Chris Hann interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 14th May 2010

0:05:07 Born in Cardiff in 1953; my mother's father was a native speaker of Welsh but the language died in my family with his death in 1958; I was five at the time so never got to know him; he married a lady from Sligo in Ireland and they could only communicate in English; that was fairly typical of Cardiff at the beginning of the twentieth century; the Hanns originate, according to my father, in north Somerset but I have not taken any interest in the details of family history; they moved from Somerset to Cardiff just as the coal boom was getting underway in the later nineteenth century; most relatives on both sides of my family are still concentrated in Cardiff; I spent a little time with my maternal grandmother, a Catholic from Ireland; it is because of her that large numbers of her descendants are Catholics, but we are a minority in South Wales; she was a matriarchal figure who was ill much of the time and could not leave her house; as young children we had to visit her every weekend and during holidays, so I knew her better than any of my other grandparents; my mother's family was lower middle class and I don't really know what they did - something to do with the sale of insurance possibly; I don't think that my grandmother had to go out to work, so they were comfortably off, owning a small terrace house in Cardiff; my father's side is more emphatically working class; his father worked for Cardiff City Council in the plumbing or water engineering department; he was also a life-long member of the ground staff of Cardiff City Football Club; he was the grandparent I was most proud of because we could get used, very heavy old leather footballs that Cardiff City no longer needed for their practice; they were passed on to me while I was still at primary school; my father was sixteen in 1940, was grammar school boy at Cardiff High School, and that is where he lost all traces of a Welsh accent; the school was open to working class children but the policy was not to speak Welsh, or to speak English with a Welsh accent; my father was bright enough to be taken aside for officer training in the Navy; he spent six years in the Royal Navy and that undoubtedly changed his life; in 1946 when he was demobilised he was expecting to be sent to university, but he had spent a few months before going to the Navy working for Cardiff City Council; according to the regulations the council could draft him back if they needed him urgently in post-war rebuilding; that is what they did, and the compromise they worked out was that my father would study at night school, taking some classes at University College, Cardiff; he eventually obtained qualifications as a civil engineer including membership of the Institute of Civil Engineers; he was the first member of his family to obtain any higher qualification, and I was the first to go to university; he didn't stay long in Cardiff; I think he fell out with the Chief Engineer, and in the early 1950s there were plans to develop a new town some twenty miles north-east of Cardiff at Cwmbran; it was the only new town set up in Wales though many others were set up in England and Scotland; my father took the opportunity to become a surveyor, development engineer, and a little bit of everything in transforming four villages in the eastern valley of Monmouthshire into what nowadays in Cwmbran New Town with a population of about 60,000; he was designing houses, roads, the sewage network, between the early 1950s and retirement with local government reorganization some time in the 1970s; he is my only living parent now, still living in Cwmbran, working in his garden; he has mellowed as he got older; he did stay with the Royal Navy as a reserve officer for several decades after being demobilised; he rose to become Captain of the South Wales branch of the Royal Naval Reserve; this meant dressing up in uniform once a week and driving to Cardiff for an evening that was a mixture of enjoyable socializing as well as pursuing the goals of the Navy; he went on extended trips to sea every summer, the longest of which took him to the West Indies for two months; it was so casual in those days that it was not difficult for him to take me when still a schoolboy on the mine sweeper on trips to the Mediterranean; when I was a university student we made a trip to Canada when he was the Captain of a flotilla of mine sweepers; I was then officially an Ordinary Seaman doing jobs on board; I didn't really get to know my father very well in those days; he was quite a stern figure, very different from my mother; my mother died in 2002 and since then my father has softened; he lives alone but does pretty well with his large garden, and my sister living not too far away; it is a pleasure visiting him these days and getting him to talk about his boyhood in Cardiff and the class structure of the suburb of Splott Docklands, which no longer exists; my mother inherited a deep Catholicism from her mother; she was the home maker and did not go out to work after they moved to Cwmbran; she had four children of whom I am the oldest, spaced out over twelve years; she was always there, a typical British housewife of that time; my parents were very supportive of my going to university and were pleased when I got a scholarship to Oxford; for some reason it was my mother who would drive me the hundred miles from Gwent to Oxford at the beginning of each term that I was an undergraduate

