitely Diploma, BLitt and then DPhil. It was only when I had submitted and taken out my BLitt that I discovered to my horror that this meant I was deemed to be starting a new degree with the DPhil, and was thus liable for up to nine terms of postgraduate fees all over again. Now the reason that this seems to have slipped everybody’s mind was that fees, even overseas postgraduate fees, had been negligible. I was comfortingly told that it was not much of a problem since the fees were only about £50 a year, were they not? Alas, things had changed by the early 1980s. Foreign student fees had greatly increased, and I was going to be up for several thousand pounds (which I certainly did not have). But I had an idea. I made an appointment with the proctors and asked whether I could hand my BLitt degree back so that I could convert from BLitt status to DPhil status on the basis of the nine terms’ fees that I had already paid. In a moment of anthropological inspiration I even suggested that if needs be I could perhaps walk through the Sheldonian backwards, while taking off my BLitt gown. The proctors feigned amusement, but gave a very firm ‘no’ to my suggestions. I was not, of course, the only overseas student caught in this position, and so I approached various members of staff suggesting that if something were not done about the requirement to complete the Diploma and the BLitt before starting the DPhil, the Institute of Social Anthropology (as it was then called) might find itself with very few overseas students in the future (and since twenty-three out of the forty-five students in the 1973/4 and 1974/5 Diploma cohorts were overseas students, this seemed like a serious matter). I think I was probably right. As Jeremy MacClancy (this volume) reports, in 1979 there were seventeen students taking the Diploma (as opposed to twenty-three in 1974), and by 1981 the cohort had shrunk to eight. There may well have been other reasons for this decline, but I suspect increased overseas fees for up to a possible eighteen terms of postgraduate studies had something to do with it. But, in 1976 (when I completed my BLitt) there seemed to be a peculiar reluctance to foresee the problem. One person who did listen to me with care and attention, however, was once again Wendy James, and although I was not privy to whatever discussions subsequently took place, the Diploma/BLitt/DPhil sequence was eventually changed. The Diploma was renamed the Master of Studies in 1988, and then it and the BLitt were together replaced by the present two-year MPhil, which also offers a three-term concession on the DPhil. All that, however, was far too late for me (and others).

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And so, on the advice of my mentor and sometime BLitt supervisor, Godfrey Lienhardt, I embarked on ‘plan B’. The regulations in 1976 stated that I was liable for up to a further nine terms’ fees for the DPhil. Since I already had a BLitt it was, however, technically possible to submit a DPhil after only a further three terms’ fees. More importantly, there was nothing that stated that the fieldwork on which a DPhil would be based could be conducted only while a student was actually enrolled at the university. My plan, therefore, was to commence fieldwork while not being a student at Oxford, and then to re-enrol at such time as I might have the money for three terms’ fees. I had this plan checked with the university authorities, who replied that while it was ‘within the letter of the law’ it was not within the ‘spirit’ of the law. I decided I was not that much concerned with matters spiritual, and, in any case, I could live in Greece (my proposed fieldwork location) much more cheaply than in Oxford, and so prepared to set off on fieldwork. At this stage, however, and despite my lack of any official university status, I also became the grateful recipient of generous help from the Institute, from my college, Wolfson, and from my designated supervisor-to-be, Dr J.K. Campbell. In 1977 the Institute awarded me a £1,000 scholarship from the Philip Bagby Trust (then a quite significant amount of money) which took me to Greece. I returned to Oxford after ten months, largely for academic reasons, and worked for about six months as the Graduate Assistant at the Institute. At the same time, I was made a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson, and although this carried no stipend, it did give me a free meal a day. The Institute then awarded me a further £1,000 Philip Bagby Trust scholarship with which I returned to Greece. Even more important, my ‘supervisor’ (and I put the word in inverted commas only because I was not, of course, enrolled at the university), suggested that I write an ESRC research proposal to be submitted in his name. We received the grant, which then employed me as Campbell’s Research Assistant. I could now officially enrol for DPhil studies funded by my ESRC salary. I completed fieldwork in April 1980, and on my return to Oxford, I set about writing up as quickly as possible (since it was imperative to complete before my research assistantship ran out), and submitted my DPhil thesis in December 1981. So in the end I did follow Wendy James’s advice, I did complete the long haul, and not really ‘against the odds’. In fact, I think the odds were stacked in my favour, given the amount of help I received from both individuals and institutions. It is just that it was not all plain sailing – why should it have been? But how many others did? To what extent was I a survivor?

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By 1981 there were not a lot of academic jobs around, and certainly not in anthropology. I managed to get a year’s temporary position at UCL, but largely because of my Classics background, which allowed me to stand in for an academic on leave who had a joint position in anthropology and ancient history. I resigned after six months, because, very unexpectedly, I was offered the position of Assistant Director at the British School at Athens (a.k.a. the British School of Archaeology), where I had stayed from time to time while on fieldwork. I knew nothing about archaeology, but I was reasonably fluent in Greek and pretty familiar with Greece, which were assets in a job that was largely administrative. I stayed in Athens for three very enjoyable years. Since prospects in the UK were not looking good, I returned to Australia in December 1984 on a six-month fellowship to the Hellenic Research Centre at the Australian National University. Again, I was lucky. The University of Melbourne did not at that time have an anthropology programme, but it did teach Modern Greek (in which, by the way, I have no degree), and while I was in Canberra I was invited to take up a position teaching courses on Modern Greek history and society, which I did for five years. In the meantime, an anthropology programme was belatedly established at Melbourne, and in 1991 I was invited to join it – so I finally obtained a lectureship in anthropology. Let me return to the other members of the 1973/4 and 1974/5 Diploma cohorts at Oxford. Here I have done only very superficial research. Through personal contact I now know what happened to a few of those forty-five students, but on the grounds that anyone who has an academic position will nowadays appear on the faculty lists of their university’s website, I simply ‘googled’ their names. This, of course, is far from foolproof, and the results far from exhaustive. Some people – mostly, I presume, women – may have changed their names since 1975; some may have died. What I can say with confidence is that of the twenty-three students in my 1973/4 Diploma cohort, at least eight currently hold an academic position in the UK or abroad. That is roughly 30 per cent, and there may be more. Of the twenty-two students in the 1974/5 cohort, I can only find three who I am certain hold academic positions – but again, there may be more. I do not think that amounts to a ‘lost generation’. But there is another important consideration: securing an academic position is hardly the hallmark of worldly success. I suspect, and I certainly hope, that many of those who did the Diploma or even went on to take the BLitt and DPhil in the 1970s, but who do not show up as teaching academics, may have gone on to have exciting careers in

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other walks of life in which their time at the Institute proved fruitful. About ten years ago, when I was teaching at the University of Kent, I went to Canterbury Cathedral to watch a ceremony. One of the figures in the procession looked strangely familiar. To my astonishment he turned out to be a fellow DPhil student from the Institute, whom I had not seen for twenty-five years. He was the cathedral’s Canon Treasurer, and has since become Bishop of Ramsbury – his robes, titles and achievements considerably outshine my own. Roger Just is Professor Emeritus at the University of Kent. He studied Classics at the University of Melbourne and, in 1973, came to Oxford (Wolfson College), where he completed the Diploma in Social Anthropology, and subsequently a BLitt and DPhil, the latter based on two years’ fieldwork in Greece. He taught briefly at University College London, and then for three years was Assistant Director of the British School at Athens. In 1985 he returned to Australia where he was a lecturer in Modern Greek Studies, and then in 1991 senior lecturer in Anthropology. In 2002 he became Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent. He is the author of Women in Athenian Law and Life (Routledge, 1989); A Greek Island Cosmos: Kinship and Community on Meganisi (James Currey, 2000); Love in a Changing Greek Climate, and Other Essays (Cambridge Scholars, 2018), and with David Zeitlyn, Excursions in Realist Anthropology (Cambridge Scholars, 2014).

Chapter 5

IS NECESSITY THE MOTHER OF INVENTION? A. David Napier

How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all? —Firesign Theater album, Columbia Records, 1969

Achievement is often, as we all know, a mixed blessing: it is hard for those who successfully achieve to consider it other than deserved. Although Europe and America after the Second World War experienced growth and prosperity, most of us had parents raised during the Great Depression and wounded not just by war. Many had also suffered, or seen their parents suffer, from prejudice and discrimination. It was natural, therefore, that when they succeeded they considered their own achievements as deserved. In pre-war England, religious and ethnic minorities felt discrimination at Oxford and Cambridge, even though Jewish undergraduates had been permitted since 1856, and the 1871 Universities Tests Act had abolished the ‘tests’ that had held back Catholics and non-Christians. Many seeking a university degree ended up at my present academic home, University College London, which had been established to combat the extreme hierarchies that dominated Oxbridge life. Those lucky enough to survive the Second World War would return to their homes in Europe and North America determined both to achieve financially and to reshape their nations in ways that were more stable and fairer. It would take another decade for Europe to rebuild, but by the 1960s things looked substantially better in Western Europe at least. In short, those who taught us following the social

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upheaval of the 1960s were positioned, as was their generation by and large, to make better lives for themselves than their parents had known. As we were learning by the late 1970s, they would also on the whole do better than their children. For example, in North America, people of our parents’ generation could send their children to university on trade wages. Most could have a job, own a home and buy a car. Many even had something called a savings account, and (if they were a bit frugal) could take their families on the occasional holiday on other than borrowed money. Discrimination was still everywhere – and not only in race and religion. Women had significantly limited rights, as did some men. Not being a certain height, for instance, could prohibit even the whitest of Anglo-Saxons from door-to-door sales work. You needed to be able, after all, to impose yourself on prospective purchasers. In the UK the post-war years were harsher; but universities were opening up, and life peerages were introduced so that hard-working achievers might even end their careers with a Sir, Dame, Lord or Lady before their names. Indeed, such distinctions would eventually also go to rock musicians, airline moguls, and various people whose previous status opportunities – business or academic – had been severely limited. While most applauded this bringing down of inherited status, and also the emergence of significant forms of upward mobility for those who might benefit from hard work, it is easy to see how difficult it would become for the fortunate not to think that status was a thing now justly earned – that somehow the world was theirs and that its future depended in some way on what they did. In the worst cases, not only did opportunity provide a chance to achieve, it also led to a sense of having been chosen. American president, Ronald Reagan, for example, openly expressed the view that he was a member of a privileged generation – the last to enjoy the world’s fruits prior to Armageddon (Vidal 1987); and in the UK his friend and admirer, Margaret Thatcher, was on her own mission to eviscerate the very welfare state that had allowed her to attend Oxford and eventually become prime minister. In short, Oxford of the 1970s was ill-inclined to imagine a future world that it was somehow not a part of making; it even had (and still retains) its own degree programme (PPE) for those intent on careers in government and politics. But how quickly expectations change around what comes with a degree!

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*** I arrived in Oxford in September 1976, an artist and recent postgraduate in Phenomenology from the University of Leuven in Belgium. While I now cringe at anthropology’s late and inaccurate use of ‘phenomenology’ to describe any simple phenomenon, at that time few had heard of phenomenology, and fewer had read beyond popular existentialist works in translation. The year 1976 was when Rodney Needham, my supervisor, would briefly direct what was then the Institute of Social Anthropology. Evans-Pritchard had died only a few years earlier, and the Institute more or less resembled a living homage to ‘E-P’ in the form of so many of his students occupying teaching posts. The Institute was both their sibling battleground and our academic fortune. There is no need to count all of the names present and visiting to sense the diversity amongst then senior staff; rather one only has to consider what different forms of anthropology (let alone personalities) were represented in the voices of Godfrey Lienhardt, Edwin Ardener and Rodney Needham to understand how well Evans-Pritchard had fostered an intellectual environment that was rigorously contested. Lienhardt’s Divinity and Experience (1961) was, and to my mind still is, one of the finest books ever written by an anthropologist; Needham’s then recently published Belief, Language, and Experience (1972) was a monument to precise critical thinking about structural anthropology and the Durkheimian social fact; and Ardener was setting up his own form of new critical thinking, creating a postgraduate équipe keen to reshape the discipline. In short, Oxford was teeming with diverse ideas, but socially not altogether functional. Friday afternoon seminars were a display of all manner of intellectual gymnastics, and sometimes the air was heavy with smoke and solvents, depending on what had been consumed in local pubs at midday. Students literally held their breath in anticipation of what might emerge, but the memorable moments were not the ones that led to a vulnerable speaker being intellectual crushed. What I remember most were the carefully constructed comments, rendered as innocent inquiries, but filled with irony. Being too openly clever (‘clever-clever’) was definitely frowned upon. Godfrey Lienhardt was the master of this art. Now, as I look back on those days, I miss most his witty remarks in which he might compare certain indigenous practices, or the behaviours of guest speakers, to the idle habits of various North Oxford amateurs. Today, one

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of my prized possessions reminds me of his reflections on often-idle Oxford life: an inscribed copy of Lagooned in the Virgin Islands by Hazel Ballance Eadie (1931), handed to me late one night after several bottles of wine at Godfrey’s – bottles whose first pour was ceremoniously offered as a libation over the Yoruba divination pot that stood in the middle of his sitting room. Godfrey was surely one of the funniest people I have ever met, but also unexpectedly kind and supportive for such a cynic – not only in terms of making sure we students were enjoying ourselves in the satyr’s den, but going out of his way to attend to our often-precarious welfare needs. In my case, Godfrey convinced Wolfson College to mount an exhibition of my paintings so that I could defray the cost of my degree. I will return to that precariousness later, but I need first to give a broader portrayal of student life as I remember it – both to sense how unique a moment it was at Oxford, and to establish also how much since then things have changed in our field. *** For a North American already living hand-to-mouth as an artist, Oxford was an absolute liberation. Had I wanted to attend a North American university, I would have been bound by multiple requirements (indeed, as our own students are today) – requirements that as an artist, even with a good degree in philosophy, I would have been hard pressed to meet in terms of time and expense. But the Diploma in Social Anthropology proved the ideal conversion course: my supervisor, as those who shared Rodney’s time knew well, was demanding – in fact, extremely so. I still remember our first lecture in the Institute’s Banbury Road Annexe. ‘So, do you still want to do this’, Rodney asked, as I stood by while Andrew Duff-Cooper rolled a cigarette? Later that day we met for our first weekly Diploma group discussion. There were thirty-two of us, I think – in any case the Institute’s largest class ever, we were told. At that meeting, we were informed that no one receiving a degree from this programme had ever failed to find a university post. Little did we know that six years later only half a dozen of us would have our DPhil, and fewer still would have regular work in any university. Indeed, our cohort would emerge wondering what on earth had happened to this field of such promise. As things declined in the world of academic opportunity, we were regularly asked by our tutors what we would do when we left anthropology to return to our ‘real’ professions. We had sympathizers, principally amongst

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younger staff – Peter Rivière, Nick Allen, Wendy James and Bob Barnes – but the reality was, nonetheless, not promising. This increasing instability meant that we students spent a good bit of what little free time we had talking about the relationship of social anthropology to our former fields – law, medicine, professional rugby, the Royal Marines, the clergy in Nepal and in Nigeria, to name just a few. The fact that most of us had had previous careers meant that we were also aware of how we differed from senior staff educated in colonial settings. We had no course on research methods, and the notion that anthropology could or should play any applied role in the day-to-day lives of those we studied was dismissed, if not wholly frowned upon, as not academically rigorous. Most of those who taught us had conducted sponsored fieldwork in colonial environments under the aegis of one or another colonial office or religious organization. But they knew, even if they could not accept the fact, that we were about to inherit a quite different world. These (mostly) men had engaged in what was already by then understood as a traditional kind of salvage fieldwork; and their responsibilities to their students were framed by related expectations of what we should engage in. One lecture a week was the norm, so that a Reader could actually write a book – as Needham sometimes did – by cleaning up a series of lectures delivered over a term or two. Each staff member was responsible for advising his or her group of four to six Diploma tutees once a week for an hour-long tutorial in which we read out an essay we had hastily written after devouring as many books and articles as the intervening days allowed. At least that was the way the more demanding tutors operated. The fact that some tutors did not make such demands would, regrettably, lead Mrs Thatcher a few years later to come after Oxbridge with an especially heavy bludgeon. While some students were led to believe by supervisors that tutorials were moments for chatting – and even ‘optional’ – Needham proved relentless. Yet, there were no required courses, and I spent much of my time in philosophy following A.J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire and Rom Harré. Friday Anthropology seminars were key moments each week, and I think I never missed one except on the occasional weekend when I would drive to the Continent to make my fees by setting up another exhibition of my artwork. This I did first with the assistance of ‘Hobson’s Choice’, a Triumph 2000 sedan (held together by plastic filler) that I had bought in an industrial neighbourhood (Blackbird Leys) from a man named Hobson. Later, needing a bigger boot for my artwork, I moved up to a 1960 Jaguar sedan, which I purchased for

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225 pounds and later named ‘the old ham’ following a breakdown in Dusseldorf. However, in spite of my selling art, it became more and more difficult to make my fees, as the time for my art diminished while educational costs rose quickly. All in all, though, the Diploma could not possibly have been a better experience. A well-known Marxist historian had insisted on renting me (at cost) his house in centrally located St John’s Street, so there was always a setting for dinners and late-night talk. And, like many in our cohort, my Diploma merged immediately into a BLitt in 1977/8, the first real independent research I had done in the discipline. At that year’s end I found myself across a table from a formidable examiner, my soon-to-be friend, Francis Huxley. Rodney had only said I should be prepared for the unexpected; but Bob Barnes was laughing at my fortune. Because I wrote my dissertation on masks – at that time an only marginally suitable topic (nobody, then, worked on art or material culture in the department) – I came to the exam with a mask under my subfusc. Barnes had suggested I meet one surprise with another – so I did, hiding my own paper mask for the exam just in case I needed it. *** All in all, it proved an exciting year, full of ideas and stimulating friendships. But then it all changed. Although Mrs Thatcher had benefited herself from the largesse of the welfare state, she was determined to do what Oscar Wilde had once said of men – namely, kill the thing they love. Like many upwardly mobile academics of the era, she had no idea of just how much she owed the state. So, in addition to dissolving the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), making it the slave of economics, she introduced for the first time an overseas student fee that was calculated by taking the cost of running the university and dividing it by the number of students served. For me, this meant that my annual expenses rose more than threefold over two years. Moreover, because I had to take a year off for financial reasons, my fee schedule was not fully protected. In the end, the lives of my British and European classmates appeared rather gilded. I, on the other hand, related to the students from poor Commonwealth countries who just went home. Indeed, Oxford was, as if overnight, reshaped into a place largely for those lucky enough to have government funding or family resources. Most of my friends were fortunate in being funded, but I was denied by my nationality from UK support, and had not advanced enough at that stage to seek

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out a conventional research grant. No matter – a year away made my resolve to continue all the firmer. What is easily forgotten today is just how damaging these actions would prove to be for higher education in the long term – including some decades of depression in which academics would lament the collapse of their disciplines. It is hard to know what things might otherwise have been like – for the changes were profound, affecting radically how all universities would function in coming decades. I remember writing a letter to the University Gazette in which I lamented the battle between state and status, recalling Marilyn Monroe’s favourite fantasy of removing her clothes in church, and asking if the practice might be considered for Encaenia (Napier 1989). The letter, I was later told, had been cited at that year’s Encaenia. But the tragedy prevailed: it was a difficult moment for those of us who saw things coming undone so overtly. But Mrs Thatcher eventually got her comeuppance. The university for the first time violated its own tradition of giving prime ministers honorary degrees by denying the Iron Lady hers. Indeed, even Tory dons found themselves asking why the university had provided the opportunity for this former student to get an advanced degree for experiments related to pumping air into ice cream until it collapsed – something Jeremy MacClancy, actually went on to make a matter of record (1992), asking if her task might be viewed as an early concern over inflation! What I am trying to paint here is an atmosphere of decline that not only satisfied governmental bean counters, but also perversely fuelled a widespread fatalism amongst university staff that made our tutors passive about our discipline’s future. Although our daily lives as students were affected by the less than optimistic demeanour of those who taught us, the larger battle being waged was between state and status – one in which government was prepared to leave empty the Chair of Regius Professor of Greek because of the failure of classicists to produce ‘deliverables’. To call government’s strategy wrong would be to suggest that it had an informed motive beyond its clear misunderstanding of why and how the Oxford system of learning worked. Now, things have changed dramatically. Some of us embrace and even work with overseers and assessors who attempt to make our discipline ‘relevant’ and ‘outcome driven’. And the effects on what we knew and valued are palpable: any student who wants to do real fieldwork involving the study of a new language, I now advise to enrol part-time to provide a sufficient window to learn. And ‘research

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methods’ – which urges us to know in advance what we will discover – have replaced basic human curiosity regarding what ‘other’ ways of thinking might reveal to us. Indeed, there is so much more that could be said on this account in the face of our discipline’s bowing to the absurd and ridiculous. But before I seem to protest too much that perhaps we had hoped for the impossible, we should remember just how brutal and ignorant those changes were. Oxford’s several funded degrees awarded yearly were reduced to a few; and each and every time a teaching post became available we hungry-and-waiting postgraduates were gathered together and informed by senior staff that funding cuts were so radical that they considered it irresponsible to extend false hopes by hiring one of us temporarily – so unstable was academic life at the time. No doubt their own disillusionment combined with our academic inexperience to fuel this unpleasant situation. Causes aside, the results were the same: the field we were told was in a state of decline. My experience is a case in point: I still remember my tutorial visit to Needham’s single room in All Souls following the news that I had passed my BLitt viva. At this meeting Needham set out the implications of Mrs Thatcher’s new policies. As a North American I did not qualify for SSRC support aside from the few hundred pounds the Institute controlled through its Alan Coltart Scholarship. They were happy to give me this. But the bottom line was that I needed to rethink my degree. Were I to proceed with the monies I had either earned as an artist and set aside or borrowed, I would now need to forget fieldwork before the degree and rethink my plans for studying ritual healing in Indonesia. I would teach for a year, save what I could, and return in autumn of 1979. I would have only one year, and if I were to make a go at transforming my BLitt into a DPhil, I would have to do something unheard of – complete the entire process before that year’s end. That project eventually became my first book. Frankly, I cannot describe the delirium involved in trying to do what had not been done before – write an Oxford DPhil in one year. A chapter draft every six weeks was the rule we set. In turn, I got comments back overnight or over a weekend – an endless stream of sleeping in libraries and forgetting at times that there was a world beyond my desk. I still cannot describe this experience with any accuracy or clarity, except to say that I felt I had nowhere else to go. I came to Oxford as an artist with limited finances in 1976/77; wrote my BLitt in 1977/78; spent 1978/79 back in the United States to save money; and returned in 1979/80. I left Oxford rather battered with my DPhil completed at the end of that year.

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To be honest, the whole process was a scramble, and I suspect my dissertation in the Bodleian reflects that, though I haven’t looked. In fact, thanks to Mrs Thatcher, my career was reverse-engineered: I got my degree first; got my dissertation accepted as a book, and only then went to the field; stalled the publication of the book; rewrote the manuscript in light of the fieldwork; and had it published some six years later, in 1986 – so much for planning. Yet, in his typically mannered way, Rodney played all of this down in the Preface he wrote for Masks, Transformation, and Paradox (Napier 1986). Instead, he described my study as an outcome of the ‘Oxford method’ (hah!), following supportive remarks with equally critical ones, rather leaving adrift those accustomed only to reading recommendations filled exclusively with superlative comments. I refer to this Preface because what Needham says there is very much about the opportunities Oxford provided to our ‘lost generation’ – about the key elements largely lost to higher education as we now know it. In fact, what caught my attention in reading again this Preface is Needham’s undramatic use of the word ‘eclectic’ – saying towards the end of his introductory comments that my study emerged out of the kind of open intellectual inquiry that at that time was possible at Oxford – in his own words, ‘an eclectic conception of the scope of a comparative study of social facts’ (Napier 1986: xx). Although today the word ‘eclectic’ has largely negative connotations – being principally used to suggest a thing that does not conform to recognized standards, patterns of behaviour or common practice – what Needham meant was that learning about something one felt to be important would always be characterized by gaps in one’s thinking and apparent idiosyncrasies. However – and this is his important caveat – if one’s inquiry, as he says, ‘eventuates in a success of method, then this outcome will tend to validate the comprehension and the analytical resources of that approach’. The ends, that is, justify the (liberal Oxonian) means. In fact, Needham was marking a world on the wane; at the time, there were plenty of eccentric people in Oxford, and lots of creative thinking. I was merely doing what I thought I was supposed to do, and following (with much admiration) the eclectic – even eccentric – ‘methods’ of much greater minds that filled so many senior posts in the university’s departments and colleges. It was a time of great privilege that is now not only lost on government, but also lost on most of us. That world, to put it brutally, no longer exists; for what Needham was suggesting is less that the proof is in the pudding, and more that

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the worth of an idea can only be known by allowing it both to grow in its own way and to take a curious mind where it might. For in pre-Thatcherian Oxford it was possible to work in a style he called ‘accretive’ – where ‘contentions are delineated by way of slow divagations’ (Napier 1986: xix). That style of work, to say it simply, was not characterized by preconceived benchmarks, outcomes or deliverables (whatever any of these may actually be). It worked, rather, in a way that is hardly available to students today. Yes, we were a ‘lost generation’, but only to the extent that we were the first victims of a new regime that bore little or no resemblance to the one from which we had so benefited. Exploration, as I remember it, was about learning something new, and the journey was unpredictable. Those were the days when Keith Thomas (1971) could work for fifteen years to produce his magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic. Just think where such ‘methods’ might lead one in the context of our contemporary, government-imposed research assessment exercises, and you get the sense of how much the world has changed. This all is not to say that our research was largely unmethodical. The ‘divagations’, importantly, were just that: for the way one worked was a function of who one was, and our ideas were similarly a part of how we developed and grew, not something rolled out in a classroom or measured by management specialists. Learning was understood, if I can generalize, as a part of how one’s character developed and matured – a thing full of gaps, failures and an occasional minor inspiration. The anthropological method, such as it was, either came from one’s devotion to the subject at hand or simply failed to emerge. Graduate programmes were opportunities for graduates to prove themselves, not places for yet more structured teaching. If one failed to produce innovative work, it was because one had failed – not because one’s tutor had not made one succeed. *** Although the Oxford ‘method’ made, as Thatcher argued, huge demands on resources, what we have today as an outcome of government’s attack on thinking is a space where the opposite is indeed the case: one only has to ponder the real prospect of fieldwork-dependent research being seriously interrupted by illness, disease or lack of funds to see just why that old style of anthropology is increasingly erased by the 4-year PhD in which departments are penalized by government if students do not graduate on time. For this we should hang our heads low.

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Such change begs several questions. First, who can judge innovation and by what credentials do our funding councils position themselves to be capable of either recognizing or assessing it? What do assessors mean by a ‘deliverable’? After thirty years of such assessing we have no evidence whatsoever that they can either identify or promote it, let alone show us that they have produced any more or better knowledge than did those who taught us. Second, looking at the extraordinary output from UK anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s, who can hold the new regime to account for the fact that this attempt to manage ideas has failed? Is there anything like a new critical voice today in anthropology? Or have we bowed in defeat? To grasp the distinction I am trying to make, it is useful to resurrect how innovation and invention are understood in establishing the ownership of ideas – that is, in intellectual property law, where what we as creators actually own must be articulated in precise ways. Though we mix innovation and invention indiscriminately, the distinction is actually important: innovators modify an existing art or technology, whereas inventors create wholly new paradigms. This is to say that today our field is full of not-very-assertive innovators, while the inventors have been silenced if not excommunicated. The distinction is important because the innovator needs to understand enough of an existing technology or practice to be able to reverse engineer a thing and make it better. The innovator is like the Japanese manufacturer who does not invent the car or laptop, but makes both better by unwinding an existing practice or product. Innovation, that is, focuses largely on studying carefully how something works in order to make it better, flourishing in today’s funding environment by refining a thing already invented. By contrast, an inventor is fascinated by new paradigms that he or she intuits but cannot verify in advance. Like the light bulb, the phonograph or today’s internet, invention may actually work by distancing oneself from what others take for granted, engaging in a process of experimentation in which ideas and concepts are merged or superimposed in an effort to create a novel construction that may initially fail more often than work. Indeed, the literature on creativity makes this quite clear. Inventors recognize that only 3 per cent of all patents ever actually prove profitable in financial terms, becoming ‘deliverables’ taken up to good effect by society. Inventors know the risks of invention, of following an idea to wherever it leads. They look for connections in places where others have prematurely closed off something that seems in the short term to be going nowhere. Like the don in his study looking

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at the same notes for those fifteen long years, the inventor holds on in the hope that a new pattern will emerge. It is a big gamble that depends much on persistence, because so much is risked. And, of course, that is where government has failed us, and where we fail one another by suiting ourselves up for rank mediocrity. As Thomas Edison once famously said, ‘to invent you need a good imagination and a pile of junk’. The ‘pile of junk’ being, of course, the stuff of imagination that provides the raw material for the merging of unlikely things. Invention is, in this respect, a messy ‘divagating’ business – governed by practices that are intuitive and rarely known in advance. Research on creativity makes this clear (Napier 2011; 2014: 151). But given the challenges of divagating, perhaps even ‘practices’ is too strong a word; for the inventor is not choosing between deduction and induction. That polite philosophical distinction has long ago been put aside in the discovery process. Inventors almost never end up discovering what they set out to find. Instead, they work to sharpen their fluency so that when something unexpected emerges, they can recognize it. This need for alertness raises difficult questions. What has happened to the space for invention that the academy once occupied and supported? More troubling still, how can we expect anything new to emerge if the ‘pile of junk’ has been prematurely recycled and the would-be inventor told that unless he or she can promise a particular outcome, the chances of being supported are next to nil? What I am saying here is that the worst consequence of the drive to make universities efficient was not just the loss of a place where mistakes were common and waste was allowed. If the legal distinction is right, it may be fair to say that our accounting practices have all but eliminated the very basis on which invention depends. For who can say what damages to invention have been caused by so-called assessment exercises? Indeed, we can only suspect that such damages are incalculable, because we cannot know what we cannot know. To put it another way, if we never have the opportunity to explore that ‘pile of junk’ there is no way of knowing what new things might have emerged from our ‘collage’ or ‘bricoleur’ practices (Lévi-Strauss 1962); and because we have sanctioned ourselves, there is no way of appreciating why such environments matter. By way of analogy, we cannot have first-hand knowledge of places we have never visited; which is why migrants always know more about the places they migrate to than do those who receive them know about the migrant’s homeland. As Mark Twain once famously said, ‘travel is fatal to

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prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness’ (1869); for myopia has a very high cost. To state this argument in personal terms, I am sure that my oneyear DPhil was only made possible because I was surrounded at Oxford by a degree of speculative engagement that has long since disappeared from the lives of most academics. Combining our accounting procedures with our bionic addiction to technology means that we now spend much of our professional lives accounting to others who know little about the nature of speculation, and even less about its potential merits. This point, I think, cannot be overstated. There was space to think at the universities of the 1970s, and especially at Oxford, where learning required uncertainty, making mistakes, and being told by one’s mentors of the gaps in one’s thinking. Tutorials provided such a space – one that today has been replaced by a classroom in which a syllabus takes on the status of a contract of obligations on the lecturer’s part, and an assumption of success on the part of the student. Whether the environment we knew can be reclaimed is an open question; for it may be that we shall not see again the kind of inventive space made possible (in spite of all of its flaws) by a way of learning that stood wholly unaccountable to those not only suspicious of thinking, but sometimes even overtly anti-intellectual. What was brought down by government’s war on invention, in other words, was not only the hopes of so many of our era who fell to the wayside when a form of learning was taken down, but the belief that government would or could ever recognize the damages done by ignoring its core obligation. Thus, let’s do raise the challenge. Let us demand that those who brought down free thinking demonstrate what their ‘deliverables’ have produced – I would say it is little or next to nothing. Indeed, what is now lost on those too young to remember an Oxbridge before Mrs Thatcher is how what we can know, as Kant put it, may stand beyond our capacity to wonder what might have otherwise been. A. David Napier is Professor of Medical Anthropology at University College London (UCL), and Director of its Science, Medicine, and Society Network. He is also co-editor of UCL’s Culture and Health book series, and the author of several books and numerous articles on culture, health and human well-being. He is currently the academic lead of a global ‘Cities Changing Diabetes’ initiative, and Innovations Lead for SoNAR-Global, a network designed to integrate social science knowledge into both infectious disease responses and effort to limit anti-microbial resistance.

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References Eadie, Hazel Balance. 1931. Lagooned in the Virgin Islands. London: G. Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. Trans. The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966). Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1961. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacClancy, Jeremy. 1992. Consuming Culture. London: Chapmans. Napier, A. David. 1986. Masks, Transformation, and Paradox. Berkeley: University of California Press.  . 1989. ‘State Versus Status’, Oxford Magazine 44 (Hilary Term): 15–16.  . 2011. ‘Time to Stop and Stare’, Le monde diplomatique (November). https://mondediplo.com/2011/11/16inventors, last accessed on 20 February 2020.  . 2014. Making Things Better: A Workbook on Ritual, Cultural Values, and Environmental Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press. Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language, and Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Twain, Mark. 1869. The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company. Vidal, Gore. 1987. ‘Armageddon?’, in At Home: Essays 1982–1988. New York: Random House, pp. 92–104.

