Hobsbawm y Macfarlane - Jack Goody, Clifford James Geertz and Philippe Descola - 2022

CREATIVE LIVES AND WORKS
History, Culture and Ethnography

History, Culture and Ethnography: Jack Goody, Clifford Geertz and Philippe Descola is a
collection of interviews that is being published as a book for the frst time. These interviews
have been conducted by one of England’s leading social anthropologists and historians,
Professor Alan Macfarlane.
Filmed over a period of several years, the three conversations in this volume are part
of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions form a part of a larger set of
interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences and the sciences to
the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three of the world’s most eminent
social and cultural anthropologists.
These conversations focus primarily on feldwork experience in Ghana, Indonesia
and Amazonia and how new dimensions and interpretations were added to the discipline
of sociology and social anthropology. While Jack Goody and Clifford Geertz gave a new
turn and depth to the disciple through their experiences in West Africa and Indonesia,
Philippe Descola, who belongs to the succeeding generation of anthropologists, added
human-nature interactions into the mix.
This book talks about both overcoming and understanding the importance of taking
into account linguistic, historical, economic and cultural elements in the study of these
societies through engaging conversations and occasional anecdotes. Immensely riveting
as conversations, this collection gives one a favour of the many different societies and
cultures in far-fung reaches of the world encompassing several continents, often with
no knowledge of each other’s existence, and a taste of how expansive the discipline of
sociology and social anthropology are.
The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in the felds of Sociology,
Social Anthropology and Ethnography, but also those with an interest in History, Philosophy,
Comparative Religion and Cultural Studies.
Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School,
Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities where he received two Master’s degrees
and two doctorates. He is the author of over forty books, including The Origins of English
Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked
in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was
elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology
at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Professor
Macfarlane received the Huxley Memorial Medal, the highest honour of the Royal
Anthropological Institute in 2012.
Eric Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and
nationalism. A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions infuenced the character of
his work. Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and spent his childhood mainly in
Vienna and Berlin. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler,
Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family. After serving in the Second World War,
he obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. In 1998, he was appointed
to the Order of the Companions of Honour. He was President of Birkbeck, University of
London, from 2002 until he died. In 2003, he received the Balzan Prize for European History
since 1900 ‘for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for
his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent’. His best-known
works include his trilogy about what he called the ‘long 19th century’ (The Age of Revolution:
Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914),
The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, and an edited volume that introduced the
infuential idea of ‘invented traditions’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm
CREATIVE LIVES AND WORKS
History, Culture and Ethnography

Jack Goody, Clifford James Geertz
and Phillippe Descola
In conversation with
Eric Hobsbawm and Alan Macfarlane
Edited by
Radha Béteille
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Social Science Press
The right of Alan Macfarlane and Eric Hobsbawm to be identiﬁed as authors of
this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identiﬁcation and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh,
Pakistan or Bhutan)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 9781032201320 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781003262374 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003262374
Typeset in Sabon Lt Std
by Manmohan Kumar, New Delhi 110020
Contents
Transcriber’s Note – Radha Béteille vii

Introduction – Alan Macfarlane ix
PART I
Jack Goody: Some Personal Memories – Alan Macfarlane 3
Jack Goody – In conversation with Eric Hobsbawm 12
PART II
My Encounter with Clifford Geertz – Alan Macfarlane 41
Clifford James Geertz – In conversation with Alan Macfarlane 49
PART III
My Encounter with Philippe Descola 93
Philippe Descola – In conversation with Alan Macfarlane 100
Appendix: Biographical Information 129

Transcriber’s Note
The transformation of videographed speeches into the written

word has been a riveting experience. Transcriptions, while retaining
the essence of a conversation, lend a new dimension to the oral
transmission, opening them up to a wider readership, including
those with diminished auditory functions.
This collection of transcripts tries to capture the engaging
interactions between Alan Macfarlane, one of Britain’s foremost
social anthropologists, and three eminent social anthropologists
– Jack Goody, Clifford Geertz and Philippe Descola. In fact, the
intellectual discourses in these interviews on social anthropology and
ethnography draw in the reader as a participant. And, while offering a
different order of internal cohesiveness, accentuates the ability of the
reader to retain information, in this case, knowledge and scholarship.
Here, it must however be noted that not being a subject expert
has been somewhat limiting because I have had to acquaint myself
with speech patterns, accents, diction and intonations in areas that
I was unfamiliar with when I began.
Furthermore, the transcribing of oral transmission leaves little
room to represent facial expressions and non-verbalized sounds such
as chuckles, laughs, sighs and for that matter exclamations, as well
as pauses and idiosyncrasies in actual speech. Thus, I have taken
the liberty to replace them with closely corresponding punctuations,
so as not to alter the meaning or import of what is being said.
Discrepancies in speech patterns have been isolated and addressed.
Any misrepresentation of words and phrases, is entirely inadvertent.
The trust and generosity of Professor Macfarlane in sharing his
wealth of scholarship with Social Science Press cannot be adequately
expressed in words.
– Radha Béteille
Introduction
Alan Macfarlane
There have been many autobiographical accounts of the creative

process in science as well as in the arts, humanities and social
sciences. Yet these tend to concentrate on one level, and within that
one aspect, the cerebral, intellectual working of a single thinker’s
mind. If we are to investigate further the connections between the
levels of civilization, institution, network and individual, and the ffth
dimension of chance or random variation, we need to supplement
these accounts, in particular by letting scientists and others talk in a
relaxed way about what they think has been important in their lives
and works. Over the years I have been collecting such data and here
I would like to describe how this happened and what opportunities
it opens up for further understanding of the springs of creativity.
***
There is a puzzle as to why I have spent so much time and effort (and
expense) on interviewing (on flm) a large number of academics and
others over the years. No one else has done this as far as I am aware
and it has few tangible rewards except the occasional gratitude of
one’s colleagues. Why and how did this project build up over the
years to a point where I now have about 250 lengthy interviews,
almost all of them on the web?
One factor is clearly my anthropological training and the
experience of anthropological feldwork. Although some social
historians of the recent past began to become interested in oral history
and the tape-recording of memories from the late 1960s, for example
x INTRODUCTION
Paul Thompson, Brian Harrison and others, on the whole historians

deal with dead people who cannot be interviewed. Certainly, as a
17th century historian I was not interested in interviews.
Anthropologists on the other hand deal with the living and the
‘life history’ or in–depth study of one or two ‘informants’ naturally
leads into the use of recording devices – again usually tape-recorders,
but also sometimes flm cameras, to record interviews. So, from my
frst feldwork in 1968–70 in Nepal, I was aware of the potential
of interviews. Alongside the interviews with intellectuals described
below, I have made in–depth interviews with my anthropological
subjects, in particular a 10-part interview with Dilmaya Gurung in
1992. I also taped and flmed members of my family talking about
their lives, especially my grandmother in 1978.
My interest in biographical details as a source of social
history was also stimulated by the accident of moving through a
number of different intellectual landscapes in my early years. My
grandmother’s stories of Burma and India and then my mother’s
vivid autobiographical writings in her letters and when she visited
me from India were early infuences which led to an interest in
listening to older people talking about their lives. So, when I became
an undergraduate and then a graduate at Oxford (1960–66) I spent
some time listening to elderly academics, particularly my history
tutor Lady Rosalind Clay with her deep immersion in the world
of Oxford life through her father A.L. Smith (Master of Balliol),
Sir Henry Clay her husband and links to the Mitchison an Mitford
families. She seemed to know personally many of the people whose
books I was reading – Namier, Tawney, Trevelyan, Hill, Habakkuk,
and she told me about their lives and personalities. I also began
to hear about the folklore and gossip of historians from my other
teachers – Harry Pitt, Keith Thomas and others.
The world of the historians was brought into relief by being on
the edge of another group of academics, the social anthropologists.
As I did my D.Phil. on witchcraft, I began to meet the older
members of the distinguished school of anthropologists, the
Lienhardts, John Beattie and above all E.E. Evans–Pritchard. This
was a particularly intense and gossip–connected tribe and I heard
INTRODUCTION xi
their stories of the great feuds and friendships and how they had
survived their feldwork.
The interest in biography was also strengthened by my early
apprenticeship in history at Oxford where I was taught how
important it was to study not only the works but also the lives of
great historians – Gibbon, Macaulay, Tocqueville, Bede and others.
This led me much later in my life to write detailed studies of other
major fgures in books on Montesquieu, Adam Smith, De Tocqueville,
Maitland, Fukuzawa and others which put a strong emphasis on
the biography as well as the ideas.
As a social historian I wanted to get inside the mentality as well as
the social structure of the past. As an undergraduate I had discovered
that letters (Pastons, Stonors) and diaries (Pepys, Kilvert) were
wonderful sources for social history. So, my frst book was a study
of the life of one individual The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, based
on the diary of a 17th century clergyman. Henceforth I collected
letters, autobiographies, diaries, travellers’ journals and made a great
deal of use of this biographical material in a number of my books.
The early experience of eavesdropping on what appeared to be a
disappearing world of a certain academic endeavour in the pre-war
world of Oxford history and anthropology, was reinforced by moving
to the London School of Economics for two years, where giants of
the post-Malinowski generation, Raymond Firth, Isaac Schapera,
Lucy Mair, were on the point of retiring. Then when I moved to the
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) I met another group of
giants from a previous age, particularly Adrian Mayer and Christoph
von Fürer–Haimendorf who became my supervisor.
When I moved as a research fellow to Cambridge in 1971, I
encountered again several oral worlds which intrigued me. There
were a new set of older anthropologists, Meyer Fortes, Audrey
Richards, G.I. Jones, Edmund Leach, S.J. Tambiah, Jack Goody
among them. And there were a group set of historians, in particular
Peter Laslett and Tony Wrigley. A third world was that of King’s
College, where memories of the Bloomsbury era lingered on with
Dadie Rylands, Peter Avery, Christopher Morris, Richard Braithwaite
and others.
xii INTRODUCTION
With six or seven sets of oral history washing through my

life by the age of 30, it would have been a rather insensitive and
myopic young scholar who did not realize that he was experiencing
something special and perhaps something that should be recorded
for posterity. I did not want to write a conventional history of
academic disciplines, yet I had a sense that there were webs of ideas
and connections which were carried by elderly individuals which
should be recorded. They should be treated with the same respect and
desire to save and document as was accorded to small oral cultures
around the world whose myths, legends, rituals and folklore was
carefully recorded by anthropologists.
It was perhaps a jumble of such motives, combined with
friendship with the Director of the Cambridge University Audio-
Visual Unit, Martin Gienke, which led to the frst experiment to
record academics on flm. I had been asked to organize a series of
seminars in history and anthropology in 1976–77 for the Economic
and Social Research Council and this I knew would be a chance to
gather together some of the leading thinkers in both felds. If they
were coming for several days to Cambridge, might it not be an idea
to flm them, both as an archive for future generations and to show
to students and colleagues who could not come to the meetings?
So, I organized the seminars and two were flmed. Amongst those
attending were many younger scholars who would become well
known – Maurice Bloch, Raphael Samuel, Keith Thomas, Keith
Hopkins, Peter Burke, and a number of more senior fgures in their
prime such as E.P. Thompson, Edmund Leach, Maurice Godelier,
Jack Goody, Arnaldo Momigliano and Ernest Gellner.
I had assumed that this experiment, which is up on the web
would be repeated by others as the technology became better. Yet,
to my knowledge, it has hardly ever been duplicated. One of the
few instances when something similar was done was again an idea
I had. When making a six-part series for Channel 4 on the history
of the world over the last 10,000 years, we assembled fve leading
historians and they talked for two days about various aspects of the
past. The whole was flmed and is also up on the web.
INTRODUCTION xiii
The next step was probably infuenced by this early flming

attempt. Jack Goody had been involved in the flmed seminar and
fve years later, with the help of the Cambridge linguist Stephen
Levinson, he arranged three seminars where Meyer Fortes, Audrey
Richards and M.N. Srinivas would be flmed talking about their lives
and work. Jack Goody then retired, but continued to take an interest
in the project and interviewed several others for me, including John
Barnes and Jean La Fontaine.
In 1982 a portable video camera which took low-band U-matic
was available and so I founded the Rivers Video Project with several
of my Ph.D. students, to experiment with the use of flm in teaching
and research in anthropology. Among the early projects were several
biographical and archival flms, including a flm of Brian Hodgson
and a long interview in June 1983 of my supervisor Christoph von
Fürer-Haimendorf. The group also flmed my undergraduate lectures
and some of the students made a flm as part of their course on
T.R. Malthus.
Now that I had started to flm interviews, I could see the way in
which my early interest in the gossip and interconnections of what
was in effect a small tribe of British social anthropologists could
be turned into a permanent record. The frst interviews tended to
be done by someone who knew the subject well – Goody in the
cases above, Jean La Fontaine interviewing Lucy Mair, Caroline
Humphrey interviewing Owen Lattimore. But gradually this faded
away and I did nearly all the interviews and all the flming. About
ten of the interviews were however done by friends and colleagues
abroad and sent to me.
At frst the focus was almost exclusively on anthropologists
– with some sociologists who were also anthropologists such as
André Béteille, John Barnes, Ronald Dore. Later it was extended
to others in the general area of social sciences, more sociologists
and some historians.
The flming continued to be done for the next 10 or 15 years on
low-band U-matic and the tapes were stored away. It was not easy or
necessary to edit them, but nor was it easy to show them, so very few
xiv INTRODUCTION
were ever shown to students or colleagues. I looked at the collection

as an archival collection, a time capsule of a vanishing world, which
might be interesting in a hundred years’ time. That was assuming that
it would be possible to play them. Already 20 years after they were
made the tapes of the ESCR seminars were unplayable in Cambridge
and had to be saved by the National Film Council.
Then a set of interconnected technological changes occurred
which affected many of my projects. The internet and high-speed
broadband made it possible to send flms across the world. Large
external hard discs and new compression techniques made it possible
to store and edit the flms. The arrival of a digital repository in
Cambridge in 2004 made it possible to put up the interviews we
had done until that date in June of that year, an idea frst suggested
by Mark Turin.
This development, which meant that the material could be
appreciated by many more people, and the arrival of better cameras
for the flming, meant that I began to increase the number of my
interviews. By 2004, I had done about 30 interviews, by 2006
there were about 70 interviews and lectures. I described my project
in relation to the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences to some
colleagues in King’s College. The scientists Patrick Bateson and
Herbert Huppert were excited by the idea and asked whether I
could extend the flming to cover the natural and physical sciences.
I was surprised that very few people or organizations appeared
to be doing the in-depth ‘lives and works’ kind of interviews I had
undertaken for the immensely larger felds of the sciences. (Two
sites which did have interviews on were that at globetrotter.berkeley
and the Vega project at Sussex initiated by Harry Kroto). I was also
hesitant about my ability to interview in felds about which I knew
nothing. But they urged me to try and introduced me to a number
of distinguished scientists. Shortly afterwards Gabriel Horn became
an active advisor on the project as well.
I started gingerly with the scientists, flming Dan McKenzie
with whom I shared a room in King’s, the co-discoverer of tectonic
plates and continental drift. It went well and I greatly enjoyed it. Pat
Bateson then interviewed Gabriel Horn and I flmed another session
INTRODUCTION xv
with them talking about their partnership, and I interviewed Pat

Bateson himself. So, I was now suffciently confdent to interview
other scientists. Having broadened it beyond arts and social sciences,
there was all the world which lay between, such as economics,
psychology, philosophy and so on. There were also other interesting
people I wanted to flm – the Vice Chancellor Alison Richard, the
ex–Cabinet Secretary Richard Wilson, the musician John Rutter, the
sculptor Anthony Gormley.
In fact, the series broadened out not only into politicians and
civil servants, but into many other felds. There are interviews on
the performing and visual arts, crafts and skills (pottery, gardening,
sculpture), law, journalism, literary criticism, business, exploration,
publishing, the military, filmmaking, classics, archaeology,
architecture and linguistics. Whenever I heard of or met someone
who seemed to have made a creative contribution to the world,
whether they were a road sweeper or a College butler, up to some of
the most distinguished thinkers in the world, I would try to interview
them. It is a wide spread.
So, from May 2007 when the frst scientists were flmed, until
September 2009 when I formally retired as Professor, I flmed
something like another 80 interviews and the total now stands at
about 200 flms.
As far as I know this archive is unique and as a number of
the major fgures are dead and others are getting very old, so the
interviewing cannot now be done. There are some small projects,
sometimes infuenced by our experiments, in Germany, the London
School of Economics and elsewhere. Yet on the whole there is
nothing quite like this.
***
Naturally the way in which I have done the interviews refects both
my own interests and my experience of what works. My central aim
has been to let the speakers tell their own story, present themselves
as they wish to do, without threatening or probing or adversarial
questioning. Yet in doing so, and with a roughly chronological
xvi INTRODUCTION
approach, I have been particularly interested in the question of what

accidents, historical contingencies, or personal traits have infuenced
the subjects and sent them towards a particular career. In particular,
what they do has contributed to their more creative and sometimes
inspired work and innovation in their various felds.
From the very start of my interest in the oral history of my seniors
and contemporaries, I have been keen to learn what I should do to
make me as good an anthropologist and historian as possible. What
are the craft skills and what are the ways of thinking and ordering
one’s life which will maximize the chance of making a serious
contribution to our knowledge of the world? This early interest
was heightened when I found myself in the incredibly privileged
surroundings of Cambridge for 40 years, surrounded by the ghosts
of Newton, Darwin, Rutherford and many others.
The following describes the topics I have tried to cover in my
interviews. On the surface, the interviews are almost unstructured
and I avoid referring to a written questionnaire as this can distract
from the spontaneity of the occasion. I encourage the interviewee
to talk about whatever they would like. My role is similar to a
psychiatrist’s, that is to say to let the subject narrate their life,
in particular in relation to the obstacles and encouragements to
creativity and discovery. We tend to cover the following:
when and where born

ancestry – going back as far as they like, including occupation
and temperament and possible effects of grand – parents, parents
and siblings
frst memories and hobbies as a child
frst and subsequent schools, with important teachers, hobbies,
subjects which gripped them, sports and games, music, special
books
university and those who taught and studied with them and
interests there
frst research, supervisors, mentors, infuences
jobs and career and travels through life, work abroad
colleagues, friends and network of workers, partners and children
INTRODUCTION xvii
methods of working and thinking

major achievements and problem – solving during life, how they
occurred, including especially important bursts of activity
administrative tasks
teaching and supervising of students
effects of their work environment (laboratories, departments,
Colleges etc)
philosophy and religion
political views and activities
advice for a young person starting out in their feld
specifcally ask if there is anything which they would like to have
talked about and I have omitted to ask about
Yet if the subject does not want to follow this order, or to answer
all of these, or to add further subjects, that is fne. What I want the
viewer to see is the inside of a life, told in a conversational and
personal way.
***
The interviews are an intimate probing of personal experience,
usually by a complete stranger who is holding a potentially
threatening video camera. The subjects know that this may be seen
by almost anyone in the world – friends, students, competitors, and
enemies, now and in the future. This could be intimidating, especially
to older subjects and for those who share a widespread reserve and
distaste for talking about themselves.
I have therefore developed a number of techniques for putting
the subjects at their ease. These have contributed, I believe, to the
rather startlingly honest and trusting conversations which I have
managed to have with a wide range of near strangers. It is worth
briefy summarizing these since they could be helpful for others who
help to extend this project.
1. It is important to have a fairly small and unostentatious camera

that does not dominate or frighten the subject. The less intrusive
xviii INTRODUCTION
the microphone the better – which is one reason why I have

given up using lapel microphones. I place the camera on my
knees and do not use a tripod, which can again be intimidating.
2. The room in which the interview is done is important. I avoid
formal settings if possible – lecture theatres, ‘offces’, and
seminar rooms. A room with gentle furnishings, an easy chair
for both interviewee and interviewer, books and pictures and
objects in the background, a pleasant view all helps. And of
course, absolute silence and absence of telephones, mobiles,
computers and interruptions is essential. I do not sit too close,
or too far away. I sit at the same level, as I would do in any
normal relaxed conversation between friends.
3. I try to develop the sheepdog technique. When gently moving
a fock of sheep to its destination, a good sheepdog is mostly
silent and still. Each time the sheep move in a satisfactory
direction, the dog creeps forward. And then sinks onto the
grass and waits attentively. It does not bark, just guides. So, if
possible, I try to help the interviewee along, but only interrupt
when they need encouragement or direction. I never shut them
off (though I occasionally warn them if the conversation is
getting into the realms of damaging speech and check that
they are aware of this), but try to bring them to subjects as
they are needed.
4. I always try to show interest, however little I know, or even
care about the subject being discussed. What is being said is
often important to the subject and has a depth which I, or
others, may only realize later. They deserve serious attention
and respect for what is often a summary of a life. Of course, I
may verbally disagree a little, or query things, but I try always
to do so in the pursuit of a common goal of understanding.
Curiosity is the most important attribute.
5. It is important for there to be no sense of rush. If I want an
hour of flm, I allow 90 minutes, which gives time for general
conversation, a cup of tea etc.
6. I used to prepare carefully for the interviews. With people in
my own subjects, this was possible. With scientists, beyond
INTRODUCTION xix
reading a brief life in an encyclopaedia, I cannot really prepare.

It seems to work as well without preparation.
7. I used to think that it would be good if the ‘subjects’ prepared
themselves in some detail, and when they asked me, I would
advise this. In fact, I have found that spontaneity, even if it
leads to some confusion, forgetting of names etc., is better and
I advise people not to think about the interview – just that it
will be chronological and they can say what they like (though
they can look at one or two of the earlier interviews on the
web if they would like to do so).
8. The fact that there is no commercial side to the endeavour has
an effect. That I am doing it without specifc pay for the job
and not as part of a well-funded project, is usually obvious
and helps. That all the materials are freely available on the
web, can be downloaded for free anywhere in the world and
used in teaching and research, all adds to the trust and spirit
of altruistic collaboration.
9. The absence of any bureaucracy is important. We enter into an
implicit contract. I have no paper for them to sign, assigning
copyright, intellectual property rights etc. It is all agreed
verbally and informally in the act itself. And hence the bond
of friendship is not broken.
One of the things that has developed over the years and has
greatly increased the interest and usability of the interviews is
the possibility of putting up a summary with some time codes to
help viewers navigate to an area that particularly interests them.
The summaries are often very detailed and the development
of the web has again made them more interesting and reliable
since one can check names, theories, and connections. It is an
art form in itself, combining considerable synthetic skills, a
jigsaw ability and great concentration. It is not easy, but the
website gives many examples of highly professional examples
which have won high praise from the interview subjects who
are often amazed at how accurate and complete they are. The
obvious comprehension shown in the summary further adds
to the sense of trust.
xx INTRODUCTION
10. Before the interview it is important to explain that anything

that is said can be retracted or glossed later. People should
not censor themselves too much. Candour and a relaxed fow
of ideas are important and trying to avoid things detracts
from this. I explain that while flming – before or after saying
something – the interviewee can easily say ‘this is not for public
dissemination’, ‘this is confdential’ or whatever. Any such
passage is then excised from the version that becomes publicly
available – but the original tapes are kept for posterity. I also
explain that we will send them the full summary which needs
to be checked for accuracy (especially names and technical
terms), interpretations of statements, and also gives the person
a chance to withdraw any section or passage if they wish. They
may, as has sometimes happened, feel that they want to add
something – some more autobiography, a clearer exposition
of something technical. It is not diffcult to put this into the
summary either in square brackets or as an appendix.
11. The duration of time people can concentrate varies. Most people
can manage an hour, and then, with a break, another hour.
When the tape ends, I allow a few minutes for revival – but it
is important not to lose the momentum. Some people prefer to
do an hour, go away and come back some days later. This is
alright, but can lead to repetition. But for older subjects (and
many of mine are in their later eighties and older) it may be
necessary. The older subjects also often feel more comfortable
in their own homes amongst their books and belongings. This
often gives an added dimension to the interviews.
If the subjects do reveal things which should be kept private for

some years or even decades, these are edited out of the versions
that go on the web, but the original tapes and full interviews will
be preserved for posterity. Meanwhile the edited versions are put up
on DSpace at Cambridge and on other websites, including YouTube,
and now increasingly on websites all over the world – Scandinavia,
America, China and elsewhere. The value of the interviews is
enormously enhanced by the excellent and thorough summaries
INTRODUCTION xxi
which Sarah Harrison has made of most of them, taking much more
time and skill to do than the interviews themselves.
What has been created, through a set of accidents, is a resource
for the study of a number of academic disciplines, from anthropology
to molecular biology, from history to astronomy, from sociology to
mathematics. It also provides rich material for the study of British
academic life and institutions in the 20th century. Furthermore, for
those interested in the conditions of creativity and discovery, it is
a unique archive.
The project has developed as a result of a set of accidents and
through the help and support of many people, in particular Sarah
Harrison, Mark Turin, Jack Goody, Gerry Martin and many others.
This project to publish the full interviews of selected individuals
was the idea of Esha Béteille, whose support and advice have been
indispensable. I would particularly like to thank Radha Béteille who
it has been a great pleasure to work with. Her transcripts and editing
have been extraordinarily well done and I am deeply impressed
and grateful for her contribution. Institutions such as Cambridge
University (DSpace and the Streaming Media Service in particular)
and King’s College, as well as the British Academy, the Leverhulme
Trust, the Firebird Foundation and others have also made all this
possible. It is hoped that others will take the task on through the
21st century.
PART
one
Jack Goody
Some Personal Memories
Alan Macfarlane
Some people have infuenced me through the force of their ideas,

some through the force of their personality. The distinguished
Cambridge anthropologist, Professor Jack Goody has combined
these. He has undoubtedly been the strongest infuence on my career
as an anthropologist.
When I applied for my frst teaching job in the Department of
Social Anthropology, in 1974, the post until lately held by Jack’s
former wife Esther, he not only encouraged me to apply, but clearly
backed me strongly for the post.
For the rest of his tenure as Professor (to 1983) Jack was always
a wonderful mentor and friend. A few examples will suffce.
Whenever we needed equipment for our various computer
projects, he supported the application. On one occasion I remember
him pulling out his own cheque book and paying for a piece of
equipment and muttering that he would somehow fnd some money
later. It was this ‘can do’ attitude which I appreciated so much. He
was always optimistic, believing that anything was possible.
Jack himself was always intrigued by new technologies and
was among the very frst to recognize the value of computers and
video. For instance, his indexing of the large offprint collection
in the department, his computer version of the west African
Bagre myths, his purchase of the Human Relations Area Files, all
showed this interest. As did the very early recordings he organized
Alan Macfarlane wrote this article for the Jack Goody Memorial Seminar that
was held on 2 July 2016.
4 CREATIVE LIVES AND WORKS
of off-air television programmes which gave the Department the

basis for its excellent video library. Or again his early realization
that we should video-tape sessions with senior, retiring or retired
anthropologists. He did this with Meyer Fortes, Audrey Richards
and M.N. Srinivas.
Jack Goody and Alan Macfarlane at Jack’s

retirement party in 1984. Photograph courtesy
Alan Macfarlane.
JACK GOODY: SOME PERSONAL MEMORIES 5
His enthusiasm and energy meant that not only did he build up a
large department in a short time, but early acquired through grants,
and then the University, a technician post. These technicians have
been invaluable for many projects in the Department.
***
Jack’s drive and political skills made the Department of Social
Anthropology a really exciting place to be from 1975 to 1983. He
prevented feuding and stopped the Department from narrowing down
to selected specialisms. He encouraged all forms of anthropology
and in all areas of the world. Cambridge became the main exporter
of good graduates to teach in European universities.
One of the many things I learnt from Jack was how to approach
local academic politics. Watching Jack at work through a long
day of teaching and administration was an education in itself. He
was occasionally over aggressive, took up lost causes, and fought
unnecessary battles. But on the whole his immense energy and deep
cunning (he reminded me of a bear, apparently clumsy, but lethal and
quick thinking) and many ties of friendship and reciprocal networks
made him a formidable operator.
Observing and talking to Jack gave me many practical hints.
Don’t waste too much time on lectures; make them spontaneous
and rough rather than too polished. Don’t waste time going up to
London during term. Don’t waste time on formality – a quick note
on the back of an envelope will usually do the trick. Don’t be seduced
by the idea of American think-tanks. If one has ideas they will come
out in any setting and teaching is an encouragement to creativity.
Don’t waste time on administration, but try to achieve the maximum
amount with the minimal effort. Be courteous and encouraging to
assistant staff, secretaries and others, and make them feel valued.
Through Jack I learnt how the University and Department
worked, which has since stood me in great stead. I could not have
had a better guide to the extraordinary complexity of Cambridge.
Intellectually Jack’s written work and conversations with him
had an enormously enlivening effect. Part of his breadth of vision
arose from the fact that he was interested in and encouraged inter-
disciplinary work with many disciplines. He had read English as an
undergraduate, but fortunately for me a particular interest was in
history and its relationship to anthropology. So we discussed themes
and overlaps, in particular in relation to the history of European
kinship and marriage, about which we were both writing in those
years. Much of his work was set in a long historical time frame, often
covering thousands of years. He was practising an early form of global
history and maintaining the honourable tradition in anthropology of
A.L. Kroeber in looking at long sweeps of civilizations.
Another stimulation was Jack’s interest in technology and
material life. Not only was he interested in the practicalities of
computers and machines, but he again maintained an earlier
(and somewhat unfashionable) anthropological tradition in being
interested in material technologies. Thus he wrote books and
articles exploring technologies of production, destruction and
communication and their effects. This was all the more suggestive
because it was broadly comparative, always coming back to the basic
contrast which informed his work, that is the difference between
the post-Neolithic civilizations of Eurasia, and the pre-Neolithic
technologies of sub-Saharan Africa.
So a whole set of areas of our interests overlapped, demography,
kinship, communication and technology. And the idea of speculating
at a broadly historical and comparative level, taking India, China,
Europe and Africa all as grist to the mill, was a constant inspiration.
Listening to Jack at seminars, talking to him and reading his stream
of works was a constant source of new ideas and themes to pursue.
He was constantly suggesting new links, expanding the borders of
what anthropology might be. And this was based on a large library
and much travel and experience.
***
Jack was enormously productive. By the time he retired, he had
published seven single-authored books, and several co-authored and
edited ones and many articles. In the thirty years since his retirement
he published another sixteen, many of them very long. This set me

a target, something to exceed in friendly competition.
In particular I was interested in how he managed to write so
much, always based on meticulous reading and research, and to
bring together so many diverse ideas. I picked up various hints.
Jack seemed to be working in parallel on half a dozen books or
articles at once. If one became bogged down, he switched to another.
Furthermore, he was always observing and writing, on journeys, in
meetings, even in the shortest period. The blight of busy people is that
they have only small bits of time and are tempted to put off producing
something worthwhile because of distractions or feeling that they
will be interrupted. This did not affect Jack. Great self-discipline and
concentration as well as enormous energy and curiosity lay behind
this. One aid to his creativity was that he wrote as if he was making
a mosaic. At frst he would write a few scraps of ideas on a sheet of
paper and have it typed. Then he would add in a few more sentences.
So a book would be built up as if it were cross-word or jigsaw puzzle.
Another key was moving every two or three years to a fresh
subject. He did not, like so many of his colleagues, become stale.
This made for great creativity and a freeing of the mind in order
to make connections. The fact that Jack was constantly exploring
new subjects, and then darting back to old ones, always with the
backdrop of deep feldwork in West Africa and a constant low-key
ethnography wherever he went, made his writing very rich. One
learnt alongside him and new worlds were opened up.
Whereas Jack’s lecturing and speaking style was sometimes
awkward, pausing in the middle of sentences, going back, long ‘oh’
and ‘ah’ pauses (it seemed to me that his speech could not keep up
with the lightning speed of his mind) his writing is very clear and
easy to follow and in some of his books very good indeed.
He wrote fast and in an almost unreadable hand, using a memory
stuffed with information and following his swift and connecting
intuitions to bring together ideas from disparate felds. The result
are books of great energy and insight.
There are those who have felt that he wrote too much, too
fast, and that some of the work is not easy to read because there
has been too little attention to the fnal polishing. There are others
who feel that his project to fnd deep similarities between East
and West is fawed because he did not suffciently distinguish
between Renaissance and renaissance, Capitalism and capitalism,
Industrialization and industrialization, Science and science,
Enlightenment and enlightenment.
Yet there can be no doubt that in a period of what he described
as The Expansive Moment (1995), when a small group of
anthropologists contributed more to our understanding of the world
than many larger disciplines, he was one of the great fgures.
***
There was a certain core to all his work which gives it consistency
and unity. This is the question of why Eur-Asia had developed
through the Neolithic and post-Neolithic revolutions of many kinds,
while Africa had not done so (a theme he had early encountered
in Gordon Childe’s work). His fexibility arose out of the fact that
he did not become constrained by a particular academic fashion.
Jack was a materialist, yet not a Marxist, interested in myth and
communication, but not a structuralist. He was no faddist and
because of his interests in his later years he was more famous perhaps
in France than in England. Likewise, his reputation was as great in
neighbouring disciplines, particularly history and literary studies, as
it was in social anthropology.
One way to approach the very large corpus of his writing is to see
it under four main themes. One is the area of kinship and marriage.
He wrote seven books in this feld, including Death, Property and
the Ancestors (1962), Production and Reproduction (1976) and The
European Family (2000). Kinship is the toughest and most technical
part of anthropology and one where the discipline has contributed
most profoundly. Goody’s work on descent, inheritance, bridewealth
and dowry, incest and adultery, is a signal achievement.
A second theme was orality, writing and representation, covered
in further books; among them are The Logic of Writing and the
Organization of Society (1986), The Domestication of the Savage
Mind (1977) and The Interface Between the Written and the Oral
(1987). His work in transcribing and editing The Myth of the Bagre
(1972), was ground-breaking. He was one of the major fgures in
this feld.
A third theme was material culture and technology on which he
published half a dozen books, including Technology, Tradition and
the State in Africa (1971), Cooking, Cuisine and Class (1982), Food
and Love (1998) and his last book, written in his nineties, Metals,
Culture and Capitalism (2012). Goody opened up an area which
is often overlooked by social scientists, namely the intersection of
material and cultural worlds.
A fourth theme was an attempt to balance what he considered
to be the Eurocentric vision concerning the differences between
western Europe and Asia. There were another six books including
The East in the West (1996), Islam in Europe (2004), The Theft
of History (2006) and The Eurasian Miracle (2010). In an age
when global history is expanding fast, the breadth of Goody’s
knowledge, rooted in both history and anthropology, with a deep
understanding of African and Islamic civilizations, and a keen
interest in India and the Far East, made a major contribution to the
attack on Euro-centric bias and arrogance of western triumphalism
in the Cold War years.
***
I cannot end without noting that he was enormously kind and
supportive to many of those he encountered, from children to
elderly dons. He would put his hand on your shoulder and draw
you into his world, and you knew you could depend on him in any
contingency. He was a warm and rounded human being and always
exciting to be with.
Jack Goody was a big man in every sense. He was fnally
knighted, as he should have been earlier. Perhaps he had to wait
because there was an ‘Again the Government’, contrarian, streak in
him which annoyed some in the Establishment, a characteristic he
shared with Edward Evans-Pritchard.
Jack was an excellent ethnographer, a wide ranging and

innovative thinker, and bridged the diffcult years when anthropology
was changing fast from the late colonial period into post-modernity
with style and wit.
I have met many fascinating people in my ffty years in Oxford,
London and Cambridge and elsewhere, and interviewed several
hundred of them. Jack stands up there as the man who has shaped
my life most and as a constant inspiration. He was a major thinker,
innovator and institution builder and a remarkable man.
Jack Goody. Photograph courtesy Alan Macfarlane.
A more legible letter from Jack Goody.