10:37:12 I was brought up in the community of Cwmbran, when I remember the whole vast centre of the valley was still green fields in the 1950s; today it is a shopping centre, originally designed by my father, which serves a much larger community in the once flourishing industrial zones of Gwent; I grew up with green fields and parks, but it was an urban settlement that was growing rapidly; like Cardiff earlier, it was attracting people from everywhere; almost all my school friends originated in England, many in the Midlands; English was the only language we used at school although the place names were thoroughly Welsh; I went to Croesyceiliog School, a new establishment at the end of the 1950s; it was a good school and I had a successful time there; my earliest memory is when I was aged four, going to school, and being away from my mother; I could already read as she had taught me, but I hated being away from her and screamed my head off, and she had to come and collect me early; I haven't thought about that for some time but I fear other early memories will have been distorted by photographs; we were Catholics and had to go to a Catholic primary school even if it meant inconvenient travelling; for my first year I went north to Pontypool, to St Albans, but after that I was sent down the valley to Newport, to St Joseph's Convent, where I was taught by nuns until I passed the 11+; at that point I think I was very lucky as other Catholic parents sent their children twenty miles to Cardiff; my parents thought that too extreme and allowed me to go to the local grammar school, which meant I could walk

14:11:03 I think it was an excellent school, though I am not sure that I thought so at the time; we had a headmaster who was an Oxford graduate, a chemist, Mr Summers, who was quite strict and determined that as many pupils as possible from this not particularly prosperous setting should go to the best universities; he organized a system which was designed to produce kids who could apply for Oxford and Cambridge; I was certainly not the first to follow that road in the 1960s; he did not have the power to prepare us for exams in Greek, an certainly my Latin was a bit shaky, but we did 'O' levels after four years instead of the usual five; I was privileged to have very good teachers in the subjects I chose for Advanced level work - history was one of them, French and English were the others; I had several history teachers, but the one I owe most to was a very devout Welsh non-conformist; we had to study the Tudors and Stuarts, so debated Geoffrey Elton's views month after month; for European history  we had a younger, more relaxed, teacher; we could chose projects and somehow I came do one on Calvin; I wrote a detailed study after doing a lot of extra research in local libraries, and ended up with something which was infused with my Catholic background, about their being an inherent connection between the dissolution of the monasteries and the construction of a similar number of workhouses for the poor three centuries later; this was so outrageous to my non-conformist teacher when he got to hear of the thesis that I was putting forward, that it led to some controversy; but we were also very good friends, and he did instil some kind of dedication to scholarship in me; his name was Watkins and he looked a little like the comedian Frankie Howard, but with a completely different temperament

18:08:16 I was not very good at games then, being too small to be very good on a rugby field which was the grammar school game; I did play football but that was not an option at school; I never competed for my school in any sport; I don't think I had any real hobbies; I inherited a stamp collection from my father which informed my sense of geography; in later school years there was a group of friends with whom I went youth hostelling regularly in the wonderful countryside around South Wales; I rode my bicycle around Cornwall aged fourteen, with a couple of friends; I was passionately devoted to the popular music of the time; when, as good Catholic children, around ten or eleven we had to prepare ourselves for Confirmation, I had to think what my Confirmation name would be, I had no hesitation in choosing George because George Harrison was my favourite Beatle; my own efforts to strum a guitar were frustrated, and I shall never forgive my parents for not giving me the kind of guitar I wanted at that age; they did give me a little record player and I do spend a lot of time listening to music still; I still listen to the Beatles occasionally, but I did come to recognise other kinds of classical music at a relatively early age; I remember a somewhat awkward conversation in my 'O' level Italian oral - I forgot to explain that I had some good language teachers, and one in particular, Idris Jones, a native Welsh speaker, but because our headmaster did not approve of Welsh it was not taught; I could do French, German and Latin and even Italian as a two year extra 'O' level; I had never been to Italy so my oral Italian was absolutely dreadful, but in my oral exam I had a long discussion with my examiner about Mahler's Fourth Symphony, which I knew well enough to impress him; I listened to the music that I could find on record in the chain stores in Cwmbran; we had no concerts or theatre life; once or twice a year the school would take us to Stratford or Bristol Old Vic; I don't think that music has any direct influence on my work; now I can listen to Mahler, quietly, while working, but not when writing; I did publish an article in Cambridge Anthropology in the nineties, which was very carefully structured around the lyrics from a famous song by The Who, another of my favourites from early on; 'Don't get fooled again' is one of the more sophisticated analyses of the post-Socialist predicament

