Second Part

0:05:07 On Ernest Gellner, the clarity of his writing and his basic position as he formulated it late in life - 'The Enlightenment Fundamentalist' - actually I think his position was rather more subtle than that simple label would indicate, but pushed as he was into these endless polemics through most of his life, always fighting causes with such wonderfully lucid prose; he was obviously not the greatest of ethnographers though I am told that the Morocco monograph is respected by those who know Morocco, but I think Gellner outperforms everybody in anthropology in terms of his range; coming from his secure background in philosophy, having found his roots in the eighteenth century with David Hume, in particular, also Kant, he knew what he was talking about; when anthropologists nowadays dabble in philosophy, very often they have not got even the faintest of backgrounds in that discipline; the authority of Gellner's voice over so many years warning against the seductions of the post-Geertzian generation in particular; up to a point I think he respected Geertz, but I remember Gellner telling me of the respect that he had for some of Geertz's more substantial work, and bemoaning the fact that Geertz's work helped to open up more of the indefensible post-modern excess of the end of the last century; I see Gellner as a spokesman for a certain rationalist, rigorously comparative, empiricist - many of the labels that I am sympathetic to, though somewhat ironic that he is doing this from a background in Central Europe; I miss him enormously; the silencing of his voice so prematurely was a great loss for all of us; Popper was fundamental and Gellner acknowledged that on many occasions, but he is a lot more interesting than Popper because he does have an appreciation for what makes societies and cultures different from each other; he had the sensitivity to the problems of understanding other cultures; of course, it helps that he had an interest in those parts of the world where I have an interest; I have not engaged much with his work on Islam, and I know that it is still intensively criticised, but the fact that people in that field still engage with his model shows you the value of putting forward a kind of ideal type, which he drew together in 'Muslim Society'; for me, it is more his work on socialism, and the problems addressed by Marxism, and interest in debating the living conditions of societies following some kind of Marxist-Leninist path while that was still open; on this I had a particular reason for engaging with him though we very seldom agreed on much; of course, his own background would make it very unlikely that he would see things as I saw them, but it was also typical of him to take my points seriously as I had done fieldwork in Hungary; he was charitable and generous to me

8:23:13 After four years as a research fellow at Corpus, became a lecturer in Ernest's department; with Keith Hart, taught economic anthropology; he is very much my older brother and knew very much more about economic anthropology than I did when we shared the teaching in the department in the 1980s; he was already disillusioned with quite a lot that was going on, including work on development in which he had made major contributions in the past whereas I was still the enthusiastic novice; we didn't always get on well together but we have done some books together; the jointly written 'History of Economic Anthropology' will appear quite soon with Polity Press, following the 'Market and Society' volume that came out last year; it has been very rewarding to produce these volumes with him; he has visited Halle once or twice and we correspond intensively; that is an ideal way to work with Keith; sometimes when you are too close to him in daily interaction, he doesn't suffer fools gladly; you need a thick skin sometimes, but the benefits of working with him, profiting from a mind that is as lively and creative as any of the others we have discussed; we were appointed at the same time, but in a sense in a department where Ernest Gellner had the status of the William Wyse Chair, again and again Keith would want to debate with him as an equal which led to friction between them on numerous occasions; in the end he put so much energy into teaching activities in Cambridge, which I respected but also regretted that it gave him less time to publish his own work; since retiring he has come to be more productive; I don't pretend to understand his psyche; we have a good joking relationship - I am the lad from South Wales and he's the Manchester man; he can't dismiss the things that I do, while on some occasions he will resort to referring to a certain social background or political stance to explain views that he disagrees with; we manage to hit it off pretty well; we had a great week together at the Polanyi Jubilee Conference in Montreal where we made the plans for the book on the history of economic anthropology; we shared a hotel suite for a whole week and it was a great experience; I could only wish I had other similar lively intellectual exchanges with other colleagues over the years, but it is easier to do this at a distance using the Internet than to be in continuous daily interaction with Keith

