Sally Falk Moore

0:09:07 Born New York City to Jewish parents; father a surgeon and mother an artist, though she never sold anything; brother two years younger; as children taken care of by various nannies; first experience of multi-culturalism as the first was Swiss, the second German, and so on; we slept in a room with the nanny so a very intimate relationship; my mother spent an hour with me every evening before my father returned; I did not eat my meals with them until I was thirteen; my mother was a second or third generation American; father's family had come from Hungary and moved into the slums of New York where they had a dry goods store; he was a prodigy who got himself to Columbia Medical School; he was so young when he graduated at twenty in 1910 that he lied about his age so he could be licensed; he became a very distinguished surgeon and teacher; his father had died on the trip to America and my grandmother married again; she had two sons by her first husband, two more with the second; there was always some tension between them; she had come to the states with my father when he was two years old, but left his older brother behind with her parents; the resentment over that never died; his brother was brought over when about ten; he became a prosperous lawyer in New York; this grandmother and her Hungarian husband lived in a little house in Rockaway that my father had bought for them; they had an orderly little garden which my grandfather cultivated in European style with apples, flowers, vegetables in raised beds; he was quite a character with a Hindenburg moustache. We had a game in which I sat in his lap and tried to pull his moustache and he would bite my finger if I were not fast enough to escape; he went to Synagogue every morning, taking a swift drink beforehand to keep warm; my grandmother took care of the household and cooked enormous heavy meals which I loved; we were taken out to their house in Rockaway by the governess; during the period I remember it was a German governess who would take us; we would go on the Long Island railroad; we only ever went for the day and they never came to our house; their English was creative though they were fluent in Hungarian and German; my mother's parents lived on Park Avenue and were a contrasting case; my mother’s father was a paediatrician; he was a typical exemplar of Russian dress and behaviour; he spoke Russian, German and French; I knew him when he was very old; his principal hobby was to roam second-hand books stores which were then on 59th Street; I liked him a lot but never knew what to talk to him about; his wife was awful; she had been a school teacher and at the slightest provocation would recite the names of the capitals of all the states of the United States

9:07:13 My parents sent me to a wonderful progressive school called the Lincoln School, an experimental school that the Rockefellers had set up for their sons; it was supposed to epitomize the philosophy of John Dewey; it was the experience of my life; all my teaching, contacts with students and contacts with universities have always been to try to replicate this school; they didn't consider children to be too young to talk about anything; in addition to normal things like math which we had to learn, we taught about the city around us and the poverty such as the shacks in Central Park; there was a great deal of learning by doing; remember in fourth grade we had a long study of Egypt, building pyramids out of clay and making paper from papyrus; we read Plato and all sorts of other utopian works and were then asked to write about our ideas about a Utopia; we wrestled with things like government and democracy at an early age; the school used the well connected parents of the students to capture people to come and speak to us; Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer came, and so did Franz Boas; Boas was there not to talk to us but to measure us as we were all the children of immigrants and he was interested in the way the children of immigrants grew compared with their parents; we felt that because of the school we were in touch with the world and that our parents lived in a very restricted social circle; because I spoke French, which I had learnt from my German governess, I advanced rapidly through school; at some point because of high school credits the school said that I was ready to go to college; I was fifteen; I applied to Vassar and Barnard; I got in to both, but my parents wanted me to go to Barnard, which I did; I lived at home and commuted; I majored in English literature because I thought I would become a writer; I hated Barnard; I had also thought I would do a pre-med course to become a doctor, but an acquaintance with a smelly dogfish discouraged me; also pre-med courses were crowded and purely lectures and memorization; my father did not want me to become a doctor as he thought it not a profession for women; the literature course was also trying with lots of memorization from Shakespeare's sonnets to everything else; the nadir was a history course in which the teacher did not lecture but read from a textbook that she had not written; Barnard had a policy that if you were often absent from class you failed the course despite doing well in exams; it seemed to me that the whole thing was hypocritical since the point of school was to learn the material, not to sit in class; so I became the head of the student curriculum committee and started a movement to change the curriculum; I made enough trouble so that Dean Gildersleeve called me in and said I should stop my activity; by that time I had had a couple of public meetings and had also recruited some faculty members; I was successful in this very small political move; I thought they should have some education about sex (they only taught about what they called “hygiene” meaning good diet, good posture) and much more about what was going on in the world; not much came of my curricular efforts; toward the end of my senior year I saw that the employment for an English literature major would be at best be to become a typist at Time Magazine, or some such, in the hope that somebody would notice you; I had ambitions to write fiction; I realized that it was a much better idea to go to law school than to go into the job market as just a college graduate, and that I could perhaps also realize some of my political ambitions by going to law school.