24:22:11 The school pushed us to think about applying to Oxford and Cambridge; because Oxford is nearer to South Wales, every year most students would put Oxford ahead of Cambridge; in particular we would apply to Jesus College because of its Welsh connections with scholarships reserved for applicants from Wales; I applied and got a scholarship to read PPE; I do remember thinking about reading Intellectual History at Sussex, which looked exciting, but Oxford did not have intellectual history and my teachers told me that PPE was a very well-known combination; we had no economics at my school so were not really prepared for any of those disciplines, but I certainly did not want to continue with any of the subjects that I had taken at 'A' level; if I had chosen one it would probably have been history because I had done an 'S' level in it; I think that that was when I first came across Maitland and Evans-Pritchard on history being anthropology and anthropology being history; E.H. Carr's 'What is History?' was the bible for many of those classes; on the academic side, I don't think Oxford was very well organized; at Jesus I had a very conscientious economics tutor as my moral tutor, Donald Hay; he had recently arrived from Nuffield College with a Cambridge background; he had studied geography and wanted something more rigorous, therefore had switched to economics; he was a good Christian who always told us when we had had enough of reading Samuelson or Lipsey, much more important was the Gospel of St Mark, which I am afraid fell on deaf ears at the time; there were only three in my year, the cohort was very small, and we all chose different options; I was farmed out for politics teaching to Nuffield College, to Philip Williams, a nice man who was a tutor there; my area option specializing in Eastern Europe took me to St Anthony's College; in my final year I took the option in Marxism which took me to Hertford College; it was all rather fragmented and the lectures were not very good; my good memories of Oxford, apart from getting a good result at the end, are mainly of football and summer balls, and making friends that I still have today; I did not go to many lectures, certainly not in my final year; I remember thinking Peter Oppenheimer was quite good on economics in my first year; I also had John Plamenatz for politics but he was not very inspiring; in general I don't think the standard was very high; I was taught by Dick Smethurst at Worcester College in my final year; I was covering my options, having done Marxism one term which associated me with a certain type of undergraduate; we are talking about the early 1970s when students were occupying the examination halls and a lot of students were very political; I was the President of the Junior Common Room, by no means an extremist, but going to a lot of the meetings where the International Marxist group was arguing with the International Socialists; it was a very political struggle, but with an eye on my future I chose to do the money paper the following term, and that is how I got to know Dick Smethurst; at that time he was a Junior Proctor and was interested in talking to me as a junior common room president for inside information about when the students were planning to occupy a building that he was responsible for; he was a very nice guy, full of energy and enthusiasm, and I think already a little bit bored with teaching well-bred young men whose only interest was in landing on their feet when they went to the City of London after graduating; I think he realized that I was unlikely to follow that path, but I thought I was keeping my options open by taking a paper which would potentially have enabled me to make a lot of money

31:32:09 I was brought up as a Catholic; we had special classes for those children not going to Catholic schools and I had more than my share of sitting on benches listening to priests who all came from Ireland; South Wales was missionary territory; all I got out of it was the opportunity to be with boy scout groups, to play football in the Church team, and I lost any last semblance of religious faith around the age of twelve or thirteen; from then on I don't think I was ever particularly militantly secularist; I was influenced at school by people like Albert Camus and that kind of non-Christian philosophy; if I take religion seriously nowadays, as I do, leading a number of recent projects at this institute, it is very much as a social scientist interested in what holds communities together; I am also interested in the spiritual commitment that individual human beings are capable of; I find that extremely interesting, but I can't identify with any of it myself; fortunately the category of agnostic is flexible, so I would still place myself there rather than atheist; the latter has such a bad taste, especially if you work on socialist countries where this was required for such a long time - scientific atheism was the Soviet Union's peculiar form of religion and ideology; I find the category of agnostic, helpful, useful, but I don't personally connect to religion; I do not have mystical moments and I am married to a lady who is cynical about all forms of organised religion, as indeed is my father; it was always my mother who would go to church with us on Sundays whereas my father would boast that he was an old-fashioned pagan so was allowed to stay at home and dig his potatoes instead

