Interview of Harvey Whitehouse

Interview of Harvey Whitehouse 5th August 2023
AM: Well, it's a great pleasure to have a chance to talk to Harvey Whitehouse. Harvey, I always start by asking when and where you were born.
HW:: In London in 1964.
AM: That's very precise. Any part of London?
HW: I was born in Kensington in a hospital, even though I was the second child and it was more normal to have them at home. I think my mother had had a tough enough time with the first one so they thought it was better to do it in a hospital.
AM: Right. So I then ask people to go back as far as they like with their heritage. Normally people don't go beyond their grandparents, but if you're a family historian you can go a bit further. But can you tell me something about your parents' parents?
HW: My parents' parents. So my paternal grandfather worked for Shell film units at Shell Mex House. My mother's father was the head chef at Fortnum and Mason in London. Very creative chef. I know more about him partly because he was still alive when I was born and he remained alive until I was about four years old, whereas my father's father died before I was born. But also because he wrote a wonderful diary of his experiences in the RAF during World War II, which really, later in my teens after he died, brought me quite close to him actually. It was a very rich and, I mean, there was a lot to read between the lines, but it was actually a very rich description. He travelled throughout North Africa, Libya and Algeria, and I'm trying to remember all the places he went to. Various parts of the Middle East, he was in Syria, various parts of Southern Europe, particularly Italy and Malta. You know, he was all over the place and it was a wonderful diary.
AM: You should publish it one day.
HW: Yes.
AM: Any of the other grandparents?
HW: I knew both of my grandmothers quite well... We don't have a very deep family genealogy. I'm glad to hear that's fairly normal. I think my only ancestor who was of note was my great-grandfather on my father's side, who was a penny-farthing racer and a bit of a champion of that. I know because I've got photos of him with his machine.
AM: So coming down to your parents, tell me something about them.
HW: Well, I don't know where to start.... My mother had many jobs. Both my parents left school at the age of 14 and never went to university, but my mother had a whole variety of interesting jobs. The first one was with Lord Reith at the Commonwealth Telecommunications Board, or something like that it was called. This was obviously after he left the BBC, having founded it. And my mum tells stories about how he was actually a very benign and kind character, extremely tall of course, and quite severe and frightening, but he praised her on more than one occasion, I think, and she remembers that. My father worked in the film industry. He was a film director, mainly documentaries. He won some awards for his work, including his script writing. And he was a passionate environmentalist. One of his films that was made in the 1960s, called 'The Choice', was really about the problem of pollution of land, sea and air. He was very proud of that film. But he gave it up when I was a child in the 1970s to become an inventor. He came up with an engine which he thought could run on very low emissions, on very clean fuel and produce very low emissions. It was a kind of rotary engine, which he thought would replace the internal combustion engine. He had very high ambitions for it. But in abandoning the lucrative work in the film industry for this career as an inventor, it plunged the entire family into poverty for good reason, but it was painful. We had a whole year at one time without electricity, without a phone, and it was tough.
AM: Preparation for an anthropologist.
HW: Well, exactly, Yes.
AM: What about their characters and how that might have influenced you?
HW: Well, both of them were quite ambitious and driven people. Actually, given that they never went to university and weren't from particularly posh backgrounds, their choice of place to live, Hampstead, was a good indicator, I think, of their quite strategic thinking about how to become more upwardly mobile. They rented a small flat above garages in the southern part of Hampstead, which gave them access to lots of networks and people and things that they wouldn't have had in many other places. My mother created, with others, but I think she was the one spearheading it, a local neighbourhood association for our street. She was very networked in. She became the chair of various committees and charities and organisations. My father was far less social. He was, I think, a natural engineer. He was very keen on maths. He worked quite joyfully with very good physicists trying to demonstrate the capacity of his inventions to do what he claimed they would. He was very much a self-taught kind of person.
AM: You liked them both.
HW: I liked them both deeply. My mother's still alive, actually. She's moved to Oxford as of about seven years ago, so she's quite close.
AM: That's nice. Good. I often ask what people's first memory was, not in a pram with trees waving over them, but something specific and what sort of age they were when they have that memory.
HW: I don't suffer from the same degree of childhood amnesia that I think is normal, based on the sort of developmental psych literature. I actually think I have way too many memories for that first year, and certainly by second, third year of life, I've got a lot of memories.
AM: Really? First year?
HW: My very first memory is before I was 12 months, so it was on a... I believe it's an accurate memory, but of course I'm happy to entertain the possibility that it's not, but I feel like there's continuity in my memory of the memory, if you see what I mean, that goes back a very long way. It's really of being on a little houseboat that I can accurately date to before I was one. So not a pram, but something a bit like that. When I was a little over a year old, I had, and this is medically documented, some injuries. I was always hurting myself, and I remember having stitches in my chin on one occasion, and I remember vividly various features of that experience that I can't believe were made up, but who knows.
AM: I know other people will discuss it who go back to that period, Compton Mackenzie in particular.
HW: Interesting.
AM: Where did you first go to school?