Photograph courtesy Alan Macfarlane.
Jack Goody
Sir John Rankine Goody, FBA (1919–2015), known as Jack Goody,

was an English social anthropologist. He was a prominent lecturer
at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social
Anthropology from 1973 to 1984.
Born on 27 July 1919, Goody grew up in Welwyn Garden City
and St Albans, where he attended St Albans School. He went up to St
John’s College, Cambridge to study English literature in 1938, where
he met leftist intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm. His parents were
Harold Goody (1885–1969) and Lilian Rankine Goody (1885–1962).
Goody left university to fight in World War II. Following
offcer training, he was commissioned into the Sherwood Foresters
(Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment), British Army, on 23
March 1940 as a second lieutenant. Fighting in North Africa, he was
captured by the Germans and spent three years in prisoner-of-war
camps. At the end of the war he held the rank of lieutenant. Following
his release, he returned to Cambridge to continue his studies. He
offcially relinquished his commission on 19 January 1952.
Inspired by James George Frazer’s Golden Bough and the
archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, he transferred to Archaeology and
Anthropology when he resumed university study in 1946. Meyer
Fortes was his frst mentor in Social Anthropology. After feldwork
with the LoWiili and LoDagaa peoples in northern Ghana, Goody
increasingly turned to comparative study of Europe, Africa and Asia.
Between 1954 and 1984, he taught social anthropology at
Cambridge University, serving as the William Wyse Professor of
Social Anthropology from 1973 until 1984. He gave the Luce
Lectures at Yale University – Fall 1987.
In 1976, Goody was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).
He was an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. In
the 2005 Queen’s Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Knight

Bachelor ‘for services to Social Anthropology’, and therefore granted
the use of the title sir. In 2006, he was appointed Commandeur dans
l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic.
Jack Goody explained social structure and social change primarily
in terms of three major factors. The frst was the development of
intensive forms of agriculture that allowed the accumulation of
surplus – surplus explained many aspects of cultural practice from
marriage to funerals as well as the great divide between African and
Eurasian societies. Second, he explained social change in terms of
urbanisation and growth of bureaucratic institutions that modifed
or overrode traditional forms of social organisation, such as family
or tribe, identifying civilization as ‘the culture of cities’. And third,
he attached great weight to the technologies of communication as
instruments of psychological and social change. He associated the
beginnings of writing with the task of managing surplus and, in
a paper with Ian Watt (Goody and Watt 1963), he advanced the
argument that the rise of science and philosophy in classical Greece
depended on the invention of the alphabet. As these factors could be
applied to any contemporary social system or to systematic changes
over time, his work is equally relevant to many disciplines.
Goody has pioneered the comparative anthropology of literacy,
attempting to gauge the preconditions and effects of writing as a
technology. He also published about the history of the family and
the anthropology of inheritance. More recently, he has written on
the anthropology of fowers and food.
Among his main publications were Death, Property and the
Ancestors (1962), Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa
(1971), The Myth of the Bagre (1972) and The Domestication of
the Savage Mind (1977).1
JACK GOODY 15
I
Eric Hobsbawm (EH): Guided partly by your little autobiographical
memoir of anthropology in the Annual Review of Anthropology I
would like to ask you a few questions. Let us start off with, if you
like, a bit of autobiography, no doubt we are not suffciently post-
modern to think that anthropology is an autobiographical genre,
nevertheless, it might help with your background. You do compare
your background with that of Meyer Fortes2 and Edmund Leach,3
you just say that it was more modest in the home counties. Could
you perhaps elaborate a bit more about where you came from and
who your parents were and where you went to school.
Jack Goody (JG): My father was a Londoner. My mother was from
the borders of two adjoining towns in Scotland, but she met my
father in London. After the First World War, they moved out to
Welwyn Garden City, which is where I grew up. I went to primary
school there. There was no secondary school in Welwyn Garden
City at that time, so I went to school at St Albans. I travelled there
by train every day. Eventually my parents moved out to St Albans
because my brother and I were going to school there.
EH: What sort of profession was your father in?
JG: My father was an advertising manager in London. His
background, however, was that of an electrical engineer, though
he became a technical journalist in the early days of electricity and
later on worked as an advertising manager for a frm in London.
EH: And your mother, was just at home, or was she…?
JG: My mother used to work in the central post offce administration
in London before she came down from Scotland. She did not work
after her marriage. She was at home, but my father went out to the
This interview was conducted by Eric Hobsbawm on 18 May 1991. The

transcription for this interview was provided by Radha Béteille, for this volume.
These interviews are available for viewing on:
https://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1117872
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITRrAbns5D0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CZBSAIUCmc
city. We lived in Hertfordshire in the outskirts of London. It was not

very far from where I am now. It was halfway between London and
Cambridge. In fact, I used to cycle up to Cambridge, at one stage,
in the days when the roads were slightly less encumbered than they
are now. It is my home country.
EH: Let me move quickly to Cambridge – it is a logical connection.
Could you say a little bit more about the intellectual atmosphere,
your friends, infuences, and your impression of Cambridge when
you came because, obviously, I observed that at least two or three of
the people you have collaborated with, were people you must frst
have known in the days that we met – Ian Watt4 and Peter Laslett5….
JG: That is absolutely true. I read English when I came up to
Cambridge. When I was in school, I was much infuenced by a
schoolmaster who had worked with the Leavis School. A number of
my friends, got scholarships to Downing [College, Cambridge] in that
crowd. The English school, if I recall, was organizing its own teaching
and seminars, at that time. I was also into the Socialist Club, that
too, was organizing its own seminars. In fact, there were all sorts of
alternative activities going on when I came up to university. So, I did
not go to many lectures because there were so many other interesting
things to be done. This was towards the end of the Spanish Civil War
and one was much involved with political activity. There were a series
of events leading up to the war which required knowledge of the
political feld, so one’s activities included politics. Therefore, it was
natural to take seminars in the Socialist Club on a variety of topics.
The atmosphere in Cambridge was extremely lively in those days.
EH: The faculty groups I seem to remember. There were faculty
groups….
JG: There were faculty groups of one kind or another. But the English
students were organizing various things and there were some people
who were very vigorous about that at the time. As I said earlier, I
did not go to many lectures in my frst year.
EH: Other than Leavis?6
JG: I went to Leavis’s seminars in Downing. I went to Hugh Sykes
Davies’s7 lectures because he was my supervisor. Though I went to
JACK GOODY 17
other seminars as well, very few were connected with what I was
actually meant to be doing then. At that particular time, you had to
fll up a piece of paper at the beginning of term which was then sent
to the Director of Studies which had a list indicting that you were
attending a certain course of lectures. I remember I got reprimanded
for not attending suffcient lectures. I do not think that I either went
to or listened to any lectures of anyone above the age of 30. It seemed
to me as if there was so much else to do other than attend lectures,
this was in part because of the great intellectual atmosphere that
prevailed at the time. And partly because people were going off to
Spain to be involved in the Spanish Civil War. One felt very close to
what was happening outside Cambridge – a real world experience
– as opposed to how one felt being in school.
EH: Presumably, of course, the infuence of Marx8 through the
Socialist Club and the Communist Party must also have been
noticeable at that time, at least that was so in my case.
JG: The Communist Party was very noticeable. I did read a certain
amount of communist literature while I was still in school. I was a
member of a Left Book Club9 while still at school before I ever came
up to Cambridge. It was the time of publishing and of the Left Book
Club which was important to a lot of people. It gave them access to
cheap, inexpensive books before the paperback era. I read the works
of Marx and Engels10 because it interested me and that naturally
led on to the Socialist Club and Left-wing politics in Cambridge.
EH: It is very interesting because you know your case was typical.
I, myself, was the pupil of one of these young English teachers who
had come from Cambridge – Leavis. I put down Downing as one
of my colleges….
JG: I did not get into Downing. I would have loved to get into
Downing, it was the height of my ambition.
EH: But you see, when I came up to Cambridge, I decided that
English was not my thing. Did you ever consider not studying English
and studying something else?
JG: I should have done history. I was much better at it than I was in
English. But English was the peak ambition for so many of us at the
time. I did not realize that then, but Edward Thompson and others,
so many people did English. It was years after the war. It was said
English was the most diffcult subject to get in to and it remains
true to this day – it required the highest A Levels to get in. Even
though I would have been better at history, I somehow did not have
the drive to get into it. It was English literature that I wanted to do.
EH: Who were the chief people who infuenced you, if any? Or
whom do you think you infuenced?
JG: A lot of people in Cambridge infuenced me, especially those
who were slightly senior to me, including me, were the signifcant
ones. There were people who were two or three years older and
gave me receptions – Ian Watt with whom I worked later on. And
people who were giving seminars. My friend R.O.C. Winkler11 was
at the same school as I was. He read English at school. He got the
scholarship to Downing, became a philosopher, but he died young.
EH: There is no question about it that in our days it was mutual
education much more than it was from top to bottom.
JG: That is absolutely right. That was the vigour of Cambridge. It was
those kinds of circles that I got my education from and that is where
I talked about the books I had read or the books that other people
had read and exchanged ideas – it was in that kind of ambience.
EH: Did you at that time have any particular relationship with non-
European students, Third World students as you would say today,
colonial students as people would have said in those days?
JG: My relationship with ‘colonial’ students was pretty minimal.
My frst introduction to anthropology was through the notes in T.S.
Eliot’s12 The Waste Land13 – references to Frazer and so on. It was
Leavis’s references to Lord Raglan14 – that is where I frst got the
name from – it was mediaeval drama. When I was in prison camp in
Germany later on, there was a very good library run by Tim Munby
– in Stalag 7B which had been accumulated by these people since
Dunkirk – and it was a rather extensive one. That is where I read
two volumes of Frazer and Chamber’s Medieval Stage, which I had
always wanted to read. My own contact with Indian students was
during and after the war.
JACK GOODY 19
EH: This does get us to the war. It seems to me that the war had
quite a big impact on you intellectually in many ways through your
experiences in Italy, what you were reading and the rest of it. What
did it teach you, what ideas did you derive from it? Tell us a little
bit about that.
JG: The war years had a great infuence on me. I went to the Middle
East for the frst time, and spent some time in Cyprus. Seeing the
use of the Mediterranean plough in the villages in Cyprus and then
visiting the museum there to see the same kind of plough being used
4000 years earlier is what got me interested in anthropology. My
interest in the ancient Middle East was aroused after being camped
under the pyramids in Giza, visiting Cairo, in Egypt, which in turn
got me interested in works of [V.] Gordon Childe and archaeology.
I remembered from when I was a child, Sir Mortimer Wheeler
unearthing a part of the hypocaust in Verulamium, which has a
magnifcent Neptune mosaic on top. All this piqued my interest in
archaeology. Experiencing the Middle East, walking up to the Disney-
like crusader castles and going into a Gothic cathedral in the middle
Nicosia [capital of Cyprus] being transformed into a mosque was
what got me interested in the history and the cultures of that region.
But more specifcally, as far as anthropology was concerned, my
interest in it grew after being captured at Torbuq in 1942 when
we were taken to Italy. I was in a camp in Italy where university
courses were arranged, and I got involved in teaching modern English
literature with a friend of mine, Stuart Hood,15 who later went on
to become Director of ITV. At the end of the war, when I had done
one year of university, I even thought of becoming a professional
bridge player! It was the only thing I could do that qualifed me for
anything as far as I could see.
Later, I got interested in social interaction with small groups,
living with people in a confned space. This was when I escaped and
spent time in Ubruzzi, up in the hills with peasants, and then again in
Rome after I escaped again and was hiding out. It was more Europe
and the Middle East that interested me than Africa.
EH: That actually leads to the question why do you think you settled
down in Africa?
JG: I did not really settle down in Africa. Besides, the economic base
was not far away. What I did frst, when I came back to Cambridge,
was to fnish off my degree in English very quickly. Thereafter, I took
a year and did a diploma in anthropology.
EH: Why in anthropology? It wasn’t an obvious choice.
JG: If there had been sociology, I would probably have taken
that, except that sociology would not have led me on to business
studies. Not that anthropology led me on to business studies
either. But Evans-Pritchard16 was lecturing in Cambridge, on Africa
and he was a very infuential lecturer and fgure at the time. He
inspired many people in Cambridge to go in for anthropology. I
did not take up anthropology immediately, instead, I went into
education for a while. After getting a certifcate, I realized I wanted
to do something active so became an adult education offcer in
Hertfordshire. I would have liked to have done sociological work
at the Tavistock Clinic in London and in aiding the adjustment
of returning prisoners of war. Instead, I applied for the job of a
researcher at Dartington Hall which I did not get because the job
required more qualifcations than I had. It was then that I decided
to do a PhD in anthropology. My decision was partly prompted by
the fact that there was government funding, for which I applied
through the Colonial Social Science Research Council, and in part
because I knew a lot of Africans by then and I wanted to work
in Ghana – Ghana was at the front of changes having become
a newly independent territory. This led me to go to Oxford and
work in African Studies. Besides, all the grants and scholarships
were essential for going to African territories. These grants did
not cover work on peasants in Italy, perhaps because there was
no work on peasants in Italy.
EH: I would like to read something that you wrote yourself – here
are some fragments…
I saw post-war Britain under the Labour government of ’45 as the

national outcome of many lives like my own. …grown up between
the two wars with an interval of only 20 years from one terrifying
JACK GOODY 21
destruction to the next and lived our adolescence under the shadow
of continental fascism and so on. This period began as the Japanese
attacks. They followed my generation for six and a half years of
life under arms during which time all one could look forward to
was post-war reconstruction through the national government
and through the United Nations and this obviously involved the
dissolution of earlier empires.
It is important for people now who did not recall this and are
not in a position to remember the general state. For instance, it
seems to me worth mentioning that when you decided to go into
adult education, you were not doing something that Goody thought
of, but there were several other people including academics were
doing this at that time.
JG: Adult education, after all, was associated with the outcome of
the war. It was stimulated by Army Board of Current Affairs which
was very much involved in adult education. A number of people
like Raymond Williams17 and Thomas Hodgkin were working in
the adult education feld and my friend George Schofeld also went
into it. It was for a specifc reason. The 1944 Education Act had
been passed. The universities were opening up and one felt that one
could do something in the feld of education.
EH: Academic life was not self-contained. It was not just a job.
It had to be in some ways useful to people both here and abroad.
JG: I wanted to do something in education at that time. It was also
the time when independence was obviously coming. It had already
come to India and to Africa and one wanted to be a part of this
change. A lot of people went into adult education, a great number of
whom became academics and later on went into adult education in
Africa – Nigeria and Ghana with various WEA [Workers’ Education
Association] and associations for education support.
University life did not hold any particular attraction for me. I saw it
as a place where all the fuddy-duddies were and everything exciting
was happening outside that. What was much more likely was, as
many of my friends did, to teach in overseas universities during that
period rather than get a job here.
EH: Let me take you back to Ghana where you did your feldwork
there and paid your dues as an anthropologist. You have kept up
contact there, you still go. What did you get out of going to northern
Ghana, apart from, as you say, it somewhere forced you to keep
contact with French literature?
JG: I got an enormous deal out of my feldwork in Ghana. I was
forced to sit in a place for two years and simply observe. I had not
thought very much about the law or religion in any concrete way
except going to church. This was a kind of a revelation to me, to be
involved in all these aspects of life including the whole productive
process. Living in the towns and villages in Ghana, I learnt how to
make beer, bread and porridge. It got me interested in a number of
felds of social life which I would not have thought that I would
be interested in before. Those things that I was interested in at
an intellectual level it made me take them up on another one, for
instance, my friendship with Ian Watt, his work on The Rise of the
Novel which he was preparing at the time. I was interested in Q.D.
Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public and the kind of changes
involved with printing and printing presses and the general feld of
the sociology of literature. Having looked at medieval literature,
popular culture, oral and literate cultures, what particularly intrigued
me, was the idea of being in a society without any reading matter
and what this really meant to people inside it – what they could or
could not do without a book – without reading and writing. The
reason for this could have been because as prisoners of war, we were
not always with libraries and we had nothing at all to read. I was,
therefore, drawn to subjects of oral and written discourse. Besides,
I also got interested in the transmission of property in Ghana and
property relations. Overall, being in Ghana gave me the chance
to examine two adjacent communities and try and fnd out their
differences and similarities.
EH: How would your work have changed if, instead of going to the
LoDagaa in northern Ghana, you had gone to Uganda or Borneo
or to Ceylon? It is a counter-factual question.
JG: I did think of what I would have done in Italy if I had gone
there. I was, at that time, worried about anthropologists going to
JACK GOODY 23
places like Indonesia because people were going to societies with

written culture and history, who, to my mind, did not know enough
about their history. I was pleased to go to Africa because I could
read all the historical documents and do all the work within the
compass of my own research. I was always worried about India
and China for those reasons – getting involved in a literate society
of which I did not know enough about. Since then, I have lost that
fear of talking or writing about literate societies. It was important
for me to be in Africa because I could know everything about
a certain area, its history, its archaeology. That was one of the
attractions of being there. It, perhaps, comes out more in French
anthropological writings than it does in English ones on Africa,
where they would be much more teamed up with history. Some
of my friends, whether they are historians or anthropologists is
irrelevant, because they are doing the same kind of work. I was
not very sympathetic, partly because I was interested in history,
to discussions on synchronic analysis in anthropology and in part
because I thought I could do that in Africa, which would not have
been possible in places like Borneo. I always felt that some of my
contemporaries who went to work in China or the Middle East
were somewhat at a loss because they did not know the classical
languages. I was always worried about speaking to people in the
villages because they were always confned to that area, I was
interested in that particularly when I went to work with Esther
[Goody] in northern Ghana. I was much more interested in states
and tribal systems in a regional context. People have done work of
that kind. My friend Kathleen Gough did so in India but it is much
more diffcult and more complicated because it involved learning
the local languages and the classical languages.
EH: It turned out lucky for you and it formed the breadth of your
interests. Is it a retrospective judgment or did you feel this at the
time that these were the things that would allow you to take a much
broader, including historical approach to the thing?
JG: I certainly did not feel that. What I did feel, however, was
that Africa was the most exciting place, politically, but also
anthropologically, and most of the academics who held senior
positions in this country were Africanists – Evans-Pritchard, Fortes

and others – these were the people I knew and whose work I
admired, not so much the historical aspects, theirs was more highly
professional work and still is in my mind. They worked on Africa
rather than other places.
JACK GOODY 25
II
EH: You are among the rare anthropologists who insists on
working with scholars in other felds but you have been formed
as an anthropologist and presumably in the UK and in Cambridge
and I was about to ask you who had infuenced you most inside
and outside the UK and Cambridge and whom you admired most.
JG: I would say Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes and Max Gluckman,18
people I worked with on African topics and what people were
writing at the time – textbooks on anthropology on African political
systems and African systems of kinship and marriage. These were
the important works that were coming out that were theoretical as
well as political.
EH: Outside the UK, I don’t see any notable American infuence.
JG: There was no American infuence. The little interest I had partly
arose out of the war. Many of us have read Ruth Benedict, Margaret
Mead, Geoffrey Gorer and Gregory Bateson. They had partly led me
to have an interest in anthropology, but there was a lot of hostility
here towards American anthropologists and references lady novelists.
There were American infuences, and American scholars whose work
was interesting, but they usually turned out to be people interested in
the work of Radcliffe-Brown in Chicago. I cannot say I got a great
deal out of reading people like Julian Steward19 or Leslie White20,
mostly because it was not professional enough at the empirical level.
I was more infuenced by the French. The training at that time was
largely Durkheimian, especially because of Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-
Pritchard and others. I read an enormous amount of Durkheim
and I was reading the work of the journal L’Année sociologique. A
number of my contemporaries were doing translations of Durkheim
into English – Rodney Needham – several of Durkheim’s books had
been translated by pupils of Evans-Pritchard and Fortes. But French
anthropology was not of supreme interest apart from the new work
of [Claude] Lévi-Strauss. It also centred around these feld trips of the
countries of West Africa, which many of us were rather suspicious of.
There were people who could not speak the native languages. There
were people who went on feld sites for a short period of time and
were prepared to talk about death and complexities of religion and

ideology without understanding the language of the other people
themselves. That seemed to be, to many of us, a supreme insult. I
apologize for talking about material objects here – health and social
censuses and things like that, but in subjects like myth, the work was
very speculative and has not stood the test of time. This is around
the time when Lévi-Strauss’s work was coming up and it was very
much more interesting on the intellectual level.
EH: Not unspeculative?
JG: The feldwork element, as many have pointed out, particularly
among the French anthropologists, was somewhat limited and mildly
speculative. But he was using ideas in a more interesting way than
others. French anthropology has changed a lot since then in the
1960s and 1970s because of the enormous amount of funds which
the French were prepared to put into it, and it has done very well.
Now extremely good ethnographic work is done in France, probably
better than anywhere else.
EH: You were not put off by the rather empty historical approach
of the classical British functionalists which seemed to me only to be
just about fraying at the edges in the early and mid-1950s?
JG: Classical British functionalism was fraying at the edges. But
curiously it did not exist for very long. It was Malinowski, of course,
principally, and Radcliffe-Brown in a more theoretical way. It was
following along a sociological tradition of Emile Durkheim. Evans-
Pritchard had done his work on the Azande.21 Schapera22 was fairly
interested in the historical methods. Max Gluckman was there,
sometimes, in a cryptic fashion shifted his point of view. The frst
paper I wrote on Ghana was on the background infuence of Islam. It
seemed natural to be writing about it and it did not worry me what
other people were saying about this. I could see that there was a case
to be made for doing a synchronic study from certain points of view,
but to think that it could answer all the questions and think that
one could say that history was irrelevant seemed not worth arguing.
EH: These were the people you admired and who infuenced you. Who
are you for or against anthropologically, in your feld? Schools, people?
JACK GOODY 27
JG: Earlier on, I was against most who were in the school of British
anthropology was against. There was a time when the school of
British anthropology, in the early 1950s, was a close network – the
founding association of the Association of Social Anthropologists
certainly thought they had certain keys to unlocking the secrets of
the universe. One tended to look down on people trained in America.
In fact, even now, this Association of Social Anthropologists, it was
born out of the Commonwealth and it includes people on the basis
of the way they were trained. At frst it was only in England, then it
extended to the Commonwealth, it never really extended to America
and Americans could join if they spent time over here, otherwise it
was a rather exclusive club.
It was not true that I was against some of the kind of
psychological anthropology that was taking place in the States, I
was against some of the cultural personality work because it seemed
to me rather superfcial, but not against others. This people might
say has stigmatized me as an anti-structuralist, but I am not sure if
I would accept that designation. I have always found the works of
Lévi-Strauss interesting from a polemical reference point of view.
EH: Just one incidental question – Polanyi23 – any opinions? He has
been infuential in anthropology.
JG: Yes, Polanyi has been infuential in anthropology and I did
read him a lot. He had been a great infuence on my close friend’s
neighbour, Moses Finley,24 and many others. During the 1950s I
had been infuenced by Polanyi. But later I became unhappy about
radical revisions, the concept of the ancient economy and the ideas
of reciprocity in the way that Moses expounded it. I was also not
happy about the various levels of society where reciprocity was
the only mechanism for exchange. The more I looked at Africa and
the history of Africa, and this came out in the work of a number
of historians of Africa, like Basil Davidson, 25 that commercial
exchange was part of the African way of life for very many years
and I thought that the attempts to apply Polanyi’s theory to it was
not very useful at all. I think he overgeneralized the notion and
people were not giving enough attention to the long, commercial
exchanges in Africa. They had missed the importance of the
enormous amounts of cowries, and the fact that they from the
waters of the Indian Ocean. They came in some kind of exchange
system and that was part of the operational systems I studied. It was
not simply a local business of exchanging cowries up and down for
chickens and goats, it tied in with that. This system, not just in areas
adjacent to my study area, it also played into the mediaeval gold
trade pushing mediaeval gold into Italy to enter into commercial
exchanges with the West. It was that kind of networking that I
was interested in. The kind of cuttings off that Polanyi did and
people accepted made it more diffcult to understand and describe
these kinds of things.
EH: Let us go a little bit further into your work. In your
autobiographical statement in the Annual Review of Anthropology,
it describes the keywords, probably this was not your choice as
history, Cambridge, kinship, literacy, LoDagaa.
JG: That was not my choice and I do not recall making any such
choice. I certainly would have put in comparative studies. I was
interested to see how inheritance systems in Ghana differed from or
were similar to European arrangements. I was not in Africa simply
to look at African values, I was interested in comparing these with
European ones that were prevalent in the nations where I had lived
and worked in and that I had read about. Very often the things that
I write start off with Africa, but they spread, in a sometimes rather
picaresque way, into other areas, because I am interested in trying
to make sense of it in the wider context, what I have read about
and experienced in Africa.
EH: The point is, it seems to me, that it is not only comparative
studies, but in some ways a very broad, what Perry Anderson calls a
‘deliberately macro-evolutionary attack’, as it were What Happened
in History to go back to Gordon Childe.
JG: It is quite true that Gordon Childe is one of the really important
books I have read. And you are absolutely right. What Happened
in History – it was one of the really important books of his. It is
true that I was interested in what happened from the Bronze Age
on and how that might affect people.
JACK GOODY 29
And it seems to me that in Africa, after talking to many economists

and other young people, particularly in trying to understand the
processes of development that took or were taking place in Africa or
not taking place in Africa, and it came to be absolutely clear to me
that this was an important revelation. It came up in the Nkrumah era
in a rather acute form when I gave some public lectures suggesting
that African agriculture could be improved by the adoption of the
plough. This was much against the policy of improvement according
to Nkrumah who was engaged on importing Yugoslav tractors which
rarely worked and cost a great deal.
There was this notion at that time of a Third World that was
on one level in which one could do certain things to improve and
bring it up to the standard of the West – Europe and America – in
a relatively short space of time. It just seemed to me that there were
such enormous differences between Africa and the cultures that
Childe was talking about in the Bronze Age because they were not
based on the use of the written word or the plough and they did
not have the numerous specialisms of technology which they needed
to develop. People thought that bringing in the tractor or a plough
without any knowledge, simply as an instrument, and without any
idea of a social organization of production behind it that they could
change things overnight. The one thing we have learnt about Africa
is that we cannot change things overnight. It did not simply imply
making some sort of technological change at the agricultural level
without seeing that technology within a much wider social system
of organization and production.
EH: It seems to me that once again you are anticipating the question!
The axis around which a lot of your work turns is precisely that of
a contrast between the African and Eurasian societies. And it comes
out in all of your writing. Let me ask one incidental question – why
don’t you ever bring in the Americas and American societies?
JG: I am already stretching myself as far as I can. I am interested in
American studies and I am invested in them. It is just that it would
have required a lot more work. It is not through deliberate neglect
there because I am conscious of it. What I want to do and what I am
interested in doing with Europe and, Asia to a degree, which I am

working on, is connected with the opposition for Africa and the idea
to see those as much more similar than many scholars have wanted
to do. I had once wanted to emphasize the differences I see between
Africa and India and then make the difference less between India
and China and Europe. It always seemed to me that Lévi-Strauss’s
exemplifcation of China and parts of India as elementary structures
of kinship and that there must be something obviously profoundly
wrong comparing those except on a very limited level with Australian
systems. If you were saying something, you were saying something
very restrictive about the notion of kinship in that context. You were
singling out something which was clearly not linked or entitled in
any close way with the society as a whole. I wanted to see how the
various aspects of kinship worked linked to societies as a whole and
I saw to be nearer to the European systems than the African ones.
EH: You have already done this in an extremely stimulating manner,
not to mention the differences between Europe and some of the
others. Nevertheless, what I want to ask you is this, essentially the
major axis of your work in the broadest sense appears to me to be
a sort of materialist conception of history approach – after all, on
the one hand, you have got a certain type of agriculture and various
other things that follow from it and on the other, you have limited
resources and so on. In some ways it ties in with Gordon Childe
because of the agriculture, plough and literacy aspect – how did
you get to this? How early did you begin to formulate this basic
organizing principle which is still coming out in your work and why?
JG: There is no easy way to answer this. I see Bronze Age civilizations
as introducing literacy and the books we had around us as forms
of knowledge in which we were dealing with and I see this as being
absent from Africa except areas where Islam entered and brought
with it some of these aspects. It was not available for organizing
state systems in Africa. But it is absolutely true that I see literacy
and writing as emergent at some point in the development of human
society. To that extent, coming back to the point of schools that I
differ with – the relevant relativistic tendency in anthropology of
which I am in appreciation of certain areas, the relativity of morals.
JACK GOODY 31
I was interested what differences were to be found between societies