34:39:00 I have thought about whether it is helpful as an anthropologist to have a faith background; it may explain why for most of my career I have stuck with the harder areas of economic and political anthropology, and even when I have looked at religion I have been interested in its social aspects - religion and civil society rather than meanings and interior states; I would not claim to have the religious sensibility of an Evans-Pritchard, or T.S. Eliot before him; this is not the sort of person that I am so obviously it has had some effect on the kind of anthropology that I have tried to do; of course one needs to be careful because you don't want to end up saying that only a Catholic can study the Catholics; I am not up to date with the arguments in Britain, but right now in Germany, organised religions are under enormous public pressure, mostly because of sexual scandals in the Roman Catholic Church; I have a certain glee as more revelations come forward because the power that has been abused over centuries is fairly clear to see; at the same time I do not share the slightly more militant stance of my wife in this respect; we discuss this at home and have many debates here at the Institute, but the role that different forms of religion have played in many post-socialist societies can help people to deal with all kinds of stressful situations; I think I have learned to respect that more over the last couple of decades; that has to do with the evidence that we have been collecting on religion in post-socialist countries; I have a sneaking respect for people who take their faith seriously and see it as ultimately what holds communities together; I always thought  that the much heralded demise or redundance of Durkheimian sociology was exaggerated - I have been listening to this from the 1970s and I still have sympathy for the school, despite the moral didacticism of Durkheim; you may not like his political sympathies either, and clearly some of his models of religion mirroring social organisation are grossly exaggerated; Pickering's very detailed book on Durkheim and religion shows it is not only relevant to simple Australians, but that the fundamental insights of the Durkheimian tradition are relevant to social cohesion in modern conditions; for me, Durkheim has his place in the pantheon of anthropology as well as sociology

40:24:23 In 1974 I went to Cambridge to do the Certificate in Anthropology; I could have stayed in Oxford and done a year's conversion course but I decided it would be more exciting to sample the 'other place'; by that time I had read Edmund Leach's introduction to Levi-Strauss and was immensely stimulated; it was a very exciting way to discover anthropology; Polly Hill was appointed as my supervisor because of my economics background; I got on very well with her; I was a deferential student wanting to learn about anthropology; one of the first books she got me to read was Abner Cohen on Hausa migrants; I should say that the Cambridge introduction was just as chaotic as most of my teaching in Oxford had been; I would go to lectures here, there and everywhere; I came to Corpus College because my economics tutor in Oxford had a connection with it, which was how I came to a college that had no close links with anthropology; it was all a little arbitrary, but I learned a lot just through going to classes organised for us; Stephen Hugh-Jones and Caroline Humphrey were the joint convenors of the meeting which was the most important weekly session for the students doing the Certificate; it was a nice little community that year so I learned a lot from all of them; Cambridge was very different, above all because of Corpus Christi College; I was living at their graduate centre off Grange Road at Leckhampton; it was very posh compared to what I had known at the Welsh college in Oxford; everything was much more hierarchical; when you went into Corpus Christi, the porter called you 'Mr' and 'gentlemen'; the relationship between porter and students was totally different from what I had known in Oxford, so it was in that context that I really noticed a difference; of course, I was a graduate student and that was a very different experience too; there were obvious continuities - I joined the football team again as I had as an undergraduate - but the Cambridge colleges that I was exposed to, King's being the other, were of a scale and atmosphere that were both very different from my rather intimate Welshness as a Jesus scholar in Turl Street, Oxford