HW: My first school, proper school, was New End in Hampstead. That was my primary school. Overall it was a wonderful school to be in. Many happy memories of it. I made some lifelong friends there actually. People I still...
AM: Really? That's unusual.
HW: One in particular, a very, very close friend. We ended up spending a lot of our middle childhood and adolescence together as well. Obviously as adults, separate lives, but we meet frequently and I going to see him actually in a couple of weeks.
AM: Given your very good memory, what about teachers at that school? Do you remember any of them?
HW: There were some interesting teachers at that school, none who inspired me I would say. My first teacher in that school was a Mrs Carter who I'm ashamed to say I offended deeply very early in my school career because I think I was about four, not yet five, that's right, because it was the first term of school. We were tidying up at the end of the school day, putting chairs on tables and I thought this was a very important thing to do efficiently and I pulled a chair to put on the table just as she was about to sit on it and she hit the ground very hard and I think I was in her sort of black books from that point onwards. But I remember the excruciating feeling of shame for this act, you know, in the sense that I had violated a really important norm. So it was one of the first really strong indicators to me that it's important to follow the norms and that, you know, my biggest fear was actually not a telling off but some kind of, as I recall, a feeling of exclusion from the group for having failed to do the right thing.
AM: Interesting. Around that time, four, five, six, seven, some children developed passionate hobbies of various kinds. Did you have any?
HW: Very much so. Yes, I had several hobbies at primary school. The biggest one that started at primary school was bird watching and has pursued me through life. I thought of it more as ornithology than birding or twitching or any of those things which became more important later but I became fascinated by birds and wildlife in general. I began to be quite passionate about writing even at primary school and I had a first attempt at writing a novel when I was a very precocious child, probably a very annoying child.
AM: How old were you when you..?
HW: I would have been about ten, I suppose, when I started doing that. And I was a collector of stuff. I collected a lot of different things and birding was partly a collecting thing. It turned into a collecting thing more and more but I collected all kinds of stuff and that was connected with my idea about writing as well and this little novel.
AM: Have you continued to collect?
HW: Yes. I'm an inveterate collector of stuff. It's a bit of a problem actually because the house is too cluttered and I have collected too many things over the years. But yes, I am a collector but I'm also a documenter of things and I like to observe things. I think all of these things were present at primary school and have fed into my sense of what it is to be an anthropologist.
AM: An early anthropologist. You then went on to your first proper school after primary school.
HW: Yes.
AM: At what age and where? I was eleven and I went to Left New End for Pimlico Comprehensive near Victoria. And there things started to go quite badly wrong for me. I didn't integrate well at the school. It seemed to me that everyone in the classroom pretty much, certainly a dominant core of the kids in the class were not interested in learning at all and were quite disruptive. It felt like, it can't have been as bad as it, but it felt like I was spending a lot of my days at my desk with my head in my hands or my hands over my ears thinking I don't want to be here. And I started to drop out and eventually refused to go to school. And to my astonishment, nobody stopped me. No one forced me to go to school. And so I spent a year, most good part of my first year supposedly at this comprehensive school not going at all. But I went to the library and I worked really hard and I loved working. I turned in all the work that the school sent me but I wouldn't go to school. And so I eventually got at the end of that year, starting the next year, I went to a grammar school. Is that what happened? ... No, I didn't. No, I didn't do that actually Alan. Sorry. Actually, at the end of that year, I went to a small prep school called Herewood House, which was quite close to where my parents lived. So it was in Hampstead more or less on the outskirts of Hampstead. And there I gosh, I had a really inspiring teacher who really, he said to me, I'm going to make you into a scholar. We'll make a scholar of you Harvey, he said. And I really, that's actually when I first realised I wanted to be a scholar. A wonderful teacher. He taught me Latin, maths and English, but it was the Latin that I loved. We were translating the letters of Pliny the Younger. And I was fascinated by that. And in fact, I did very well in the exams there and I got a scholarship or part scholarship to Highgate, a public school, you know, from, but kind of quite posh from the sort of mid 16th century, you know, long history, strong sense of tradition. And I was there for a year, but that's right, it was a part scholarship. And this was during the same period that my dad, you know, was suffering the worst struggles as an inventor. So there wasn't enough money coming in to keep up the bit that they needed to pay. So I got moved then to a grammar school. And that's when I went to this grammar school, which I ended up hating too. So I'm sad to say, I did that same thing..
AM: What grammar school was it?
HW: William Ellis, and I hated it. And I did the same thing as before, I refused to go, having discovered that you can get away with that. So very chequered experience, eventually after, and I went then seriously to work in the libraries, because I wanted to get my O levels. But I was also, actually, I started to develop interest in all kinds of things. I actually became a bit of an independent researcher, actually thinking about that. Because I researched a lot of things, and I wrote another book. And I became, I had a lot of free time, right, because I didn't have to go to classes. So my time was my own. And then I went back to Pimlico for one year, did my O levels and left school at 16 forever, never went back.
AM: Really? Yes. So you didn't do A levels?
