Stephan Feuchtwang interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 12th March 2009

0:09:07 Born in Berlin in 1937; father had just come out of gaol where he had been tried and acquitted of smuggling gold out of the country; he had Austrian nationality so had a certain amount of immunity; he had been in gaol most of my mother's pregnancy so very distressing for her; six months later at the Anschluss my father realized we no longer had any immunity and we would leave that night; we went to his sister's in Holland; the next morning the Gestapo went to the house to round us up; spent a year in Holland and then we came to London; the only grandparent I knew was my mother's mother; she came to visit us in London  then returned to Berlin and later to Austria where she spent the War; she was not Jewish although my mother's father was; in 1947 I went with my mother by train to Switzerland and then to Austria to see her; my father's father was the Chief Rabbi of Vienna but he had died in 1936; his father was also a Rabbi at Nikolsburg, now called Mikulov, in Moravia; have visited both their graves; my mother's mother was a very independent woman - a pacifist and Rosa Luxemburgist during the First World War; she ran an art gallery in Unter den Linden in Berlin; she brought up all her children to be tolerant and cosmopolitan, and gave each an Aryan and Biblical name; my mother's father was a businessman, then my grandmother remarried a solicitor for the UFA film studios in Berlin; my father was a businessman and came to England through his business contacts; he was a patent broker and industrial advisor; he had been quite successful in Germany as an asset stripper; he was interned during the War; my mother formed a relationship with a publisher with whom she got a job; they became the founders of Thames and Hudson; my father was quite authoritarian but extremely charming; I have an affinity with babies which I think I get from him; my mother was the opposite and I could see how awkward she was with my children; she must have been like that with me; both my parents married again and I could see my father become more authoritarian with my half brother and sister as they grew up; I rebelled against his authority although I did not spend much time at home as I was at boarding school; I distanced myself from him and only became close again as a young adult; he died at sixty-seven; my mother was a passionate person about everything, including her work; she was always fashionably dressed, and became a fairly grand lady as I realised when I was adult; I was closer to her than my father; my father was a rather sad figure in England whereas my mother found herself; he had suffered having to get us to England and being interned in the Isle of Man

10:44:17 I had an orthodox bar-mitzvah; for a short period I went to Hebrew lessons near my boarding school, in Welwyn Garden City; habitually in the family it was just Friday evenings, but for a few years both before and after my bar-mitzvah I did go to Synagogue for festivals; I have not gone since and am basically an atheist; as a Jew, I felt that I had to interpret everything; I went to mainly Christian schools and although I felt the lessons read in services were not mine, I could try to understand them; when I think about why now I am an anthropologist of ritual and religion I feel it was a development of that stance; being of German birth during the War in England, Jewish or not, was to be marginalized; I was quite embarrassed when my mother spoke to me in German in public; I only realized in my forties that I must have been German-speaking before I learnt English at kindergarten; don't think it is being Jewish that attracted me to anthropology, but the marginality; all anthropologists cultivate being marginal to some extent, and may already incline in that direction; I am a political animal and think that for an anthropologist the normal stance is to be an anarchist, to see things from the grass roots; that I was predisposed to by my previous life, but don't know if I am typical of other anthropologists of religion; I do think I felt the need to understand the big religious traditions, including my own, as an outsider; I was not inside as I had rebelled against my father, but the Friday ritual at home is important now and I think it was then; it was a hidden presence then as most of my life was in boarding school where this was edged out; the adage that anthropologists are anarchic in their own society but conservatives in the societies where they work is true of me; what I loved in the end about the festivals that I became most interested in Taiwan and other parts of China, is both their richness and innovativeness as well as their repetitive nature; when I see how politicians and others seek to turn these festivals into cultural heritage, I resent it; I would like to see it bubble up from below as I think of it as a sort of anonymous, collective, poetry; of course it is not anonymous but it is embedded in what was already there; when it is reinvented as a tourist spectacle, or a Temple is rebuilt for the same reasons, I feel it is both wrong and artificial, although I acknowledge it is no more artificial than the previous one was

20:45:13 I think I was always an atheist; I had to ask myself what is God all the time; however, I am deeply respectful, as well as utterly sceptical, of what people say they have as their spiritual experience including what they say about God or gods; I come from a psycho-analytically inclined family culture; my mother was psycho-analysed and did graphology, and I am married to a psycho-analytic therapist; what Freud calls an oceanic experience, the emotion of religiosity that goes with a belief in God, I think I can detect in myself; I have never had an epiphany but have had oceanic experiences, the sense of wonder, as the arch-atheist, Richard Dawkins, himself has; I think that is part of one's human heritage