PART II

Ethnography as a Vocation

Chapter 6

CHANGING QUESTIONS? REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN AND OUT OF OXFORD SINCE THE 1980S David N. Gellner

Introduction: Some Personal Background Every generation believes that it has to struggle more than its predecessors. I was astonished some years ago to discover that EvansPritchard, writing in the Oxford Magazine in 1951, had claimed that ‘the members of the Institute are so overwhelmed with teaching, supervision and administration that they are unable to get on with their own research or even essential reading’. My initial reaction was disbelief: I could only explain it as E-P trying to get university funding for further posts. The evidence that things were easier in the past is clear in the recorded numbers: there were many fewer tutorials to take, far fewer doctorates to supervise, as yet no undergraduate degrees to worry about, and lectures were advertised as ‘Some Anthropological Topics’, ‘Some Themes in Social Anthropology’, or some such title that enabled the lecturers to speak about whatever they happened to be working on at the time. It cannot be denied that the number of students one is now expected to teach has gone up (even at Oxford), the number of conferences, journals, books, forms to be completed, and committee meetings, have all increased, and new bureaucratic audits have been invented that would have seemed incredible to earlier generations. Meanwhile the number of hours in the day has stayed the same. In short, it is a measurable fact that the pace and the oversight

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of academic life have both intensified considerably (cf. Napier, this volume). In mainstream subjects it is also undeniable that it takes a lot longer to get an academic job than it used to: a process of professionalization has taken place,1 such that a PhD and articles in peer-reviewed journals, plus evidence of teaching experience, are an essential minimum, where once (well into the 1960s) a first-class BA from Oxford or Cambridge led straight, or almost straight, into a permanent academic job. It is true that anthropology was always different from mainstream subjects, in that people came into it having studied other subjects and often having had other careers beforehand, so that a one-year Master’s degree and a period of fieldwork for a PhD were the mandatory initiation rites from a long time back, well before PhDs were normal in other fields.2 It is a small sample, but in 1976 I met three US anthropologists, all doing doctorates at Yale, and I visited each of them in situ in three different villages in west central Nepal (a wonderful practical introduction, for an 18-year-old, into what it is that social or cultural anthropologists actually do). Of the three, one (reportedly very brilliant theoretically) dropped out before finishing the degree and went back to practising as an architect. The second, Harvey Blustain, finished his doctorate (a potentially important but still unpublished study of Hindu-Muslim caste relations at the village level in hill Nepal), but after further fieldwork in the Caribbean, he abandoned academic anthropology for the world of consultancy. Only one of the three, David Holmberg, ‘stayed the course’, eventually making it into a tenured professorship. He is now a respected senior anthropologist of Nepal and the Tamangs (Holmberg 2012). A similar ‘casualty’, who established himself at Oxford as an expert on Nepal, Tibet and development studies, was Graham Clarke; sadly, he died, tragically young, in February 1998, without ever obtaining the permanent job that he had craved. As for anthropology as a vocation, I suppose I always had it. My Buddhist friends in Nepal occasionally distinguish a born Buddhist from a convinced or converted one. In that sense I was a born anthropologist, and only converted later, inheriting the subject not only from my father, but also from my maternal grandfather, a civil servant, who was (according to my father) a ‘tribes and mountains’ chap, at his happiest administering far-flung bits of Ethiopia during the final years of the Second World War. In my gap year, before going to university, I spent four months in Nepal (as noted above), followed by five months in South East Asia, learning basic Nepali and basic

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Bahasa. In both places I dabbled in ethnographic enquiry (and ran into anthropologists) wherever I went. Later, in the summer before the final year of my BA, I spent two months visiting my parents’ fieldwork village in the High Atlas in Morocco. I struggled against this inheritance of, or predisposition towards, anthropology in that I studied politics and philosophy as an undergraduate, followed by an MPhil in Indian Religion, also at Oxford, in a department that even today is still called Oriental Studies. I continued directly from the MPhil to my doctorate, which for bureaucratic reasons had to be an extension of my MPhil dissertation. Despite this attempt to move into adjacent fields, rather than into anthropology, it was perhaps overdetermined that for my doctorate I would end up going back to Nepal between 1982 and 1984 to spend two full years doing ethnographic fieldwork (what a luxury such an extended period now seems). The topic – inspired by a trio of foundational classics in the anthropology of Buddhism by Gombrich (1971), Tambiah (1970) and Spiro (1970) – was Buddhism and society, but translated to a Mahayana Buddhist setting. My twenty-one months’ training in Sanskrit was not enough to turn me into a Sanskritist, but it did give me a big leg up in the task of acquiring basic fluency and literacy in the two local languages I needed, Newari and Nepali, both of which have large numbers of loan words from Sanskrit. It was also very helpful in doing the anthropology of Buddhism.3 Thus, I came into anthropology sideways, as well as by descent and affiliation; I suppose I had less of a sense that pathways were blocked (as the call for papers put it), because it was not a path that I had consciously planned to take in the first place. When the time came to apply for jobs, the first teaching job I managed to get (after several failed interviews) was a 0.5 post in anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. From there I applied simultaneously for jobs in the Religious Studies Department at Lancaster and the Human Sciences Department at Brunel. But for some accidents of history, I might have ended up as an anthropologist in a Religious Studies Department. I grew up with anthropologists in the house, I mixed with anthropologists while a doctoral student, I taught sociology and anthropology to Human Sciences students at Oxford, as well as at Oxford Brookes, I was supervised by an honorary anthropologist (the fieldworking Sanskritist and Pali scholar, Richard Gombrich), my DPhil was examined by an anthropologist (who had also taught me as part of my MPhil and influenced me), and in due course I married an anthropologist.4

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Changing Questions: The Rise and Fall of Dumont in the Anthropology of South Asia In the 1980s, the towering figure in the anthropology of South Asia was Louis Dumont. I think it is fair to say that his large comparative questions about egalitarian and hierarchical societies, and perhaps even more his powerful application of structuralism across a whole range of material, were, at the time, considered of supreme importance, whether one agreed with him or not. It is hard to exaggerate the difference between his reputation then and his reputation today. Dumont has gone massively out of fashion among South Asianists, to the extent that he is neither read nor cited, for reasons that I will come to presently (although among non-South Asianist anthropologists his stock has recently started to rise again, thanks to the revival of interest in questions of values and hierarchy). In 1981, as part of my MPhil, I followed Nick Allen’s option on the anthropology of South Asia. It was taught as a class, and each week we read one chapter of Homo Hierarchicus alongside other relevant work, almost as if they were holy writ plus commentary. Although not wholly uncritical, it was clear that Dumont’s was the central and foundational synthesis around which all else revolved. The comparative reach of Dumont’s work can be illustrated by the conference discussing his work that was held in Oxford in 1984; it was attended by many of his team from Paris.5 The conference led to the edited volume Contexts and Levels (Barnes, de Coppet and Parkin 1985). Dumont himself had been at Oxford from 1951 to 1955, as lecturer in the Sociology of India (later retitled the Social Anthropology of South Asia), following M.N. Srinivas. Dumont’s work was, of course, deeply structuralist, and very little interested in the details of historical change. He thought he could characterize caste society; he believed that characterization was valid not only for both North and South India but also from 2,500 years ago to the present. He emphasized continuities where the fashion, very soon afterwards, was to look for ruptures. For me, his whole approach was a breath of fresh air. Instead of piling up more and more examples and concentrating on the heterogeneity of the subcontinent, he made it his business to isolate the underlying principles that stayed the same, despite the hundreds of languages, local deities, different customs and manifold variety. That structuralist approach was very powerful and very impressive. Notwithstanding the extremely flattened view of South Asian history that Dumont adopted, it would be a mistake to interpret his

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approach as uninterested in ethnographic details or variety – on the contrary. Until he switched his primary attention to looking at the intellectual history of Europe, Dumont made it his business to keep on top of ethnographic details and to deal with cases that might prove difficult for his theory (e.g. most notoriously, the radically different kinship systems in North and South India). The power of Dumont’s approach lay in the fact that it could – all at once – deal with the small details of micro-ethnography and, at the same time, make big statements both about a whole subcontinent and about global comparisons between different culture areas or ‘civilizations’ (as Dumont did not hesitate to call them, though other anthropologists did recoil from the term, perhaps even before they abandoned ‘primitive’).6 Dumont’s original fieldwork was in South India. If his reputation were to rest merely on the monograph he produced from that fieldwork (Dumont 1986), it would be as no more than a worthy ethnographer of that region. But he came to Oxford and he began to work out his idea that a wholly new approach to the anthropology of South Asia was needed. He aimed for a hugely ambitious overarching framework that linked anthropological fieldwork to the historical knowledge of India as a civilization that Sanskritists and historians were producing, and had produced. This ambition was outlined in the manifesto, ‘For a Sociology of India’ (Dumont 1957), with which he opened Contributions to Indian Sociology, the journal that he and David Pocock launched as a vehicle for this new approach. Dumont’s position was a direct attack on the crude, evolutionist history that would explain the whole of South India’s history in terms of the interaction of two essentialized identities, Aryan and Dravidian. It was also a plea for getting the relationship between anthropology and Indology right – a plea that had a big effect on me and many other South Asianist anthropologists of my generation (and those of the generation before, including my own supervisor, Richard Gombrich, and Nick Allen). In the years that followed this manifesto, published not long after he returned to Paris from Oxford, Dumont went on to pen Homo Hierarchicus, which ambitiously set out to analyse the fundamental ideas lying behind a whole civilization, through the detailed examination of a single village, while simultaneously pulling in conceptual tools and examples from an extremely wide range of sources (Dumont 1980, originally published 1966). Since his own fieldwork village was dominated by a single caste, Dumont chose to provide a detailed analysis of caste interaction by drawing on Mayer’s monograph from

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central India (1960). Dumont explicitly framed his own enterprise as the inverse of Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic study of democracy in America. Just as the latter had gone to America to understand the new egalitarian form of society emerging there, which was destined to be the future, so Dumont went to India to understand the paradigm case of hierarchical society, which he took to be the past of all of humanity. There is unfortunately an ambiguity in Dumont’s basic procedure that he himself never fully faced up to. Is ‘India’ meant to be thoroughly typical of all premodern societies? In other words, is it a good case study to understand hierarchy because it exemplifies in a particularly clear form what is found everywhere else, and because its organic intellectuals produced clear theorizations of what they were doing? Or was India rather an extreme case, more hierarchical than other premodern societies? Consistent with his own comparative project, but sadly for those of us committed to studying South Asia, Dumont abandoned South Asian studies around 1977 and began to focus exclusively on the European side of his comparison. He wrote a number of studies on the emergence of egalitarianism in Western thought, and specifically on the economic ideology that underlay it. However, whereas the South Asian part of his theory was underpinned by the meticulous ethnography of Adrian Mayer, as well as his own wrestling with (among many other things) contrasting marriage patterns between North and South India, when it came to Europe he focused primarily on the history of ideas and on formative thinkers. He left institutions and social practices out of account, defining his project in terms of the comparison of ideas and values. It was a fundamental part of Dumont’s study of India to emphasize that approaching South Asian society with assumptions derived from the West – assumptions that took individualism and egalitarianism for granted – meant that one was highly unlikely to be able to grasp either the deepest values or the social logic of the way that South Asian people, households, corporate groups, or the wider society actually operate. Those deepest values rest on hierarchy and holism in a way that is antithetical to dominant Western values. Dumont sought to relativize one’s own values, as part of scientific method, in search of universal generalizations. In one sense Dumont’s approach aligned him firmly with long-standing anthropological imperatives not to judge and not to import external assumptions into the study of other societies. But, equally, his stress on holism and hierarchy put him completely at odds with the contemporary anthropological

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imperative to identify with the underdog and to attempt to unmask the ideological pretensions of the powerful, wherever they are found. Early on, Dumont ran into criticism from Berreman (1971) that his model merely reproduced the viewpoint of Brahmins. Most tellingly, Berreman recounted how he had outlined Dumont’s theory of caste to a group of his Rajput informants in the Indian Himalayas, and they had responded: ‘You’ve been talking to Brahmins!’ Later this criticism came to be taken for granted as a majority view among scholars of South Asia. A more nuanced criticism came from Richard Burghart, who sought out recent historical evidence, on the basis of which he pointed out that kings and ascetics both had their own hierarchies, in which they were the apex. Thus, rather than a single agreed model, Burghart suggested that there were at least three competing hierarchical models in play (Burghart 1978, 1990). Others pointed out that Dumont’s model, which placed the Brahmins unequivocally in the top position, above Kshatriyas, might be the outcome of first Muslim and then British rule, which created the power vacuum that left Brahmins dominant within Hindu society (Fuller 1977; Quigley 1995; Dirks 2001). There was one line of criticism of Dumont that sympathized with his attempt to give an overall account of South Asian society, of the place of caste within it, and the role of the king or the powerholders in relation to local hierarchy. This line of criticism sought to complexify his argument, to add nuances, alternative viewpoints, and ethnographic and historical richness. It did not, however, dismiss out of hand the attempt to provide an overarching theory. I would place Parry’s work (1979, 1994), Burghart’s work (1978, 1990), and even Raheja’s powerful, ethnographically grounded critique (1988), in this trend. An alternative tendency dismissed Dumont’s whole project as untenable and impossible. Diverse reasons were given. It was impossible because (1) no single model could apply to both North and South India (Fuller 1989); (2) no single model can explain the whole of South Asian history starting 2,500 years ago; (3) Dumont had been hoodwinked into thinking that caste has been around for millennia when it only came into existence in the colonial period (Dirks 2001); or (4) this theory of caste was an ideological construct to support Brahmin pretensions (Berreman 1971; Appadurai 1986). Dumont’s model was so dominant at one time that it produced considerable and very evident frustration for those who opposed it. In a review article published in 1998, Quigley wrote: ‘Dumont has a lot to answer for. It is doubtful whether the explanation of caste will ever recover from

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the damage done by his seductively elegant proposal that caste is to be explained by the hierarchical opposition of purity and impurity’. He concluded his review by saying, ‘If progress is to be made in the explanation of caste, it is time to stop using Homo Hierarchicus as the theoretical baseline for discussion: Raheja’s book [The Poison in the Gift] would make for a much more profitable point of departure’ (Quigley 1998: 289, 291). As a parenthesis here, one may note that Chris Fuller’s work is notable for having always resisted Dumontian models. As befits a student of Leach, Fuller has always been sceptical of static models. His ethnography was always grounded in particular historical conjunctures, whether the twentieth-century Kerala of The Nayars Today (Fuller 1976), the supposed single ‘jajmani system’ (Fuller 1989), or the functioning of a Great Traditional Hindu temple and its priesthood in the specific contexts of a postcolonial state (Fuller 1984) or globalizing Hindu clientele (Fuller 2003). Frustration with and rejection of Dumont gave way to total neglect. For some time, the topic of caste was avoided altogether. Yet caste forced its way back onto the agenda of South Asian scholars, because it is still very important in South Asian society, increasingly so in the political sphere. Insisting that caste is not important has begun to seem like complicity with the predominantly high-caste members of the middle and upper-middle classes, who would like to pretend that such difference has faded away and that today there really is a level playing field, a genuine meritocracy.7 Another striking trend is that religion has become a less pressing topic than it was for anthropologists of South Asia. In so far as anthropologists of South Asia study religion today, it tends to be as an epiphenomenon of politics and ethnicity. In other words, religion is not studied as an autonomous sphere, but only as part of contemporary political trends (usually Hindutva). There is, therefore, much less work on ritual, for example, than there was in the immediate post-Dumont generation. Today, scholars working on ritual traditions and practice tend to come from Indology or Religious Studies departments. It is strange that anthropologists, who once contributed so much to ritual studies, no longer specialize, at least in the South Asian context (Africa would seem to be different), in the detailed documentation of ritual.8 The questions that interested me in the 1980s were very much in the Dumontian paradigm. I went to Kathmandu quite explicitly to carry out ‘salvage ethnography’: to study a hierarchical form of Sanskrit-based Buddhism that existed only in Kathmandu as a

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survival of what was once far more widespread in northern South Asia. The Tantric Buddhist culture that was alive then was and is a direct descendant of the practices and traditions found in North India a millennium earlier, before Muslim invasions destroyed the HinduBuddhist culture of the Pala kingdom of Bengal. It was a premise of my work that whatever I found would be interesting for its own sake, but that there was also this wider historical and comparative dimension. In other words, it was valid – with all due consciousness of historical changes – to understand a form of life in the present as representative of something a thousand years older. The charge against this was that the procedure is irredeemably Orientalist. We would hesitate to posit thousand-year-old continuities and stability in Greece or Italy: we might even laugh at someone who tried. Is it fair to do so in Asia? My answer was that we can study the differences, the changes that were introduced at different periods of Nepalese history (though I confess I did not become a historian and did not go into these questions as deeply as they deserve). It is of course important not to provide succour for naive nationalist history that sees essentializing continuities wherever there is a common ethnonym across the centuries. But, at the end of the day, it is possible to show that there have been very significant continuities of ritual and liturgy, and we can see traces of similar continuities of social practice.9 I was not alone in being interested in these questions of long-term continuities and civilizational identities. My old friend Charles Stewart shared my enthusiasm for Dumont. As I had studied Sanskrit and set off for the subcontinent, he had studied classics and then set off for fieldwork on the island of Naxos to work on ideas about spirits that survive from ancient Greek times (Stewart 1991). Consequently, we also shared an interest in questions of syncretism, of the relationship of ‘Great Traditional’ religious traditions to the ‘Little Traditions’ that they encompassed (Stewart and Shaw 1994; Gellner 1997b). At a certain point, when Braudel and the longue durée were discovered, other anthropologists started to acknowledge the possibility of asking longterm historical questions. Like all social anthropologists of the time, we had internalized the critique of evolutionism, of speculative and deductive history, but we were interested in history all the same (Ortner, Bloch, and others who were turning to history at the time, were influences).10 We could see also that Dumont had been too structuralist and too schematic (in contrasting Hinduism and Islam, for instance).11 We could see that Dumont’s framework, despite the undoubted power of

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his vision, was too simplistic; and it did not, and perhaps could not, allow for social and historical change, for contestation or for power dynamics to the extent that it should have.12 Once this was acknowledged, the big question became: If such continuities did exist, then how – given contestation, power dynamics, migration, conquests, inequality, etc. – was one to explain them? What subtle set of forces could explain long-term continuities? This still seems to me to be an agenda worth pursuing, and one that has not yet been satisfactorily addressed.13 Dumont’s approach is seen as impossibly passé in South Asian Studies, but it appears to be experiencing a comeback within contemporary anthropology. This is thanks in large part to the efforts of Joel Robbins (2013, 2015; see also Robbins and Siikala 2014), who defends Dumont against the charge of monism, and advances a plausible interpretation of Dumontian hierarchy as effectively pluralist about values. Dumont’s German Ideology, he argues, is ‘a model for how to analyse cultural pluralism … in the contemporary world’ (Robbins 2013: 105). More generally, the revival in Dumont’s fortunes among non-South Asianists may be due to the fact that he stressed the importance of values and therefore provides succour to those arguing for a turn towards the anthropology of morality (Laidlaw 2013), as well as to those who would like to reintroduce the idea of hierarchy into social anthropological discussion (Hickel and Haynes 2018; Haynes 2017). My own reworking of Dumont consisted of reinserting him in a Weberian genealogy that Dumont himself was not keen to acknowledge (Gellner 2001).14 That more capacious Weberian framework is well suited, I argue, to accommodate the interests that are usually flagged up in contemporary anthropological writing by invoking Bourdieu and Foucault. Not only well suited, but better able to articulate them without obfuscation.

The Present Options I now venture some generalizations about the place social anthropology in the UK has reached, and where we might be heading. Baldly put, for the sake of exposition, I see four (not necessarily mutually exclusive) paths. All four find a place in the much larger Oxford department of today.15 It is possible (though unlikely, given that the temper of the times is against it) that a grand synthesis might be offered to bring them together.

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1. Anthropology as Philosophy This humanist, philosophical and occasionally deconstructionist approach views anthropology, in Tim Ingold’s words, as ‘philosophy with the people in’ (1992: 696): in other words, anthropology is and should be a kind of meditation on the nature of humanity, and the various aspects (embodiment, relation to the environment, perception of objects and human others, ethics) that make it up. Or, as Ingold puts it elsewhere, ‘The objective of anthropology … is to seek a generous, comparative but nevertheless critical understanding of human being and knowing in the one world we all inhabit’ (Ingold 2008: 21). 2. Area Studies Another option is for anthropologists to be regional specialists, becoming ever more expert on the historical, linguistic and ethnographic minutiae of particular regions of the world, but never seeking to speak to an audience larger than that, or to tackle more universal questions. 3. Collaboration with Other Social Sciences, Albeit Sometimes with Friction Remembering anthropology’s past, and drawing on anthropology’s methodological strengths, anthropologists may seek to bring something different to collaborations with other disciplines; and through such collaborations to address new problems – migration, climate change, political violence and dislocation, financial meltdown, etc. – that anthropologists would not have felt were their concern in the past. This can be done either as a pure, collaborative and interdisciplinary project; or explicitly as an applied enterprise, as when anthropology forms a part of development studies. It can also even be done in competition with sociology, as when anthropologists tackle big contemporary subjects like capitalism or neoliberalism. 4. Collaboration with Natural Sciences In this version of anthropology, it tackles universal questions in a cross-cultural way, but with a different set of disciplines, usually modelled on natural scientific procedures. Results are, in the first place, published in scientific journals; but some practitioners of this genre have proved adept at the popularizing monograph as well.

I shall now examine each of these four options in greater detail.

Anthropology as Philosophy I usually suggest to students, when they are struggling to grasp the point of some theoretical position or other, that they should ask themselves what its proponents are against. We are defined by those we hate (or, more mildly, reject). Social anthropologists have frequently defined themselves as not tourists (too superficial, do not

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learn the language, seduced by the exotic), not journalists (also superficial, also seduced by the exotic and spectacular, often use people in a highly instrumental way – so no ethics), not missionaries (who may stay long term, and know the language very well, but only want to understand the culture so that they can destroy it; too judgemental). This differentiating logic goes too far, in my opinion, when anthropologists are so determined not to be any of the adjacent disciplines (not sociology, not development studies, not economics or politics, etc.) that they try to carve out a separate sphere for themselves – whether that be ontology, cosmology, materiality, embodiment, phenomenology, or any other name for a restricted locus of human experience that other disciplines are barred from entering. Such mini spheres are defended by the creation of a subfield, with its own specialized journals, and restricted list of required references. A surreptitiously evolutionist view of the history of the subject is introduced by talking about ‘the X turn’ or ‘the Y turn’. The cynic might say that anthropology has had more turns than an ornamental maze or a Victorian hypochondriac – no wonder it feels lost. The term ‘turn’ carries with it the implication that before a certain date all literature was inadequate in some crucial respect, that previous anthropologists were heading along the wrong path, so that, in so far as theoretical orientation is concerned, nothing before a specific date or before a particular text that marks the day the correct path in the forest was found, need be considered. (This does not rule out, of course, occasionally rediscovering some long-forgotten early figure who anticipated some of the themes of the new ‘turn’, but was ahead of his times – and it usually is ‘his’ – and ignored by the mainstream figures of the subject.) Thus, for example, the so-called ‘ontological turn’ may be interpreted as an atavistic longing for a return to the days when anthropology was not required to engage with other social sciences. In other words, it may be seen as an attempt to carve out a separate domain where social and cultural anthropologists can safely pursue their interests without fear of interruption or correction from those with more conventional and more quantitative ways of assessing the world. Inspiration is taken from philosophy, but not from other empirically minded disciplines. Put more charitably, in terms closer to those of the adherents of this point of view, the aim is to evolve new concepts of the social, and to take seriously the worldviews of others. Generations ago, Durkheim too sought to carve out a special sphere of social phenomena, safe from the interference of psychologists

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and others, which sociology and social anthropology (ethnologie in French) would have the authority to explain. For a long time, anthropologists thought the remaining small-scale (‘tribal’, ‘primitive’) societies, where they had a monopoly on expertise, likewise provided a protected area for social anthropology. But those societies are all now well on their way to being incorporated within contemporary nation-states. Anthropologists have no monopoly on studying marginalized peoples, and must compete with or, alternatively, cooperate and engage with, social scientists of all stripes, whether from inside or outside the country concerned.

Regional Studies Area Studies have come under fire from a number of quarters – as tainted by the strategic priorities of government funding, for example, and as incoherent intellectually, because dividing up the world into sections that neither in the past, nor today, reflect true cultural boundaries.16 The dangers of such area specialization are best exemplified, in my experience, by scholars employed by CNRS in France: they often produce works of unrivalled scholarship, being free from the constraints of teaching and administration that so overburden most anthropologists elsewhere. But the price, in many cases, is an ever-increasing ‘inward-turned-ness’ – an inability to communicate beyond the ranks of specialists, even to anthropologists working on other parts of the world. This tendency is found in other academic systems, of course, but the institutional support it receives in France, in terms of lifelong employment in CNRS, attached to a ‘lab’ specializing in one part of the world, with no need to simplify for students, or to teach, encourages it more than elsewhere. Area specialization, taken to an extreme, is profoundly untheoretical, even anti-theoretical. It is sometimes defended as plain good sense, but the classic rebuff applies: common-sense empiricism is itself a theory, or smuggles in whatever theoretical disposition was dominant at the time when the writer in question came of intellectual age.

Collaboration with Other Social Sciences In this understanding of the subject, anthropology can and should cooperate with other disciplines. Cooperation can occur within the framework of ‘Area Studies’ but it does not have to. There is, undeniably, a tension between an area studies framework and a purely

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anthropological one; I personally believe we need both kinds of emphasis. There is, for sure, in any specific project or piece of work, ultimately going to be a trade-off, especially when choosing how and where to target the published outcomes. A collaborative approach comes very naturally to the many anthropologists who work outside anthropology departments, often in more applied contexts (development studies, business schools, geography, social policy, health, education, or religious studies). When one is a lone anthropologist among colleagues trained in other disciplines, such an approach is almost imposed by the working environment. The danger, of course, is that anthropology becomes a source of decorative ethnographic case studies or a token nod towards the inclusion of qualitative methods. Those occupying such structurally interdisciplinary positions need to demonstrate that social anthropology can make a difference. Such collaboration is, of course, encouraged by the UK government’s and the funding councils’ ‘impact agenda’. But it may not, and evidently does not, appeal to at least some of those who teach within anthropology departments and see themselves as the guardians of the sacred flame. I suggest that it is time we took up serious interdisciplinarity within anthropology departments as well. One can be more ambitious than this and claim that anthropology actually has the tools to incorporate and explain the insights of other disciplines and produce a new holistic synthesis.17 This may sound too grandiose and Parsonian, but it may not be beyond the scope of some of our more ambitious practitioners of the anthropological art to try to construct such an edifice. At the outset of anthropology, it was possible to aspire to study radically different ways of understanding the world and radically different ways of being in the world. Those who would turn inwards, and restrict the discussion to fellow anthropologists, seem to me to be motivated by the desire to continue this founding inspiration of the discipline. The problem is that the world has almost entirely moved on, so that, like it or not, we are reduced to studying ‘alternative modernities’.

Collaboration with Natural Sciences While the practitioners of the first approach (certainly Ingold, if not others) are in favour of using the findings of natural science, they do not usually wish to adopt the methods of natural science. That is precisely what is aimed at by the advocates of this fourth approach (e.g.

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Currie et al. 2010; Atkinson and Whitehouse 2011). The aim here is to use the statistical and mathematical tools of evolutionary biology, as well as the experimental methods of psychology, and apply them to cultural and historical questions. Teaching and research imitates the laboratories of ‘hard’ science; the results are aimed at scientific journals. Collaborators tend to be biologists and psychologists. Of these four trends within the subject, it is probably the first and the fourth that tend to be the most iconoclastic. Their advocates discover new ‘turns’, exaggerate newness, and cast those who ignore or oppose the new discovery into darkness. The adherents of the new trend frequently turn inwards, constructing a series of sub-disciplinary specialized fields, with their own seminars, terminology and journals. They talk mainly among themselves and barely communicate with other anthropologists, let alone beyond, though exceptions can be made for similarly self-constituted subfields in neighbouring disciplines (e.g. fellow practitioners of STS [Science and Technology Studies]/actor network theory). It must be particularly galling for distinguished scholars, who have worked on their subjects all their lives, to discover that the anthropology of (as it may be) children, or of Christianity, or of values, is entirely new, with a completely new literature and set of references from which their own work is either excised or barely mentioned because it falls before the supposedly key founding text or moment. This tendency apart, work of value, indeed even progress in knowledge, is possible in all four approaches, and therefore all four approaches should be encouraged.

Conclusion: Why Anthropology? Anthropology is always going to be in more of a crisis than sociology. Sociology may have numerous trends and reinventions, but it has a bedrock of subject matter and method, and a comfortable relationship to national units and social problems, none of which are going to go away, despite transnational migration and globalization, despite sometimes difficult relationships with government agencies. Anthropology, by contrast, has an ineluctable connection in the public eye to vanishing tribes and to ways of life that are increasingly extinct. One need only think of the BBC/Discovery series ‘Tribe’ (2006–8). One of its predecessors, ‘Disappearing World’, disappeared from our television screens over two decades ago. It appears that audiences took messages from the series that were quite different from those the filmmakers had wished to convey.

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In spite of all the problems, I believe there is and will remain a place for anthropology as what I call the Heineken discipline: it can reach and refresh the parts that other disciplines cannot reach. In other words, it may now be in competition with other disciplines, occupying the same space as them, and may now need to cooperate with them in many cases, but, because of its bloody-minded preference for always questioning the terms of the question, and always giving priority (if not ultimate authority) to the voices and ideas of the research subjects, and finally because of its openness to contingency in the field (Holmberg 2012), it simultaneously gets further than, and often fits most awkwardly with, established agendas. This makes it the awkward discipline (Gellner 2009b), but also the discipline with potentially the most to offer. It can actually find things out that you would not expect and could not have predicted, because it goes with an open mind (or as open as can be), rather than a closed methodology and a list of pre-set questions. Of course, other disciplines have gestured towards, and even taken some steps towards, such open-mindedness (e.g. ‘grounded theory’ within psychology) – but these are only faltering steps. In other social science disciplines, half a dozen interviews are considered to produce plenty of data; and four months is considered a long time in the field. Of the four approaches outlined above, the first and the fourth are probably the least interested in political questions. Yet one of the ways in which approaches have changed from the 1960s onwards is an increasing – sometimes overwhelming – appreciation of the role of the political. It would be a highly unanthropological move – though not one foresworn by many of the founders – to insist that there is only one right way to do anthropology. All four tendencies that I have outlined on the basis of contemporary realities surely have deep roots in the subject’s past. I offer a final reflection on the particular generation, or generation and a half, that is examined in this volume. Just as one’s own children grow up incredibly fast, so anthropologists pass from being young and feeling like outsiders to becoming ‘elders’ of the profession in what seems like the blink of an eye. Yet it may well be that for this particular generation the ageing process was compressed into an even shorter than normal period by some of the institutional factors discussed in other chapters – for example, the lack of jobs in the 1980s and the expansion thereafter. David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology and a Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. Among his many books are

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Religion, Secularism, and Ethnicity in Contemporary Nepal (co-edited with S. Hausner and C. Letizia, OUP, 2016); Global Nepalis: Religion, Culture, and Community in a New and Old Diaspora (co-edited with S. Hausner, OUP, 2018); and Vernacular Religion: Cultural Politics, Community Belonging, and Personal Practice in the UK’s Nepali Diaspora (editor, Vajra, 2019).

Notes Since this chapter results from an invitation to reflect on my own career, it is inevitably autobiographical in parts and there is no point apologizing for this. Thanks are due to Lola Martinez, Charles Stewart, João Pina-Cabral, Glenn Bowman, Nick Allen and members of the seminar in Kent and follow-up meeting in Oxford. The usual disclaimers apply.  1. For anthropology, see Kuper (1983), Spencer (2000), Rivière (2007), Mills (2008).  2. In so far as the cohort represented by this volume were taught on arrival at Oxford that anthropology was an unsuitable subject for undergraduates and could only be imparted to graduates, there was a degree of sour grapes about this. Both Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard had tried hard to get the university to agree to an undergraduate degree in anthropology, without success (Rivière 2007). Eventually, in 1973, the Human Sciences degree, in which today’s students must take one Finals paper either in Sociology or Social Anthropology, was accepted, though not without controversy, a whiff of which continues right up to the present.  3. More detail on what led me to Nepal is given in Onta (2004: ch. 10). See also Gellner (1992). For a sophisticated theorization of the nested, hierarchical relationship of South Asian vernacular languages to Sanskrit, see Sheldon Pollock’s magnum opus (2006); for my detailed assessment of this work, see Gellner (2017).  4. In the 1980s and 1990s I also learned a great deal from the annual meetings of the South Asia Anthropology Group (SAAG), which in those days always met in SOAS. The format was, and still is, designed to maximize interesting discussion (papers are circulated ahead of time and briefly summarized by discussants, rather than being presented). In the late 1980s, Chris Fuller and Ron Inden were regular and active participants.  5. I missed it because I was still in the field, but people were still avidly talking about the meeting when I got back. One of the stories related to Mark Hobart’s punning interlinguistic chapter title ‘Texte est un con’, which apparently shocked the French participants.