20:13:03 At the end of three years at college I started in law school; I was eighteen; it was at the beginning of the War, men were being drafted and the school had shrunk; there were very few women and not many men; outside we could hear recruits marching; that was a strange time; when you were called upon to present a case in class the professor went through the list calling everybody 'Mr'; there would always be general laughter when a woman stood up; there were some professors who made fun of women, one in particular, Julius Goebel, had “ladies days” and other torments for the women in the class; there has recently been a survey of women who were at Columbia at that time, many of whom said it was a demeaning experience; it was true of some professors, but not all; the mode was as in many law schools today, you presented a case and then you were asked questions; it was adversarial; one professor was very rude to me and I decided to go and see him; to my surprise, he was very genial, and although his attack on me had been vicious (“you are an example of the reason I opposed the admission of women to the law school”) there was nothing personal about it; although shaky at the start, by the time I reached my last year I has some dazzling grades and was recognized to be one of the bright people; I became research assistant to Jerome Michael, a criminologist; I also had the experience of having worked with Karl Llewellyn who was interested in anthropology and also wrote poetry, which most law professors did not do; I liked him very much for his understandings of law; he explained to us that litigation at the appellate level always presumed more than one interpretation of the law; he was a contracts persons and said you could only understand the legal implications of a contract if you understood the circumstances under which it was written; he was overwhelmingly interested in social context; in the meantime I had got married at eighteen, to a lawyer who was then in the army, so I saw him only when I travelled to the localities where he was stationed; this broke up my legal studies but it had its interesting side; for a time he was stationed in Richmond, Virginia, and became aide de camp of a general; I came to realize that generals were just people; (this general had been a silk stocking manufacturer in civilian life) he decided that, as a law student, I should visit bereaved families and tell them what their financial rights were; I was very scared and found it uncomfortable, but I had to do it; it was surprising to me that I didn't meet any people who were crying but instead were very much interested in their entitlements, and wanted to know how they could get hold of money

28:10:08 After law school I started job hunting; I had chicken pox during that time, which was embarrassing; my parents were in the background saying that I should work for a Jewish firm; in all these firms they asked if I was married and how soon was I going to have children; they were interested to see if they were going to get their money's worth out of me; the job I got was through Karl Llewellyn who had put in a good word for me at the firm Spence, Hotchkiss, Parker and Duryea in Wall Street; they had just made a woman a junior partner; her name was Soia Mentschikoff, and she eventually became Karl Llewellyn’s wife; both of them left Columbia and went to teach at Chicago Law School, and later, as a widow, Soia became the Dean of Miami Law School; her prominence was very encouraging; there was one other young woman at the law firm in an apprentice position like mine (we were called “associates”); what interested and excited me at the law firm was the standard of their product; we had to produce briefs for the partners, and the standards of performance were very high; we were given every support with secretaries etc.; the plan of the firm was to rotate each new young lawyer around from one partner to another through a year and then attach them to one department; there were various kinds of law, in business, banking, or other things; it was still during the war and from the upper floor of our office we could see the ships with soldiers coming back; this was a very different experience from college and one had to learn the culture of the office; it always went beyond the five day week and one was working all the time; everything was urgent or an emergency; what I realized very soon was the way one became a partner was to bring in clients; I couldn't imagine crashing the social circles that produced the clients that this firm had; I was only twenty-one and didn't know those kinds of people, so I felt that I had no future there in terms of high ambition; in the short term, in some ways the work was very dull; I assiduously read the opinions as they came down from the courts because you had to be ahead of the game; a lot of clients came in with the kinds of questions I couldn't possibly answer, like should they float more stock or not, business advice, and I realized that one would have to know something about the business world to be able to do that; I did not feel I was a success even though I was very much a pet in this law firm and did well; in the spring at the end of my first year, Telford Taylor who had just been made the head of the Nuremberg Trials, the successor to Jackson, came to New York to recruit lawyers because the War had ended and his staff lawyers, who were military men, were leaving him; he would never have heard of me except that I had two sponsors for the bar, one a senior partner in the law firm, Kenneth Spence, and the other Max Lowenthal who was a lawyer who was very active in Washington; Max had had a strange career as in his mid-thirties he felt he had made enough money and wanted to become a lobbyist for his political views; he had worked for the ILG and he knew Taylor and suggested me to him

