Part 2: Australia onwards (60 mins)
Fieldwork among Australian aborigines: Groote Eylandt
0:01:00 Attempted entrapment. No support from the Department. Some sympathetic and nice people like Richard Storry the Japanese specialist at ANU. Nadel washed his hands of it, wouldn’t do anything. Firth found me a dreadful embarrassment. We were poverty stricken, forced to live in the University Hostel. I was hired for interviewing on a project and my boss Jean Craig was furious with me [because my political scandal might prejudice her project]. I had little support from senior colleagues.
0:03:00 Freddy Rose suggested that I study Australian Aborigines and go to Groote Eylandt. Fred Gray’s life and career and his setting up of an Aboriginal reserve with financial support from the Government.
0:04:50 work in Groote Eylandt; remonstration at beating of boys and ordered off, but did not leave
0:06:15 converted from Africanist, overnight an Australian aboriginal specialist; the complicated kinship systems an intellectual magnet – so difficult.
0:06:30 Stanner my supervisor – cracked the kinship system I think. Discussion of Aboriginal kinship systems and theories about, including Rose, Gray and others. Four and eight section systems.
0:08:17 young men’s marriage systems and the mechanisms for keeping young men inferior; riven with structural inequalities of age and gender
0:09:15 I worked through the language and spent some ten months in the field, ghastly difficult topic
0:10:28 women as pawns etc. , the logic of algebra cannot work; no available women, have to manipulate kinship terms. Not pure algebra.
0:11:20 Others showed the politics of bestowal. The argument goes on. The sociological work of David Turner still seems to me algebra - four or five different accounts might need to be reconciled! Josselin de Jong tried. I was interested in all dimensions of the lives of the 450 people there – very rich.
0:13:10 I read the Berndts’ work; they record just a small part of one of the ritual cycles, only a segment; incredibly complex. An order of complexity similar to Griaule on the Dogon, even though a hunter-gatherer people. Incredibly sophisticated and I couldn’t penetrate into that, as the Aboriginal ritual specialists were at the Mission and I could not go there as a Red.
0:14:50 various negative things about the CMS; puritanical, useless etc., story of having to dress up when missionaries visited. They had no interest in the aborigines
0:15:26 an exception is the absolutely marvellous recent book, which could only have been written after the deep immersion of a missionary, Dr. Julie Waddy, a 2 volume work on plants and animals - superb. No anthropologist could do this.
0:16:30 I pioneered that field. It came about through a school test when I asked children to draw the island and was amazed at the trails which they could see [and called ‘roads’] and I could not – so I started to ask about plants and animals and to write articles. I got very excited and read the work of Vygotski and was blown away. I thought this is the answer, the classification system
0:18:20 the social structure helps to classify, intra-myth connections, how animals occur in myths, the four frames [see the chapter in my book Knowledges (1997)]. Edmund Leach used the original article in his teaching.
0:20: I blew up at the Hungarian Revolution. I was going out there on a motorbike when it happened. I couldn’t stand it. It set up new resistance within the CP, led to the Reasoner, the New Reasoner and finally the New Left Review. I was a founding member of the NLR
0:21: Hungary was the first great shock. Stalin was not unmasked to me before then. I withdrew from academic talks in Budapest; I got a telegram in reply to mine expressing appreciation. The horrors only became patent later.
0:23: we revolted with the Hungarians, we started to ask questions, what was wrong with Marxism and the Soviet Union?
0:24: the change from the original New Left movement and the New Left Review today; became a ‘Mandarin’ journal under Perry Anderson. Perry not far short of genius, but converted NLR into an arid and esoteric journal. It was part of a movement and used to be sold in all sorts of places and discussed everywhere.
0:25: it was linked to the start of CND with which we immediately identified; the New Left became the biggest protest movement since the Chartists
The journal at first attracted people like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and covered arts, films and others. Later E.P.Thompson said it was converted into an arcane and specialist and highly Marxist journal. EPT exploded.
0:27: the disappearance of the CP(Communist Party) in England, which scarcely now exists. Asked about Orwell and Koestler. I’d read them and I would have been more sympathetic, but E.P.Thompson very hostile to both of them and influenced me. I deferred to the immense charisma and power of EPT, an amazing guy, so we never gave them much attention. We thought of them as unspeakable right-wingers, and they were of another generation.
0:29: What was the central doubt about communism after Hungary? That the entire state of society and the role of the party was in doubt, the brutal Stalinism. We were blinded to this before Hungary. I have become more humble since. We made a total re-examination of our own culture and of Marxism and the development of the (rival) concept of ‘socialist humanism’. My main role was as a commentator on colonial affairs, especially Africa. I wrote an article on Mau Mau which later converged with writing on cargo cultures. I tried to explain MM, the brutal rituals of induction and the horror of the Kikuyu themselves [at the taboos which Mau Mau deliberately broke in their initiation rituals].
0:31: I also wrote an article against Albert Schweitzer, not a saint. This brought the house down on my head. AS a bloody old colonialist, though dedicated. This takes us to 1966-7
[rest for a few minutes – break of 4 seconds]
0:32: Further reflections on Stalingrad and the feelings about loyalty to Russia. There was nothing to stop the Germans except the Red Army. It showed us that the Soviet Union was real and that we had been fed a load of myths about how weak it was, the people would rise up against Stalin etc. Hence my loyalty to the people who had saved us.
