John Barnes

0:00

JG I suppose the first thing to ask is why any respectable scholar in mathematics and St John’s Cambridge ever went into anthropology.

JB Well it’s quite a good question but it’s not very difficult to answer. When I was interviewed to come up to John’s I explained that I wasn’t really interested in mathematics, I wanted to read economics, and my college said that since they’d given me a scholarship in mathematics, if I wanted to do economics I should do part 2 of the maths tripos first and then in my third year I could read part 2 of the economics tripos, and that to do that I would have to read and do the work for part 1 of the economics tripos in my spare time during my first two years. So I embarked on this course and it didn’t take me very long to discover that economics was the dullest subject imaginable, so that at the end of my second year, having failed to become a wrangler in part 2, it became quite clear that I shouldn’t persist and read part 3 of the maths tripos and that I ought to switch to something or other. So I merely read through the handbook and tried to arrange the triposes that were available to me in some order of preference bearing in mind that I was sure of a degree anyway and if I failed nothing would happen. So I dithered for a long time between moral sciences which contained psychology, philosophy and metaphysics and other interesting subjects, and the archaeology and anthropology tripos. And according to the handbook the archaeology and anthropology tripos would enable me to answer questions like the origin of civilization, what’s the meaning of culture, and so on, and I thought I’d like to know the answers to those questions so I switched to archaeology and anthropology but I still haven’t found the answers to the questions.

JG You didn’t get any advice from anybody in St Johns. There weren’t any anthropologists there, I take it.

2:10

JB Well there were no anthropologists but Glyn Daniel was director of studies in archaeology and anthropology and he was my supervisor, of course, when I switched.

JG And you switched in 1938?

JB Yes.

JG And so you did the A&A tripos in the year before the war and finished in 1939. And it was Glyn who supervised you right through?

JB He was my director of studies but I was supervised by Driberg and Trevor as well.

JG Trevor in physical anthropology?

JB Well no, not only in physical anthropology but also what was called general anthropology.

JG Of course, he was a pupil of Herskovitz and he knew about most of these different fields. Jack Driberg, what was he like as a supervisor?

2:58

JB Well he was very inspiring. I didn’t think that he knew very much but he was full of enthusiasm and encouraged one to think for oneself and I enjoyed working with him.

JG He was inspiring in what way, that he believed in anthropology?

JB Yes, he enjoyed life. He was a very colourful figure. There were all sorts of legends about him which one could fully believe in, about his adventures in Sudan and in Kenya. I admired him as a man. I remember being very impressed once by…, he suffered from some kind of toe rot and the only available cure was in East Africa. He was being treated, rather ineffectually, by an ordinary orthodox G.P. and the G.P. called on him one morning while I was in his rooms in Brookside and the G.P. came in and walked over to the sideboard where there was a decanter with whiskey in it, poured himself a glass and drank it down, and without speaking a word to my supervisor said “Right, same time again tomorrow?”, and left, and I thought anybody who could be treated in this way must surely be a man worth listening to.

JG He was a great friend of Evans-Pritchard [E-P]. Did any of this come out in his teaching?

4:41

JB I don’t think he understood a word of what E-P was up to but his friendship with E-P showed itself in his consideration for his students. He took three or four of us over to Oxford to visit E-P and Radcliffe-Brown [R-B] and Gluckman as well in the Easter term of 1939 and explained that E-P was the external examiner in the tripos, and that he thought it would be helpful for E-P to get to know us beforehand. So it was.

JG Who were the other students? Anyone who went into anthropology professionally?

5:32

JB No. Paul Howell was a year ahead of me. I’ve forgotten the names of the other people.., well Philip Baldwin, he became an Air Commodore..

JG He was in charge of the cadet squadron here. You met Max Gluckman over there.

JB Yes. I thought he was Zuckerman when he was introduced to me but I was never any good at remembering names.

JG Meyer Fortes, was he there then too?

JB Yes. I’d met Meyer before in Cambridge because he’d come over to read a paper to the Anthropological Society. I remember my first exchange with him. He asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated so I said I want to become an anthropologist. So he said “Oh really, have you got a private income?” So I said “No”. So he said “Well, you’d better give up the idea, hadn’t you”. That was that.