with writing and those without writing, or societies with systems
of production and support and various specialists like ourselves.
It obviously ties in with things that I have read on Marx and
Engels. It also comes out in my experience of Africa where I
asked myself how one could support a school population in this
community, though I did not ask it soon enough without changes
in the economic structure which would have enabled us to do this.
What happened in this fascinating period? I would have spent my
time writing the history after the liberation of these countries. We
put in all these universities and we thought they would change things
overnight without asking how these were going to be supported. We
simply did not ask the question we should have done, given some
background perhaps, but we did not ask the economic questions
about these. We thought they would follow. One thing that was so
tragic about it was that these institutions were built up and have
now had to retract.
One of the fascinating things that is going on now is to fnd the
new adaptations to the possible situations in which you will fnd
school and university teachers being part-time farmers. Farming and
doing farming work were an adaptation to a situation in the fux of
interest of wanting Africa to change after the war and we had hoped
that they would get over this phase, but they have not. It strikes
me that one will not see much development in Africa today. And
years from now, the kind of development taking place in Taiwan,
Hong Kong and Korea. Where are the African Koreans and African
Taiwanese? It is not because people have not tried, there was a lot
of activity, a lot of attention was given to Africa. But what we were
building on at the economic level and at the level of literacy, we had
a lot more success in education than we have had in other things.
Now, unfortunately, the educated people from Africa are thriving
in America and elsewhere. I was in Chicago recently, and there are
8,000 Ghanaians in the city, obviously they were educated people.
Their country cannot afford that kind of education. There is nothing
going on, what you see now in Ghana is really no different or very little
different economically or otherwise from the time of its independence.
EH: Of course, this raises these issues that distinguish only Africa
from the remainder of the world. Almost every relatively poor or
undeveloped country – the drain of the educated people that upholds
the First World. However, the point it seems to me that you bring
out very much is that as against the fashion for pure relativism you
insist and take the view that one must insist on the difference between
simple and complex and primitive and further advanced societies
whether you put them in inverted commas or not….
JG: It is about the range of complexities that is critical for
understanding what is happening now and what has happened in
the past.
EH: I would agree with you because the thing that follows from
it is that it is exceedingly diffcult to jump if you are used to your
society structured in one way with a certain background, simply to
transform this from one day to the next will not work.
JG: It is enormously diffcult. I wrote about area in rural Africa
where they have got the wheel, but all the wheels were made outside.
In every Indian village it would be right out there. Every wheel on
anything has to come in from outside. There are no bullock carts,
or horses or even donkeys pulling anything, so you are completely
dependent. It strikes me every time I go back there how critically
important the dependence of a country is on these imports. If they do
not have these imports and aid from the outside world, they would
have to go back to simpler technologies because there is no change
in the social organization of production to produce carts. It is true
that people have tried but their attempts have been feeble – they
have had aid volunteers to come and do this.
EH: You have developed three basic strains of writing through the
years. One is about family, marriage and reproduction. The other is
arising out of your oral literacy studies and the third, if I read you
rightly, is the one you concentrated on to some extent in the 1980s
was food culture, fower culture – are there any other aspects that
you think you would like to pursue but have not had a chance to do?
JG: I was very much interested in modes of production and
reproduction but also what I called ‘modes of destruction’. It was
JACK GOODY 33
particularly important in Africa and is therefore critical to my mind,

is that when the Portuguese came to West Africa and established
their forts for cannons and handguns and even at an earlier stage
there were some Portuguese who rushed off and sold handguns to
the Africans and got a good price for them. Then, of course, the
English and the Dutch started to sell frearms to the Africans. They
moved in so that they could give them their guns, and they do so to
this day in West Africa, because the Africans could never make their
own guns. They could copy things, including some of the intricate
fring mechanisms and so on, but it was absolutely critical to every
African state to have an outside supply of guns because although
they had iron working which you do come across in Africa, they
never had furnaces equipped to make steel and they had never made
barrels. I have been to places including funerals – there would be
somebody shooting off frearms at funerals and these barrels would
just burst open because somebody had put a bicycle tube instead
of a gun barrel on the end of a rife. They never learnt how to do
this and yet when the Portuguese got to Arabia, to the Malabar
coast and Japan, they would copy European guns and claim to have
Malabari guns and they would be making very important changes to
the politics in Japan and India. Africa was always dependent on the
import of guns and is to this day as far as I am aware. Once again,
this sort of dependence – they had not developed a certain level of
production and found it diffcult, not because they were unintelligent,
but because they accepted the technology that existed and which had
been set up here. It was never institutionalized or built up in Africa
and it was therefore critical that all frearms come from outside.
EH: The other thing that strikes me that you know, but was less
interested in, is the question of state and state powers and I am not
certain if you have ever dealt very widely with your comparative
work in cities.
JG: You are absolutely right there. I did actually do some research on
cities in Africa and I was interested in the nature of cities there, the
agro-city and the merchant city. But I never went into any systematic
comparison of state power. I did look into some aspects of state
systems, but it really had more to do with – you mentioned cultural

interest – the nature of differences in ‘classes’ and the strata and the
relationships between strata. The differences – the ruling classes were
marrying commoners and it was not at all like the Indian situation
or even the situation that Marc Bloch writes about for England,
people marrying in a circle. Girls would marry commoners partly
because they were beautiful and partly because they wanted ties with
commoner groups. There was no cultural cuttings-off.
I have never thought of any conceptual way of categorizing the
different complexities of state systems that were not so very obvious
ones. I think one can talk in terms of authority and so on, but it is
very important to do comparative work in that feld. I have never
found anything satisfactory when I have tried to compare it in
African societies, I have never got very far in doing so.
EH: You are a sort of totalizing historical anthropologist, you try
and cover all bases, nevertheless, in fact, you fnd yourself in your
actual work concentrating on little strands much more than others.
Why is it that you fnd yourself concentrating on these strands rather
than on some others?
JG: The personal biography and literacy thing is pretty obvious
because I work with Ian on it. I got interested in it because I was
interested in English. As for work on the family, it is one thing that
anthropologists specialize in, and therefore the interest in it. There
are certain areas that I have not touched upon, not because it was
a deliberate attempt not to, but because I concentrated on things
that interested me at a particular time. It had nothing to do with
one being more important than the other, it was just that I did not
think that state power was unimportant, but more so that I had not
seen my way of dealing with it.
EH: Where do you think that your interests are likely to be next
assuming that you are in a position to carry on?
JG: The next thing I might be interested in once I have completed
my fower book is to sum up the similarities and differences as I see
them between European and Asian societies, partly on the level of
culture and knowledge systems, generally trying to distil something
out of Joseph Needham’s work. This touches on what I am interested
JACK GOODY 35
in fowers and food, it looks at aspects of family as I have done and

other variables for example accounting systems – things that made a
great difference between European and Asian societies and in their
development. It is partly rethinking [Max] Weber and the concept
of oriental society, and looking at various aspects of this kind of
a contrast, particularly the period between 1700 and 1800 and
the prevalent knowledge systems in and across these areas. These
societies in the East are developing so rapidly because they are built
on advanced knowledge systems. That, however, does not seem to
be happening in Africa in terms of contributions of knowledge.
EH: Supposing somebody comes to you and says what have you
actually contributed to anthropology – what would you say?
JG: I have contributed at one level that we have not discussed and
that is my feldwork. Something that I feel proud of is recording a
number of unreported myths, editing that and publishing various
versions of those. Having done that at a time when the tape-
recorder came and I was able to, at least for me, changed my
views on mythology. I was pleased to be called back to Africa as
I was in December in order to discuss these matters with locals. It
gave me great satisfaction to have been able to do that at a local
ethanographic level. With regard to the other, I hope that I have
pointed out the relevance to many problems, not all, of historical
facts and notions for anthropological processes and the comparison
of societies now and in the past. Furthermore, I have also tried not
to overthrow the history of Africa for the cause of development, one
has to take this into account and build on what is there.
NOTES
1. Jack Goody. Wikipedia. 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_
Goody
2. Meyer Fortes, see Appendix.
3. Edmund Leach, see Appendix.
4. Ian Watt, see Appendix.
5. Peter Laslett, see Appendix.
6. F.R. Leavis, see Appendix.
7. Hugh Sykes Davies, see Appendix.
8. Karl Marx, see Appendix.

9. Pioneering British publisher Victor Gollancz founded the original Left
Book Club in 1936. Members received one book a month, including George
Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China.
By 1939 there were 57,000 members. The popularity of the LBC is widely
credited with helping to bring about a shift in public opinion which led to
Labour’s landslide victory after WW2. https://www.leftbookclub.com/about
10. Friedrich Engels, see Appendix.
11. R.O.C. Winkler was the author of Knowledge and Experience (1941).
12. T.S. Eliot, see Appendix.
13. The Waste Land is widely regarded as one of the most important
poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. While
it is not considered as Eliot’s masterpiece by many critics, it is undoubtedly
his most famous poem.
14. The Charge of the Light Brigade was a failed military action
involving the British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian
forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean
War. Lord Raglan had intended to send the Light Brigade to prevent the
Russians from removing captured guns from overrun Turkish positions,
a task for which the light cavalry was well-suited. However, there was
miscommunication in the chain of command and the Light Brigade was
instead sent on a frontal assault against a different artillery battery, one well-
prepared with excellent felds of defensive fre. The Light Brigade reached
the battery under withering direct fre and scattered some of the gunners,
but they were forced to retreat immediately, and the assault ended with very
high British casualties and no decisive gains. The events were the subject of
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s narrative poem The Charge of the Light Brigade
(1854), published just six weeks after the event. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Charge_of_the_Light_Brigade
15. Stuart Hood, see Appendix.
16. E.E. Evans- Pritchard, see Appendix.
17. Raymond Williams, see Appendix.
18. Max Gluckman, see Appendix.
19. Julian Steward, see Appendix.
20. Leslie White, see Appendix.
21. The Azande (plural of ‘Zande’ in the Zande language) are an ethnic
group of North Central Africa. They live primarily in the north-eastern part
of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in south-central and southwestern
part of South Sudan, and in south-eastern Central African Republic. The
JACK GOODY 37
Congolese Azande live in Orientale Province, specifcally along the Uele

River; Isiro, Dungu, Kisangani and Duruma. The Central African Azande
live in the districts of Rafaï, Bangasu and Obo. The Azande of South Sudan
live in Central, Western Equatoria and Western Bahr al-Ghazal States, Yei,
Maridi, Yambio, Tombura, Deim Zubeir, Wau Town and Momoi. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zande_people
22. Isaac Schapera, see Appendix.
23. Karl Polanyi, see Appendix.
24. Moses Finley, see Appendix.
25. Basil Davidson, see Appendix.
PART
two
Encounter with
Clifford Geertz
Alan Macfarlane
The encounter with Clifford Geertz and his work was one of
the half dozen most important such encounters I have had with
anthropologists. He stands, alongside E.E. Evans-Pritchard,
Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Jack Goody, Ernest Gellner and
Marshall Sahlins, as someone who, for decades, shaped my ways of
thinking as an anthropologist.
I frst read a little Geertz as I converted into anthropology at
the London School of Economics in 1966–68. He was one of the
few Americans, and even non-British, anthropologists who was
taken seriously during our course. When I did my feld research,
and then wrote my doctorate on population and resources in Nepal
from 1968–1973, his book Agricultural Involution (1968) was one
of the most inspiring anthropological analyses I encountered. Its
brilliant analysis of the relations between intensive rice production
and population densities was an inspiration. I continued to draw on
this book in my own research and teaching through the years. A few
notes from the book, which I put into my database of quotations,
show some of the ideas that I drew from it. (The original citations
reference includes the page number and source).
Equal inheritance as a mechanism which prevents growth of

inequality.
Economic individualism – good characterization of in Java – class
confict, individualism.
Growth of individualism and weakening of extended family,
economic individualism.
Wet rice cultivation – with its extraordinary ability to maintain

levels of marginal labour productivity – soaked up almost whole
of additional population...
Wet rice culture – marked tendency to respond to a rising population
through intensifcation.
Excellent account of paddy cultivation – ecology of.
Slash and burn technology – brilliant account of as an ‘ecosystem’.
Effects of destruction of forests – brilliant account.
Ecological approach in anthropology – outline of.
Growth of inequality – reasons why no growth of despite intense
population policy in Java – very good passage on.
Increasing numbers and limited resources do not in Java lead to
stratifcation – reasons.
Anthropology and history – successful attempt to marry anthropology
and economic history.
Reasons for rapid population growth in nineteenth century Indonesia
– disappearance of Malthusian checks (as twentieth century Nepal).
Population growth – some of the disastrous effects of in Indonesia.
Geertz’s work on Islam in Morocco also interested me and it was

around this time that I had my frst personal contact with him as
my diary shows. ‘The last seminar of term – Clifford Geertz – very
interesting. On Islam as a religion of extreme individualism/market
mentality. The whole Protestant ethic = pre-protestant in England,
invented as C16 phenomenon by Tawney? Geertz had read and
enjoyed my book, he said.’ (25.5.1979)
Geertz was a friend of both Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner, the
successive heads of my department, so he came to give lectures in
Cambridge several times. For example, Sarah notes in the diary,
‘then went to hear Clifford Geertz and to go to a party in his
honour.’ (6.2.1984)
The other work which inspired me most was his large collection
of essays in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). There were many
brilliant observations, as well as one of the best examples of ‘the
world in a grain of sand’ kind of ethnography in ‘The Balinese Cock
ENCOUNTER WITH CLIFFORD GEERTZ 43
fght’. These are just a few of the passages which I marked in the
book and which reverberated in my mind through the years.
‘Believing, with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in

webs of signifcance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those
webs, and that analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’
‘In fnished anthropological writings, including those collected
here, this fact – that what we call our data are really our own
constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their
compatriots are up to – is obscure…’
‘Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of
“construct a reading of”) a manuscript – foreign, faded, full of
ellipses, incoherencies suspicious emendations, and tendentious
commentaries, but written not in conventional graphs of sound but
in transient examples of shaped behaviour.’
‘Anthropologists have not always been as aware as they might be
of this fact: that although culture exists in the trading post, the hill
fort, or the sheep run, anthropology exists in the book, the article,
the lecture, the museum display, or, sometimes nowadays, the flm.’
‘Yet, the problem of how to get from a collection of ethnographic
miniatures on the order of our sheep story – an assortment of
remarks and anecdotes – to wall-sized cultural spaces of the nation
the epoch, the continent, or the civilization is not so easily passed
over with vague allusions to the virtues of concreteness and the
down-to-earth mind. For a science born in Indian tribes, Pacifc
islands, and African lineages and subsequently seized with grander
ambitions, this has come to be a major methodological problem,
and for the most part a badly handled one.’
‘There are a number of ways to escape this – turning culture into
folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting it,
turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures
and toying with it. But they are escapes.’
‘The religious tradition of Java, particularly of the peasantry, is
a composite of Indian, Islamic, and indigenous Southeast Asian
elements. …. Working their way into the peasant mass, these two
world religions became fused with the underlying animistic traditions
character of the whole Malaysian culture area. The result was a
balanced syncretism of myth and ritual in which Hindu gods and
goddesses, Moslem prophets and saints, and local spirits and demons
all found a proper place.’
‘The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves
ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the
shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.’
I was particularly interested in the way in which Geertz

worked, and how he analysed the work of other thinkers – his self-
questioning, almost autobiographical, approach. This is shown again
in my diary. ‘I read in the morning & thought about writing methods
& read Geertz & Goody on writing autobiography & thought more
about possibly doing something autobiographical.’ (18.8.1995). Or
again, ‘Reading books … also for a piece of autobiography I want
to start tomorrow on research methods – reading Geertz & Edgar
Allan Poe on analytic methods of a detective.’ (20.8.1995). I found
his book Works and Lives (1988) particularly interesting as one
of the very few anthropological analyses of how anthropologists
write. The book helped me to embark on a series of studies of the
combined lives and works of great thinkers in the past, Montesquieu,
Adam Smith, Tocqueville and others. It also confrmed me in the
belief that the flmed life interviews, which I had started in 1983,
were really worthwhile.
So, I continued to meet Geertz occasionally, for example on 7
July 1997: ‘Alan at a dinner for Clifford Geertz at Corpus tonight.
He has just received an honorary degree.’ When I heard that he was
coming to give the Frazer lecture in 2004. I asked if I could interview
him. It turned out to be rather special for I put more effort into
getting to know him better than I recall doing for almost any other
interview. The process is well recorded in our diary.
Started to read a little Geertz to get myself in mood for his visit.
(2.5.2004)
ENCOUNTER WITH CLIFFORD GEERTZ 45
Alan went in and met Clifford Geertz and his wife and liked them.
He may do the interview here on Wednesday if the weather is not
too bad. (Sarah, 3.5.2004)
Alan went in after lunch and hosted Geertz and wife to supper at
King’s, then a meeting with the Department in his room afterwards.
Said it went well. (Sarah, 4.5.2004)
Alan went in at lunchtime to interview Clifford Geertz and later
brought him and his wife back here. We took them to supper at
‘The Swan’ at Stow cum Quy. Nice people, keen to complain about
Bush and all his team. (Sarah, 5.5.2004)
Alan at the Geertz lecture then dinner in King’s. (Sarah 6.5.2004)
Much of the week seems to have been taken up with hosting Clifford
Geertz and wife, Karen Blu. On Monday – lunch and planning;
Tuesday dinner and a seminar in the evening; Wednesday a long
interview and supper in Lode; Thursday the Frazer Lecture and
party, and dinner. As they were extremely nice and everything went
perfectly, it was a great pleasure and got some excellent flm. But
took about 20 hours and used up quite a bit of nervous energy, so
not too much time for other things … (8.5.2004)
Sarah gave a warm reaction to the lecture when she started to

work on a detailed summary. ‘I spent most of the day summarizing
the Geertz interview. He came across as a nice man – complex, but
not insensitive. He was careful not to say negative things about his
colleagues or anyone else.’ (Sarah 13.5.2004). Most pleasing was
the reaction of Geertz’s family. Geertz died in 2006 and a memorial
celebration was held at Princeton on 3 March 2007.
Karen Blu, his second wife, rang up with a request recorded in
the diary. ‘Had a call from Geertz’s wife as the family want to use
Alan’s interview in his memorial service. She said how much it has
meant to have it since his death, and she complimented Alan on
making the best interview of all that has ever been done of him.’
(Sarah 6.2.2007) During the conversation she said that the interview
had been particularly helpful for Geertz’s children and grandchildren.
Geertz was a reserved man and had not talked about his early life, so
they knew nothing about his earlier diffculties which clearly shaped
much of his character. They all felt they could begin to understand
him after the interview. This warm comment was echoed in an email
from Hildred, Geertz’s frst wife, on 19 March 2007. ‘Our family
has seen the marvelous interview you made with Cliff; many thanks
for making such an evocative interview happen.’
Clifford James Geertz. Photograph courtesy Alan Macfarlane.
Clifford James Geertz
Clifford James Geertz (1926–2006) was an American cultural

anthropologist, a leading rhetorician and proponent of symbolic
anthropology and interpretive anthropology.
After service in the US Navy in World War II (1943–45), Geertz
studied at Antioch College, Ohio (BA, 1950), and Harvard University
(PhD, 1956). He taught or held fellowships at a number of schools
before joining the anthropology staff of the University of Chicago
(1960–70). In 1970 he became professor of social science at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, where he retired as
professor emeritus in 2000.
At Chicago, Geertz became a champion of symbolic anthropology,
which gives prime attention to the role of thought – of ‘symbols’
– in society. Symbols guide action. Culture, according to Geertz, is
‘a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by
means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their
knowledge about and attitudes toward life’. The function of culture
is to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable. The
role of anthropologists is to try – though complete success is not
possible – to interpret the guiding symbols of each culture.
Geertz’s writings tend to be rhetorical and idiosyncratic, more
given to metaphors and examples than simple exposition. Among
his major works are: The Religion of Java (1960), Person, Time, and
Conduct in Bali (1966), The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Local
Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983), and
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988).1
CLIFFORD JAMES GEERTZ 51
I
Alan Macfarlane (AM): It is a great pleasure to have met you again
after so many years and to have a chance to talk to you about
some of your writing and life. You are one of the most refexive and
refective anthropologists, so this is a particular opportunity to see
what imprint your work has had. When were you born? What year?
Clifford Geertz (CG): I was born in 1926 in San Francisco. My
parents were divorced before I was three and I was sent off to live
north of San Francisco, in the countryside, with an unwed woman
who was 60 at the time. It was in Marin County, which is now a very
fancy place, but at that time it was in the depth of the Depression.
It was a little place in the hills called Woodacre with 200 or 300
people and I lived a very isolated life there. I went to a two-room
schoolhouse. I never went anywhere or did much of anything until
the war came. When I was 15 or 16 years old, I enlisted as soon as I
could. I graduated from school at the age of 17, went into the Navy
and ended up in the Pacifc. When I came back, I left California,
more or less permanently. I have been back and forth, but I left it as
a home. There is a kind of cleavage in my life that is rather striking
to me – the frst 17 years of my life living an isolated rural life in
the depths of the Depression – we were poor, but we had enough
to eat and keep warm, so it was not as bad as many people had
it. Since then, I have lived a very cosmopolitan life. Though I lived
in an extremely rural atmosphere, very countryside, I was urban
from the start. I do not know what people would say about that,
but once I got out and got east, that is where I felt I belonged, or at
least where I wanted to be. I did not want to go back because of the
complexity of my family, not just because my parents were divorced
This interview was conducted by Alan Macfarlane on 6 May 2004.

The transcription for this interview was provided by Radha Béteille, for this
volume.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dQDx3axrDs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6FftV-XGV0
but also because it was a mess. That was a period in my life when
nothing really happened.
AM: There were no teachers…?
CG: There were teachers who were always my salvation. I was, if
I might say so, a smart kid and this was the countryside, so even
the kids that were considered smart were not really smart. I was an
intellectual from the start, alone and isolated, I read an enormous
amount. Two teachers come to mind, one in elementary school,
who thought I was the cat’s pajamas! She taught to read and learn
things. I remember her with great warmth, but she must be dead
now. Later on, even more importantly, I do remember my high
school teacher whom I mention in something I have written – Loris
Tardy or Morrison Tardy, who was a merchant seaman and a Leftist.
This was the time of the California courts, Left labour unions and
Harry Bridges.2 My grandfather was a labour union printer – we
were all connected to that kind of thing indirectly. My father was a
civil servant. Anyway, Morrison Tardy was an ex-radical who was
teaching in high school. While I was in high school, I was the editor
of the high school newspaper. He was the faculty advisor. He also
had a tremendous infuence on my reading because I wanted to be
a writer and a novelist.
AM: At what age did you want to be a writer?
CG: Very young. As soon as I knew there was such a thing, I think. I
never wanted to be a freman or anything like that. I always wanted
to write and I admired writers. By the time I was in high school I
knew I wanted to be a writer and he encouraged that. And I did
contribute to the college literary magazine, later on.
Tardy had a tremendous infuence on me. When I went into the
Navy and we headed towards Japan to invade it around the time
the bomb was dropped, we turned around and came back. I went to
him and asked him what I should do. I had never considered going
to college because we were poor, not really poor, just not well off.
In those days not everyone went to college. I expected I would get
a telephone company job like everybody else or something similar.
But he said that I should opt for the GI Bill.3
The GI Bill, for a non-American, was an enormous social

enterprise in the United States in which any ex-GI, ex-serviceman
with time served, got a year of paid tuition, books and a living
expense. It was not restricted to a particular region in the United
States, it was applicable anywhere you could get in to study. Tardy
said that I was eligible and that I should take it. And I replied saying
I did not know where to go to college, though I knew I did not want
to go to Berkeley because I did not want to stay in California. To
which he said that there was a Left-wing experimental college in
Ohio called Antioch where they had a work-study programme that
enabled you to work half-time and study half-time. It was a very
radical place in terms of its teaching. I agreed to apply there. It was
the only place to which I applied because I could not think of the
notion that if you applied you could not get in. He prodded me to
go there. He was responsible in forming my sense of self, politically,
socially and as a literary fgure. He was truly an extraordinary man.
Between grammar/elementary school principal and some other
high school teachers who also had an infuence on me, Tardy was
not alone in that, though he was way ahead and by far the most
infuential.
AM: It sounds as if your parents did not have much infuence on you.
CG: Without sounding negative, I would say that say that they
were non-infuential. My father was forced to pay for my upkeep.
My mother tried, sometimes, but it was not very effective. I only
saw my mother once a year and my father, maybe once every two
years. Neither of them wanted to bother with me. My father was a
detached character, though he was not hostile. I ended up burying
both of them when they died not so long ago. They were just absent
and they should not have been parents. They were not hostile,
just neglectful and I was somebody they wanted to send off to the
countryside and forget that I was ever born.
AM: You were the only child?
CG: Yes. They had only been married a few years ahead of me and
then they got divorced. They both remarried and they remarried
well. They did not have any children from their second marriages.
I liked both my stepfather and stepmother a good deal, they were

very nice people. I had some sort of relationship with my grandfather
who was a printer on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Essentially,
family was something for me, by the time I got back in the 1940s,
to get far away from. The whole family was like that.
AM: On the war service – did you learn Japanese?
CG: No, I did not learn Japanese. What I did do, oddly enough,
and this will surprise you, I was an electronic technician. It was odd
because we had these classifcation offcers at sea who were always
smiling and who decided where you went in the Navy. I had to go to
boot camp twice because I got scarlet fever in the middle. Somehow,
I got through all that fnally. There was this programme whereby
if you volunteered, because the Navy, for reasons we do not need
to go into, supplied the medical corpsmen for the Marine Corp,
you could become a medical corpsman. It was a non-combatant
assignment that you could volunteer for, which I did. I was about to
go into it in which case I would be dead! I would have gone to Iwo
Jima as a hospital corpsman. They gave me an IQ test and I scored
very high in it and I went to see the ‘smiling sea’ and he said that
I would not be a corpsman, but an electronic technician. I had to
undergo the longest most technical training for it. I went to Chicago
for three months, then three or four months to Mississippi and then
seven months at Treasure Island in San Francisco. I was not a radar
operator, but a radar repairman and that is how I became, frst, a
third class, then eventually, a second class petty offcer. I served on
a brand new heavy cruiser with [the USS] Saint Paul which was the
sistership of the USS Indianapolis which was famously sunk while
we were at sea.
As we were sailing towards Japan, I thought that we were headed
towards Tokyo Bay, but apparently, we were headed towards the
south. One day there was this announcement on loudspeakers that
a mystery weapon, they did not say A-bomb in those days, had
been dropped, shortly followed by the notion that – this was the
frst we had heard of anything like this – that we were not to go in
there. We sat around a bit and all those who were not regular Navy
people were discharged, including me. I got off and went back to
San Francisco. I spent four or fve months wandering about, at the

government’s expense – they gave me USD50 a week for 42 weeks
– until you had readjusted yourself to civilian existence. I lived in
San Francisco in an apartment, wrote short stories and novels. And
then Tardy asked me to go to Antioch.
AM: You went to Ohio University, Antioch. Were there any teachers
there, again, who infuenced you?
CG: There were a number of teachers there who infuenced me. I
have written and dedicated books to them. I have written about
George Geiger4 who was John Dewey’s last graduate student, he was
also the backup to Lou Gehrig5 on the Columbia baseball team, in
which I do not think he ever played. But he was an extraordinary
man. He taught philosophy. I frst majored in literature and then
shifted to philosophy, mainly because in philosophy you could do
anything you wanted, but I did both. There were a number of others,
but the person who really shaped me in my life and made me an
intellectual was – he is not famous by any means and would never
be – but he was more than just an ordinary philosopher – people
did not know of him. It was he who – after four weeks of working
with him – said that I should go and be an anthropologist. I did
not know what to do with that. I had majored as an undergraduate
in literature and philosophy, written papers on Emily Dickinson,6
Hawthorne,7 George Herbert Mead,8 but without much direction.
I was very much interested in literary criticism and I wrote, but I
did not know what to do. By then I was married to Hildred whom
I had met there. She was an English major and she did not know
what to do either. I was out of the GI Bill.
I have had a lucky life, you will see, everything turns up roses.
The American Council of Learned Societies which is a covering
organization in the United States, still goes on, had this grant
programme where in each of the small colleges, Columbia is not
small, but the small ones which really counted, in each small
college they took one professor and told him to give the grant to
any student he wanted, so Gardner gave it to me and asked me to
try anthropology. I had never studied it, read or knew anything
about it. I had probably read [Ruth] Benedict,9 but I am not sure.
I certainly did not know anything about anthropology or have any

particular interest in it. The reason he said that was because he had
been in contact with Clyde Kluckhohn,10 but I have no idea how
that happened. He must have met Kluckhohn somewhere. They
were just starting the Social Relations Department at Harvard –
Kluckhohn, Talcott Parsons,11 Sam Stouffer,12 Henry Murray,13
Gordon Allport14 – that famous enterprise. He said that I should
think about going there and I readily agreed. I tried to fnd out a
bit about anthropology, then I had a friend, a woman who was
working for Margaret Mead.15 Margaret is up in that famous tower
in the American Museum of Natural History. There was a harem of
young women working for her. And this friend said that she would
get me to meet Margaret Mead. By then both Hildred and I were
interested and there was enough in this grant to fnance both of us,
which is extraordinary for graduate school, even at that time, now
that would be out of the question. We both went off to see Margaret
and she did not know us from Adam. We spent two or three hours
talking to her, showing us her feld notes. They were very strange
feld notes – totally behaviouristic. But she was very enthusiastic and
said that we should become anthropologists and we did.
We both applied to Harvard. There were only six people that
year in the anthropology section and Hildred and I both got in.
The rest is history.
AM: The frst major anthropological fgure we have met is Margaret
Mead. Your impression in the beginning was positive. Did it continue
to be so?
CG: I can see why people get furious at her, she made people furious
– without motivation or malice! But she was always extremely kind
to me. I would not like to generalize, but Margaret did not have
trouble with younger people, she was very good with them. This
was when she was already established. But she had trouble with
peers and superiors. Later on, I stayed friends with her though I did
not see her often. I did not study with her and I do not consider
myself a follower or non-follower of Margaret Mead. She did refer
to Hildred and I as younger friends of hers.
When we were in Bali in 1957, and I had already been there a

year – there was a cremation – the Balinese have huge celebrations
which thousands of people attend, to bury the dead. It was not in
the town, but down at the coast in a very remote area. There was
no proper road, one had to walk in. We had been down there for
about a week – it was hot and dusty and thousands of people and
a crazy laughing thing going on, it was a really discombobulating
situation. Hildred was up at the palace where they cut a hole in
the wall to take the body out and they carry the body about half
a mile to the burning ground. I was at the burning ground in an
attempt to cover this cremation ceremony like a couple of reporters.
I do think that anthropology is quite like covering news stories. I
had been at this for four or fve days without getting much sleep,
the heat and the dust. All of a sudden, the dust suddenly parts
and there standing, leaning on her crutch or stick, was Margaret.
I looked at her and the frst thing I said to myself that if one was
to go crazy in the feld, this is how anthropologists go crazy in the
feld. So, I rushed back up to Hildred and told her that she would
not believe this but Margaret seemed to be standing out there. We
went down and saw her. She was on one of her great trips, going
to India I think and had stopped in Bali. She had found out where
we lived and found out that we were not in our little town, but
way out in this remote place, hired a car and walked in on her
notoriously terrible legs and said: ‘I know anthropologists do not
like other anthropologists at their feld site, I came here because I
was passing through, I wanted to see you and also because I have a
friend of old standing, locally well-known, a Japanese art salesman
at a gallery, whom I had not met and you should come to dinner
in a couple of days and meet this man. It would be good for you
to meet him.’ Two days later we did meet with him on a beautiful
beach with Margaret. To answer your question, she was already
really kind to me. I would never say a negative word about her. I
can understand why she would drive some people crazy, she could
be diffcult, but she never was with me. She was always very nice
to me and I remember her with great warmth.
AM: Apart from being diffcult, in a recent interview, I heard a lot

about Derek Freeman16 who alleged that Mead manipulated her
data and made up quite a bit.
CG: I would not know anything about that. I went to Australia
10 years ago. I gave a general talk and some guy stands up in the
audience and starts asking me questions – the talk was not on
American anthropologists – the question had nothing to do with
the subject matter of the talk. It was Derek and he kept asking these
questions and pursuing me to get me to say something negative
about Margaret and my anthropology and why we were all cultural
relativists and my reply was no we were not. I did not know what else
to say. I do not know if you knew Derek, he was in and out of a phase,
he was not always off his head, everybody says he was. As far as I
could see, I did not know him well enough to make a diagnosis, but
he did behave rather oddly. There are millions of stories about him.
My loyalty to Margaret came out of the fact that it was rather
cowardly of them to wait till she died to take her on. I really do not
believe that he [Freeman] could have taken on Margaret before she
died. Then he would have been in for a struggle and it would have
been a fair fght. To answer your question, certainly Coming of Age
in Samoa is not a great book, but she was 26 when she wrote it in
1926. But for a 26-year-old woman who wrote it in 1926 it is not
a bad book. Coming of Age in Samoa may be interesting but it was
not a good anthropology book. I never talked to Margaret about
that or Freeman, because Freeman did not appear on the scene until
she was dead.
Freeman was a rather strange man, when I was in Australia, he
kept sending me postcards with odd statements on them. I never
responded because I did not want to get involved with this man.
I never wanted to be a part of another man’s delusional system. I
said to myself, I am not involved in this, I did not work in Samoa
and I liked Margaret personally. Oddly enough, I kept getting letters
from him asking why we were all conspiring against him. I was not
conspiring against him or doing anything. On the issue itself, there
were people better placed to decide what it was.
AM: Coming back to Harvard, another fgure there, one of earliest

books I have on anthropology was Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror for
Man about Navajo witchcraft. From a recent interview I have done,
he appears to be quite an eccentric character. Florence was eccentric
too. Is there anything you’d like to say about them?
CG: My relationship with Kluckhohn was rather complicated.
He was a tortured man. I got caught between him and Talcott
Parsons in a crossfre for which he publicly lambasted me. I was
then a graduate student and it so happens, that graduate students,
sometimes get caught between two professors. But when push came
to shove, Clyde supported me. He was the reason I got the job at
Berkeley and went to Indonesia. I have no real resentments. My
relationship with him I remember with a certain amount of agony.
As I said earlier, he was tortured, I have views about that but I do
not want to go into that.
AM: Kluckhohn – it is a strange name – was it east European?
CG: No. It was not east European. He was very American.
Kluckhohn was not his own name. He was adopted by the
Kluckhohns after his parents died. He grew up in Iowa. He was
sick all his life, he had heart trouble from very early on. He was
sent to the southwest and that is how he got to become a Navajo
specialist. I just want to be careful here. He was a deeply conficted
man. He ran the Russian Research Center at Harvard. His son, as
you might know, got into trouble for shooting a woman out of a
window, supposedly accidentally. His wife, Florence, also had a
heart disease. Florence was my wife’s thesis director. She got along
with her. I never had any trouble with Florence. They drank heavily
– again I do not want to get too personal because it is not right.
But it is fair enough to say, on the one hand, that they were not
a happy crew and on the other it must be said that Clyde really
supported me. He really did think that I was going to do some
good work. He was very hard to deal with personally – played
favourites shamelessly – played people off one another. He was
not a simple man and despite what I just seem to be saying, I feel
gratitude towards him.
AM: What about Talcott Parsons?