HW: Oh, Yes, I did my A levels, but I did them in evening classes. And I spent my days doing the stuff that really interested me. What A levels did you do? English literature, government and politics, which basically just meant reading the newspapers. I was amazed because I didn't actually read anything except newspapers, and still got an A for it. Because it was just basically showing that you knew what was going on in the world and how the structures of government worked and stuff like that. And I did French, I think, and gosh, it's a long time ago, isn't it? Anyway, I remember, I went to LSE at age 18. And I remember being interviewed by Alfie Gell and Johnny Parry, I think it was.
AM: Interesting. I saw him last night.
HW: Did you? I wonder if he remembers interviewing me because I was quite cheeky. But they were sufficiently impressed that they said, all you need is to get one pass at A level, we don't really, because we want you to come here. And I was very lucky that they took a shine to me. Because I remember saying something like, something about the caste system that I thought it was, the theories of it were ethnocentric or something, I picked up this terminology. And I remember Alfred saying, well, my colleague here, I think would agree with you. Whether he did or not, I don’t know. I wonder if he [Johnny] remembers that, actually. I must ask him.
AM: He's around and he's looking very well.
HW: Good.
AM: So, one thing that I went through, certainly at the age of about 16, 17, 18, was a kind of religious phase in my life. I was confirmed, obviously, but I was in a sort of vaguely religious Quakerish school in the north of England. And often children do go through a maximum interest in religion around their teens or just after. Given this has been your life's work later in anthropology, I wondered whether either your parents' religion or your early experience has been important in your development of religious thought and interest.
HW: Well, neither of my parents were religious. They both were of the view that I should choose myself. In fact, I remember vividly when I was in the infant section of New Ends School, primary school, that one of the children in the infant's playground told me that he was Jewish and then asked me what I was. And he said, well, you've got to choose. You've got one or the other, Christian or Jewish. It's got to be one. And I said, well, Jewish then, because that's what he was. And I came home and announced this to my parents and they were a bit surprised and said, well, you know, our view is that you can choose to be whatever you want to be. I remember that stuck in my mind, but I never felt attracted, never in my life have I felt strongly attracted to joining a religion, despite the obvious benefits of it. I think the nearest thing, I have had phases where I've been a bit fanatical about stuff in ways that would resemble some aspects of what I think it means to be religious. I think I followed my father's sort of passionate interest in environmentalism at certain points in childhood. I remember I tried to join Greenpeace, the London branch of it, when I was a child and they wouldn't have me because I wanted not to join, but to offer my labour to help. And they didn’t have any honorary positions or opportunities for tea-boys or anything else I would have done.
AM: So there was no kind of God entering your heart period in that, your late teens or at any time?
HW: Not at any time. And it's always been kind of a mystery to me what that would feel like. But no, my view is that a lot of the components of what we call religion are not necessarily a feeling of divine presence, but lots of other things. And those things I've had plenty of. In fact, I feel quite naturally superstitious and have to override quite a lot of intuitions about supernatural intervention and supernatural forces at work and that kind of thing. So I get that. And it seems to me that that is something that we all have to some extent. And the research that I've done suggests it's a sort of pan-human thing and it has many recurrent features worldwide. And I suppose, given that that's a natural aspect of being human, it's not going to go away. So I'm certainly not one of these new atheists who wants to eliminate all of that, because I think it's impossible. I rather think we should kind of work with the grain of it and use it in ways that we can agree consensually would be good for humanity at large or good for other portions of humanity that we're concerned about.
AM: We may, we will come back to religion later, but you went to the LSE, it must be about 1985?
HW: 82, 82 to 85.
AM: Some 12 or 15 years after I was there. Were there any teachers or experiences there that stand out in your mind?
HW: Ernest Gellner stuck out for me because he was there in my first year. I went to his lectures even though they weren't part of my degree. I signed up for the anthropology degree. I remember the first teacher I had was James Woodburn. He wasn't my tutor, but his was the first class I went to. It actually had a big impression on me. It was a course called elementary ethnography and there were some very dry and difficult books on it. I don't know why he chose them.
AM: Shapiro and things like that.
HW: I think the first book was 'Igbo Village Affairs' by Margaret Green, you know, sort of all about the Aba riots in 1920s Nigeria. It was really, it was very dry. It was about dual division I think, the way that villages got divided into two halves and kind of like moieties and used this method to accomplish various cooperative feats and stuff like that. But it was written in a very dry way. I don't know why. There were other books, perhaps more readable ones like Julian Pitt Rivers, I think, 'The People of the Sierra' and there were other interesting books. The people who really inspired me at LSE, most of all, actually I did find Woodburn's Ethnography very fascinating on the Hadza. I think the people who really inspired me were Alfred Gell, who was my tutor and he was very important in my life because he really encouraged me to go on and do a doctorate, and I might well not have done that without his encouragement. And actually Maurice Bloch, his lectures on religion, he was sort of in the process of figuring out all that stuff that went into 'The Prey into Hunter' book. And I found that very fascinating, also a bit frustrating because none of it was testable. And this is why I like Gellner, I like the idea of things that were testable. And I've often wondered if there's a version of Maurice Bloch's ideas that could be rendered in a more empirically tractable, testable kind of way. But who else? Mike Salnow, who sadly died, I don't know if you remember him?
