0:01: I always wanted to write for a popular audience. One of my ambitions, which has never been realized, is to write a book that will be sold on station bookstalls. I thought I had done it when I came back from China and wrote a book on it, but it was not so successful.
0:02: I applied to Cambridge, but there were no posts in those day. There was very slow expansion. Max said that with my political reputation I would never get a job in anthropology. So I thought of other possibilities, including studying schizophrenia at the Maudsley. Max said I should switch to sociology, which was just beginning to take off. I got the first job I applied for, at Hull, against strong competition. I don’t know why I was picked, though two days before the interview I did a BBC interview on 3rd Program on Cargo Cults. I then tried to read a lot of sociology.
0:03: I also used a lot of anthropology and gradually we built up a very popular course. The social sciences exploded after the Robbins Report. We ended up with a huge department. I finished there in 1964. I was there for eight years. Quite prestigious. I was Head of Department.
0:04: Max managed to get a Chair in Sociology at Manchester a year before I left it all and after a year I was appointed to that new Manchester Chair and went there. The expansion of sociology was exponential. This caused great problems with Max who saw sociology as an ancillary part of his empire and tried to restrict it. It turned into a nasty territorial battle, which we won and then the Department was split. There were 10 new Universities a year. I was offered many other Chairs.
0:07: Teodor Shanin came a little later. In 1965 I was recruited onto the British Economic Commission on Tanzania, and got interested in co-operatives, the predecessors of Ujamaa. So I got interested in co-operatives in the 3rd World and this drew the attention of Teodor. An amusing story of their first meeting and Teodor’s personality.
0:10: Teodor taught me more about peasants in two hours than I had ever learnt. I became a patron of Teodor and together we worked on peasant studies, including promoting the work of Polish scholars like Galeski. Teodor got the second Chair at Manchester. A larger than life man, a great guy.
0:11: The Third World was written at the end of my time at Hull. The Press lost the first copy of the index, which I had to completely re-do. It was published just after my arrival in Manchester and was well-reviewed and made me the ‘Third World’ person in the Anglophone world, (though the French had invented the concept). I travelled all over the world with the book – there were 8 editions in Mexico alone. Mainly in South America it took off. It was never translated into French. There are still huge barriers with France.
0:14: One thing I resented about the NLR was that they worshipped everything on the South Bank in Paris. Only very recently has there been a French translation of ‘Trumpet’, nothing else, not ever invited to France or Germany. The term ‘Third World’ was coined by Alfred Sauvy in 1952, taken up in France and probably I learnt about through the contacts of NLR.
0:15: our motto was ‘neither Moscow nor Washington’ (Trotsky), and this idea fitted well, but more positive. CND and the Third World worked together, a new entity was forming. The publishers put in the sub-title ‘A vibrant new force in international affairs’. It was indeed a new, and important, force. A new force in the world.
0:16: It was written in a burst of steam, in a couple of summer vacations. White heat. Philip Larkin described it as a passionate book. I do not like to write unless I have something to say. Unlike today, when people have to write – publish or perish – and hence churn out an exponentially increasing amount of rubbish.
0:17: I now feel the germs of a new book, a kind of sexual itch of another book coming up inside me.
0:18: reflecting on The Third World, I couldn’t re-write it as the great non-aligned movement has died back, though it still persists. Now there is the non-aligned group in the UN. The Americans cannot control the UN any more. But then it was a political force.
0:20: Nyerere and new leaders were just realizing the problems of taking over the emerging countries, in particular the power of the multi-nationals. The African countries found they could not do anything. In many areas the situation is getting worse. They began to see the problem as a global one – the first UNCTAD conference, predominantly a resistance to the economic power and hegemony of the West.
0:22: I waited a long time to find out about Latin America, and also felt [that the ‘Third World’, by virtually ignoring Latin America, was not good enough an intellectual job. My chapter on nationalism was not very good. I gradually equipped myself to write another book, helped by Brian Roberts and Teodor and finally wrote it after 14 years.
0:23: I was sentenced to be Dean at Manchester for two years, the final degradation. Sterility, though I quite enjoyed it. I got a year off and decided to go to Ecuador and learnt Spanish and Portuguese. It opened up a new world. A rich intellectual tradition, Chile etc., the time before the dictators. Mexico with its revolutionary heritage.