JG You met Radcliffe-Brown over in Oxford. What was your impression of him at that time?

7:04

JB He gave me the impression of a repertory actor waiting between trips. He had this air about him of playing a part all the time. He was a very odd creature and one can understand why it was that his period in Sydney was the height of his career in that there he could play a part on a small provincial stage much more effectively than he could in either Oxford or Cambridge.

JG Or Chicago?

JB I don’t know what happened in Chicago.

JG That must have been a particularly interesting time at Oxford because Radcliffe-Brown went there in 1937 and Meyer and E-P must have gone there just after that and there is some very interesting correspondence which I have about that period, and the plans of E-P and Meyer Fortes to set up, with Gluckman I think, the best department of anthropology in England. Which in a sense I suppose they did, to supercede Malinowski’s department whom they didn’t get on with. And Jack Driberg in this early correspondence had always been the great helper of E-P in his troubles against Malinowski, I imagine intellectually.

9:12

JB I think he may have provided moral and convivial support but I don’t think intellectually he had that much to offer and he wouldn’t have been much ammunition in an intellectual battle with Malinowski.

JG No. I think it was probably in their manipulations that led them to this. There was an interesting passage in Tom Driberg’s autobiography, “Ruling Passions”, in which he quotes a comment in an obituary of Jack Driberg that E-P wrote, and E-P said he had quite a high idea of Driberg and talks about him keeping Cambridge anthropology alive at that particular time.

JB That wouldn’t have been difficult as otherwise it would have been very dead without him.

JG The professor at that time, you didn’t mention anything about the professor.

10:26

JB Hutton. He did teach me material culture, and probably gave some more lectures on caste, but one had to choose one special area. The tripos can be taken in one year or two. If you took it in one year you only needed to take one special area so I took East Africa rather than India. Hutton taught the Indian stuff. But he also taught material culture and his method of teaching was to stand at the end of the room and we were all sitting round at tables, and he would hold up a bow or something like that and describe it and hand it to the student who was sitting nearest to him and the student would fondle it and hand it on to the next student, and so on. By this time Hutton would have started on the next bow. So that if one was sitting opposite the lecturer there was a phase difference of about half a dozen or so bows between what one was listening to and what one was handling. This made it impossible to understand anything at all.

JG Did you get taught the 8 or 9 different forms of bow release.

JB That’s the sort of thing.

JG He was still doing that after the war when I was…, it nearly put me off both materialism and culture for a lifetime. Terrifying, it was. And curiously I never heard him lecture on caste and things that he knew something about, just about material culture, and usually taken from the Horniman Museum handbook. And if you had these books under the desk you could flick them over and find the right page.

JB You must have put more effort into it than I did.

JG I was just trying to keep track of the different forms of bow release. There was Hutton…

12:40

JB And there was Miles Burkett, the squire of Grantchester.

JG That was another man who lectured from a book. I don’t know whether it had been published in your day but its one of those that so many Cambridge academic’s write with eight chapters in, one for each lecture during term time. He was the archaeologist, but there must be Glyn Daniel?

JB No. Glyn Daniel certainly wasn’t a lecturer. Graham Clark wasn’t a lecturer either. He certainly lectured on pollen analysis. There was Trevor. That was probably about all.

JG Without wishing to be uncharitable to any of those people it’s difficult to see how one might decide on a career having been taught in rather a haphazard way that went on at that time.

13:54

JB Well I didn’t think I would complete my professional training in Cambridge, indeed I was all set to go to Harvard in 1939 had conscription not come. Jack Trevor was very helpful in getting me these connections and at one time it was suggested that I should go to North Western University to work with Herskovitz but then I was shunted to Harvard instead and was made a fellow of the Peabody Museum but I never took it up because of the war.

JG You said that you’d already got interested in East Africa. The fact that you were going to Herskovitz meant you were already interested in Africa.

14:50

JB Well I had to make a choice between East Africa and India, and it was a choice between Hutton and Driberg, and Driberg was obviously the better person. Glyn Daniel probably advised me on that point.

JG And you had had some contact or relationships with East Africa before that?

JB Not at all. I’d hardly been anywhere north of Birmingham.

JG I didn’t mean you personally. I really meant your relatives.

JB No, none at all.