14:17:22 The book published last year has the subtitle 'The Great Transformation' and we think that the message, however exaggerated it was (and it is not a model that many historians would defend), has fundamental insights of Polanyi and the substantivist school do make a lot of sense; its most important argument is that the world does not have to be run on the basis of the principals of English utilitarian liberalism - economic man, the Formalist idea of the individual utility-maximizers, driving all human behaviour; I see an obvious link here with economic theory and rational choice theory more generally; what attracts me in the substantivist critique is the idea that humans are capable of more than that, and that people often evoke to support the individualizing economic man approach individuals like Adam Smith, when you look more carefully at their work are countering that aspect with the moral sentiments, an understanding of human capacity for empathy with others as well as maximizing only utility; this is what I would try to explain to a colleague in Bangladesh or anywhere else in the world; this is actually a long running internal debate in European philosophy and social thought which has been grossly simplified in our era, the so-called neo-liberal age; I was a junior lecturer in the decade of Mrs Thatcher and it is still somehow fresh in my mind, and those are still ideas that command large sections of the intellectual landscape here in Germany today; it is still hard to argue against those intellectual positions, but I think the counter-arguments of Polanyi, despite the polemical excess and inadequate attention to a lot of historical detail; the critique of market logic is not fundamental in the sense that he denies the importance of markets or that kind of selfishly motivates economic action, but he insists that it must be embedded in other forms of action, human behaviour; you may disagree with the labels that he used - reciprocity and redistribution are very vague general types that he sets up, based on his own reading of the ethnographic literature available to him in the 1930s, drawing heavily on Malinowski, Mauss and Thurnwald - I think Polanyi's critique and that whole debate between the substantivists and the formalists is still very important for the syllabus of economic anthropology, but also for public debate more generally about the kind of world we live in which parasitical finance markets can do so much damage to the real economy; Polanyi generated those views in the age of the Great Depression, it would not have been possible without his own background and upbringing in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his experience in the First World War, the biography is extremely important in understanding how he came to put forward those ideas; the main thing is to see the value of those ideas, and in fact, as Keith and I point out in the book, this Formalist substantivist debate is not so different from the debate that was going on inside German history in the later nineteenth century where people like Karl Bucher, also very important for the history of economic anthropology, were trying to find their own middle way between the universalizers, arguing that there must be universal laws to explain human economic behaviour;  we would now look to the evolutionary psychologists as the exemplary representatives of these universalists, that there is one hard-wired human brain, and on the other hand, historians and anthropologists much more interested in documenting different forms which that universal hard-wired brain can lead to in different local settings; it is an old debate, and I am not saying that Polanyi won all the arguments, but I would still insist that his side of the argument always needs to be listened to and it is nowhere more important than in our own countries nowadays with fresh financial crises hitting us almost every month

20:40:16 Having experienced Oxford, Cambridge then the University of Kent, and now the Institute in Halle, Germany, there are of course major differences between them; although Kent was set up with a collegiate model it was very different from Oxford and Cambridge; the founding professor of anthropology and sociology was Paul Stirling; I knew him quite well through my work in Turkey and that was one of the attractions of going to Kent, for although he had retired he was still active; I also enjoyed working in a department where sociologists had a major presence; of course, conditions were very different from those I had known in Cambridge, still they were happy and productive years for me; the German scene is very different; here German scholars themselves often joke that not much has changed since the nineteenth century; the institution of the ordinarius, the Professor, who once appointed recruits staff at various levels; a department of anthropology at a German university may have only one professor, the other staff will be directly subordinate to this professor and generally expected not to complement this professor in their expertise and teaching range but to do things for the professor in his or her field of interest; there is a degree of hierarchy to a degree of exploitation that I have never come across in the British system where even a very junior assistant lecturer is treated as an academic equal in a community that is fundamentally collegial; it is collegiality versus hierarchy to put it crudely; we try very hard at this Max Planck institute to respect principles of collegiality because I really believe that to be more fruitful of good academic work, but even within Max Planck things are set up by directors who expect then to appoint subordinates, and it is difficult to generate the kind of intellectual community which I always used to take for granted in Britain; I know managerial pressures are leading to new forms of hierarchy in Britain, but in Germany, despite a lot of efforts to improve things - for example, they have talked for many years about abolishing habilitation degrees, a second PhD which allows you to qualify for chairs; quite a lot of people never get around to writing a second degree, and the joke used to go round that dissertations are not read but weighed - if you don't write a couple of kilograms then it won't go through; that is no longer the case, but you do have to subject yourself for gruelling examination rituals, typically in your forties, in order to qualify then to apply for chairs; it is then not so surprising in human terms that people who still have to go through those rituals then appoint junior staff in the same way that they themselves were appointed a generation before; the system reproduces itself despite the efforts of some reformers in ministries to abolish habilitation, informally it continues to exercise the same pernicious effects that it has done since the nineteenth century; as a foreigner in this country I have to be politic about such matters and have to interact constructively with people that have to operate within this system