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 6. Chris Hann (2011; Arnason and Hann 2018) has recently called for a return to civilizational analysis within anthropology, and he convened a conference at MPI-Halle on the theme, to which I contributed a paper (Gellner 2018).  7. See Jodhka (2017) and Naudet (2018) as just two examples of the new work on the continued importance of caste. My own recent work on caste and class in Nepal aligns with these trends in the social scientific study of South Asia.  8. My own scholarly production reflected this more general shift: I wrote four detailed articles on Newar Buddhist liturgy early in my career (Gellner 1988a, 1991a, 1991b, 1997a), but nothing since. I had thought this might be an artefact of my own professional trajectory, but I noticed at Chris Fuller’s retirement celebration at the LSE, attended by most of his students, that none of the younger generation had followed Chris himself into the analysis of ritual.  9. See Gellner (1988a) on monastic initiation, and (1991a) on the guru mandala ritual. 10. For a discussion of Geertz and Bloch, see Gellner (1999). On anthropology and history, see Hirsch and Stewart (2005). 11. See Gaborieau’s decisive critique (1993), which shows just how hierarchical premodern Islam was when it arrived on the Indian subcontinent. 12. The Dumontian response to this critique is to say that his framework is about ‘values’ and not about what actually happens, but this was never very convincing, except possibly to a few of Dumont’s inner circle. For a sophisticated periodization of South Asian history that is very definitely post-Dumontian (and not indebted to him at all), see Pollock (2006). 13. Robbins (2007) is a much-read attack on anthropology’s ‘continuity thinking’, and a plea to take both social ruptures and Christianity as an ideological system seriously. It could equally be read as a plea to problematize continuity rather than taking it for granted, as is usually the case. For a useful survey and critique of the new anthropology of Christianity literature, see Hann (2007). 14. This was the inverse of Geertz, who overemphasized his debt to Weber and tried to obscure his debt to Durkheim. The precise reasons why Dumont did not wish to place himself in a Weberian genealogy remain somewhat obscure to me, but it may have derived from his stress on holism (Gellner 1988b; 2001: Introduction; 2009a). 15. The Oxford department today bears the official title School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, or SAME (a nicely ironic acronym for a department specializing in the study of difference). It has expanded enormously from the period described in the other chapters here. In 2013 it had twenty-six permanent staff, thirty-eight fixed-term and research members of staff, nine regular weekly research seminars, and six sub-units. The old ‘Institute’, now the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, was just one of the six units that make up the department/school. By 2019 those six units had grown to seven, with

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Harvey Whitehouse’s Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion being spun out of the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (ICEA). 16. Van Schendel (2002) is a classic critique of this sort. He introduced the term ‘Zomia’ to refer to the South East Asian upland area, stretching westwards into the Himalayas, which effectively lies outside, and confounds, conventional regional distinctions between East, South East, South, and Central Asia. Scott (2009) adopted and popularized Zomia in his analysis of ‘state-repelling’ spaces. 17. Another name for this may simply be ‘holism’ (Parkin and Ulijaszek 2007).

References Appadurai, A. 1986. ‘Is Homo Hierarchicus?’ American Ethnologist 13(4): 745–61. Arnason, J.P., and C. Hann (eds). 2018. Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis: Eurasian Explorations. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Atkinson, Q.D., and H. Whitehouse. 2011. ‘The Cultural Morphospace of Ritual Form: Examining Modes of Religiosity Cross-culturally’, Evolution and Human Behavior 32: 50–62. Barnes, R.H., D. de Coppet, and R. Parkin (eds). 1985. Contexts and Levels: Anthropological Essays on Hierarchy. Oxford: JASO. Berreman, G. 1971. ‘The Brahmanical View of Caste’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 5: 18–25. Burghart, R. 1978. ‘Hierarchical Models of the Hindu Social System’, Man 13(4): 519–36; reissued in R. Burghart. 1996. The Conditions of Listening: Essays on Religion, History and Politics in South Asia (edited by C.J. Fuller and J. Spencer). Delhi: Oxford University Press.  . 1990. ‘Ethnographers and their Counterparts in South Asia’, in R. Fardon (ed.), Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, pp. 260–78. Currie, T.E., et al. 2010. ‘Rise and Fall of Political Complexity in Island SouthEast Asia and the Pacific’, Nature 467: 801–4. Dirks, N. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: University Press. Dumont, L. 1957. ‘For a Sociology of India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 1: 7–22.  . 1980 (first French edition 1966). Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.  . 1986 (first French edition 1957 [thesis 1954]). A South Indian SubCaste: Social Organization and Religion of the Pramalai Kallar. Delhi: OUP. Fuller, C.J. 1976. The Nayars Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 . 1977. ‘British India or Traditional India? An Anthropological Problem’, Ethnos 3–4: 95–121.  . 1984. Servants of the Goddess: The Priests of a South Indian Temple. Cambridge University Press.  . 1989. ‘Misconceiving the Grain Heap: A Critique of the Concept of the Indian jajmani System’, in J. Parry and M. Bloch (eds), Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 33–63.  . 2003. The Renewal of the Priesthood: Modernity and Traditionalism in a South Indian Temple. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gaborieau, M. 1993. Ni Brahmanes, ni Ancêtres: Colporteurs Musulmans de Népal. Nanterre: Société d’Ethnologie. Gellner, D.N. 1988a. ‘Monastic Initiation in Newar Buddhism’, in R.F. Gombrich (ed.), Indian Ritual and its Exegesis. New Delhi: OUP, pp. 42–112.  . 1988b. ‘Priesthood and Possession: Newar Religion in the Light of some Weberian Concepts’, Pacific Viewpoint 29(2): 119–43 (Ch. 4 in Gellner 2001).  . 1991a. ‘Ritualized Devotion, Altruism, and Meditation: The Offering of the guru mandala in Newar Buddhism’, Indo-Iranian Journal 34: 161–97.  . 1991b. ‘A Newar Buddhist Liturgy: Sravakayanist Ritual in Kwa Bahah, Lalitpur, Nepal’, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 14(2): 236–52.  . 1992. Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and its Hierarchy of Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  . 1997a. ‘The Consecration of a Vajra-Master in Newar Buddhism’, in S. Karmay and P. Sagant (eds), Les Habitants du Toit du Monde: Hommage à Alexander W. Macdonald. Nanterre: Société d’Ethnologie, pp. 659–75.  . 1997b. ‘For Syncretism: The Position of Buddhism in Nepal and Japan Compared’, Social Anthropology 5(3): 275–89 (Ch. 14 in Gellner 2001).  . 1999. ‘Religion, Politics, and Ritual: Remarks on Geertz and Bloch’, Social Anthropology 7(2): 135–53 (Ch. 3 in Gellner 2001).  . 2001. The Anthropology of Buddhism and Hinduism: Weberian Themes. Delhi: OUP.  . 2009a. ‘The Uses of Max Weber: Legitimation and Amnesia in Buddhology, South Asian History, and Anthropological Practice Theory’, in P. Clarke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 48–62.  . 2009b. ‘The Awkward Social Science? Anthropology on Schools, Elections, and Revolution in Nepal’, JASO-online (NS) 1(2): 115–40.  . 2017. ‘Sheldon Pollock and Max Weber: Why Pollock is more Weberian than he Thinks’, Max Weber Studies 17(2): 212–34.

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 . 2018. ‘Civilization as a Key Guiding Idea in South Asia’, in J.P. Arnason and C. Hann (eds), Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis: Eurasian Explorations. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 99–119. Gombrich, R.F. 1971. Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon. Oxford: Clarendon. Hann, C. 2007. ‘The Anthropology of Christianity per se’, European Journal of Sociology 48(3): 383–410.  . 2011. ‘Back to Civilization’ (Guest Editorial), Anthropology Today 27(6): 1–2. Haynes, N. 2017. ‘Contemporary Africa through the Theory of Louis Dumont’, Sociologia & Antropologia 7(3): 715–34 (doi 10.1590/2238-38752016v733). Hickel, J., and N. Haynes (eds). 2018. Hierarchy and Value: Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order. New York: Berghahn Books. Hirsch, E., and C. Stewart. 2005. ‘Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity’, History and Anthropology 16(3): 261–74. Holmberg, D.H. 2012. ‘Contingency, Collaboration, and the Unimagined over Thirty-Five Years of Ethnography’, in S. Howell and A. Talle (eds), Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 95–122. Ingold, T. 1992. ‘Editorial’, Man (NS) 27(4): 693–96.  . 2008. ‘Anthropology is not Ethnography’, British Academy Review 11: 21–23. Jodhka, S. 2017. Caste in Contemporary India (2nd edn). Delhi: Routledge. Kuper, A. 1983. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (3rd edn). London: Routledge. Laidlaw, J. 2013. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, A.C. 1960. Caste and Kinship in Central India: A Village and its Region. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mills, D. 2008. Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Naudet, J. 2018. Stepping into the Elite: Trajectories of the Elite in India, France, and the United States. Oxford: OUP. Onta, P. 2004. Nepal Studies in the UK: Conversations with Practitioners. Kathmandu: Martin Chautari. Parkin, D., and S. Ulijaszek (eds). 2007. Holistic Anthropology: Emergence and Convergence. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Parry, J.P. 1979. Caste and Kinship in Kangra. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.  . 1994. Death in Banaras. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pollock, S. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quigley, D. 1995. The Interpretation of Caste. Oxford: Clarendon.  . 1998. ‘The Hierarchy Trap’, Current Anthropology 39(2): 289–91.

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Raheja, G.G. 1988. The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rivière, P. (ed.). 2007. A History of Oxford Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Robbins, J. 2007. ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity’, Current Anthropology 48(1): 5–38.  . 2013. ‘Monism, Pluralism, and the Structure of Value Relations: A Dumontian Contribution to the Contemporary Study of Value’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(1): 99–115.  . 2015. ‘Dumont’s Hierarchical Dynamism: Christianity and Individualism Revisited’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1): 173–95. Robbins, J., and J. Siikala. 2014. ‘Hierarchy and Hybridity: Toward a Dumontian Approach to Contemporary Cultural Change’, Anthropological Theory 14(2): 121–32. Scott, J.C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Spencer, J. 2000. ‘British Social Anthropology: A Retrospective’, Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 1–24. Spiro, M.E. 1970. Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and its Burmese Vicissitudes. New York: Harper & Row. Stewart, C. 1991. Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stewart, C., and R. Shaw (eds). 1994. Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. London: Routledge. Tambiah, S.J. 1970. Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Schendel, W. 2002. ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 647–68.

Chapter 7

THE FIELDWORK TRADITION AND THE QUEST FOR ESSENTIAL PERPLEXITIES Signe Howell

Some years ago, I initiated a research project at my department in Oslo which resulted in the edited volume Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology (Howell and Talle 2012). We asked the contributors to reflect upon the experience of long-term engagement involving multiple returns to the same community, and the effect it has had on their work and analysis. My chapter here can be viewed as some further reflections on the importance of fieldwork, and about how I perceive anthropology. I shall discuss some theoretical, methodological and personal implications of the fieldwork tradition as this was instilled in me during my time at Oxford. The focus will be on how that has influenced my research in my two fieldwork sites (Chewong and Lio) in South East Asia. My reflections are, of course, highly personal, but I hope they will provide a glimpse of why some of us persevered in our academic vocation at a time when there were few opportunities for employment.

Oxford and the Fieldwork Tradition The idea to investigate multitemporal fieldwork was a result of a profound commitment to the purpose of fieldwork that I picked up as a postgraduate at Oxford during the period 1975–1981. At the time, Oxford did not have an undergraduate programme in Social

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Anthropology – not because it was not possible, but because (we were told) the founders of the Institute felt strongly that it was a discipline that required maturity, and that a background in some other discipline was a prerequisite. This made for a rather special student group. Many were older, with a range of experiences, which contributed to a lively intellectual climate. I arrived with a BA in Middle Eastern History from SOAS, with the aim to live in an Arab country in order to study the life of women. I knew little about Social Anthropology as an academic discipline except that it provided opportunities to travel and live with the local people. My Diploma year opened my eyes to a hitherto undreamt-of intellectual world, and I changed my focus from Arab women to the cosmology of the Chewong hunter-gatherers in unexplored parts of the Malaysian rainforest. This change was motivated by a desire to immerse myself in the life of people who had had relatively little contact with the outside world. I also wished to work with Rodney Needham. I found Needham’s preoccupation with classification, the comparative study of the human mind, and human ‘primordial characters’ (e.g. 1972, 1975, 1978a, 1978b) highly stimulating. As he had worked in Indonesia and Malaysia, his suggestion to look for a hitherto unstudied group of hunter-gatherers in the rainforest of the Malaysian Peninsula appealed. My MLitt was a comparative study based on available literature concerning the religious values and practices of various indigenous groups in the region. This was an extremely useful preparation for fieldwork. Despite the fact that most of the students had no background in anthropology, this was not reflected in the courses that were provided. A generally cavalier attitude prevailed. There was no systematic introduction to any topic, and the teachers’ lectures reflected their own current interests. While highly exciting, it also meant that our knowledge became rather piecemeal. This was to some extent rectified through weekly tutorials. Nevertheless, when I got my first teaching job at the University of Edinburgh and was required to lecture to undergraduates, inter alia on kinship, on economic and political anthropology, and on religion, I had to work extremely hard to familiarize myself with the syllabi, and beyond, in order to keep one step ahead of the students. At the Institute at the time, it was taken for granted that we students would go to unknown places and immerse ourselves in life there in order to anthropologize our findings. Ethnographic fieldwork, we were given to understand, is empirical (not empiricist) philosophy. In our investigations of the premises for social life in alien sociocultural settings, we should aim to enter into dialogue with philosophical

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(and even psychological) debates about human condition and human sociality. I did not question the idea that, by performing longterm so-called ‘participant observation’ undertaken in the local language, I would be able to contribute to our understanding of the human condition. By keeping an informed gaze upon manifestations of human thought processes expressed in utterances and behaviour, contextualizing them, and placing them in a holistic mode, I hoped to provide a more complex understanding, and one that challenged the dominant Western ones. That, however diffusely formulated, was my ambition; and that was the preoccupation of our teachers such as Evans-Pritchard (who had died before I arrived, but whose spirit was still very much present), Godfrey Lienhardt, my supervisor Rodney Needham, Peter Rivière, Edwin Ardener, Wendy James and others. Evans-Pritchard had initiated the translation into English of the work of the members of the Anné Sociologique group on the comparative investigation of ‘categories of the human mind’ as identified by Aristotle – namely, ideas of time, space, class, the person, cause and number. At Oxford, we were encouraged to continue these investigations. At least that was how I perceived it. This was not typical for British Anthropology at the time. In my work with the Chewong I have kept such issues at the forefront of my concerns, and I have written about their notions of person, of cause, of class and space/place, of myth and ritual (e.g. Howell 1984, 1996a, 2011). In fact, the title of my thesis was Chewong Modes of Thought. In my work with the Lio, I have mainly pursued an interest in classification and hierarchy of values, ritual as well as notions of personhood (e.g. Howell 1984, 1986, 1995a, 1998). My overall concern throughout has been with the constituting mutuality between cosmology, metaphysics and practice. The point I wish to emphasize is that we were given to understand that anthropology, through its method of ethnographic fieldwork, is uniquely placed to make original contributions to these and other central concepts and preoccupations. It was wildly ambitious. It was exciting. Although participant observation was presented as the be-all and end-all of the method to be employed, our teachers did not debate what it actually meant in practice, and we were given no lectures on either fieldwork method or ethics. ‘If you’re any good, you’ll survive; if not, you should not have tried it in the first place’ was the most direct advice some of us were given. Reading ethnographies and trying to glean – usually between the lines – how the writer had obtained his or her knowledge, and talking to each other, especially to those who had returned from the field, were our guides. I still remember

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the excitement in the library when some unknown person would suddenly appear and someone more senior would say ‘Hi! I have not seen you for a while’, and they would answer, ‘Well, I just got back from eighteen months in the Brazilian Amazon’ … or West Africa, or New Guinea. This laissez-faire attitude is best captured by my being presented with a torch by my supervisor before setting off for the jungles of Malaysia. He advised me to write my notes in pencil because biros might explode in the humid climate. I was also told that I should not expect to obtain an academic position once my doctorate was completed – not necessarily because of lack of ability, but because of lack of jobs in the foreseeable future. Certainly, the practice of Social Anthropology as we have known it since the time of Malinowski was what fired my imagination and enthusiasm. Long-term fieldwork and participant observation in remote and unknown parts of the world, informed by the inductive approach, set it apart from the other social sciences. Naively, I assumed that I would be able to achieve this. Naively, I assumed Malinowski himself had practised what he taught. However, I have been lucky and, by and large, I have managed a semblance of the ideal. To live with hunter-gatherers deep in the Malaysian tropical rainforest for one and a half years, to learn their language (after a fashion), to live and work with and alongside them, to be accepted into their world, to make profound friendships, and to confirm our common humanity despite vast ontological and metaphysical differences, has been a personal achievement that has given me much pleasure as well as intellectual satisfaction. My time with the Chewong was mind-blowing. Through our daily interaction, through narrative and action, I slowly unravelled the premises for and the details of their modes of thought. Much later, when I moved to the Indonesian highlands in order to start a new project among the Lio, I was motivated by similar ambitions, but this time the intellectual quest was more clearly defined. I chose the Lio for specific anthropological reasons. I wanted to put structuralism to the test. Oxford had a distinguished record of the study of Indonesian societies, and I was familiar with it. Although at the time the Lio had not been studied, literature from the region indicated that, sociologically speaking, they were likely to prove to be the antithesis to the loosely structured Chewong. I wanted to explore that in theoretical terms. The Chewong had turned out to be a disappointing challenge for a student fascinated by structuralism. A simple kinship system, an egalitarian social order, virtually no ceremonies, and seemingly little ritualized behaviour (this proved not to be the case, but it was not

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observable to the untrained eye); I had to look elsewhere for pegs on which to hang my analysis. In the end, in itself, this was very rewarding. I became interested in cosmology, modes of thought, notions of personhood, shamanism and ‘animism’. The Lio, on the other hand, were a structuralist’s dream: a kinship system based on prescriptive matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, a highly stratified socio-religio-political order, and a complex ceremonial and ritual life. This was a place to critically apply a number of classic theoretical concepts, to test Lévi-Strauss and Dumont (Howell 1985). It was fun. My relationship with the Lio turned out to be very different from what I had established with the Chewong. I will return to this. The point is that what I found, and find, exciting about anthropology is the freedom to choose where to go – within certain constraints, of course – and who and what to study; to let the topics for investigation spring out of that which is important in the community, and then relate that to anthropological concerns. Oxford allowed me this open-ended approach. In anthropology, there is little point in coming along with a detailed research project, hypotheses to be tested; theories about what one may find – that is not how it is done (in fact, it is counterproductive). I observe with dismay that this natural science model is becoming more common in anthropological research proposals today. Ethnography is, and must continue to be, the prime source of our knowledge. Of course, ethnography does not produce final answers or ‘the truth’. Rather, it provides backstage insights and thick description unlike any other method. Anthropology is at its very core phenomenological; and, with certain notable exceptions, it has always been so. Certainly, Oxford anthropology is part of that tradition. It is through critically reflecting upon our ethnographically derived knowledge about other peoples’ values and practices, and the premises for their knowledge, that anthropologists are uniquely placed to contribute to debates about human social proclivities and predispositions. The more fieldwork we undertake, hopefully the more profound will our understanding become. Observed changes in the communities studied require critical contextualization; not just in relation to the community itself and to external influences on it, but these observations must be linked to changes in the anthropological intellectual climate, as well as to those in the anthropologist herself. Change permeates social, intellectual and personal life. Multitemporal fieldwork provides a method to examine aspects of all these changes. Given that many anthropologists have undertaken multitemporal fieldwork, it is surprising to realize that there is a lacuna in

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anthropological debate precisely about the analytical and methodological implications of that activity. Although some have addressed it from time to time as a result of reflecting upon the personal and epistemological implications that repeated fieldwork present to the individual researcher, surprisingly few have made it an explicit focus for reflection. One exception can be found in an excellent volume edited by Dresch, James and Parkin (perhaps not an accident that they are all Oxford people?), Anthropologists in a Wider World (2000), in which the editors state that the return visit is part of doing anthropology. Multitemporal fieldwork raises different methodological and epistemological questions from the more commonly encountered practice of one return visit a decade or two after the original one, usually undertaken in order to check on changes that have occurred during the intervening period. Following a return visit to Tikopia in 1952, Firth calls this ‘dual-synchronic’ fieldwork. This he contrasts to ‘diachronic’ (Firth 1959: 22) – the latter consisting of multiple and irregular returns, which, he suggests, raises different theoretical conundrums. Before I present some aspects of my own fieldworks, let me consider James Clifford’s characterization of Mauss’s attitude to ethnographic fieldwork: ‘He presented generations of ethnographers with an astonishing repertoire of objects for study that put the world together: ethnography was a dipping of different nets in the teaming ocean, each time catching its own sort of fish’ (Clifford 1983: 130). From such a perspective, anthropology, I suggest, is the task of contextualizing the catches in relation to each other, both synchronically and diachronically. This is best achieved by many return visits, and by having periods in between to reflect upon one’s most recent catch; to ponder its significance in relation to one’s existing knowledge – ethnographic, anthropological, personal. The time in between thus becomes an important part of fieldwork itself. Fieldwork becomes a process, not a temporally delimited activity. The passing of time enables one, inter alia, to investigate the significance of one particular practice and observe how it changes – or continues, or disappears – over time, and to observe the depth and complexity of ‘total social facts’ as defined by Mauss, or the significance of key or dominant symbols; hence my enthusiasm for multitemporal fieldwork. An added consideration is that the ‘teeming ocean’ (the society studied) is never identical each time one throws a net into it. Yet it is the same ocean – an observation that demands a dedicated anthropological phenomenological endeavour.

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All these fine thoughts and values were instilled in me during my Diploma and MLitt years – at the pub, as much as in seminars and tutorials. There were no profound intellectual disagreements between our teachers, although there turned out to be serious disagreements about how to run the Institute. I am not going to discuss that painful period, but feel it necessary to mention it. When I left for fieldwork in the autumn of 1977, I left a relatively happy place – although Needham’s election to the professorship had already caused some turmoil. I returned eighteen months later to a very different place. The Institute seemed to me to have lost its sparkle. We students were brought into conflicts that had nothing to do with us and that we found very distressing. I tried to ignore this as much as possible, and carried out a juggling act between attending seminars at All Souls College as well as at the Institute and at St John’s College. All these occasions were intellectually stimulating, but the atmosphere at and around the Institute was not what it had been before I left. Still, I wrote my chapters for my thesis, had them commented upon, and submitted without problems.

My Fieldworks I turn next to a brief consideration of my own fieldwork history in light of the points raised above. I have returned to my two fieldwork sites in Malaysia and Indonesia many times over a period of more than thirty-five years.

Chewong My fieldwork with the Chewong, a small group of aboriginal people engaged in hunting, gathering and shifting cultivation, who lived deep in the rainforest of Peninsular Malaysia, began in the autumn of 1977. I spent eighteen months there as part of my doctoral research. In the early 1980s, having published my thesis and four articles, all of which dealt in some way with the categories of the human mind, I felt I had exhausted my material for the time being and so turned to Eastern Indonesia, where I undertook fieldwork on Flores Island with the Lio people during the 1980s and 1990s. But I did not forget the Chewong. Since the early 1990s, I have returned many times in order to keep in touch with the people and to observe how they were coping

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with various external bodies – government officials, loggers, and more recently, tourists and Muslim and Christian missionaries, who were alerted to their existence in the wake of the establishment of an elephant sanctuary on Chewong territory. All this meant that they were being pulled into the larger world around them. As I kept returning, it became clear to me that I had acquired a historical perspective and that this ought to be theorized, not least because my involvement with Chewong happens to have overlapped with a period that is probably the most dramatic they are ever likely to experience. Most literature on vulnerable populations, such as hunter-gatherers, tends to present a scenario of inevitability towards poverty, acculturation and disempowerment. But Chewong actions demonstrate the complexity in people’s understandings, motivations and choices. Little can be predicted about the way people handle new situations (Howell 2002; Howell and Lillegraven 2013). The focus of my first fieldwork was on cosmology (the word ontology was not used in those days). This led me to a study of animism, a topic of little general interest at the time, and a word that Rodney Needham strongly advised against using, but one that is receiving a lot of attention today. At the time of my first fieldwork, Chewong conformed, broadly speaking, to Sahlins’ characterization of the ‘original affluent society’ as having material plenty and needing low physical exertion in order to satisfy most needs (Sahlins 1972). The Chewong forest environment is made up of a number of non-human conscious beings with whom Chewong interact on a daily basis through the observation of a number of prescriptions and proscriptions – what I call cosmo-rules. Failure to observe these leads to illness or mishaps of various kinds caused by some non-human personage (Howell 2013). Behaviour is thus predicated upon knowledge that does not distinguish the social from the cosmological and that extends the boundary of their social world to include these animated beings. Equality, be this symbolic, classificatory or social, has been – and continues to be – a positive value, which permeates both their cosmic and social structures. Equality as a value manifests itself in an egalitarian social organization (including gender) and in peaceful interaction; competition, anger and violence are foreign behaviours and not part of their classification of the world (Howell and Willis 1989). All these factors caught my attention and have been a topic for subsequent writings. In 1977, only a handful of the Chewong adult men could speak Malay, and their people had minimal contact with the outside world.

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Today, the vast majority have mastered the national language, and most are in regular contact with the larger Malaysian society. Chewong areas have been opened up to the outside world through logging, roads and the establishment of an elephant sanctuary on their territory, which has become a tourist attraction. All of these have led to increased interaction between the Chewong and outsiders. They are under heavy pressure from the state to ‘modernize’ and assimilate into Malay society by adopting a standard rural Malay lifestyle. This entails settling in permanent villages, becoming cashcrop farmers, converting to Islam, and submitting to state institutions and control. Over the years, I have had to confront my early romanticizing of their way of life and my desire to ignore everything that I regarded as an intrusion on this image. It has been difficult to come to terms with Chewong desire for shop items and the lengths that they are willing to go to obtain them. Their reactions to the invasion of their territory are the focus of my present-day research.

Lio For reasons already mentioned, I moved my ethnographic location to the Northern Lio in 1984. Lio are settled agriculturists who live in the highlands of Central Flores, Indonesia. They practise a kinship system that is probably as close as you can get to an elementary structure (in Lévi-Straussian terms). They have a social hierarchy with priest-leaders, and they perform large-scale ceremonies that often include animal sacrifice. Prior to my visits, they had not been studied by an anthropologist, so my encounter with them was also filled with the anticipation of coming to grips with the unknown. In addition to the many differences between Lio and Chewong ideas, values and practices, their experience of the outside world was also very different. Lio had already been Catholic for about forty years when I first arrived, and most could speak Indonesian, but their existential reference points continued to be anchored in pre-Catholic understandings. In retrospect, I realize how my training had instilled in me a disregard for Western influences. My visits have spanned eighteen years and it was only towards the end that I began to taken an interest in how Lio interact with external agents, especially with the Catholic Church (Howell 2016). However, during my time, changes have been much less dramatic than those that the Chewong have undergone.1

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Multitemporal Fieldwork – Some Lessons and Perplexities Most anthropologists are likely to agree that repeated fieldwork over a long period will give rise to enhanced understanding. This is probably the case; one’s language skills improve, one’s access to people’s lives becomes evermore relaxed, one is able to contextualize new events and grasp complexities more easily. But it is also the case that the more one observes and the more one learns, the more the picture becomes muddled. In my experience, clear patterns are more easily discernible in the relatively early stages of fieldwork than after many years and revisits. This does not mean that the early perception is wrong – or right – only that complexity muddies the waters. As we experience a complex multitude of contexts, the core values emerge more clearly. We learn the grammar and syntax of social life, which allows us to relate new events to old contexts. However, multitemporal fieldwork does not give rise to a seamless perception of history. Rather, it results in a series of ethnographic presents. The anthropologist drops in from time to time, picks up the threads, tries to understand what has happened in the intervening period and links this to the current situation and to relevant occurrences in the past. I have been involved with Chewong for forty-one years, during a time when they have gone from being ‘an original affluent society’ to one in which they have to cope with a number of new factors as a result of the intrusion of the modern world of Malaysia. Changes in Lio life are much less dramatic, but there too they are observable. Both Chewong and Lio have entered a cash economy. What I have learnt is that, powerful as these external forces are, they could not have occurred without some degree of collaboration from Chewong or Lio themselves. The desire for shop-bought food, for motorbikes, cell phones, clothes and finery should not be ignored as a contributing factor to their changing life styles (Howell and Lillegraven 2013). Chewong certainly feel coerced; they regret losing much of their previous way of life (which they value); they are concerned about the future, especially that of their children, whose knowledge of forest exploitation is diminishing and who know little about the cosmology that made the forest such a significant interlocutor for humans. However, for the time being, they want to have their cake and eat it. Lio, being a stratified society, display a more composite set of reactions. They are more confident in their identity and more able to withstand external pressure.

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Despite the strong focus on fieldwork at Oxford, we students were not prepared for the challenges and tribulations of its practice. Matters such as how to behave when first arriving, how to establish trust, and how to overcome possible hostility were not discussed. Thinking back, it is really rather remarkable that most of us persevered and came back to write our DPhil theses. This lack of preparation for fieldwork contrasts sharply with today’s teaching in our own departments, which renders our success even more remarkable. Moreover, as was typical of the time, gender was not on the agenda of my male teachers. Women were interesting in so far as they were pawns in male social performativity. This attitude affected my early research. Despite defining myself as a feminist, who had eagerly attended Shirley Ardener’s seminars before and after going to the field and there learnt the significance of mutedness, I did not integrate a gender perspective as such into my early work. This I have remedied subsequently (e.g. Howell 1996a, 2002, 2011). No two fieldwork situations are alike. As the Chewong and I slowly got to know and trust each other, we were able to create a fiction of belonging. My first fieldwork trips with them were a case of total immersion – a situation where participation gave enormous personal satisfaction, and at the same time provoked daily intellectual challenges. A similar fiction of belonging to the same moral community did not occur in my relationship with the Lio. This is a society where knowledge definitely means power. Lio priest-leaders, who compete among themselves for prestige and authority, were determined to control what and when knowledge was imparted to me. However, the more I returned, the more they imparted. Upon each return visit, I sensed that another door to their sociocultural life was deliberately opened for my benefit, revealing previously hidden knowledge. Consequently, every time I returned, I had to adjust my understanding in ways I had not suspected. For example, it was not until my fourth visit that I was introduced to the ultimate senior priest-leader of one domain, of whose existence and symbolic significance I had been completely unaware. Similarly, thinking that I understood the complexities of their kinship system, I was unprepared for the sociological and symbolic importance played by descent through the mother (Howell 1995a). I do not think that this feature of their kinship system was deliberately withheld from me, but it is no accident that I only became aware of it once I was allowed to penetrate further into ritual spaces – both literally and figuratively.

