THIRD PART
I wanted to study fishermen whose vessels were small enough so they only went away for a short time and therefore weren’t isolated from social life ashore. I didn’t want to go and study whalers who spend all their time in the South Atlantic and didn’t have an impact on local society. I consulted a Norwegian friend of mine who was working in Oslo and he advised me to go to Bremnes. It so happened that in his office was a woman who had been born in Bremnes and she arranged for a relative of hers to look after me and I went to live in his house.
JG Although you were interested in boats as moveable property, your first published work was on land and immoveable property.
56:53
JB That’s right. When I got there I found that it was a complete non-starter. All the vessels that had been in use at the beginning of the war had either been sunk by the British or requisitioned by the Germans. It was a non-problem. There was no inheritance at all, or no possibility of inheritance. They’d got new boats and none of them had been inherited yet, in fact a lot of them were sunk in order to qualify for a subsidy.
JG So you moved away from the sea?
57:23
JB No I studied the fishing. But it did so happen that I had this information on land rights. One of the entrenched clauses in the Norwegian constitution is concerned with the transmission of rights in land and this seemed a fairly obvious place to start.
JG And the work on fishing, you also got a lot of material on that.
57:52
JB I’ve got quite a bit. Not as much as I would like but in my article on class and committees I do talk about fishing. I discussed this with Redfield, the contrast between the ethics of fishing and the ethics of agriculture. Fishing is a kind of warfare, its hunting.
JG You were in Bremnes for over a year?
58:25
JB In the first instance we were there for over a year. I had two winters there, about 16 months. My family came later on.
JG Then you went back to University College?
59:11
JB No. My job there had come to an end. I became an honorary research assistant instead. I went back to Manchester to write up my material and started to apply for jobs. I applied for a lectureship at Cambridge but was unsuccessful.
JG Who got that job?
59:34
JB Edmund, and then I got his readership in London. I went to L.S.E. in January 1954. I stayed there for two years and a term. I left at the end of the Lent term 1956 to go to Australia.
JG You were working with Firth and Schapera again at that time?
1:00
JB That’s right. Schapera came just a little after I did. I remember talking to Raymond about Schapera coming.
JG Mostly when you were at L.S.E. you were teaching?
JB Yes. I didn’t get much time for writing.
JG Your next job was in Australia?
JB That’s right.
JG You took the chair that Firth and Radcliffe-Brown had earlier held at Sydney?
JB Well, Firth was never really the Professor, he was only acting head of department. Radcliffe-Brown was the first holder of the chair and then there was an interim period when Firth was acting, but Elkin was the…
JG Oh, I see. Firth was never the.., I didn’t realize that. I thought he took over the chair.
JB No, not really. I think he was only acting head of department and then he went off to L.S.E. to a lectureship.
JG What prompted you to leave a nice berth..?
1:02:04
JB Well, there were a number of reasons. It seemed to me that most of my colleagues in England who were senior to me were healthy and not all that old, and that it would be a long time before senior posts became vacant in England. I had four children by this time so I was anxious to earn enough to look after them. I found working at L.S.E. not all that congenial in as much as I could never really empathise with Firth and I think the precipitating cause was that Firth had submitted a manuscript to the L.S.E. monograph series which I thought was so terribly badly written that it was unfair to his co-author to publish it. I took rather a stern line about that so I thought it would be better if I left.
JG And Sydney was the only prospect you saw of leaving at that time?
1:03:18
JB Well that was the only chair available.
JG Were you trying to get back to the Pacific?
JB No, I don’t think so.
JG But you got involved in New Guinea?
JB I got involved through my student in New Guinea and also in Aboriginal Australia, also through my students, but I didn’t do an field work or collected any systematic data anywhere while in Australia. Had I stayed on and not come to Cambridge I would have gone to New Guinea. I had a plan lined up to study a place in the West Sepik area.
JG What were you going to look at there?
1:04:27
JB I was going to look at a society which had, I forget the details now, I was concerned in patterns of authority in a society that lacked organised chieftainship but on the other hand did not have organised competitive Big Men leadership that you find in the Highlands. I’d visited a number of areas on the Highland fringe on the northern side and it seemed a very pleasant area to work in.
JG And your work on the Murngin that you published later on, that really arose out of your reading?
JB That’s right. I had visited the Murngin or one of the bits where the Murngin might be because I’d supervised Les Hiatt’s work in Arnhem Land, so I had actually been there. But it was essentially an intellectual problem.
JG Did you find it very different teaching.., I mean you’d just come from the L.S.E. which was the epicentre of anthropology in the 1930’s if not in the early 1950’s, and apart from getting away from Sir Raymond and earning more money to keep your numerous family, were there any other benefits or costs?
1:06:92
JB There were certainly costs. I remember feeling very dejected at the low expectations of academic attainment.
JG At the undergraduate level?
JB At the level of the staff as well. I remember writing to Gluckman saying that I’d got this job in Sydney and nobody was going to take the slightest interest in anything I did, and I could sit here for the next 25 years and not write a single paper and no one there would complain.
JG You felt that?
JB Yes. I remember saying I was thinking of applying for some deputy assistant door keeper’s job in S.O.A.S. which was the worst I could think of at that time.