46:01:09 You were lecturing about English kinship which went down very well, we also had Jerry Leach who was a gifted lecturer, but other lecturers were not all equally inspiring; it was always intended that I would go on, what was not clear for quite some time was what kind of a PhD would I go on to do; I took the Melanesia option which was run by Jerry in combination with Gilbert Lewis; Gilbert was also my advisor in the very first term; I was so excited by all the materials they were presenting, not to mention the wonderful film, 'Trobriand Cricket', which was the first ethnographic film I ever saw; we were all attracted to that area, but Jack Goody suggested that I study Eastern Europe; I had already been to Hungary several times although I did not speak the language; from 1975 onwards I was applying to the British Council to work in Hungary; I had first gone there at the end of my first year in Oxford on an interrail ticket as I had wanted to explore a part of Europe that I knew nothing whatever about; I visited Prague, Budapest and Vienna, travelling alone for a month; I discovered Hungary, met a girl in a train between Vienna and Budapest, and corresponded a little with her in German; that was the reason why I enrolled for a Summer university course at the end of my time in Oxford; I spent a couple of weeks in very stuffy classrooms learning about Hungary's new economic mechanism; it was intellectually quite exciting to be in Hungary at that time; they were reforming classical central planning models and they offered an English language international Summer school; Jack knew that I had done these things which was why he encouraged me to go to Hungary to do PhD work in anthropology; by that time I was already less enthusiastic about the structuralist things I had been reading by Edmund Leach, and I quickly came round to the idea of a fieldwork project in countries that I had already been researching in economics as well as politics; the anthropologist, using the methods of participant observation, could generate fresh kinds of knowledge about what was really going on in those societies that would go beyond the stereotypes of totalitarianism; none of the popular images really fitted Hungary as I already knew the place in the early seventies; it also seemed an attractive place to go with a good climate

50:51:24 I was never close to Jack Goody as a graduate student; he was officially my supervisor, but that was because somebody had to put their name down to take responsibility; I am grateful to him for doing that, but I don't think he read a word of anything I wrote about the Hungarian village where I ended up spending a year; I think I was very lucky to get through my PhD in such a casual way, I am sure it would not be possible nowadays; I wrote an occasional letter to him but don't think I prepared any text while I was in the field; later when I was in Cambridge, he was the Chair of the writing up seminar, so he would hear me talking about this and that, but I don't think I had much constructive academic supervision from Jack; it was somehow tacitly understood that if you were good enough to be given a free hand to go to a country where nobody had been doing anthropology from Cambridge before, that you would be getting on with it in your own way; I am grateful to Jack for letting me get on with things; it would be an enormous risk nowadays and we would not take on students in this Institute in such a manner, but in those days I can only feel grateful looking back; I did get to know him much better later on; obviously I owe him everything because in the year in which he retired I was appointed as an assistant lecturer, having in the meantime spent a few years at Corpus as a research fellow; I started work in the Department in 1984 which was the final year of his tenure of the William Wyse Chair; it was after that, even though he was away from Cambridge most of the time as he was determined not to interfere in any way with the regime of Ernest Gellner, that I saw him more frequently; he has been here at this Institute; I don't pretend that I read all the books that he writes because there are just too many of them, but his fundamental arguments that has driven most of his work, comes back to Eurasia, to the contrast with Africa as shown in his early works; the best synthesis, which I did not appreciate at the time is 'Production and Reproduction', which he published in the mid-seventies, obviously tied together a lot of the things that he had been working on since his own dissertation published ten years before; I remember asking him why hadn't he followed up those particular themes, but he had said all he wanted to say and had taken it as far as he could; however, all of the later work, though it might look as though he was interested in engaging with people like Pomeranz on the great divergence, is actually all about the agenda which he was setting up in the 1970s; it was an agenda, deriving from Childe, contrasting Eurasia East and West since the urban revolution of the late Bronze Age, with all that he knew from his years in the field in Africa; there is a consistency with almost all that he has done; even the apparently obscure things like flowers, they all fit into this agenda; I respect that enormously but intellectually I still think that those relatively small books of the 1970s will be the books that will continue to be read by future generations of anthropologists; on the pantheon of anthropologists, for me, he and Ernest Gellner are the two I know best, not only because of their works but through sitting in their kitchens, drinking red wine with them, watching football with them, so I can't begin to give an objective answer; those two would be at the top of my pantheon, but I recognise that my reasons are inevitably subjective; I have criticisms of the work of both of them; Jack clearly exaggerates his contrasts, though I don't think I would accuse him of technological determinism which he was accused of in the 1970s, but I see weaknesses in the theoretical edifices exhibited by both of my local heroes; at the same time, I think that both Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner are going to stay key figures in the pantheon; it is true that both of them published so furiously in their later years that it is sometimes hard to separate wheat from chaff; I would like somebody to do a selection from Jack's work in the way that James Laidlaw and Stephen Hugh-Jones did for Edmund Leach; of course, Leach's writing was very different but I would place him with the other two; I did not know Meyer Fortes at all, but he would have to be there too as part of the Cambridge pantheon