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In Conclusion So much for what has been going on in the Malaysian rainforest and the highlands of Eastern Indonesia. I am aware that much of what I have been saying may be regarded by some as controversial – or perhaps irrelevant. There are signs that the trademark of anthropology that underscored long-lasting, intensive, open-ended, inductive ethnographic fieldwork in far off places is no longer perceived by many as essential – or, indeed even as politically acceptable. While the old methodological terminology is still in use, the actual practice of many young ethnographers is giving it new meanings. Among the more striking changes I have observed are the following: topics (‘research questions’) for investigation are more narrowly delineated; actual time spent in the field is shorter; the local language is used less, as interpreters, formal interviews and questionnaires are used more; students are less motivated by remote fieldwork sites and wish to remain with access to modern urban technology, such as internet and mobile telephone. Many projects are multidisciplinary – often with policy aims – which necessarily contributes to a demand for predefined research questions. Moreover, increasing portions of projects are undertaken in the anthropologist’s own country. I have no problem with that – I myself have carried out a study of international adoption in Norway (e.g. Howell 2006) – but the practice should not overshadow fieldwork in distant, previously unknown places. Part of the explanation for these changes may be found in the high fees and changing funding practices, and another part in the loss of an earlier spirit of adventure and curiosity about ‘unknown’ others. If this trend continues, it may, indeed, be contributing to the end of anthropology as the discipline was understood (at least by me) when I was a student. Does this matter? I think it does, especially if what is taking its place today no longer leads to the same love of anthropology by its new recruits – but this remains to be seen. Anthropology has gone through several theoretical loops during my time, and these affect each one of us. As functionalism and structuralism lost their credibility, so-called postmodernism with, inter alia, its critique of ethnography meant that in some influential circles it became politically incorrect to carry out fieldwork in distant parts of the world. Nevertheless, whatever one may criticize that epoch for, it did alert many of us to a reflexive stance regarding our own position as fieldworkers and the way we choose to write. What has emerged from the critique is a more open attitude. We have become

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more conscious of the writing process, and we value serious discussion about fieldwork methodology and the premises for representation, interpretation and analysis. This is where multitemporal fieldwork comes into its own. As we keep coming back to the same place to pick up the threads again and again, we perceive that our relationship with individuals deepens and that barriers between our understanding and theirs diminish. We return, and we reflect on the experience of return. We take up old questions and look at them anew in the light of local and personal histories, and changes in anthropological concerns. New events and issues are placed in these trajectories. Yet each fieldwork and each fieldwork experience is unique. Chewong and Lio have afforded me with very different experiences. This can be attributed both to me and to the two communities. During my initial engagement with Chewong, I was inexperienced; I was filled with romantic notions and very anxious not to offend in any way. By the time I got to the Lio I was older, I had a lot more anthropological self-confidence, and I controlled our interaction more deliberately. But the two communities were dramatically different, and this too affected our relationship. Finally, multitemporal fieldwork provides ample opportunities for serendipity. Contrary to common understanding, serendipity is not synonymous with chance or coincidence, but is the ability and wisdom to perceive the significance of an accidental event and to see connections where none are obvious. The longer one engages with a community, the more alert one becomes to such ‘accidental’ events. Above all, ethnographic fieldwork combines personal adventure with intellectual challenge – and for that, I am grateful to Oxford. Signe Howell is Professor Emeritus at the University of Oslo. She came to Oxford in 1975 in order to follow the Diploma course. She continued to write an MLitt, and in 1977 started fieldwork with Chewong, a hunter-gatherer group in the Malaysian rainforest which turned into her DPhil thesis. In 1984 she started fieldwork in Indonesia with the Lio on the island of Flores. In 2000 she initiated a joint project ‘Kinship in Norway’, in which she focused on studying transnational adoption. Her final research project was a study of international efforts to save the rainforest, manifest in the programme REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).

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Note   1. In recent years, due to poor health and the remote location of Lio villages, it has been inadvisable for me to travel to the Lio. In order to finalize some publications, I felt a great need to catch up. I was able to scrape together some money and persuade a keen and intelligent student whose MA fieldwork had been in Indonesia to undertake an eight weeks trip to them during the summer of 2017. This was a great success. I am pondering how to use that experience in my writings about fieldwork.

References Clifford, James. 1983. ‘Power and Dialogue in Ethnography’, in G. Stocking (ed.), Observers Observed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 121–156. Dresch, Paul, Wendy James and David Parkin (eds). 2000. Anthropologists in a Wider World. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Firth, Raymond. 1959. Social Change in Tikopia: Restudy of a Polynesian Community after a Generation. London: Allen & Unwin. Howell, Signe. 1981. Chewong Modes of Thought. Doctoral thesis, University of Oxford.  . l984. Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Re-issued 1989 in paperback edition by University of Chicago Press.  . l985. ‘Equality and Hierarchy in Chewong Classification’, in R.H. Barnes and D. de Coppet and R.J. Parkin (eds), Contexts and Levels. Oxford: JASO Monograph no. 4, pp. 167–180.  . 1986. ‘Of Persons and Things: Exchange and Valuables among the Lio of Eastern Indonesia’, MAN (NS) 24: 419–38.  . 1995a. ‘Rethinking the Mother’s Brother’, Indonesia Circle 67 (November).  . 1995b. ‘The Lio House: Building, Category, Idea, Value’, in J. Carsten and S. Hugh-Jones (eds), About the House: Levi-Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 149–169.  . 1996a. ‘Many Contexts, Many Meanings? Gendered Values among the Lio of Indonesia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Incorporating MAN) 2(2): 253–69.  . 1996b. ‘Nature in Culture or Culture in Nature? Chewong Ideas of ‘Humans’ and Other Species’, in P. Descola and G. Palsson (eds), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 127–144.  . 1998. ‘“May Blessings Come, May Mischiefs Go!” Living Kinds as Agents of Transitions and Transformation in an Eastern Indonesian

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Setting’, in L. Rival (ed.), The Social Life of Trees. Oxford: Berg, pp. 159–176.  . 2002. ‘Nesting, Eclipsing and Hierarchy: Processes of Gendered Values among Lio’, Social Anthropology 10(2): 159–172.  . 2006. The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. Oxford: Berghahn Books.  . 2011. ‘Sources of Sociality in a Cosmological Frame: Chewong, Peninsular Malaysia’, in T. Gibson and K. Sillander (eds), Anarchic Solidarity: Autonomy, Equality, and Fellowship in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 40–61.  . 2013. ‘Knowledge, Morality, and Causality in a “Luckless” Society: The Case of the Chewong in the Malaysian Rain Forest’, in Giovanni da Col and Caroline Humphrey (eds), Cosmologies of Fortune: Luck, Vitality and Uncontrolled Relatedness. Special issue Social Analysis 56(1) (2012): ….  . 2016. ‘Battle of Cosmologies: The Catholic Church, Adat, and “Inculturation” among Northern Lio, Indonesia’. Social Analysis 60(4): 21–39. Howell, S., and A. Lillegraven. 2013. ‘Cash, Culture and Social Change: Why Don’t Chewong Become Entrepreneurs?’, in E. Bråten (ed.), Embedded Entrepreneurs: Market, Culture and Economic Action in Southeast Asia. Leiden: Brill, pp. 133–147. Howell, S., and A. Talle (eds). 2012. Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Howell, S., and R. Willis (eds). 1989. Societies at Peace: An Anthropological Perspective. London: Routledge. Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language and Experience. Oxford: Blackwell.  . 1975. ‘Polythetic Classification: Convergence and Consequences’, Man (NS) 10: 349–69.  . 1978a. Primordial Characters. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.  . 1978b. Essential Perplexities. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. The Original Affluent Society. Chicago: Aldine Atherton.

Chapter 8

JOURNEYS OF AN ETHNOGRAPHER FROM OXFORD TO THE FIELD AND ON TO THE ARCHIVES Sandra Ott

On a rainy day in September 1973, I went to the Institute of Social Anthropology for the first time, unannounced and eager to meet my tutor. I made my way up the stairs to Rodney Needham’s office.1 When I introduced myself, Rodney observed that I had arrived exceedingly early (three weeks before the start of term). He asked me how I proposed to make good use of that time; and when I looked to him for direction, he told me to read Wittgenstein’s The Blue and Brown Books: Philosophical Investigations, and to come back in a fortnight. On returning to my small room on Charlbury Road after a pleasurable exploration of Blackwell’s bookshop, with the book in hand, I wondered if I would ever successfully complete the Diploma. I felt somewhat better when I later read that Rodney doubted that he had understood much of The Blue Book as an undergraduate (see Needham 1972.) Philosophical works figured prominently in my reading list that year. As Rodney once observed, ‘an ethnographer is unlikely to ask revealing questions about categories, inference, (and) contradiction … if he has not prepared himself philosophically to do so’ (ibid.: 198). During the course of that year, and aged twenty-two, I became acutely aware of just how little I knew. In preparation for my first weekly tutorial, Rodney assigned Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature. The topic for my first essay was: ‘Death is a fact of human experience’. Back in his office one week later, I sat opposite him on a hard, wooden chair. I gripped my paper tightly and galloped along, reading

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aloud ever faster, as Rodney leaned closer and closer. He stared at me with increasing intensity. I became uncomfortably aware that I was making bold statements about ‘human nature’. When I had finished, Rodney sighed, ‘And in what, my dear, might human nature consist?’ Rodney and I spent the following nine months stripping away the foundation of knowledge I thought I had gained as an undergraduate. Rodney incessantly picked apart my arguments, and questioned, at every turn, what I meant and how I knew that my assertions were true. Roughly halfway through the Diploma year, when I expressed utter despair and admitted that I now felt that I knew absolutely nothing, Rodney laughed, not unkindly but approvingly. In my copy of his monograph, Belief, Language, and Experience (1972), I now see that I underlined the following passage in 1973: ‘the first task of social anthropology is precisely this: the undermining of categories throughout the entire range of cultural varieties in the conception of human experience’ (ibid.: 203). I had also written ‘TUTORIAL!’ in the adjacent margin. As the author of Rodney’s obituary in The Telegraph observed thirty-two years after my Diploma year, Rodney’s scholarly works ‘often (had) the philosophical purpose of unsettling our complacent assumptions that the world is what it seems to be’.2 By the end of Trinity Term, confidence still evaded me. As I gloomily walked through the Parks in subfusc at the end of exams that June, convinced that I had done poorly, Rodney suddenly appeared. Much to his great consternation, I burst into tears and (as I recall) wailed, ‘I have failed you, and I have failed myself !’ He made me sit down on a park bench and regain my composure. I do not remember our conversation, only his kindness. In the 1970s, he and Edwin Ardener were the ‘principal poles of attraction for Institute loyalties’ (Benthall 2007: 156). Their followers, including many of us who have contributed to this volume, socialized in different venues; and the tensions between our tutors sometimes, but not always, affected relations among us. As a BLitt student, I was glad to be heading for the field. Owing to a Watson Fellowship awarded for fieldwork in Ireland, I went to Dublin in August 1974, and on to Donegal. Rodney’s parting advice was as follows: always write up field notes at the end of every day; never treat anything as unimportant or uninteresting; and live with the people rather than among them. I wanted to work on an island among Irish Gaelic-speakers. (I had spent nearly a year on the Scottish Gaelic island of South Uist as a junior in college, and so wanted to learn about Irish island life.) I chose Tory Island, being the most remote, inhabited island in Ireland at that time.3 Located nine miles off the

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north-western coast of Donegal, the island is two and a half miles long and averages less than a half mile in width. A bleak strip of wind- and sea-blasted rock, surrounded by a notoriously rough sea, the island was, in 1974, accessible only by local fishing boats. For nine months I lived with the only family willing to take in an outsider. The islanders regarded me as an oddity. On several occasions soon after my arrival, people asked me about my teeth: ‘Are they yours?’ one young woman wanted to know. Quite a few of my peers and many of the older islanders had lost all of their teeth owing to a poor diet and drastic dentistry. As they laughingly observed, my teeth reminded them that they had not yet collected the dentures made for them by a mainland dentist more than a year before my arrival. An exodus to the dentist’s office brought a dozen sets of dentures back to the island. Shortly thereafter, a doctor from the mainland held a clinic on Tory. He generously distributed Valium and heart medication, and then left. After a few days, islanders became disgruntled with both their dentures (which often did not fit) and their medications (about which they had been given very little instruction). Alarmingly, people started to swap teeth and tablets in an effort to find some satisfaction. I rang the doctor and alerted him to the problem. He then dispatched a nurse to the island to end the kula ring-like exchange of false teeth and medications. After some three months, she became severely depressed by the wretched weather and a severe infestation of mice in her prefabricated bungalow. When mouse traps and a cat proved to be ineffectual, the nurse resorted to buckets of water, linked with cords along which the mice scampered until they finally fell in and drowned. No one replaced the nurse when she returned to the mainland, but to her great credit she managed to ensure that the health and well-being of the islanders improved. The only telephone available to the islanders was in one of the island’s few shops, located in the front room of the postman’s bungalow. The shopkeeper/postman was well placed to know the latest island news and the concerns of its inhabitants. Whenever the postal boat delivered letters, people squeezed into his shop. Like me, islanders eagerly waited for him to call their names as he sorted through the envelopes that had arrived. Rodney wrote to me once a fortnight in response to the field notes I regularly sent him. He also kept me abreast of the latest gossip from the Institute. As a female ethnographer, I was in an advantageous position to study the Tory household, which played an important part in the ordering of social life (see Ott 1975). I helped with domestic chores, and was eventually invited to join my hostess and her female friends

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beside the hearth in the back kitchen for ‘talk’ (the art of gossip, backbiting and mockery). I also helped her husband and son with the harvest and planting of crops. But I was excluded from three male social activities: gambling for cattle, drinking in the ‘shebeens’ in winter, and fishing on the herring boats. In winter the sea was so rough and the wind so strong that yellowish, quivering clumps of sea foam piled up against the cottages’ walls in the small, compact village. The island’s generator only operated for a few hours a day, so the four television sets on the island offered little viewing time. People spent much of the day huddled near their peat fires, smoking, gossiping, and listening intently to the shipping forecast on the wireless. Depression was common. The woman of my house took to her bed for three months – a common practice in the 1970s – leaving me to look after her husband and adult son. I tried to be transparent about my reasons for being on the island. I was interested in the island’s history, its traditional culture, local economy, the classification of groups and individuals, the household, inheritance strategies, the marital practice of ‘divided residence’ (by which spouses remained in their natal households), and ‘talk’. Not surprisingly, I aroused considerable suspicion among the islanders. Direct questioning was considered tantamount to prying, and rumours circulated about me for the duration of my fieldwork. When backbiting, people gladly told me what their ‘unfriendly’ neighbours had said about my reasons for wanting to spend the winter on Tory. One woman claimed that I was a Protestant spy from Northern Ireland and that I was in fact only pretending to be an American. Having heard that I wrote in a notebook, one man concluded that I was an ‘informer’ for the mainland pension officer (Ott 1975: 25). Others variously speculated that I belonged to the IRA or to the CIA. Yet another rumour claimed that I had committed a crime in America and was ‘running from the police’. Such rumours deeply upset me until I realized that gossip, backbiting and speculative ‘talk’ were a kind of game, a form of entertainment (especially in winter), and the primary means of social control. The islanders had a long history of confounding the efforts of outsiders to collect information about them. I heard several stories about government employees who had visited the island to gather evidence about taxes and property ownership, only to have their papers thrown into the sea by local fishermen as they returned to the mainland. Fearful that the same thing might happen to me, I posted carbon copies of my field notes to Rodney every week. (This practice no doubt fuelled rumours about my undercover life as a spy, terrorist

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and criminal.) As Christmas of 1974 approached, I must have expressed discontent about my fieldwork. In a letter dated 14 December, Rodney wrote: A quick note on this grey and squally Saturday morning, just to wish you a cosy Christmas, and to say we look forward to seeing you fit and plump with data next spring (if not before) … I remember with such calm pleasure the peace and charm of the tea you gave me. Thank you. … Italics above to remind you that you are your own mistress (as it were) and are not compelled to be or to stay anywhere other than you wish. Yours ever, Rodney.4

That winter the islanders and I endured seventy-eight days without a boat to or from the mainland. On Christmas Day, an Irish military helicopter landed near the village, despite the rough weather, so that Santa Claus could distribute sweets to the children and adults alike. On 1 January 1975, Rodney wrote to wish me a happy new year: ‘Your two letters of early December brought much comfort and instruction: at the lowest level, that is professionally, I am greatly impressed by your observations, power of observation, observances, and so on. There will be no problem with your thesis’.5 His letter of 28 February 1975 welcomed me back to the island after I had spent a fortnight with my parents in the United States, as a break from fieldwork. Hilary Term drags along, which is odd considering how full and eventful it is, and there is little room for even the friendliest of communications. I write a line or two at a time, between visitors and tutorials and telephone calls, and have scraped together an introduction at long last to the new edition of Starcke.6 This note is done between the typing of page 3 and page 4. And in ten minutes I have to be off to Merton. Oxford has been looking so lovely as I can scarcely recall: golden stone in misty mornings, cosy lights from quadrangles in the evenings, mist around the finials, the Parks bursting with leaves and blossoms and birdsong. Whatever are you doing on that windswept rock, the air full of plangent gulls and the recriminations of your neighbours? Yours ever, Rodney.7

In March of 1975, Rodney noted that I had a ‘renewed resilience’ in my fieldwork, and generously spurred me on: What you write ethnographically is quite fascinating, and I foresee a splendid thesis. In the interim, you must read, when within range of a library, Julie du Boulay’s Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, for the parallels with what you have found – in particular, the attitude towards the responsibility of the truth – are remarkably close. Only I don’t much like Human Nature, I must say.

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We have had really a pretty good term. My own pupils are splendid, and the research class went well; Roger (Just) in particular gave a very professional and interesting paper on Greek marriage (fell word). There has been no winter, and the Parks are full of young leaves and blossoms and birdsong and the harsh cries of rugger players. Affectionately, Rodney.8

A few weeks later, Rodney wrote a few brief lines. He was ‘just off to the Radcliffe in order to read about polythetic classification’.9 On the completion of my thesis in June 1976, Rodney badgered me for months about publishing it. My refusal to do so vexed him. But he remained keen to supervise me for the DPhil. I wanted to remain in Europe but did not want to do fieldwork in Italy, Spain or Greece – favoured destinations at that time. Peter Rivière suggested that I might study the Basques.10 I wrote to Bill Douglass, the founder of the William A. Douglass Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. He recommended the French Basque Country (Franco had recently died), and directed me to Eugène Goyheneche, a French Basque scholar, who in turn directed me to a small Basque language summer programme run by ardent Basque nationalists. An old convent housed the school in a hamlet near Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Most of the students were adolescent boys who cared little about learning Basque (despite their parents’ determination that they should do so). Initially, I lived in an open-plan dormitory, until two of the boys sneaked into the room and placed live crawfish on my face as I slept. I quickly moved into a room above a café in a nearby village. The family took a keen interest in my wish to learn Basque. Through them I met a culturally proud, Benedictine Basque monk, who in turn enabled me to spend one month living with his aunt and uncle in another village. In late July 1976, Goyheneche drove me to a beautiful, remote French Basque mountain community, Santazi (Ste.-Engrâce in French), located on the border with Spanish Basque Navarre in the highest of the western Pyrenees. He knew that the Santazi people had an unusual form of summer transhumance, spoke Basque as their daily language of preference, and had kept many rural Basque traditions intact: a perfect venue for an Oxford ethnographer in the 1970s. I quickly found a household in which to live. A widow in her sixties, Kattlin Curutchague, took me in. Her soon-to-be-married son was roughly my age. Like most Santazi people, she was culturally proud. Kattlin and many other locals took my wish to become fluent in Basque seriously. Every night after supper Kattlin and I sat together

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by the open fire while she quizzed me about vocabulary. When I knew enough Basque to formulate questions and to understand responses, she also quizzed me about my daily findings as an ethnographer. Thanks to her and her son’s father-in-law-to-be, I quickly met a wide range of people. I learnt how to perform most tasks on their farms (except milking sheep, at which I proved to be disastrous) and spent most of my time working alongside my informants in the fields and, during the summer, in the mountains, where shepherds took their combined flocks for the ‘mountain’ cheese-making season. Whenever people found my questions odd, they would ask me why I wanted to know. They took a genuine interest in my desire to learn about their way of life; and they laughed with me when I made hilarious linguistic mistakes. (I once asked a shepherd, who had just returned from his mountain hut during a cold spell in late August, whether he had been amply covered in animal intercourse – in Basque, only one ‘k’ differentiates the terms for blanket and animal intercourse.) Once again, Rodney and I corresponded regularly. In October 1976, he expressed delight at receiving a ‘lovely long letter’, adding: I am so glad that you are content and that you like them [the Santazi people]; and the countryside (as in the postcard you sent earlier) is just enviably mythical and in sunset must be so poignant. You would believe but not be entranced by the narration of what a tedious series of chores and distractions has kept me from anything resembling your useful and revelatory industry. We are in the second week of full term and I have written not a line of my own since a fortnight before it began. I groan to get congratulatory letters saying how fine it must be to be free to be creative and all that … I despair, really. No need to make this longer: the snow is on your hills, the beasts descend into the valley. Love, Rodney.11

Rodney was elected to the Chair of Social Anthropology at Oxford that year. By November 1976, I had sent Rodney numerous, detailed ethnographic letters. His response to one such missive elicited the following: Honestly there is not the space in the days’ pre-emptions of time, but your letter burns my conscience and I may not let it languish in your plump file. Also, I do want to write, that is to be in communication with you. And your news is so splendid and encouraging: things could hardly be going better, nor you either. A coupla more letters and we shall have a thesis.12 Only I cannot comment on all your details, grateful though I am to hear every one. From here there is hardly any news at all. Autumn has come: that’s the first thing. Leaves fall and flatten

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on the damp pavements. Parks Road is a dream as one goes back down it at dusk in the soft air and the shade, home is more and more like a cave of warmth and cosiness to return to, and the streets suddenly exhibit all kinds of notably intelligent and interesting faces again as the new academic year begins. As for the department, there is a great deal to do, it turns out, once one considers with an efficient eye what should be done and known, and it has all kept me very busy between visitors and intruders. … I send you all professional encouragements and shall look forward intently to your return next month, or whenever the snows force you down the sheep pastures with the brute beasts and their masters all talking in a gabble of x’s and z’s. Rodney.13

A bitter conflict with the administration at the Institute was underway as he wrote that letter. In 1977, when senior figures at the university questioned his judgement in certain personnel matters, Rodney retreated to his rooms in All Souls and never set foot in the Institute again. During that first period of fieldwork in the Basque Country, I focused on traditional, rural Basque institutions: the house, the relationship between ‘first neighbour’ households, rituals, the local system of summer transhumance and cheese making. I found that certain principles organized many of these institutions and practices, most notably the concepts of rotation and something I called serial replacement. I found intriguing systems of dyadic exchange and reciprocity. In keeping with Rodney’s injunction to treat everything as potentially important, and to record observations and findings that did not seem relevant to the task at hand in 1976–77, I did not ignore historical details that emerged during the course of early fieldwork. The information simply did not make its way into my dissertation or first book. Occasionally in that period, elderly Basques would talk among themselves about the German occupation of their mountainous community. When they realized that I was listening, people usually turned quickly to other topics, insisting that it was ‘too soon to talk about the war’ and that ‘Sandy doesn’t need to know these things’. Memories about local betrayals, German brutality, and loss of life were ‘too painful’. I knew little about the German occupation at that time, and failed to appreciate the full extent to which the war had affected local life. I did, however, take detailed notes whenever Santazi people talked about ‘the dark years’ (see Ott 2017: 10–11). Thus, my field notes about the German occupation now span forty-three years. As I became more fluent in Basque and more knowledgeable about Santazi society in the 1970s, people became increasingly eager to know what I had found out about the occupation of their

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community from December 1942 until the liberation of France in August 1944. They especially wanted to know what I had discovered about ‘collabos’ – local people who had, in one way or another, aided or supported the Germans. I spent many mornings in the town hall, copying parish birth, marriage and death records. One day I came across the death of a young Santazi shepherd, Tomas. In the register’s margins, I found the priest’s notation: ‘Died in Buchenwald, October 1943’. The woman of my house told me that Tomas and his neighbour, Jean, had worked as clandestine guides in 1943. As fit young shepherds who knew the mountains well, Tomas and Jean took Jews, Allied pilots, and evaders of Vichy’s obligatory work service in Germany (STO) across the border into Spanish Basque Navarre. Someone denounced them to the local German security service (SD or Sicherheitsdienst). In 1976, the female head of my household was initially very reluctant to talk about the circumstances of their arrest and deportation. Over the years, I heard conflicting accounts of the tragedy: some people blamed Tomas’s father for the denunciation, and claimed he had done so ‘for a sizeable reward’ from the Germans. Others attributed the betrayal to a long-standing, rancorous father–son quarrel over inheritance, or insisted that a neighbour had betrayed the two young shepherds. Tomas’s father had been an active member of the Gaullist Secret Army resistance movement. He, too, experienced local betrayal and deportation to Buchenwald. Unlike the younger men, Tomas’s father survived the death camp and returned to Santazi after the war. In 1976–77, the woman of my household advised me not to ask too many questions about the tragedy, because people still tried to ‘forget and to forgive’. During the final months of writing up in 1978–79, I saw Rodney on a weekly basis. When he returned my last chapter during my penultimate tutorial, I was horrified to find that red ink, in his miniscule handwriting, covered the entire first page. He laughed: ‘My dear, I am teasing you!’ That colourful ‘page of mock-corrections’ became a long-standing joke between us and a part of the extensive file he kept about me (as he did for his other closest pupils).14 He also kept copies of drawings I made for him of works by Schiele, as well as copies of my illustrated poems from the Outer Hebrides and my undergraduate days in California. I received my DPhil in 1979. Rodney wrote a brief note shortly thereafter to thank me for my thank-you gift (cognac) and card: ‘As for the supervision, there never was a more straightforward task, and I was constantly interested by the progress of your work. It all makes a

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fine culmination to that chance encounter with Lorna (MacDougall) from which so much has stemmed … Love, Rodney’.15 My dissertation became a monograph, The Circle of Mountains: A Basque Shepherding Community (Ott 1981), an ethnography that clearly reflected the kind of training I had received at Oxford under the mentorship of Rodney Needham and Peter Rivière. As John Davis once argued, however: if (the book) owes some of its excellence to the school in which it was produced, some of its faults should also be laid at that door. It works on the assumption that that if you can show a fit between cosmology and institutions you have provided an explanation of both. So history appears mainly in the effort to reconstruct the St. (sic) Engrâcien system, and plays no part in any attempt to discover its origins nor to plot the changes in it against possible causes of them.16

A week or so after the book came out, I saw Rodney walking down Holywell and cycled over to greet him. He looked straight ahead and continued on his way. Distraught, I could not understand his behaviour. During the past three years, we had often seen each other for a drink in the pub or tea in his flat. Rodney did not speak to me for nearly one year. Towards the end of that period of painful estrangement, I sought the advice of John Campbell, who had examined my BLitt and DPhil theses, and with whom I had long enjoyed a lovely friendship as a colleague at St Antony’s. John kindly pointed out that my greatest debt of thanks in The Circle of Mountains had gone to Peter Rivière, then my husband. John was absolutely right: I had not thanked Rodney for his immense contribution to my education and friendship throughout my postgraduate years. I felt wretched. John and Rodney were friends. John suggested that perhaps I should write to Rodney. I did so, eagerly. A long silence ensued. John then spoke to Rodney, but only telling me much later that he had done so. Rodney invited me to tea, and we re-established our friendship. My career, of necessity, then took a different direction. I was fortunate enough to be appointed to two temporary lectureships at Oxford. But in the 1980s, as job prospects in British anthropology departments diminished, I decided to forge a second career in university administration, first as a study abroad director for American students in the Basque Country (1983–86), and then in London for Ithaca College’s study abroad programme (1986–89).17 In 1989, I returned to Oxford as the departmental administrator for continuing education. As a personnel manager, I put my anthropological training and skills as a participant observer and listener to good use; but I longed to return to academia. I started to write a historical novel about the

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French Basques; but when my characters faced conscription in the French Army during the First World War and, twenty-eight years later, faced German soldiers on Basque territory, I realized how little I knew about French Basques’ experience of twentieth-century wars. The German occupation intrigued me. Having heard (via the Oxford grapevine) of my interest in the war, a leading British historian of the French Resistance, Rod Kedward, contacted me. He had been a member of St Antony’s College, with which I was still connected. He came to my house with a sack full of books and papers about the Resistance, and encouraged me to start reading. Virtually no research had been done on the Basques’ involvement in the Resistance or on their experiences during the occupation. I was not sure how I would find the time, but I was determined. During my career as a departmental administrator at Oxford I saw Rodney almost weekly, for tea at his flat or, increasingly, for champagne. In September 2000, he wrote a note of thanks (as was his custom) following a pleasant evening together at my house in Oxford. The young daughter of a close American friend was my house guest at the time. Rodney found her ‘not only lovely but possessing that admirable American courtesy such as these days one finds only in upper-class continentals, now that the English have decided that diction and manners are elitist and posh. I liked your two champagnes too: that was a genial idea. Here next time, and let us not leave it too long. You never know! Love, Rodney’.18 A turning point in my career came in 2001, when I applied to become an associate professor in Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Rodney wrote to the search committee on my behalf. I got the job and faced a tremendous challenge. I had not only changed career paths, again; I had also shifted my area of specialization to the intersections of history and anthropology. But I had advantageously kept in close touch with many French Basques during my lengthy stint as a university administrator. I had returned to Santazi to see friends at least once, often twice, and sometimes three times a year. They knew me well, and most people trusted me. The Circle of Mountains had been translated into French and Basque, and was widely read in the region. Many people had also seen the documentary I made – ‘The Basques of Santazi’ (1985) – with Granada Television in its ‘Disappearing Worlds’ series. I was well placed to do fieldwork about a highly complex, confusing and turbulent period in French Basque history: the German occupation (1940–44). Rodney and his two sons visited me in Reno in the autumn of 2002. Delighted that I had ended up back in the States, he was eager

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to see my home and to find me settled in the American West, which he had always loved. The following year we four also met for lunch in San Francisco at one of his favourite Chinese restaurants. Until 2006, I always stopped in Oxford before or after bouts of research in the French Basque Country or Paris. From 2002 through 2006, I conducted fieldwork for my second book (Ott 2008a), which focused on French Basque resistance groups in four different Basque communities, and their differing responses to the German occupation. Everyone wanted me to tell ‘the right story’ about what had happened in the French Basque Resistance during the 1940s. Three rival Resistance groups operated in the province, and their ageing members and supporters still continued to find fault with one another, sixty years after the liberation. Opposing sides vied for my attention. I found that entire communities were still deeply divided by political, ethnic and class-based animosities, as well as by long-standing personal and commercial rivalries. As happened elsewhere in France, most people were neither heroes in the Resistance nor collabos who had aided or sympathized with the Germans. Most citizens accommodated to the enemy in one way or another, whether they liked it or not. When I began to investigate local experiences of the German occupation, many elderly French Basques lamented that I was now ‘too late’. ‘Too many people have died!’ they observed. ‘You should have asked us about the war ten years ago!’ (Ott 2017: 11). By that time, however, many people who had directly experienced the occupation wanted to tell me about their wartime experiences, especially in the French Resistance. The men were decidedly more forthcoming than the women who had actively participated in organized resistance. Men’s accounts of their exploits as resisters were usually filled with heroism. Men typically shifted languages from Basque to French when I recorded their testimonies. In wartime, they identified in a significant way with France. By contrast, women who spoke Basque did not make that shift. They always underplayed their role in clandestine operations. I do not want, however, to take the gender difference too far; for I have found archival evidence that some Basque women were highly vocal about their wartime achievements as résistantes, and were adamant about their heroism. They were, alas, gone by the time I began my research. I first worked in the departmental archives of the PyrénéesAtlantiques (Pau) in 2004. The trial dossiers of people accused of collaboration were not the main focus of my research at that time. I sought information about German reprisals against resisters and

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civilian populations, about grass-roots public opinion of what was going on locally, regionally and nationally, and about Vichy’s persecution of communists and Jews. Out of curiosity, however, I applied to the French government for special permissions to read a range of classified files about suspected collaborators. When I sampled some of the dossiers, I realized that I had an invaluable ethnographic resource at my disposal. One of the first files I opened contained twenty-nine long letters from a Nazi officer to a female collaborationist in Pau, as well as photographs and more than one hundred testimonies (for an analysis of this case, see Ott 2008b). Owing to time constraints and other priorities, I initially read only a small part of the file. The story that emerged from the documents seemed complicated and compelling. Thoroughly intrigued and puzzled by their Franco–German friendship, I resolved to return to the file as soon as possible. But first, I had a book to finish – one that rested more squarely in the field of social anthropology as an ethnographic study. Rodney continued to write to me, though less frequently. His letter of 18 February 2006 was very brief: My dear Sandy, I have been thinking of you, and the more this past Tuesday and with hopes for your sentimental satisfaction, but have done deplorably little about it19 … The weather continues pleasing: clear skies, golden sunlight, and freezing temperatures. I still have not written that new foreword for the Italian edition of ‘Reconnaissances’, but must pull myself together, except that physically living does become more burdensome. I hear nothing of you and the city from Guy (his son) but shall hope. Love, Rodney.20

Shortly thereafter, Rodney read one of my early articles about a Basque woman who allegedly denounced several of her commercial competitors and enemies during the German occupation of her village. Accused of ‘horizontal collaboration’ with a German officer and endangering the lives of French citizens, Mme Etxart had her head shaved at the liberation and faced the court of justice in Pau. Found guilty in May 1945, Mme Etxart spent two years in prison. I knew her, which intrigued Rodney. In his letter to me of 7 March 2006, Rodney wrote: Thank you for ‘Good Tongues, Bad Tongues’ (see Ott 2006: 57–72). I have found it engrossing and clearly expounded. Mme Etxart is an alluring character and I am sorry she was so badly treated. The Germans come out pretty well. And the moral contrast between Basque evaluations of the sexes is clearly an important determinant that an observer other than yourself would have been unlikely to perceive. May the publication satisfy your academic judges, as it ought. Love, Rodney.21

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I last spoke to him on the telephone in late November 2006. He had rung me to see if I planned to come to Oxford during the break. He told me to ‘hurry’ because he ‘had not much time left’. I was unable to make the journey, something that I shall always deeply regret. Rodney died shortly afterwards, on 4 December. I went on to do archival research for my third book, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the Western Pyrenees, 1940–1948, from the summer of 2007 through to that of 2012. As a social anthropologist, I read the trial dossiers of suspected collaborators with an eye towards the living processes of social interaction. I used anthropological theories of hospitality, commensality and gift exchange as analytical frameworks for understanding Franco–German relations (see Ott 2017: 14–15). Archival research becomes an ethnographic enterprise when the investigator engages in ‘a process as painstaking as fieldwork’ by ‘treating both documents and their authors as interlocutors’, by paying attention to ‘who speaks to whom and in what register’, and by piecing together daily routines, relationships, and wider networks of sociability in communities of the western Pyrenees. As the anthropologist Mary Des Chene once noted, ‘the condensation of archival material into notes is an interpretive task akin to that of writing field notes, and when notes of either sort are then elaborated into prose, the work is much the same’ (see Des Chene 1997: 97). Ethno-historians know how things turned out, broadly speaking, in occupied and liberated France. Through fieldwork with survivors of the period and archival research, we are able to identify the numerous historical contexts in which our characters acted. Classified trial dossiers enable us to reconstruct Franco–German relationships from individual testimonies, letters and other period documents. The ethno-historian, however, faces certain disadvantages, too. The informants with whom we work in the field were there; but the accounts of their experiences that we record, on tape and through contemporaneous note taking, consist of long-term, autobiographical memories, always subject to selectivity, distortion, and deterioration through time. We cannot supply the literal dialogue of the past, unless it is left in the records. Even when dealing with archives, we can participate in the society only through our intellect and imagination. The historical record always leaves large gaps. Testimonies can never be taken at face value. When working with trial dossiers, we rarely know how the lived reality of our characters ended – except in the few cases of capital punishment carried out in Pau. Obituaries (if we are fortunate enough to come across them) and the recollections of

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informants in the field may offer further glimpses into that lived reality. But we never know how the whole story ended. The book that emerged from these extensive forays into the archives would (I like to think) have intrigued Rodney. The narratives that I reconstructed from the trial dossiers reveal certain recurrent themes: human folly, lust, vengeance, deceitfulness, greed, self-interest, opportunism and betrayal. The book focuses on ordinary people who became involved with Germans for a range of reasons: to gain revenge; to satisfy selfish desires; for power, money, scarce material commodities, and protection; for sexual and gastronomic pleasure; for friendships that were usually ambiguous, sometimes intimate, almost always utilitarian, at times driven by fear and desperation; and, in a few rare cases, for ideological reasons (see Ott 2017: 6). I wish that Rodney could have read it. Sandra Ott is Professor of Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Rodney Needham supervised her throughout her postgraduate years at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford (1973–1979). Her most recent works focus on the experiences of Basques during the German occupation (1940–1944) and the post-liberation trials of suspected collaborators. Cambridge University Press published her latest monograph, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the Western Pyrenees, 1940–1948 (Cambridge, 2017).