0:24: I encountered Gunder Frank and swallowed him at first. But as I looked around at the traffic filled cities etc. I began to wonder if this was really ‘underdevelopment’. I started to study industrial things. But I remained deep down in my fibres an anthropologist. I’m never happy with purely sociological totalities and I’m most interested in cultural things.
0:25: I was brought back to culture by people like Marshall Sahlins, the big influence of ‘Culture and Practical Reason’, which has never been answered by Marxists who cannot take M.S. to pieces. I read early Geertz etc. But I think Geertz mystifies and absolutized culture and reifies it and is unsatisfactory. So I persisted and wrote Three Worlds.
0:27: A critique of ‘World System Theory’. Of course there is a world system, from at least 1885 on, but I fell out with it on a particular occasion in Berlin. [better light] Wallerstein and Frank were on the platform and we were discussing ‘One World or Three’. Gundar was very rude and I was piqued. So I went home and read Wallerstein comma by comma and decided to write a critique and it was published by the Socialist Register. Zero response from Immanuel. Wallerstein is much better than Gunder Fr’s polar model. Revolution is no longer an option. Comments on Wallerstein.
0:30: I visited Hong Kong and was shattered by the transformation in 16 years. I went back recently. Is HK a 3rd World country any more? Clearly not. The ‘Little Tigers’ are clearly not 3rd World, so impressive, though vulnerable. But the end of the 3rd World a bit premature and I began to read about a new international division of labour, Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs). Dependency was exaggerated.
0:32: It is a sleight of hand that the 3rd world has disappeared, a recent visit to Peru shows that there is still a 3rd world. Peru is broken backed and with tremendous problems. [nice close ups and good light]
0:33: Black Africa is going backwards in conventional terms, a 6% decrease in exports etc. Dropped off as a basket case by the west, we don’t care a damn. The World Bank has divided countries into poor, middling poor, very poor, degrees of poverty. These are our perception, they also see themselves as 3rd World.
0:34: I do not believe in any immanentist models, e.g. like those of Nigel Harris.
Anthropology, culture and knowledge
0:35: Alan asks about Wallerstein, how much was your critique determined by your being an anthropologist? Absolutely, a brilliant man, but I was by then moving back towards anthropology. For instance, Hong Kong cannot be understood without understanding its Chineseness, culture.
0:36: China is very different in its communist ideology from Russia. Ideologies and social structures do not correspond 1:1, cultures and histories exist and have to be taken into account. Most political scientists and economists have no understanding of this or realize the relevance of this, not in their intellectual universe.
0:37: I now want to write a book about other knowledges, influenced by Dr. Waddy [since done – Knowledges]. I want to take the Australian Aboriginal knowledge system, their elaborateness, also others like the Micronesian navigators. This is related to the wider theme about how other cultures work, e.g. Chineseness, Iranian Islam etc.
0:39: the Chinese quarrel with the Soviet Union is not just about Marxist ideology, but to do with Russians and Chinese society and culture.
0:40: Alan asks about the abandoning of base/superstructure model and the turn to Weber. Views about Weber, what is attractive about him, he raises interesting questions. Weber a great genius. Better than Marx who stressed production too much.
0:42: Alan asks about the move from economic determinism towards ideas, aesthetic. Why? Most significant was the death of Marxism, the disastrous pluralism and faction-fighting of the Marxisms, the clash between Promethean and determinist. This exploded into savage wars and undermined by Stalin, Pol Pot, Sendero Luminoso and other horrors.
0:45: Now the Salman Rushdie affair and the re-emergence of Islam, regenerated, not the original Islam, the Koran re-interpreted, it had not put the mullahs at the top. But it is an example of the persistence of historically rooted cultures themes. A huge change in the world.
0:47: Asked what most proud of. Story of Bertrand Russell – three women. But I think it was ‘Trumpet Shall Sound’ and my other books. Also, as a political animal, though sickened by subsequent history, of my early work for NLR, the New Left, CND etc.
0:48: What would you have liked to have done which you did not? What avenues did you not go down? Further work in Australia. I quite enjoy public bureaucracy. I could have done industry and business. Also something practical in the 3rd World. We are so involved in our own culture, we lose interest in the rest. I have noticed that anthropologists who go to the field then return and, having had children, mortgages etc, suddenly become interested in their own place which “must be studied”. They argue that it is imperative to study the West. This is false consciousness.
0:51: Have you ever been bored? Yes, in the Army at times. Otherwise not.