JG No settler…

JB None whatsoever. It was just foreign parts as far as I was concerned.

JG And there’s nothing in the family background like so many anthropologists. Scratch them and there’s a tea planter underneath.

JB I had an uncle at the time who was in Australia but that was all. All the others… well, there were a number of relatives who had gone to Australia because my paternal grandfather was the youngest of 13 and I once enquired where the other 12 were and was told that they’d all been advised by the police that if they left then no further proceedings would be taken against them. Two were alleged to have last been seen working in a quarry in New South Wales. So that was two generations up.

JG Where did they come from?

JB The village of Corsham in Wiltshire. My grandfather was a stone mason and worked in a quarry and then became foreman, and then ran a news agency, I think.

JG And your father was..

JB My father began life as a piano tuner and then went into partnership with a man and they sold pianos in Reading.

JG So you were brought up in Reading.

JB Yes. Well I went away to school but I was born there.

JG When your nascent career in anthropology was interrupted by the war you went into the Navy. Were there any experiences there which confirmed you or disconfirmed you in your intention to go on with anthropology afterwards?

17:23

JB No, I think that I was confirmed in my feeling that it would be nice to have a job where I could do research, be my own master, and travel abroad.

JG But you didn’t really spend any time ashore in foreign parts?

JB Yes. I was in New Caledonia. The ship was based in Noumea and we were based at Tontuta.

JG When you came back to England when you were demobilised how did you make the transition to anthropology?

JB I came back in 1943 and then I was in Farnborough as senior naval officer at the Royal Air force Establishment for a year and then I was in the Admiralty for a year, so I was already in England at the end of the war.

JG How did you make the transition into anthropology?

19:00

JB I was anxious to get out of the Navy as fast as possible. There was a scheme whereby one could get accelerated demobilisation if you could show that you had a useful job to go to. I thought that if I could dream up a research project that had to be done at once if it was to be done at all, this would be a powerful argument for getting out of the Navy. Perhaps I should explain. In 1939 I had gone to Lappland on a so-called field trip on a grant of £15 from my college..

JG Who were very interested in the Arctic at that time..

JB Well it was Lindgren who suggested that I should go to Lappland

JG She of course was attached in a vague way to the department..

JB I don’t know whether she gave lectures at that stage. That was after the war. But she certainly was around, and it was she who suggested that I should go to Lapland and I suppose it was through her that I met Firth when he was secretary of the Colonial Social Science Research Council which was set up in 1944. I’d gone to some sort of anniversary meeting of the R.A.I. in about 1944 when Firth read a paper about micro-sociology. It was a rather grand occasion as Jan Smuts was there, and through meeting Firth I then discussed with him the possibility of going to the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific in order to study the effect of the Japanese occupation on the islands, this being the only part of the British Empire that had been occupied by the Japanese but had already been liberated. And my argument was that the Americans had moved into the Gilberts having driven out the Japanese and that the effects of the Japanese occupation would soon be submerged under the effects of the American occupation therefore I must be sent there forthwith to study this. Then somebody drew my attention to an advertisement on the back of the New Statesman for a job with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and, although I had no particular desire to go to the middle of Africa, at that stage I would have preferred to go to the Gilbert and Ellis, it was prudent to apply, and indeed, I thought that if I was offered a job by the RHODES-LIVINGSTONE this would be a way of putting pressure on Firth to hurry up with his grant to go to the Gilbert and Ellis. So I applied to the RHODES-LIVINGSTONE and was offered the job and spoke to Firth who said there would be long delays before they could come to any decision. I was still keen to leave the Navy as fast as possible so decided to take the RHODES-LIVINGSTONE appointment.

JG So you went straight down to join them?

22:41

JB Yes, I went on a troop ship from Liverpool to Durban and caught a train and went up to Northern Rhodesia.

JG And at that time who else was there? Max Gluckman…

JB Max Gluckman was director.

JG He had been back in Oxford in 1939?

JB Yes. Then he went back there just before war started..

JG Oh yes, when he took over from Godfrey Wilson.

JB He was assistant to Godfrey Wilson and Godfrey Wilson joined the South African Army and Max became acting director and was eventually made director.

JG So he was installed there by the time you got there?