Notes  1. One of his former pupils, Lorna MacDougall, was among my favourite teachers as an undergraduate at Pomona College. She introduced me to the works of both Needham and Lévi-Strauss, and encouraged me to apply to Oxford under Rodney’s supervision.  2. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1536732/RodneyNeedham.html (last accessed 11 December 2019).  3. I chose Tory, in part, because another anthropologist, Robin Fox, had already done fieldwork there and published a few articles. His monograph, The Tory Islanders, only appeared in 1978. In 1974, I was curious to see whether any radical differences would emerge from our respective studies of Tory, either owing to gender or to the seasons during which we did fieldwork there. My decision to do so displeased Robin Fox. In a letter dated 24 September 2005, Rodney wrote that he was halfway through Fox’s autobiography (2004) and directed me to page 262 to find Fox ‘embarking for Tory Island. He mentions a phonetician who

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 4.  5.  6.

 7.  8.  9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

worked there but not you (yet, anyway)’. On 27 October 2005, Rodney wrote again: ‘Dear Sandy: You receive the treatment on page 545 of Fox’s book’. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Holywell, 14 December 1974. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Holywell, 1 January 1975. A reference to Starcke’s The Primitive Family in its Origin and Development, a reprinted translation with an introduction by Rodney Needham (Starcke 1976: ix–xxxi). Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Holywell, 28 February 1975. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Holywell, 10 March 1975. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Holywell, 25 March 1975. I shall always remain grateful to Peter for that suggestion. The Basques have played a major role in my professional and personal life since 1976. I return to Santazi every year. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Holywell, 19 October 1976. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Oxford, 30 November 1976. Rodney would sometimes playfully lapse into an exaggerated American accent. ‘Coupla’ may have been written in that spirit. Rodney refers here to the Basque language, Euskara, in which x’s and tx’s figure prominently. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Holywell, 26 January 1994. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, All Souls College, 26 March 1979. ‘Lorna’ refers to my undergraduate professor in Claremont, California, Lorna MacDougall, Rodney’s former pupil. John Davis, ‘Systematic Relations’, review of The Circle of Mountains, in The Times Literary Supplement, p. 17, 1 January 1982. University Study Abroad Consortium (USAC), based at the University of Nevada, Reno, started this programme in San Sebastián-Donostia in 1983. I am grateful to Bill Douglass for having asked me to be its first director. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Holywell, 9 September 2000. I had just begun to date an American man and had shared the news with Rodney. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Holywell, 18 February 2006. His modestly titled Reconnaissances (1980) offers a concise introduction to some of Rodney’s principal intellectual concerns during his career. Letter from Rodney Needham to the author, Holywell, 7 March 2006.

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References Benthall, Jonathan. 2007. ‘Oxford Anthropology since 1970: Through Schismogenesis to a New Testament’, in P. Rivière (ed.), A History of Oxford Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 155–70. Boulay, Juliet du. 1974. Portrait of a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Des Chene, Mary. 1997. ‘Locating the Past’, in Akhil Gupta and James Fergueson (eds), Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 66–85. Fox, Robin. 1978 (2nd edition 1995). The Tory Islanders: A People of the Celtic Fringe. New York: Cambridge University Press.  . 2004. Participant Observer: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishing. Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language, and Experience. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.  . 1980. Reconnaissances. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ott, Sandra. 1975. ‘The Maintenance of Order on Tory Island’. BLitt thesis. Oxford University.  . 1981. The Circle of Mountains: A Basque Shepherding Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.  . 1985. ‘The Basques of Santazi’. An ethnographic film in the ‘Disappearing World’ series. Granada Television.  . 2006. ‘Good Tongues, Bad Tongues: Denunciation, Rumour and Revenge in the Basque Country (1940–1945)’, History and Anthropology 17(1): 57–72.  . 2008a. War, Judgment, and Memory in the Basque Borderlands, 1914– 1944. Reno: University of Nevada Press.  . 2008b. ‘The Informer, the Lover, and the Gift-Giver: Female Collaborators in Pau, 1940–1946’, French History 22(1): 94–114.  . 2017. Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the Western Pyrenees, 1940–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Starcke, Carl Nicolai. 1976. The Primitive Family in its Origin and Development. Reprinted translation with an introduction by Rodney Needham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

PART III

Why Anthropology? Concluding Remarks

Chapter 9

WHY ANTHROPOLOGY? STRUCTURALISM AND SINCE Timothy Jenkins

The Problem Why anthropology? Let me start to answer the question with some naive biography. I entered the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford in October 1973, more than forty years ago. The period I entered the discipline was one of feast rather than famine: I received grants for an initial period of three years, covering the Diploma – a conversion course after my first degree – and the production of a library thesis (on the French structural Marxist, Louis Althusser) for the BLitt degree. I then embarked on fieldwork in France, studying the modern Occitan movement, intending to write a doctorate, this period also being paid for in part first by a scholarship from the Institute and then by a national Funding Council. However, I did not submit a doctorate, for the bottom dropped out of the economy, feast turned to famine, and the costs of a doctorate multiplied beyond my means. At the same time, funding for new posts dried up and many retirements were not replaced. There was both a freezing and a shrinking of the discipline. I took another course in life, becoming ordained. Eventually, however, twenty years later, I took a doctorate at Cambridge on the basis of publications, having produced a book on British materials (incidentally, none of that research having been

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funded). On the strength of that book and the doctorate, I obtained a university post. My second book, published only in 2010, concerned my first fieldwork in France, which I had continued through various visits and sabbaticals, and had written up for a lecture series in Oxford. So I offer an example of one kind of trajectory, fulfilling an anthropological vocation, but not in the standard form. The standard form runs something like this: initial training, library thesis, fieldwork, doctorate (which remains unpublished), first post, production of monograph out of the initial fieldwork, second period of fieldwork elsewhere, promotion, production of second monograph (often disappointing), gradual switch with maturity to more theoretical topics, and so forth. I shuffled up these elements and have produced quite a different sequence – and so, I believe, have several of my contemporaries. How are we to make anthropological sense of the kind of history I represent? One thing to remark about anthropologists (and other social scientists) is how often in their work they believe they have captured a unique moment of change, as one world of meaning gives way to and is replaced by another. A moment of irreversible change structures a great deal of fieldwork, when the anthropologist believes he or she was the last person to find evidence of a particular way of life, a way of life that is undergoing radical change as modernity impinges on more traditional social forms. It is interesting to note, then, how readily we experience our own personal and professional lives in the same terms; and how, if we were informants, we might present our situation as a shift from a relatively stable and satisfactory world, of which we had known the last days, to a situation in which we have had to improvise solutions and ‘make do’ in less-than-classical fashions. We tend to use the concept of an ‘epistemological break’, to employ some jargon, in order to make sense of our life experience; we organize experience in terms of a shift from one world of meaning to another. If this is the case, and the concept of a break is simply a way of imposing sense, it is quite difficult to give an accurate account either of one’s own life or of the recent history of the discipline without putting both into some sort of mythical form – the loss of some sort of Paradise, a hero finding his way in a troubled world, and so on. Writing accounts without importing ‘stories’ from either the investigating community or from the people studied is a central anthropological problem. Yet these two temptations – the first to talk autobiographically, the second to give a naive review of the recent

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history of the discipline – are present in the invitation to participate in this book, whose aim I take to be comparing the present situation of British anthropology with the context in the 1970s when I (or we) embarked on the anthropological enterprise. This then is the problem to which I referred on setting out: how do we avoid mythologizing both the recent history of the discipline and our personal histories?

A Possible Way Forward Both autobiography and scanning the recent history of the discipline are of course legitimate enterprises; it is simply that their difficulty needs to be recognized. Autobiography has had its place in the forty or so years under consideration (in the turn to ‘writing culture’), but so has a distrust of what Bourdieu calls the ‘facile delights of self-exploration’ (Bourdieu 2003: 282). For Bourdieu, indeed, the task of a social scientist may be thought of as recasting one’s life as an apprenticeship in understanding, by casting off the unreflective categories by which we make sense of our experience, and making the logic contained in those experiences emerge. He wrote about this problem in his late conception of a ‘reflexive sociology’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). He attempted in this fashion to reply to the question of why anthropology might serve in the context of an ordinary life, and why, too, an ordinary life might serve anthropological understanding. This kind of preoccupation was also a feature of the teaching I received at the Institute in the early 1970s from Edwin Ardener (1927–1987), and Ardener’s views are my major concern in this paper. I shall attempt to combine autobiography and disciplinary history by talking about the teaching I received at Oxford in the early 1970s, and asking how it has fared in retrospect. I believe Ardener’s approach is peculiarly well suited to the project in hand, of combining a review of the contours of the present situation of the discipline with personal or idiosyncratic reflection. And this is because his principal concern was with the history of the discipline of social anthropology and with innovations in the period, innovations with which he identified himself. Indeed, he put reflection on the ambiguous notion of a ‘break’ at the centre of his work. He thought much in terms of the ‘origins of the present crisis’ and the resources available to meet it and (as I put it in a review of his collected papers) his papers ‘represent a sustained series of experiments to develop the means of thinking anthropologically about British social anthropology’ (Jenkins 2009). They may therefore contribute to our present

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project: this paper is simultaneously to pay homage to his teaching, an autobiographical reflection upon my formation – or an aspect of our shared formation – and an attempt to answer the question: Why Anthropology?

The Situation in the Early 1970s Ardener was educated in the Anthropology Department at the LSE after the departure of Malinowski (who had gone to the States in the period immediately after the War) and, subsequently, after a long period in Nigeria and Cameroon, he was recruited in 1963 to teach in Evans-Pritchard’s department at Oxford (see Chapman in Ardener 2007). He was therefore born under a curious constellation: the first of a new generation of students after 1945, with the beginnings of the subject behind him, yet with that old world embodied in the pupils of the founders, who taught him. Nevertheless, he had a sense of a new world forming about him. This is a recurrent academic pattern, but the acute sense of a break with the past created by the post-war context needs to be recognized. In his account of the period, Ardener gave the various actors in the discipline positive or negative markings (to employ a structuralist motif), denoting progressive or regressive characteristics. In particular, whilst he was a subtle and careful reader of Malinowski, it is fair to say he regarded him as personally flawed and his followers as failing to follow up the more exciting prospects Malinowski had opened up. Here we have an instance of the mixture of personal biography and disciplinary history that is particularly significant in a small subject. Ardener wrote: ‘I have … come reluctantly to the conviction that it was exactly because of Malinowski’s personal influence on social anthropology that the functionalist interest in language withered, together with much else, in the climate of rather provincial anti-intellectualism that fell like a drought upon his empire at his death’ (Ardener 2007: 37). These followers, then, were termed ‘functionalists’ and then ‘high functionalists’ as they tried to meet the limitations of their approach not by reforming the principles but by creating further elaborations or extra saving conditions – called ‘Ptolemaic epicycles’ at one point. However, Ardener also suggested that at Oxford in that period a range of scholars had not become trapped in the functionalist tar pits but, on the contrary, drawing particularly on an engagement with the writings of Durkheim and Mauss, had found ways of envisioning

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anthropologists as actors of the same kind as the peoples they studied. This opposition may be labelled as being between ‘function’ and ‘meaning’; we are probably more familiar with it as between natural scientific approaches to human behaviour and historical thinking. Each relies upon certain kinds of models. If the Oxford anthropologists gained certain positive markings in this description, the hero of the piece was undoubtedly Lévi-Strauss, who derived from the Durkheim–Mauss approach in a direct fashion. Lévi-Strauss was the most self-aware of the writers concerned with what Ardener called the ‘new anthropology’ or – let the reader understand – the ‘proper business’ of anthropology. Now, as a matter of fact, Lévi-Strauss worked out his ideas in the late 1940s and early 1950s through a series of engagements with contemporary works produced by linguists and communication theorists, largely American sources in the first instance, for Lévi-Strauss spent the War years in New York. His work therefore possessed a recondite and technical aspect. Ardener’s teaching in the early 1970s was summed up in the Introduction to Social Anthropology and Language, a volume of essays he edited in 1971 (republished as Chapter 1 of his collected essays – Ardener 1989, reprinted 2007). It consisted in great part in an erudite reconstruction of the linguistic sources for Lévi-Strauss’s work. The point of the work, however, was to draw attention, against a number of misunderstandings, to Lévi-Strauss’s contributions to anthropology. Whilst it is not necessarily the easiest way forward to clarify some contested issues in one discipline – anthropology – by detailed recourse to another, less familiar, discipline – linguistics – it was nevertheless an instructive exercise and formed part of the anthropological education we underwent. It is worth remarking in passing that the subsequent neglect by the discipline of linguistic issues has not been one of the brightest features of the recent period (although there are some, largely American, exceptions). Ardener’s objective, then, was to draw attention to some new moves emerging in contemporary British anthropology – the ‘new anthropology’ of the 1970s – and these new moves were inspired by a positive reception of the works of Lévi-Strauss. The broad lesson to be drawn is that responses to the opportunities and constraints of a period need to be thought out in terms of the resources available to the discipline: anthropologists need to think anthropologically about the situation in which they find themselves, rather than separating theoretical questions from practical ones. A second lesson is that language seems to be at the core of this integrated reflection.

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The ‘Epistemological Break’ In Social Anthropology and Language, Ardener described the context and what he believed to be the stakes; this comprised the core of the teaching we received. We will, however, leave the linguistic matters to one side as he made his positive anthropological proposals clearer in ‘The New Anthropology and its Critics’, a paper delivered in 1970 as the Malinowski Lecture at the LSE, and published the following year. The ‘new anthropology’ of the title refers to some sort of change in the ground rules of how the arts and humanities work, a change in what counts as a good research question, and what counts as an appropriate output. We might notice a shift in focus, from an aspiration to completeness in ethnographic description (holism) to more precise questions, and a move from monographs to essays; in short, anthropologists used to produce monographs, such as Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935), while now (in 1970) they produce syntheses such as Mary Douglas’s texts Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970). The contrast was not a new one; we were in fact returning to the concerns and style of publication of an older anthropology (the Année Sociologique school, or Weber, or Simmel), which produced works simultaneously of a greater generality and a greater insight. We might have supposed we were coming to the end of a particular interlude, one in which empiricist, positivist thinking had predominated, and which might be dated, say, from 1920 to 1950. Though, looking from fifty years later, we might conclude that Positivism has not gone away. Another way of looking at the issue is to suggest that it always threatens to predominate in the modern period, but that, at intervals, more interesting forms of thought gather energy to challenge its dominance. If we want a label for the change, Ardener suggested the then-fashionable continental term of an ‘epistemological break’ (from Bachelard 1938). The notion of a shift in the ground rules is important because we are not simply dealing with a succession in styles, but an alteration in focus. It is perfectly possible to go on producing work of the previous period, but it no longer appears as complete and as adequate as it would have done ten years before: there has been a shift in authority and legitimacy as well as in form (and both these terms are Durkheimian concepts that mark a social fact). The new style and the old, then, occupy ‘different conceptual spaces’ (Ardener 2007: 46).

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How are we to characterize this change? As Ardener pointed out, ‘the restructured field [of anthropology] does not abolish previous empirical results – it generates them, plus some more’. This experience is typical of a new theory. The anthropology that results is, he insisted, as empirical as before, but harder to do well, and this is because the fieldworker needs a greater self-consciousness as to the categories employed. I have put the point earlier in this fashion: the anthropologist has to be thought of as being of the same kind as the people who are studied, similarly involved in the production of meaning. The anthropologist is also an anthropos – and so we have to search out the complexities of historical thinking rather than apply supposedly scientific models. And we also have to remember that applying scientific models to human experience is itself an activity carried out under particular social conditions – conditions that pertain to the period just past. In a word, our world has become more complex. How then do we give content to this notion of a ‘break’?

Programme and Outputs, Together with Changes in the Programme Ardener discussed three interrelated themes to fill out this notion of a change and increase in complexity. The first theme concerns the distinction that is central to Durkheimian sociology, to Saussurean linguistics, and to the structuralism they together bred: the distinction between a system of meaning and its outputs. Consider the distinction between language seen as a system – a speech community and its conventions, we might say – and the utterances spoken by the members of that community. While you can record and measure the second, their well-formed nature is a function of their being part of the wider body and conforming to its rules; this wider body is neither measurable nor capable of capture by empirical means, and yet it is far more real and enduring than the ephemeral utterances of the speakers. Moreover, the two cannot be separated out; there is no ‘rule book’ separable from the collection of utterances. The only access we have to the conventions that order meaning is through the activities of the speech community. This is the crux: the idea that as well as empirical instances of behaviour or speech you also need some sort of explanation of what constitutes well-formed, legitimate or grammatical activity or utterance. There are two levels; that was indeed Durkheim’s central concern, expressed in the opposition between ‘profane’ and ‘sacred’: the

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distinction between what you might do, or could do, or should do, on the one hand, and what you must do (or must not do), on the other, the latter being the social forms expressed in authority, legitimacy, integrity, value and so forth. In short, there are outputs and programmes. In keeping with his structuralist approach, Ardener tended to play down the question of compulsion or desire and look instead to more formal kinds of problem. So he began by pointing out that, if you confine yourself to considering outputs, which is what the empiricist or functionalist tends to do, it is easy to confuse two kinds of issue: in the first place, the observed frequency of certain kinds of behaviour; and, in the second, the informants’ accounts of what ought to happen. The functionalist project indeed began to fall apart around this confusion, when anthropologists noticed that the occurrence of, say, cross-cousin marriage failed to match up to the prominence given to the idea in native accounts. Observation has to be distinguished from native models. The ‘high’ functionalist response to this discovery was to improve statistical methods (‘Ptolemaic epicycles’), in this fashion creating a more detailed ‘objective’ account, and yet such accounts failed to satisfy: they did not appear to yield ‘better’ anthropology. Ardener pointed out that this failure was because these anthropologists had begun at the wrong end, for output contains few clues as to meaning. He gave an example: you can measure footfall and the movement of objects, but all this work is rendered unnecessary by a ‘programmatic’ statement of the kind ‘this is a dining room’. The crucial question then is to understand what the native concept of a ‘dining room’ entails, for this includes in it – or ‘generates’ – all the activities that are subsequently measured – along with, of course, a whole range of activities that do not take place. One does not sleep, or cook, or fight in a dining room (hence the idea of ‘oppositions’, also drawn from Saussurean linguistics). These ideas can be elaborated in the distinction between prescriptions, which set up what behaviour is allowed and what is not, and preferences, which is how humans carry out the programme. The second theme concerns the idea of transformation in the programme, and this is the idea that is crucial in thinking about change or a break in meanings. We might sum up the first theme by saying that you need to pay attention to the native categories and how they work. But the real value of terming this feature a ‘programme’ – and thus invoking information theory and linguistics – comes with the notion that humans continually alter their programmes. The simple example Ardener gave is that ‘this is a dining room … except on

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Thursday from seven until eleven when it is a dance hall’ (Ardener 2006: 48). He went on to suggest that Lévi-Strauss’s account of myth is a writing out of a series of such transformations, an inventory of legitimate translations of one state of affairs into another. ‘Rationality can be restored in part to the “nonsensical” output [of a myth], by a series of re-write instructions’ (ibid.: 54). Ardener then played a series of games around this notion of re-writing or transformation, distinguishing between the relatively free play of mental activities like myth making, which employs distinctions found in other systems, and the more constrained nature of human classifications that interact directly with material constraints. And he drew attention to the problems that emerge if, as an anthropologist, one ignores these different levels and tries to explain phenomena as if they contained their own rationale (usually assumed, of course, to be a utilitarian rationale). This reprise allowed him to reintroduce the distinction we have already met between outputs and systems (or syntagms and paradigms, respectively, in the jargon of the period), and to identify a series of cases from the anthropological literature, contrasting instances of those writers who have grasped the issue – that facts are organized, and that the organization is not static – with a series of those who have not, for whom, in essence, the facts are supposed to reveal their own order transparently. And finally, he noted a number of differences even amongst those who have grasped the crucial distinction, and therefore can be counted among the advocates of the new anthropology. He also pointed out that such theories that deal only at the surface of things work well in practice until the underlying structuring order changes. Empirical thought can deal with everything but change; it is, however, helpless when confronted with events. Structuralism and empiricism in this account can be distinguished by their different models of the future and the past. Here the crucial distinction is between ‘mechanical’ and ‘statistical’ models, the one (functionalist) dealing in predictions based on past performances – past utterances we might say – the other (structuralist) alert to changes in generative principles, which is therefore capable of perceiving necessary relations. This allows us to glimpse the distinction (introduced in a later paper) between ‘prediction’, which deals in continuities, and ‘prophecy’, which focuses on discerning changes in the programme (a distinction I exploit in Jenkins 2013). The third theme developed from the point we have now reached, and offered a classification of forms of thought in the light of the distinctions which have been made concerning the distinction of

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programme and outputs on the one hand, and transformations in the programme on the other. A good deal of the pleasure in this kind of approach comes from classifying approaches by their sufficiency or otherwise.

Modes of Registration What are the broad achievements of this ‘moment’? One way of putting it is to say that structuralism called attention back to the activity of classifying things: that people do not simply name things from the point of view of their own needs and evaluate them accordingly, but that there are complex collectively articulated systems which organize elements in sets and distribute values to these elements in ways that can only be discovered, and not understood in advance. The processes of classification can, however, be flattened out and oversimplified, and therefore misread. This is what happened, by and large, when structuralism was introduced into British ‘empiricist’ circles. It is easy enough to agree that there is a system of meanings, of classes and values, and that this generates outputs or events. But, as Ardener insisted, there is also an intermediate stage which he called a ‘mode of registration’: people employ their collective representations intelligently, to achieve their socially constructed ends. This is pretty important when thinking about change and the employment of concepts of change, or breaks. The way Ardener put these matters initially created its own problems, and the ‘black box’ of the mode of registration was quietly dropped. But the notion drew attention to the sophistication of the use of collective representations: they are not determinative, in the sense of generating outcomes unreflectively, but rather are smallscale, flexible operators that are sensitive to context or situation. This insight is important for two further reasons, already hinted at. In the first place, it drew attention to the fact that other social elements impinged on and were included in the employment of classifications in events, so that modes of registration were themselves subject to change. For example, previously secure categories – those by which one made sense, without reflection, of events happening in the world – might themselves become dysfunctional, so that issues of measurement become problems of definition. The world of economics works well on a secure basis of indices until this basis ceases to operate; then all predictions and foresight fail, and there is what is called a crisis. These failures impinge on our lives in the drying up of

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funds and posts. We are no longer, then, dealing in ‘social structure’, with its strange sense of being ‘outside’ history, and having to make sense of historical interactions – or ‘real life’ – in terms of either the modern consuming the traditional or of the latter resisting the former. Instead, we have a far more dynamic, at times unpredictable and event-centred focus. In the second place, this approach also draws attention to the classificatory activities of the investigating parties and to the changing modes of registration that they may bring to bear. This is indeed where we began, with the epistemological break in the field of anthropological investigation, which allowed these kinds of questions to emerge into the light (although they had always been there). So Ardener’s work – and the structuralist moment, and the insight that Lévi-Strauss and others brought into the work of the Année Sociologique school – was never really ‘Structuralist’ but always-already ‘post-structuralist’, open to the reintegration of ethnography and theory, the focus on historical particularity, and an awareness of the implications of reflexivity. As anthropologists, as I have suggested, are also anthropoi, subject to the same processes as those they study, they are implicated in the same field of activity, and the encounters between anthropologists and their subjects are just one of the many encounters that the subjects of anthropology have to negotiate (cf. Jenkins 1994). And our professional lives exemplify many of the conflicts we find within disciplinary debates. I have one comment to make on Ardener’s style. He wrote in an optimistic style – for reasons of clarity of presentation, I believe, rather than conviction – as if the days of positivist descriptions, functionalist accounts, utilitarian explanations, methodological individualism and so forth were over and done with. But they were not, as we know: the past forty years have been just as dominated by naturalistic thinking in various forms as had the fifty years before he wrote. Indeed, each of these approaches was pretty well described early on in its history, and its limitations exposed, and these denunciations have had no noticeable effect on the subsequent success of the theory in question. And so it has been with the structuralist critique: one may conclude that intelligent criticism has only a small role to play in the life of social formations, even in universities. The theories it had hoped to replace are themselves collective representations of an enduring kind – moral accounts of the world or theodicies – and relate in partial and obscure ways to the manifold of effects that organize our lives.

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Why Anthropology? Was this then a prophetic voice that cast light on the coming years that we have lived through? If it does succeed, it is because it offered us a clear delineation of the present moment (in 1973) and of the history leading up to it. Ardener was indeed keen to emphasize that prophecy is a perception of the present moment of change, and not a prediction of future states. Or were we wrong to put such emphasis on the idea of a break? A good deal of what of interest has emerged from this history concerns the focus on what Ardener called the mode of registration. Prophecy, or insight into the present moment, concerns monitoring changes at this intermediate level. As a sociologist, one needs a clear notion that corresponds to programme and outputs. We can then offer reconstructions of our recent history as the replacement of one programme by another (if we are ambitious) or (if more modest) as oscillations between an emphasis on theory and on empirical study, and relate these changes to context and circumstance. But a more detailed approach – an anthropological perspective – deals neither in the simple replacement of one set of ideas by another, nor in an empty alternation of methods, but rather seeks to explain how we attribute significance to change. These explorations deal in alterations of the outputs, talking about how events become ‘events’. And this may be the enduring lesson to draw, to understand the present period. The focus on this intermediate and integrative level is hard to maintain, and difficult to give a strong content to. Identifying the ‘mode of registration’ does not then constitute a new theory, and indeed it effectively signalled the end of structuralism because of the subtleties it introduced. But it allows the (re)introduction of such notions as intelligence, freedom, non-deterministic forms, and the realization of non-real forms (or ideas). And when one looks to repeated movements of renewal in the discipline – among the most recent forms being the focus on different ‘ontologies’ (to take a single example, see Holbraad 2012), the ‘anthropology of Christianity’ (Robbins 2004), ‘anthropology of ethics’ (Laidlaw 2014), and the ‘anthropology of the contemporary’ (Rabinow 2007) (which is the movement closest to Ardener’s concerns) – it may be suggested that their interest lies precisely in their engagements at this intermediate level or scale, between the too-abstract and the too-concrete, where time, passion and social order are brought together in a series of improvised frames, and the business of anthropology is renewed.

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This focus on scale and framing at least points to where we might find an answer to the question ‘Why anthropology?’ Where else might understanding be found?

