Interview of John Barnes, by Jack Goody, Cambridge 19 December 1983. Filmed and edited by Alan Macfarlane and Sarah Harrison
[timecode of the film in minutes and seconds]
JG I suppose the first thing to ask is why any respectable scholar in mathematics and St John’s Cambridge ever went into anthropology.
JB Well it’s quite a good question but it’s not very difficult to answer. When I was interviewed to come up to John’s I explained that I wasn’t really interested in mathematics, I wanted to read economics, and my college said that since they’d given me a scholarship in mathematics, if I wanted to do economics I should do part 2 of the maths tripos first and then in my third year I could read part 2 of the economics tripos, and that to do that I would have to read and do the work for part 1 of the economics tripos in my spare time during my first two years. So I embarked on this course and it didn’t take me very long to discover that economics was the dullest subject imaginable, so that at the end of my second year, having failed to become a wrangler in part 2, it became quite clear that I shouldn’t persist and read part 3 of the maths tripos and that I ought to switch to something or other. So I merely read through the handbook and tried to arrange the triposes that were available to me in some order of preference bearing in mind that I was sure of a degree anyway and if I failed nothing would happen. So I dithered for a long time between moral sciences which contained psychology, philosophy and metaphysics and other interesting subjects, and the archaeology and anthropology tripos. And according to the handbook the archaeology and anthropology tripos would enable me to answer questions like the origin of civilization, what’s the meaning of culture, and so on, and I thought I’d like to know the answers to those questions so I switched to archaeology and anthropology but I still haven’t found the answers to the questions.
JG You didn’t get any advice from anybody in St Johns. There weren’t any anthropologists there, I take it.
2:10
JB Well there were no anthropologists but Glyn Daniel was director of studies in archaeology and anthropology and he was my supervisor, of course, when I switched.
JG And you switched in 1938?
JB Yes.
JG And so you did the A&A tripos in the year before the war and finished in 1939. And it was Glyn who supervised you right through?
JB He was my director of studies but I was supervised by Driberg and Trevor as well.
JG Trevor in physical anthropology?
JB Well no, not only in physical anthropology but also what was called general anthropology.
JG Of course, he was a pupil of Herskovitz and he knew about most of these different fields. Jack Driberg, what was he like as a supervisor?
2:58
JB Well he was very inspiring. I didn’t think that he knew very much but he was full of enthusiasm and encouraged one to think for oneself and I enjoyed working with him.
JG He was inspiring in what way, that he believed in anthropology?
JB Yes, he enjoyed life. He was a very colourful figure. There were all sorts of legends about him which one could fully believe in, about his adventures in Sudan and in Kenya. I admired him as a man. I remember being very impressed once by…, he suffered from some kind of toe rot and the only available cure was in East Africa. He was being treated, rather ineffectually, by an ordinary orthodox G.P. and the G.P. called on him one morning while I was in his rooms in Brookside and the G.P. came in and walked over to the sideboard where there was a decanter with whiskey in it, poured himself a glass and drank it down, and without speaking a word to my supervisor said “Right, same time again tomorrow?”, and left, and I thought anybody who could be treated in this way must surely be a man worth listening to.
JG He was a great friend of Evans-Pritchard [E-P]. Did any of this come out in his teaching?
4:41
JB I don’t think he understood a word of what E-P was up to but his friendship with E-P showed itself in his consideration for his students. He took three or four of us over to Oxford to visit E-P and Radcliffe-Brown [R-B] and Gluckman as well in the Easter term of 1939 and explained that E-P was the external examiner in the tripos, and that he thought it would be helpful for E-P to get to know us beforehand. So it was.
JG Who were the other students? Anyone who went into anthropology professionally?
5:32
JB No. Paul Howell was a year ahead of me. I’ve forgotten the names of the other people.., well Philip Baldwin, he became an Air Commodore..
JG He was in charge of the cadet squadron here. You met Max Gluckman over there.
JB Yes. I thought he was Zuckerman when he was introduced to me but I was never any good at remembering names.
JG Meyer Fortes, was he there then too?
JB Yes. I’d met Meyer before in Cambridge because he’d come over to read a paper to the Anthropological Society. I remember my first exchange with him. He asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated so I said I want to become an anthropologist. So he said “Oh really, have you got a private income?” So I said “No”. So he said “Well, you’d better give up the idea, hadn’t you”. That was that.
JG You met Radcliffe-Brown over in Oxford. What was your impression of him at that time?
7:04
JB He gave me the impression of a repertory actor waiting between trips. He had this air about him of playing a part all the time. He was a very odd creature and one can understand why it was that his period in Sydney was the height of his career in that there he could play a part on a small provincial stage much more effectively than he could in either Oxford or Cambridge.
JG Or Chicago?
JB I don’t know what happened in Chicago.