CG: Talcott was a honey. People have usually overemphasized
Talcott’s infuence on me. Towards the end of his life, Talcott was
attacked from all sides. I personally took a resolution not to do that.
He had also been very good to me, though I never really found his
line of thought appealing. Talcott was a benevolent character, a bit
skittish, did not always know what was going on. I taught a course
with him once and enjoyed it. One thing that can be said about
Talcott is the range of really good students he produced – David
Schneider,17 Bob…He had an enormous range – from infrared to
ultraviolet – Renée Fox18 who was a leading medical sociologist.
The image of him as an intellectual tyrant is all wrong. It is true
you could not budge him because he had these enormous schemes
and whenever you tried to disagree with him, he would fnd a slot
for you and if I said that I was in disagreement with him, he would
say, I know what you are saying fts over here – you are under the
‘I’ and the ‘R’. One could never get to Talcott and say that on this
you and I are not of one mind. He had a Hegelian mind and that
it was all going to be interpreted by the system. It was almost as if
you were foundering about in a sea of stuff. He was a warm and
intelligent man and I learnt an enormous amount from him.
The thing is that you do not learn from Talcott by learning the
system. Someday someone will do an editing job on Parsons and
take out the bits that are really valuable. Some of the stuff that is not
very avant garde – about power and status – he had talked about
it years ago. It is there but it is buried under 16 pages of something
else. This was probably more on Clyde’s side, the tension between
him and Parsons and I got caught between it because I was working
a bit with Talcott though I was mainly working under Clyde.
AM: Talcott Parsons was infuenced by Max Weber19 whom he also
publicized and translated. Would you say Weber is the classical fgure
who has infuenced you most in anthropology?
CG: I had never heard of Weber till I met Talcott. And yes, Weber
did and still does infuence me. There is a New Testament and Old
Testament view of Weber. Parsons was the New Testament reader.
Therefore, I got the New Testament version of Weber. Later on,
I tried to read Weber directly in German. I still consider myself

fundamentally Weberian.
AM: Anyone else? You talked about Winckler.
CG: There is an enormous number of people who had an infuence
on me. Kenneth Burke20 and various kinds of philosophers, but
[Ludwig] Wittgenstein21 had the most infuence on me.
AM: Marx22 at all?
CG: Not so much. If you read Weber, you get to be a little
sceptical and critical of Marx. The other figure, of course, is
[Émile] Durkheim23 with whom I have always had an arm’s length
relationship. I do admire him in some ways and I really do not in
other ways. Talcott Parsons was going to bring Marx, Durkheim,
[Vilfredo] Pareto,24 Weber and Kluckhohn together – they were one
big happy family. Talcott was a very optimistic character, the ultimate
hedgehog, I tend to be a fox, radically so, and not a hedgehog.
Isaiah Berlin25 also had an infuence on me. Isaiah was responsible
for me coming to Oxford. There are an enormous number of
intellectual fgures who have infuenced me, but Weber was certainly
the most important among them. And if you go the Weber way, it
is the natural way for a fox to go.
AM: What about the earlier great tradition of American anthropology
– [A.L.] Kroeber,26[Franz] Boas,27 [Ralph] Linton28…?
CG: I knew many of them. [Ruth] Benedict had a big infuence on me
because she brought an aesthetic approach to anthropology. I knew
Robert Lowie. He was partly responsible for me coming to Berkeley.
I had met him when he came to talk at Harvard and I was, at that
time, the head of a teacher-students speakers’ association. Before I
went to Berkeley, I went to the feld in between and I saw him, but
when I got back, he was dead, alas. I did know Robert Lowie.
AM: I have huge respect for him. Was he a nice man as well?
CG: Mine is the other way around, his work has not had much of
an impact on me. But that is just me, but he was a fne man, though
I did not know him well. I knew Kroeber. Kroeber and Kluckhohn
did that culture book [Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and
Defnitions] for which I was a research assistant. Later, when I was
in Berkeley, Kroeber was then retired, living up in the hills. When

he left, he called me up and we had a long discussion about why I
was leaving Berkeley, after a year there, to go to Chicago. He was
very nice and warm, but that is all I know of him. The relationship
was formal, but pleasant. He wanted me to stay, but he said if I
wanted to go I should.
I met Linton once or twice when he talked at Harvard. Clyde
knew all these people, so I got to meet them all. But I can’t say I knew
them. I admired [Edward] Sapir29 greatly, who was very infuential,
but I never met him.
Boas, of course, was dead before I came into the feld, so I did not
know him. When I frst came in, there was a feeling in the air, which
was quite wrong, that Boas was all about fsh recipes and that he
was the ultimate ethnographer which is not correct. He was a much
deeper thinker than that, but it took a while and when you started
talking to people before you understood that. I shared that cliché,
not out of reading him much, I had read [The Mind of Primitive
Man and Primitive Art, but I had a general idea that he was about
fsh hooks and my interest in fsh hooks is limited.
AM: To return to your PhD work, how was it that you came to start
your work in Indonesia?
CG: By the end of this interview, you will feel that my life is a
continuous chance of lucky breaks, but it is true. Hildred and I were
studying at Harvard. I did not do anything but study. Fieldwork was
a destiny. It was going to happen. It was a rite de passage – there was
no question. One had to be out of the United States, learn another
language, that is no longer the case, alas, in my view. I thought that
I might go to Brazil.
But, one day, as I was walking along the Harvard yard, Doug
Oliver,30 an anthropologist teaching in Peabody, came up to me
and said that they had a group project that was going to Java for
two years and that they needed somebody to study kinship and
religion, would my wife and I be willing to do this? I agreed, but
asked where Indonesia was! I had never thought of it or heard of
it. It was extremely well fnanced, as such things were those days.
Ford Foundation was fnancing it. I joined the group. There were
eight of us at the start, but only fve managed to make it to the feld
study. We had language training every weekend for a year with this
doyen who was the leading Malayo-Polynesian linguist. It was just
the ‘fnger of God’. It was Clyde’s doing. This is another reason why
I am positive about Clyde even though my personal relationships
were not happy ones, but he was very good to me.
AM: How was your frst moment as you stepped on to the beach
in the Trobriand Islands? What were your frst impressions as you
arrived in Indonesia? Can you remember it?
CG: Very vividly. I went to Holland for two or three months before
I went there to learn Dutch and to meet some Dutch scholar half
of whom would talk to me and half who would not. That was the
time when they thought America was still in their empire. Some
of them were very kind to me. I lived in Leiden for quite a while,
about three or four months. Then I got on a ship, the rest came by
later, which took a month. The day before we arrived, the frst coup
d’état rebellion against the Sukarno31 government broke out. When
we arrived, there were tanks on the streets. We had some Indonesian
socialist friends. Sutan Sjahrir was then the frst prime minister
of Indonesia, we did not know him, but his right-hand man was
known to us. The socialists took us to a safe house and put us up
there because it was not clear if the socialists were going to go to
jail for being on the wrong side of this rebellion. It was very tense
for three or four days.
So, I entered Indonesia right in the middle of a coup d’état or
an attempted one. It was eventually quelled after Sukarno gave
one of his famous performances in the Parliament and talked the
people out of the rebellion. The socialists escaped without much
damage – these were early days, later on they had a harder time. We
then came out of hiding because for three days we did not know
whether we would get arrested, shot or thrown out the country.
We did not really know what was going on because we could not
leave the safe house. There were a lot of rumours and numerous
socialist conspirators were coming back to the house of a very
famous socialist politician at that time. It eventually cleared up and
we went and lived downtown.
AM: There was a certain amount of chaos because your leader

decided not to come with you and you were going to be sent off to
some remote hotel somewhere?
CG: This was a little…now we were on the beach and we went
to Jogjakarta. Though Douglas Oliver had organized the whole
thing, Clyde was the real entrepreneur behind it all and set it all
up. Douglas Oliver had gone to Jogja, in central Java, where the
new national university – Gadjah Mada, housed in the Sultan’s
palace – had just been founded. It was a beautiful town and place at
that time and I still remember it with extreme nostalgia. It was not
long before we left and Oliver said he had some sort of mysterious
illness and he was not going to go. He had made an arrangement for
three nationalist professors, this was the middle of the nationalist
revolution, they were not trustful…and one of them asked me what
my methodology was and I said that I was essentially an empiricist,
he made some wisecrack about not being interested in imperialists,
but we eventually went off on the right foot.
The three professors were quite different characters. It had
been set up such that there were 30 students from Gadjah Mada
University who were going to learn from us. We were all going to
go up and sit in a hotel – a watering hole – it was one of the few
places in Java that did not grow rice. It was high up and a rather
beautiful place where the government offcials were going to bring
in people for us to interview – in a mass interview – in the company
of these students. This is how the…law tradition in Holland had
worked. They were worked with the village chief and they asked
him questions such as what do you call your brother or your cross-
cousin and what happens at marriage and they took notes and
published books. This was antithetical to everything we were trained
to do. Participant observation was what we were trained to do. It
could not be further from what we had in mind. We were simply
not going to do this because we thought this was ruinous, but in
addition to that, they suspected that Douglas Oliver was not coming
was a plot of some sort and that he had never really attempted to
keep his side of the bargain. They were suspicious and they said,
what do you know, you come with this full Harvard professor and
you send us a bunch of graduate students. I was almost the oldest,

Ed Ryan was the oldest. We did the best we could for eight months
trying to get disentangled from that situation without a leader or any
status and eventually we said it was great. Rufus at that time was
not a major fgure. He was, at least, a faculty member, so that was
a step up, but he was just an assistant or associate professor. I have
written about how all this happened. Donald, Hildred, Ryan and I
had a car that was provided to us, so we rode all over east-central
Java trying to fnd a town we could work in. We found one which
was a very fne local town. The key to anthropological feldwork is
who is in charge locally, especially in a place like Indonesia. If the
district offcer wants you there, it works. The district offcer in this
town was great, an old nationalist and he really thought it was a
great idea that Americans wanted to understand it, he had it all. He
understood that we wanted to live with families and set it up and
that made us decide to go there. This was Bali.
AM: I’m told there were another 2000 or 3000 of you coming….
CG: No! That is just rumour, there were only fve or six of us and
we distributed ourselves around the area. We worked there for
two to two-and-a-half years. It all worked out well. We detached
ourselves, we did not have the students, that ended. There was a
lot of bitterness. They had the right to feel some bitterness, they
felt they had been deceived, not purposely, at least, not by me. We
got on good relationships with these three professors. One of them
was very supportive.
We went to see the culture minister, an Islamic medical fgure,
who subjected Rufus to about three hours of bitter harangue about
what Americans were like. We as a group had it coming in a way.
But in the end, he gave us his consent, saying that he did not want us
to bother him again and that if anything happened to us, we should
not write to him. So, we went off and it worked out beautifully.
Gradually the relationships did smooth out, they became cordial.
Looking back at the professors and the whole apparatus there,
they were just as relieved themselves, because they had all got in
too deep. It was something they did not understand.
AM: Have you been back?

CG: Yes. Many times.
AM: What is it about feldwork – do you do it because you know
it is important or because you enjoy it?
CG: I love it but also because it is important too. Anthropologists
lead a very oddly divided life, a part of it is a self-proving thing.
When I taught students in a class you could not tell whether they
would be good feldworkers or not. Some of the brightest cannot do
it, some of the least impressive in class, can. But it does not work that
way either. It is just that there is no correlation between class work
and feldwork abilities – sometimes they go together – sometimes
they are both bright in class and bright in the feld. But you cannot
predict, I certainly could not predict who among my students would
become good feldworkers and who would not. I did not think that
I would be. But I found that I was good at it, at least, that is how
I feel, never mind what the world thinks. Fieldwork is excruciating
and there is a tremendous amount of effort involved, but I have
always been happier in the feld than anywhere else.
AM: There was a time when you were very ill, both of you were very
ill. The war going on around you, the conditions were horrendous
yet you went on.
CG: Yes, I almost died. We were ill at different times. It goes with
the territory. I was sick even the frst time and I almost died. I had
pneumonia. I stayed in hospital in Jogja for several months. On the
trip I took 10 years later, it was in the middle of the war and I had
malaria and I could not see and Hildred was practically dying when
she had hepatitis, she turned yellow and we were isolated with only
a solitary German doctor who had been on the Italian front.
AM: Did you not think in the middle of all that that I am never
going to do any more feldwork.
CG: No. As soon as we got back and Hildred recovered, though
I recovered frst, they invaded us from the sky. We were in an oil
camp loaned out to an American oil company. We were there so
that she could be treated for which we had to take a horrendous
trip to reach. We got invaded by paratroopers and we went back
to Bali for another six to seven months to fnish our feldwork. It

interrupted the programme that I was going to go for but that was
not possible. Then most of the work in Morocco came after that. I
have never thought about not going. The last time I was back was
three years ago for about six weeks, but I went all over the place
and I still like it. I would do it again if I thought I would survive,
but I am not sure I would now.
AM: I am sure you would. What is it? Is it curiosity, relaxing from
relationships you have in your own…many anthropologists fnd
feldwork a great sense of relief….
CG: No. For me it is fnding out about people who are really quite
different from what you are and what they are about. I fnd that
absolutely intriguing. The Javanese, Balinese and Moroccans are,
to me, endlessly intriguing. I have the reputation of not being very
scientifcally oriented, in that, I am not a hard scientist type, but
in this regard I am. I really want to know because I have the same
kind of puzzlement a physicist would have about a phenomenon of
stars or some such. I want to understand them. My main motives
are radically cognitive, though I would not put it that way, but they
are to understand and interpret people and cultures. I really enjoy
fguring how to get along with them, live with them, what makes
them tick is what I fnd extraordinary and being able to do that
without anybody telling me how to do it. That is the other thing
you have in the feld – you are your own person and you can do
what you want. There are millions of constraints, but they are not
the constraints of professors and courses.
AM: You started in philosophy, were there any larger questions? The
earlier generations of anthropologists were trying to fnd out whether
there were common features of humanity, very general questions
about human nature, progress and so on. Behind the curiosity of
trying to fnd out what they were about and understanding – were
there any…?
CG: I do ask the questions as to how people construct meaningful
lives. But I am, as I have said earlier, more of a fox than a hedgehog
so I do not think there is a single underlying explanation to which I
have always been opposed, I have always been a pluralist. I assume

that people really are different – not radically so, because then they
would not talk to each other. I really do think that the Javanese are
not a different version of the Americans, they are very profoundly
themselves. I am not looking for a common humanity in that sense –
there is a commonality – we are all human beings. But I am looking
for the specifc and particular expressions of it. Again, I start off with
literature, I am interested in specifc experiments. When you study
literature or at least the way I studied it you are not interested in a
general notion of what literature is, you are interested in Dickens32
and Shakespeare,33 Emily Dickinson, in my case, and Hawthorne
– what is specifc, special and extraordinary about these people. I
am not looking for some sort of abstract common humanity, I am
more interested in the Javanese as the Javanese, the Moroccan as the
Moroccan. That is what concerns me and I am trying to puzzle it out.
I am interested in peoples’ ways of being in the world – a Hegelian
phrase – but it is the right way to put it. It is the ‘form of life’ as
Wittgenstein says that I am interested in exactly. I am interested in
those in the way in which anyone interested in diversity, the way
Darwin was into species and animals and what they are really like.
This does not mean that you do not want some general notions, I
do, I have tried to make some general arguments. But I am not an
Enlightenment fgure who is trying to fgure out what people are
like underneath it all. I want to fgure out what they are like within
it all. I do not know if that makes any sense.
AM: It does, but we will come back to it. Edmund Leach34 and
Keith Thomas35 have both said that the only point of history or
anthropology is really as a mirror of your own society in other words
it will tell something about your own world to make you better in
your own work – not taking it to that extreme did you ever feel this
might help understand America?
CG: It certainly helps to understand yourself in America. I do not
agree with that position however – that is exactly what we are not
supposed to be doing. I am not studying the Javanese in service
of understanding the United States. I am studying the Javanese to
understand the Javanese. Keith is a very good friend of mine, but I
do not agree with that. I think we do want to understand the other

as the other and not just as a pale refection of us or as a way into
our own selves – that is more narcissistic than I care to be, which
does not mean that we do not know anything about the United
States because it has changed my view about a number of things. I
went to Java and Morocco and Bali to understand Java, Morocco
and Bali, not to understand the United States.
II
AM: We have got you to Indonesia and through your PhD, should
we move on from Harvard to Berkeley?
CG: Sure. I was very briefy in Berkeley. After Harvard, I worked for
a little while at MIT in the Center for International Studies. I then
went back to Indonesia to do a study – that is when I got caught in
the war we were just talking about. It ended up with a year in Bali,
which was originally planned to be in three different places, but that
did not turn out as planned. Then I came back, spent a year at Palo
Alto at a think tank there and had a job at Berkeley where I taught
for a year. That is almost the only time in my life when I have been
fully enclosed in the anthropology department, worked very hard
towards the course of large classes. I was a young assistant professor
and I got a lot of work. The anthropology department was larger
than my college had been. I was there for a year and I enjoyed it.
It was just prior to the outbreak of the Berkeley rebellions and that
was the year the house of American Activities Committee came to
San Francisco to the City Hall. My father was the senior engineer
of San Francisco, so I knew the CEO. The frst day the kids went
over to protest – this is prehistory of Berkeley. They came to me
and Tom Fowler and some other younger anthropologists and said
that they wanted us to come over and witness it so that if they did
anything horrible, they had real professors to say what happened.
I did go but nothing happened.
Then when Edward Shils36 and David Apter,37 at Chicago, were
forming a committee for Comparative Study of New Nations and
asked me to join them – it would almost be full time, though I was
involved in the anthropology department too, but there was not much
to do there. I jumped at it because I wanted to get back to research
and to where my work was, so I went. The year at Berkeley was just
a year of teaching though I enjoyed it because it was a nice place.
AM: Do you like teaching?
CG: I do not like teaching or lecturing, though I like teaching
seminars and I like to work with students, in that sense I like
teaching. But I agree I do not like teaching to any lecture courses.
AM: What about administration?

CG: I have never done it, in fact, I have avoided it. One of the
reasons I fnally left Chicago, not the main reason, but one of the
considerations 10 years on, was that I was going to end up chairman
of that department if I did not watch it because it was coming round
– these things come around as fatalities and I did not look forward
to that idea. I did run the committee for Comparative Study of New
Nations, I became chairman of it. It was a minor administrative
role. It was all friends and it was a small group. At the institute, I
set up a school and ran it, but I had no aspirations for a Dean-level
administrative role.
AM: When you went to Chicago you mentioned two people – Ed
Shils and David Apter – what about them? I think I met David
Apter years ago.
CG: He is still around. David and I were at the Palo Alto centre
and so was Edward. David is a very well-known political scientist
working on Africa. He wrote a very good book on the Gold Coast.
He has worked in Uganda, Japan and China. He was an old friend. I
did not know Edward then though he was involved in talking about
the project. I met him in Palo Alto. They asked me then whether they
could set it up for which they got money from Carnegie eventually
to do it. So, halfway along the year in Berkeley I got this invitation
to join them in the anthropology department.
Three anthropologists left Berkeley at one time to go to
Chicago. It was an accident, but David Schneider, myself and Tom
Fallers38 – we all knew each other very well. I have known David
[Schneider] for years, since Harvard. The Chicago department was
somewhat transformed. It was an odd situation because it was
the most benevolent ruling class I have ever encountered – Fred
Eggan,39 Sol Tax40 and a number of other people. They wanted
us to change the place, not just me, later on there was Victor
Turner,41 McKim Marriott42 and Milton Singer43 – also one of
the benevolent elders.
Most of my time was spent in the committee which had fellows.
We brought people for a year. There was a seminar in which we met
once a week and published things. I was more or less in charge of
that. I was a secretary for a long time and that was also the period
when I started working in Morocco.
AM: You were going to Morocco because for the moment you could
not get back to Indonesia?
CG: Yes, that is right. I had two young children. I just did not feel
it. I might have gone myself, but not with them.
AM: Did you consider anywhere else?
CG: I thought seriously about Bengal, working on both sides of the
border, but that would have been a disaster.
AM: How did Morocco come up?
CG: That is a story because I was here in Cambridge – that is
the famous Cambridge ‘Hands across the sea thing which I shall
mention again tomorrow when I talk. I mentioned to somebody, I
cannot remember who it was, and they said that I should consider
Morocco – Morocco is Islamic, peaceful and one could work there.
Nobody had worked there, or at least, I did not know about it. It
was not Ernest Gellner.44 I did not know him in those days, so it
was not him. It was not anybody prominent or I would remember
them. Instead of going home after the meeting to Chicago, I went
directly to Morocco, hired a Peugeot and for about six weeks drove
all across the country, at 80 miles an hour, which you can on those
roads. I visited a very small town in Morocco, decided I wanted to
do this, got the money and went back three or four times while I
was still in Chicago. I gathered a number of students and we did
a chain mail rather than in Java and Bali, where we were together.
But in this one, I went and then a student came for about a month
or so when I was there. I came back when he was still there and
I had several students do that. We covered the town continuously
for almost a decade. I went in before and after each student – so I
spent half the time in Morocco and half in Chicago. As I have said,
I have gotten away with a lot in my day.
AM: This kind of backwards and forwards….
CG: I sometimes think that if I stayed in Indonesia all the time I
would have thought of Indonesia as the Third World country or
the other as they now say. Going to Morocco disabused me of that.
It gave me a sense of the variousness of it which extends to the

understanding of how much variousness there is across the whole
board. I learnt more about Java going to Morocco than I would have
done going back directly to Java because everything then becomes
like a counter-relief. Hildred and I have played this back and forth
all the time – uncontrolled comparison – just trying to compare
comparables to see if they match up. It keeps you from seeing, again,
the society you are studying – Java or Morocco entirely through the
lens of Americans. You, at least, have a triangulation and you see
Morocco in terms of Indonesia and Indonesia in terms of Morocco.
You can play that off in a way that it familiarizes you a bit and
deprovincializes you so that you do not have always have – which
is implicit in any kind of anthropological work – is the ‘we’ and
‘they’ thing that you were talking about. Keith Thomas thought it
was only the ‘we’ we were interested in, but I do not agree with that.
Having a third term helps a lot because it is not just the difference
between Morocco and America or Indonesia and America but
between Morocco and Indonesia. I found Morocco very liberating
and if it was an accident, it was a very lucky one.
AM: One of the things you talked about, apart from language, was
that Morocco was all about gender and Indonesia was all about
hierarchy. when you decided that it really was not quite like that.
CG: There is that difference though I am not quite sure what you
are referring to. I do think that you cannot sum up complex societies
in glib ways. I do think that the gender and hierarchy contest does
tell you a lot about the difference between Indonesia and Morocco.
Obviously, I was quite interested in other things as well, but that
did not quite pan out. I am not quite sure what you are driving at,
I did start with linguistic studies, when you studied the languages,
the Javanese people always corrected hierarchy mistakes. Javanese
as a language is even more stratifed than Japanese. In fact, most
things were not marked for gender and when they were, they did
not care. Whereas, in Morocco, there is no marking for language,
but any gender mistake was immediately corrected, so that gave a
way to look into the two societies. I was not trying to sum up the
two societies in terms of the languages.
AM: There was another contrast you made, one was about sedq
which is about honour and trust, that was Morocco. In Indonesia,
it was about communities, was it?
CG: No. I think it was more about rasa – it was feeling, meaning,
intuitive. I had a whole string of terms on both sides – it was not
just one term. Morocco is moralistic, it is about loyalty, strength,
directness and so on. Java is about hierarchy, subtlety, difference and
feeling. Rasa is a very hard term to translate and so is sedq. Later, I
did the whole string of Arabic terms in the book I did on the souk
– the market. I tried to show how these terms give you a sense of
the mentality of a marketplace, a bazaar is in Morocco. I used the
terms to try and get an access to broader differences and similarities.
AM: Coming back to your progression through university – did you
move on from Chicago to Princeton?
CG: Yes. I was asked earlier to go, but I said no. I thought about
it again, and then when I was back in the feld I wrote to ask if
they were still interested and they said they were. The Institute for
Advanced Study [IAS] was set up in the 1930s to bring [Albert]
Einstein45 and a number of people, including [John von] Neumann,46
who came a bit later, and the famous mathematician [Kurt] Gödel.47
IAS was bringing all these people from Europe and it was a place
wholly for research. By the time I was asked to join them in 1970,
there were three schools that had evolved – a Natural Science
School, which was essentially physics and astrophysics, a School of
Mathematics, which is the largest and probably the most famous
mathematics school in the world and a History School which was
mainly back then, classical, medieval and very early modern history.
When [J.] Robert Oppenheimer,48 who had been Director, died, he
was replaced by Carl Kaysen,49 an economist from Harvard whom
I knew of, though not very well. He, again on the advice of Edward
Shils probably, decided he wanted to have a Social Sciences School
and invited me to be the frst member of it and to start it up. I was
appointed and I went there – the rest is rather chequered history.
AM: You do talk about the Bellah50 dispute, but you have implied
that even after that was settled, the whole relationship in Princeton
was rather tense.
CG: It is not now so much, but it was up until very recently. There
were a couple of other appointments that were blocked and there
was a constant attack. In the early days we were living under the…
who was going to succeed or not…eternal vigilance was the price of
liberty and that is the way it was. The hostility, not there anymore
now, there may be some, but nothing like what it was, there was a
determination to drive this school out and the director out. They
did not drive the director out – Carl fnally quit and went back to
Harvard. It was touch and go for a long time.
After the Bellah affair, and Bellah’s departure, there was an
attempt to appoint George Miller,51 in psycholinguistics, but Carl
did not have the money for that, besides there was opposition to
Miller being appointed. But on my side, I got Albert Hirschman,52
whom I knew, to join – he had the languages and the status – by
then the crisis had embarrassed them. Some of the wiser heads in the
other Schools said that this had to stop because they did not want
to be in the New York Times every day, it was scandalous and not
in their interest to do this anymore. Some very nice people in the
mathematics committee said that they need not be driven out and
that they could be absorbed. I got together in the committee to get
Albert to come. Once Albert was there, he and I brought Michael
Walzer53 in, a few years later and then eventually John Scott54 – in
between there were some missed opportunities. We tried to bring
in Bruno Latour,55 but there was revolt against it. We got the whole
committee to support it, but the trustees would not do it because of
the major fgures in the other schools said that they would resign if
he were brought – so that did not happen.
For several years, of course in the beginning I was there by myself
because Carl had left, and it was a bit of a business. It was exhausting
as I say. When you say administrative, I do not know whether it
was administrative, but it certainly was academic politics like I had
never seen, but I survived it. But the School is now for keeps, and it
rocks along, more or less. They are about to make four more formal
appointments, but I am now retired formally – we bring about 20
or 30 people a year. It is now an accepted part of Institute along
with the other schools.
AM: Tell me, perhaps now since we have got your last resting place
too – your ideas, infuences and methods – you write in anthropology
that there isn’t really an anthropological method, it is more like a
journey you have gone on. Last night you said that above all to
understand your work you would have to understand the contexts
of the people you are talking to. Is that right?
CG: Yes, that is right. Last night, the students were asking me who
did I think I was writing for and I was saying that I have a vague
idea of an audience, but I do not have a very clear notion of whom
I am writing for. If you look at my work, who I was among when
I was doing this, whether it was the people at Harvard or MIT
during the developmental phase or the committee which studied
new nations, you can see the kinds of forces, and later, of course, at
the Institute, that were playing on me. It is probably a better way
for me to understand why I did the things I did and why I made
the choices I made.
AM: A reference group theory would be the best way!
CG: Yes, except that the reference groups keep changing.
AM: One thing about all your famous stories – this shift from
the kind of anthropology that I was trained in – you went out
and studied social structures on the ground and you studied
interpretations of meanings – how do you think it led to that? Was
it your military background?
CG: I keep trying to stress how little a professional anthropologist
in some sense I am, I do not mean that I am an amateur. I came
into the feld never having had any anthropology. My formation was
that I wanted to be a novelist, a writer, I had been in English and in
Philosophy. When I got to Harvard, the frst thing I got involved in
was the culture book. I was always concerned with the relationship
of ideas to life and to behaviour. I was philosophically oriented. I
cannot admit and I had objected to it earlier, to sometimes being
stereotyped by the social relations experience. It had a big effect
on me – it was one of those contexts that we were talking about
earlier and it was a real one. But I was also pretty well formed by
the time I arrived there. My interest in worldview – ways of being in
the world and how people live and what they think life is all about
and how they live effects everything – from politics to economics.