Final Comments This chapter was originally written to be delivered to a group of contemporary postgraduates at the University of Kent. It began, as with several of the contributions in this volume, by noting the parallels between the present economic climate and the one that we had encountered in the late 1970s, and then asked whether any of the ideas we were taught have anything to contribute to understanding both situations. I focused on the concept of a ‘break’, seen both as part of our experience and in the theory of the period, and followed its career through Edwin Ardener’s writings. The plot of the chapter, then, takes the idea of a break and replays it in the end in terms of Ardener’s notion of a ‘mode of registration’ – a rather insecure entity operating at an intermediate level between ‘programmes’ and ‘outputs’. Although I describe it as insecure, it was valuable in reintroducing a range of topics which may most usefully be summed up in the proposition that actors are people, who possess limited but real powers of perception, choice, initiative and so forth. I think it possible to make connection with a number of developments in present-day anthropology in this fashion. The discussion we had a year later in Oxford (on 12 September 2014) suggested a couple of final comments on the paper, and then a couple of remarks on the context of the paper and the workshop. My first comment is that the task of anthropology is more to repeat the basic insights of the discipline than to offer radical innovation. That is difficult enough to achieve. I am then distrustful of the idea of a ‘break’, except in so far as it allows us to step away from the categories of common sense and focus in new ways on what is going on. The break is temporary and often renewed, an act of intellectual ethics as much as the discernment of new possibilities in the world; it is not the birth of a new world, nor a certificate of avant-gardism. My second comment derives from my finding parallels between Ardener’s work and that of Rabinow – the anthropology of the contemporary. There is a recurrent problem in anthropological thinking, which relates to the discipline’s failure to develop a common critical language – unlike philosophy – so that each attempt to describe the problems and challenges of the subject is partial and idiosyncratic,

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and consequently hard to decipher and to map on to others’ efforts. The partial exception to this failure is found in the work of the Année Sociologique, whose language and concerns order and reappear in much subsequent social anthropology. A great deal of interesting contemporary work – for example, Descola and Viveiros de Castro – builds on these earlier insights. The history of the discipline then remains a key, and the trajectory of the subject is, I believe, coherent for this reason. An important subsidiary and, for me, unsettled question concerns the influence and importance of Weber; I suspect a rather distorted version of him plays a role in some of the less productive aspects of American sociological/anthropological thinking. These topics reappear in the remarks I wish to make about two features common to many of the papers in this collection: on the one hand, the idea of going over an economic precipice in the late 1970s, giving rise among other things to ‘short’ established careers in many cases, and, on the other hand, the sense of a shift in the late 1980s, from an anthropological ‘vocation’ in fieldwork to a sterile and argumentative focus on theory, often called ‘postmodernism’. These remarks simply express how I have experienced these two features. In the first place, I certainly shared in the economic break and still bear its marks: a circuitous academic career, a low level of outputs, few pupils and so forth. Nevertheless, every generation of scholars has to respond to the particularities of their context. Our position might be described as having learnt the habits of a previous generation – a generation who had fought a war and were in place before the university expansion. As a generation, we carry a certain post-Bloomsbury air, a view of intellectual activity as a vocation, which might nowadays be resented. It is certainly difficult to sustain such an attitude in the circumstances of effectively total state support for higher education and the consequent proletarianization of the professoriate, which we tend to analyse as the collapse of civilized culture (the famous break). I would emphasize that I by and large share these attitudes, but their only justification is the production of work of sufficient merit to last – books that will survive and ideas that are fruitful. For if you live by literary attitudes, you should die by them too. And in compensation for my marginal position, I have had time to produce works which – whatever their merits or otherwise – are what I wanted to say. In the second place, I feel a twinge of guilt when I hear about the destructive effects of an over-focus on theory. It took me a long time to become an honest ethnographer, and I loved theory. For a young person, theory is fascinating, and the attraction of empirical research is only slowly learnt. I went to the South of France to study a nationalist

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movement, and ended up learning about land inheritance (see Jenkins 2010); I have not really moved away from the centrality of the family and transmission between generations, although I now look at a range of phenomena including flying saucers and spirits. I therefore had a sense of shared vicarious responsibility for the theory wars of the 1980s. I was not involved in any departmental politics or splits in that period, though I observed something of the intergenerational fights at the University of Nottingham, with friends drawn from the Critical Theory group. It in no way measured up to the total warfare I had already experienced at the Oxford Institute. But I was not particularly moved by the later debates because I felt much of the substance was familiar. Until recently, I taught a brief, strangely antiquarian course to Cambridge second year anthropologists on the Année Sociologique school, because I think you can find nearly everything that comes later there in embryo. To conclude, I would concur with what I take to be the guiding theme of this book, which is that anthropology is defined by fieldwork, and that this vocation was transmitted to us by the Institute. Anthropology comes at one end of the spectrum of social sciences in that it believes the subjects of research for the most part set the terms of the study. Such an attitude will have consequences for theoretical understandings of both society and approach. And we were initiated into both aspects of this trade in our time there, although some teachers emphasized one rather than the other, and therein lay their differences. In my experience, there are enough contemporary postgraduates who look as if they are learning the same lessons. I have plenty of narrow-minded criticisms about partial theories that are taken to be complete, about thin fieldwork and so forth; but because of these students I am optimistic about the discipline. As a form of collective intelligence, it is as well established and well regarded in the academy as is any discipline in the humanities. To repeat my earlier point, the challenge is to produce published work that sufficiently embodies its virtues and particularity. Timothy Jenkins is a retired Reader in Anthropology and Religion at the University of Cambridge. He was trained at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology and has carried out fieldwork in Britain and France. He is the author of Religion in English Everyday Life (Berghahn Books, 1999), The Life of Property (Berghahn Books, 2010) and, most recently, Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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References Ardener, Edwin. 1971. ‘Introduction’, in Social Anthropology and Language, edited by Edwin Ardener. London: Tavistock. Ardener, Edwin. 2007. ‘The New Anthropology and Its Critics’ (originally published in 1971) in E. Ardener, (1989) 2007. The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays. London: Berghahn Books.  . (1989) 2007. The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays. London: Berghahn Books. Bachelard, Gaston. 1938. La formation de l’esprit scientifique. Paris: J. Vrin. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2003. ‘Participant Objectification’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9: 281–94. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Louis Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Douglas, Mary. (1966) 2003. Purity and Danger. London, Routledge.  . (1970) 2003. Natural Symbols. London: Routledge. Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Jenkins, Timothy. 1994. ‘Fieldwork and the Perception of Everyday Life’, Man 29: 433–55.  . 2009. Review of Ardener 2007, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 15: 180–81.  . 2010. The Life of Property: House, Family and Inheritance in Béarn, South-West France. New York: Berghahn Books.  . 2013. Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1935. Coral Gardens and their Magic. London: George Allen & Unwin. Rabinow, Paul. 2007. Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chapter 10

FROM OXFORD TO CAMBRIDGE CHASING THE ‘AKA’ Maryon McDonald

Introduction: Fear and Learning at Oxford I studied Social Anthropology at Oxford and currently hold a Fellowship teaching social anthropology at Cambridge, a position I have held since 1997. However, I first went from Oxford directly to Cambridge in the 1980s, when I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Girton College. That is the initial Oxford-to-Cambridge trajectory that I will refer to here. What I really want to talk about more generally is different styles of Social Anthropology, different anthropologies. In so doing, there may be a very strong element of caricature, for which I should perhaps apologize in advance. We can probably only talk about different social anthropologies by indulging in caricature to some extent. This chapter may also seem at times to be a personal story but this is just one way of talking about broader historical changes and about some differences and changes in the self-monitoring practices that make up a discipline. I was taught social anthropology at Oxford through an intensive and exhausting postgraduate Diploma, which was followed by research, for which I won SSRC (which became ESRC) funding. By this time, it was no longer necessary to submit the intermediate BLitt library thesis that Oxford had previously required, and I progressed directly to DPhil research. The DPhil degree was formally awarded in early 1983, and the thesis published in book form in 1989 (McDonald 1989a). To get to the point of submitting my DPhil thesis, however,

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I had had to seek supplementary funding. This was partly because I was already a married woman in the early 1980s and my Research Council grant was assessed on my husband’s income. The more successful he became, the less I saw of my very hard-won research grant. Encouraged by an official at the Research Council, I even tried to get a quick divorce, but that was not possible at the time. In the meantime, my grant seemed to be dwindling to nothing. All this can seem shocking to us now perhaps, but it would, I imagine, be only one aspect amongst many of that period that would now appear to be so. The political shape and salience of my research project came to the rescue. My field research was undertaken in Brittany, which had one of the noisiest nationalist, separatist movements in France. The Breton militants1 that I was going to Brittany to study already seemed to have demonstrated their seriousness by blowing up part of the Palace of Versailles. This perhaps helped me to get supplementary funding from the CNRS in Paris. The Celtic Breton language was at the heart of the separatists’ nationalism, and this helped me to win a Zaharoff Scholarship from the Taylor Institution in Oxford. I also did some paid teaching at Rennes University, where my fieldwork began. I was brought up in anthropology at Oxford largely by Edwin Ardener, who died suddenly in 1987. It was Edwin who supervised my research. In priority and on a daily basis, however, I was educated in social anthropology by all the students at the Institute at that time. The coffee room and the local pub alike were alive with pedagogical and other delights. So was the Institute library, where students were free to smoke, eat and drink until Rodney Needham imposed an unpopular formal ban on such activities. There were also some heady days and nights putting together the pages of the student journal, JASO, which I co-edited at one stage. Edwin Ardener had been active in founding this journal, and his students (but not solely his students) came together around it – sometimes running round tables late at night, I recall, putting pages in order, ready for stapling, then merrily crunching staples and ideas in what we liked to imagine was witty congruence. I always pretended to enjoy these sessions but, in truth, I would often emerge with a sense of exhaustion, particularly if some of the sharper-tongued (male) intellects had been present. A certain pedagogy of fear went way beyond Edwin, and kept me – and no doubt other students, too – in a permanent but productive state of resolve to read more. The list of those we were encouraged to read, and whose work we students avidly discussed, included Foucault, Lacan, Bourdieu, Deleuze and Derrida – as well as Collingwood,

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Whitehead and many others. The more we read, the more we wanted to read; through a strong mutual encouragement that developed in small groups over drinks, coffee or JASO – and ultimately seemed to involve all students, irrespective of supervisor – we learnt to be affected by texts that elsewhere were regarded as variously arcane or irrelevant in anthropology at that time. Those working with Edwin Ardener were also moved to look repeatedly at his crumpled, cyclostyled articles. Edwin’s work was passed around his students like precious pieces of samizdat, which some of us pored over and discussed again and again. Perhaps more relaxed but nonetheless challenging venues of debate were provided by various informal student reading groups. I recall one in particular in Wolfson College, organized I think by Roger Just, where we tackled Marx – not the marxism that was becoming fashionable in some anthropologies at that time (as if trying to get anthropological feet back on the ground in the face of the idealist embarrassments of structuralism), but the works of Marx. There were also influential and productive seminars organized by Edwin Ardener at St John’s College on the very elastic theme of ‘History and Ethnicity’, which became the theme of an ASA conference that I proposed with Malcolm Chapman and organized with both Malcolm and Elizabeth Tonkin in 1987 (see Tonkin, McDonald and Chapman 1989). And, importantly, there were pioneering seminars on the anthropology of women, which became the anthropology of gender, organized by Shirley Ardener at Queen Elizabeth House. Edwin’s own work (Ardener 1972) had been an important inspiration for such seminars, as it was for some much later, self-consciously ‘feminist’ anthropology (e.g. Moore 1988). Edwin did not look back on his own 1972 work as ‘feminist’ at all, and he did not find that label analytically appropriate: to him, it was simply anthropology. Most of Edwin’s own students seemed to be men during the time I was at Oxford, but Shirley Ardener’s pioneering – and enduringly interesting – seminars gave women anthropologists a very welcome space in which to articulate their own work in a relatively relaxed gathering. A stream of publications resulted, supported by Marion Berghahn who founded Berg and went on to found Berghahn Books. With fear left at the door of that gendered room, it was in these seminars before an audience of women that I first chaired a seminar and gave my first research paper. Importantly, it was also in these seminars that I learnt to keep strictly separate feminism and the analytical gaze of anthropology. Anyone at the Oxford Institute in this period could not fail to hear about staff divisions. It was part of the local lore, and could be both

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part of the fun and part of the intellectual terror of the place. For some, too, it could no doubt be distressing: there were tales of at least one student losing her grant after being caught in the fray, and of one or more staff members fearing the sack. The status of such stories (and there were many) was never quite clear to many of us – other than that they added considerable extra spice to what was otherwise an everyday intellectual effervescence in the student coffee room. One of the best-known divisions was said to be that between Rodney Needham and Edwin Ardener. Both were excellent and inspiring scholars, and were thinking critically about the anthropology of the time – with an engagement in ‘rethinking’ and ‘paradigm shifts’ being part of their own self-definitions – and each in their own way. They lectured at opposite ends of the week. Rodney Needham’s Monday lectures were a celebration of analytical clarity. He brought home some of the joy of thinking critically about structuralism, and some of the categories it had inherited, and about some of our categories of analysis more generally. He did so largely in order to sharpen these analytical tools, and it was a great pleasure to listen and to try to keep up with him (even first thing on a Monday morning). Edwin Ardener then seemed keen on Fridays not to sharpen such tools for continued use but often to push us to hold them up for inspection within a self-aware empiricism – to situate them and examine them ethnographically. Along with other titillating points and asides that seemed to emerge from Edwin’s beard or from behind the coffee mug from which he sipped, his approach felt new and exhilarating: his lectures were not always easy to follow, and were not meant to be. Finding a way through the provocative fog was nevertheless a great part of the fun of a Friday morning, and for me the challenge and excitement would often last through the weekend until Monday’s welcome if different dose of analytical prophylaxis.

The ‘Aka’ The coffee room was a place to discuss lectures – and to try to work out what they were about. I learnt a great deal not only from both Rodney Needham and Edwin Ardener but perhaps even more from the students who in various ways gathered around each of them. In Edwin’s case, this might be whilst standing in the queue that formed occasionally to get into his lectures, or it might be in the small band of those who dared to drink with him on visits to the nearest pub

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after a seminar. We all pretended to understand what he said. At the time, I seemed to live in constant fear – fear of Edwin’s intellect and of being the only person who did not understand. Reassuringly perhaps, just what on earth he had been talking about was often hotly debated between his students afterwards. These discussions were always challenging. I recall one such discussion over a drink in the pub. Some of his students (myself amongst them) were soon to go off to fieldwork. ‘Get your…’ Edwin said to us, gesticulating to what seemed like his elbow. No, it was his hand; no, his wrist; no, his upper arm; no, his arm… What could it all mean? But perhaps that was the point. What did it mean? Ah, ah. I knew that some students who had been around much longer had written already of being in a late-stage grip of the shift from ‘function to meaning’ (an expression from Pocock 1961; Crick 1976), a shift that Edwin’s Oxford had long since encouraged. But the analytical aspirations seemed to be shifting further and faster than that. I just thought I had got it when: ‘not mean’, Edwin suddenly said to me. ‘Not just what does it mean’. I came later to realize that whilst textual and semantic metaphors might be acceptable as oppositional tools at that time, it was only up to a point – and certainly not if they were to be stacked up with the icing on a layer-cake model of analysis, an exotic if scholarly icing of ‘culture’ that Geertz ( amongst others) had spread. In that same discussion, Edwin went on to warn more explicitly that we needed to ‘get your aka, get your aka…’ He said this several times, as if giving us time to catch up. These were words uttered in circumstances in which so much was read into so little, and had to be. It was one of his enigmatic admonitions that haunted me for a long time. I never felt thereafter that I could try out any text of mine on Edwin (even if he rarely read what I wrote) without showing evidence that I was duly chasing the aka – an item that thereby took on a life of its own. The relative autonomy of many of our conclusions in relation to Edwin’s own statements, oral or written, was part of the process of learning anthropology in these circles, and often actively encouraged by Edwin; we were not constrained to running after authenticity, but to chasing a self-consciously new brand of rigorously empirical anthropology. The ‘aka’ as cited by Edwin was an Ibo term (used among the Ibo of south-eastern Nigeria, an area well known to both Edwin and Shirley Ardener from long fieldwork and post-fieldwork involvement). Shaking the aka could translate as ‘shaking hands’ – but where ‘hand’ is bounded at ‘the wrist’, the aka had the capacity to travel up what we

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might see as ‘the arm’ (for a published account, see Ardener 1982). A British shaking of hands offered the possibility of what could seem, to the Ibo, to convey and confirm distant disdain – whilst, conversely, an Ibo shaking the aka, sometimes gripping your upper arm, could confirm native impropriety. These were different gestures, not through any linguistic determinism but with linguistic back-up for different behaviours and their interpretation and misinterpretation. So, we were not dealing here with simple mismatches of meaning nor any simple language and culture equation; and we were not dealing with different ideas of ‘the hand’ or ‘the arm’; we were not simply dealing with different categories but were watching different categories in action; and we were not dealing with different categorizations of a limb that stood as an innocent object in itself beyond its classifications; no, we were dealing with different definitional realities; we were dealing with post-Saussurean realities. When I eventually came to write up my field research on Brittany at much the same time as this article of Edwin’s was being published, and I described differences between the Breton movement and the Breton-speaking peasantry in whose name they pretended to speak, I noted material mismatches in action and tried to talk less of cultural differences than of different ‘worlds’ (McDonald 1986b; 1989a)

Reality and Representation The anthropology that Edwin encouraged at Oxford became, for some, strongly anti-representationalist, though this description came much later. To effect this stance was a battle at the time, and those of us who struggled with it may owe a great deal to conversations with each other, and we did not always agree. I can recall related conversational debts to Tim Jenkins, Paul Dresch and Glenn Bowman, and to Signe Howell, Jeremy MacClancy and David Napier amongst others. In particular, Malcolm Chapman and I would at one stage correct each other whenever we were in danger of falling back into what we saw as the old representationalist pit: we would talk of getting a crane to sort it out, to lift everything – whether referent, signified or infrastructure – back onto the same level. This same metaphor was shared with another student who first applied it to Durkheim. There were clear affinities between some aspects of Saussure’s own work and that of Durkheim and the structural functionalists (see e.g. Ardener 1971b: 19), but it was not those aspects that Malcolm Chapman and I drew on. Langue and parole were given the same treatment as

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signifier and signified (though otherwise not congruent with them), and they were, in an important sense, collapsed, the one into the other. Similarly, but with some difficulty, we progressively worked our way through other dualities, largely drawn from linguistics or information theory, that were put before us at the time to mark a distinction from the functionalist anthropology of old: through emic and etic, for example, and through programme and output. Each time, with the crane re-evoked, a light went on… We often seemed to talk jokingly in this way, in live metaphors. The pages of JASO seemed replete with related struggles. As a student just grappling with what would now appear to be an anti-representationalist question, I published a deliberately jokey piece in JASO in which I tried to take to task any anthropological analysis that pretended to stack the world in layers, and to see down into the depths, or analytically to be grasping true referents for symbol or representation, or that pretended in any way to be the clear-eyed vision above the text. There was no literal bedrock to get at, no innocent reality to be grasped. Through a joking play on the possible elisions of such analytical languages (marxism included) – and out of sheer exasperation at some of the shoddy translations of French and other non-anglophone texts that were starting to be given licence and veneration in anthropology – I tried to suggest that all language, no matter how ‘literal’ its pretensions, was metaphorical (McDonald 1978). Malcolm Chapman wrote a related but eloquently clear piece in the same issue, tackling any followers of structuralism and symbolic anthropology who still imagined themselves to be in a world of representations or in a world of ideas distinct from the concerns of ‘the empirical man’ (Chapman 1978). One of our main points – a point for which we had to bring that crane back to help us in the early days – was that reality had already been taken up into the sign. For us, arbitrariness and relationality were the main tenets to take from Saussure and quickly move on. The language used initially was that of arbitrary and structural – but this eventually became (partly, I believe, through the influence of other francophone writers we read) arbitrary and relational. Post-Saussurean realities contained materiality within what might otherwise seem – in the terminology then being used to counteract structuralism – to be a semantic and thereby idealist universe. When Edwin Ardener eventually published his piece on the aka, he still felt the need to ‘stress the material feature, the realities demonstrated – being tired of the naïve assumption that we must be in an “idealist” universe’ (Ardener 1982: 11). This tiring battle was far from won.

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Relationality and Arbitrariness There were several ways in which these important points were brought home to me. I cite just two here. First, an example taken from Edwin’s lectures was brought into interesting conjunction with the rationality debates going on at the time in Balliol College (and published in part in Hollis and Lukes 1982). The example that I cite here is derived from Edwin – for which he in turn had acknowledged the linguist Helmslev (Ardener 1971: 9–10), each using it for their own purposes – and involves a mismatch in colour categories between English and ‘standard’ Welsh. In what we might now see as a diagrammatic caricature that relies on a problematic ground of comparison so familiar to anthropology (Candea 2019), some of these differences between English and Welsh were presented as in Table 10.1 below. We can say from this that there are apparently contexts in which part of what English speakers see as green is, for the stereotypical Welsh-speaker here, gwyrdd; and that part of what we, the stereotypical English-speakers, might still call green and all of what we see as blue plus part of what we see as grey is glas; and that part of what we see as grey and some of what we might say is brown is llwyd; and part of what we say is brown and all of what we say is black is du. What can we make of this? It is quite common – and all too easy – to reconcile such apparent differences in colour classification through the giant twin discourses of positivism and romanticism that have stalked across Europe. This exercise in reconciliation might leave the Welsh either unable to tell Table 10.1 Some apparent differences between English and Welsh. green blue

gwyrdd

glas

grey llwyd brown black

du

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the difference between blue and green – no wonder they are unable to govern themselves – or just wonderfully poetic, seeing trees, sea and mountains, for example, as all glas – enough to make one want to live in a tepee in North Wales and learn Welsh. When we shift into post-Saussurean analysis, however, we also move away for all this, away from what might then be seen as interesting but potentially insidious misinterpretation. We might then dispense with ‘real blue’ or ‘real green’ out there, as simple givens in the world for which the Welsh categories risk becoming but poor labels or apprehensions, and instead watch the relevant relationalities in action. However, we could well end up seeing the same discourse of reconciliation being effected by those we study (and I often came across this later on in Brittany) – which can underline that that mode of reconciliation (amongst others) may be important ethnographically but should not be imposed uncritically anywhere by our own analytical tool kits. Into this analytical world of relationality and arbitrariness, ‘Berlin and Kay’ seemed to intrude awkwardly for a while but we learnt to retort that, in the work of Berlin and Kay (1969), you might still be in the very world that you should be examining. Our retorts became unseemly heckles, I recall, when philosophers speaking at the Winchinspired ‘rationality’ seminars at Balliol (which some of us attended) seemed to fear for anthropological sanity and insisted on ‘real’ green in the world (e.g. Hollis 1982). We were caught between further amusement and embarrassment when this self-consciously rational Balliol greeted Derrida in person as a speaker. The velvet-jacketed deconstructionist puffed occasionally on a cigar as he grinned his way through this apparently easy meat. Second, when I went to do my DPhil fieldwork in Brittany, firstly amongst the educated members of the Breton movement and then amongst the Breton-speaking peasantry whom they claimed to represent, different Bretons and different Brittanies were regularly brought into mismatch and it was clear that there was no ‘real’, innocent object of Breton or Brittany out there to grasp beyond these. Ethnographically, the ‘real’ Brittany was the one that the more powerful Breton movement constructed, and to which their enthusiasms directed me – namely, amongst the peasantry in Breton-speaking Brittany. This real Brittany turned out to be filled with Bretons aspiring to speak French – but I had been forewarned that this aspiration was no more than a mark of their oppression. The militants knew what the reality was. My research became, in part, an account of this Breton militant movement fighting for Breton revival against all things French, and

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siding with insular ‘Celtic’ movements to do so. In one chapter, I was examining the historical construction of this Celtic category, and was pushed hard by Edwin not only to grasp the historical linguistics or comparative philology at work but to treat it ethnographically. I tried to show that the historiography in which minority Celts were sent fleeing by oppressors, whether Anglo-Saxons or Gauls, and left cowering in the geographical peripheries, was a matter of the empty spaces of philological logic being rhetorically filled with birth, copulation and death – and it had become a history for which bombs were thrown. This was a difficult milieu for me to study, potentially inhabiting as I did the majority category of ‘English’. Relationality inevitably came into the fieldwork and its writing up. After the thesis, I wrote up the chapter containing the above points as a paper, and submitted it to Man (which became the JRAI). It was rejected. I learnt from the response that my study was not ‘objective’, that putting myself into the field was unacceptable, and that the piece was ‘anecdotal and idealist’. I felt quite battered. No doubt my piece needed very serious improvement but I was also up against the same world, it felt, through which positivist anthropology had long distributed so many elisions of the material and ideal – running into relevance on the one hand, and triviality on the other; real anthropology and idealist nonsense (cf. Chapman 1989). Edwin just shrugged his shoulders. He seemed to have come to regard such rejections and misunderstandings as simply ‘tiresome’. I later submitted the same piece to Current Anthropology and it was accepted (McDonald 1986a). Writing Culture was published in the same year. Like Moliere’s bourgeois gentilhomme, I was now speaking prose. Taken together, the written reasons I was given for rejection by Man and the published comments in Current Anthropology (McDonald 1986a) suggested that some in anthropology still wanted the positivist securities of interchangeable observer. There was clearly a real world out there for anthropology to get hold of, and I had failed to get hold of it; I would only do so if I took a more objective view. I was obviously an idealist, and typical of what one Current Anthropology comment explicitly called ‘the Oxford school’. I apparently needed to grasp the material world – the ‘objective conditions’ of the Bretons’ struggle. These objective conditions were, of course, to be specified by university students and academics – just the people I was studying and whose worlds I was examining. I was condemned, however, for studying university lecturers. The real people anthropology should study were the very same people on whose behalf the militants themselves claimed to speak. The respondents seemed to be asking

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me to put forward as my own analytical frame the very analyses that I was examining ethnographically. I could no doubt have dealt with all this very much better than I did – but I did my best, as we have all had to do, within the language of the time. Quite unexpectedly and exceptionally, Edwin then telephoned me to say he had read both my article and my response to the comments, and was pleased. This was praise indeed. He knew, he said, that the muted could not just feel battered but be so.

Cambridge of Old This was strong language, and it is oddly embarrassing now, but to understand just how battered I felt, let’s go back a little to my departure to Cambridge, which happened first in October 1983. Marilyn Strathern was one of the people who interviewed me at Girton College for a Research Fellowship. This could have been terrifying – but given my Oxford fears and the apparent incomprehension that I and others from Oxford had encountered elsewhere, that interview felt peculiarly constructive and pleasant. Within anthropology, Marilyn seemed to understand what I was trying to say. She had kindly read my written and published work (including my now embarrassing student joke in JASO). She said she was working through similar issues herself. We were able to talk to each other (when we were not away on fieldwork, that is). I first gave what became the Current Anthropology paper in a seminar at the Cambridge Social Anthropology Department. Marilyn was one of the colleagues who were very supportive afterwards, and she was kind enough to say she enjoyed it. I admit I breathed a large sigh of relief. So, there might be post-Saussurean life outside Oxford after all. However, that life was severely restrained. The Cambridge Department was overwhelmingly male; not only that, but it seemed to be largely under the ghost of Meyer Fortes in many respects, with structuralism and grand narratives added on. It seemed increasingly that newer anthropological approaches had not challenged old categories and approaches but were simply taken on through accretion (cf. McDonald 1989b). There was one bulging examination paper called ‘Culture and Communication’ into which every novelty seemed to be poured. I was asked to supervise on this paper, but was not wholly trusted, it felt, with much else.

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The main choices on offer at Cambridge were not narrow at all but seemed to comprise a refined structural-functionalism, plus structuralism, and the grand narratives of Jack Goody and then Ernest Gellner. There was one exponent of grand narrative here that, even in 1985 at the first meeting of EASA, quite explicitly stood no truck with gender or postmodernism, both said with a sneer. Coming from Edwin Ardener’s Oxford, this for me was another planet. Coming from the Oxford of Shirley Ardener – where gender issues had been given such an early platform – all this seemed to be a step into the dark side. Given the heady heights she reached thereafter, it seems odd now to place myself with Marilyn Strathern in any way – but it did not seem so in my early Cambridge days. What I want to say is simply that we began to be able to talk to and understand each other, that it was not difficult to learn each other’s language, and that we were, each in our own way, marginal at Cambridge at times, and perhaps felt so when it came time to leave. I left Cambridge after two years, before the end of my Research Fellowship: I was lucky enough to get a job at Brunel University to start a new department of Human Sciences with Adam Kuper. Marilyn went off to Manchester University, which – in what some other anthropologists wanted to see as an unsubtle swipe at the Cambridge of that time – gave her the position of Chair. When I had first arrived in Cambridge, Jack Goody was no doubt an interesting scholar (albeit an ‘ageing hippy with flowers’ in Edwin Ardener’s eyes [Goody wrote about flowers]), and Edmund Leach, whom I recall sometimes sitting with his structuralist head in his hands, gave an amiable and mischievous, critical cutting edge. Alan Macfarlane was a friendly and supportive intellectual presence who contributed scholarship in historical anthropology. At the same time, the apparent dominance of structural functionalist and related approaches continued to hoover up the world willy-nilly in enduring categories of kinship, politics, economics and so on, such that the introductory courses required that separate examination paper of ‘Culture and Communication’ into which the seemingly more embarrassing party of structuralism and everything else could be fitted. There were recensions of a formalist-substantivist debate going on in some of the economics teaching, I recall – and it seemed to take a while to suggest that the supposedly formal was, in an important sense, substantive. Such whispers had been circulating long ago in those queues to Edwin’s lectures. I am not, however, suggesting that Cambridge was simply left behind. It was not at all – it had its own empirical rigour and a great

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deal of excellent scholarship within and beyond established domains of analysis. Rather, there was a lack of easy comprehension at that time between some of the dominant ideas at Oxford and those at Cambridge, which could bring a sense of time lag when Oxford viewed Cambridge – and a world of mad idealism without empirical rigour when Cambridge viewed Oxford. Whatever the sources of mutual incomprehension or misunderstanding (and they varied), it was interesting to me that, although I had come from an Oxford that still insisted on teaching the ‘classic texts’ and taught structural functionalist and structuralist material along with the rest, it was the exciting elements of ‘the rest’ from Oxford that had reframed anthropology sufficiently to get in the way. The mess that one could easily get into was brought home to me forcefully when I later attended a research seminar at Cambridge, chaired by Ernest Gellner, in about 1986, I believe. The discussion turned to demographic realities, which, in Edwin Ardener fashion, I questioned. I do not recall the details but I do recall shocked voices turning on me – was I really suggesting that these realities were ‘merely’ a social construction? Yes, I said, hesitantly; I was not happy about the ‘mere’, and social construction was not a language I used myself, but it was generally a category into which anything vaguely poststructuralist was sometimes placed. However, I was being placed here in a world not of relationality and arbitrariness but of independent realities out there being ‘socially constructed’ (or, worse, of social constructions that had no secure, independent referent at all). I tried to retract, but it was too late. I was asked if I was honestly saying that these things were not real. I ventured that they were only real because socially constructed. I was struggling. I was dismissed as someone poorly educated at Oxford who would soon be saying that life and death were socially constructed. Probably right, I felt – but this was meant to shut me up. When I answered ‘well, yes, actually…’ the scorn was such that shaking heads and ‘tuts’ ensued as the seminar moved abruptly on to the next question. Ernest Gellner was not an unfair sparring partner, I should stress, but a very kindly one. When I was next invited back to Cambridge to give a seminar paper (at Pembroke College, in a seminar series run by Barbara Bodenhorn), the rubric required that I set out some of the general tenets of my anthropology at that time. To the surprise of others, and to my initial consternation, Ernest came along – but then also stayed throughout the discussion afterwards, and participated. He gave the very wise advice that using the term ‘innocent’ was problematic: talking of an ‘innocent’ reality out there, which I

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wished analytically to dismiss, was perhaps not the best language in which to do it.

The Fresh Air of Uxbridge By this time, I was teaching at Brunel University in a new Department with Adam Kuper. Brunel is situated on the western outskirts of London, and was sometimes talked of as being ‘halfway between Oxford and Cambridge’. Adam Kuper had studied anthropology at Cambridge but was deliberately, explicitly and supportively ‘openminded’. I was left free to teach my Oxford Anthropology, and it was a joy. I did so in a new Human Sciences Department that brought together other disciplines and scholars such as Steve Woolgar (who had already published his Laboratory Life with Bruno Latour) and Nik Rose. The resistance of self-monitoring disciplinary practices meant that it was challenging, but often exciting, learning to talk to each other. I certainly learnt a lot and owe a debt to these and other scholars (for example, Christina Toren, who later joined us, bringing new insights into Bourdieu). Given the particular interests of early colleagues such as Nik and Steve, I was learning all the time to push the anthropological machinery of fact production further – into scientific and medical practice, for example. This interest was honed alongside excellent mentors. We then launched, and I taught on, the first Medical Anthropology Masters in the UK (led by Ian Robinson, and taught with the help of figures such as Ronnie Frankenberg and Cecil Helman, and supportive visits from stars such as Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes). Life and death became very much the material of our analyses. I was still living with my family in Cambridge (whence I commuted), but serious problems at home eventually caused me to leave Brunel, which I did with very heavy heart. I was very lucky, however, that a vacancy came up in Cambridge, and I was elected to my current Fellowship in 1997. In the time I had been away, it seemed that the old ‘Culture and Communication’ paper had eventually burst, given everything that was required to be in it, and some of the old categories had been rethought. Some of this seems to have happened most clearly after Marilyn Strathern returned to Cambridge in 1993. Edwin had died, and Oxford had moved on in its own way and was developing new strands of interesting scholarship. The Oxford I knew had, in some important respects, come to Cambridge – and it had been reformulated and reinvigorated in the process.

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And So … the Aka Comes Home We could seem, therefore, to be back at the beginning – but not quite. The colour category issue is still one I use with undergraduates. When we look at colour categories now, we can bring so much more to the task; we look at the practices of colour classification in specific situations, the way in which categorizations are determined and standardized. Where we might once have stressed categories in action, we might now talk of practices; and Berlin and Kay now present no problem. They have become part of a complex of ‘technologies’ through which everyday practices of colour classification might be effected. We have had all the benefit (and the problems) of Actor– Network Theory (ANT) and more (McDonald 2012a). We no longer need the cranes or to plead against stacking the world in layers: the old levels have long since been quite deliberately flattened. What else has happened? Categories such as culture and nature have been taken out of our analytical toolkits – or should have been perhaps. They survived for a while through Viveiros de Castro who nevertheless encouraged an ‘ontological turn’ – pointing everyone to worlds of definitional realities that Edwin Ardener might have recognized and enjoyed with a critical eye. The problems that this particular philosophical terminology of ‘ontology’ has brought have been many – not least in mapping ontology onto culture – but its use by ex-Cambridge students in their 2007 volume Thinking Through Things (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007) echoes very closely and uncannily those heady days of JASO, and of pubs and coffee and lecture rooms in Oxford in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The young Cambridge editors of this volume evocatively dispute a priori analytical distinctions between a metaphorical and a literal reality (ibid.: 1), and between the material and the cultural, matter and meaning, representation and reality (ibid.: 2). There is much more one could cite here, and the volume takes us much further along this path than many had dared to venture ethnographically before, but this is perhaps echo enough. Both Ardener and Needham are, we might note, acknowledged in the bibliography. We have also had STS and Anthropologies of Science (into which ANT had fed), and we can talk more freely about the realities (ontologies) wrought by scientific as by ethnographic practice. We have also had therefrom what can seem to be confirmation of post-Saussurean multiplicities – of different bodies, of different worlds – and all this without travelling overseas. For those of us who have long worked in Europe (and not just when we get older!), this has meant –

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to use a perhaps creaking ANT language – a network of potential allies that did not previously exist. There has even been allied talk of ‘onto-norms’ (e.g. Mol 2012). Some of this reminds me of an Edwininspired lecture point that I made a couple of times when I first went to Cambridge in the 1980s. I slipped it into lectures on ‘History and Anthropology’, as preparatory warning about the lived realities of people’s own historiographies. In order to try to get across some of the key points about definitional realities (difficult at the time, we remember), I would ask everyone in the audience why they were sitting down quietly in rows, taking notes. I would start to dance wildly (in which I was well practised from the Oxford Institute parties) and to even sing and shout out to the imagined accompanying music; I would then stop suddenly and say, ‘Isn’t this a night club?’ At their quizzical laughter I would feign confusion, and then say ‘Oh, this is a lecture theatre’ and resume a slightly pompous pose and speech. This was all at 9.00 in the morning (the graveyard slot I was given) for final-year students. The audience greatly increased the next week, ready for the apparent madness – but it was never clear if this was really because of the intellectual excitement of realities taken up into the sign. If I do something similar now at Cambridge, it would be in a first-year supervision, and the point is relatively quickly grasped. The teaching context, like that of anthropology more generally, has changed significantly, with new languages that, for the moment, more readily persuade of their materiality-reality-talk, and we can take on board ontological multiplicity – not, I think, as what might once have been termed a cross-cultural phenomenon (as is sometimes implied) but as an everyday affair (cf. McDonald 2014, 2015). The aka has come home.