AM: I know of him.
HW: He was one of my tutors who was wonderful, really, and he got me reading about Guatemalan market systems and things like that. But he was a really good tutor. Yes, there were some wonderful people at LSE.
AM: Can you just come back to Ernest because he was a close friend and a huge influence on me too. And I went to lectures which he was giving in the early 1980s, and that influenced me a lot. Can you say anything more about why you liked his lectures or his work?
HW: Many reasons. He actually became my PhD supervisor. I didn't know if you knew that. that was one of the reasons why I applied to Cambridge, because he'd moved here, as you know. So the biggest impact Ernest had on me was in the way he took me under his wing and he said, look, you're clearly determined to be a Marxist, which I was at the time, unfortunately. I gave it up, largely thanks to him, eventually. But he said, if you're going to be a Marxist, let's make you into a good Marxist. And he meant that very sincerely. And he was very generous. He put a lot of effort into setting me straight. He wrote reams actually in response to the essays and work I gave him. Very generous in that way. I think his biggest problem with the version of Marxism that I was quite preoccupied with was the idea of economic determinism, and the idea that there are features of production relations that he said determined various aspects of, let's call it the superstructure, what Marxists often call the superstructure. And he thought that was tautological and circular. And even though I sort of built that into the whole idea of my fieldwork and the research I was going to do in Papua New Guinea, the strangest place in a way to apply Marxist theory of economic determinism. But I wasn't alone in that. There were lots of people doing it. Godelier, Nick Modjeska. There were lots of people who were doing that kind of thing. And I guess it was there that I sort of had this dark night of the soul that was prompted by Gellner's constant sort of encouragement to question this apparent circularity. That if you think of production relations as a sort of relation to some kind of force of production or could be human labour, that such that you have the right to, sorry, in terms of the production relation, you have the power to use and exploit it and prevent other people from doing that. How do you distinguish that from the whole set of legal rules or norms or other things that govern the activity at that level of the superstructure? It seems circular. And no matter what social formation you transpose that problem into, it remains unresolvable in any kind of clear way. And I think that really put an end to my Marxist ambitions, that problem.
AM: So you talked of a dark night of the soul. Do you mean you did have a real depression at losing your faith?
HW: It wasn't quite that bad. It was Gilbert Lewis that called it my dark night of the soul, because I think he did it with a sense of amusement. But he saw that I had in my letters and things, I'd given up on that. And it was, in a sense, it was a difficult and painful thing to give up on as the more I thought about it, the more I thought I'm just trying to force things to fit with a theory that doesn't add up.
AM: You mentioned Gilbert. I mean, he was the obvious supervisor for you.
HW: Yes.
AM: But why wasn't he your supervisor?
HW: He was, so I had two. It started with Ernest because of my Marxism problem. But as soon as it was absolutely clear that I would go to New Guinea, and I think it was clear to me all along, but I think when the department realised, well, he's definitely going to Papua New Guinea, he needs Gilbert. And Ernest said, well, you need Gilbert. And I did need Gilbert, and he was a wonderful supervisor.
AM: Yes, I was going to say, can you say something about Gilbert?
HW: Gilbert was a really incredibly patient, supportive and empiricist. The wonderful thing about him was that he really cared about very, very careful observation in the field and encouraged that. And it really spoke to my natural desire to be a good documenter and collector of facts, because it went back to my childhood, really. And I think with him too, it went back to his childhood. I think he was naturally that way. Yes, so that really rubbed off on me. I went to his memorial service a year or two ago, and to his funeral before that. But I was invited to give a talk at his memorial service, which caused me to reflect on Gilbert as a teacher. And I had quite a lot to say, I realised about how wonderful he was. And I also remember there were moments, do you remember Gilbert had this little habit of putting his hand to his head like this? And I always thought it was because I said something incredibly stupid, but it wasn't, it was just a natural gesticulation that he did. And I discovered that lots of his other supervisees had that similar fear. But it wasn't that at all.
AM: Are there any other particular memories of your time doing your PhD here?
HW: Lots, yes.
AM: I mean, you must have been influenced also by Stephen, to a certain extent..Stephen Hugh Jones?
HW: Yes. Stephen Hugh Jones. Yes, definitely. In fact, Stephen took our sort of pre-fieldwork classes for a while here in these very rooms, actually, one of the rooms here. And, yes, I think his interest in sort of ritual really impacted me, especially, you know, these, it was the Barasana, wasn't it? And they had these incredibly, what I would call imagistic rituals, in the very intense emotional way. And he was a very, very useful, helpful person to talk to, especially during that phase when I was trying to make sense of the psychology behind imagistic rituals. He clearly had very similar kinds of ideas to mine. But of course, those journeys of self-discovery and deep spiritual kind of revelation in Amazonian groups tend to be guided by shamans in a way that isn't the case in Melanesia. So that was the difference. But apart from that, I think the psychology was very similar. So he was a very useful person.