JG That’s harsh words really considering that Radcliffe-Brown must have had some joy there. He encouraged a certain amount of research to go on.
1:07:12
JB That’s right. He had quite a lot of money to encourage research with whereas I had nothing. I arrived in Australia at a time when the universities were at their lowest ebb. Universities then were funded solely by states not by the Commonwealth and it was only while I was there in Sydney that the Murray Commission recommended that the commonwealth government should interest themselves in financing the universities, and as a result of that the Australian University Grants Committee (or Commission) was set up and things started to improve. I had a smaller staff than Elkin had had before me.
JG Why did it decrease? Why did Radcliffe-Brown have more money than you did?
JB Radcliffe-Brown got a lot of money from Rockefeller. All the research that he promoted was financed from American sources not from Australian. Then unfortunately the treasurer of the fund embezzled it all and a lot of Australian researchers suddenly found themselves penniless, like Piddington, Stanner and so on. It was the treasurer of the body that was administering the fund in Australia.
JG Was it the Australian National Research Council?
JB It was a sub-committee of that. Radcliffe-Brown was never a member of the Research Council and there was some ill-feeling about that, but certainly the funds were misappropriated.
JG But Radcliffe-Brown had attracted the funds to Sydney?
JB That’s the story.
JG In the sense that in the same way Malinowski attracted the same funds to the L.S.E. But then what happened to Elkin? How did he get the money. There was still the Rockefeller money going on? This was the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation run by that extraordinary man, Ruml…
JB Who offered the money to Cambridge for a chair of sociology..
JG I was coming back to that.. Well he offered the money for political science and sociology and got the one and not the other. Martin Bulmer writes about it. I think it probable that the Sydney money also came from Laura Spellman and also came from Ruml who had been trained at Chicago in the days of Angell and Small and had transformed this foundation and it had funded…, they were very interested in empirical research, but it must have continued under Elkin. When did Elkin take over?
1:10:57
JB Radcliffe-Brown left in 1931. Elkin must have taken over in about 1933. Most of them were on five-year grants.
JG But you got nothing? When you came there was no money at all?
JB Yes. Canberra a national university and that was funded by the Commonwealth Government whereas the Government of New South Wales was responsible for funding Sydney. No research at Sydney was funded by the Commonwealth Government then. Nothing was available to me. We had one studentship which had been founded by a man called Strong who had been a medical officer in Papua, but that was all. So there wasn’t much scope for a research programme.
JG So who did you have there as students? Les Hiatt?
1:12:06
JB Les Hiatt was there, and Michael Allen and Frank Jones.
JG Michael Allen had migrated from Ireland to come to Sydney?
JB Well, via Nepal and Western Australia.
JG What about Meggitt?
JB Meggitt was already in the field in New Guinea when I first arrived and then he was appointed to a lectureship. That was my first appointment.
JG With Meggitt, Hiatt, Allen you had a lively intellectual circle.
JB Hiatt was just finishing his undergraduate work and went on to Canberra where they could offer him a research studentship which I couldn’t have done in Sydney. Michael Allen was doing a qualifying exam for an M.A. and I persuaded him to abandon his candidature for an M.A. in Sydney and also go to Canberra where there was more money, and where I was going anyway by that time. I was in Sydney for two years and a bit.
JG About half way through that period you were appointed to a chair in Australian National University, and took over from Nadel?
JB Well there was an interregnum of over two years.
JG While they were searching?
JB Yes. Edmund arrived in Sydney three or four months after I’d arrived on his way to Canberra. They were trying to persuade him to take the chair in Canberra, in 1956..
JG When he’d been a lecturer in Cambridge for two years.., and was feeling the strain.
JB He was offered a field trip in Sri Lanka on the way by the A.N.U.
JG They paid for his work in Sri Lanka?
JB Apparently, or enabled him to go there, I don’t know the details. I remember him mentioning this being one of the attractions of visiting Australia quite apart from the possibility of accepting the chair.
JG So it was after a year or two that you were appointed there?
JB After about 18 months or so. For about six months I ran both departments.
JG Nadel’s post was in anthropology and sociology?
JB The department was of anthropology and sociology and his chair was in anthropology. It was a department in the School of Pacific Studies so the sociology that we did had to be Pacific rather than Australian. There were four research schools in the original plan of A.N.U. medicine, physics, social sciences and so-called Pacific studies, and these were designed to attract back four eminent Australians or New Zealanders to the A.N.U. Firth was to be the first director of the School of Pacific Studies and Hancock to be the Director of the School of Social Sciences. The division between these two schools of social sciences was always a bit obscure but the notion was that the School of Pacific Studies would be more heavily engaged in research work and for the most part, outside Australia.
JG So the Pacific began where the social sciences left off?
1:16:36
JB That was its internal boundary, the external boundary was subject to negotiation. I had some difficulty in persuading my colleagues that a study just north of the Hindu Kush, the Salang Pass in Afghanistan was part of the Pacific, but I managed to do so in the end.
JG What about the Australian Aborigines?
JB Well they again were considered part of the Pacific rather than Australia.