JG That must have been a particularly interesting time at Oxford because Radcliffe-Brown went there in 1937 and Meyer and E-P must have gone there just after that and there is some very interesting correspondence which I have about that period, and the plans of E-P and Meyer Fortes to set up, with Gluckman I think, the best department of anthropology in England. Which in a sense I suppose they did, to supercede Malinowski’s department whom they didn’t get on with. And Jack Driberg in this early correspondence had always been the great helper of E-P in his troubles against Malinowski, I imagine intellectually.
9:12
JB I think he may have provided moral and convivial support but I don’t think intellectually he had that much to offer and he wouldn’t have been much ammunition in an intellectual battle with Malinowski.
JG No. I think it was probably in their manipulations that led them to this. There was an interesting passage in Tom Driberg’s autobiography, “Ruling Passions”, in which he quotes a comment in an obituary of Jack Driberg that E-P wrote, and E-P said he had quite a high idea of Driberg and talks about him keeping Cambridge anthropology alive at that particular time.
JB That wouldn’t have been difficult as otherwise it would have been very dead without him.
JG The professor at that time, you didn’t mention anything about the professor.
10:26
JB Hutton. He did teach me material culture, and probably gave some more lectures on caste, but one had to choose one special area. The tripos can be taken in one year or two. If you took it in one year you only needed to take one special area so I took East Africa rather than India. Hutton taught the Indian stuff. But he also taught material culture and his method of teaching was to stand at the end of the room and we were all sitting round at tables, and he would hold up a bow or something like that and describe it and hand it to the student who was sitting nearest to him and the student would fondle it and hand it on to the next student, and so on. By this time Hutton would have started on the next bow. So that if one was sitting opposite the lecturer there was a phase difference of about half a dozen or so bows between what one was listening to and what one was handling. This made it impossible to understand anything at all.
JG Did you get taught the 8 or 9 different forms of bow release.
JB That’s the sort of thing.
JG He was still doing that after the war when I was…, it nearly put me off both materialism and culture for a lifetime. Terrifying, it was. And curiously I never heard him lecture on caste and things that he knew something about, just about material culture, and usually taken from the Horniman Museum handbook. And if you had these books under the desk you could flick them over and find the right page.
JB You must have put more effort into it than I did.
JG I was just trying to keep track of the different forms of bow release. There was Hutton…
12:40
JB And there was Miles Burkett, the squire of Grantchester.
JG That was another man who lectured from a book. I don’t know whether it had been published in your day but its one of those that so many Cambridge academic’s write with eight chapters in, one for each lecture during term time. He was the archaeologist, but there must be Glyn Daniel?
JB No. Glyn Daniel certainly wasn’t a lecturer. Graham Clark wasn’t a lecturer either. He certainly lectured on pollen analysis. There was Trevor. That was probably about all.
JG Without wishing to be uncharitable to any of those people it’s difficult to see how one might decide on a career having been taught in rather a haphazard way that went on at that time.
13:54
JB Well I didn’t think I would complete my professional training in Cambridge, indeed I was all set to go to Harvard in 1939 had conscription not come. Jack Trevor was very helpful in getting me these connections and at one time it was suggested that I should go to North Western University to work with Herskovitz but then I was shunted to Harvard instead and was made a fellow of the Peabody Museum but I never took it up because of the war.
JG You said that you’d already got interested in East Africa. The fact that you were going to Herskovitz meant you were already interested in Africa.
14:50
JB Well I had to make a choice between East Africa and India, and it was a choice between Hutton and Driberg, and Driberg was obviously the better person. Glyn Daniel probably advised me on that point.
JG And you had had some contact or relationships with East Africa before that?
JB Not at all. I’d hardly been anywhere north of Birmingham.
JG I didn’t mean you personally. I really meant your relatives.
JB No, none at all.
JG No settler…
JB None whatsoever. It was just foreign parts as far as I was concerned.
JG And there’s nothing in the family background like so many anthropologists. Scratch them and there’s a tea planter underneath.
JB I had an uncle at the time who was in Australia but that was all. All the others… well, there were a number of relatives who had gone to Australia because my paternal grandfather was the youngest of 13 and I once enquired where the other 12 were and was told that they’d all been advised by the police that if they left then no further proceedings would be taken against them. Two were alleged to have last been seen working in a quarry in New South Wales. So that was two generations up.
JG Where did they come from?
JB The village of Corsham in Wiltshire. My grandfather was a stone mason and worked in a quarry and then became foreman, and then ran a news agency, I think.
JG And your father was..
JB My father began life as a piano tuner and then went into partnership with a man and they sold pianos in Reading.
JG So you were brought up in Reading.
JB Yes. Well I went away to school but I was born there.
JG When your nascent career in anthropology was interrupted by the war you went into the Navy. Were there any experiences there which confirmed you or disconfirmed you in your intention to go on with anthropology afterwards?
17:23
JB No, I think that I was confirmed in my feeling that it would be nice to have a job where I could do research, be my own master, and travel abroad.
JG But you didn’t really spend any time ashore in foreign parts?
JB Yes. I was in New Caledonia. The ship was based in Noumea and we were based at Tontuta.
JG When you came back to England when you were demobilised how did you make the transition to anthropology?