AM: We haven't, I mean, often, much earlier, in public school or grammar schools, there are a couple of things that I ask about. One is involvement in sport. Have you ever been sporty?
HW: I've never been terribly sporty. I played, well, I mean, I played all the normal sports at school. I think at the one very small school I mentioned earlier, Herewood House, because of its small size, and frankly, the poor athleticism of most of the pupils, I actually rose temporarily to some kind of position of captain of the school football team. I would never have got that opportunity anywhere else. And we lost a lot.
AM: Did you continue with any kind of, apart from birdwatching, outdoor activities?
HW: Yes, well, my father was very keen for me to be a golfer. So he took me every Sunday to golf courses with my brother. I played regularly. And he always thought I had a special gift for it. But I was so much more interested in the birds we saw. I was always being distracted and told off for that, running off after birds. Sport has never really had the, I mean, I did as a teenager start to go to Arsenal football matches with one of my school friends who was very keen, one from my New End primary school days, and still a friend today. And actually, that's proven quite important because I now have quite a big project going on with Arsenal Football Club and its former vice president. And it's partly because of my former Arsenal interests that that came about, where we're trying to understand how football can be used to help reduce recidivism among ex-offenders as part of a project that twin football clubs to their local prisons.
AM: Interesting. One of the other things is music. Has music meant a lot to you? Do you play? Do you listen?
HW: Music has meant a lot to me, and I do play guitar. I played guitar from primary school age onwards, classical guitar, but I developed in my middle childhood, partly through my father's influence, a real interest in jazz, which grew stronger in my teens. And when I went back to Pimlico at 15 or whatever, I made a very close friend at school who shared my passion for jazz and is now an established jazz pianist. But we used to perform together in all kinds of places in London in our teens, sometimes in competitions, but also just earning money in bars and places. And I would sing. Sometimes I'd play guitar as well, but I mostly sang and he played piano.
AM: Nice. Do you continue with any of that?
HW: We still play together occasionally. I have a dear ethnomusicologist friend, Martin Stokes, who I don't know if you know, but he and I were colleagues together for a while, both in Queens, and in Oxford. And he's a wonderful pianist who was an organ scholar at St John's in Oxford. And so we play together from time to time.
AM: Do you play other kinds of music, classical music at all?
HW:Yes, I do. My mother used to like opera and I used to enjoy that with her. I enjoyed jazz with my dad and opera with my mum. But, I do love classical music, but I'm no buff.
AM: Some people work to music and some people can't work to music. What about you?
HW: I can't. Not at all.
AM: So we've got to the end of Cambridge. Did you immediately go to, well, no, let's backtrack. Tell me more about your PhD. What were you studying in New Guinea?
HW: Well initially, as I said, my interest was in economic anthropology with this sort of Marxist colouring to it. More than that, it was a sort of commitment to quite basic concepts from Marxism. But when I was working in the field, two years in immersive fieldwork in the rainforest in Papua New Guinea, the people I went to live with really weren't bought into the topics that I had to pursue, like, you know, production and consumption and exchange and all the material relations of life. That was not motivating for people. They wanted to talk about their religious ideas, their cosmology and their rituals. And actually they, as much as .., they perhaps even more than Ernest, talked me out of my project and into another one, which was all focused on religion and ritual. And they were all part of an organisation that called itself the Kivung, which in Neo-Melanesian means a meeting or it's used as a verb to mean...
AM: How do you spell the word?
HW: K-I-V-U-N-G. And the Kivung, or to give it its full title, the Pomio Kivung, which relates to one of .., or a group of languages in the area. They had this idea that the ancestors of the group would eventually return within our lifetimes, I mean, not in the far, far distant future, and establish a sort of heaven on earth. It was one of these things that often gets labelled a cargo cult, but people really didn't like that term. It has very pejorative connotations in PNG. But there was also a very brilliant idea behind this that was not so much about the idea of returning ancestors. It was the idea that if we all pull together and unify the different language groups in this region, we can hold back the march of quite damaging forms of capitalism that involve the destruction of the rainforest, the ruination of the rivers, in many ways pollution of them, and retain our traditional lifestyles. And it became a sort of almost secessionist, almost a sort of proto-nationalist kind of movement, with the goal of separating itself from the rest of the state, establishing its own sort of state-like structures, a centralised sort of system of governments. And they managed problems of law and order very effectively, in a very consensual way. It was an incredibly impressive organisation, and very unfortunate that people were kind of scathing about it because of the religious beliefs that they thought were delusional, because actually this was a very sophisticated and inspired kind of system of a movement, really. And it's still going today.
AM: It is? I was wondering if it's been successful.
HW: It's been very successful over many decades.
AM: And they've protected the forest, have they?