JB He was not only installed, he was already in the field with the team that he was recruiting at the end of the war. So Mitchell and Marwick, and Marwick’s wife Joan, were already working among the Lamba just south of the Copper Belt when I arrived. They had been there about two or three weeks before I got there. I was in the Lamba for five days, one of which was a Sunday and another was very wet so we couldn’t do any work, so on the basis of that we wrote a monograph. It was one of my first publications.

JG You must have spent a little time. I remember that you got a certain amount of survey material in it, so you must have got off the ground fairly rapidly with that.

JB Well they had already been there and had collected most of the data.

JG Who was it who set up the survey methodology which became a feature of RHODES-LIVINGSTONE work?

24:43

JB I suppose it was thrashed out in Cape Town. When we completed the Lamba survey we then were sent to the BaTonga which were later studied by Elizabeth Colson, with the idea that we would carry out another survey there, and we were to camp in the field as we had done among the Lamba. But I was given the job of putting the camping gear on the train and being unaccustomed to African trains I put it on a goods train, not knowing it would then take weeks to arrive at its destination. So we never did a survey of the Tonga. So we then went on to Cape Town and worked with Schapera for a while. Gluckman’s theory was that Mitchell and I had spent the war learning only how to waste time and that we needed some kind of academic rehabilitation before we could start really serious research work. We spent 4-5 months in the University of Cape Town working with Schapera and writing essays etc.

JG But working up the survey research, that was really done by Mitchell and Gluckman before you arrived?

JB I think it became formalised in Cape Town because Mitchell and I had the job of making sense of the data that had been collected and I think that both of us felt that we should be much more systematic than Gluckman had ever been.

JG Was Clyde’s background..

JB Well he’d done a survey in a hospital in Durban. He had a degree in sociology so he had some idea of what it was all about.

JG And you had this mathematical background too so you thought the thing might be slightly more precise.., and that led both of you on..

26:58

JB I think we were also guided by Schapera. One of the more valuable things to come out of this period in Cape Town was really a filing system which Schapera had worked out over the years he’d been working in Bechuanaland and one can see in the filing scheme that he gave us some of the chapters of his book on Tswana.

JG When you say a filing scheme, you mean characterisation of field material?

JB That’s right so that if you were writing up your notes you knew where to file them.

JG And what heading to give the sub-sections.

JB That’s right. We took the line that this was terribly dull but it was important that it should be dull and uncontroversial so that one would know where to look for the material. Our job was then to look at the material in a new light but it was important initially to file it non-controversially.

JG Non-controversially, how was this achieved?

JB By taking the very pedestrian categories that Schapera had used. For example, you have chiefs and commoners so you have a section dealing with the chiefs’ recruitment to the office, what their powers are, their relation with senior councillors, the relation with commoners, etc. all in that systematic and mechanical way, and I think it was very useful.

JG This was a kind of check list for political relationships and for phrasing your enquiry.

JB Yes.

JG And you were in Cape Town for six months?

JB Five months. Then we went back to where we were carrying out our own field work so Mitchell went to Nyasaland to study the Yao. Marwick was financed rather differently, I think directly from the Colonial Office and not through the RHODES-LIVINGSTONE Institute but was attached to Gluckman as one of his supervisors. Marwick had a plan to do a comparative study of a matrilineal and patrilineal people. The patrilineal group that he’d chosen was the Ngoni that I was to study as a major enquiry and in fact Marwick really set up a base camp among the Ngoni before I did, and then I took over the camp.

JG He wanted to move to a matrilineal people.

JB He wanted really to look at the Cewa rather than do a contrast between the Ngoni and the Cewa.

JG So that this, in anthropological circles in this country, almost unique collaboration between more than one anthropologist that you had at RHODES-LIVINGSTONE, then in a sense, finished because you all went off to your separate domain.

30:37

JB It didn’t finish in as much as we kept in contact with one another. We managed to visit one another in the field. I was perhaps more fortunate than most in as much as I visited Gluckman himself in Barotseland, and Colson among the Tonga, and I went to the Yao to see Clyde Mitchell with Elizabeth Colson.

JG And all this was being financed out of Colonial and Development Welfare funds which were funding the RHODES-LIVINGSTONE Institute, and who were funding Elizabeth Colson’s research, Marwick’s research..

