SECOND PART

0:05:07 After initial difficulties, Christine and Edmund got on very well and he was most supportive when she decided to leave anthropology to become a doctor; Jack Goody was also supportive; later when Edmund was dying of cancer he and Christine were very close as he trusted her opinion on his state of health; similarly, with Alfred Gell, who also died of cancer; on the question of whether it is a good thing to have a wife who is also an anthropologist, did find it quite tough as we are both pretty competitive; in fieldwork there was the huge benefit of being able to work together to learn an unwritten language; Barasana also pretty rigidly divided by sex although Christine could function much better as an honorary male than I as an honorary female, we were quite split up during the day; however this meant that we had two views on everything; when I was initiated going through the 'jurupary' rite that I wrote my thesis on, women were not even supposed to know let alone see; Christine was in the back of the long house with the women while the men were in the front, with a screen between; the women actually reported all that happened to her and one old woman was consulted by her son on what to do next; Christine was able to show that there was no secret knowledge but the women were behaving in an appropriate manner; initially Christine found fieldwork difficult as I was with the men discussing shaman, myths, cults, and also going hunting while she spent her time digging in the manioc gardens in blazing sun; later she did find the experience of daily work gave revealing insights into practical and cosmological aspects of the Barasana; we found field research acutely stressful at times; Barasana were not exactly friendly due to negative experiences with white people; we depended on them for food and sometimes were very hungry; difficult in the writing up stage too as difficult to separate out criticisms of an academic kind from irritation; however, still happily married and still talk about anthropology all the time

11:00:19 On my findings, there were two axes on which I was working; in theoretical terms put Levi-Strauss's work into a specific tribal context, particularly with regard to myth; he had written little on ritual but I could show that myth and ritual work in a dialectical system; myth and structure; describes going through initiation, being painted black then red, on-off nature of ritual which Levi-Strauss had picked up almost intuitively; in terms of Amazonia, find that North-West Amazonia is very different from the classical pattern which is slightly atomistic, with strong divide between "us" and the outside world - kin and affine, friend and enemy, and relatively simple; in North-West Amazonia get development of lineages, hierarchy, elaborate architecture and mythology, probably related to much more complicated structure of chieftains historically; initiation rituals remnants of the much more complex priestly society which survived longer in the North-West; has similar features to societies in Polynesia and Melanesia such as secret flute cults which are odd in the context of the rest of Amazonia

20:47:21 There was no real first arrival at a fieldwork site; we work in a vast area with only about 30,000 Tukanoan Indians, some living in tows, others (in 1968) living in long houses who had never met an outsider in their lives, none of whom spoke any language but their own; first arrival meant that you went from the city further and further out; we did an exploratory voyage down the length of the Pira-parana and then decided to go back to a particular long house owned by somebody called Bosco; we had thought it looked large and the people were friendly, with two powerful shamans; we arrived alone at night without a guide and simply stayed there; we couldn't communicate with them so learning Barasana language by gestures; children most helpful in language learning; took us about two or three months before we could converse enough to say who we were or what we were doing; had a retrospective view of our first arrival as we learnt what they had thought we were doing and who we were

25:42:00 Feel very much a psychic unity with the people; sometimes worrying that things become too familiar; Christine and I went native, partly for ideological reasons, but also for practical reasons; it was a difficult and dangerous place to get to so we couldn't take much with us; also knew that the previous experience of the Barasana with outsiders was with a rather brutal rubber gatherer and semi-enslavement; thus we never got anybody to carry anything for us; we lived in the long house, dressed as they did, ate what they ate; soon took the impressive architecture of the long house for granted and only much later looked at again; I get an enormous amount of pleasure that I can now walk into an Amerindian long house and be treated like an elder, and know how to behave; takes me back to my dreams in Jamaica of living with Amerindians

30:48:12 Don't feel I am escaping into another world; I do love being in Amazonia and I have brought together my interests in botany and zoology in recent work; do dislike the tendency to use Amerindians as a foil against which Westerners test themselves; Indians are either ignoble savages or pristine and pure; a lot of my writing has been against the binary view; don't accept that Amerindians are natural born ecologists or that clothes represent a corruption; I suppose my roots are counter-cultural and going to Amazonia in the sixties could be seen at that, but don't see it as a paradise

34:38:19 The experience of being between two cultures, initially Jamaica and Britain, was one of the reasons I became an anthropologist; my experience of the tropics was of animals and plants, I still keep snakes; this was one of the things I loved about Amazonia and enabled me to communicate quite effectively with the Indians; not unsurprising that they should have such a wide knowledge of the world around them; learnt from them and have done quite a bit of work on herpetology and will write it up now I am retired; combination of my own interest in snakes, lizard, frogs and also the people whom I work with who are similarly very interested, and whose mythology and symbolic ideas are full of flora and fauna.

38:33:01 Joined Cambridge Anthropology Society early at a freshers' fair; met Caroline Humphreys, Jonny Parry, and Chris Fuller, who were just above me; Edmund used to tell us who to invite to talk to the society; we got Desmond Morris as he was about to write 'The Naked Ape', Mary Douglas - Edmund used to refer to the Leach-Douglas theory of taboo, but he found her a bit difficult; remember occasion where Edmund signaled displeasure with a speaker by rattling keys, then going to sleep and snoring loudly; speaker furious, most embarrassing; I became an assistant lecturer in 1971 in the year we returned from Amazonia; although I never had the intention of becoming an academic but Fortes suggested I applied for a job in Latin American Studies; by then had one child and another about to be born, Bernard Archand wanted to go back to Canada and Peter Silverwood-Cope wanted to go to Brazil; I was writing my thesis while Christine was going to delay hers so I was the likely candidate for the job and got it; became a fellow of King's in 1974 where I had been Director of Studies; at the time we lived a hippy-type existence out at the Gog Magog hills and had nothing to do with the university; I was summoned by the college Council to discuss supervisions and to my surprise was offered a fellowship; later got heavily involved with King's and became Assistant Senior Tutor for three years among other things; King's has been privileged in anthropology so good to be here as an anthropologist; always stimulating, and the Friday Seminar used to be held here; also get extremely good undergraduates

49:48:08 Enjoyed administration and working with people, trying to achieve things together; I enjoyed being Head of Department where I saw my role as to be a facilitator; Jack Goody as Head of Department; had very good relations with Marilyn Strathern, a person who cares about people; volunteered to take over as Head of Department from her so that the headship would no longer be tied to the William Wyse Chair; thinking of the faculty, the alliance of archaeology, biological anthropology and social anthropology, feel that administratively its a good thing as the others can act as a friendly critic of what we do and vice versa; do think that the Part I is problematic as it should be connected at an intellectual level, but does not, as taught, appear to emphasize the overlaps between them; a missed opportunity as I can see from Amazonia where archaeologists and anthropologists work very closely together; Am enjoying retirement which has allowed me to write more than ever before, also to develop other interests in Tibet and Bhutan to pursue