25:48:17 On my experience in Corpus, I have a great nostalgia for the college model though I don't like every aspect of it; Corpus was a very peculiar place in those days and I have been told that it hasn't changed that much over the years; there was a lot of trouble recently with the election of a new Master; for me it was quite an exotic social world bearing in mind the world that I come from in South Wales; I played a very active role in it in the 1980s; when I was a junior lecturer in the department my salary was not very high, and simply to make ends meet, with small children and a wife who was finishing her PhD, I ended up doing quite demanding jobs inside the College; I was the tutor for advanced students at Leckhampton doing a job that my predecessor had done full-time, paid a full salary by the College; in my case they supplemented my University salary; I don't regret doing it because I did enjoy many elements of what we called, the Leckhampton community;  I sometimes had to rush away from the anthropology seminar on Friday evenings for a governing body meeting at college; sometimes the discussion at that meeting was just as interesting as the seminar I had left; I made some good friend there; the college had some obvious advantages in that it provided you with hot meals, Corpus Christi being right next to the anthropology department; I organised JRF competitions, I put in quite a lot of work for the college but I also got a lot back from it; I would definitely end up defending the college system against its critics; I am sure it can be improved and made to work better; Ernest Gellner used to joke when he came to lunch at Corpus with me that the college felt like a gemeinschaft whereas King's, being so much larger, the hall itself being a much more impressive building, felt anonymous; he appreciated the smaller community of my college; on his induction at King's he joked that it was the only time he knelt to a linguistic philosopher, Bernard Williams

29:23:23 I would not put myself high up in the pantheon of original thinkers; if I have done something to remind today's anthropological audiences of the insights of a Polanyi or even of a Malinowski - I  have written about him, not only in relation to his Polish roots, but more generally the importance of ethnographic analysing; I have an immediate reservation about trying to identify key ideas in my work; there is not one central theme; I think I would claim that a lot of things hang together, in certain senses at least in a process of accumulation so that I have learned a lot from different fieldwork experiences; I have probably done fieldwork in more places and in greater depth than many anthropologists; if I just think of the early projects comparing the situation in rural Hungary with the very different situation in the countryside of rural Poland; that was very important in helping me get beyond some limitations, largely conditioned by political orientations and strong sympathies which took shape in my student years, to help me resist the temptation to write books as the academic observer who knows better than the people I am writing about; I had a lot of that arrogance in my younger days and I like to think I have become less so over the years through paying more attention to interpreting as distinct from the social scientist's explanation; I think that anthropologists should keep their own values and preferences out of the way however difficult it is to write value-free social science; in recent years I have been constantly asked to write about civil society; this is not my idea, and my criticism of it is not very original either; it is an eighteenth century term which was reinvented in the late twentieth century; that had a lot to do with the experience of Eastern Europe in those years; when Ernest Geller, (and this was one of many topic on which I could not agree with Ernest), published a book called 'Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals', he is at his most Euro-centric; it is the wonderful invention of some parts of Europe only, and what they are struggling heroically to establish in some places like Prague; you can only respect someone like Gellner, given his childhood in Prague, that he admires people like Havel and intellectual dissidents, but this was not the society that I knew as a fieldworker in Eastern European countries; I thought that I had some authority, and in other moods he would acknowledge this and admit that his civil society was an idealistic construction of the kind that he didn't really approve of, but he found civil society a more useful concept than democracy to theorise what was going on; my basic problem is that when anthropologists pick up this term as it starts to appear in the political science literature and in sociology, and I have read anthropologists' accounts of Eastern Europe where civil society means nothing more than a review of the new non-governmental organisations; there are anthropologists who no longer learn local languages but study NGOs and do multi-sited fieldwork by jumping from one NGO to another; you can get by with just the English language if you do that kind of study, but to end up with a dissertation entitled 'Contemporary Civil Society in....' is just farcical, an impoverishment of our discipline; I have been very critical of other disciplines where the term civil society creeps in as a replacement for the discredited term, totalitarianism; very often "society" on its own is enough, we don't need "civil"; if we do use it we should be very careful that a term from the eighteenth century can be of very much help in theorising the problems of the late or post-industrial societies; mine is a negative contribution but has been cited even outside anthropology; the most extreme formulation of my critique is where I mimic some of Gellner's work; I say that paradoxically we now have a church, in his sense of a closed community, of scholars who talk about civil society, and Gellner himself had contributed to this unfortunate new orthodoxy; a term that I feel much more positive about is E.P. Thompson's "moral economy"; again it has eighteenth century origins, picked up by Thompson, and again by James Scott in the 1970s, to oppose notions of political economy; what is the moral economy depends very much on who you read; Thompson was quite sympathetic of the use that James Scott made of the concept even though Scott used it of peasantries in South East Asia whereas Thompson was talking about the urban crowd; as a shorthand for getting at some of those Polanyi issues we talked about, the way in which the economy is embedded in the social context and the moral context that most of us would like to live our lives in, and feel that relations of trust and communal sentiment, or Adam Smith's "fellow feeling"; it also has an eighteenth century pedigree and anthropologists have a long record of promiscuously borrowing their concepts; I think there may still be some mileage in using that shorthand, moral economy, to engage with issues in today's world economy; I have written also on ethnicity theory, and have tried over the years to bring studies on nationalism and ethnicity theory together, based on my own empirical work on Central Europe and also on the Black Sea coast of Turkey; here I am broadly consistent with Gellner's approach, emphasising the modern nature of the new identities; in a way, Gellner, like Polanyi, is a "great divide" man who wants to have sharp lines between what came before and what came after - traditional, modern; most historians, many anthropologists, devote a lot of their energies to qualifying those sharp, great divide, theories, but we can still benefit from those models and the notion of punctuated equilibrium; it is not the case that everything proceeds through human evolution by gradual, incremental change; sometimes things do seem to accelerate, and it does make sense to use terms like revolution; I find the models of Gellner and Polanyi very useful to theorise with even though I am aware of the criticism I have made; when you start looking more closely of course there are continuities in so many areas, resilience of some practices even while others are being radically transformed; in a way that is what we are doing now in all this work on post-socialism; I suppose that will be another term that is associated with my articles and edited books, but we have been trying very hard for some time to get away from the term "post-socialism" which we never intended to become a label for a sub-discipline in the way that some people seem to see it; I was recently invited to do yet another survey of anthropological work in post-socialism, but for some time now I have declined as I am no longer interested in using that term; it made some sense when we were first defining our activities here, but it was never intended to become a label; we are interested in analysing the balance between continuity and change in the years after the fundamental institutions of socialism were swept away; it was a radical institutional change by any standards, and yet in all sorts of areas there are deep continuities, in social practices as well as in people's heads