0:34: return from Australia, with a Ph.D., looking for a job. I was not very proud of my Ph.D., because of the conditions of writing, a new baby and written in five months. My wife in the field and very stoical, worked with the people and always busy but not directly involved in my work. Awful climate in the monsoon. The living conditions described. The aboriginals were in the open. I was given a room in the bungalow and hence living in a quasi-colonial relationship. Went out often for sheer sociability or when significant things happened.
0:37: my daughter is a ‘classificatory’ member of the West Wind clan, Deborah, and has a territory [by virtue of my own ‘brother’-like relationship to my chief informant]. I have never been back and still wonder whether I would even now be allowed in.
0:39: I got back and looked for jobs. I had gone out as the protégé of Max Gluckman. MG’s intellectual power. He could turn anthropology to anything and had ten ideas before breakfast. He started up sociology of Britain, e.g. Tom Lupton, Allcorn and others. The intellectual centre was Max, he infused people with a strategy for looking for certain clues, though he did not provide the answers. This was different from sociological work but the tradition he developed did not persist.
0:41: Max could turn his mind to current social and political issues, e.g. in his very popular radio broadcasts which ordinary listeners found illuminating and exciting. Imagine, best sellers about the Zande etc, Max made them exciting, they could see common problems and the rational ways in which people in other cultures faced universal human problems. The classic anthropological message. A superb lecturer and teacher, even on themes, (e.g. when Srinivas came) – which were far from his expertise.
0:43: another who had the same gift was Victor Turner. At Brandeis VT gave a lecture in a Mexicanist department on pilgrimages etc. Often his lectures went on for 2-3 hours, difficult to stop, entrancing, often went on into the night. When he talked to Mexican experts they said it made them look at their familiar topics they had been studying for decades in a new way.
0:44: Max was authoritarian but democratic, surrounded by a group of apostles, we spent all our time together, worked in his garden, constant face to face inter-action, made us inter-act, a constant flow of people were coming from the field like Turner, Ian Cunnison, Bill Watson, we had a sense of collectively working on joint problems.
0:45: I remember sitting in on a Srinivas seminar on what turned out as the Coorg book – I knew nothing about India, but we all contributed. The senior people treated us as intellectual equals; Max was very supportive and encouraging.
0:46: Reflections on The Trumpet Shall Sound. I went back and I’d written my Ph.D. and published a little. I was still frustrated about New Guinea but I’d collected a lot of material and discussed it in that book together with the latest findings of Peter Lawrence and Ken Burridge.
0:47: One week-end Max, like yeast, played his stimulating role. He had become interested in movements of protest among colonial peoples. He arranged a special week-end, not on the Mau Mau. Eric Hobsbawm came to talk about the materials which later became Primitive Rebels, Norman Cohn on medieval movements and me on cargo cults. One of the most exciting week-ends I remember, marvellous, out of which came three cracking books.
0:49: Eric Hobsbawm in those days had a bit of a blockage about writing, though known to be a genius and a polymath. Not many articles. He started to write this book and never looked back. E.H. was incredible and marvellous and gets better as he goes on, e.g. The Invention of Tradition is a mind-blowing and funny book and iconoclastic. Also, like me, a jazz man. I myself (like EH) nearly became jazz critic for the New Statesman! He, Perry Anderson and others like Christopher Hill were my great heroes among living Marxists.
0:50: I later wrote The Third World and Christopher Hill reviewed it enthusiastically in the Guardian, commenting that I was really a historian as well as anthropologist and intellectual sociologist. My historical interest stemmed from a wonderful history master at school. Life does not start at University, it starts at school. My great debt is to that master, also influenced by others. But my real trio of greats is Edward T, Perry Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. Which is the greatest? Perry is still young…
0:51: I decided I would not continue to write just about one area, as E-Pritchard had done on the Nuer, so I would not go on about Groote Eylandt. Max G. was approached by a young leftish publishing firm, McGibbon and Kee, to write a book about the Mau Mau. He said no, but referred them to me and that is how ‘Trumpet’ came about.
0:53: It is a book about colonial resistance, the disintegration of colonialism, on the eve of the ‘Winds of Change’ in Africa in particular. Millenarianism was the dominant form of political action on the part of ordinary people in places like Melanesia, a very different phenomenon from revolution in Russia or China. We had to try to come to terms with it.
0:54. An auto-criticism of ‘Trumpet’. It was too heavily political economy. This can be seen when compared to Peter Lawrence. I started with pol. econ., Peter with the Melanesian world-view. This is how I come to see it now. The amazingly different impacts of colonialism. How does one explain these different responses? All kinds of response. Not dictated by the colonialists themselves.
0:56: the inherent logic of political economy is threaded through my book, the Melanesian perceptions are there but not so obvious; I should have planted them at the start.
0:57: a similar auto-critique of my work on the Tallensi, which over-emphasized the material dimensions of life and ignored the lineage ideologies etc. It was a base-superstructure model which is inadequate.
0:58: Alan talks of the recent Sahlins lecture at the British Academy which fits with this re-assessment of local resistance, the McCartney Mission account of the Chinese Emperor being the classic statement. Yes, the heliocentric arrogance and contempt for the West of the Chinese is classic. The core-periphery models are nonsense and can be answered by one word: Iran. How does c-p explain the Ayatollahs? We have got to start talking about Islam.
0:59: I wrote the ‘Trumpet’. It was very successful. Reviewed by Geoffrey Gorer in the Observer as a wonderful book, and other very good reviews. I myself became a reviewer for the Guardian and did numerous reviews and became quite well known (and earned quite a lot of money).