JB I came back in 1943 and then I was in Farnborough as senior naval officer at the Royal Air force Establishment for a year and then I was in the Admiralty for a year, so I was already in England at the end of the war.
JG How did you make the transition into anthropology?
19:00
JB I was anxious to get out of the Navy as fast as possible. There was a scheme whereby one could get accelerated demobilisation if you could show that you had a useful job to go to. I thought that if I could dream up a research project that had to be done at once if it was to be done at all, this would be a powerful argument for getting out of the Navy. Perhaps I should explain. In 1939 I had gone to Lappland on a so-called field trip on a grant of £15 from my college..
JG Who were very interested in the Arctic at that time..
JB Well it was Lindgren who suggested that I should go to Lappland
JG She of course was attached in a vague way to the department..
JB I don’t know whether she gave lectures at that stage. That was after the war. But she certainly was around, and it was she who suggested that I should go to Lapland and I suppose it was through her that I met Firth when he was secretary of the Colonial Social Science Research Council which was set up in 1944. I’d gone to some sort of anniversary meeting of the R.A.I. in about 1944 when Firth read a paper about micro-sociology. It was a rather grand occasion as Jan Smuts was there, and through meeting Firth I then discussed with him the possibility of going to the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific in order to study the effect of the Japanese occupation on the islands, this being the only part of the British Empire that had been occupied by the Japanese but had already been liberated. And my argument was that the Americans had moved into the Gilberts having driven out the Japanese and that the effects of the Japanese occupation would soon be submerged under the effects of the American occupation therefore I must be sent there forthwith to study this. Then somebody drew my attention to an advertisement on the back of the New Statesman for a job with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and, although I had no particular desire to go to the middle of Africa, at that stage I would have preferred to go to the Gilbert and Ellis, it was prudent to apply, and indeed, I thought that if I was offered a job by the RHODES-LIVINGSTONE this would be a way of putting pressure on Firth to hurry up with his grant to go to the Gilbert and Ellis. So I applied to the RHODES-LIVINGSTONE and was offered the job and spoke to Firth who said there would be long delays before they could come to any decision. I was still keen to leave the Navy as fast as possible so decided to take the RHODES-LIVINGSTONE appointment.
JG So you went straight down to join them?
22:41
JB Yes, I went on a troop ship from Liverpool to Durban and caught a train and went up to Northern Rhodesia.
JG And at that time who else was there? Max Gluckman…
JB Max Gluckman was director.
JG He had been back in Oxford in 1939?
JB Yes. Then he went back there just before war started..
JG Oh yes, when he took over from Godfrey Wilson.
JB He was assistant to Godfrey Wilson and Godfrey Wilson joined the South African Army and Max became acting director and was eventually made director.
JG So he was installed there by the time you got there?
JB He was not only installed, he was already in the field with the team that he was recruiting at the end of the war. So Mitchell and Marwick, and Marwick’s wife Joan, were already working among the Lamba just south of the Copper Belt when I arrived. They had been there about two or three weeks before I got there. I was in the Lamba for five days, one of which was a Sunday and another was very wet so we couldn’t do any work, so on the basis of that we wrote a monograph. It was one of my first publications.
JG You must have spent a little time. I remember that you got a certain amount of survey material in it, so you must have got off the ground fairly rapidly with that.
JB Well they had already been there and had collected most of the data.
JG Who was it who set up the survey methodology which became a feature of RHODES-LIVINGSTONE work?
24:43
JB I suppose it was thrashed out in Cape Town. When we completed the Lamba survey we then were sent to the BaTonga which were later studied by Elizabeth Colson, with the idea that we would carry out another survey there, and we were to camp in the field as we had done among the Lamba. But I was given the job of putting the camping gear on the train and being unaccustomed to African trains I put it on a goods train, not knowing it would then take weeks to arrive at its destination. So we never did a survey of the Tonga. So we then went on to Cape Town and worked with Schapera for a while. Gluckman’s theory was that Mitchell and I had spent the war learning only how to waste time and that we needed some kind of academic rehabilitation before we could start really serious research work. We spent 4-5 months in the University of Cape Town working with Schapera and writing essays etc.
JG But working up the survey research, that was really done by Mitchell and Gluckman before you arrived?
JB I think it became formalised in Cape Town because Mitchell and I had the job of making sense of the data that had been collected and I think that both of us felt that we should be much more systematic than Gluckman had ever been.
JG Was Clyde’s background..
JB Well he’d done a survey in a hospital in Durban. He had a degree in sociology so he had some idea of what it was all about.
JG And you had this mathematical background too so you thought the thing might be slightly more precise.., and that led both of you on..
26:58
JB I think we were also guided by Schapera. One of the more valuable things to come out of this period in Cape Town was really a filing system which Schapera had worked out over the years he’d been working in Bechuanaland and one can see in the filing scheme that he gave us some of the chapters of his book on Tswana.
JG When you say a filing scheme, you mean characterisation of field material?
JB That’s right so that if you were writing up your notes you knew where to file them.
JG And what heading to give the sub-sections.