Peter Rivière interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 9^th September 2001

Life in general:

0:00:05 Introduction by Alan Macfarlane; father a soldier, mother’s father was M.P. for Helensborough in 1920’s; after the army, parents farmed in Sussex for ten years, then back to Wiltshire for the rest of their lives; paternal grandfather organ-master in Wells Cathedral; some ambiguity of whether family was Huguenot or came to England later; Prep school, Sandroyd, which had been evacuated from Surrey to General Pitt-Rivers house in Wiltshire; house surrounded by evidence of his excavations; then Stowe and National Service in the Air Force for two years; then Magdalen, Cambridge

0:05:30 At Sandroyd and Stowe influenced by two classics masters; at Cambridge accepted to read geography but changed to archaeology and anthropology for part II; had read classics at school and hoped that archaeology would link to classical archaeology but it didn’t; G.I. Jones was his tutor; he was last of the ex-District Officers who had moved into teaching anthropology as had Hutton and Hodson; not a very demanding tutor; also there was Burkett and Bushnell who was happy to allow students to use spear throwers on the Downing site; still did an examination in identifying objects from the museum

0:09:50 Ray Abrahams a contemporary as an undergraduate; lectured by Meyer Fortes on West African kinship; for Marett lecture used the same slides as shown in the 1950s; Reo Fortune there part of the time – a strange man; after degree spent a year on  a filming and botanical expedition in South America; met Audrey Butt (Coulson) in Georgetown [sound glitch]; aroused interest in South America but also very keen on cars and became a motoring journalist for ‘Autocar’ for three years

0:13:50 Michaelmas 1962 went to Oxford; as a journalist learnt to write to time and length; had to take B.Litt. first; thesis on the native peoples of the Amazon Guyana divide; examined by John Beattie and John Middleton; then fees were very low and easy to support oneself; for doctoral research got grant for ‘Research Institute for the Study of Man’ in New York; Audrey Coulson was in Oxford and was an influence; Cambridge not really interested in graduate students at the time and The Institute at Oxford dominated graduate work; supervisor was Rodney Needham as assumed that Audrey Coulson would also help but she was in the department of Ethnology and Pre-History; demarcation disputes over departments not resolved finally until the early 1990s

0:19:40 Memories of Rodney Needham; efficient but demanding supervisor; strong theoretical influence if you let him; 1965-66 doing tutorial work and then got a two –year research fellowship at newly opened Institute for Latin American Studies at London University; part of that time spent in Brazil working on ranching communities of North Brazil; after this spent a year in Harvard as a visiting lecturer; then replaced Audrey Coulson for a year, during which time was appointed as an assistant lecturer in the social anthropology of Latin America at Cambridge; ostensibly shared room with Leach and Tambiah but nobody ever used it but mainly used a room in the new history building; miserable building to work in as either too hot or cold etc.; during that year applied for John Beattie’s post in Oxford and have been here ever since 1971

0:26:07 In Cambridge lectured on myth and  habitat, economy and society, and kinship to first year undergraduates during that year; memories of Evans-Pritchard in Oxford in the 1960s; in decline but still a formidable mind; used to get up very early and have finished his day’s work by midday and was looking for people to take to the pub; remained extraordinarily energetic if a little absent minded up to his last days; some people found his idiosyncrasies difficult to cope with, and could take against people rather unpleasantly; Godfrey Lienhardt seemed to have inherited this trait; Evans-Pritchard could have got money to endow the Institute in the 1950s but never bothered to follow the potential donors; place run in a lackadaisical manner and when appointed in 1971 was the first person ever to have been appointed as a result of an interview, before that people were just nominated; Edwin Ardener was the last person to have been just appointed; after Maurice Freedman died, inherited his desk and at the back of a drawer found the paperwork relating to the post I got with my application and letters of reference; Leach’s reference negative because he wanted me to stay at Cambridge

0:33:35 Memories: Edmund Leach, preferred communication by letter rather than face to face; Godfrey Lienhardt, a formidable mind; could be incredibly unkind or kind; Mary Douglas refused to believe he was a lapsed Catholic; Mary Douglas, previously Mary Tew, had been at Oxford; got to know her well in the year in London; Ioan Lewis had gone to L.S.E. by then but Daryll Forde was still professor

0:39:00 Social Anthropology committee of the Social Science Research Council; became chairman of committee; later became Economic and Social Science Research Council which was increasingly bureaucratic; was once a passive obstacle to research now actively seems to prohibit it; was put as chairman of the review committee of CAMPOP which the E.S.R.C. wanted to close down despite its success; we wrote a report saying it should be kept open but told we could only put in another saying it should be closed down; refused to do so and threatened to resign; original favourable report presented but the Council decided to ignore it

0:42:25 Memories: David Maybury-Lewis; first met him in central Brazil in 1958, then at Harvard; has family in Oxford so comes here occasionally; will probably retire in US; Stephen Hugh-Jones got the assistant lectureship at Cambridge when I left; in my year in Cambridge he and Christine had just come back from fieldwork in Colombia; Christine’s lecture to the department seminar; I examined both their theses

0:46:00 Reflections on changes in academic life; used to talk about academic matters, now only of money; goes hand in hand with extraordinary bureaucratisation of academia; spent half our time justifying the work that we do in the other half, rather than getting on with it; worry slightly about the future of anthropology; the trend towards N.G.O. studies rather than philosophical ideas; fewer people are interested in remote fieldwork studies; range of questions has narrowed

0:50:00 Work in retirement; volume for Hakluyt Society on Robert Hermann Schomburgk and a history of anthropology in Oxford for the centennial celebrations of the Institute in 2005; other memories of  bureaucratic life in Oxford; Linacre College; Paul Slack