JB Marwick was being funded directly from the Colonial Office..

JG Oh yes, Gluckman’s research and the rest. Although you were separated were you using sort of common schedules…

JB That’s right. We produced a few blank forms for doing census stuff and these were common to the Institute as a whole. There was an emphasis on producing material which would be comparable. And Gluckman himself produced a paper which was never published but was a quite ambitious attempt to produce a kind of comparative survey of the whole matrilineal belt of Central Africa, based partly on published material but partly on the new stuff that we were collecting.

JG You went to the Ngoni and you were there for some 20 months or so?

32:20

JB Well, I was there for a year in the first instance and then we went to Oxford and then came back for another year. So I was there for nearly 24 months.

JG You all went to Oxford?

JB We all went.., not Marwick but Colson, Mitchell and myself.

JG That was part of the contract, was it?

JB Well the idea was that we would have one year in the field and then one year writing up and then another year in the field. We had contracts that lasted for three and a half years and then there was six months leave at the end. We’d spent six months in the initial preparations among the Lamba and in Cape Town, then there was this year in the field. The argument was as to where we would spend the year in the middle. At one stage there was a proposal that we would go to the railway line in Northern Rhodesia but there was really no suitable place there, so then the Colonial Social Science Research Council suggested that we should go to Cape Town. But by this time Gluckman’s name had already gone forward for a lectureship in Oxford and so Gluckman was keen that we should go to Oxford with him. At one time it looked as though there was a deadlock between the two and Gluckman suggested as a compromise that we should go to St Helena and in the face of this suggestion the Colonial S.S.R.C. gave way and allowed us all to go to Oxford.

JG And Gluckman had gone there by this time, so there were all four of you there.

JB That was the academic year 1947-48. Then I went back to the Ngoni for another year. While I was in Oxford a job was advertised at U.C.L. and I applied for it and was offered it and I said that I could only come in a year’s time. I discussed this with Daryll Forde and he agreed that they would wait for a year.

JG When you went to the Ngoni, was this dictated by outside bodies or did it arise from your own interest?

35:11

JB No. I had no idea who they were. I hardly knew where Northern Rhodesia was. It arose out of a plan of research that Gluckman had drawn up and I think was largely influenced partly by theoretical considerations like patriliny and matriliny and things like that, partly by what we would now call applied considerations, that is to say there was a resettlement scheme among the Ngoni and he wanted to study the effects of that, partly also by the fact that some of these areas had been studied, and he thought studied not well, and Ngoni was selected partly because Margaret Read had written about the Ngoni and I think that whoever was to go to the Ngoni was to check up on what Margaret Read had written. I had the impression that I was being drawn into a quarrel among the senior generation..

JG Margaret Read having worked with Malinowski and being on that side.

36:33

JB That’s right. Mitchell went to the Yao. Reo Fortune was originally asked if he would study the Yao but he turned it down because he’d studied people called Yao in China and that he’d get them mixed up.

JG In most areas after the war there were these plans. I think Firth did one for West Africa. Schapera did one for East Africa and think Edmund Leach did one for Sarawak.

JB That was a little later I think.

JG I wasn’t thinking of research but a survey commissioned. You may be right that it was later.

JB There was a research plan for the Institute which I know was discussed at great length by the trustees which Gluckman was the author of. The Colonial authorities then approved that one person should go to the Yao. I think at one time I was to go to the Yao but because I was in London and Margaret Read was in London, and would have the opportunity of talking to her about the Ngoni it was thought that I should go there. I discussed what I was going to do with Margaret Read before I went to Africa.

JG The kinds of things that she had done, did they influence you in any way, either negatively or positively?

38:19

JB I found what she’d written very helpful, and it was she who put me on to the whole question of land ownership in the Eastern Province of Northern Rhodesia which has a very complicated history, and it was through her prompting that I eventually ended up at the Public Record Office and started reading dispatches and things like that after I got back, but it was because she’d pointed out what a complicated history of land settlement there had been in Eastern Province, more so than in the rest of Northern Rhodesia.

JG What year were you working in the Public Record Office?

JB When I was at U.C.L. in 1949-50.