HW: They've been pretty good at doing that. I mean, one of the most effective politicians, Francis Komainrea, died in, I think it was 2017 or something like that [it was actually 2019], unfortunately, because he was a really important figure in pushing that angle. The leadership was kind of divided between those who were working more on the sort of religious aspects and those who were more associated with the political efforts of the group. And through their representation, first in the sort of House of Assembly and then in various other, as the government system itself evolved post-independence, they evolved with it, and their political influence infiltrated provincial and national government. They were very effective. Without them, I think far more of the rainforest would have been destroyed. And I think people would have had a poorer standard of living and the Pomio-Baining groups who were always relatively deprived and oppressed compared with the sort of dominant, Tolai elites, would have been much worse off.
AM: Right. So you then went to Belfast?
HW: Yes.
AM: When was that?
HW: That was in 1993 or 4. 93, I think.
AM: 93.
HW: Yes.
AM: John Blacking had left, had he not?
HW: He'd just died, I think, when I arrived. I mean, not just, but I mean a couple of years at least before.
AM: Who else was there? There was some South Americanist or Latin Americanist.
HW: There was a Latin Americanist called Suzel Reily, if that's who you're thinking of. But the head of department... You see, there was a sort of interregnum after Blacking died. And then Elizabeth Tonkin came in.
AM: Oh, yes.
HW: And Elizabeth was fairly newly appointed. And I think this is why I got the job, because there weren't many opportunities around. I just had a research fellowship at Trinity Hall for three years. That's what happened after my PhD.
AM: Oh, right. So you were here for quite a long time?
HW: I was here. Cambridge was my home for quite a long time.
AM: Yes. And you spent that time turning your thesis into a book?
HW: Yes. A book called 'Inside the Cult'. All about the Kivung. And I think Elizabeth Tonkin shared my interest in memory. Having given up on Marxism, I was very attracted to cognitive sciences of all kinds, and I felt that here was a very viable replacement for that theoretical framework in the sense that it provided some important mechanisms for shaping and constraining cultural systems other than class and forces and relations of production and all of that. So it sort of took up the slack, really, that was left. It filled the gap that was left by Marxism. And although Elizabeth Tonkin wasn't particularly bought into all of that, she was interested in memory. And I think that's partly why she thought I was an attractive hire, because I don't know, I should ask her. But anyway, that's where I got my first job, permanent job. For how long? I was there for about 12 or 13 years.
AM: And you enjoyed it?
HW: I loved Northern Ireland in many ways. Not everything was a bed of roses, but there were... There was the troubles of that time. The troubles were just in a very interesting stage in the early 90s. You know, we hadn't yet... Peace hadn't broken out yet, but it was still... But it was in the air. It was coming. And tragically, quite a lot of the people who would never be brought on board with that process were being killed left, right and centre during that period. And I was there when Bratty and Elder, two paramilitary leaders who would never have been brought on board with the peace process, got killed. So there was still a lot of violence going on. But the Queen's campus, as you probably know, is relatively free of that kind of thing.
AM: I had a colleague, I think he probably was there, and my daughter was there, Martin Ingram. He was teaching history, then later went to Oxford, of course. So I used to visit occasionally and found, you know, our screens were filled with all these bombs and so on. And I talked to my daughter, she said, oh no, we haven't had anything round here. It's quite peaceful.
HW: It was extremely rare for any kind of event connected to the troubles to occur on campus. There were one or two. But, actually, this is also the case that the countryside of Northern Ireland, the North Antrim coast, the mountains of Mourne and all kinds of areas around Northern Ireland were relatively untouched and underexploited, because of the reputation Northern Ireland had, you know, it wasn't on the map for most tourists. And that made it a wonderful place to raise a child.
AM: Lots of birds.
HW: Yes, and lots of birds.
AM: So after 12, 13 years, how is it that you came back?
HW: Well it was partly that I hadn't been looking for jobs for all of that time, but my son was just about coming up for, you know, university and A-levels in university, that phase, and it seemed like a good juncture to be on the lookout for things. And the chair, a newly created chair in social anthropology was created at Oxford with an affiliation to Magdalen College. And it seemed, yes, like a really wonderful choice of a job opportunity. And it was the first thing I had thought of applying for for well over, you know, a decade. And I thought, I'll go for it, see what happens. And I was absolutely blown away to have been offered it. And Danny, my son, was very much up for the idea of moving at that point. And so it just, everything fell into place. It was tough too, because I put a lot of effort into building what's called the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's. And I felt worried that, you know, I was leaving people in the lurch with this.
AM: You built that up in Belfast?
HW: I built that up in Belfast. And some of the people came with me to Oxford, some of my post-doctorate students, including my secretary. We all kind of moved together to Oxford and set up another centre. And we put a lot of effort into helping to, you know, sort of continue through shared grants and things like that, the ICC in Belfast. And it's still flourishing today. And one of my former PhD students and former colleagues from the days I was there are now running it together. And it's flourishing. So, you know, all my fears about it being sort of left to sort of decay, none of that happened. That's great.
AM: This professorship was also tied to being head of department for a while, so how was it? That notably ferocious department of anthropology, how was it?