43:28:11 I only know Pomeranz through Jack's work but see him cited regularly; he seems to rely on Tony Wrigley's work to explain the particular circumstances of having coal that made the difference between China and Europe in making the radical breakthrough; I have done fieldwork in a number of places, have put energy into language learning and background reading, but have done little archival work; at the moment I am writing up materials from China and hope to produce a book, for the second time with my wife as we did a book together on the Turkish work; there was not much historical depth to the Turkish study, but for this book I hope there will be more historical depth; in each of the places I have worked I have lived for a couple of years and feel that I have some insider appreciation of what makes those places tick, a fundamental requirement for writing an anthropological monograph; at the same time, as the head of this institute, I am also interested in broader definitions of anthropology and we have just started a new group for historical anthropology; here we will be exploring ideas of social evolution, perhaps training students to get degrees in anthropology without needing the obligatory twelve months in the field, learning a new language, which is at present obligatory in German universities; in my own case I have gone to these places and struggled to learn the language; I have never worked with interpreters, and nobody at this institute will need interpreters to do their fieldwork; that would be an unacceptable lowering of standards

48:39:24 Ildiko Beller-Hann, my wife, trained in archaeology, English and Turkish studies at university in Budapest; I met her first on an archaeology dig, but it was the Turkish connection that became most important in her academic career; when we lived in Cambridge she completed a PhD in the Oriental Studies faculty, with Susan Skilliter - that was in philology in which she was trained in Budapest; over the years she became much more interested in social science and anthropological work; she moved away from philology, and her own habilitation thesis - coming to Germany she was obliged to go through these rituals followed by German scholars - and she now has a job in Turkish studies at the University of Copenhagen, specializing on the eastern end of the Turkic world rather than Anatolia; she covers a very wide range and we lived in Turkey together for two years; I devised that project in order to fit in with her interests in improving her Turkish, and it was interesting for me to work in a state which in some ways resembled the socialist states of Eastern Europe; in terms of rural development, for example, it was very much top down; the state was transforming the lives of most of its citizens in a very aggressive, interventionist way, but it was doing so in a capitalist context; comparisons between Turkey and Eastern Europe were very interesting for me and I still find them a useful foundation when I am teaching or writing, to have that experience of capitalist transformation; the Xinjiang study that we are writing up at the moment, was a place that both of us wanted to go; she has far better knowledge of the local languages than I will ever have, but I can get by; Uighur, although a nation of some 10,000,000, have not been very much studied so there is a lot to be done in that part of Central Asia; we have a daughter and a son

52:31:24 Now Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute in Halle and have been here for eleven years; luckily, I do not have to do much administration as we have excellent administrators who cover every aspect of the Institute's activities, the idea being to free the Directors to get on with their research; there is obviously a lot of time managing other people's projects; inevitably, if you are the native English speaker and English is the dominant language of your discipline, but most of your colleagues do not have English as a native language, you are constantly wondering if the time you spend correcting other people's bad English is a good investment of your own time; what I really should stress is a remarkable network, and it is intended to give the academics selected for these appointments the best possible conditions to get on with their research agenda; they are not expected to become bureaucratic administrators; there is a widespread understanding in Germany that when you get to be Professor you will spend much time on committees, and many German professors will not publish another book once they have got their Chair; they are not expected to, and the climate of the Research Assessment Exercise in Britain has not yet reached German universities; in Max Planck,  we are evaluated and people would ask very searching questions if a director was not productive as an individual as well as supporting all the work of colleagues appointed by that director; I cannot complain about conditions here; on the contrary we are very privileged