I came with that set to anthropology, but I learnt a lot about how
to do feld anthropology.
I will tell you a funny story because I did not know any
anthropology at all at Harvard when I arrived. When Hildred and I
arrived and got to my frst round I thought I should fnd out what
anthropology was all about, so I went to Widener, which was the
largest university library in the United States, and I went into the
anthropology section, at random took one book off the shelf to see
what it was. I told this once to the author but he did not think it was
very funny. It was George Peter Murdock’s56 Social Structure, which
as you may know is the quantitative study of social structural form
and I went back to Hildred saying that we had made a tremendous
mistake. Nothing could be more antipathetic to my temperament.
People should do that. I am not trying to stop it. But the notion that
I would go into such matters was exactly what I thought was wrong
with the world. It turned out that it was not representative of what
was going on in Harvard. When we were talking about Clyde earlier,
he was not interested and he had a philosophical background as well.
He was concerned about the world. He wrote books on pattern and
the infuence of Sapir and so on. That part of the socialization was
fertile ground or natural environment for me and I brought that
kind of orientation to anthropology. I do not think I got it from it.
Then, of course, came…anthropology and how it worked out with
my ideas. If anthropology had really stayed in a hard social structural
form, I would have probably drifted away – maybe to social thought.
AM: In a way you mentioned last night the unintended consequences
of your work stretched well beyond what you had predicted…
you happen to be at a time when all these other changes that you
mention like decolonialization, loss of self-confdence and so on,
simultaneously with your work you became a kind of banner bearer
for a new kind of anthropology which was deeply loathed at the
time by many people. But you remain rather surprised that there
was such vehemence.
CG: I still do not quite understand it. I had no programme to take
over anthropology. I had no desire to do anything except my work. I
still do not and I never have. You were talking about administrative
responsibilities – I have always gone away from building houses for
other people to live in. I am not interested in doing that. The one
little project design was Morocco, but that was pretty invertebrate,
I did what they wanted. I have never occupied positions of power. I
have stayed outside, mainly outside the anthropology bureaucracy
of the United States. I have not been involved in associations and
fairs very much. I have never been a Dean of anything, or a Chair.
I am not even a formal appointment so I have no idea why they
are so frightened – I just do my work – and I hope that it has its
infuence. I guess it did threaten some people, perhaps, still does –
that is too damn bad! I have not tried to set up a school, a School
of Social Science or the Institute is not a marching society, I am the
only anthropologist there. I do think we can bring more there. If
you know the people there, Hirschman and Scott, whatever they are,
they are certainly not replicas of me. They are sympathetic too, but
I am not likely to choose people who are very narrowly focussed,
apart from that, our elective affnities are very broad and general.
I was a little surprised by it, but as I had no particular ambitions
in those directions anyway, they did not worry about it very much.
AM: If someone said what you did basically destroyed external
realities, they were no longer facts, everything was constructed –
well, I want you to say that.
CG: That is nonsense! I think the conception of facts that some
of these people have is rather one-dimensional, so is their view of
the world. But on the notion of there being no facts – I never said
anything like that. My thesis was 700 pages long and what is has is
lots of data – some of it may be correct. But I have never done that.
I am very ethnographic and I have always done that.
AM: You do have two or three times as many pages of feld notes
as you have in your books, don’t you?
CG: Yes, I do. More than fve or six times that and a lot of it gets into
the work. There is a fear of the failure of the enlightenment project
that worries some of them deeply. I think the fear is exaggerated
and that they have nothing to be so afraid of. But if they are afraid,
they are afraid. I certainly do not think there are no facts, I think
quite the contrary, the world is very, very real. People vary and differ
and there are things to learn that you cannot learn from your own
tradition and that could be another reason why, perhaps, there is
so much hostility because I tend not to be thinking of the Western
tradition as normative. That by now is almost a commonplace, but
when I started it was not. We studied them and I never thought that.
AM: While not building up an institutional base or a set of disciples,
you are probably one of the two or three anthropologists of the 20th
century who have become an adjective. My students write about the
Geertzian this and that. There are not many.
CG: There was someone from Mexico recently, who said he was a
‘Geertziano’ and he was part of the ‘Geertziano’ movement – the
whole business ‘Geertziano’, ‘Geertziano’ and ‘Geertziano’.
AM: If we could just talk around a few things that interested to
me. Some of things that strike me a lot about what you write is a
slight sense of disappointment. It is like people visiting my garden,
I always say, ‘Well if only you had come a week ago, or if you came
in three weeks, it would be a lovely garden. Right now, it is just in
between’. And you portray a sense of that in your feldwork.
CG: That is interesting. It is true that I have been to a number of
places that seemed to be in trouble when I got there. I am a bit of
a historical pessimist which probably comes through, though in
an Islamic proverb – there never was a bad year, but a worse one
to follow – I have a slight tendency to think in that direction that
things are going to hell in a handcart, but I do have that note in
my work – an odd nostalgia to feeling, ‘Oh God, the grasshoppers
and bees are gone’ – I do have that, that is the romanticism in me,
I suppose. I was not quite aware that it shows through the prose as
much as it perhaps does not intend to be there.
AM: Both of you had lived at the edge, both in your academic
position and your feldwork.
CG: Yes. That is what anthropology has provided for me rather
consistently. You are always purposely marginal. I have never
believed in going native or feeling could you become a Javanese, you
are always an American in Java. You need to try and live the way they
live and understand them, but it is a self-delusion to think that you
can – if you have lived there for a long time, you can, some people
have – but by and large anthropologists are always marginal to the
societies they are involved in. I have been deliberately marginal in
life. I do not want to be into something I cannot get out of. So, it
is true and it may lead to some of this note in my work too. I feel
at the edge of things and I like it there because you can see things
from the edge that are harder to see from the centre.
AM: You have a phrase – between the large and the small – as a
feature of anthropology.
CG: That is recent. What is defnitive of my career, in a way, is that
I came in just at the time when anthropology was no longer going
to New Guinea and to Africa and so on. People were going to India
and Indonesia – you cannot walk barefoot to those societies. You
have to know their story, there is a lot of history to know. You, no
longer could, just study a little place – the Trobriands – and the
kula – not that there is anything wrong – it just does not make any
sense in Java. I could have done a community study of the Pare and
just described it and said, ‘Well here is a town in Java’, but that is
crazy when the world is blowing up around it and there are political
parties, the largest communist party outside the block and there
is no way to isolate the essentially localist focus of anthropology,
which I still maintain, but there is no way you should detach that
from general forms.
So, to be in the middle of – I had just given a set of lectures
that were about this transition – being often in a jungle or in some
place that was really marginal to the world – to being in the middle
of history all of a sudden. It was clear to me, very briefy, that in
those places that was no longer possible. The Cold War ripped Pare
apart. So, you cannot make believe that it does not. Major economic
changes were going on which were at the national level that you
cannot understand. It was quite clear to me from the very start that
though I was going to study locally, it was in order to understand
the things that had transcended the local and the play between the
local and the general issues – national and transnational. By now
that is a commonplace, but again, if we are talking about the 1960s,

it was not a commonplace, it was just starting.
The Pare project was, perhaps, at the same time as the project of
the people of Puerto Rico that [Julian] Steward started. We were the
frst of those collective things going to major civilizations. Sometimes
I have had students come to me and say, especially the ones who
had done some good work on the standard anthropological sort,
wanted to go to Japan and I would say that was fne, but you really
could not go barefoot to Japan. You had to learn the language and
a lot of history. You have got economists there and anthropologists
have to fnd a niche – it is no longer you studying canoe building
or yam growing or even marriage. You could not do that – that is
just the realities of the conditions of work.
If you were to go to Java in 1951, which is what I did, and get
off the ship, and there is a coup d’état going on, you know this is not
sandy land, I am not putting sandy land down, this is just what that is.
I want to emphasize that watershed quality of the 1950s.
When you asked me earlier why people were so mad at me, part
of it was that anthropology had changed, not that I had changed
anthropology. It was no longer going to some place and studying
the tribe. People are still doing that to this day and they should,
but we had a much different situation. My whole generation could
not be content with – I do not know what you do with lineage
theory – we had this argument in Morocco whether lineage theory
applies there between Amazigh and some other people. A subset of
that argument – the issues is raised in a place like Morocco that it
is going to be raised among the Nuer. You cannot isolate society.
A lot of what we did, not just me, that disturbed the old debenture
holders was really that we were doing a different kind of work,
in a different kind of place with different kinds of concerns and
constraints. As I said, you could not walk barefoot, you cannot
study everything. If you are going to study lineage organization in
a place like Morocco, you have to notice that there is a king and
that there is large-scale caravan trade. I am not alone in that, there
are a lot of differences in my generation and in our orientation, but
we shared that. All of us who came at that time, who went to India,
Nigeria, Indonesia, Morocco and to wherever they went, and they

did go to Japan and China, began to understand that something
had to happen to the feld because the conditions of the work had
changed. If you want a Marxist phrase – the material bases of our
studies had changed.
AM: When an anthropologist went to somewhere like Japan or India
where there were already many specialists or students and then they
were asked what can these people do that other people cannot?
CG: My work has been dedicated to showing what that could be.
Anthropologists are the only kinds of people who want to do the
kind of work of understanding people’s conception of what life is all
about. What they can do is do particularly locally focussed studies
that do refect on the whole. They do get at some of the major themes
of society. My own sense is that people who are economists and
sociologists are often blind to a great deal of what goes on in places
like Japan and China because they come with extremely Western
views. Let me give you a different example. I worked at MIT at
the time of the development phase and I worked with economists
there, a number of whom I liked very much and had worked with.
There was a typical cycle the highly-trained MIT type or Harvard
type economist, they would go out to Indonesia and the frst thing
that they would fnd out is that the government was a bit different
from the government they were used to, so they fgured they would
have to learn a little bit about the politics and they would begin
to do that. Then they would fnd out that the politics was set in a
rather complicated society, 300 languages – this is not New Haven.
After that, they would then begin to think that they do not quite
see the things the way we see them – there is quite a culture here.
At that point one of three things happen – one they went back to
MIT and built a model of Nebraska’s economy. Second, they went
overboard and started talking about child training and became
non-economists, or the best ones wondered what an economist
could do in such a strange place and began talking to people like
me and I talked to them, because I learned a lot from them. This,
as I say, is not a barefoot place, it has got a complicated economy
– what do I know about economic planning – but it was going on.
So, you fnally found some highly trained technical economists, Ben
Higgins,57 who was a good friend of mine, and who is dead now,
was a very fne man. He and I as well as some other people at MIT
developed a real conversation where we both had something to say
that the other did not know.
Anthropologists can answer if you ask the question more
generally what Java is like. We can say something about it, though
not in some defnitive way or summarily, but we can begin to address
that question. What is it about this place? An economist can ask
that kind of question and we can get a dialogue going where you
can have an interchange and be part of a group of people. That
is what an anthropologist can do – he can ft into a division of
labour of that sort – not to become, in the same sense an economist
studying child training – you do not become an amateur economist,
you learn enough economics so that you are at least not illiterate
and can understand what the issues are. What you are doing with
anthropology, an economist can learn something about what it is like
in a small village in Morocco, nobody but an anthropologist would
know that. It is changing a bit now, but by and large then, it did not.
Again, you have to go back to fgures, but nothing was mentioned
until now. The Dutch had done some kind of graphic model, but the
sense of what life was like in these places and why these odd things
were happening, anthropologists were the only people who had any
idea of what was happening. The best economists, sociologists and
historians were open to listening to that and the best anthropologist
were open to being taught about things beyond their kin and that
changed the whole notion of the lone anthropologist. I was there
but I am always at the edge and I related it to other people. I do
not think that you can tackle a place with 220 million people and
2000 years of history and every imperialism known to man with
your notebook and pencil scribbling – that is just crazy. But you
can learn things with a notebook and pencil that the person with
his models to fgure out the gross national product cannot do. That
is what I would argue and it can be developed and I would try and
say that in my work and it is what I have been trying to do, to tell
people what this place is like.
AM: You say, rather scathingly, about general laws in the political
feld such as that power tends to corrupt or the big fsh eat the
small fsh, these are empty banalities, so what kind of thing did
you fnd out?
CG: It is hard to do that without being concrete. You fnd out, say
political life and how it goes in Java, the main lines of cleavage, I
tried to show at one point how the political lines of cleavage, the
ones that people died and were killed on eventually in a large-scale,
which in greater part were refections integrated with long-standing
worldview of differences coming from Hindu and Islamic traditions
and, Malayo-Polynesian outlooks – the entanglement of these – it
gives you some understanding of what politics is about in Indonesia.
It is not that power tends to corrupt is wrong or is not helpful,
but it does not get you very far with trying to understand why the
fssions that divided Indonesia and Java and led to three-quarters of
a million people being killed – where did those come from? If you
move to Morocco, it is a different set of divisions. That is exactly
what I have been trying to do. I tried to show in the Java book that
what was peculiar about the Balinese sense of political life was like
and therefore try to understand why the Balinese do act as they do.
There is no law that comes out of that that I can think of – maybe
someone can derive one – but I have not been able to.
AM: If a young Javanese or Moroccan came up to you and said
that you studied the society in an earlier time, I am growing up in
the society now, are there a few things you could tell me in a simple
way and in a short space?
CG: I have written a lot on Indonesia and they can read it. I would
try to teach them how to learn about their own society and how
they can fnd out for themselves who and what they are. But I also
have views which I share with the Indonesians all the time. I discuss
things, my work is much discussed, it is in Morocco too. It is not as
if I am hesitant to say what I think to say to people – but I do not
have the arrogance to say – ‘hey this is what I think your culture
is’ – that is rather much. I do get many emails asking my opinion
on something or the other, I do not answer them all, but some I
do. I am always wanting to talk about Java, Morocco or Bali with
anybody because it fascinates me. A lot of young people work with

me. I have had assistants at the Institute but I do not have a little
red book to give them.
AM: Tell me about your writing methods. One of many things that
I like about your work is that you do refect on the creative side
of writing and the production of knowledge. But you again seem
somewhat dissatisfed – there seems to be a genre missing in terms
of autobiographical accounts of feldwork, you are never satisfed
in a way – what exactly do you mean by that?
CG: We need to be much more self-refexive about what we are doing.
Again, this comes out of my literary background – in literature there
is a whole secondary literature about the way which novels are made.
People talk about how Faulkner58 writes his novels, not in terms of
what their psychology is, but how they write. There is almost none
of that in anthropology. There has begun to be a little and my book
is an example of that – some of the things in the agriculture book,
but it still has to set in. Almost all book reviews have very little to
say about how books are constructed, how the argument is made
or about the language. There is nothing there. The kind of refection
that literary criticism does for literature is more or less absent in
anthropology. People always ask methodological questions and they
want them answered in the wrong way – if we understand how – this
is really the point of the book – how Lévi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard
and Benedict put their text together. Whether I am right or wrong,
literary criticism is where people argue constantly about whose
interpretation of George Eliot’s59 work is right, that is open for grabs.
But we do not even begin the conversation. If one does not care for my
interpretation of [Bronisław] Malinowski, that is fne, but there is not
much of that. And that is the genre that is missing – a genre that would
be the equivalent of literary criticism or philosophical commentary
or commentaries on philosophies. People just talking about, not
just doing Wittgenstein, but commenting on what Wittgenstein was
doing – we have very little of that. We seem to think we know what
we are doing. It is that or there are no questions.
When you ask me how I do what I do, I do not know. I do not
know how Evans-Pritchard or Malinowski did it either. It is not as if
there has been no refection, but in recent years there has been more.
That is the genre that is missing and I would like to see more of it,
I would like to see more people think about how anthropological
texts are constructed, how they make their arguments, how rhetoric
plays into it, the language in which they are cast – there is very little
of that. The reviews are all the same – ‘x’ has written this and this
is right or that is wrong and it is an interesting book and those who
are interested will be interested in this interesting book. For everyday
reviewing that is alright, you cannot have everything be a great essay.
There are very few good essays on anthropological writers, there are
some now, but there is still very little. If I had to pick a date, before
1960, I doubt there were any. There may have been a few scattered
things here and there, but nobody worried about how [W.H.R]
Rivers60 wrote, they were worried about what Rivers had to say
and they should be, but the genre that is missing is the connection
to how he got the effects he got.
AM: That was going to be my last question. You started off wanting
to be a writer and much of the eclectic-ness of your work is in the
crafting, the writing, but you also said over the last couple of days
– whatever you did you do not recommend to others. Can I ask
what it is that you do?
CG: As I said earlier, I consider myself a writer, essentially. I just
happen to write about anthropology, but I could write travel books
or something else. I am an anthropologist, but writing to me is an
autonomous good in itself. It is not just a décor or a decoration.
How I write? I write in a way that I do not recommend to anyone
else. I write by hand, that in itself is alright, but I write sentence by
sentence, paragraph is usually a big unit and I get where I want it
and I go on to the next one. It takes a long time, but I do not write
drafts. There are no integral drafts of anything I have ever done.
AM: And it is complete when it is written?
CG: Yes. When I write the last sentence, it is over. Nowadays with
the computer it is much easier than it used to be, with a typewriter
you had to white things out and write on it with a pencil or pen.
Now I play it back and forth, I write something out, I type it out so
that I can read it because my handwriting is terrible, I correct it and I

build it up to a paragraph, a paragraph up to a section, a section up
to a whole. It is more like making a sculpture, you push a little here
and it comes out over there and you push it back in and it comes up
on top and you keep at it till you stop pushing and you have got a
statue – good or bad – you have got it. But you do not have a draft
statue – so it is more like that – I have never thought of it quite in
sculpting terms or a painting – you do it till you get it. If you do
not get it, then you have a busted painting or sculpture and if you
do get it, it something you are willing to display. It is how I work.
AM: How long does it take you to write a paragraph on average?
CG: When I am really working, I work consistently. A paragraph
a day is the most I have got done. Sometimes, it just does not go
that fast. There is this pushing and pulling business, you go on for a
while and discover that it is not working, so, you go back and start
over. But you do not go back and redraft what you have and change
it. If it really gets screwed up, you abandon it. I have abandoned
things, this is not working, it is not going to do, and just give it up.
It takes me, to write, I just did this thing, it is not great, for you
guys which is about 35 type-written pages, took me two and half to
three months – doing nothing else because I do not have to teach.
I, however, do not advise that. It sounds so congratulatory to say
it that way. I know people who write beautifully, who do not do
it that way. They write much more rapidly and better. Writing has
to do with temperament and style, maybe genes, I do not know
what it is. I have enormous anxiety while writing, it is hard. I enjoy
having done it, but while I am doing it, it is extremely painful, but
so is feldwork.
AM: Is there anything else that I have missed out – about Karen,
obviously, who has been your companion for some time.
CG: My frst wife was there much of the time for the frst part of it.
Karen and I have been in Indonesia and Morocco some of the time.
AM: You said that you had never done feldwork on your own.
CG: That I do not think I could do, I never tried it. But, without
Hildred, for the frst part, much of it, and Karen later, I was talking
about how diffcult and hard feldwork is to do alone. I admire

people who can, maybe I could have, but I do not know and I do
not see how I could have done it without somebody to….
AM: …to read your….
CG: Yes, to read over it. Hildred works in the areas I do, more or
less, or at least the same general area. Karen works on the American
Indians. Both are excellent anthropologists in my view and they are
very good critics.
AM: That is a nice point to end this. Thank you very much indeed.
NOTES
1. Clifford Geertz. 2021. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/
biography/Clifford-Geertz
2. Harry Bridges, see Appendix.
3. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known
as the G.I. Bill, was a law that provided a range of benefts for some of
the returning World War II veterans (commonly referred to as G.I.s). The
original G.I. Bill expired in 1956, but the term ‘G.I. Bill’ is still used to refer
to programs created to assist some of the U.S. military veterans. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill
4. George Geiger, Appendix.
5. Henry Louis Gehrig (1903–41) was an American professional baseball
frst baseman who played 17 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) for
the New York Yankees (1923–39). Gehrig was renowned for his prowess
as a hitter and for his durability, which earned him his nickname ‘The Iron
Horse’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Gehrig
6. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830–86) was an American poet.
Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the
most important fgures in American poetry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Emily_Dickinson
7. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) was an American novelist, dark
romantic, and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality,
and religion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Hawthorne
8. George Herbert Mead, see Appendix.
9. Ruth Benedict, see Appendix.
10. Clyde Kluckhohn, see Appendix.
11. Talcott Parsons, see Appendix.
12. Samuel Stouffer, see Appendix.

13. Henry Murray, see Appendix.
14. Gordon Allport, see Appendix.
15. Margaret Mead, see Appendix.
16. John Derek Freeman (1916–2001) was a New Zealand anthropologist
known for his criticism of Margaret Mead’s work on Samoan society, as
described in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa. His attack
‘ignited controversy of a scale, visibility, and ferocity never before seen in
anthropology’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Freeman
17. David Murray Schneider (1918–95) was an American cultural
anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major
proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Schneider
18. Renée Fox, see Appendix.
19. Max Weber, see Appendix.
20. Kenneth Duva Burke (1897–1993) was an American literary theorist,
as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy,
aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burke was best
known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Further, he was one
of the frst individuals to stray away from more traditional rhetoric and view
literature as ‘symbolic action’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Burke
21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, see Appendix.
23. Émile Durkheim, see Appendix.
24. Vilfredo Pareto, see Appendix.
25. Isaiah Berlin, see Appendix.
26. A.L. Kroeber, see Appendix.
27. Franz Boas, see Appendix.
28. Ralph Linton, see Appendix.
29. Edward Sapir, see Appendix.
30. Douglas Oliver (1913–2009) was a cultural anthropologist who
conducted an intensive study in 1938–1939 of the culture and diet of the
Sinai people of south-west Bougainville. Anthropometric observations were
made on adolescent and adult males from different tribes. Oliver joined the
staff of Harvard’s PeabodyMuseum of Ethnology and Archaeology, where
he served as a research associate from 1936 to 1941. https://www.eoas.info/
biogs/P001514b.htm & https://bit.ly/3fCUnp8
31. Sukarno, see Appendix.
32. Charles Dickens, see Appendix.
33. William Shakespeare, see Appendix.

34. Edmund Leach, see Appendix.
35. Keith Thomas, see Appendix.
36. Edward Shils, see Appendix.
37. David Apter, see Appendix.
38. Tom Fallers, see Appendix.
39. Fred Eggan, see Appendix.
40. Sol Tax, see Appendix.
41. Victor Turner, see Appendix.
42. McKim Marriott, see Appendix.
43. Milton Singer, see Appendix.
44. Ernest Gellner, see Appendix.
45. Albert Einstein, see Appendix.
46. John von Neumann, see Appendix.
47. Kurt Gödel, see Appendix.
48. J. Robert Oppenheimer, see Appendix.
49. Carl Kaysen, see Appendix.
50. Bellah dispute, Robert Bellah, see Appendix.
51. George Miller, see Appendix.
52. Albert Hirschman, see Appendix.
53. Michael Walzer, see Appendix.
54. John Scott, see Appendix.
55. Bruno Latour, see Appendix.
56. George Peter Murdock, see Appendix.
57. Benjamin Higgins (1912–2001) was the foremost foreign economist
in or on Indonesia in the 1950s and the main architect of the frst Five-Year
Plan (1956–60), which was the model upon which all the later Bappenas
development plans have essentially been based. https://bit.ly/3fDvg5B
58. William Faulkner, see Appendix 1
59. Mary Ann Evans (1819–80; alternatively, Mary Anne or Marian),
known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist,
translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven
novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861),
Romola (1862–63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–72)
and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she
emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. They are
known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed
depiction of the countryside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot
60. W.H.R. Rivers, see Appendix.
PART
three
Encounter with
Philippe Descola
Alan Macfarlane
While Jack Goody and Clifford Geertz have been major inspirational
fgures throughout my life as an anthropologist, Phillipe Descola has
become important only relatively recently. In a way this lateness is
surprising since Descola had spent time at King’s College, where I
am a Fellow, from the 1980s and was a close friend of my colleague
Stephen Hugh-Jones. Yet it was only when Stephen arranged for
Descola to give a seminar in our department in February 2004 that
I frst remember encountering him. I flmed the seminar and later
put it on the internet.1 I remember it was a lively and intriguing
occasion, but mainly a discussion between specialists of Amazonia.
As I moved towards retirement, I discovered that there was a
new movement in anthropology called ‘the ontological turn’, of
which Descola was a leading exponent. I wondered what this was
and how I could stretch my already jargon-flled mind towards a
new area. I grasped hold of the defnitions in various dictionaries,
for example the following:
Ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies concepts such as

existence, being, becoming, and reality. It includes the questions of
how entities are grouped into basic categories and which of these
entities exist on the most fundamental level. Ontology is sometimes
referred to as the science of being and belongs to the major branch
of philosophy known as metaphysics. (Wikipedia)
I was not at the time deeply struck by this, and my comment

in my diary a year later does not show much enthusiasm. ‘Went to
London today, then the Radcliffe Brown Lecture by Descola – rather

similar to before.’ (31.3.2005)
It was only on a more recent visit by Descola to King’s, some
ten years later, that I met him over a meal and discovered what an
interesting and charming man he is. He kindly agreed to do a flm
interview and my diary shows my new enthusiasm. ‘I went in to
Cambridge and interviewed Philippe Descola – an excellent interview
and he anticipated what we needed. Enjoyed it. And new thoughts
about memory etc.’ (Tuesday, 3 February 2015)
Only after this did I start to read his work. I started with The
Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle (1996)
and was absolutely entranced. It is an extraordinary account,
bringing home the delights and diffculties of feldwork and how one
discovers new and unexpected worlds. It does this in a way which
is only paralleled in one or two other books of which I know. It is
beautifully written, totally involving and shows what anthropology
can do. It is undoubtedly a great book.
I then read page 463 of his Beyond Nature and Culture (2005)
which had been so often referred to by some of my colleagues, and
by friends in philosophy and other disciplines. Again, I found myself
enthralled in a way which would not have happened ten years before.
By this time, I was six years into my retirement and I was
expanding my thought. I was turning to the meta-level which
ontology, and hence Descola, deals with. Many years earlier I had
started as an anthropologist and historian at the local level of a
particular village or the partial history of one nation. I had then
become interested in the next level up, namely the various paradigms
– such an evolutionism, functionalism or structuralism. This absorbed
me for another twenty years. Yet, as I worked more extensively,
comparing China, Japan, Nepal, Europe and England, I found I
needed a higher-level encompassing framework to ft them into.
I developed the concepts of civilizations, or spheres (the Sino-
Sphere, Anglo-sphere) and played with the opposition between Axial
and Non-Axial civilizations following Jaspers. I realized that my
experience in the shamanic worlds of the East was totally different
ENCOUNTER WITH PHILIPPE DESCOLA 95
K NOWL E DGE SYST E MS
WORLD VIEWS
MYTHICAL AXIAL SCIENTIFIC POST-MODERN GLOBAL

TO 800 BC GENERALLY TO THE FROM THE 15TH FROMTHE 1970’S
20TH CENTURY CENTURY IN THE
WEST ALONE
PARADIGMS
PROGRESSIVE ENLIGHTENMENT EVOLUTIONARY STRUCTURAL

C. 1450–1700 C. 1700–1840 C. 1840–1910 C. 1910–1970’S
SEPARATE DISCIPLINES OF FIELDS

FOR EXAMPLE
HISTORY LAW BIOLOGY SOCIOLOGY ECONOMICS
from that of the ‘modern’ world derived from Greek, Christian,

Arabic, Renaissance and Scientifc thought. I called this higher system
a ‘World View’, as in the following diagram in my book How Do
We Know? (2018).
Descola made me realize that an ontology is even wider than
a ‘world view’, because it not only deals with intellectual, logical,
mental systems – cosmologies and processes of thought – but the
whole state of being and identity. It encompasses the whole of a
person’s life – heart, mind, body and spirit. This is the ultimate level,
as far as I can now see.
It took a huge effort to rid myself of the constrictions of my
education and western assumption in my work on East and West
and to realize that I was imprisoned in my own western ontology.
That is why I found passages such as this from Descola resonated
so much – it was exactly how I realized I felt.
Anthropology is the daughter of these trends [towards modern

naturalistic, dualistic, thinking] and of scientifc thought and a belief
in evolution … All the same, its role is hampered by this heritage –

for that role is an understanding of how peoples who do not share
our cosmology came to invent for themselves realities that are
distinct from our own, thereby manifesting a creativity that cannot
be judged according to the criteria of our own accomplishments.
And this is something that anthropology cannot do so long as it
takes our reality for granted as a universal fact of experience. …
Because it is deeply rooted in our habits, this ethnocentrism is
very diffcult to eradicate… By turning modern dualism into the
standard for all world systems we are forced into a kind of well-
meaning cannibalism, as we repeatedly incorporate nonmoderns’
objectification of themselves into our own objectivization of
ourselves. … amalgamating them into the categories to which
we belong is also the surest way of wiping out their distinctive
contribution to the intelligibility of the human condition. (pp. 80–81)
Or again, echoing my own experience.
In the frst place, it goes without saying that my own starting point
is without doubt rooted in the familiar soil of naturalism. It is no
easy matter to escape from one’s origins and from the schemas of
apprehending reality that have been mastered through education
and strengthened by being accepted as common practice.’ (p. 303)
I found that Descola had brilliantly simplifed world ontologies

down to four kinds, based on the relations of the exterior (physical)
and the interior (spiritual). These four he explains as follows.
The recognized formulae for expressing the combination of

interiority and physicality are very limited. Faced with some other
entity, human or nonhuman, I can assume either that it possesses
elements of physicality and interiority identical to my own, that
both its interiority and its physicality are distinct from mine,
that we have similar interiorities and different physicalities, or,
fnally that our interiorities are different and our physicalities are
analogous. I shall call the frst combination “totemism,” the second
ENCOUNTER WITH PHILIPPE DESCOLA 97
“analogism,” the third “animism,” and the fourth “naturalism” (fg.

1). These principles of identifcation defne four major types of
ontology, that is to say systems of the properties of existing beings;
and these serve as a point of reference for contrasting forms of
cosmologies, models of social links, and theories of identity and
alterity.’’ (p.121)
Similar interiorities Animism Totemism Similar interiorities

Dissimilar physicalities
Dissimilar interiorities Naturalism Analogism Dissimilar interiorities
Similar physicalities Dissimilar physicialities
The four ontologies.
I realized that I had experienced two of the four – Animism

and Naturalism, but had no frst-hand experience of Totemism
and Analogism. So, I was comforted by Sahlins’ critique which
suggested that there were, at an even higher level, only two
ontologies – Anthropomorphism (which encompasses Animism,
Totemism and Analogism) and Naturalism.2 Yet I also sympathized
with Descola’s counter-argument that there is a huge difference
between the shamanism which I have encountered, and, for
example, the totemism of Australia and native North America as
I read about it.
What Descola has given me is another level of thinking. He
has encouraged me further in the pursuit of the deep and enduring
differences between my own inherited assumptions and the rich and
strange ontologies which I have glimpsed in my dozens of visits to
Nepal, Japan and China. As Bruno Latour has observed, his book
is ‘without doubt the most important book coming from French
anthropology since Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structurale’.
It is in the great tradition of world anthropology and shows how
anthropology can contribute to all felds of human knowledge by
helping us to escape, at least partially, from our own blinkered
upbringing. This is especially important now, as people around the
world grapple with the differences between great world civilizations
in East and West.
NOTES
1. The flm of the seminar can be seen and downloaded from: https://
sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1115696
2. Marshall Sahlins, ‘On the ontological scheme of Beyond nature and
culture’, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1), 281–90 (2014) and
Descola’s reply ‘The grid and the tree’, pp. 295–300.
Philippe Descola. Photograph courtesy Alan Macfarlane.
Philippe Descola
Philippe Descola, FBA (b. 1949) is a French anthropologist noted

for studies of the Achuar, one of several Jivaroan peoples in Ecuador,
and for his contributions to anthropological theory.
Descola started with an interest in philosophy and later became
a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss. His ethnographic studies in the
Amazon region of Ecuador began in 1976 and was funded by CNRS.
He lived with the Achuar from 1976 to 1978. His reputation largely
arises from these studies. As a professor, he was invited several times
in the University of São Paulo, Beijing, Chicago, Montreal, London
School of Economics, Cambridge, St Petersburg, Buenos Aires,
Gothenburg, Uppsala and Leuven.
He has given lectures in over 40 universities and academic
institutions abroad, including the Beatrice Blackwood Lecture at
Oxford, the George Lurcy Lecture at Chicago, the Munro Lecture at
Edinburgh, the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture at the British Academy, the
Clifford Geertz Memorial Lecture at Princeton, the Jensen Lecture at
Frankfurt and the Victor Goldschmidt Lecture at Heidelberg. He has
chaired the Société des Américanistes since 2002 and the scientifc
committee of the Fondation Fyssen from 2001 to 2009, as well as
holding memberships in many other scientifc committees. He has
also been elected Honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological
Institute and received in 2015 the honoris causa doctorate from
the University of Montreal, Canada. Descola is currently chair of
anthropology at the Collège de France. His wife, Anne-Christine
Taylor, is an ethnologist.
Some of his publications include: In the society of nature: a native
ecology in Amazonia, (1994); The spears of twilight: life and death in
the Amazon jungle, (1996) and Beyond Nature and Culture, (2013).1
I
Alan Macfarlane (AM): It is a great chance to talk to Philippe
Descola. Philippe, when and where were you born?
Philippe Descola (PD): I was born in Paris in 1949. My father was a
historian and my paternal family came from the southwest of France,
the Central Pyrenees. My paternal grandfather was a medical doctor,
his father was a journalist, and my great aunt was a novelist. On
the paternal side, I came from a family of doctors, publicists and
writers. On the maternal side, my mother was the daughter of an
army offcer who died young after the war. There were many army
offcers in my mother’s family. I was brought up in a middle-class
family of the classical French Catholic bourgeoisie. We lived near
the Tuileries in Paris. My father saw himself as Catholic but was not
really practising as such. My mother probably had a deeper faith,
and I was brought up a Roman Catholic, although I became, frst
an agnostic, and then an atheist quite early, by about 10 or 12. This
was not a problem for my family who were not trying to bring me
up in any specifc religious faith. This was in contrast with other
anthropologists in France or England, in many cases, who tend to
belong to minority faiths. In fact, there is a higher proportion of
Protestants among anthropologists, which is much higher than the
general population, or of Jews. I did not belong to any minority and
was raised in a straightforward way. I went to the Lycée Condorcet
which was one of the elite schools in Paris.
AM: Before we go on to your education, let us pause a moment
on your parents’ characters. You have sketched in very well your
grandparental accounts. What were your father and mother like and
how did that infuence you?
This interview was conducted by Alan Macfarlane on 3 February 2015.