So Why Anthropology? We live with what we might once have treated as simply different realities but which I would still, for the moment, call ‘ontological multiplicity’ – but these realities and their fallout are not always successfully coordinated (as they were in Mol’s 2003 study). This was evident in my first study in Brittany (e.g. McDonald 1989a) and in the worlds of alcohol and drug consumption I went on to study (McDonald 1994). Where it is desired, the outline and possible reconciliation of different realities in a manner that does not bring undue diminution of any one party might be considered a worthwhile ambition – and it is one for which anthropology is eminently suited, with its input actively sought on occasion. (Such solicitation, we know, is something that – for better

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or worse – we are now supposed to encourage, as ‘impact’.) In a very small way, I have tried to be active in such endeavours in the Breton context and in medical contexts at home – but also more widely, in the apparently multicultural world of the European Commission, for example. This is a practical task for which I know I had to climb a steep learning curve, and it is one that ought perhaps to figure more prominently in anthropology teaching. On the way, ‘culture’ most definitely became an object of ethnography rather than a notion for our tool kits (e.g. McDonald 2012a), and life and death have been important materialities to examine very carefully (e.g. McDonald 2011, 2012b, 2017), and will continue to be so. I have found myself examining ethnographically some of the very obstacles in my own career, which has perhaps been therapy of a kind. Objectivity and detachment have been important objects of ethnographic examination in this respect, both in the EU and in medical practice (McDonald 2012a, 2014, 2015), and some of the bodies of medical education and of the students who learn to be affected thereby have been central in some of my work, along with the ethical issues they raise. So, perhaps I have at last got my aka – and, indeed, my femoral triangle and my thigh (McDonald 2014). I fear I may have been very slow. But we do not need to talk in quite the same wearying and laboured way about ‘reality’ anymore – not because we have gone mad but because the old-style exteriority of reality has gone, analytically at least. The realities of people’s worlds for those who live them is a point that was felt to be hard-won long ago (cf. the Introduction to Tonkin, McDonald and Chapman 1989) – but this has hopefully come to be taken for granted in a discipline in which there has since been so much talk of ‘taking seriously’ those whom we study, including the environments they articulate and embody. The key problems and aims might remain, as ever: (1) to do this well, without traducement and without political naivety; (2) to then be able to make informed decisions or to advise where required; and (3) to spread the message of anthropological endeavours more widely. Maryon McDonald is Fellow in Social Anthropology at Robinson College, Cambridge. She was previously Reader in Social Anthropology at Brunel University, and has held visiting appointments at the universities of Rennes (France) and Oxford (UK), where she was also elected ‘O’Donnell Lecturer’. Apart from her own publications, she has been editor-in-chief (2012–18) of The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology and, until 2019, a founding co-editor of the WYSE Series in Social Anthropology (Berghahn Books).

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Note  1. One could talk here of Breton ‘activists’ but those whom I studied did not like this term. They saw activism in this context as merely an impotent ‘regionalist’ identity politics; instead, these self-styled ‘militants’ wanted a separate, independent Brittany.

References Ardener, E. 1971. ‘Introduction’, in E. Ardener (ed.), Social Anthropology and Language (ASA Monographs 10). London: Tavistock, pp. ix–cii. (Also published in Ardener 1989.)  . 1972. ‘Belief and the Problem of Women’, in J. La Fontaine (ed.), The Interpretation of Ritual. London: Tavistock. (Also published in S. Ardener 1975 and E. Ardener 1989.)  . 1982. ‘Social Anthropology, Language and Reality’, in D. Parkin (ed.), Semantic Anthropology. London: Academic Press, pp, 1–14.  . 1989. The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays (posthumously published essays, edited and with an Introduction by M. Chapman). New York: Berghahn Books. Ardener, S. (ed.). 1975. Perceiving Women. London: Dent. Berlin, B., and P. Kay. 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Candea, M. 2019. Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method. Cambridge: CUP. Chapman, M. 1978. ‘Reality and Representation’, JASO [Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford] 9(1): 35–52.  . 1989. ‘Introduction’, in E. Ardener, The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays (posthumously published essays, edited by M. Chapman). New York: Berghahn Books, pp. vii–xxviii. Crick, M. 1976. Explorations in Language and Meaning: Towards a Semantic Anthropology. London: Dent. Henare, A., M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds). 2007. Thinking Through Things. New York: Routledge. Hollis, M. 1982. ‘The Social Destruction of Reality’, in M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds), Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell. Hollis, M., and S. Lukes (eds). 1982. Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell. McDonald, M. 1978. ‘Language “At Home” to Educated Radicalism’, JASO [Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford] 9(1): 13–34.  . 1986a. ‘Celtic Ethnic Kinship and the Problem of Being English’, Current Anthropology 27(4): 333–47.

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 . 1986b. ‘Brittany: Politics and Women in a Minority World’, in R. Ridd and H. Callaway (eds), Caught Up in Conflict: Women’s Responses to Political Strife. London: Macmillan, pp. 163–184.  . 1989a. ‘We are not French!’ Language, Culture and Identity in Brittany. New York: Routledge.  . 1989b. ‘Postscript 2. Towards a Rigorously Empirical Anthropology’, in E. Ardener, The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 279–81. (ed.). 1994. Gender, Drink and Drugs. New York: Berghahn Books.  . 2011. ‘Deceased Organ Donation, Culture and the Objectivity of Death’, in W. Weimar (ed.), Organ Transplantation: Ethical, Legal and Psycho-Social Aspects. Eichengrund: Pabst Science Publishers, pp. 267–273.  . 2012a. ‘Putting Culture in its Place: Anthropological Reflections on the European Commission’, European Societies 14(4): 1–22.  . 2012b. ‘Medical Anthropology and Anthropological Studies of Science’, in U. Kockel, M. Nic Craith and J. Frykman (eds), Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 459–479.  . 2014. ‘Bodies and Cadavers’, in Penny Harvey et al. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Objects and Materials. New York: Routledge, pp. 128–143.  . 2015. ‘Some Merits and Difficulties of Detachment’, in T. Yarrow et al. (eds), Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 35–57.  . 2017. ‘The Ontological Turn Meets the Certainty of Death’, Anthropology and Medicine (July): 1–16. Mol, A. 2003. The Body Multiple. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.  . 2012. ‘Mind your Plate! The Onto-Norms of Dutch Dieting’, Social Studies of Science 23(3): 379–96. Moore, H. 1988. Feminism and Anthropology. Cambridge: Polity. Pocock, D. 1961. Social Anthropology. London: Sheed and Ward. Tonkin, E., M. McDonald and M. Chapman (eds). 1989. History and Ethnicity (ASA volume 27). London: Routledge.

Chapter 11

MEDITERRANEAN EQUIVOQUES AT OXFORD João Pina-Cabral

The notion of Mediterraneanist anthropology is traditionally associated with Oxford in the 1950s, and to such figures as John G. Peristiany, Julian Pitt-Rivers and John K. Campbell. Yet, in the course of its half-century of existence, anthropological Mediterraneanism was forced to respond to profound changes both in terms of new understandings of anthropological theory and of European geopolitics. In this chapter I present a series of chained equivocations that I have had to contend with over the past decades. My aim is to highlight, on the one hand, how the history of Oxford Mediterraneanism has been systematically misread and, on the other, how anthropology has failed to deal adequately with the matter of sociocultural comparison. Articles such as the one Chris Hann (2016) published in Current Anthropology debating the category of Eurasia, whether or not one is in agreement with the specificities of the argument, are very welcome, for they force anthropologists to address explicitly something that they normally prefer to leave unstated: the contexts of socioregional comparison implicit in their ethnographic analyses (see Pina-Cabral 1989a). The first aspect that needs to be stressed is that the category ‘Mediterranean’ is not independent of the other regional categories that surround it: Europe, the West, Africa, Middle East. Each of these carries with it a set of symbolic implications that were central to the dominant imperial projects over the past two centuries. It is hardly just a matter of identifying a body of water around which were built some of the world’s most important historical cities. A broad regional

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category such as Mediterranean is deeply relational; it cannot be defined in purely geographic terms, as it only makes sense by reference to a set of assumed alterities: the Orient, Africa, the Middle East, the Eastern bloc, the Third World. The definition of what constitutes Europe or the West has evolved, responding to the profound changes in political and economic conditions that have occurred over the decades. Our recent history is full of such geopolitical shifts: for example, the end of the Ottoman Empire; the creation of a Soviet bloc; the postwar recentring of Westernness in America and no longer in Europe; the process of decolonization and the arrival of colonial populations in the European metropolitan cities; the advent of the South European democracies and their entry into the European Union; the creation of the East European democracies; and the more recent split of Europe into two as a result of the ‘austerity’ regime, nationalism and the ‘refugee crisis’. Today, the Mediterranean region silently qualifies Europe and its imperial successor, the West, by fudging its borders. The Mediterranean sits at the border of ‘the Rest’ (as in ‘the West and the Rest’), playing the role of historical mediator to a civilizational heritage that ‘the West’ claims to own but whose origins it traces elsewhere (the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and the Phoenicians come to mind as master metaphors). As these two categories evolved in the second half of the twentieth century, so the anthropological Mediterranean was forced to shift its place and alter its nature, being silently resituated a number of times. The works of the Oxford Mediterraneanists (but also the early Algerian work of Pierre Bourdieu [1979; original editions 1962 and 1973] and Ernest Gellner’s [1969] Moroccan ethnography) are part of a process of resituating the Mediterranean that was taking place at mid-century, accompanying the shift in the meaning of the word ‘West’, when it came to signify primarily American civilization and no longer Western Europe. This was not, however, the sort of implications that the concept had carried half a century earlier, during the belle époque, when it was used by the founders of the social sciences in the early twentieth century. This deserves to be noted. For example, when Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl corresponded in 1909 concerning the title of the latter’s book Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés – ‘primitive’, as Durkheim would have it or ‘inferior’, as Lévy-Bruhl finally decided1 – the operative opposition they used was between ‘the mentality of the primitive/inferior societies’ and that of the ‘societies originating in the Mediterranean civilization’ (cf. Goldman 1994: 177–78). In short, the primitivizing rereading of

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the Mediterranean that was going to occur after the Second World War was still foreign to them. It occurred as the result of a major change in the meaning of Southern Europe that came about in the course of the American occupation of southern Italy. This process was brilliantly and poisonously described in Curzio Malaparte’s masterpiece La Pele (1949) and in Norman Lewis’s famous war diary (1978). Works of Mediterranean delegitimation such as Banfield’s elaborations on ‘amoral familism’ (1958), and much that was written on clientelism and patrimonialism, were an integral part of that ideological shift. Over the past decade, however, such discriminatory typecastings have again resurfaced by the hands of ‘social psychologists’ as part of the neoliberal attack on peripheral European societies that is once again splitting Europe (e.g. Cohen and Nesbitt 1994). Mediterranean equivocation in anthropology is the product of the fact that theory and geopolitics silently merge in social scientific thinking. This is due to the ideological centrality of the primitive/ modern polarity during the past century. Our nineteenth-century anthropological ancestors developed the notion of primitive (that is, the association of ‘otherness’ with primordiality) as an intellectual tool in order to account for the unity of the human species in the face of its blatant diversity (see Kuper 1988: 1–36). Soon enough, however, it turned into one of the more powerful implements of European imperialism. Ernest Gellner (1974) used to call the boundary between primitive/ancient and modern ‘the Great Divide’. He claimed that it was an indispensable theoretical tool of analysis (perhaps the single most important one in twentieth-century social sciences, as Latour ([1991] 2006) has argued. What is not so seldom observed is that the way the Great Divide is specifically drawn responds to geopolitical interests that shift every few years. Since the days of Durkheim, the Mediterranean has become an area of uncertainty, a terrain of negotiation, a favoured field for geopolitical mediation and, therefore, of analytical equivocation. It is a producer of ‘remoteness’ (see Ardener 2012). Following my own personal history as a practitioner of the discipline, this paper argues that a series of equivoques have been heaped up that deserve to be unravelled since they seem to be persistent and remain fully contemporary. A few years ago, Lidia Sciama and myself were asked by the Journal of Mediterranean Studies to comment on the apparent persistence of many of these regional confusions and uncritical attributions of stereotypes (Sciama 2013; PinaCabral 2013). These perplexities are, after all, the terms of European schismogenesis, with immense long-term historical implications.

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We were questioning them at Oxford over twenty years ago, when they were evolving due to the enlargement of the European Union, and then the fall of the Berlin Wall (see Pina-Cabral 1989a).2 But they are again evolving today in a different direction in response to the faltering of the project of European unification. Furthermore, this chapter sustains that, due to the essential role of primitivism in the way Anthropology defined itself as a discipline in the course of the twentieth century, the complex original drive that led to the study of the history-filled social contexts that surround the Mediterranean Sea by a number of anthropologists in the postwar period has remained hidden from our view for too long, both in terms of the geopolitical implications of studying this border zone and in terms of the theoretical implications of doing so.

The First Equivoque In early 1977, I had a long conversation with David HammondTooke, my erstwhile supervisor at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, concerning where I should go to do a doctoral thesis. At the time, we were both fascinated by Lévi-Straussian structuralism – after all, my earlier thesis had been a formal study of the canonical formula of myth using the example of a Portuguese folktale, and he was carrying out a structuralist analysis of the Zulu folktales collected long ago by Bishop Calloway (Hammond-Tooke 1977, 1992). Being a Portuguese national, and at a time of decolonization, I could not remain in South Africa; and, in those days, Portuguese universities had still not recovered from the 1974 democratic Carnation Revolution. Paris would have been an option. However, in spite of our fascination with French structuralism, it was clear to both of us that postgraduate study in Paris was far too personalized and erratic an activity for me to be comfortable about it. So, England it had to be. I had a short list of people who inspired me. Maurice Bloch’s Placing the Dead (1971) had been a major revelation, but as he was on sabbatical leave in the United States I had to look elsewhere. As it happened, Mary Douglas, who had also inspired Hammond-Tooke’s early work, had just left for the States too, and in a more permanent capacity. Therefore, one afternoon, by telephone from South Africa, I spoke with the director of Graduate Studies at UCL, and asked him where I might go. Knowing that I wanted to write a thesis on Portuguese rural society, he said that the person for me to study with in the United

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Kingdom was definitely John Campbell at Oxford, and that, if I liked structuralism, I could also be oriented by his friend Rodney Needham. So off I went. A few years later, when I met him in Berkeley, where he was an Invited Professor, we discovered that the person I had spoken to was none other than Michael Gilsenan. This constitutes my first Mediterranean equivoque. In fairness, Michael’s mistake of classifying northern Portugal from a sociohistorical point of view as a ‘Mediterranean society’ would be shared by most of his colleagues at the time, and he had not way of knowing that Rodney Needham was rapidly moving away from his structuralist romance. After all, if you do not look closely, Portugal seems to be just on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, very close to Spain, which is the motherland of all Mediterraneanism. And then, he could not know that Rodney was just about to launch his Wittgenstein Seminars at All Souls College Oxford, where the sort of semiotic structuralism that had brought him to fame in the 1970s was to be profoundly questioned. In my first encounter with Rodney he immediately corrected me concerning structuralism: the first book I ever read at Oxford, on his suggestion, was a spoof on Lévi-Straussian structuralism (Asger and Arnaud 1968). That convinced me that I had no alternative but to follow the old empiricist route: the ethnographic data would drive my cogitations, not the testing of some predetermined hypothesis. But as to what, precisely, was at stake theoretically in this abandonment of structuralism, it took me over two decades to work it out. In fact, I do not blame myself for being obtuse, as Rodney too (just as he was writing his later books) was driven by a process of deconstruction, the conclusions of which, I believe, he never really managed to fully come to terms with (Needham 1987). It was only by the early 2000s, long after his death, that much of what he was critically uncovering in the mid-1980s started to fall into place in terms of new approaches to cognition in anthropology. Once at Oxford, upon doing the background reading, I quickly realized that, from the point of view of its rural institutions, northern Portugal was part of those societies on the western fringe of Europe that were then called Celtic. The old ‘honour and shame syndrome’ as described for the Mediterranean heartlands simply did not fit that material. This may not have been very important, were it not for the fact that anthropological feminism (and feminist inspired psychoanalysis) was all the rage in anthropology in those days, and I was deeply impressed by some of those ladies. I wanted to enquire into the

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relation between gender, value and personhood. But the equivoques kept coming. I remember a conversation with Ann Whitehead based on a total failure to communicate. I had claimed that gender relations in northern Portugal were far more egalitarian than in southern Iberia. She arrogantly put me down, accusing me of being a male chauvinist ignoramus. I concede that I might have been ignorant about many things in those days, but I was not consciously a male chauvinist, and what I was reporting to her concerning the very long-term nature of the relation between gender roles and social organization in north-western Iberia still seems fascinating to me today (cf. PinaCabral 1983, 1991a; and Pina-Cabral and Silva 2013). Indeed, the people who have studied the matter in greater depth over the years have repeatedly manifested their agreement with me on that point (see Bestard 1998; Rowland 2011). After my first fieldwork stint in 1978–79, it became absolutely clear that, much as I was very impressed by People of the Sierra (PittRivers 1954), by Honour, Family, and Patronage (Campbell 1964), and by Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village (Du Boulay 1974), the material I had in hand was most comparable with Martine Segalen’s (1985) ethnography of the Pays Bigoudin, in Brittany, and not with the Greek material my colleagues at Oxford (Roger Just, Julie Makris, Michael Herzfeld) were collecting at the time. Edwin Ardener was leading a group of students working in what he dubbed ‘the Celtic Fringe’ – Brittany, Ireland and Scotland. It seemed reasonable to check, so I did just that, even knowing that it would hurt a little my two supervisors, who were his sworn personal enemies. I found Edwin a learned and inspired thinker but a somewhat uncomfortable person to be with – he lacked Campbell’s generous concern for his students, and Needham’s naughty capacity for intellectual provocation. Nothing came of that.

The Second Equivoque I will now move on a few years to the second Mediterranean equivoque. The actors here were a different bunch. In those days, the small group of Europeanists working under the wing of John Campbell organized a reading group at St Antony’s College. Michael Herzfeld had finally finished his thesis, and shortly after published The Poetics of Manhood (1985). We read it just as it was coming out and, on the whole, we were disquieted by it. Ours Once More (Herzfeld 1982) had

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seemed a really visionary book, since it was in fact working actively at the European project in terms of anthropological cross-fertilization; it was opening up a way of rethinking the relation between the old strands of pre-Malinowskian nationalist ethnography with the cosmopolitan brand of theoretically informed anthropology that we aimed to practise. But the ethnography of Crete written from the perspective of men’s talk in a local village café, seemed to us to lack some of the more important aspects of what we believed ethnography should convey. Our response to the culturalist interpretivism coming from America in those days was double pronged. Those of us, such as myself, for whom Marxist thought had been an early influence, found the ‘semiotic turn’ an unfortunate development, particularly in light of our reading the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and E.P. Thompson. At the same time, we were fascinated by the potentialities that were opened up in terms of new rhetoric modes of writing ethnography (cf. Rabinow 1977). Back in Lisbon, in 1986, I started writing Aromas de Urze e de Lama ([1993] 2008), an exercise in the rhetoric of fieldwork reporting (that is, ethnopoetics). When he heard of it, Rodney sent me Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de Style (1979). But my intentions were hardly those of the surrealist poet. They mostly had to do with the need to explode the old formats of ethnographic writing which, by then, felt so restrictive and unresponsive. In those days, I evaluated my own recently published Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve (Pina-Cabral 1986) as a good study but written in a very boring style. The truth is, I was never really at peace with Evans-Pritchard’s ethnographic empiricism and the way it sneakily hid away its own sophisticated and complex theoretical underpinnings. In 1986, John Campbell and I decided to organize a workshop at the Congress of the European Association of Rural Sociology to debate the changing conditions for ethnographic fieldwork in Europe, and we invited colleagues from Portugal, Spain, the United States and Britain.3 In the end, John could not come for the usual health reasons, but in the introduction to the book that we eventually published, Europe Observed (Pina-Cabral and Campbell 1992), we noted that: The British and American postwar fieldworkers did not think of themselves as Europeanists, preferring the designation of Mediterraneanist. They stressed the similarities and continuities between the southern and the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea at the expense of those existing between Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe. To a younger generation of fieldworkers studying Atlantic Spain, France or

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Portugal, this view appears increasingly problematic … Some contributors to this volume would support the latter point of view, but even they would not regard the option for abandoning the Mediterraneanist label as a radical criticism of it, but rather as a reasoned challenge to the long-established practice in Anglophone anthropology of dividing Western Europe in two for the purposes of ethnographic comparison. (Ibid.: xi–xii)

As it turns out, the Braga meeting was awash with equivoques. Those who were present will never forget the deep embarrassment of Stanley Brandes who had kindly accepted to translate Isidoro Moreno Navarro’s paper into English without previously enquiring from him what it was about. Stanley was the perfect gentleman and a superb translator. Isidoro, on the other hand, delivered a heavily emotional diatribe in which he stated that, since they never quote their Spanish colleagues’ work, American anthropologists were stealing ideas and, therefore, they should be made to pay a tax to the Spanish government for being allowed to do fieldwork in Spain. Similarly, when the time to speak came for Josep Ramon Llobera, the Anglo-Catalan anthropologist informed us that he no longer wanted to deliver his paper. To everyone’s surprise, two months later, Critique of Anthropology (Llobera 1986) printed a vicious attack on the workshop that Josep Ramon had prepared and evidently sent for publication before he even went to Braga. He had a different axe to grind: as John Campbell and myself were associated with Oxford, Josep Ramon had interpreted our concern with discussing participant observation as a manifestation of ‘mindless empiricism’, and unmitigated structural-functionalist obscurantism. He called our need to rethink the bases of participant observation ‘an epistemological straightjacket’. Many of us, with Peter Loizos in the forefront, responded (Loizos 1987; Pina-Cabral 1987), but it all fell on deaf ears and the equivocation survived. John Campbell’s position in all of this does deserve comment. In those days, he was not only a Mediterraneanist but the Mediterraneanist, and he was not about to abdicate from that position. He was, on the other hand, a deeply informed person and a sophisticated political historian who was quite conscious of the divers geopolitical implications of using such a category at a time when Southern Europe was becoming closer to Northern Europe, Eastern Europe was entering in dialogue with Western Europe, and the Middle East and the Maghreb were entering rather dark and disturbing moments. On the other hand, in theoretical terms, having a historian’s imagination, he was in fact an Oxford empiricist, in the sense that he

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had no trust in rootless theory. But he was deeply engaged in bringing about a relation between historical and anthropological thinking (both methodologically and theoretically) and, much like his friend Pitt-Rivers, he had much sympathy for phenomenological insights, on condition that they were grounded in actual ethnographic interpretation (see Mazower 2008). Initially, and in view of the strangeness of the workshop in Braga, John and I decided to drop the idea of publishing the papers as a book. But those last few years of the 1980s were years of great upheaval in Anthropology; US colleagues were aggressively rewriting the history of the discipline and they were (often not deliberately) obscuring much of the best work that had been carried out by anthropologists elsewhere. As it turns out, Isidoro did have a point. The younger generation of European anthropologists were being educated mostly in the recent trends in cultural anthropology, and they were prone to be rather ignorant of the rich and varied history of social anthropology as a whole. They were taking on board wholesale a series of misinformed accusations about their own anthropological predecessors. It took a while for it to become apparent how deleterious this kind of amnesia was for our discipline. John Campbell and I felt the need, on the one hand, to give a historically more sophisticated account of the history of Europeanist ethnography than those that were coming out in the disciplinary press at the time; but, on the other hand, we were keen to signal that we were not simply continuing with the theoretically blind positivism that Llobera assumed we served. Europe Observed (Pina-Cabral and Campbell 1992) was a response to all this. The book addresses essentially three concerns: (a) the need to overcome Evans-Pritchard’s interpretivist view of ethnography as translation (see Pina-Cabral 2017), by setting it within a phenomenologically inspired discussion of fieldwork intersubjectivity and its implications; (b) the role of gender, nationality and class in fieldwork and the way in which the ethnographer’s own personal characteristics affect the nature of the exchange, thus questioning the implicit association of ‘us’ = modern v. ‘other’ = primitive; and (c) the way in which the intense interchange with history that had been developing ever since the late 1970s had led to a series of innovative fieldwork techniques and research dispositions. Finally, the book gathers two unique documents: John Campbell’s own account of his field experience in postwar Greece, and Julian Pitt-Rivers’ re-encounter with his personal fieldwork record in the light of his own father’s (deeply problematic) engagement with the discipline (see Hart 2015).

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The greatest equivoque with this book is that if we had called it Mediterranean Observed it would certainly have had a much wider readership. As it happens, neither my own preoccupation with rethinking the nature of the ethnographic method in the light of phenomenological thought, nor John Campbell’s message concerning the interaction between history and anthropology ever came to be noticed by our colleagues. In particular, if we take into account both his lifetime’s devotion to integrate history and anthropology, and the sophisticated methodological discussions we gathered in this book, the repeated claims that continue to emerge today that anthropology has not interacted with history can only be interpreted as culpable ignorance.

The Third Mediterranean Equivoque The next equivoque happened just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and as Adam Kuper and a group of us decided to launch a European Association of Social Anthropologists. With hindsight I can now see how courageous it was of Adam, then editor of Current Anthropology, to publish a paper I had presented called ‘The Mediterranean as a Category of Regional Comparison: A Critical View’ (Pina-Cabral 1989a). The paper had been written as a response on my part to the blatant misunderstandings that had emerged in the Critique of Anthropology debate (Llobera 1986; Loizos 1987; Pina-Cabral 1987). I felt that we could no longer accept to be limited to two types of anthropological comparativism, both of which seemed equally unsatisfactory: it was either a ‘one-village-one-vote’ type comparison (see Hammel 1984) or a cultural area type comparison based on the blank attribution of stereotyped psychological traits to whole regions. We needed some kind of ‘controlled comparison’, but this meant working at developing a far more systematic approach to the nature of long-term sociocultural differentiation – something that anthropologists mostly shy away from doing. Llobera had accused us of not working with history, of ignoring class and rural–urban differentiation in our studies, and of being more concerned with the literary value of our ethnographies than with the way they contributed towards the broader scientific undertaking. And yet, avoiding those failings had been precisely our aim ever since the early 1980s. In particular, a whole generation of which I was part had been dialoguing intensely with the demographic historians of the Cambridge School (Joan Bestard Camps,

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Paolo Viazzo, Robert Rowland, etc.), in an attempt to develop more sophisticated, long-term approaches to the nature of regional differentiation in marriage patterns, household formation patterns, and community organization (see Pina-Cabral 1989b). Curiously, none of that work seemed to have been registered either by the people that engaged in the Critique of Anthropology debate or by those who responded to it. To this day, very few anthropologists even contemplate debating critically how regional attributions are made in our discipline. Methodological nationalism continues to be de rigueur to this day: an anthropologist of Greece stops his comparison at the borders of Greece, an anthropologist of southern France does not even know the name of his colleagues working in Barcelona, and an anthropologist of Galicia is more likely to compare his findings with those of his colleagues working in Valencia than with those working in Portugal a few kilometres away. My feeling, twenty years after the Current Anthropology debate, is that, ultimately, we have not managed to dispel the equivoques that we aimed to clarify. In fact, as financial deflationism (‘austerity’) wreaked havoc across the countries of peripheral Europe, financial oppression started again to be explained by the ‘primitive’ characteristics of those who were being subjected to it. Two instances of the systemic nature of this Mediterranean equivocation come to mind, as they had a great impact on me. The first was a passing, but very incisive comment by Sydel Silverman, then president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, at the meeting in Castel Gandolfo (Italy) where we prepared the launch of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.4 Upon being introduced to me, Sydel congratulated me on the smartness of the publicity stunt I had pulled off at the expense of my masters. I forget her precise wording, but I was absolutely stunned, particularly as she did not seem to be criticizing me. She could not imagine what really had happened – that the paper had been read beforehand by John Campbell, who was mostly in agreement with its central points. It was her kind of Mediterraneanism that was being attacked, not his, but she could not see this. She simply assumed otherwise. The second was a detailed and aggressive response published in Current Anthropology by David Gilmore (1990) accusing me of being a Comtian anti-reductionist and of stubbornly failing to see how useful psychoanalytical insights can be to anthropological theorization. He failed to even start to understand why I was not satisfied with the psychologistic stereotypes that he had applied to a region

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that, according to him, went from somewhere in Asia all the way to Portugal, and that included both sides of the Mediterranean Sea in their vast historical and social differentiation. Why he had been incapable of seeing that I was asking for a more systematic and responsible form of engagement with sociocultural differentiation, and that this had nothing to do with the use of psychoanalytical insights, left me utterly puzzled (Pina-Cabral 1991b).5 Again, in light of what happened after that, I should not have been surprised. To this day, most ethnographers of Europe fail to grasp that they are responsible for explaining why they choose some regional comparisons and avoid others; that they are responsible for the way in which they cope with long-term sociocultural differentiation; and that they have to validate their options empirically and theoretically. Every so often, a study emerges in which this is done, like the notable study by Peter Rivière (1984) about the Amerindians of the Guyana region, but it is the exception rather than the rule. Historians have addressed this challenge much more effectively than anthropologists. And those of us who, in the 1980s and early 1990s, worked at it systematically, attempting to experiment with new and more theoretically validated forms of regional comparison inspired by historical research, have been frustrated by the fact that the later generations of Europeanist anthropologists are as unkeen to validate analytically the bases of their comparisons as were their own mentors. For this reason, the equivoque survived. In 2000, Horden and Purcell published their comprehensive historical revisitation of the unity of the Mediterranean. There, they again fail to see that my central argument is not against the evidence that there are some sociocultural features that are generally found in the regions that border on the Mediterranean Sea (Horden and Purcell 2000: 487– 88). My argument is another one (and an old one, by the way; see Eggan 1954): to wit, when we place our ethnographic evidence in comparative terms, we have to be careful that the parameters of our comparison are historically and geographically relevant. Honour and shame (Horten and Purcell 2000: 522), is a good example of a category that might easily be observable in one or another manifestation in most civilizations across the globe. When Pitt-Rivers was writing The People of the Sierra (1954), he first encountered these notions in the work of Georg Simmel, and they are not presented there as features specific to ‘the Mediterranean’, but as broad features of all human experience to which Pitt-Rivers found a specific local cast that he meant to analyse.