HW: It had its challenges. So yes, for three years, it was part of my sort of, it was the expectation that I would be head of department. I think the remit was very clear. I was meant to expand the department, which I did. We created new units or, you know, centres and institutes. We grew the number of staff quite substantially. We had many challenges to do with support staffing as well as academic staff, all of which needed to be kind of dealt with. But the way that we dealt with them collectively was to create a sort of set of standing orders for the department. Up until then, you know, the department had been ISCA. You know, everyone thought of, you know, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, that was the department. But on the statutes, I discovered, though, of the university, there was this School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, which hardly anyone had heard of. And we decided that was going to be the department, a much more inclusive umbrella organisation of which ISCA would be part, but not the whole thing. And so we could have other institutes in it. So we created...
AM: Including Biological Anthropology.
HW: Well, that's right. So Stanley Ulijaszek had sort of remained in the department and Rick Ward had gone to Zoology and this sort of thing had fallen apart. So we took what was then the MSc in Biological Anthropology, which was no longer being taught, but was still on the books and created, used it as a foundation, or one of the foundations for a new Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, which we set up in the, you know, sort of around about 2008, 2009. And prior to that, I set up the sort of Centre for Anthropology and Mind, which was a bit like the ICC in Belfast, much more focused on cognitive anthropology and other units in the department. And this sort of grew it into something much more than just ISCA. And that was the point. It was multiple institutes and centres. And it's remained that way since, in fact, just grown since. So even though those were tough three years, they had, I think, a positive long-term effect. You know, the collective effort then has paid off.
AM:: So what were your relations with David Gellner?
HW: Very good. I mean, so David also has been head of department since I was. And Yes, we've had to work together quite closely on various challenges that that role involves. Yes, I mean, we're, I think all those who've had to bear the burden of responsibility of head of department, I've naturally had to work with quite closely. And David, of course, is among them.
AM: And did you see something of Ernest in David?
HW: Do you know, I never really think about that connection. It's so obvious, isn't it? And I don't frequently think, where is the influence of Ernest? You know, I just see David as David. I see him as a separate person. But it's an interesting question. Yes, we should ask him.
AM: So let's talk a little bit, we've got 10 minutes or so, about your theoretical ideas. One thing that intrigued me from the summary of them was this distinction between imagistic and doctrinal systems. Can you outline that in a few more words?
HW: Sure. So the idea here is that there are two ways of building cohesion within groups. One depends on quite intense, emotionally intense rituals that get sort of, that stick in your episodic memory and become part of your personal identity. But because they're conducted in a collective setting, they're also usually quite group defining experiences. And when we go through those experiences, I call them imagistic, because they sort of burn their images of the experience into your brain in a kind of way that is enduring, and becomes a locus for reflection in subsequent years. And that's how it becomes part of your personal identity as well as your group identity. When those things happen, when we experience those things, it creates a very intense form of social cohesion that my colleagues in social psychology and I have been developing as a kind of theory of extreme group bonding that motivates very strong forms of pro-group action. And what inspired this whole idea in the first place was studying very intense initiation rituals in Papua New Guinea. But it became clear to me that these sorts of imagistic practices are found in lots and lots of different groups. They've become historically rather problematic, let's say in state formations, because often imagistic groups, they sort of present a threat to the power holders, unless they're very closely managed within, let's say, a military system that is endorsed by the state in various ways. So you can have hazing and extreme forms of intense bonding that go on in your professional military, and perhaps in your public schools, and perhaps in university fraternities and certain other groups. But by and large, it's the kind of thing that gets pushed into the peripheries as something that terrorist cells do or that extremist groups do, and it's generally prohibited. The reason it's prohibited is because it bonds groups together very tightly and makes them potentially dangerous as military groups, because if you attack what we call a highly fused group, when you threaten it, what you do is unleash all kinds of extreme reactions, including self-sacrificial behaviours, as we see in suicide terrorism. So that's the imagistic stuff. The doctrinal stuff uses a different pathway to group bonding, which is based not on episodic memories, but on semantic memories and general knowledge that we have about group identity markers, for example, that we know, intuitively, we know that they're acquired from other people, rather than something that is deeply embedded in our own personal identities. And so those kinds of identities are more depersonalizing. And this is the world of identification, where you make your group identity salient and your personal identity becomes less accessible. And so this is a different kind of group bonding, and one that doesn't tap into the very strong power of individual personal agency. And it's the kind of bonding that we find in very large doctrinal religions, but we also find it in various other very, very large groups. And I call that doctrinal because it's based on, it derives its stability from highly routinised forms of social transmission, highly repetitive rituals, where not just the rituals, but their meanings and the narratives and stories and other things that go along with that are repeated so frequently, as for instance, in church services, but not exclusively, because we get all these things in lots of doctrinal religions and other kinds of doctrinal practices. And that heavy repetition makes deviation from the norms much easier to spot and therefore easier to suppress. And it also...
AM: So you have heresy.
HW: Yes, so you have heresy and, and that's when it's not just .. So that process of suppressing things depends not just on being able to detect when people step out of line, but in force. And that involves religious hierarchies and forms of policing. And hence the idea of heresy and blasphemy and all these other terrible things that can be punished.