The transcription for this interview was provided by Radha Béteille, for this
volume.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdrmif9CqLg
PD: My father was a very brilliant man, a good conversationalist

and very charming. He specialized in the history of South America,
Latin America and Spain, although he had begun by working on
St John of the Cross at a time when he was much more attracted
towards mysticism. He always left me to do what I wanted. I had
a very happy childhood. I lived surrounded by books of which my
father had many. I could read all of them. My father did not look
very hard at what I was reading, and I read a large part of the family
library early on.
There were many pictures and my paternal grandmother was
a professional painter and so was her father, who was quite well
known. My parents loved music, so I was introduced to it very
young. My mother was a social worker, a working woman, and I
was mostly left to do what I wanted. I was not really disciplined. I
have an older sister, 13 years older, who was in fact the person I was
closest to because my parents were not at home most of the day. I
still am very fond of her. I had a very agreeable childhood in the
centre of Paris which I really loved. It is a city in which very early
on I was allowed to go wherever I wanted, so I explored the city.
AM: What is your earliest memory?
PD: It is diffcult to say, but I think my earliest memory is of
the Pyrenees, where we would go during the summer for brief
periods, although the family house had been sold during the Great
Depression, we would go to a hotel there. We would go with my
grandparents, and my earliest memory was the commotion when
my parents thought that I was lost at a fair in the village of Seix in
Ariège, where we would go for a holiday. It is a beautiful place from
where you can walk up the mountains and over to Spain, which I
did several times later with my parents and grandparents as a boy.
That is how I learnt to love walking in nature. My grandfather
was an ophthalmologist, he was very well educated and erudite
and he knew Latin and Greek. He helped me with my essays. He
also knew a number of modern languages which he never spoke.
He was very proud and did not want to be accused of speaking
like a hotel porter. He was also a very good naturalist, so when
we walked together in the mountains and later when my parents
bought a house in the southwest of France, he would tell me the

names of fowers and stories about fowers. At night, he would tell
me the names of the constellations and their connection to Greek
mythology. I was immersed very early on in the written world, the
classical world, and a liking for the natural world and walking, and
the connections between them.
AM: How old were you when you had the memory of being lost
in the fair?
PD: It was not so much the memory of being lost, but the memory
of the terror of my parents looking for me. When they found me,
I must have been fve, there was a spectacle at the fair, there was a
scene, a comedy, and I was sitting transfxed.
AM: Did you have any hobbies or particular interests?
PD: As was rather common among us, I liked making scale models
and also scale models for theatres. I would make stage decorations
for theatre plays in shoe boxes. But my main pursuit was reading,
which was one of my main hobbies. I also liked drawing and
painting. At the same time, while I was well adapted to the world,
I always felt at a distance from what I was looking at and I felt
that I would not ft completely in. Although I was popular with
my friends at school, I always had the impression that I was an
observer rather than being in the midst of things. This is one of my
earliest impressions of the relationship I had with the world. It was
amplifed by an early ethnographic experience. When I went to the
Lycée Condorcet at about 10, I was not a very good pupil to begin
with. I had very good marks in French and good marks in Latin
and perhaps geography, but not so good for the rest. My English
teacher told my parents that my English was not very good, so they
decided to send me to an English boarding school. The end of the
French term was mid-June, a month earlier than in England, so I
would go from the beginning of May, by agreement with the Lycée,
to the end of July, to a rather decrepit public boarding school in
Gloucestershire. It was a remarkable experience.
Leckhampton Court School was in an old manor house, set up
by the Headmaster, and it disappeared when he retired. I went there
some years ago to see if it still existed and it is now a retirement

home. In this school, I discovered it was the absolute opposite to
the French system. The Lycée, though I was not a boarder, was
very military in its organization. It was devised by Napoleon as an
elite form of schooling for the French nation, based on the Jesuit
system, whereby we were extremely controlled and there was no
leeway for personal initiative. What I found quite extraordinary in
the English system was that we were living in an area of this manor
house and we never saw any adults. The discipline was enforced by
the prefects which, for you is a very common experience, but for
me, it was extraordinary. It was not far from Cheltenham in very
nice surroundings, so I enjoyed that.
AM: Was there bullying? Because that is the danger of these prefect
systems.
PD: I was never bullied. There was some boxing!
AM: In the two systems did you play an equal number of games,
team games?
PD: I have never been keen on team sports which is another aspect
of personal distance. I preferred personal rather than collective
involvement in sports. I did some fencing, and thanks to my sister
who was a fanatic horse rider, I learnt to ride early on. These two
things I enjoyed a lot. I played football for a while because I had to
but I did not enjoy it.
AM: Did the French Lycée have football and hockey?
PD: They did. In France, it was a bit complicated in contrast to the
British system, especially in small towns, you had to go quite far to
play collective games. Some of my friends played football and rugby,
but I never really enjoyed doing it. I was not a collective sport person.
This, frst experience of exoticism and variety was informative, not
yet to become an anthropologist, but to enjoy the diversity of the
world and its ways of doing things.
As I said, I was not a very good pupil, I began to be a better
pupil later on when there was more liberty was given to the pupils,
rather than having them regurgitate the knowledge that one had to
absorb and that was in the last three years at the Lycée.
I started to travel, which my parents allowed and supported. My

frst big travel experience was to go to Canada where my father had
a friend who ran a mink farm, north of Quebec. I spent several weeks
there working. I must have been about 17 at the time. I then found
a room in a small freighter boat going from Quebec to Chicago via
the Great Lakes, so I went to the United States for the frst time. I
landed in Chicago at the time of the riots in the ghettos of Newark
and Chicago, and I was struck by the violence of this society. The
National Guard, patrolling with guns and letting loose the dogs,
which was something I had never seen in France.
Of course, France had done so in Algeria, but I had been too
young to know that. In fact, I found out what had been going on
in Algeria while I was at school in England. There was a television
room for the pupils and we were watching the news. This is where I
became aware of this, because I was too young to read the newspaper
and these were things that were not discussed at home.
AM: Would this have been shown on French television?
PD: Probably, but we had no television at home. I did not know
what a television was. It was not a question of ideologies, but parents
were completely indifferent to television. I had no idea what a
television was and my friends would discuss at school the television
programmes they had seen. This was in the mid-1960s.
The year after the Canada visit, I went to Turkey, Iran, Northern
Syria, all on my own. Looking back, it is incredible, but all our
generation did these things. Retrospectively, we could travel very
far with little money and we thought the world was open for us.
There was probably some neo-colonial covert ideology in that in
the sense that nothing could happen to us, though you had to be
prudent and cautious.
In my family, among the books, was a large magazine series Le
Tour du Monde, the equivalent to National Geographic at the end
of the 19th century. There were stories by geographers and proto-
anthropologists of travels in different parts of the world, illustrated
with etchings in black and white. I was fortunate enough to have
early editions of Jules Verne illustrated by the same persons, so there
was a porosity for me between novels and the accounts of discovery
and travel in faraway places. When I started travelling quite far away,
in the Near East, I must have been about 17, I had the impression
that some of these illustrations had come alive. I remember waking
in a bus in Central Anatolia and seeing the minarets in a village
and a caravan of camels, and I really had the impression that I had
entered into one of those etchings. So, very early on, I had enjoyed
the spectacle of the world and its diversity. Intellectually at that time,
I loved the French language and writing, and had got good marks
in that domain since I was very young.
In 1967–68, I became politically conscious with many of my
friends, we were curious of everything – of the counter-culture
in the United States, of new ideas, read anything and at the
time the main place where our political conscience was forged
was the Committees Vietnam. It was at the level of the Lycée,
where we would protest against the Vietnam war and organize
demonstrations. This is where we became conscious of the iniquity
of imperialism and class difference, although I had never suffered
from any oppression myself.
Until the mid-1970s the Lycée was the preserve of the middle-
class, so a minority of people would study for the Baccalaureate and
go to university. When faced with the choice of studies at university,
I decided with some schoolmates to prepare for an elite school the
École normale supérieure. It may appear bizarre from the fact that
I was drawn towards Leftist politics, but at the same time, we were
conscious of the complexity of the social and political situation
which required good training. We knew that we needed to exercise
our brains and that the criticism of the present situation required
intelligence and knowledge. Although some of our great intellectuals
at the time thought we should preach for the younger generation
rather than embed ourselves with the workers in order to preach
the revolution. We thought that, rather than do that, we ought to
acquire the intellectual instruments of criticism was.
After the Baccalaureate I entered the classe préparatoire at the Lycée
to prepare for the École normale supérieure.
AM: At what age was this?
PD: I was 18.
AM: So, it was like going to university?

PD: Yes, it is. Usually you prepare over two years, it is a highly
competitive system where you are accepted on the basis of your
marks at the Baccalaureate. Between the subsequent frst and second
year, approximately 30 per cent of the class remain, and at the end of
the second year there is a competitive examination for the entrance
to École normale supérieure. About one in 40 get accepted.
AM: What subject did you do?
PD: In the second year, I specialized in philosophy because I was
attracted by complex thinking. I had read Lévi-Strauss2 early on –
Triste Tropiques when I was 16 or 17. I was not so much attracted by
anthropology, but by the man. He was someone who was obviously
a great intellectual who had also gone to the furthest corners of
Brazil to study the people, and write very warmly, humanely and
intelligently about them. It was the intellectual autobiography
that attracted me to Lévi-Strauss rather than to anthropology
as a discipline. I knew what anthropology was, so I decided on
philosophy because it was the best general intellectual training that
one could master, but at the same time started reading more serious
books in anthropology. Most of my friends in philosophy would
read The Savage Mind, which I think is one of the most important
books in philosophy of the 20th century. It has many elements of
anthropology, but is not as technical as The Elementary Structures
of Kinship, for instance, which I read at the time.
There are different École normale supérieure, there is one where
Latin was part of the examination. I was not good at Latin, but
Latin was eliminatory. I chose another École normale supérieure,
the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, which is just outside
Paris where instead of Latin, there was a dissertation in geography
in the examination. I discovered that I enjoyed geography very
much. I was fortunate to be admitted at École normale supérieure
de Saint-Cloud in my frst attempt where I read philosophy. I got
a very good training in philosophy there from great minds such as
Jean-Toussaint Desanti,3 a philosopher of mathematics, Martial
Gueroult,4 a great fgure in the history of philosophy. He was a
specialist on Spinoza5 and Descartes6 and was a source of inspiration
for Foucault,7 for instance, and much of what Foucault did. The
history of philosophy was very much inspired by the technique that
people like Gueroult adopted.
There I really became a militant. My friends were either in the
Communist Party, Maoists – it was the time of the big wave of
Maoism. I was much more attracted by Trotskyism, and particularly
by Trotsky8 as a man of action and an intellectual. I had read some
of his books. I decided to become a member of the French section
of the 4th International, called Ligue communiste révolutionnaire
and I was a militant for three years when I was at the École normale
supérieure. However, I did not much enjoy the militant life. Most of
the time we would endlessly discuss obscure points of doctrine or
strategy which I felt was a bit ridiculous. At that time, it was quite
numerous. There were probably 5000–6000 members, which for the
Trotskyist movement was rather large. We discussed how best to
organize ourselves for the revolution, but even with the enthusiasm of
the time, it was obvious that the situation was not pre-revolutionary
and these discussions, in many respects, were pointless. Of course,
there was the politics of entryism too, which was classical among
Trotskyites – we were asked to be militants, in unions. When you
enter the École normale supérieure and pass the examination, you
become a civil servant and are paid as a teacher in training. I became
a member of the teachers’ trade union and many other things of this
kind, which took up a lot of time. After three years I felt that this
was not the way for me to deal with the transformation of society.
There were two dimensions at the time which I thought were
important, but considered secondary. I was very much interested in
nature in general, for reasons of delectation, but it was the beginning
of the dawn of the idea that there were grave ecological problems
and that politics had to take this into account. This was not at all
the case with the extreme Left at the time. The other was gender
politics, which was also considered a secondary problem. So, I left
after three years, discretely, but have never regretted this period.
AM: This was 1971–72?
PD: This was in 1973 when I took the decision to become an
anthropologist. What made me decide was that Maurice Godelier,9
a former pupil at the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud 13

years earlier, had just published Rationality and Irrationality in
the Economy, an analytical criticism of neo-classical economics
and a reading of [Karl] Marx’s10 Capital, which was common at
the time. But at the end there was an interesting development on
the theme of pre-capitalist economies. He came back to the École
normale supérieure to give a seminar on this book, at the end of
which, for several weeks and months, he dealt with the subject of
pre-capitalist economies. I became quite interested and asked him
if it was feasible to become an anthropologist and he said it was. I
had become intellectually interested in the subject but had no idea
how to do it. He told me I would have to do feldwork. I passed
the competitive examination to become a professor of philosophy
because that was what was expected of us and spent a year teaching
the subject. However, before that I decided to go to Mexico in the
summer to see whether feldwork was possible. Although I had good
training in philosophy, I had none in anthropology.
At the same time that I was studying philosophy, I went to the
University of Nanterre and took a B.A. in ethnology to get some
basic knowledge of anthropology. The year after that I went to the
École pratique des hautes études (VIe section) where Lévi-Strauss was
teaching and so was Godelier, in the Sixth Section which later became
the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, for a year’s training
programme in anthropology. This had been created by Lévi-Strauss
and we were very fortunate in our teachers – Godelier, Dumont11
was teaching kinship, Clastres12 was doing political anthropology.
We had very good and dynamic teachers. This was where I met
Anne-Christine Taylor, during the training period. She had been in
Oxford for a while and was interested in doing anthropology in
Central Asia. However, at that time it was not an area where one
could freely do anthropology. We fell in love, and I tried to convince
her to go with me to Latin America.
Why did I choose Latin America? I wanted to go there for
various reasons. I spoke good Spanish. Although there was no
direct connection with Spain, my father being a historian of Spain
and Latin America, we would speak Spanish as a playful way to
communicate. I spoke Spanish with my grandfather too. That was

one important consideration that I had a good knowledge of the
vernacular language.
Africa, appeared to me complex and complicated social machines
but without any real mystery, at least, to me at the time. Once you
took apart the nooks and crannies, the job was done. It is a very
simplistic way of looking at Africa, but that is how I saw it. And, I
was not attracted to such complex machinery. As for Asia, in general,
there seemed such a complexity there because of superposition of
history, the expansion of great religions, the trade routes, and needs
infnite knowledge in order to grasp simple facts. I felt it was too
complicated. This is why, in the frst instance, I chose Mexico. Anne-
Christine and I went together to Southern Chiapas, where there
were many anthropologists working at the time particularly in the
Harvard Chiapas project.
What I was interested in was a combination of political and
ecological anthropology. I was interested in the way that the people
of highland Chiapas, specifcally the Tzeltal who were speaking
a Mayan language, who had migrated down to the forest, were
adapting to a new environment. This was a tropical forest and the
only Mayan speaking people living there were Lacandons who
were quite different from the highland Maya and had complex
relationships with the Tzeltal. I was interested in seeing how
these people adapted to a new environment, both technically and
ideologically. We spent a few months in a village in the midst of
the Lacandon forest called Taniperla where I discovered the basic
trade of being an ethnographer. It was not very satisfying because
the Tzeltal had been pushed by the big landowners in the highlands
so there was less and less land for them, and had been forced to
migrate to the lowland as settlers. They were not really happy in this
environment which was so different from the highlands, and they
were trying to adapt precisely their institutions, the way they saw
and organized space – it is not so much a moiety system13 – there are
social segments that correspond to segments in space, deities and so
on in the midst of this jungle chaos. They could not transpose this
system so were very unhappy. Their unhappiness affected me too
and after a few months I decided it was not where I wanted to be.
I had always been attracted by Amazonia but thought it was too
petit bourgeois to go there because of the romantic image it had
of naked Indians talking about philosophy in hammocks wearing
splendid feather adornments. But I had always been fascinated by
that part of the world and my nickname at École normale supérieure
given by my class-mates was ‘les plumes’ – feathers! I said: ‘To hell
with these idiotic scruples!’ I had discovered the tropical forest in
Lacandonia. It was a wonderful place. Remarkable. I was struck by
its diversity, so I decided to go to Amazonia. This is when we came
back to France, I started a year of teaching philosophy. I went to see
Lévi-Strauss who was the authority on Amazonian Indians and asked
him whether he would supervise my doctoral thesis on Amazonia.
AM: You must again describe how he was sitting and how you were
sitting when you met – could you retell that story?
PD: Yes! Rather see God than the saints! If I have to do a doctoral
thesis on Amazonia – there were very few people qualifed to
supervise such a thesis. For me it was like going to see Kant in
Königsberg. He was a major fgure and one of the great heroes of
our time. I was impressed by the idea of meeting him. He received
me in a large offce and offered me a seat in a dilapidated leather
armchair which I sank into. He sat by my side on a wooden chair
looking down at me – like an entomologist looking at an insect –
while I spent the most diffcult half-hour in my whole life trying
to explain what I wanted to do. I will go back in a moment to tell
you why I wanted to go to this specifc part of the Amazonia. To
my great surprise after hearing me out, he agreed to supervise my
thesis and I was so relieved and elated by his response.
Before talking about the specifc place that we went, let me tell
you how I came to be interested in Amazonia, which I had suppressed
because, as I said that it was too romantic. One of the things that
fascinated me about Amazonia was – I had read a lot – there were
not many quality publications on Amazonia at that time. There were
two great books that I had discovered, your colleagues, Stephen and
Christine Hugh-Jones14 had gone to Colombia and done wonderful
feldwork and their monographs – The Palm and the Pleiades and
Under the Milk River – which were very new in the panorama of
anthropology of the Amazon. They were almost the only books
because the others were just matter of fact reports lacking in insight.
What fascinated me in Amazonia was that from the first
narratives of the people of the lowlands, from Brazil 16th century
observers, would insist on two things, one that these people had no
institutions to speak of, and they were very close to nature, either
in a positive or negative sense. In the positive sense, they were
expansions of nature, the children of nature, like Montaigne,15 they
were naked philosophers who lived freely in the ‘Garden of Eden’ or
on the negative side. From the beginning you had these two versions
– they were prey to their instincts, therefore brutish, cannibals, not
properly human. In these two senses, they were very close to nature.
I had the impression there was a connection between the apparent
lack of institution and the leitmotif that they were nature folk,
and that maybe their lack of visible social institutions was due to
social life expanded much beyond the perimeter of humanity, and
included most plants and animals. So, I had this very general idea
which attracted me to Amazonia.
Another aspect was, of course, the positive and romantic aspect
that Clastres had insisted on, that these people were anarchists, rebels
to authority, there was no fxed destiny for people, no hierarchy, so
they were free to achieve what they wanted. It was not like in some
societies the segment into which you are born, life, in great measure,
is predicted by the place of your birth. These were interesting things.
We decided on the Achuar, a sub-group of the Jivaro. We had
a friend who had come back from Ecuador doing feldwork in the
highlands, and talking with her she said the Jivaro where not as
well-known as they appeared, which was bizarre because it was an
ethnic group that everybody had heard of because of the shrunken
heads. In fact, we discovered when reading the literature on them
that although there was a great monograph from the 1930s by
Rafael Karsten,16 the great Finnish anthropologist, the most recent
stuff was not very illuminating. There was still a sub-group of the
tribe which spoke a dialect of the Jivaro that had not been studied,
and they were the Achuar so we decided to go there to see what
could be done. We went for an exploratory feldwork and made sure

that they existed as there were only scarce mentions of them in the
literature. We got married frst because we thought that with the
missionaries it might be easier if we had a normative status to bind
us, and Anne-Christine and I went to Ecuador in 1976 as a sort of
honeymoon which was to last three years.
II
PD: It started, as I had said, I had come to terms with my
romanticism, with a long journey in a freighter. We decided to go
to South America in a cargo boat which was very pleasant and
which took three passengers. The honeymoon started when we
began to learn the Jivaro language on the boat. The problem with
South America is that you cannot learn the language unless it is
Quichua, Aymara and Guarani – the great languages. But in the
Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, the equivalent
of SOAS in Paris, no other languages of the Amazonia were taught.
But we had a friend, an Italian linguist, Maurizio Gnerre, who was
the only professional linguist until now to have worked on Jivaro.
It is an isolated language, spoken by approximately 100,000 people
in Ecuador and Peru, in the foothills of the Andes in the rainforest,
and they occupy territory which is about the size of Portugal. It is a
very large ethnic group and Jivaro is probably the largest population
in Amazonia who speak a single language. He gave us a small devise
to teach yourself Jivaro with cassettes and a book by a missionary,
and also help with pronunciation.
We arrived in Ecuador, landing in Guayaquil, and went to the
forest across the Andes to a small town called Puyo which was the
end of the road – the end of the colonization front. No one there
knew how to get to the Achuar though some said they knew such
people were living about 200 km away, but they had no idea how
to get there. Finally, we got a lift from the Ecuadorian Army. They
took us to a small army base in the forest by plane and there we
were introduced to Quichua speaking people who were maintaining
the base and being used as scouts and porters by the army. They
were the neighbours to the north of the Achuar and used to trade
with them. Two of them said they would take us to the Achuar. We
walked there with them and it took us about two days of our frst
real hard trek in the forest. In the evening, we arrived at a group of
houses where people seemed to be speaking a language similar to
that we were learning. They had painted faces and long hair and the
two guides left us saying they would never sleep in an Achuar village!
So, they left. There was a young man who knew some Spanish as he
had worked for oil prospectors for seismic lines. He was our frst
contact because the little that we had learnt of the language on the
boat was not enough to communicate. That was the beginning of a
long stay of almost two years continuously.
After that we each got positions at the University of Quito
where there was a department of anthropology which had been very
recently created. No one at the time had any idea what Amazonian
people were and had very little notion of kinship studies or things
like that. We spent a further year in Ecuador alternating giving
classes in Quito and going back to the feld for shorter periods. It
was a remarkable experience. I have written two books about it –
one was my doctoral thesis on the relationship between the Achuar
and their environment and the other is a more personal account of
what it is to try to make some sense of a very foreign culture – The
Spears of Twilight – where I tried to recount precisely the progress
that we made in getting to know these people. I do not know what
to say about that.
AM: Could I ask you one or two simple questions about it?
PD: Yes, of course.
AM: I knew Stephen Hugh-Jones used to lecture about the boredom
of feldwork and how tedious it was – days and days of similar
activities – extreme boredom and diffculty of sustaining interest,
was that the case?
PD: On the subject of boredom in feldwork we did not have even
the relief of the large rituals that Stephen Hugh-Jones described in his
book. In fact, the only rituals they had were linked to warfare. The
experience of feldwork is long periods of boredom, much like village
life. Nothing happens. Except for the few houses gathered round an
airstrip which had been built for the Protestant missionaries, most of
the houses were scattered as in the traditional habitat. You have to
imagine arriving in a house with a polygynous family, populous, of
maybe 30 people, and then you are completely isolated from any other
house which may be one or two days walk or canoe away. It is a world
where the humans are scarce. This is where I understood precisely
one of the many reasons why there was such a close connection with
non-humans. As soon as you go out of the house you will not see
humans but you are immersed in a sea of non-humans – plants and
animals and so forth. The boredom was precisely these long periods
where nothing happened, where people would get excited in ritual
discourse during visits – it was a society that mediates visit through
ritual discourse. There would be interminable ritual discourses with
a minimum of information exchanged.
AM: It reminds me of Cambridge high tables!
PD: It is very similar, though the food is not so good. And the wine,
not to talk about the wine! These long periods of boredom were also
shattered by periods of feuding and warfare, when gossiping could
lead to accusations of shamanic attack and escalate into small-scale
war. At times I wondered whether warfare was not just a way to
interrupt this boredom because there was sudden excitement and
everybody woke up in a way. In contrast with an anthropologist
working in a city or a large village, there were very few people for us
to interact with. Women go to the garden for the whole day where
men are not welcome, neither are foreigners or even husbands.
Anne-Christine would go with the women. I had a shotgun and
I was supposed to behave like a man but I was a terrible hunter! I
would go out and when they were feeling tolerant, one of the men
would take me hunting with him. But I was very clumsy and most
of the time I would scare off the animals! They would have much
preferred that I hunted on my own.
The knack of hunting is not about shooting animals but fnding
them. That requires an expertise in ethology and a vast knowledge
to connect clues as to where animals are which I could not have
acquired. Even among the Achuar, the best hunters were over 30–35
years old. A boy of 10 would be able to name about 300 birds,
recognize them and imitate their sound, understand their behaviour
and know what they feed on, but this incredible naturalist knowledge
was not enough. It required 20 years more of experience, walking
in the forest and being attentive to clues to become a good hunter,
so I had no chance of that happening. That was a problem because
there were no informants because everyone had gone off. The most
productive period was early in the morning before dawn. The Achuar
wake up around 4.00am, then gather round fres in the hut because
it is a bit chilly in the early mornings and discuss their dreams.
They also talk about anything that is important at the time. This
is the real moment important things can be discussed and where
important information can be acquired. At 6.00am, when the sun
is out, everybody goes off to do things and the long day begins.
AM: I know you have developed and I would like you to explain
a four-fold classifcation of the different ontologies as the ways of
knowing which stemmed out of this work. It is taking the contrast
between nature and humanity and pivoting it in four different ways.
Could you tell me how the feldwork led into this and what this
theory is more generally?
PD: When I went to the Achuar it was with the idea of trying to
understand how the society adapted and coped with its environment.
At the time there were two main theories to deal with this – one
was American materialism, cultural ecology, which was extremely
deterministic and which held that in fact most institutions in small-
scale societies of this type were the product of adapting to limiting
factors in the environment. The main fgure was Marvin Harris.
Some of his students had worked in Amazonia and a good deal
of the literature in cultural ecology was either on New Guinea or
Amazonia. I had my doubts about this for epistemological reasons
because I felt it was a form of vulgar materialism and much too
simple, but I wanted to do the same kind of analysis that the cultural
materialists had done to see if it worked or not.
The other was broadly speaking the symbolic or Lévi-Straussian
paradigm, that nature was not something you adapted to in the sense
of the cultural materialist, but it was a vast lexicon from which you
extracted meaning in order to construct these meanings into symbolic
constructs – classifcations, myths and so forth. I thought that what
was left between the two was the interaction, even the technical
interaction, between humans and non-humans in this process, and
this is what I went to study.
However, after a few months, when I began to understand the
language, especially in the morning sessions when people would
recount their dreams, they would say that they had been visited in
the dream by a human-like entity, a howler monkey or manioc plant,
and this entity would deliver a message of complaint. I remember
vividly a case where a manioc plant appearing as a young woman
was complaining that the mistress of the garden – women are the
mistresses of the gardens – was trying to poison ‘her’ because she
had planted a species of plant used for poisoning fsh, too close. A
young woman who comes in this dream – the question is, why is
it a young woman? The manioc plant sees herself as a woman and
when we are not there, they live the life of humans.
We discovered also that the Achuar were constantly singing in
their heads, either to plants and animals, spirits, or to humans who
were not present. These songs were addressed from the heart to
the heart of the addressee. The idea was to infuence the behaviour
of the entity addressed by these songs. Every person had tens even
hundreds of these songs which were adapted to all circumstances.
In fact, when they were doing their chores in the garden or hunting,
they were constantly establishing a direct link through these songs
to the non-humans with whom they were interacting. This is when
I really became aware that the premises that I had gone with in
my mental toolbox when I went to the feld were not adapted. I
was interested in studying precisely the adaptation of a culture
to a natural environment and in fact nature and culture were not
separate. They were meaningless concepts. There was a constant
interaction between humans and non-humans, and non-humans
were not perceived as nature but part of a wider network of social
interactions. I did the vestigial but necessary analysis of the soils,
plants, the density of planting, productivity of the soils, analysis of
the plants in the forest and the gardens so on which is the basis of
my dissertation, In the Society of Nature. I also became aware of the
degree of manipulation of the plants out of the garden was enormous.
Each garden not only had a number of cultivated plants but also of
plants that were transplanted from the forest. This manipulation of
plants meant that the forest was in fact due to the cyclical nature of
the swidden agriculture, regularly transformed by this and became
progressively something like a macro garden. There was not a raw
nature which a raw society would adapt to, but a very complicated
process of co-evolution between humans and non-humans in the
very long term. When I came back to France and started writing
my dissertation, it became obvious that I could not frame that in
the language either of materialism or of symbolism or even of Lévi-
Straussian analysis. It was not the relationship of a culture to a
specifc nature. This is when I tried to fgure out how best to rework
the concepts that I was using to describe this situation. To cut a
long story short, when I got back – I spent some time here in King’s
College – I embarked on a monstrous project for my dissertation
which I never completed as such because it would have taken me
20 years. I fnally restricted it to what it is now. I was a teacher by
trade, I decided not to teach philosophy in the lycée because I knew
it would take too much of my time away from my dissertation, and
so we were living meagrely with a little teaching in anthropology.
One day I went to the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris,
an institution created by Fernand Braudel.17 At the time the head
of the institution was a remarkable man called Clemens Heller,18
an Austrian historian, and he knew everyone in the world. I would
go and see him regularly to see if he had some subsidy for me. One
day when I arrived in his offce and he told me Bernard Williams19
was here and because I spoke good English said that I should go
and have lunch with him at the expense of the Maison des Sciences
de l’Homme. We had a nice conversation and at the end he invited
me to come to King’s for a few months and Clemens Heller gave me
the money for that so that in 1981 I fnished writing my doctoral
dissertation here, living in a small fat in King’s Parade, that is when
I discovered Cambridge and King’s College.
After that I was fortunate enough to get a teaching position at
the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and elected maître
de conférences and I started a research seminar. This is where I
really entered into a comparative framework trying to make sense
of what I had observed in Amazonia and see how I could account
for that with concepts that were not available on the intellectual
market. Research seminars are fabulous because when you fnish
your research dissertation you may be knowledgeable about the
kinds of people you stayed with but you know nothing about
anthropology. I really started learning my trade by teaching things I
did not know to people who knew less. This is when I embarked on
reading systematically the ethnography of Amazonia, North America
and the circumpolar regions including Siberia. This was because I
saw that some of the features that I observed among the Achuar are
present elsewhere in Amazonia and other parts of the world. So, I
came to call this animism, this thing which I had observed among
the Achuar, and in some other parts of the world, the idea that most
entities in the world have what I call an interiority, a subjectivity, a
disposition to communicate, to lead internally the life of a human,
but were differentiated by their bodies in the sense that their bodies
give them access to specifc, but disconnected parts of the world,
because the world of the fsh is not the world of the bird, nor insect,
nor human, because each of these classes of species have special
bodily dispositions that open up for them something which is an
expansion of this bodily disposition but which is restricted. This
was the reverse of the way we see things usually and it is why it
was initially so diffcult to grasp it.
We, in Europe, in the past centuries have seen humans having a
distinctive interiority in contrast to any other beings in the world
because we have a symbolic capacity, we have a language that
expresses it, we have the cogito and so on, yet we are a substance
like any other which submits to the same laws of chemistry,
physics and so forth as the rest of the organic and non-organic
beings in the world. So, that was the reverse. I started toying with
this idea that in fact all humans were able to see continuities and
discontinuities between themselves and their environment and non-
human environment, but did not necessarily see the continuities and
discontinuities in the same place. We, in the West, would see them
in the way that we have ended by calling them nature and society,
or nature and culture, which is mainly predicated on this idea of
the ‘distinctivity’ of the interiority of humans, while among animist
people the discontinuity was rather between physical worlds and
the kind of perspective you could have on the physical world. Since,
it was obviously not the case everywhere and I could not restrict
myself with the idea of us and the rest, there were other formulas
which were obviously very different from the animists, and especially
Australia. When I began reading systematically on Australia, I was
struck by the fact that these people were also hunters, had a close
relationship with the environment, but were completely different
from the animist hunters and horticulturists in the countries that I
had studied frst and read about elsewhere, in the sense that there
was no real interaction as from person to person between Australian
aboriginals and the animals for instance.
Discoveries happen by chance. I remember reading a book by
the linguist Carl Georg von Brandenstein.20 In a footnote of this
book, Brandenstein says a very important thing of which probably
he was not even aware himself. He was not aware of the importance
of what he was writing. It is a book on the name of totems in a
number of aboriginal languages. He says that in some cases these
names of totems are not taxa, they are not names of species, but of
qualities and these names of qualities are used to designate a taxon.
It is not a ‘kangaroo’ but a ‘bright one’ which is used as an epithet
to denote an animal. This was extremely interesting in the sense that
it allowed me to sidestep the old idea of descent from an animal.
So, you either have the Lévi-Straussian analysis of totemism as
a universal classifcatory device which uses discontinuities between
natural species to conceptualize discontinuities between social
species, but that is a universal device, or you have the Frazerian idea
of descent from an animal ancestor. But in that case, it was obvious
that it was not an animal ancestor. It was a prototype which was
defned by a quality and which subsumed a number of qualities that
humans and non-humans of the totemic class would be sharing. By
contrast with the previous opposition what we had here was groups
of humans and non-humans who shared qualities, physical and
moral, subsumed under a name and issued from the same prototype.
By contrast with the other two ontological formulae, there was a
coagulation of internal and bodily qualities.
AM: What did you call that?
PD: I called that totemism, obviously. I took Australia as the model
of course, but it is present elsewhere, in particular in some places in
North America, although not from the place that the word ‘totem’
originates from which is the Ojibwe, but rather in the central North
America with people like the Creek and the Chickasaw. There was
a missing piece where all that belongs or pertains to interiority or
bodily functions or physicality is disconnected. This I thought I
recognized, call it serendipitous, because at that time I was reading
Marcel Granet’s21 book on Chinese thought, and re-reading a chapter
of Michel Foucault book The Order of Things called ‘The Prose of
the World’ in which he analyses the devices used in Renaissance
thought for connecting things. It was obvious that they were very
close to the devices that Chinese thought was using to connect things.
So, I started in this direction and the fourth ontological formula
(besides animism, naturalism and totemism) is one where everything
in the world at the infra-individual level is made of fragments that
are disconnected and in order for such a world to become liveable,
interpretable, cognizable, these disparate elements need to be
connected. They are connected by correspondences. Correspondences
are systematically organized by analogical reasoning. Such reasoning
is universal but is very much pre-eminent in these ways of detecting
continuities and discontinuities between things in the world. This
is why I call that analogism. It is something that was present in
ancient Greece and up to the Renaissance in Europe, but also in
the Far East. I particularly analysed it in the case of cultures I
have a stronger purchase which are central Mexico and the Andes
where it is very obvious that we have analogous systems. This is
four ways of detecting precisely continuities and discontinuities
between elements of the world which are models. I do not pretend
that they describe specifcally a situation, but they are models in the
sense that they provide a general understanding of the connections
between different elements which we tend to dissociate – societies,
religion, the relationship to the spirits, forms of subjectivity so on
– in a rather integrated manner. All this started precisely from my
discontent with the intellectual tools I had brought with me to the
feld and which led me to try to reconfgure these tools in order to
be more faithful to the kind of situations which anthropologists fnd
when they do their feldwork.
AM: When you were going you were already at a distance from
your society, was it diffcult coming back? And what has been the
effect on you?
PD: Coming back from the feld was extremely diffcult. It was almost
an ordeal. This distance that I mention was an intellectual, perhaps
playful aesthetic one, but when you come back you fnd that many
dimensions of the world you come back to are pointless. What I
found most diffcult was the mediation of goods and objects, mainly
goods, when I was struck by the accuracy of Marx’s analysis of petty
commodity fetishism, the fact that social relations are mediated by
objects. I became detached from objects at the time and I very rarely
buy things when I travel now as I am oppressed by objects, in a
way. This became obsessive when I came back. I had the constant
impression of objects mediating between me and other people. This
comes out of the fact that we had lived for two years with the Achuar
with very few things, and we had lived very happily. Of course, there
were things that I missed and it is when you are in the feld that you
really appreciate and know what you look for in your own culture
and what is important to you. Some pieces of music, and landscapes
that I was used to from my youth in Southern France, these I missed.
But not the objects. This meant there was a widening of distance and
that we lead a double life in a way. We live a social life because I am,
what is called in France, a Mandarin. I am at the top of the pecking
order in the French university system, but at the same time, I always
have the impression that I have a dissociative personality and I observe
myself as an actor in the theatre of life. This was the case before but
it was considerably augmented as a feeling after I came back.
AM: My last question is about Anne-Christine. When students ask
if they should go to the feld with their partners or wives, I usually
tell them it is very risky – it will either make the relationship very
strong or, if there are any cracks in the relationship, it will break it
pretty soon. In my case, I have had both experiences. I wondered
how you worked together and what your relationship in your
intellectual life has been?
PD: I think your remark is very accurate, it is either or. In my case
it worked wonderfully because we were both partners and lovers.
It worked well also because of the division of labour in feldwork.