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The Last Equivoque This leads me to the last equivoque that I will detail here. I only found about it as the result of a conversation I had in Recife’s coastal walkway one evening in 2004 with Richard Fardon. We were there as representatives of the various anthropological associations that Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (then president of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology) had brought together to plan the founding of what eventually became the World Council of Anthropological Associations. I told him I had my doubts concerning the nature of the Mediterraneanist label, and felt that the theoretical foundations of that school had never been properly researched. For one, I was sure that neither Pitt-Rivers nor Campbell agreed with the culture-trait type of interpretation of the ‘honour and shame syndrome’ that had become the standard American form of Mediterraneanism (e.g. Schneider 1971). I have never forgotten Pitt-Rivers’ comment in the introduction to the second edition of The People of the Sierra that the notions of honour/shame he had used in his 1954 monograph had been directly influenced by German verstehen theories of personhood and value. In fact, when we look at the founding texts of Oxford Mediterraneanism, we soon discover that the aspiration to define the distinctive features of the Mediterranean as a ‘culture area’ was simply not there. For example, in his introduction to Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (1966), Peristiany never even tries to explain what is specifically Mediterranean about the values he identifies. In the beginning of his exposé, the matter is presented in a thoroughly universalist fashion: All societies sanction their rule of conduct, rewarding those who conform and punishing those who disobey. Honour and shame are social evaluations and thus participate of the nature of social sanctions; the more monolithic the jury, the more trenchant the judgement. Honour and shame are two poles of an evaluation. They are the reflection of the social personality in the mirror of social ideals. What is particular to these evaluations is that they use as a standard of measurement the type of personality [that is] considered as representative and exemplary of a certain society. Whoever is measured by its standards and is not found wanting may, without falling from grace, break a number of rules considered minor in relation to those of honour. (Ibid.: 9–10)

He then goes on to detail the specific papers gathered in the book, only to conclude with a second assessment that is even more universalistic: ‘For any one man to embody the ideal, to pursue a rigid and

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uncompromising course, generates social reactions from which most truly outstanding men have suffered’ (ibid.: 17). In my conversation with Richard Fardon, I argued that, in the 1950s, the discourse of honour and shame at Oxford had had little to do with the generalized attribution of broad psychological propensities, but was in fact a theoretical reassessment of the notions of person, gender and class; a questioning of the Durkheimian paradigm that had ruled anthropology during the Classical Period by a group of people who were themselves, like the Mediterranean itself, uncomfortably seated on the borders of Westernness: Peristiany, AbuReid, Caro Baroja, Gellner (a Czech), Bourdieu (of southern French, peasant extraction) and even Pitt-Rivers, who, for all that he was an English aristocrat, was married to an Andalusian countess when he wrote his book. Richard’s response to me was that he was not at all surprised by this, since he had just collaborated with Jeremy Adler in the production of a two-volume edition of the unpublished works of Julian Pitt-Rivers’ DPhil supervisor: Franz Baermann Steiner, a Czech Jew. A few weeks later, he actually sent me the volumes (Steiner 1999a, 1999b). I have to say that reading them was a veritable epiphany. Steiner, who had studied and then taught at Oxford in the immediate postwar years, had died suddenly in 1952 leaving most of his work unpublished. He turned out to have been a major influence on practically all of the young people who carried out postgraduate work in Oxford in the immediate postwar period, and who were to shape the discipline internationally from thence to the 1970s – Mary Douglas, Laura and Paul Bohannan, M. Srinivas, Louis Dumont, Julian PittRivers – all of these have made explicit comments about Steiner’s decisive intellectual influence. When he died, Steiner was halfway through a series of very insightful lectures on Simmel’s theory of value. Furthermore, it must be noted that Steiner was not a pure theorist; he had carried out fieldwork before the war in the rural areas of Carpathian Ruthenia (present day Ukraine). At that time, he had been a student of Anthropology in Vienna, but he then went on to study in Palestine. So, Pitt-Rivers’ option for fieldwork in Spain must have seemed very different to Steiner from what it had seemed to Evans-Pritchard, whose primitivist leanings had led him to sustain a marked disdain for fieldwork in Europe (which he felt to be less demanding and less valuable) to the end of his days.6 Yet Steiner’s influence is not the only instance of a kind of intellectual association that anthropologists have surprisingly failed

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to explore; a silenced legacy. For example, there is much work still waiting to be done in digging out the roots of Campbell’s theology – a central aspect of his study of the Greeks. Many of us, working with him – from Du Boulay to Charles Stewart, Roger Just, Renée Hirschon and myself – have had quite a lot to say about Southern European and Middle Eastern Christianity. He guided us that way, as this was explicitly an interest of his. Campbell’s influences – mediated by Onians’s famous 1954 text that he always timidly suggested we might like to read – are those of the sort of Anglican neo-Platonian theology that was practised at Oxford going back to the days of Ruskin, Collingwood’s patron. The latter wrote an essay on the Devil that Campbell might have had in mind whilst writing his own contribution to Peristiany’s book (Collingwood 1916). This matter surely does deserve further attention. Suddenly, I became aware of the greatest of the Mediterranean equivoques: I had not known, and no one had ever bothered to tell me, anything about the intellectual roots of Oxford Mediterraneanism. It turns out that it did not fit into the general mould that the chief historians of our discipline – such as Adam Kuper and George Stocking Jr – had written about. Why had we not been told of Collingwood, of Simmel, of Franz Steiner’s folklorist training, of neo-Platonist theology? No one had ever even suggested that verstehen sociology had been the central source of inspiration in rethinking personhood that Pitt-Rivers and his colleagues had undertaken and that, later on, was an important step in the development of a constructivist view of personhood taken up in the 1980s by such feminist theorists as Marilyn Strathern. No one seemed to know that the supervisor of the founder of Mediterranean ethnography in Britain had been a specialist on the peasantry of the Carpathian Mountains, trained in Vienna, or that Talcott Parsons’ translations of Weber’s work had been the main theoretical inspiration for Honour, Family and Patronage (1964) and for Belmonte de los Caballeros (Lison-Tolosana 1983 [1966]). Read from that perspective, ‘honour and shame’ was something totally different from the vaguely culpable ‘culture trait’ that our American colleagues were trying to map out and explain away in a reifying fashion to fit neo-Freudian moulds. As a discourse on value and personal constitution, honour and shame is one thing; as a reifiable item, a mapable culture trait, it is food for the geopolitical trade of attribution of psychological causes for underdevelopment, in line with such ideological equipment as ‘amoral familism’ or ‘patrimonialism’. Seen in the light of Simmel’s sociology, Pitt-Rivers’ work acquires a new phenomenological significance that would otherwise

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remain totally unfathomable. His paper in Europe Observed leaves no doubt that those were his intentions. So, it was with great pleasure that I recently saw his work being re-edited by HAU Books, in line with a far better informed revisitation of the intellectual roots of anthropological thinking (Pitt-Rivers 2015).

Conclusion I would now like to make a more general comment concerning equivocation. The Mediterranean equivocations I have identified above are not only in the reception. An equivoque is an act of communication where what is one thing to one person appears to their interlocutor, albeit under the same word, as being something else. As we have seen, equivoques imply a relation between shared meaning and sociality as a field of power. This is largely due to the fact that the two partners in the communication act assume different contextual backgrounds without necessarily realizing it, for they believe they are communicating. And there is no doubt that they do communicate, but the indeterminacy between their two meanings is higher than it would be under a linguistic context of fuller communication. It should not surprise us, therefore, if someone such as myself, who holds onto a minimalist realist position and has an investment in the anthropology of action, should be so interested in equivocation as an analytical tool (cf. Pina-Cabral 2002: 105–26). Thus, I feel that it is worthwhile emphasizing that an act of communication is held to be an instance of equivocation when what is at stake is not merely a matter of indeterminacy but where the nature of the different receptions suggests the common presence of two (or more) different implicit structurings of the world, different ‘worldviews’ (even when these are present within one single person – see Pina-Cabral 2010). There is politics in all equivocation, therefore, for there is the assumption of a contextual placing that implies the common presence of different collectively shared traditions of meaning contextualization – that is, the implicit acceptance of different hegemonic orders. This is the case, for example, when Banfield or Gilmore speak of the Mediterranean assuming geopolitical implications that are deeply divergent from those that Pitt-Rivers or myself would carry. But in the case of the Mediterranean equivoques detailed above, as we moved from instance to instance, we saw that the failures in communication associated with Mediterraneanism had hailed from

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two different fields of meaning: on the one hand, there were geopolitical equivocations, but on the other there were theoretical equivocations. The really surprising thing is that these two aspects should interact due to the centrality of the primitive/modern dichotomy. Over the Mediterraneanist half-century, the geopolitical meaning of the Mediterranean Sea changed significantly, as Europe underwent major political restructuration. This sea, that in the immediate postwar period seemed to the Anglo-American anthropologists to divide Europe whilst integrating in their common ‘backwardness’ the countries around its borders, became today one of the bloodiest and most sinister reminders of the deep unfairness of the present world order, separating those who can hope to receive a salary for their work from those who are simply not remunerated for their daily efforts. Lampedusa, of all places, came ironically to embody the most nightmarish objectifications of the Duke of Salinas’s lonesome cogitations. In April 2015, in only a week, more than six hundred people died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, and the bloodshed goes on unabated to this day. So, the equivocal character of the Mediterranean label turned out to be relevant, not only synchronically but also diachronically. This equivocation arose not only between different takes of what that geopolitical order of Europe, the Maghreb and the Middle East is supposed to be at any one time, but also across time, between anthropologists and their disciples and their future readers. After all, in the wake of the Peninsular Wars, Pitt-Rivers’ Alcalá de la Sierra (a.k.a. Grazalema) had been a famous bandit hideaway, trading on the contraband of the nearby port of Cadiz; later on, during the Spanish Civil War, when Pitt-Rivers got to know it, it represented one of the most notorious instances of anarchist popular revolt – the villagers even burnt their own village church. Today, the only thing that reminds us of the village Pitt-Rivers studied are the ancient stone faces in the fountain of the central square, appearing from behind the large buses that bring German tourists every day to sample the ‘traditional’ food and enjoy the mountain views. Similarly, theoretically speaking, assumptions have changed throughout the Mediterraneanist half-century, to the point where the original theoretical drive in the attempt to reform Durkheimian anthropology by an input of German phenomenologically inspired sociology was practically lost, and had to be analytically unpicked by people such as Richard Fardon and myself through historical research in the face of the new theoretical hegemonies that imposed

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themselves on anthropology from the 1980s onwards. These were so forceful that they managed to silence the earlier theoretical constructions, imposing a ‘culture area’ mode of comparison that was totally foreign to people like Peristiany, Campbell and Pitt-Rivers. I might not even have been led to search for this, had it not been for the deep-seated distaste of these men for the Mediterraneanism that was all the fashion in the 1980s and early 1990s. Oddly enough, to the surprise of those who interpreted my Mediterraneanist defection as an act of betrayal, John Campbell and Julian Pitt-Rivers of all people had no difficulty in coping with my own youthful arguments concerning the unsuitability of the ‘honour and shame syndrome’ for the Alto Minho, a region where, historically, gender relations where structured very differently from those that were characteristic of the Southern European coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. Yet the complexity of the Mediterranean equivocation is still greater, for there is a crossover between theoretically based equivocation and geopolitically based equivocation caused by the primitivist assumption. ‘Amoral familism’, patronage and corruption, feud and the vendetta, ‘the honour and shame syndrome’, the ‘veil’ and other forms of female dress code – all of these have at one time or another been instruments of ideological dispute that have had profound effects in moulding ‘the West’. They are all instruments that validate such acts of oppression as the so-called ‘economics of austerity’ that we suffered from over the past decade, or, in my youth, the dictatorships that were financially and diplomatically supported by AngloAmerican interests all around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea, and the need for which was also explained by the very same ‘culture traits’ that a more phenomenologically inspired anthropology would have readily debunked. João Pina-Cabral is Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Conservation of the University of Kent, and Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. He was co-founder and president of both the Portuguese Association of Anthropology and of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He has published extensively on matters related to kinship and the family, personhood, and ethnicity in postcolonial contexts.

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Notes  1. See Lévy-Bruhl 1910; their correspondence in Davy 1973: 320.  2. To understand how polemical this questioning was at the time and the way in which, then as today, it casts a disturbing light on the way psychological determinism is being abused, it is perhaps worthwhile looking at Gilmore 1990 and Pina-Cabral 1991b.  3. Workshop: ‘Methodological Problems of Participant Observation in a European Context’, April 1986, Braga, Portugal.  4. I turned out to be chosen as the organizer of the conference in 1990 (Coimbra, Portugal) where the association was formally instituted.  5. As it happens, I was right then researching a paper on genital symbolism, in which I precisely explore the relevance of psychoanalytical insights for the anthropological analysis of gender (the 1992 Malinowski Lecture, Pina-Cabral 1993).  6. John Campbell’s personal information. See MacClancy’s contribution to this volume in which previously unknown documents are presented that show that the breaking point at the Institute of Social Anthropology in the late 1970s was the attempt by the new professor to bring John Campbell, who was associated with St Antony’s College, into the Institute.

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Davy, Georges. 1973. L’homme: le fait social et le fait politique. Paris: Mouton. Du Boulay, Juliet. 1974. Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Eggan, Fred. 1954. ‘Social Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Comparison’, American Anthropologist 56(5): 743–63. Gellner, Ernest. 1969. Saints of the Atlas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  . 1974. The Legitimation of Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilmore, David. 1990. ‘Discussion and Criticism: On Mediterraneanist Studies’, Current Anthropology 31(4): 395–96. Goldman, Márcio. 1994. Razão e Diferença: Afectividade, racionalidade e relativismo no pensamento de Lévy-Bruhl. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ. Hammel, Eugene. 1984. ‘On the *** of Studying Household Form and Function’, in R. Netting, Richard R. Wilk and Eric J. Arnould (eds), Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 29–43. Hammond-Tooke, W.D. 1977. ‘Lévi-Strauss in a Garden of Millet: The Structural Analysis of a Zulu Folktale’, Man 12(2): 76–86.  . 1992. ‘Twins, Incest and Mediators: The Structure of Four Zulu Folk Tales’, Africa 62(2): 203–20. Hann, Chris. 2016. ‘A Concept of Eurasia’, Current Anthropology 57: 1–27. Hart, Bradley W. 2015. George Pitt-Rivers and the Nazis. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Herzfeld, Michael. 1982. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press.  . 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Context and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell. Lisón Tolosana, Carmelo. 1982 [1966]. Belmonte de los Caballeros: Anthropology and History in an Aragonese Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kuper, Adam. 1988. The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. London: Psychology Press. Latour, Bruno. (1991) 2006. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1910. Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociètés Inférieures. Paris: PUF. Lewis, Norman. 1978. Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy. New York: Carroll & Graf. Llobera, Josep Ramón. 1986. ‘Fieldwork in Southwestern Europe: Anthropological Panacea or Epistemological Straitjacket?’, Critique of Anthropology 6(2): 25–33. Loizos, Peter. 1987. ‘In Reply to Llobera’, Critique of Anthropology 7(1): 92–96.

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Malaparte, Curzio. 1949. La pelle. Rome: Aria d’Italia (see 1988. The Skin. Trans. David More. Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press). Mazower, Mark (ed.). 2008. Networks of Power in Modern Greece: Essays in Honour of John Campbell. New York: Hurst & Co. Needham, Rodney. 1987. Counterpoints. Berkeley: University of California Press. Onians, Richard Broxton. 1954. The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate: New Interpretations of Greek, Roman, and Kindred Evidence, Also of Some Basic Jewish and Christian Beliefs (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peristiany, J.G. (ed.). 1966. Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pina-Cabral, João. 1983. ‘Female Power and the Inequality of Wealth and Motherhood in Northwestern Portugal’, in R. Hirschon (ed.), Women and Property, Women as Property. London: Croom Helm, pp. 75–91.  . 1986. Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: The Peasant Worldview of the Alto Minho. Oxford: Clarendon Press.  . 1987. ‘Reply to Llobera’, Critique of Anthropology 7(2): 93–97.  . 1989a. ‘The Mediterranean as a Category of Regional Comparison: A Critical View, Current Anthropology 30(3): 399–406.  . 1989b. ‘L’Héritage de Maine: L’érosion des categories d’analyse dans l’étude des phénomènes familiaux en Europe’, Ethnologie Française 19: 329–40.  . 1991a. Os contextos da antropologia. Lisbon: Difel.  . 1991b. ‘On the Supposed Irreconcilability of Psychological and Sociological Explanations’, Current Anthropology 32(3): 331–32.  . 1993. ‘Tamed Violence: Genital Symbolism in Portuguese Popular Culture’, Man 28: 101–20.  . 2002. Between China and Europe: Person, Culture and Emotion in Macao. London: Athlone/Continuum Books/Berg (LSE Anthropology Series 74).  . (1993) 2008. Aromas de Urze e de Lama. Lisbon: ICS.  . 2010. ‘The Dynamism of Plurals: An Essay on Equivocal Compatibility’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 18(2): 1–15.  . 2013. ‘The Mediterranean: A Wall’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 22(2): 223–29.  . 2017. World: An Anthropological Examination. Chicago: HAU Books. Pina-Cabral, João, and John K. Campbell (eds). 1992. Europe Observed. Oxford: Macmillan / St Antony’s. Pina-Cabral, João de, and Vanda A. Silva. 2013. Gente Livre: Consideração e Pessoa no Baixo Sul da Bahia. São Paulo: Terceiro Nome. Pitt-Rivers, Julian A. 1954. The People of the Sierra. Introduction by E.E. Evans-Pritchard. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.  . 2015. From Hospitality to Grace: A Julian Pitt-Rivers Omnibus. Edited by Giovanni da Col and Andrew Shryock. Chicago: HAU Books. Queneau, Raymond. 1979. Exercises de Style. Paris: Gallimard.

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Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rivière, P. 1984. Individual and Society in Guiana: A Comparative Study of Amerindian Social Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowland, Robert. 2011. ‘Familia y transición demográfica’, in Francisco Chacón and Joan Bestard Camps (eds), Famílias: Historia de la sociedad española (del final de la Edad Media a nestros días). Madrid: Cátedra, pp. 605–66. Schneider, Jane 1971. ‘Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honour, Shame, and Access to Resources in Meditenanean Societies’, Ethnology 10: 1–24. Sciama, Lidia Dina. 2013. ‘The Mediterranean: Topos or Mirage?’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 22(2): 229–44. Segalen, Martine. 1985. Quinze générations de Bas-Bretons: parenté et société dans le pays bigouden Sud, 1720–1980. Paris: PUF. Steiner, Franz Baermann. 1999a. Taboo, Truth and Religion. Introduction by J. Adler and R. Fardon. Oxford: Berghahn Books.  . 1999b. Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilization. Introduction by J. Adler and R. Fardon. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

INDEX

academic employment, 1, 8–10 activism, 26, 37, 42, 194 Actor-Network Theory (ANT), 191–192 adoption, international, 138 adventure, spirit of, 11, 75, 138, 139 alcohol, 31, 192 All Souls College, 27, 32, 95, 133, 149, 200 Allen, Nick, 11, 69, 92, 108–109 amoral familism (Banfield), 198, 210 animism, 131, 134 Année Sociologique, 4, 26, 72, 166, 171, 174, 175 antagonism, 59–60, 62 anthropologists in a wider world, 132 anthropology Cambridge, 27, 187–190 critical (engaged), 44 cultural, 53, 82, 204 ecumenical anthropology, 6–7,  13 end of, 138 gender shift in, 42–43, 45 history of, 2, 21, 41 New Anthropology, 166 Oxford, 1, 5, 7, 28, 37, 45, 69,   81,82, 131, 190 social, 5, 7–8, 9, 24, 29, 39, 53,  60, 71, 82, 92, 114, 117, 130, 143, 163–165, 166, 174, 177, 204 anthropologies of science, 191 anti-representationalist, 182–183 archival, 153, 155–156 Ardener, Edwin, 4, 5, 12, 25–26, 28–29, 31–32, 35, 50, 54, 61, 90, 163–173, 178–183, 191

Ardener-Needham ‘war’, 25, 54, 143 Ardener, Shirley, 137, 179, 181, 188 area studies, 115, 117 austerity, 6, 197, 206, 213 Australia, 38, 80–81, 83, 86 Australian National University, 86 autobiography, 22, 56, 65, 161–163 Ayer, A.J., 92 BLitt in social anthropology, 35–36, 42, 81–85, 93–95, 143, 151, 161, 177 backbiting, 145 Basque language, 147–149, 152–153 Basques, 147–149, 151–153, 157n Barnes, Bob, 92–93 Barley, Nigel, 50 Benthall, Jonathan, 7, 10, 21, 26, 143 Berghahn, Marion, 179 Berlin (Brent) and Kay (Paul), 185, 191 Berlin Wall, 2, 199, 205 Berreman, Gerald, 111 Bloch, Maurice, 199 Bodenhorn, Barbara, 189 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 69, 114, 163, 178, 190, 197, 202, 209 Brandes, Stanley, 203 Breton, 178, 182, 185–186, 193, 194 Brideshead Revisited, 81 British School at Athens, 86 Brittany, 178, 182, 185, 192, 194, 201 Brunel University, 13, 107, 188, 190 Buddhism, 107, 112–113

220

Campbell, John, 5, 28, 85, 151, 187, 200–206, 208, 210, 213, 214 Casagrande, Joseph B., 9 cash economy, 136 caste, 106, 108–109, 111–112 Castañeda, Carlos, 35, 67 Catholic church, 135 Celtic, 178, 186, 200, 201 Chapman, Malcolm, 54–55, 179, 182–183 Chewong, 11, 127–131, 133–135, 139 Chewong Modes of Thought, 129 Clarke, Graham, 106 CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), 117, 118 class, social, 39, 66, 67, 112, 129, 153, 204–205, 209 classification, 13, 26, 128–129, 134, 145, 169, 170, 182, 184, 191 clientelism, 198 Clifford, James, 132 Cohen, Erik, 56 collaborators, academic, 4, 76, 119 collaborators (with Germans), 150, 154 Collingwood, R.G. (Robin George), 4, 178, 210 colour classification, 184, 191 comparative literature, 50–51 comparitivism, anthropological, 11, 196, 203, 205–207, 211 conceptual ‘toolbox’, 58 cosmology, 116, 128–129, 131, 134, 136, 151 Cosmo-rules, 134 Crick, Malcolm, 50, 53 culture, cultures, 13, 35, 67, 109, 113, 116, 181–182, 187–188, 190–191, 193, 208, 210, 213 academic, 39, 174 popular, 74 Cyprus, 57 Dante Alighieri, 5, 52, 61 Davis, John, 33, 151, 157n. Decolonization, 197, 199 de-ethnocentrification, 13 departmental histories, 21, 43–44 Derrida, Jacques, 51–52, 178, 185 design process, 98

Index

‘difficulties’ at the institute, 22–31, 44 diploma in social anthropology, 22, 25–26, 31–32, 34–35, 37, 41, 42, 50, 54, 69, 81–84, 86, 91–92, 128, 142–143, 177 disappearing world, 119, 152 discontinuism, 2, 204 discrimination, 88–89 Donato, Eugenio, 52 Douglas, Mary, 4, 49–50, 54, 68, 166, 199, 209 Douglass, William A., 147, 157n DPhil in social anthropology, 56, 69, 81–84, 91, 95 Dresch, Paul, 45, 76, 132 Du Boulay, Juliet, 146, 201, 210 Duff-Cooper, Andrew, 54, 91 Dumont, Louis, 11, 14n, 57, 108–14, 122n, 131, 209 Durkheim, Émile, 3–4, 14–15, 69, 90, 116, 122n, 164–167, 182, 197–198, 209, 212 early Christian history, 57 Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), 22, 32, 34–36, 38, 42, 83, 178 Edison, Thomas, 99 empiricism, 10, 117, 169, 180, 202, 203 Encaenia, 94 encysting, 60 epistemological break, 162–163, 166–167, 170–173 equality, inequality, 7, 114, 134 equivoques, equivocation, 196, 199–200, 201, 205–208, 210–213 ethics, ethical, 2, 13, 24, 44, 76–77, 115–116, 129, 173, 193 ethnography, 9, 11–13, 24, 45, 69, 109, 112, 131–132, 138, 171, 193, 202, 204 ethnology, museum ethnography, degrees in, 33, 37, 42 ethnopoetics, 202 etiquette, 24, 44 Eurasia, 196 Europe, 6–7, 9, 12, 13, 15n, 26, 88, 110, 191–192, 197–198, 202–203, 204, 207, 212

Index221

European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA), 188, 205–206 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan (EP), 3–5, 12, 13, 26, 30–31, 40, 45, 53, 65, 69, 71, 77, 81, 82, 84, 90, 105, 121n, 129, 202, 204, 209 events (as outputs), 169, 170, 172 exilic identity, 59 fees, 32, 45, 56, 83–85, 138 feminism, 1, 68, 137, 179, 200 fieldwork, 56, 58, 66, 71–72, 75–76, 85, 143, 145–146, 149, 155, 156n, 201–205, 209 diachronic, 132 ethnographic, 128–129,   132, 138–139 dual synchronic, 132 multi-temporal, 131–132, 139 new, 165, 166, 169 as qualification, 40–41 financial difficulties, 80–85 Flores, 133, 135 folklore and folklife, 50 Forest Peoples Programme, 37 formalist-substantivist debate, 188 Foucault, Michel, 52, 69, 114, 178, 202 Fox, James, 5 Fox, Robin, 156, 157n Freedom of Information (FOI), 23 French Basque Country, 147–148, 149, 151–153 Fuller, Chris, 111–112, 122n ‘function to meaning’, 181 functionalism, 71, 77, 138, 188 Gellner, Ernest, 71, 188–189, 197–198, 209 gender, 34, 42, 45, 73, 76, 134, 137, 153, 156n, 179, 188, 201, 204, 209, 213 geopolitics, 196, 198, 203 German Occupation, 149, 152–155 Gilsenan, Michael, 57, 200 Girard, René, 50, 51 Gombrich, Richard, 107, 109 Goody, Jack, 27, 188 gossip, 145 Gray, Douglas, 56

Greece, 85–86, 113, 204, 206 Hammond-Tooke, David, 199 Hampshire, Stuart, 92 Hann, Chris, 122n, 196 Harré, Rom, 92 Hayden, Robert, 60 Hebdomadal Council, 32 Hebrew University, 56 Herzfeld, Michael, 201 higher education, restructuring of, 10, 39, 74, 94–96, 174 Hinduism, 106, 111–113 historical transformation, 51–52 Holmberg, David, 106, 120 Holy Sepulchre (Anastasis), 60, 61n honour and shame, 200, 207–210, 213 human nature, 71, 142–143, 146 human sciences degree, 81, 121n hunter-gatherers, 128, 130, 134 Huxley, Francis, 93 Hymes, Dell, 50 hypocrisy, 44 imperialism, 196–198 Indonesia, 128, 130, 133, 135 Ingold, Tim, 7, 115, 118 institute assistant, 28 institute librarian, June Anderson, 26 invention versus innovation, 98–100 Islam, 113, 122n, 135 James, Wendy, 83–85, 92, 129 Japan, 69, 72–75 Jenkins, Tim, 53 Jerusalem (Old City), 53, 56–58 Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO), 27, 50, 51, 53, 55, 178, 183, 191 Kapferer, Bruce, 57 kinship, 25, 26, 55, 109, 128, 130–131, 135, 137, 188 Kiriwina, 55 Kirkwood, Kenneth, 28–29, 44 Kripke, Saul, 59 Kuper, Adam, 70, 188, 190, 198, 205, 210

222

lability of identity formations, 60 Laclau, Ernesto, 59, 62 Lady Davis Fellowship, 56 Lancaster University, 107 Leach, Edmund, 3, 24, 71, 112, 188 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 4, 25, 67, 69, 99, 131, 135, 165, 169, 171, 199, 200 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 3, 197 Lewis, Norman, 198 Lewis, Oscar, 67–68 liberal arts, 35, 54 Lienhardt, Geoffrey, 30, 31, 32, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 85, 90, 129 Lienhardt, Peter, 28, 32, 69, 72, 76 Lio, 127, 129–131, 133, 135–137, 139, 140n Llobera, Josep, 203–205 Loizos, Peter, 203, 205 London School of Economics (LSE), 34, 67, 71, 81, 122n, 164, 166 MacClancy, Jeremy, 54, 94, 182, 214n Malaparte, Curzio, 198 Malaysia, 128, 130, 133, 136, 138 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 3, 55, 65, 71, 130, 164, 166, 202 Malory, Thomas, 51 Marco Polo, 52–53 Master of Studies, 84 Mauss, Marcel, 3–6, 13–15, 26, 132, 164–165 Mayer, Adrian, 109–110 McDonald, Maryon, 54, 55 Mead, Margaret, 67 medieval travel literature, 52. See also pilgrimages (pilgrim narratives) Mediterranean, 28, 196–199, 202–213 metaphysics, 129 missionaries (Muslim and Christian), 116, 134 Mitchell, J. Clyde, 28 mode of registration, 170–173 models (mechanical and statistical), 111, 112, 165, 167–169 modes of thought, 130–131 Monroe, Marilyn, 94

Index

Morinis, Alan, 56–57 Morocco, 107 Mouffe, Chantal, 59 MPhil in social anthropology, 84, 107, 108 myth, mythologies, 68, 129, 162, 163, 169, 199 nationalism, 66, 75, 77, 178, 197, 206 Needham, Rodney, 4–5, 14, 15n, 25–30, 32, 33, 44, 54, 57, 69, 90, 92, 95, 96, 128, 129, 133, 134, 142, 146–156, 157n, 178, 180, 191, 200 neglect of students, 31–32 neoliberalism, 1, 5–7, 13, 115, 198 Nepal, 92, 106–107, 113 networks, academic, 40, 42, 57 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 49 Norway, 138 ontological turn, 116, 191–192 orientalism, 113 Ortner, Sherry, 113 overseas students, 32, 45, 54, 82–84 Oxford Brookes University, 107 Oxford Magazine, 105 Palestinian identity, 58–60 Parry, Jonathan, 111 Parsons, Talcott (Parsonian), 118, 210 participant observation, 129–130, 137, 203 patents, 98 patrimonialism, 198, 210 peaceful interaction, 134 Peristiany, John G., 196, 208–210, 213 person, personhood, 49, 129, 131, 201, 208–210 phenomenology, 90, 116 Philip Bagby Trust, 85 pilgrimages (pilgrim narratives), 52–53, 55–56, 58 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 14, 196, 201, 204, 207, 208 Pitt-Rivers Museum, 33 Poe, Edgar Allan, 61n Polanyi, Michael, 4, 15n

Index223

Portugal, 200–203, 206–207 postcolonial, 1, 5, 75, 112 postmodernism, 7, 65, 138, 174, 188 poststructuralist, poststructuralism, 1, 5, 8, 9, 12, 14, 25, 51, 69–70, 189 prediction, prophecy, 169–170, 172 priest-leaders, 135, 137 primitive,primitivist, 11, 197–199, 204, 206, 209, 212, 213 primordial characters, 128 proctors, 28–29, 84 programmes and outputs, 167– 173, 183 property, 60, 98, 145 prosopography, 21, 44 Quigley, D., 111–112 Rachel’s Tomb, 60 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald, 3–4, 31, 71, 121n rainforest, 128, 130, 133, 134, 136 Reagan, Ronald, 89 realism, minimalist, 211 reflexive sociology, 163 refugee, 197 refugee crisis, 197 religion, 58, 67, 89, 112–113, 128 remote, remoteness, 130, 138, 198 Resistance, French, 150, 152–153 resistance, methodological, 39, 43, 190 resourcefulness, 40 Reyna, Stephen, 50 rigid designator, 59, 61 ritual, 50, 95, 112–113, 122n, 130–131, 137, 149 Rivière, Peter, 5, 33–35, 41, 45, 69, 92, 147, 207 Robbins Report, 82 Robbins, Joel, 114 Rouse, Roger, 55 Russell Group, 38 sacrifice, 51, 135 Sahlins, Marshall, 67–70, 74, 134 Sangren, Peter, 24, 44 Sanskrit, 107, 109, 112–113, 121 Santazi (Ste-Engrace), 147–152

science, biological, 3 science, natural, 4, 7, 15, 115, 118–119, 131 science, social, 1, 4, 6, 8, 13, 44–45, 70, 74, 115–118, 120, 130, 175, 197–198 sciences, human, 81, 107, 121n, 188, 190 Security Barrier (Wall), Israel, 14, 60 Ségalen, Martine, 201 self-education, 40, 57 seminars, 25, 30–31, 54, 57, 90, 92, 122n, 133, 137, 179, 185, 200 semiotic turn, 8, 202 serendipity, 139 settlers, Israeli, 58, 60 shamanism, 42, 131 sharing, mixing, 59 Silverman, Sydel, 206 SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), 69, 71, 73–74, 76, 81, 121n, 128 Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 28, 30, 45, 93, 95, 177 sociality, 7, 129, 211 society, 3–7, 13, 75, 77, 108, 110–112, 132, 135–137, 155, 208 sociocentrism, 3, 5–6 sociocultural differentiation, 205–207 sociology, 3, 15n, 38, 72, 107, 108, 115–117, 119, 163, 167, 210, 212 Spiro, Melvin, 107 Srinivas, M.N. (Mysore Narasimhachar), 108, 209 St Antony’s College (Oxford), 151, 152, 201, 214n St John’s College (Oxford), 53, 55–56, 133, 179 stamina, 40 State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, 50, 51, 53, 55 statistics, 21–22, 41, 74, 76 Steiner, Franz Baerman, 209–210 Steiner, George, 55 Stirling, Paul, 57 Stewart, Charles, 113, 210

224

stratified society, 131, 136 structuralism, 4, 12, 26, 39, 51, 68–69, 108, 130, 138, 167, 169, 170, 172, 179, 180, 183, 187–188, 199–200 Survival International, 37 symbols, 50, 55, 132, 134, 137, 183, 196, 214n Szwed, John, 50 Tambiah, Stanley, 107 tertiary education, expansion of, 82–83 Thatcher, Margaret (Thatcherism), 1, 5, 6, 7, 11, 21, 39–40, 45, 74, 83, 89, 92–97, 100 theology, 56, 57, 68, 210 Thom, Martin, 51, 53 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 110 Tory Island (Ireland), 143–145, 156n tourists, 115, 134, 212 translation, ethnography as, 4, 52, 169, 204 trial dossiers, 153, 155, 156 tribe, 106, 119 trust, 137 tutorials, 30–32, 34, 36, 82, 92, 100, 105, 128, 146 Twain, Mark, 99 UCL (University College London), 49, 57, 86, 199

Index

Universities Tests Act, 88 University Archives, 22 University of Chicago, 67–70, 74–75 University of Kent, 57, 87, 173 University of Melbourne, 80, 86 University of Pennsylvania, 50–51 unknown unknowns, 45, 46n Vietnam War, 80, 81 vocation (anthropological), 8, 9, 10, 65–66, 69, 75, 77–78, 106, 127, 162, 174, 175 Volosinov, Valentin, 62n Webber, Jonathan, 58 Weber, Max, 11, 69, 114, 122n, 166, 174, 210 welfare state, 89, 93 West, the, 110, 196–197, 209, 213 William and Mary College, 50 Williams, Drid, 50, 53 Wolfson College, 57, 85, 91, 179 World Bank, 37 worldviews, 211 Yale University, 106 Yugoslavia, 57, 60 Žižek, Slavoj, 61n