23:22:05 I went to a series of kindergartens in London and Oxford; because my father was interned my mother was reliant on friends and relatives as she had no money; we moved from place to place to live with different people; think that the first was at Headington in Oxford; my mother trained me to go to the bus terminus where the kindergarten was so I travelled on my own aged three or four; it was cold and I remember her singing an English nursery rhyme to me; then I went to the Anna Freud clinic in London, which was terrifying because the other children were so disturbed; then went to another in London; at all of them I learned English; next I went to my favourite, Bunce Court, run by two German sisters Anna and Paula Essinger; they realized in 1933 when Hitler was elected Chancellor that they couldn't go on; they were Quakers; they arranged a school trip and took all their pupils, with the agreement of their parents, from Germany to England after having found Bunce Court in Kent; I did not go to that place as it had been requisitioned by the Army, but went to Shropshire where it was removed to until the end of the War; it was coeducational, strict in academic terms, but also progressive; from there I went to a rather grim school called Sherrardswood in Welwyn, also coeducational; it was the first time there that I came across anti-Semitism and anti-Germanism; I did not suffer from it much as I was able to stand up for myself; curiously, one of my best friends was the most anti-Semitic and anti-Germanistic, a boy called Walter Kelly; his parents were in the Fabian Society, and he and I were the only ones who could match the girls, who were always top of the class; after that I went to Gordonstoun on a scholarship as my mother could not afford the fees, and was there for the last four years of my schooling; academically it was a disaster because the teaching was not good; I really enjoyed the outdoors life but I was frustrated by the school; they kept telling us we were being prepared for life, which I wanted, and leadership, which I did not want; at that time I wanted to be either a psychiatrist or a journalist; the latter was an anthropological instinct as I wanted to be able to tell stories about other people; English was my best subject; the teacher was the Headmaster, and he was somebody I remember well; his name was Brereton; he taught me to love Robert Browning; remember not only reading Shakespeare but also Granville-Barker on it for my A levels; did not do well at A level for which I did maths, French and English, but only got English; I then joined the Army as I couldn't get into university

31:27:03 I was keen on long-distance running but didn't particularly enjoy it; what I did enjoy was being in the mountains; that was quite tough, walking in the Cairngorms which were cold and windy; I also learned to ski but had an accident whereby I tore a ligament in my knee and did not ski again; music was also very important; I learned the violin from the age of eight and at Gordonstoun there was a very good teacher who was herself German, Frau Lachman, and had been a student with Hindemith, the composer; she was a viola player; she was a fierce teacher but I took up the viola and played in the orchestra; also played chamber music, a glorious experience; I gave it up when I went to Oxford because I was never really good enough to continue; at school my closest friend was an Hungarian called István Horthy, the grandson of Admiral Horthy who ran Hungary during the War; he and I listened to Mahler symphonies in our study; I could hear others playing 'Salad Days' and traditional jazz which I didn't like; as soon as I left I got very interested in modern jazz, almost exclusively so, and then got back into classical music again; I do write to music although I know I should be listening to it; when I write I get hyper-active and excited by what I am doing so music is an alternative focus; it is not in itself an inspiration

36:29:07 I went into the Army to do National Service; that was a vivid experience; I failed the test for officer training, which I am pleased about as it would have been too much like boarding school; I lived for a whole year in Aldershot learning to type as I was in the Army Service Corps; one thing that was good about that was that I met a huge variety of people that I would not have met otherwise, mainly working class, and learned to get on with them; our children went to state schools so this was not a problem; I had wanted to be in the Intelligence Corps, and when I got to Oxford I met people who had learned Chinese while in the services; that did not happen; I dreaded having to go to Germany but got posted to Stanmore in London where I was personal assistant to the Deputy Director of Army Legal Services; I lived at home, putting on my uniform once a week to collect my pay; in the meantime I went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the evenings because I wanted to do composition; also became interested in acting; at that time I got interested in jazz and met an American saxophonist there; he was a much more accomplished composer but we did write a cantata, he the music and I the words; it was about nuclear holocaust and was never published; at that time I became quite closely connected with the Beat Generation in Paris, where I went afterwards; got interested in the poetry of Gary Snyder; he is a sort of anthropologist; although I was unpolitical I had become interested in anarchy and quite often read 'Liberty', but my interest was poetry and art; when I went to Oxford I went to do Chinese; I got into Oxford while in the Army as I also did my college entrance then; I was accepted with only one A level on the basis of the entrance exam; I had extra Latin lessons at University College to enable me to do that

