Second Part
0:09:07 I got the London-Cornell Fellowship, then spent a year at Cornell University learning Taiwanese; I knew I wanted to study religion and had already read much about Chinese religion in English and French, and written a dissertation on Feng Shui which eventually got published; I had thought of working in Penang but then decided that Taiwan was the best place; at Cornell became interested in phenomenological anthropology and linguistic anthropology, but the main point of being there was to learn Taiwanese; there was a large cohort of students and we all went to do fieldwork, mainly as anthropologists but a couple of sociologists too, in 1966; I had to come back for my father's funeral then went on to Taiwan where I spent a year and a half doing fieldwork on religious change; I had gone there under the auspices of the Joint Commission for Rural Reconstruction as you had to have a sponsor; it is an odd institution of the State, joint between the US and Taiwan, and was for agrarian extension and development, at the most senior level of government; I went on a trip with them to find a field site; there was a strange moment one evening in Puli, right in the centre of Taiwan in the mountains; we were walking down a street with stalls when a person with divination sticks called out to me that my father had just died; thought it uncanny, but didn't stop to have my fortune told; another time when I had taken the lead among a bunch of us student, finding our way in another place we had been taken to; realized that although I could ask the way, I found it very difficult to understand the answer; it took about five months to learn enough to understand; in the early months I did ordinary repetitive things, such as a census in the small town I was in called Shiding; I went round every house asking questions which they must have found curious, but they knew there was this strange foreigner living on an open balcony just under the roof of a temple with teachers from the school; after five months, having been invited into their homes during festivals, I think my Taiwanese was pretty good; at that time my wife and two children came to join me and moved to Taipei; the small town was in reach of Taipei as I wanted to see how people who moved into the city changed their ritual habits, if at all, and how they kept their links; we lived in Taipei for nine months, then they left and I stayed on for another five or six months, living with two Taiwanese friends in one room; I had a very distorted vocabulary, able to do everyday speech, but could do Daoist ritual vocabulary better than most ordinary Taiwanese could; I was studying Daoists in a certain temple at that point, and was interested in the linkages between temples and households through a set of lay Buddhist brothers who did all the funerals; the Daoists did all the "jiao", big refurbishment ceremonies for reopening of temples in a much larger region of that part of Taiwan; I went with them to the various places where they did that; I thoroughly enjoyed my fieldwork; I was not sick though I ate local food; I was lonely to begin with and felt a little persecuted by the children; it was a great idea to have my own family there, though Miranda was very isolated as she spoke no Chinese and didn't have anything to do; she was at home with our younger child, Anna, while the elder, Cordelia, went to an American school; one of my older informant's daughters came to our house to help her learn Chinese; what she loved was to come to the funerals and festivals with me, and our children came too
12:08:17 What I wanted to find out was how religion changed; there was a dilemma that everybody must have when coming to something new, that first of all I had to understand what was not changing; I tried to do so by taking copious notes and comparing them over the time I stayed; as a Levi-Straussian I was interested in understanding the structure, and I did achieve that, but did not get a sense of the change; that came a long time later; what I did achieve then, and eventually published my findings in 'Imperial Metaphor', was a sense of territoriality as such as a ritually defined thing, having certain ritual elements; found these in certain kinds of procession festivals which were true, not only for Taiwan, but the whole of China; I was accused of treating Taiwan as being Chinese which was an accusation made about all of us who were working in Taiwan; it is a justified accusation; Maurice Freedman never claimed to be projecting his work to the whole of China although he was accused of doing so as well
16:03:13 I came back to write up my PhD under Freedman; I was offered two jobs while still doing fieldwork, one was as a lecturer in Asian anthropology at SOAS and the other was from Arthur Wolf to take up a Ford Fellowship at Cornell; instead I did take two small Ford grants, one to organize a fieldwork seminar for Wolf of everyone doing fieldwork in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in Taiwan; the other was to do library research in Taiwan, Tokyo, and the Library of Congress, for Bill Skinner; it was on gazetteers, on ritual and ritual institutions in cities - Taipei and Ningbo - which were then my earliest publications in Bill Skinner's city books; I did take the job at SOAS; Maurice gave me free tuition because at that point I was registered just with the University of London, not the LSE, and his supervision was pretty minimal at the time; I would send him chapters and he would correct the grammar; I was trying to teach anthropology at SOAS while I was writing when I came back in 1968; remember being in New York at the time of the occupation of Columbia University, students sitting on the wall saying that Paris had come out for them, thinking how