JG But of course you could only get the records up to 1899…

JB 1902. But the Ngoni were conquered in 1898 so that all the interesting stuff was there. Once they were conquered they ceased to be interesting .., they were just a tribe. The span of record was narrow but there wouldn’t have been very much to discover after 1902 until much more recently. Northern Rhodesia was not controlled in that period directly by the Colonial Office but by the British South Africa Company whose records conveniently had all been destroyed during the war. I think they were not a particularly literate administration and I doubt if there was very much to discover. There was one year that all the published information available on the whole of Northern Rhodesia was the one sentence: The conduct of the natives has continued to be satisfactory’.

JG The actual problems that you dealt with when you worked among the Ngoni, they arose partly from your reading of and suggestions by Margaret Read, partly from your having worked with Gluckman. They would be the main influences.

41:06

JB I suppose so but I’m sure I’d read other things as well. The first paper that I published was on genealogies written for a seminar we had in Cape Town. I don’t think it was Gluckman who put me on to that. Margaret Read, perhaps, I doubt it though. I got onto that through reading Rivers. As an undergraduate I’d dined every evening beneath the portrait of Rivers with which I’m sure you are familiar.

JG Was that in the hall then?

JB Yes. He was in army uniform.

JG It was then taken away and I’ve never been able to lay my hands on it. I’d always wanted it in my room. As it is I’ve only got Palmer.

JB For seven years at school I walked past the tablet commemorating Henry Sumner Maine so that I had some sort of connection there too.

JG But at that time the name didn’t mean much to you…

JB No, but I discovered him later on.

JG Your interest in genealogies and more systematic modes of enquiry derive partly from Rivers too. Not much from Max Gluckman, he was not terribly systematic.

42:58

JB Max was full of ideas and one had to sift through them, but I found him a very stimulating person to work with. But one had to then convert his enthusiasm into something that would stand tests of falsifiability.

JG He was studying the Barotse. He’d also worked among the Zulu of course before that so he was familiar with some of the ethnographic, not to say the contemporary political background that you were dealing with.

JB Well he was familiar with the Southern Bantu origins of the Ngoni but they were pretty attenuated among the group that I worked with, much more so with the people I studied than with the people of the northern part of Nyasaland where Margaret Read did spend some of her time. So that the only Swazi or Zulu words that any of the people that I studied could remember were a few drunken snatches of songs and that kind of thing, and they would only talk “old Ngoni” as it was called, when they were drunk and it didn’t make sense. I certainly never tried to learn it.

JG So what did they talk the rest of the time?

JB They talked Chinsenga. It was a Central African language which had become the kind of ‘lingua franca’ of the people that they’d captured on their way north. So they didn’t represent anything like a northern branch of the Zulu or a northern branch of the Swazi even.

JG And all this had happened since fairly late on in the second half of the nineteenth century?

JB Well they left the Northern Transvaal at the end of the 1820’s and then went up as far as Victoria Nyansa and then came back again and settled where they were when I found them. They settled there in about 1880 and had been there ever since.

JG So they’d been there for seventy years or so when you were working there. So they were a fairly urbanised community?

JB They were urbanised in the sense that the great majority of the men had spent a lot of time working on mines in Southern Rhodesia or to a lesser extent in the Copper Belt. Some had even been down to the Rand in South Africa, even to Tanganyika in the gold fields, but there was just a little dorp, a township, of Fort Jameson in the Ngoni area that I studied. It was entirely rural there, and of course not all the women had been away to the mines.

JG But some of them had?

JB Well a few had been to the Copper Belt.

JG So Gluckman’s suggestions were not based on the work he had been doing earlier and what work he was doing then among the Barotse?

46:34

JB The suggestions that he made that I found valuable were those derived from his study of group conflict among the Zulu, much more so at that level of generality rather than anything specifically ethnographically to the Zulu as such, and I think that also his view of Northern Rhodesia as a whole was rather highly coloured by the fact that he worked in Barotseland where legal institutions were much more elaborate than anywhere in the rest of Northern Rhodesia. And I think that he was perhaps disappointed that we couldn’t produce from our areas anything comparable to the material that he’d produced from Barotseland on law.

JG This is presumably because Barotseland was still a much more on-going state system and had been left to continue..

JB They had never been conquered properly. I think that partly, but also because the Ngoni were essentially a migrant band of robbers, as it were, and their legal institutions were probably never very elaborate.