It is paradoxical that the Achuar live in large long-houses with no
internal separation so men and women appear to be mixed, but
they are not at all mixed. There is a strong invisible barrier between
men and women and I was confned to the male part of social life
and Anne-Christine was at ease with the women. We really led
two different lives during most of the day. We have never, in fact,
collaborated. I think we have written one article together because
from the beginning we wanted to be independent as producers of
science from one another. We were never in the same institutions in
France though we both worked in Paris. We constantly discussed,
both in the feld and afterwards, our hypotheses but never working
as a couple producing things together. I think it is a good balance
in that sense. In the feld, I would sometimes be alone because there
were some places where my best Achuar friends would tell me that
it would not have been appropriate for Anne-Christine to go, places
in the territory where there was a war going on so I would go alone,
but most of the time we were together. It was an ideal situation as
if you are a man alone it is very diffcult. The world of women is
absolutely off limits, and the Achuar are quite jealous, because there
may be suspicion that you are trying to seduce women. If you are
a woman alone it is not good either because you are treated as a
quasi-man by the women and not really as a woman by the men.
It is ambiguous. So, working as a couple, both for personal and
scientifc reasons, was the best choice.
AM: Is there anything you would have liked me to ask you that I
have missed?
PD: I do not know. I would go on were it not for my linguistic
limitations.
AM: We did not talk about religion because you said by the age of
12, you were an atheist. You mentioned music as you went along.
PD: I could talk about politics, just a few words. Finally, after all
these years, I think I can make a comeback in politics in a way, not
as the kind of militant that I was initially, but trying to reconcile the
deep concern that I have for nature, the fate of ecology, the problem
of global warming, species extinction and political concerns. My

experience of feldwork and seeing people deal politically. in fact,
with non-humans in a very specifc way has helped me to understand
and perhaps foster a new way to deal with what is called both
political anthropology, the study of social organization, and more
generally speaking the political programme, than if I had not had this
experience. This is what I would like to devote my thoughts to once
I have fnished the book I am writing on the anthropology of images.
AM: Good luck and thank you very much indeed Philippe.
NOTES
1. Philippe Descola. 2021. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Philippe_Descola
2. Claude Levi-Strauss, see Appendix.
3. Jean-Toussaint Desanti, see Appendix.
4. Martial Gueroult (1891–1976) was a French philosopher. His primary
areas of research were in 17th- and 18th-century philosophy as well as
the history of philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_Gueroult
5. Baruch Spinoza, see Appendix.
6. René Descartes, see Appendix.
7. Michel Foucault, see Appendix.
8. Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879–1940) better known as Leon Trotsky
was an Ukrainian-Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and
politician. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism
which has become known as Trotskyism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Leon_Trotsky
9. Maurice Godelier, see Appendix.
11. Louis Dumont, see Appendix.
12. Pierre Clastres, see Appendix.
13. The moiety system in anthropology means each of two social or
ritual groups into which a people is divided, especially among Australian
Aboriginal people and some North American Indians; or, a part or portion,
especially a lesser share.
14. Stephen Hugh-Jones, see Appendix.
15. Montaigne, see Appendix.
16. Rafael Karsten, see Appendix.
17. Fernand Braudel, see Appendix.

18. Franz Max Ludwig Melchior Clemens Heller (1917–2002) is an
American science administrator. He trained in economic history before
devoting himself almost exclusively to the organization and administration
of research in human and social sciences. He founded the Salzburg Seminar
with Fernand Braudel. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clemens_Heller
19. Bernard Williams, see Appendix.
20. Carl Georg Christoph Freiherr von Brandenstein (1909–2005) was a
German linguist who took up the study of Australian Aboriginal languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Georg_von_Brandenstein
21. Marcel Granet, see Appendix.
Appendix
Biographical information
(in alphabetical order)
GORDON WILLARD ALLPORT (1897–1967)

Allport was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the frst
psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often
referred to as one of the founding fgures of personality psychology.
He contributed to the formation of values scales and rejected both
a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often
was too deeply interpretive, and a behavioural approach, which he
thought did not provide deep enough interpretations from their data.
Instead of these popular approaches, he developed an eclectic theory
based on traits. He emphasized the uniqueness of each individual,
and the importance of the present context, as opposed to past
history, for understanding the personality. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Gordon_Allport
FRANCIS RORY PEREGRINE ‘PERRY’

ANDERSON (B. 1938)
Anderson is a British intellectual and essayist. His work ranges across
historical sociology, intellectual history, and cultural analysis. What
unites Anderson’s work is a preoccupation with Western Marxism.
Anderson is perhaps best known as the moving force behind the New
Left Review. He is Professor of History and Sociology at the University
of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Anderson has written many
books, most recently Brazil Apart: 1964–2019 and The H-Word: The
Peripeteia of Hegemony. He is the brother of political scientist Benedict

Anderson (1936–2015). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Anderson
DAVID ERNEST APTER (1924–2010)

Apter was an American political scientist and sociologist. He was
Henry J. Heinz Professor of Comparative Political and Social
Development and Senior Research Scientist at Yale University. He
taught at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago (where
he was the Executive Secretary of the Committee for the Comparative
Study of New Nations), the University of California, (where he was
director of the Institute of International Studies), and Yale University,
where he held a joint appointment in political science and sociology
and served as Director of the Social Science Division, Chair of
Sociology, and was a founding fellow of the Whitney Humanities
Center. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 1966. He did feld research on development,
democratization and political violence in Africa, Latin America,
Japan (Sanrizuka Struggle etc.), and China. In 2006 he was the frst
recipient of the Foundation Mattei Dogan prize for contributions to
Interdisciplinary research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Apter
GREGORY BATESON (1904–80)

Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist,
visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work
intersected that of many other felds. His writings include Steps to
an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). In Palo
Alto, California, Bateson and colleagues developed the double-bind
theory of schizophrenia. Bateson’s interest in systems theory forms
a thread running through his work. He was one of the original
members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics
(1941–60), and the later set on Group Processes (1954–60), where
he represented the social and behavioural sciences. He was interested
in the relationship of these felds to epistemology. His association
with the editor and author Stewart Brand helped widen his infuence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson
APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION 131
ROBERT NEELLY BELLAH (1927–2013)

Bellah was an American sociologist and the Elliott Professor
of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was
internationally known for his work related to the sociology of
religion. In 1972 Carl Kaysen and Clifford Geertz nominated Robert
Bellah as a candidate for a permanent faculty position at the Institute
for Advanced Study (IAS). (Bellah was at the IAS as a temporary
member for the academic year 1972–73.) On January 15, 1973, at an
IAS faculty meeting, the IAS faculty voted against Bellah by thirteen
to eight with three abstentions. All of the mathematicians and half
of the historians voted against the nomination. All of the physicists
voted in favour of the nomination. After the vote, Kaysen said that
he intended to recommend Bellah’s nomination to the IAS’s trustees
despite the vote. The faculty members who voted against Bellah
were outraged. The dispute became extremely acrimonious, but in
April 1973 Bellah’s eldest daughter died and he, in grief, withdrew
from consideration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_N._Bellah
RUTH FULTON BENEDICT (1887–1948)

Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born
in New York City, attended Vassar College and graduated in 1909.
After studying anthropology at the New School of Social Research
under Elsie Clews Parsons, she entered graduate studies at Columbia
University in 1921, where she studied under Franz Boas. She received
her PhD and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom
she shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler, were among her
students and colleagues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Benedict
ISAIAH BERLIN (1909–97)

Berlin was a naturalised British philosopher, historian of ideas,
political theorist, educator, public intellectual and moralist, and
essayist. He was renowned for his conversational brilliance, his
defence of liberalism and pluralism, his opposition to political
extremism and intellectual fanaticism, and his accessible, coruscating
writings on people and ideas. His essay Two Concepts of Liberty

(1958) contributed to a revival of interest in political theory in the
English-speaking world, and remains one of the most infuential and
widely discussed texts in that feld: admirers and critics agree that
Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative liberty remains,
for better or worse, a basic starting point for discussions of the
meaning and value of political freedom. Later in his life, the greater
availability of his numerous essays began to provoke increasing
interest in his work, particularly in the idea of value pluralism; that
Berlin’s articulation of value pluralism contains many ambiguities
and even obscurities has only encouraged further work on this rich
and important topic by other philosophers. https://plato.stanford.
edu/entries/berlin/
MARC LÉOPOLD BENJAMIN BLOCH (1886–1944)

Bloch was a French historian. He was a founding member of the
Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval
history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of
his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg
(1920 to 1936), the University of Paris (1936 to 1939), and the
University of Montpellier (1941 to 1944). https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Marc_Bloch
FRANZ URI BOAS (1858–1942)

Boas was a German-born American anthropologist and a pioneer of
modern anthropology who has been called the ‘Father of American
Anthropology’. His work is associated with the movements known
as Historical Particularism and Cultural Relativism.
Studying in Germany, Boas was awarded a doctorate in 1881
in physics while also studying geography. He then participated in
a geographical expedition to northern Canada, where he became
fascinated with the culture and language of the Baffn Island Inuit. He
went on to do feld work with the indigenous cultures and languages
of the Pacifc Northwest. In 1887 he emigrated to the United States,
where he frst worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian, and

in 1899 became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University,
where he remained for the rest of his career. Through his students,
many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and
research programmes inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly
infuenced the development of American anthropology. Among
his most signifcant students were A. L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict,
Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Gilberto
Freyre and many others. Boas was one of the most prominent
opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientifc racism, the
idea that race is a biological concept and that human behaviour is
best understood through the typology of biological characteristics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas
FERNAND BRAUDEL (1902–85)

Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School.
His scholarship focused on three main projects: The Mediterranean
(1923–49, then 1949–66), Civilization and Capitalism (1955–79),
and the unfnished Identity of France (1970–85). His reputation
stems in part from his writings, but even more from his success in
making the Annales School the most important engine of historical
research in France and much of the world after 1950. As the
dominant leader of the Annales School of historiography in the 1950s
and 1960s, he exerted enormous infuence on historical writing
in France and other countries. He was a student of Henri Hauser
(1866–1946). Braudel has been considered one of the greatest of
the modern historians who have emphasized the role of large-scale
socioeconomic factors in the making and writing of history. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Braudel
HARRY BRIDGES (1901–90)

Bridges was an Australian-born American union leader, frst with
the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). In 1937, he led
several chapters in forming a new union, the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union (ILWU), expanding members to workers in

warehouses, and led it for the next 40 years. He was prosecuted for his
labor organizing and believed subversive status by the U.S. government
during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, with the goal of deportation.
This was never achieved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Bridges
SIR EDMUND KERCHEVER CHAMBERS,

KBE CB FBA (1866–1954)
E.K. Chambers was an English literary critic and Shakespearean
scholar. His four-volume work on The Elizabethan Stage, published
in 1923, remains a standard resource. However, Chambers’s great
work, begun even before he left Oxford and pursued for three
decades, was an extensive examination of the history and conditions
of English theatre in the medieval and Renaissance periods. It was
published in three bursts. The Medieval Stage, issued in 1903,
offered a comprehensive survey of medieval theatre, covering not
only the fairly well-known interludes, but also the then-obscure
folk drama, minstrelsy, and liturgical drama. https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/E._K._Chambers
VERE GORDON CHILDE (1892–1957)

Childe was an Australian archaeologist who specialised in the
study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the
United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of
Edinburgh and then the Institute of Archaeology, London. He wrote
twenty-six books during his career. Initially an early proponent of
culture-historical archaeology, he later became the frst exponent of
Marxist archaeology in the Western world. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/V._Gordon_Childe
PIERRE CLASTRES (1934–77)

Clastres was a French anthropologist and ethnologist. He is best
known for his contributions to the feld of political anthropology,
with his feldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory
of stateless societies. An anarchist seeking an alternative to the
hierarchized Western societies, he mostly researched indigenous
people in which the power was not considered coercive and chiefs
were powerless.
With a background in literature and philosophy, Clastres started
studying anthropology with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Métraux
in the 1950s. Between 1963 and 1974 he travelled fve times to
South America to do feldwork among the Guaraní, the Chulupi,
and the Yanomami. Clastres mostly published essays and, because
of his premature death, his work was unfnished and scattered. His
signature work is the essay collection Society Against the State (1974)
and his bibliography also includes Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
(1972), Le Grand Parler (1974), and Archaeology of Violence (1980).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Clastres
BASIL RISBRIDGER DAVIDSON MC (1914–2010)

Davidson was a British journalist and historian who wrote more than
30 books on African history and politics. According to two modern
writers,‘Davidson, a campaigning journalist whose frst of many books
on African history and politics appeared in 1956, remains perhaps
the single-most effective disseminator of the new feld to a popular
international audience’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Davidson
HUGH SYKES DAVIES (1909–84)

Davies was an English poet, novelist and communist who was one
of a small group of 1930s British surrealists. He had a talent for
friendship, and as well as Empson, he numbered T.S. Eliot, I.A.
Richards, Anthony Blunt, Wittgenstein and Salvador Dalí amongst
his circle. At one stage he had Malcolm Lowry declared his ward
in an attempt to stop Lowry’s drinking.
Davies’ poems were mostly published in avant garde magazines
and were not collected during his lifetime. His novels include Full
Fathom Five (1956) and The Papers of Andrew Melmoth (1960).
He also wrote Petron (1935). He appears in the Canadian National

Film Board’s feature-length documentary Volcano: An Inquiry into
the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry talking about Lowry and
their friendship. He was a University Lecturer and Fellow of St John’s
College, Cambridge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Sykes_Davies
RENÉ DESCARTES (1596–1650)

Descartes was a creative mathematician of the first order, an
important scientifc thinker, and an original metaphysician. During
the course of his life, he was a mathematician frst, a natural
scientist or “natural philosopher” second, and a metaphysician
third. In mathematics, he developed the techniques that made
possible algebraic (or “analytic”) geometry. In natural philosophy,
he can be credited with several specifc achievements: co-framer
of the sine law of refraction, developer of an important empirical
account of the rainbow, and proposer of a naturalistic account of
the formation of the earth and planets (a precursor to the nebular
hypothesis). More importantly, he offered a new vision of the natural
world that continues to shape our thought today: a world of matter
possessing a few fundamental properties and interacting according
to a few universal laws. This natural world included an immaterial
mind that, in human beings, was directly related to the brain; in this
way, Descartes formulated the modern version of the mind–body
problem. In metaphysics, he provided arguments for the existence
of God, to show that the essence of matter is extension, and that the
essence of mind is thought. Descartes claimed early on to possess
a special method, which was variously exhibited in mathematics,
natural philosophy, and metaphysics, and which, in the latter part
of his life, included, or was supplemented by, a method of doubt.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/
JEAN-TOUSSAINT DESANTI (1914–2002)

Desanti was a French educator and philosopher known for his
work on both the philosophy of mathematics and phenomenology.
During World War II, he was a member of the French Resistance,

associating with Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux. He joined
the French Communist Party in 1943 with his wife Dominique,
remaining a member until 1956. In 1950 he participated in the
publication of Science bourgeoise et science proletarienne with
Raymond Guyot, Francis Cohen and Gérard Vassails. This book
was part of a campaign by the French Communist Party to advocate
support for Lysenkoism. Also in 1956, he published his Introduction
à l’histoire de la philosophie. Desanti taught philosophy at the
École Normale Supérieure in Paris, at the Lycée Lakanal, at the
École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud and at the Sorbonne. His
students included Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. In 1968, he
published Les Idéalités mathématiques, recherches épistémologiques
sur le développement de la théorie des fonctions de variables réelles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Toussaint_Desanti
JOHN DEWEY (1859–1952)

Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational
reformer whose ideas have been infuential in education and social
reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the
frst half of the twentieth century. The overriding theme of Dewey’s
works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics,
education, or communication and journalism. https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/John_Dewey
CHARLES JOHN HUFFAM DICKENS, FRSA

(1812–70)
Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some
of the world’s best-known fctional characters and is regarded
by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works
enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the
20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary
genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
LOUIS DUMONT (1911–98)

Dumont was a French anthropologist. Dumont was born in
Thessaloniki, in the Salonica Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. He
was an associate professor at Oxford University during the 1950s,
and director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
(EHESS) in Paris. A specialist on the cultures and societies of India,
Dumont also studied western social philosophy and ideologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Dumont
ÉMILE DURKHEIM (1858–1917)

Durkheim was a French sociologist who rose to prominence in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Along with Karl Marx and
Max Weber, he is credited as being one of the principal founders
of modern sociology. Chief among his claims is that society is
a sui generis reality, or a reality unique to itself and irreducible
to its composing parts. It is created when individual consciences
interact and fuse together to create a synthetic reality that is
completely new and greater than the sum of its parts. This reality
can only be understood in sociological terms, and cannot be
reduced to biological or psychological explanations. https://iep.
utm.edu/durkheim/
FREDERICK RUSSELL EGGAN (1906–91)

Eggan was an American anthropologist best known for his innovative
application of the principles of British social anthropology to the
study of Native American tribes. He was the favourite student of the
British social anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown during Radcliffe-
Brown’s years at the University of Chicago. His feldwork was
among Pueblo peoples in the southwestern U.S. Eggan later taught
at Chicago himself. His students there included Sol Tax.
His best known works include his edited volume Social
Anthropology of North American Tribes (1937) and The American
Indian (1966). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Eggan
ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879–1955)

Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely
acknowledged to be one of the greatest physicists of all time.
Einstein is known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also
made important contributions to the development of the theory of
quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are together
the two pillars of modern physics. His mass–energy equivalence
formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been dubbed
‘the world’s most famous equation’. His work is also known for its
infuence on the philosophy of science. He received the 1921 Nobel
Prize in Physics ‘for his services to theoretical physics, and especially
for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect’, a pivotal step
in the development of quantum theory. His intellectual achievements
and originality resulted in ‘Einstein’ becoming synonymous with
‘genius’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT (1888–1965)

Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic,
and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such
works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot
exercised a strong infuence on Anglo-American culture from the
1920s until late in the century. His experiments in diction, style,
and versifcation revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical
essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. The
publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the greatest
living English poet and man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded
both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. https://
www.britannica.com/biography/T-S-Eliot
FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820–95)

Engels was a German philosopher, economist, historian, political
theorist and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman,
journalist and political activist, whose father was an owner of large
textile factories in Salford (Lancashire, England) and Barmen, Prussia

(now Wuppertal, Germany).
Engels developed what is now known as Marxism together with
Karl Marx. In 1845, he published The Condition of the Working
Class in England, based on personal observations and research
in English cities. In 1848, Engels co-authored The Communist
Manifesto with Marx and also authored and co-authored (primarily
with Marx) many other works. Later, Engels supported Marx
fnancially, allowing him to do research and write Das Kapital. After
Marx’s death, Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das
Kapital. Additionally, Engels organised Marx’s notes on the Theories
of Surplus Value which were later published as the ‘fourth volume’
of Das Kapital. In 1884, he published The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State on the basis of Marx’s ethnographic
research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels
SIR EDWARD EVAN EVANS-PRITCHARD (1902–73)

Evans-Pritchard was one of England’s foremost social anthropologists,
especially known for his investigations of African cultures, for his
exploration of segmentary systems, and for his explanations of
witchcraft and magic. After studying modern history at the University
of Oxford, Evans-Pritchard did postgraduate work in anthropology
at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He then
did feldwork among the Zande and Nuer of what is now South
Sudan. Two books about these peoples, Witchcraft, Oracles, and
Magic Among the Azande (1937) and The Nuer (1940), made his
reputation. In 1940 he and Meyer Fortes edited a volume of essays,
African Political Systems, that revolutionized the comparative study
of governments. He was knighted in 1971. https://www.britannica.
com/biography/E-E-Evans-Pritchard
LLOYD ASHTON ‘TOM’ FALLERS JR (1925–74)

Fallers was the A.A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in
the departments of anthropology and sociology at the University of
Chicago. Fallers’ work in social and cultural anthropology focused

on social stratifcation and the development of new states in East
Africa (especially Buganda) and Turkey. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Lloyd_Fallers
WILLIAM CUTHBERT FAULKNER (1897–1962)

Faulkner was an American writer who is primarily known for his
novels and short stories set in the fctional Yoknapatawpha County,
based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his
life. In general, Faulkner is considered one of the most celebrated
writers of American literature and specifcally, he is considered one
of the best writers of Southern literature. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/William_Faulkner
SIR MOSES ISRAEL FINLEY, FBA (1912–86)

Finley was an American-born British academic and classical
scholar. His prosecution by the United States Senate Subcommittee
on Internal Security during the 1950s resulted in his relocation
to England, where he became an English classical scholar and
eventually master of Darwin College, Cambridge. His most notable
publication is The Ancient Economy (1973) in which he argued that
the economy in antiquity was governed by status and civic ideology,
rather than rational economic motivations. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Moses_Finley
MEYER FORTES (1906–83)

Fortes was a British social anthropologist known for his
investigations of West African societies. After studying at the
University of Cape Town in South Africa, Fortes received his PhD
in psychology from the London School of Economics and Political
Science (LSE) in 1930. In 1932 he turned from psychology to
anthropology and studied under Bronisław Malinowski at the LSE.
During 1934–37 he worked in Ghana and, upon his return, was
appointed lecturer in social anthropology at the LSE. Subsequently,

he was appointed research lecturer in African sociology at the
University of Oxford. He was professor of social anthropology at
King’s College, Cambridge, from 1950 to 1973. Fortes’s special
interests were the political anthropology and kinship systems of
various African peoples, especially the Tallensi. Most of his studies
were conducted in nations along the Guinea coast of Africa.
Among his major works are The Dynamics of Clanship Among the
Tallensi (1945), The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi (1949),
Kinship and Social Order (1969), and Time and Social Structure,
and Other Essays (1970). https://www.britannica.com/biography/
Meyer-Fortes
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926–84)

Foucault was a French historian and philosopher, associated with the
structuralist and post-structuralist movements. He has had strong
infuence not only (or even primarily) in philosophy but also in a
wide range of humanistic and social scientifc disciplines. https://
plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/
RENÉE CLAIRE FOX (1928–2020)

Fox was an American sociologist. She was a summa cum laude
graduate of Smith College in 1949, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology
in 1954 from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, where she
studied in the Department of Social Relations. Renée Fox’s major
teaching and research interests – sociology of medicine, medical
research, medical education, and medical ethics – involved her in
frst-hand, participant observation-based studies in Continental
Europe (particularly in Belgium), in Central Africa (especially in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo), and in the People’s Republic
of China, as well as in the United States. She lectured in colleges,
universities, and medical schools throughout the United States, and
taught in a number of universities abroad. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/ Renée_Fox
SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER, OM, FRS, FRSE,

FBA (1854–1941)
Frazer was a British anthropologist, folklorist, and classical scholar,
best remembered as the author of The Golden Bough (1890).
The underlying theme of the work is Frazer’s theory of a general
development of modes of thought from the magical to the religious
and, fnally, to the scientifc. His distinction between magic and
religion (magic as an attempt to control events by technical acts
based upon faulty reasoning, religion as an appeal for help to
spiritual beings) has been basically assumed in much anthropological
writing since his time. Although the evolutionary sequence of magical,
religious, and scientifc thought is no longer accepted and Frazer’s
broad general psychological theory has proved unsatisfactory, his
work enabled him to synthesize and compare a wider range of
information about religious and magical practices than has been
achieved subsequently by any other single anthropologist. https://
www.britannica.com/biography/James-George-Frazer
GEORGE R. GEIGER (1903–98)

Geiger, a professor of philosophy and a founding editor of the
Antioch Review. Geiger was John Dewey Professor of Philosophy
Emeritus at Antioch College in Yellow Springs. He joined the faculty
in 1937 on the recommendation of John Dewey and continued
teaching part time even after his formal retirement in 1969. Among
his students were the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the poet
Mark Strand. He was also treasurer of the American Philosophical
Association. His books include: The Philosophy of Henry George,
The Theory of the Land Question, Toward an Objective Ethics,
John Dewey in Perspective and Science, Folklore and Philosophy.
Geiger was born in New York City. He was the son of the founder
of the Henry George School of Social Science of New York City and
John Dewey’s last doctoral student at Columbia University. His wife,
Louise, died in 1982. He is survived by his companion, Joan Leon
King. https://nyti.ms/3iPqRx8 & https://bit.ly/3rBZv1K
ERNEST ANDRÉ GELLNER, FRAI (1925–95)

Gellner was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist
described by The Daily Telegraph, when he died, as one of the world’s
most vigorous intellectuals, and by The Independent as a ‘one-man
crusader for critical rationalism’.
His frst book, Words and Things (1959), prompted a leader in
The Times and a month-long correspondence on its letters page over
his attack on linguistic philosophy. As the Professor of Philosophy,
Logic and Scientifc Method at the London School of Economics for
22 years, the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the
University of Cambridge for eight years, and head of the new Centre
for the Study of Nationalism in Prague, Gellner fought all his life – in
his writing, teaching and political activism – against what he saw as
closed systems of thought, particularly communism, psychoanalysis,
relativism and the dictatorship of the free market. Among other issues
in social thought, modernization theory and nationalism were two
of his central themes, his multicultural perspective allowing him
to work within the subject-matter of three separate civilizations:
Western, Islamic, and Russian. He is considered one of the leading
theoreticians on the issue of nationalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Ernest_Gellner
HERMAN MAX GLUCKMAN (1911–75)

Gluckman was a South African social anthropologist esteemed for
his contributions to political and legal anthropology, particularly his
analyses of the cultural and social dimensions of law and politics
among African peoples. Examining feud and confict, he considered
their relation to cultural change in Custom and Confict in Africa
(1955). After feld study in Zululand (1936–38), Gluckman became
assistant anthropologist with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute of
Northern Rhodesia and made studies in Barotseland (1939–41).
While director of the institute (1941–47), he worked among the Ila
and Tonga people (1944) and the Lamba (1946). A lecturer in social
anthropology at the University of Oxford (1947–49), he later served

as professor of social anthropology at the University of Manchester.
The scope of Gluckman’s work is refected in the titles of his many
books, which include Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa
(1954); Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society (1965); and The
Ideas in Barotse Jurisprudence (1965). He also was editor of The
Allocation of Responsibility (1972). https://www.britannica.com/
biography/Max-Gluckman
KURT GÖDEL (1906–78)

The foremost mathematical logician of the twentieth century, Kurt
Gödel was associated with the Institute for Advanced Study from his
frst visit in the academic year 1933–34, until his death in 1978. He
was Professor in the School of Mathematics from 1953 until 1976,
when he became Professor Emeritus. Among Gödel’s most famous
results are his Incompleteness Theorems, which show that in any
consistent axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions
that cannot be proved or disproved within the system and that the
consistency of the axioms themselves cannot be proved. Additionally,
Gödel published proofs of the relative consistency of the axiom of
choice and the generalized continuum hypothesis (1938, 1940),
which strongly infuenced the (later) discovery that a computer can
never be programmed to answer all mathematical questions. https://
www.ias.edu/scholars/godel
MAURICE GODELIER (B. 1934)

Godelier is a French anthropologist who works as a Studies’
Director at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.
He is one of the most infuential French anthropologists and is best
known as one of the earliest advocates of Marxism’s incorporation
into anthropology. He is also known for his feld work among the
Baruya in Papua New Guinea from the 1960s to the 1980s. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Godelier
ESTHER GOODY (1932–2018)

Esther Goody was a social anthropologist, who was an Emeritus
Fellow of Murray Edwards College (formerly New Hall) and
Emeritus Reader in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
The daughter of the distinguished social psychologist Theodore
Newcomb and married for some years to Jack Goody the
anthropologist, Ester Goody was a creative thinker in the felds of
education, kinship and socio-linguistics. She worked mainly in West
Africa (the Gonja), but she was also interested in the sociology of
life in contemporary Britain.
GEOFFREY EDGAR SOLOMON GORER (1905–85)

Gorer was an English anthropologist and author, noted for his
application of psychoanalytic techniques to anthropology. Born into
a non-practicing Jewish family, he was educated at Charterhouse and
at Jesus College, Cambridge. During the 1930s he wrote unpublished
fction and drama. His frst book was The Revolutionary Ideas of the
Marquis de Sade (1934, revised 1953, 1964). He then published an
account of a journey he made following Féral Benga in Africa, Africa
Dances (1935, new edns. 1945: Penguin, 1949, 1962; Eland 2003),
which was a considerable success and proved to be a springboard
for a career as a writer and anthropologist. After Africa Dances,
his career was advanced by the publishers and anthropologists now
taking a keen interest in his well-regarded work. https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Geoffrey_Gorer
ELEANOR KATHLEEN GOUGH ABERLE (1925–90)

Gough was a British anthropologist and feminist who was known
for her work in South Asia and South-East Asia. As a part of her
doctorate work, she did feld research in Malabar district from
1947 to 1949. She did further research in Tanjore district from
1950 to 1953 and again in 1976, and in Vietnam in 1976 and 1982.
In addition, some of her work included campaigning for: nuclear
disarmament, the civil rights movement, women’s rights, the third

world and the end of the Vietnam War. She was known for her
Marxist leanings and was on an FBI watchlist. https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Kathleen_Gough
MARCEL GRANET (1884–1940)

Granet was an eminent French Sinologist associated with the
Durkheimian sociological tradition. Granet wrote extensively on
ancient Chinese religious institutions in relation to the development
of Chinese civilization. He was born at Luc-en-Diois and, after
demonstrating his outstanding scholastic abilities at several lycées,
enrolled at the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where
he studied European history and came under the sway of Émile
Durkheim, who was offering lectures there. The crystallization of
Granet’s intellectual interests, along with his turn toward China,
came about during his graduate work from 1908 to 1911 at the
Foundation Thiers. His commitment to sociological theory deepened,
and in looking for comparative material to extend his study of the
code of honour in European feudalism, he took up the study of
Chinese language and history under the direction of the renowned
Sinologue Édouard Chavannes. From this point on, Granet’s
academic focus was fxed on China. As forecast by his initial interest
in feudalism, he was continually concerned with the problem of the
development and signifcance of ancient Chinese ‘feudal’ institutions
as interrelated with kinship, morality, and religion. https://www.
encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-
and-maps/granet-marcel
ALBERT OTTO HIRSCHMAN (1915–2012)

Hirschman was an economist and the author of several books on
political economy and political ideology. His frst major contribution
was in the area of development economics. Here he emphasized the
need for unbalanced growth. He argued that disequilibria should
be encouraged to stimulate growth and help mobilize resources,
because developing countries are short of decision making skills.