JG So a black-white divide there. Pacific studies were of browns and blacks.
JB Mainly. There was no director when I went there. Davidson was only dean. The first director was John Crawford who was an economist.
JG There you were teaching only graduate students and you had money?
JB That’s right.
JG So you had a lot of people coming there and going to the field.
JB Yes. Our budget was made up of 50% on salaries, 50% on research expenses.
JG Working largely in New Guinea?
JB Well, not only in New Guinea, but that was the largest concentration. But we also had archaeology and linguistics in it, and in purely geographical terms we ranged from the northern part of Afghanistan to Tahiti.
JG But it was mostly research so your teaching was limited.
JB There was no lecturing. We had research fellows and research students. There were no undergraduates. The only courses we gave were in things like mapping.
JG You did not give courses in anthropology?
JB No. It was assumed that people coming to us would have already got M.A.’s or B.A.’s at least in social anthropology before they began.
JG So it was just seminars.
JB Yes. I remember a man arriving straight from Harvard saying that in the few months that he had before he went off into the field he wanted to bone up on kinship. I expressed some surprise at this and he said he’d never been to any lectures on kinship in Harvard.
JG But you didn’t give him any there?
JB I didn’t arrange any course of lectures for just this one chap.
JG That was a very privileged situation really.
1:19:23
JB It was privileged for the research students and research fellows, but it wasn’t particularly privileged for me running this vast show. I once made a tally of the number of people who if they’d wanted to commit suicide would have come and cried on my shoulder and there were over 70 people in this category. Luckily they didn’t all want to commit suicide at the same time.
JG They were research students?
JB Research students and members of staff, secretaries and so on.
JG But you stuck that for 11 years, and then leapt from the frying pan..
JB…into the fire. That’s right.
JG What made you come back to Cambridge?
JB You may remember that you sent me a copy of the advertisement.
JG But you were very committed to Australia by then?
JB I still am committed to Australia, but I thought that I’d been their 11 years and if I didn’t move then I’d probably be stuck forever until I retired, and that after 25 years not only would I be finding Canberra rather boring but also that I would become rather boring to other people and that 11 years was quite long enough in one job.
JG I suppose I should ask you how you found Cambridge?
JB All I can say is that if I’d known what it would be like I wouldn’t have come. I don’t know if I would have stayed [in Australia]. There was some suggestion that I should switch to sociology in A.N.U.
JG But that would have been no better as you would still have been in an administrative position. You’ve been in administrative positions since you made the break for Australia in 1956, and you’d have been going to another one, wouldn’t you?
JB I would have been.
JG So would have had the same disadvantages as in anthropology.
JB It would have been a fresh group and a fresh set of problems, and it would have been in the other research school.
JG And there weren’t research chairs that you could have gone to as distinct from administrative chairs?
JB Well I didn’t know of any. I would have looked rather keenly at any that I had seen.
JG It seems a great pity that, unlike a department of economics where you’ve got one person administering and five other chairs that in the other social sciences the professor tends to be head of department. There are very few research chairs to go to. Were there none in Australia?
1:23:39
JB No, not really. We managed to get two chairs in my own department. Stanner had one in the end, but at that time all departments only had one professor and the professor was head of department.
JG Stanner was working in the Institute for Aboriginal Studies a great deal.
JB Well he wasn’t actually at that time but he was reluctant to assume too much of administrative responsibilities when I was still there. Another reason why I was attracted to Cambridge was that you had told me that in Cambridge, unlike provincial universities, professors tended not to be head of department and it was all done for one by the secretary of the faculty board.
JG That was true in economics where it was done in that way, and since at that time you were joining economics I maybe extrapolated the particular model there.
JB Well the details of the extrapolation unfortunately weren’t explained to me.
JG Well I wasn’t the only consultant. You must have had more objective opinions?
JB There were other reasons. My daughter was over here in England and to some extent I had applied for the job only in the hope that I’d be interviewed so that I could get my fare paid to see her, and then I was trapped as I was offered the job. What happened was that I thought she was becoming a hippy and that I was neglecting my parental responsibilities and that I ought to try and see her. And I accepted an invitation to contribute to a feschtrift for Levi-Strauss which was to be unlike other feschtrifts….
JG ‘Time and the Arrow’.
JB Well that was my contribution, yes, but a seminar was to be held in New York which Levi-Strauss would discuss with the contributors what they had written in honour of him. Operation gift horse, as I called it, and when that fell through I was a bit stuck and wanted still to see my daughter so I had to apply for this job in the hope that they would interview me.
JG As you know, I also applied for the job, and had you turned it down there was not much chance that I would get it, but we might both have been in a different situation, and you would have gone back to Canberra and served out your time..
JB Or I might have thought of something else, some other ploy.
JG But you really wanted something that wasn’t on the administrative side?
JB Well that was what I was hoping for, and that’s what I got, but what I got was a job with entirely political responsibilities not administrative ones. If I’d had administrative ones I could have resigned from them in protest, but as it was I was stuck with these political responsibilities which I couldn’t slough off in this way.
JG You could have retired, as other have done, to Churchill.
JB I could have done…
JG As others have done to All Souls..