incredibly insular they were; in Taiwan it had dawned on me that I was working under a military dictatorship; even a friend in the Army clearly had sympathy with the idea of Taiwan independence but couldn't speak of it at the time; that politicised me a little bit; I had already been on demonstration against the war in Vietnam at Cornell; the time I didn't have set politics but was just against the war; in Taipei, sent daughter to an American missionary school rather than one associated with the military; at the time did have an odd relationship with the Naval Attaché at the American Embassy because he knew how to get marijuana, and we would smoke together; he was very interested in Buddhism and taught me how to meditate; I lost touch with him until many years later he sent me a beautiful book of Sutras; I knew Arthur Wolf and Bill Skinner well until they became antagonists at Stamford; Wolf was then involved in the splitting of the anthropology department itself, by which time Skinner had moved to Davis; when I was at Cornell I went to all their lectures; Arthur may have been against the war but is a very strictly unpoliticised anthropologist; his work on religion, although I didn't agree with it, was really pioneering work- 'Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors'; I was there when he gave it as a paper and was very influenced by it; I went to Arthur and Margery's field site after they had left to watch a "jiao", and was introduced through them; Margery's book 'The House of Lim', which came out while I was at SOAS, I think is a wonderful book; before I became interested in doing research I thought their work on childhood was extremely good; saw my own childhood in the light of their analysis of the transition from being indulged by a father to being taught how to be a son, which can be a stark moment in Taiwan
25:21:05 I took Mendelsohn's place at SOAS; I admired him for his expositions of Levi-Strauss, and the way he wanted to work poetry into his anthropology; his course, which I then taught, was my best teaching experience; it was basically a reading group in advanced theory; he had chosen a series of classic anthropological texts which everybody had to read, plus all their re-readings and re-doings, each week a new one; thought it a wonderful way of teaching theory; the person who became my bugbear was Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf; Barbara Ward became an auntie figure for me; Abner Cohen had his over-rigidly dualistic theory of everything, but it was very exciting to see him working it out and to be in seminars with him; being at SOAS, much more than being a post-graduate at LSE, meant learning about India of which I knew nothing; the way in which Haimendorf ran his seminars seemed to me so inferior to the way Firth ran them; he either did not have the intellect or energy for them, he always went to sleep; he considered me a troublemaker and he was on the side of the Director, Phillips; he disliked my not wearing ties or jackets and also thought I should distance myself from the students; I had written something on the SOAS school of imperialism with an undergraduate and a post-graduate, which was not a well-researched piece of work which I then had to apologise for; as soon as that came out, Phillips was overheard to say at a meeting that I had to go; Haimendorf was part of that; when I was made to go - I was not given tenure after five years - Haimendorf offered to write me a reference for a job in Papua New Guinea; instead, I got a job at the City University and became a sociologist; David Seddon - with whom I tried to publish a magazine - also fell out with Haimendorf at about the same time, and went off to UEA where he still is; did not know Piers Vitebsky was there as I only got to know him later
31:46:12 I kept on doing research on China and taught an historical introduction to anthropology at City University; I missed being in an anthropological context very much but did become interested in the relationship between racism in the UK and the history of British imperialism; while I was at SOAS I had already written what was my first anthropological publication, in Talal Asad's 'Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter'; I had done research at the RAI and other places on the relationship between indirect rule and the wish of anthropologists to be both of use to a colonial regime but also critical of it; I tried to set anthropology into a rather broadly defined ideological and political context and got into rather bad odour with various anthropologists for that; Talal and I had both been running seminars on the subject and we put them together into this book; at the City University I took over a course on the sociology of race and developed my own syllabus for it; that became a major interest; I did not do fieldwork but I did do pretty intense work on police racism, for instance, and the canteen culture; there is an extraordinary number of policemen that became anthropologists and did fieldwork on their police work; on Talal's book, I do still agree with it because I was conscious of the fact that it was ambivalent; I think there were points at which the conclusions became too strident, but my main argument was to look at what it might have been possible to write at the time of the writing; my main criticism of Fortes, for example, was that it could have been much more historical; I tried to figure out why it was so unhistorical; why did Malinowski refer to "upstart natives", what was it that could allow an anthropologist to write that; in Evans-Pritchard's preface the fact that the Nuer got strafed is there, but why isn't that a significant ethnographic fact; then I found myself doing it when I went to Taiwan because it is very difficult to do history; it is now what I want to do on a huge time scale using the concept of civilisation; I admit I did not understand the difficulty at the time