43:21:08 I had decided to do Chinese instead of English as an act of unacademic arrogance; I felt I could learn what I needed to; Thames and Hudson had published a book by Alan Watts, 'The Way of Zen', and I was very taken with that; I had read Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poetry; I realized that Zen was Chang and linked to Daoism, and wanted to learn to read Chinese poetry; I felt that to do a course on China didn't confine you to doing literature, but could do history and philosophy; felt that if I wanted to become a writer or journalist that I could do that on my own - there was the arrogance; the most significant person at Oxford for me academically was David Hawkes; he helped me a lot although he was not my Tutor; I was at Queen's College but I had most of my tutorials on Tang poetry with Wu Shi-chang who was not at that college; he was not actually an expert on Tang poetry but on 'The Story of the Stone'; David Hawkes was the translator of that book for Penguin - a fantastic translation that I would recommend to anybody; he led me to my first publication; he had been asked by a Ming ceramics collector to translate a poem on a certain kind of blue and white ware for an article to be published in 'Oriental Art'; he gave it to me to do at the beginning of my third year, a fantastic thing to do; David Hawkes disappeared in my last year as he decided that in order to work on the translation of 'The Story of the Stone' he had to stop teaching, which I think was admirable; I was in by far the largest year of students doing Chinese; it was in 1958 and there were eleven of us; John Gittings who was foreign leader-writer of 'The Guardian' was there, and Bill Jenner, the historian and translator were my contemporaries; at Oxford I tried to do too much; I wanted to play the viola, act and write, and the former two fell by the wayside; I wrote poetry and belonged to the Poetry Society and was a Beatnik in my habits; then with a friend, Geoffrey Cannon, took over a journal, 'Oxford Opinion', which we wanted to turn into something much more substantial; we had photo essays, film criticism, news articles, and completely redesigned it; I published poems there but was mainly an editor; we took it out of Oxford when we left and tried to make it into a national magazine and that was a tremendous time-wasting effort, getting advertising etc.; it was called 'Evidence'; we put out only one issue and that was all

51:22:09 At that time I had not encountered anthropology; I went to work in the Chinese bookshop just opposite the British Museum which was run by Charles Curwen; not long after he became a teacher of modern Chinese history at SOAS; I worked there for a year while trying to produce the journal; partly through talking to a friend who was Malayan-Chinese, it dawned on me although I had learned Chinese and could read poems, I couldn't speak Chinese nor understand it; we had not been taught anything but classical Chinese at Oxford; thought this absurd and wanted to go to China, and that was when I learned about anthropology; Maurice Freedman was one of the two poles of the London-Cornell Fellowship; at that time I was married with two children, having married while still an undergraduate; I needed a fellowship if I was going to get to China, and these fellowships offered people with Chinese the chance to become anthropologists or vice-versa; Freedman told me that I couldn't get the Fellowship unless I did a masters degree in anthropology; then I registered to do anthropology at LSE;  I had through doing Chinese, met Robert Reedman who had been in the ambulance service on the Burma road and had learned Chinese, and he gave me his Chinese dictionary; his partner was Maitland Bradfield, a medical doctor who had become interested in archaeology and anthropology; he became a kind of early mentor in anthropology; he was already interested in 'The Elementary Structures of Kinship' and had done his own translation and summary of it which he lent me; I had already begun reading 'Triste Tropique', partly as a literary work, and found it deeply fascinating, so became an anthropologist through Levi-Strauss, the anthropological love of my life; I wrote a lot about Levi-Strauss for Maurice Freedman's classes; I was at the LSE from 1963 to 1965 and worked at Thames and Hudson to pay my way through as a picture and text editor

56:46:13 Maurice Freedman was a huge influence on me; I liked him and at the same time felt distanced from him; we were so different politically and in our dress; he always felt to me to be verging towards pomposity and armoured himself in his waistcoats in some way, and kept a distance from his students; at the same time he came over to the students and taught extremely well and I enjoyed his seminars; he and the other pole of the London-Cornell Fellowship, Bill Skinner, whom he brought over for a series of seminars on his marketing systems theory which was just about to be published; that was fantastic and I felt invigorated to know about China in a different way; effectively they became my two models of how to learn about China; Maurice's insistence on kinship and the distinction between lineage and family, I learned but I didn't want to do them; I was more interested in friendship and territory and neighbourhood; I guess it was similar to what I did to my father as I was anti-authoritarian; I respected him and he respected me despite the fact that he knew of my politics, and had himself stood at the gates of the LSE..., and I didn't like him for that; as my  PhD Supervisor he had the admirable capacity to say that he didn't know what I was writing about, that I was a good fieldworker but my theory was beyond him, however he respected what I did with it; I had a real respect for him and hope I made that clear in the festschrift that I co-edited for him before he died; Stephen Morris was my Tutor initially; he was a distant person but I liked him; I partly got the notion of pluralism from him; later I became very interested in race and picked the notion up again; I was affected by the presence of Raymond Firth and of Jean La Fontaine; masters' students could attend the Friday seminars at that time though I didn't like the way Firth ran them, and the stereotypical notion that he had of each of us, but he was good at allowing someone to speak and then making something of it