AM: That's very interesting. If someone said what you're doing is reinventing Durkheim, because the opposition between mechanical and organic solidarity, and his primitive forms of religion and so on, seems to be talking, I mean, his all his primitive forms is all about how these imagistic events come in moments of high emotion and ritual. Infrequently, as you say, they come together and then they, whereas, once you get to organic solidarity, then it's doctrinal. In what way is it different from that?
HW: Well, it is a reinvention of that in many ways, but it's a reinvention of many other sort of dichotomous theories.
AM: I was going to say, it sounds like Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, it sounds like...
HW: Yes, or routinisation charisma.
AM: Exactly.
HW: Well, there's so many different kinds of versions of this out there. In fact, John Peel at SOAS, many years before he died, attempted to sort of look at how many theories you could sort of say are basically this doctrinal imagistic one, or very similar, overlapping with it. And there are lots of them. And it's not just Durkheim. The difference between what I'm arguing and all of those is not that there's a fundamental conceptual difference, because it's also ..another one great in little traditions, you know, and also, Ernest's distinction between Syndrome C and Syndrome P, you know, in his pendulum swing theory of Islam.
AM: And even his two versions of Islam.
HW: Exactly, exactly, the rural and the urban. So this is a dichotomy that is being reinvented many, many times in many different ways. So it's not just me doing it. But the way I'm doing it is different in the sense that I'm determinedly sort of scientific in my approach to it. That is to say, I'm trying to specify precise and testable hypotheses about the differences between these two syndromes, or modes, I like to call modes of religiosity. You know, and I think that is different. A lot of the other ones could be rendered in a way that you could actually specify what would constitute evidence against or for those theories. But they're not systematically tested in that way. But that's what I spent most of my career doing is trying to test the specific hypotheses derived from that dichotomy in a, you know, to systematically test them against data.
AM: If you said there were these two columns headed, imagistic and doctrinal, which cultures would you put in each column?
HW: Well, I don't see it as a typology, actually, I see it more like a sort of clustering of these features around these poles. And that tendency to cluster in that way is a product of a sort of winnowing process and trying to understand what the mechanisms are that drive that winnowing process is really the key. So it's not a typology, that's quite important. I guess, you know, there are lots of different methods that we've used to test this theory, some of them use the methods of carefully controlled experiments or longitudinal studies, both of which can get at causality. Sometimes we're looking at, you know, large historical data sets and, you know, sort of based on the logic of, you know, causes preceding effects, looking at what precedes what. We have lots of different techniques that we've been using to try and get at what is driving this tendency for doctrinal and imagistic things to cluster in the ways that they do, and what the consequences of that have been historically for different kinds of societies at different stages in their sort of, in their historical forms. So it's a sort of, it's really, it's important to say it's not a typology and that it's not something that, you know, you can sum up in a sentence, but there are lots of interesting findings that come out of this.
AM: Just the last point on that, I mean, I've done a lot of work on Japan and on China, and my original view was that it was on the doctrinal cluster side. But my revised view is that it's imagistic. Would that be conceivable for you?
HW: Yes, I mean, we've done quite a bit of research in Japan and some of it on very clearly imagistic practices in the sense that, even though it's not a typology, they have a, they tick a lot of the boxes that we would consider necessary to think of it as an imagistic process. And using various measures, we can show that there are similarities between those kinds of practices in Japan and the kinds of things we've seen in Melanesia or West Africa or wherever it is, where you get these sort of classic imagistic phenomena. But doctrinal religions have really struggled to get a foothold in Japan, and I've been very curious about why that is. And I think part of the reason has to do with something that psychologists call relational mobility. And relational mobility, I don't know if you've come across this idea, it was really developed by Masaki Yuki at Hokkaido University. And the basic idea, in very simplistic terms, is that it's a measure of how open you are to joining new groups. And people are not at all open to that in Japan, particularly in rural Japan, that's true of most, it's more true of rural groups than urban groups everywhere. But it's, relational mobility, people score very low on that in Japan. And I think this is, makes it very difficult for doctrinal religions to get a foothold. They require, they thrive in environments where relational mobility is a lot higher.
AM: Well we've just come into the last couple of minutes, is there anything I should have asked you?
HW: I think there's one thing that often weighs heavily on my mind, and that is about the, maybe we can explore this when we talk about your work in the afternoon, but is that a lot of anthropologists I come into contact with nowadays, subscribe to some form of what might call interpretive exclusivism, that the only way to study culture, the only way, and this is the crucial thing, is through some kind of interpretive lens by explaining it in terms of other aspects of culture rather than doing something that actually just, you mentioned just before we started recording that Einstein said you can't.., in order to explain something at one level you have to go to another level to, and I believe that this is a very important aspect of science that is being lost in contemporary anthropology, and I think that's a tragedy.
AM: Well so do I, and on that happy note of agreement we'll have lunch and then continue vice versa.
HW: Sounds very good.
AM: Thank you very much indeed Harvey.
HW: Thank you.