Key to this was encouraging industries with many linkages to other
frms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_O._Hirschman
STEPHEN HUGH-JONES (1945–)

Hugh-Jones is a British social anthropologist and a Life Fellow of
King’s College, Cambridge. Along with his wife, Christine, Hugh-Jones
he has spent 45 years researching – and living among – the Amazonian
Indians who live on the Equator, in South-Eastern Colombia. https://
www.kings.cam.ac.uk/research/fellows/stephenhugh-jones
SIGFRID RAFAEL KARSTEN (1879–1956)

Karsten was a Finnish social anthropologist and philosopher of
religion, known especially for his work among the indigenous people
of Southern America. Rafael Karsten was born in Kvevlax, Grand
Duchy of Finland, to a very religious family, and his native language
was Swedish. He studied philosophy at the University of Helsinki in
1899–1902 and had his frst job at the British Museum. A student of
Edvard Westermarck, Karsten was critical of theological explanations
of religions. He was a critic of Christianity and state religion, and a
proponent of freedom of religion. Karsten defended his doctoral thesis,
The Origin of Worship: A Study in Primitive Religion, in 1905 at the
University of Helsinki. In total, Karsten travelled six times in Southern
America and studied the indigenous people and their religions – in
Bolivia and Argentine, 1911–13, in Ecuador, 1916–18, and in the
Amazonas, 1946–47, and others – and published extensively on them
in Swedish, Finnish, German, English, and Spanish. He also authored
several academic course books on sociology and social anthropology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Karsten
CARL KAYSEN (1920–2010)

Kaysen was an American academic, policy advisor and international
security specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
and co-chair of the Committee on International Security Studies at

the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Carl Kaysen worked
for President John F. Kennedy as Deputy National Security Advisor,
and was directly under National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.
Kaysen took over the position from Walt Rostow in 1961 and
concentrated on the key issues of the Kennedy Administration such
as nuclear weapons, foreign trade, international economic policy
and international security policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Carl_Kaysen
CLYDE KLUCKHOHN (1905–60)

Kluckhohn was an American anthropologist and social theorist,
best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the
Navajo and his contributions to the development of the theory of
culture within American anthropology. In 1949, Kluckhohn began
to work among fve adjacent communities in the Southwest: Zuni,
Navajo, Mormon (LDS), Spanish-American (Mexican-American),
and Texas Homesteaders. A key methodological approach that he
developed together with his wife Florence Rockwood Kluckhohn
and colleagues Evon Z. Vogt and Ethel M. Albert, among others,
was the Values Orientation Theory. Kluckhohn received many
honours throughout his career. In 1947 he served as president of
the American Anthropological Association and became frst director
of the Russian Research Center at Harvard. In the same year his
book Mirror for Man won the McGraw Hill award for best popular
writing on science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Kluckhohn
ALFRED LOUIS KROEBER (1876–1960)

Kroeber was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his
PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the frst
doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the
frst professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at
the University of California, Berkeley. He played an integral role
in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served
as director from 1909 through 1947. Kroeber provided detailed

information about Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people,
whom he studied over a period of years. He was the father of the
acclaimed novelist, poet, and writer of short stories Ursula K. Le
Guin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._L._Kroeber
PETER LASLETT (1915–2001)

Laslett was a Life Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. A leading
historian of his generation, he was one of the founders of the
Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.
A passionate advocate for using radio and television to help history
reach a wider audience, he worked as a BBC radio producer and ran
a series of programmes on Anglia Television, the ‘Dawn University’.
With the sociologist Michael Young, he also helped establish the
Open University in 1969. https://bit.ly/3jesXGY
BRUNO LATOUR (B. 1947)

Latour is a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. He is
especially known for his work in the feld of science and technology
studies (STS). After teaching at the École des Mines de Paris (Centre de
Sociologie de l’Innovation) from 1982 to 2006, he became Professor
at Sciences Po Paris (2006–17), where he was the scientifc director of
the Sciences Po Medialab. He retired from several university activities
in 2017. He was also a Centennial Professor at the London School of
Economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour
SIR EDMUND RONALD LEACH (1910–89)

Sir Leach was a prominent British social anthropologist, is known for
his critical adaptation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist principles
in the interpretation of myths and social institutions. His book
Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) became a classic in social
anthropology. In 1953, Meyer Fortes, formerly of the London School
of Economics and by now head of the anthropology department at
Cambridge University, invited Leach to join his faculty. Thereafter,

this university would be Leach’s base of operations. From July to
November 1954, he engaged in concentrated feldwork in a peasant
village in Ceylon, on the basis of which he wrote Pul Eliya (1961a).
In 1960 he was elected Fellow of King’s College, and in 1966 he
became its Provost. He was knighted in 1975. https://bit.ly/2Fekdko
FRANK RAYMOND LEAVIS (1895–1978)

Leavis was an English literary critic who championed seriousness
and moral depth in literature and criticized what he considered the
amateur belletrism of his time. Leavis attended Cambridge University
and then served throughout World War I as an ambulance bearer on
the Western Front. He lectured at Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
from 1925 but moved in the early 1930s to Downing College,
where he was elected into a fellowship in 1936. He retired in 1962
and thereafter served as visiting professor at a number of English
universities. In 1967 he delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity
College, Cambridge (published in 1969 as English Literature in Our
Time and the University). He was made a Companion of Honour in
1978. https://www.britannica.com/biography/F-R-Leavis
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS (1908–2009)

Lévi-Strauss was a French social anthropologist and leading
exponent of structuralism, a name applied to the analysis of cultural
systems (e.g., kinship and mythical systems) in terms of the structural
relations among their elements. Structuralism has infuenced not
only 20th-century social science but also the study of philosophy,
comparative religion, literature, and flm. https://www.britannica.
com/biography/Claude-Lévi-Strauss
RALPH LINTON (1893–1953)

Linton was a respected American anthropologist of the mid-20th
century, particularly remembered for his books The Study of Man
(1936) and The Tree of Culture (1955). One of Linton’s major

contributions to anthropology was defning a distinction between
status and role. The Study of Man established Linton as one of
anthropology’s premier theorists, particularly amongst sociologists
who worked outside of the Boasian mainstream. In this work he
developed the concepts of status and role for describing the patterns
of behaviour in society. According to Linton, ascribed status is
assigned to an individual without reference to their innate differences
or abilities. Whereas Achieved status is determined by an individual’s
performance or effort. Linton noted that while the defnitions of the
two concepts are clear and distinct, it is not always easy to identify
whether an individual’s status is ascribed or achieved. His perspective
offers a deviation from the view that ascribed statuses are always
fxed. For Linton a role is the set of behaviours associated with a
status, and performing the role by doing the associated behaviours
is the way in which a status is inhabited. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Ralph_Linton
BRONISŁAW KASPER MALINOWSKI (1884–1942)

Malinowski was one of the most important anthropologists
of the 20th century who is widely recognized as a founder of
social anthropology and principally associated with feld studies
of the peoples of Oceania. A prolifc writer, he soon published
reinterpretations of Australian Aboriginal data from literature
then very popular in anthropological circles. These gained him a
reputation and promoted his plans for feld research, and in 1914
he was able to go to New Guinea. Six months’ work among the
Mailu on the south coast produced a monograph that, while lacking
theoretical development, was suffcient – along with his study of the
Australian family – to earn him a doctor of science (D.Sc.) degree
from the University of London in 1916. When he moved to the
nearby Trobriand Islands, where he worked for two years in 1915–16
and 1917–18, Malinowski’s talents fowered. Living in a tent among
the people, speaking the vernacular fuently, recording ‘texts’ freely
on the scene of action as well as in set interviews, and observing
reactions with an acute clinical eye, Malinowski was able to present

a dynamic picture of social institutions that clearly distinguished
ideal norms from actual behaviour. In later publications on
ceremonial exchange; on agricultural economics; on sex, marriage,
and family life; on primitive law and custom; and on magic and
myth, he drew heavily on his Trobriand data in putting forward
theoretical propositions of signifcance in the development of social
anthropology. Yet, while very rewarding, his feld experience had its
strains. Writing in Polish for his own private record, Malinowski
kept feld diaries in which he exposed very frankly his problems of
isolation and of his relations with New Guinea people. https://www.
britannica.com/biography/Bronislaw-Malinowski
MCKIM MARRIOTT (1924–)

Marriott is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology in
Social Sciences Collegiate Division of the University of Chicago. He
has done feldwork in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, edited Village
India, and authored varied studies on rural social organization and
change. He is concerned with formulating and simulating indigenous
sociologies and psychologies in India, Japan, and other countries.
https://bit.ly/2GN3tRB
KARL MARX (1818–83)

Marx is often treated as a revolutionary, an activist rather than
a philosopher, whose works inspired the foundation of many
communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is certainly hard to
fnd many thinkers who can be said to have had comparable infuence
in the creation of the modern world. However, Marx was trained
as a philosopher, and although often portrayed as moving away
from philosophy in his mid-twenties – perhaps towards history and
the social sciences – there are many points of contact with modern
philosophical debates throughout his writings.
The themes picked out here include Marx’s philosophical
anthropology, his theory of history, his economic analysis, his
critical engagement with contemporary capitalist society (raising

issues about morality, ideology, and politics), and his prediction of
a communist future.
Marx’s early writings are dominated by an understanding of
alienation, a distinct type of social ill whose diagnosis looks to rest
on a controversial account of human nature and its fourishing. He
subsequently developed an infuential theory of history – often called
historical materialism – centred around the idea that forms of society
rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of
human productive power. Marx increasingly became preoccupied
with an attempt to understand the contemporary capitalist mode
of production, as driven by a remorseless pursuit of proft, whose
origins are found in the extraction of surplus value from the
exploited proletariat. The precise role of morality and moral
criticism in Marx’s critique of contemporary capitalist society is
much discussed, and there is no settled scholarly consensus on these
issues. His understanding of morality may be related to his account
of ideology, and his refection on the extent to which certain widely-
shared misunderstandings might help explain the stability of class-
divided societies. In the context of his radical journalism, Marx also
developed his controversial account of the character and role of the
modern state, and more generally of the relation between political
and economic life. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding
through a series of modes of production, characterised by (more
or less explicit) class struggle, and driving humankind towards
communism. However, Marx is famously reluctant to say much
about the detailed arrangements of the communist alternative that
he sought to bring into being, arguing that it would arise through
historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined
plan or blueprint. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
GEORGE HERBERT MEAD (1863–1931)

Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist,
primarily affliated with the University of Chicago, where he was
one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of
the founders of symbolic interactionism and of what has come to be

referred to as the Chicago sociological tradition. https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/George_Herbert_Mead
GEORGE ARMITAGE MILLER (1920–2012)

Miller was an American psychologist who was one of the founders
of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science.
He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote
several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online
word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored
the paper, ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two’, in which
he observed that many different experimental fndings considered
together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human
short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by
psychologists and in the wider culture. Miller won numerous awards,
including the National Medal of Science. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/George_Armitage_Miller
MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE (1533–92)

Montaigne, also known as Lord of Montaigne, was one of the
most signifcant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known
for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for
its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual
insight. His massive volume Essais contains some of the most
infuential essays ever written.
Montaigne had a direct infuence on Western writers including
Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Montesquieu, Edmund
Burke, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Edward
Gibbon, Virginia Woolf, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, John Henry Newman, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud,
Alexander Pushkin, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan
Zweig, Eric Hoffer, Isaac Asimov, Fulton Sheen and possibly, on the
later works of William Shakespeare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Michel_de_Montaigne
GEORGE PETER ‘PETE’ MURDOCK (1897–1985)

He was also known as G.P. Murdock, was an American
anthropologist. He is remembered for his empirical approach to
ethnological studies and his study of family and kinship structures
across differing cultures. His 1967 Ethnographic Atlas dataset on
more than 1,200 pre-industrial societies is infuential and frequently
used in social science research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
George_Murdock
HENRY ALEXANDER MURRAY (1893–1988)

Murray was an American psychologist at Harvard University,
where from 1959 to 1962 he conducted a series of psychologically-
damaging experiments on undergraduate students, one of whom
was Ted Kaczynski, later known as the Unabomber. He was
Director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic in the School of Arts
and Sciences after 1930. Murray developed a theory of personality
called personology, based on ‘need’ and ‘press’. Murray was also a
co-developer, with Christiana Morgan, of the Thematic Apperception
Test (TAT), which he referred to as ‘the second best-seller that
Harvard ever published, second only to the Harvard Handbook of
Music’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Murray
RODNEY NEEDHAM (1923–2006)

Needham was a British social anthropologist. Born Rodney Phillip
Needham Green, he changed his name in 1947; the following year he
married Maud Claudia (Ruth) Brysz. The couple would collaborate
on several works, including an English translation of Robert Hertz’s
Death and the Right Hand. His feldwork was with the Penan of
Borneo (1951–52) and the Siwang of Malaysia (1953–55). His
doctoral thesis on the Penan was accepted in 1953. He was University
Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Oxford University, 1956–76;
Professor of Social Anthropology, Oxford, 1976–90; Offcial Fellow,
Merton College, Oxford, 1971–75; and Fellow, All Souls College,
Oxford, 1976–90. Together with Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas,

Needham brought structuralism from France and anglicised it in the
process. A prolifc scholar, he was also a teacher and a rediscoverer of
neglected fgures in the history of his discipline, such as Arnold Van
Gennep and Robert Hertz. Among other things, he contributed to
the study of family resemblance, introducing the terms ‘monothetic’
and ‘polythetic’ into anthropology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Rodney_Needham
JOHN VON NEUMANN (1903–57)

Von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist,
computer scientist, engineer and polymath. Von Neumann was
generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his time and
said to be ‘the last representative of the great mathematicians’. He
integrated pure and applied sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
John_von_Neumann
KWAME NKRUMAH, PC (1909–72)

Nkrumah was a Ghanaian politician and revolutionary. He was
the frst Prime Minister and President of Ghana, having led the
Gold Coast to independence from Britain in 1957. An infuential
advocate of pan-Africanism, Nkrumah was a founding member
of the Organization of African Unity and winner of the Lenin
Peace Prize from the Soviet Union in 1962. After 12 years abroad
pursuing higher education, developing his political philosophy and
organizing with other diasporic pan-Africanists, Nkrumah returned
to the Gold Coast to begin his political career as an advocate of
national independence. He formed the Convention People’s Party,
which achieved rapid success through its unprecedented appeal
to the common voter. He became Prime Minister in 1952 and
retained the position when Ghana declared independence from
Britain in 1957. In 1960, Ghanaians approved a new constitution
and elected Nkrumah President. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Kwame_Nkrumah
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER (1904–67)

Theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer served as the third
Director of the Institute from 1947 until 1966, thus far the longest
tenure of any Institute Director. Prior to his Directorship, in 1942,
Oppenheimer was appointed to the Manhattan Project, and he
oversaw the construction of the Los Alamos laboratory, where he
gathered the best minds in physics to work on the problem of creating
an atomic bomb. While Director of the Institute, Oppenheimer was
simultaneously Chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the
Atomic Energy Commission from 1947 through 1952, overseeing
all atomic research and development in the United States. https://
www.ias.edu/scholars/oppenheimer
VILFREDO FEDERICO DAMASO PARETO

(1848–1923)
Pareto was an Italian civil engineer, sociologist, economist, political
scientist, and philosopher. He made several important contributions
to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and
in the analysis of individuals’ choices. He was also responsible
for popularising the use of the term ‘elite’ in social analysis. He
introduced the concept of Pareto effciency and helped develop the
feld of microeconomics. He was also the frst to discover that income
follows a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability
distribution. The Pareto principle was named after him, and it was
built on observations of his such as that 80% of the wealth in Italy
belonged to about 20% of the population. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto
TALCOTT PARSONS (1902–79)

Parsons was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best
known for his social action theory and structural functionalism.
Parsons is considered one of the most infuential fgures in sociology
in the 20th century. After earning a PhD in economics, he served on
the faculty at Harvard University from 1927 to 1929. In 1930, he

was among the frst professors in its new sociology department. Later,
he was instrumental in the establishment of the Department of Social
Relations at Harvard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons
KARL PAUL POLANYI (1886–1964)

Polanyi was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic
anthropologist, economic sociologist, political economist, historical
sociologist and social philosopher. He is best known for his book The
Great Transformation, which argues against self-regulating markets.
In the book, he advances the concept of the Double Movement,
which refers to the dialectical process of marketization and push
for social protection against that marketization. In the book, he
argues that market-based societies in modern Europe were not
inevitable but historically contingent. Polanyi is remembered best
as the originator of substantivism, a cultural version of economics,
which emphasizes the way economies are embedded in society and
culture. This opinion is counter to mainstream economics but is
popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and
political science. Polanyi’s approach to the ancient economies has
been applied to a variety of cases, such as Pre-Columbian America
and ancient Mesopotamia, although its utility to the study of ancient
societies in general has been questioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Karl_Polanyi
ALFRED REGINALD RADCLIFFE-BROWN

(1881–1955)
Radcliffe-Brown was an English social anthropologist of the 20th
century who developed a systematic framework of concepts and
generalizations relating to the social structures of preindustrial
societies and their functions. He is widely known for his theory
of functionalism and his role in the founding of British social
anthropology. https://www.britannica.com/biography/A-R-
Radcliffe-Brown
W.H.R. RIVERS (1864–1922)

Rivers was an English medical psychologist and anthropologist
known principally for The Todas (1906), a model of precise
documentation of a people, and the important History of Melanesian
Society, 2 vol. (1914). https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-H-
R-Rivers
EDWARD SAPIR (1884–1939)

Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely
considered to be one of the most important figures in the
development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.
With his linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of
Boas to develop most completely the relationship between linguistics
and anthropology. Sapir studied the ways in which language and
culture infuence each other, and he was interested in the relation
between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world
views. This part of his thinking was developed by his student
Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the
‘Sapir–Whorf’ hypothesis. In anthropology Sapir is known as an
early proponent of the importance of psychology to anthropology,
maintaining that studying the nature of relationships between
different individual personalities is important for the ways in
which culture and society develop. Among his major contributions
to linguistics is his classifcation of Indigenous languages of the
Americas, upon which he elaborated for most of his professional
life. He played an important role in developing the modern concept
of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Sapir
ISAAC SCHAPERA (1905–2003)

Schapera was a South African social anthropologist known for
his detailed ethnographic and typological work on the indigenous
peoples of South Africa and Botswana. His work was infuenced by
his instructors A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski,

from whom he learned structural and functional analysis. He
devoted much of his time to studying the Tswana, and his research
covered most aspects of their life. His A Handbook of Tswana
Law and Custom (1938) continued to be used by Tswana courts
into the 21st century. https://www.britannica.com/biography/
Isaac-Schapera
JOHN PETER SCOTT, CBE, FRSA, FBA, FACSS

(B. 1949)
Scott is an English sociologist working on issues of economic
and political sociology, social stratification, the history of
sociology, and social network analysis. He is currently working
independently, and has previously worked at the Universities of
Strathclyde, Leicester, Essex, and Plymouth. He is a Fellow of the
British Academy (elected 2007), a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Arts (elected 2005), and a Fellow of the Academy of Social
Sciences (elected 2003). He has been a member of the British
Sociological Association since 1970. In 2015 he became Chair of
Section S4 of the British Academy. In 2016 he was awarded an
Honorary Doctorate of Essex University. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/John_Scott_(sociologist)
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)

Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely
regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the
world’s greatest dramatist. He is often called England’s national
poet and the ‘Bard of Avon’ (or simply ‘the Bard’). His extant works,
including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three
long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain
authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living
language and are performed more often than those of any other
playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
EDWARD ALBERT SHILS (1910–95)

Shils was a Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on
Social Thought and in Sociology at the University of Chicago and
an infuential sociologist. He was known for his research on the role
of intellectuals and their relations to power and public policy. His
work was honoured in 1983 when he was awarded the Balzan Prize.
In 1979, he was selected by the National Council on the Humanities
to give the Jefferson Lecture, the highest award given by the U.S.
federal government for distinguished intellectual achievement in the
humanities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Shils
MILTON BORAH SINGER (1912–94)

Singer was a leading American anthropologist and expert on Indian
studies. He was a professor at the University of Chicago. Singer was
the frst to use the phrase Semiotic Anthropology in 1978. He was a
Social Science instructor at the University of Chicago in 1941 and a
director of the Social Sciences Department from 1947 to 1952, and
in 1954 he became a professor of anthropology until his retirement
in 1979 In the early 1960s he organized studies in South Asia.
He travelled to India in his feldwork, during the years 1954–
55, 1960–61 and 1964, also developing important contact with
researchers of this country. His research centred on the discussion
of tradition in the industrialized city of Madras and the Sanskrit
tradition in modern urban centres. In the years 1970 and 1980
Singer directs his interests to the studies of the historical roots of
the anthropological theories and also of the cultural symbolism. His
feld work focuses on comparative research into the modernization
of American culture in Newburyport, Massachusetts and India,
including a deepening of studies of logic and philosophy. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Singer
BARUCH SPINOZA (1632–77)

Bento (in Hebrew, Baruch; in Latin, Benedictus) Spinoza is one of the
most important philosophers – and certainly the most radical – of
the early modern period. His thought combines a commitment to

a number of Cartesian metaphysical and epistemological principles
with elements from ancient Stoicism, Hobbes, and medieval
Jewish rationalism into a nonetheless highly original system. His
extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, the human being
and knowledge serve to ground a moral philosophy centred on the
control of the passions leading to virtue and happiness. They also
lay the foundations for a strongly democratic political thought and
a deep critique of the pretensions of Scripture and sectarian religion.
Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth century, Spinoza is among
the most relevant today. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/
JULIAN HAYNES STEWARD (1902–72)

Steward was an American anthropologist best known for his role
in developing the concept and method of cultural ecology, as well
as a scientifc theory of culture change. In addition to his role as
a teacher and administrator, Steward is most remembered for his
method and theory of cultural ecology. During the frst three decades
of the twentieth century, American anthropology was suspicious of
generalizations and often unwilling to draw broader conclusions
from the meticulously detailed monographs that anthropologists
produced. Steward is notable for moving anthropology away from
this more particularist approach and developing a more nomothetic,
social-scientific direction. His theory of ‘multilinear’ cultural
evolution examined the way in which societies adapted to their
environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Steward
SAMUEL ANDREW STOUFFER (1900–60)

Stouffer was a prominent American sociologist and developer
of survey research techniques. Stouffer spent much of his career
attempting to answer the fundamental question: How does one
measure an attitude? Stouffer served as a professor of sociology at
both the University of Chicago and Harvard University, and also
directed the Laboratory of Social Relations at Harvard. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_A._Stouffer
SUKARNO (1901–70)
Sukarno was an Indonesian statesman, politician, nationalist and
revolutionary who was the frst president of Indonesia, serving from
1945 to 1967. Sukarno was the leader of the Indonesian struggle
for independence from the Dutch colonialists. He was a prominent
leader of Indonesia’s nationalist movement during the colonial period
and spent over a decade under Dutch detention until released by the
invading Japanese forces in World War II. Sukarno and his fellow
nationalists collaborated to garner support for the Japanese war
effort from the population, in exchange for Japanese aid in spreading
nationalist ideas. Upon Japanese surrender, Sukarno and Mohammad
Hatta declared Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945, and
Sukarno was appointed as its president. He led Indonesians in
resisting Dutch re-colonisation efforts via diplomatic and military
means until the Dutch recognition of Indonesian independence in
1949. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukarno
SOL TAX (1907–95)

Tax was an American anthropologist. He is best known for creating
action anthropology and his studies of the Meskwaki, or Fox,
Indians, for ‘action-anthropological’ research titled the Fox Project,
and for founding the academic journal Current Anthropology. He
received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1935 and,
together with Fred Eggan, was a student of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Tax
SIR KEITH VIVIAN THOMAS CH, FBA, FRHISTS,

FLSW (B. 1933) )
Thomas is a Welsh historian of the early modern world based at
Oxford University. He is best known as the author of Religion and
the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World. From 1986
to 2000, he was President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Thomas_(historian)
EDWARD PALMER THOMPSON (1924–93)

Thompson was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace
campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work
on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,
in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963).
Thompson published biographies of William Morris (1955) and
(posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolifc journalist
and essayist. He published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a
collection of poetry. His work is considered by some to have been
among the most important contributions to labour history and social
history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including
on scholarship in Asia and Africa. In a 2011 poll by History Today
magazine, he was named the second most important historian of
the previous 60 years, behind only Fernand Braudel.
Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the
Communist Party of Great Britain. Although he left the party
in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless
remained a ‘historian in the Marxist tradition’, calling for a
rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of
communists’ ‘confdence in our own revolutionary perspectives’.
Thompson played a key role in the frst New Left in Britain in the
late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the
Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and an early and
constant supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,
becoming during the 1980s the leading intellectual light of the
movement against nuclear weapons in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/E._P._Thompson
VICTOR WITTER TURNER (1920–83)

Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his
work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along
with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as
symbolic and interpretive anthropology. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Victor_Turner
MICHAEL LABAN WALZER (B. 1935)

Walzer is a prominent American political theorist and public
intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study
(IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor emeritus of Dissent, an
intellectual magazine that he has been affliated with since his years
as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. He has written books
and essays on a wide range of topics – many in political ethics –
including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, Zionism,
economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political
obligation. He is also a contributing editor to The New Republic.
To date, he has written 27 books and published over 300 articles,
essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New Republic, The New
York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times,
Harpers, and many philosophical and political science journals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Walzer
IAN WATT (1917–99)

Watt was a literary critic, literary historian and professor of English
at Stanford University. His The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe,
Richardson and Fielding (1957) is an important work in the history
of the genre. It is considered by many contemporary literary scholars
as the seminal work on the origins of the novel, and an important
study of literary realism. The book traces the rise of the modern
novel to philosophical, economic and social trends and conditions
that become prominent in the early 18th century. A key element Watt
explores is the decline in importance of the philosophy of classical
antiquity, with its various strains of idealistic thought that viewed
human experience as composed of universal Platonic ‘forms’ with
an innate perfection. Such a view of life and philosophy dominated
writers from ancient times to the Renaissance, resulting in classical
poetic forms and genres with essentially fat plots and characters.
These philosophical beliefs began to be replaced perhaps in the later
Renaissance, into the Enlightenment, and, most importantly, in the
early 18th century. The importance of rationalist philosophers such
as John Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, and many others who followed

them, and the scientifc, social and economic developments of this
period, began to have ever greater impact. In place of the older
classical idealism, a realistic, pragmatic, empirical understanding of
life and human behaviour, which recognised human individuality and
conscious experience, began to emerge. Watt wrote that the novel
form’s ‘primary criterion was truth to individual experience’. This
focus on individual experience characterises the novel in Wattian
terms. A second major trend that Watt studies is the ‘rise of the
reading public’ and the growth of professional publishing during
this period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Watt
MAX WEBER (1864–1920)

Weber was a German sociologist and political economist best
known for his thesis of the ‘Protestant ethic’, relating Protestantism
to capitalism, and for his ideas on bureaucracy. Weber’s profound
influence on sociological theory stems from his demand for
objectivity in scholarship and from his analysis of the motives behind
human action. In general, Weber’s greatest merit as a thinker was
that he brought the social sciences in Germany, hitherto preoccupied
largely with national problems, into direct critical confrontation with
the international giants of 19th-century European thought – Marx
and Nietzsche; and, through this confrontation, Weber helped create
a methodology and a body of literature dealing with the sociology
of religion, political parties, and the economy, as well as studies of
formal organizations, small-group behaviour, and the philosophy of
history. His work continues to stimulate scholarship. https://www.
britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist
SIR ROBERT ERIC MORTIMER WHEELER FRS,

FBA, FSA (1890–1976)
Wheeler was a British archaeologist and offcer in the British Army.
Over the course of his career, he served as Director of both the
National Museum of Wales and London Museum, Director-General
of the Archaeological Survey of India, and the founder and Honorary

Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, in addition
to writing twenty-four books on archaeological subjects. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Wheeler
LESLIE ALVIN WHITE (1900–75)

White was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of
theories of cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially
neo-evolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of
anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. He was
president of the American Anthropological Association (1964).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_White
BERNARD WILLIAMS (1929–2003)

Williams was a leading infuence in philosophical ethics in the
second half of the twentieth century and Provost of King’s College,
Cambridge. He rejected the codifcation of ethics into moral theories
that views such as Kantianism and (above all) utilitarianism see as
essential to philosophical thinking about ethics, arguing that our
ethical life is too untidy to be captured by any systematic moral
theory. He was also an important contributor to debates on moral
psychology, personal identity, equality, morality and the emotions,
and the interpretation of philosophers including Wittgenstein,
Nietzsche, Descartes, Aristotle, and Plato. https://plato.stanford.edu/
entries/williams-bernard/
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889–1951)

Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th
century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial,
role in 20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to infuence
current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and
language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics
and culture. Originally, there were two commonly recognized
stages of Wittgenstein’s thought – the early and the later – both

of which were taken to be pivotal in their respective periods. In
more recent scholarship, this division has been questioned: some
interpreters have claimed a unity between all stages of his thought,
while others talk of a more nuanced division, adding stages such
as the middle Wittgenstein and the third Wittgenstein. Still, it is
commonly acknowledged that the early Wittgenstein is epitomized
in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. By showing the application
of modern logic to metaphysics, via language, he provided new
insights into the relations between world, thought and language and
thereby into the nature of philosophy. It is the later Wittgenstein,
mostly recognized in the Philosophical Investigations, who took the
more revolutionary step in critiquing all of traditional philosophy
including its climax in his own early work. The nature of his new
philosophy is heralded as anti-systematic through and through, yet
still conducive to genuine philosophical understanding of traditional
problems. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/
Social Science Press is grateful and therefore acknowledges the

various websites from which information was drawn to create the
endnotes and Appendix. All the websites have been duly cited, but
a special thanks is owed to Wikipedia, Britannica and Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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CREATIVE LIVES AND WORKS

History, Culture and Ethnography

History, Culture and Ethnography

Transcriber’s Note – Radha Béteille vii

Appendix: Biographical Information 129

The transformation of videographed speeches into the written

There have been many autobiographical accounts of the creative

Paul Thompson, Brian Harrison and others, on the whole historians

With six or seven sets of oral history washing through my

The next step was probably infuenced by this early flming

were ever shown to students or colleagues. I looked at the collection

with them talking about their partnership, and I interviewed Pat

approach, I have been particularly interested in the question of what

when and where born

methods of working and thinking

1. It is important to have a fairly small and unostentatious camera

the microphone the better – which is one reason why I have

reading a brief life in an encyclopaedia, I cannot really prepare.

10. Before the interview it is important to explain that anything

If the subjects do reveal things which should be kept private for

Some people have infuenced me through the force of their ideas,

of off-air television programmes which gave the Department the

Jack Goody and Alan Macfarlane at Jack’s

he published another sixteen, many of them very long. This set me

Jack was an excellent ethnographer, a wide ranging and

A more legible letter from Jack Goody.

Sir John Rankine Goody, FBA (1919–2015), known as Jack Goody,

the 2005 Queen’s Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Knight

This interview was conducted by Eric Hobsbawm on 18 May 1991. The

city. We lived in Hertfordshire in the outskirts of London. It was not

I saw post-war Britain under the Labour government of ’45 as the

places like Indonesia because people were going to societies with

positions in this country were Africanists – Evans-Pritchard, Fortes

were prepared to talk about death and complexities of religion and

And it seems to me that in Africa, after talking to many economists

interested in doing with Europe and, Asia to a degree, which I am

I was interested what differences were to be found between societies

particularly important in Africa and is therefore critical to my mind,

systems, but it really had more to do with – you mentioned cultural

in fowers and food, it looks at aspects of family as I have done and

8. Karl Marx, see Appendix.

Congolese Azande live in Orientale Province, specifcally along the Uele

Equal inheritance as a mechanism which prevents growth of

Wet rice cultivation – with its extraordinary ability to maintain

Geertz’s work on Islam in Morocco also interested me and it was

‘Believing, with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in

I was particularly interested in the way in which Geertz

Sarah gave a warm reaction to the lecture when she started to

Clifford James Geertz (1926–2006) was an American cultural

This interview was conducted by Alan Macfarlane on 6 May 2004.

The GI Bill, for a non-American, was an enormous social

I liked both my stepfather and stepmother a good deal, they were

San Francisco. I spent four or fve months wandering about, at the

I certainly did not know anything about anthropology or have any

When we were in Bali in 1957, and I had already been there a

AM: Apart from being diffcult, in a recent interview, I heard a lot

AM: Coming back to Harvard, another fgure there, one of earliest

AM: What about Talcott Parsons?

I tried to read Weber directly in German. I still consider myself

in Berkeley, Kroeber was then retired, living up in the hills. When

AM: There was a certain amount of chaos because your leader

you send us a bunch of graduate students. I was almost the oldest,

AM: Have you been back?

to Bali for another six to seven months to fnish our feldwork. It