38:58:19 I have done so much with Wang Mingming who did his PhD at SOAS; in some of his books he calls me his supervisor which I was not, but it is a Chinese way of speaking about someone senior; I met him through the London China Seminar which I was organizing while at City University but which held its meetings in SOAS; I realized that this extraordinary student was doing something so close to what I had done - he was interested in festivals in Quanzhou, where the people that I studied came from - so we had big mutual interests and I was very excited about that; the way in which he was doing it was very much influenced by people that I didn't have much time for at SOAS; it was very post-structuralist and I had already read what they wrote and was using them in different ways; he was also looking at things which I didn't and couldn't know, the relationship between the revived local festivals of Quanzhou's neighbourhoods and the official, State, festivals; I was interested in his work and in the paper that he gave; then when I got a big grant from the ESRC to do work on mutual support systems; I knew when I went to visit field sites myself (it was all done by Chinese colleagues, one of whom was Wang Mingming) I realized that we could do some work on religion; we then did some work together in a village in Anxi, Fujian province; this is now a relationship that is twenty years old; he has enabled me to rejuvenate my Chinese anthropology so has contributed an enormous amount to me, through doing joint fieldwork mainly, though he does much more of it than I do; since then, by being constantly invited to come in a senior capacity to comment on students' work; you cannot be with Wang Mingming for very long without become more and more historically conscious; he later did work in Taiwan where I had originally worked, comparing a similar culture but under completely different regimes; within two months he had found out more about the history than I knew was even there; realized that it was not just linguistic, it is an immediate instinct he has for looking for genealogies or whatever it might be; he did the same thing on the mutual support study; he talks about Chinese civilization and how we as anthropologists think about it; now I am really involved with it as a concept; I began working with Mike Rowlands at UCL who is an Africanist and Mediterraneanist; we have now given a number of lectures at Wang Mingming's invitation in Beijing; I am going to give one on the concept of civilization and Chinese civilization at Fudan University; it is looking at the really long-term, mainly of material culture, but I always want to go beyond that compared to Mike, who is an archaeologist; Wang Mingming was trained as an archaeologist as well and an anthropologist; we are reviving the concept of civilization developed by Mauss and trying to rethink all that was done by diffusionism and ethnology, but without any ethnocentricity or a universal evolutionist perspective; the challenge is to be able to see continuity and radical transformation all at the same time - what is it that continues and how does it become the vehicle for change or learning new things, all this over periods of change that can last hundreds of years; that is the comparative civilizations project
46:56:19 On the Maoist era, I gave a public lecture at the LSE on this in a series called 'After Thirty Years of Reform', and I realize that Maoism as a state is less than thirty years; Mao was so extraordinary - he likened himself to the first Emperor who only last lasted twenty-five years but had an enormous influence - but I don't think he will have that influence; he thought he would far exceed the first Emperor as he had the people on his side; not true in my opinion, but nevertheless, the state that he established in China, with institutions like the Communist Party itself and its way of working, are still going on, so I don't think it is just a blip; the deep continuity over time has often been broken, but the Maoist break was probably the biggest; the extent of destruction was probably greatest in the Cultural Revolution but under the Kuomintang there was immense deal to turn temples into schools etc.; there have been periods of iconoclasm before that in China, but there are certain things that seem to be continuous though their content may have changed; my shortest definition of Chinese civilization is "sage rule and self cultivation", and I think that still goes on; the notion of a moral leadership is quite peculiar to China, and the notion of self-cultivation through bodily techniques or feng shui and the cosmology that goes with it of balance, is still true
51:16:23 My interest in place and spatial formation to which I have now added the idea that one could look at different senses of place - I wrote the introduction and a chapter of a book, 'Making Place', on China - is an extension of my interest in feng shui; I now want to add that not only do different people have different senses of the same place which they each centre for themselves, but they have different senses of time and histories; I want to be able to develop that in the future; I am writing something now for the second in a series of workshops, which Laura Bear of the LSE and I are organisers of, called 'Conflicts in Time'; it is also about different senses of time which I am calling temporalities; that is another ongoing project; I am preparing a paper for this on planning in Quanzhou which includes different peoples' senses of the place they are in and their histories, and their sense of the future as well as the past