JG They were free-booters. And how did you find them? Were they still free-booting when you were there?

47:56

JB Well they liked to think of themselves as such. For instance there was an expression I seem to remember culling from an essay written for a competition I organised amongst schoolchildren contrasting the Cewa and the Ngoni, saying that the Cewa were just like slaves, they spend all their time eating, whereas the Ngoni were like Europeans, they spend all their time drinking, and there was this sort of notion that they were rather superior. And then again, the notion that the English must have come directly from heaven because only such a powerful people would have been able to conquer the Ngoni, whereas they had conquered everybody else around them. So they thought of themselves very much as an elite in Central Africa.

JG And they used to spend most of their time drinking?

JB They didn’t spend most of their time drinking as sometimes the grog ran out but it often was rather difficult at weekends to find a sober informant.

JG This was because they’d been down the mines or what?

JB No, I think that the effect of the mines was an unfortunate one as they introduced from the mines a number of quick recipes which produced a rather inferior brew.

JG This was millet beer?

JB Yes, whereas the real stuff which took a week or so to brew was really very pleasant to drink. But it was quite strong, but it was quite elaborate and the beginnings of parties were very formal and you offered it to people, and there were these precautions against being poisoned.

JG When you came back from the Ngoni you went to University College and worked with Daryll Forde. How did you find that? You were working with Kaberry and Forde…

50:07

JB And Barnicot.

JG Four of you?

JB Well I enjoyed myself there. I wasn’t allowed to lecture on the Ngoni. I had to lecture on kinship and East Africa generally, and all sorts of things so that I had to broaden my range of expertise pretty rapidly but I managed to cope and enjoyed it. I was there for two years between 1949-51.

JG Why did you give that up?

JB Because I was offered a Simon Fellowship in Manchester by Gluckman who wanted I think to start sociology as he saw it in Manchester and thought that I should carry out some kind of field research which would qualify as sociology.

JG What research did he want you to do?

51:18

JB He didn’t specify what I should do but I think he hoped that I’d choose something that looked more sociological than what I’d done in Central Africa.

JG But the Simon research fellowship was just for one year?

JB No, it was for one year in the first instance but it was renewable for another year and I think rather exceptionally it was renewed for a third year in my case because I didn’t have a job at the end of the second year.

JG But at the same time you were a research fellow at St John’s College. You don’t count that as a job?

JB Well it paid £200 a year, something like that. It wasn’t enough to live on.

JG What did the other research fellows do?

JB I don’t know. Perhaps they lived in college. I know that I was the only research fellow actually thought to be doing research at that time, that is actually going away to do research.

JG The rest of them were working in the labs or that kind of thing.

JB I had a wife and three children to support. I wouldn’t have been able in the best of circumstances to live on a junior research fellowship.

JG I can see that. But you used to come down to St John’s occasionally.

JB Once a week to supervise.

JG You were supervising in Cambridge right through that time?

JB I was in Norway for most of the time I held my research fellowship but when I came back to U.C.L…. I’m not quite sure when it was, but I certainly used to come up for one night a week and sleep in Hollick’s rooms I remember, and I supervised people like Salisbury etc.

JG So your move to work in Bremnes was that part of Max Gluckman’s conspiracy to make him more sociological?

53:48

JB Well I suppose that’s how it might be seen. When I got my Simon Fellowship I had to decide where to go. I had found it rather claustrophobic 1000 miles from the sea in the middle of Africa. The Ngoni were Calvinist or rather lapsed Catholics so I thought I’d try another religion so the fact that these Norwegians were Lutherans was an attraction. I had been interned in Norway at the beginning of the war. I’d been working in a work camp just before the war and on the day the war started I was in a Norwegian ship coming back to England which turned round and went back to Norway so we had to wait for a month. I had never been to Bremnes.

JG What made you choose Bremnes?

55:05

JB I wanted to choose a place where there was fishing, I wanted something maritime to disprove what had been said about the fishers of Fife by Patterson and Watson and co. who said that fishing boats were inherited matrilineally, which seemed to be nonsense. I wanted to look at the inheritance of fishing vessels which I saw as an analogue of cattle, that is valuable property that is moveable as distinct from land that is immoveable.