37:04:07 I went to Washington to meet Taylor and his colleagues; they were going to try major figures of the German Government after the first trial was over; we were clearly going to be given a list of the defendants and it was a question of making the cases against them; I was interviewed by a number of people in Washington; I went to the Pentagon, which I think had just opened at that time; they decided to hire me; my husband later got a job to work on the same project; I got leave of absence from my firm; there was always a feeling of unease in the firm about a young female lawyer; I remember one of my first cases; Soia was away and I was temporarily given her desk and her clients; I was told she was going to represent the owner of a factory who had hired underage kids; he was going to appear before a labour board and I had to represent him as she was busy elsewhere; he was in his fifties and when we got to the labour board the mediator asked which one of us was the lawyer; when he found out I was the lawyer, he laughed; I made my case anyway and it all turned out all right; my parents did not want me to go to Nuremberg for many reasons; one was that a doctor had found spots in my lungs that suggested I had TB, but I suspect they did not want me to go into a dangerous situation; I was not going to give up so I went for another opinion where the doctor said that it was not serious, and I was able to convince my parents; I knew some German but didn't speak well, but there were translators; I had also had a vision that I would be able to sort out which Germans were more and which less culpable, I wanted the Americans to make the best case they could; Taylor asked what case I wanted to work on and I asked to work on that of the industrialists because I believed that they had the option of helping or not helping the regime; other people did not have those choices; Farben and Krupp were the ones I wanted to work on; he agreed that I start with IG Farben, the chemical company that made the extermination gas, that also employed slave labour; early on I went to the Farben headquarters with three or four German speakers as assistants to help me go through their files; that was a very instructive but distressing experience; to begin with I didn't know how to drive and I had to go to the motor pool each day to get a car and driver; what I found was that there were tremendous warehouses full of documents; there were floors with shelves full of manila folders; I asked to meet the person who was in charge of the building; it was a German who had been in charge of Farben’s documents before the War; these materials had come out of a salt mine where they had been hidden during the War for fear of damage; I assumed he would know where everything was but he denied knowing anything; he said they were just randomly shelved and I felt sure that was not the case; I felt sure there was a lot of documentation of the slave labour and the maintenance of it; they must have ordered people and food and equipment; I talked to my assistants and all they could find was a telegram sent to Hitler congratulating him on his birthday and things like that; I had not expected that these files would be in the charge of a German, or a Farben man, but in the charge of an American; there was an American Major who did have formal control and I went to see him to complain; he criticized the Nuremberg trials for persecuting Germans who were doing nothing wrong, and suggested that a bunch of Jews were doing this; he said he would give me no support whatsoever in my complaints about the archivist nor would he help me get the kind of documents that I needed; ( there was no point in time where my being a Jew was relevant); there were materials in the main office, some of which I packed together into a brief, but they were not nearly as useful as other materials would have been if I had been able to get hold of them; I finally met a young chemist who was also interested in the Farben documents; but he was interested in their chemical formulae as he wanted to take them for the American Government; I asked him if he would be of any help; absolutely not as he had one objective himself and he was not going to help the Nuremberg people; it was clear to me that certain of these military people were anti the Nuremberg trials; they had to give permission for us to look at things ourselves, but they were not about to offer any assistance; I had another unpleasant experience when I got back to Nuremberg and was asked to evaluate the translators and people I had taken with me; there was one who had done no work and I gave her a poor rating; what I didn't realize was that in a small organization like this everything is public; she found out immediately and told Taylor that I had demanded a limousine and chauffeur, and that I didn't do any work; fortunately my contacts with Taylor were such that he didn't believe her; I realized then that I had to watch my step all the time

51:40:24 The legal problem we had was to connect particular people with the crimes of which they were accused; what was not difficult was to connect the firms that they worked for or the Government; you knew who set up the camps or the gas, but you could not connect the individuals in the firms or in the Government with this operation; I suggested that what we should do was to get hold of these peoples' secretaries as they would know what we needed to know; I was told that we couldn't exploit these little people as it was immoral; I found this attitude very strange; they wanted to prosecute cleanly without any embarrassments; I was too young and unimportant to be able to get anywhere; I stayed six months; I didn't live with my husband there as our divorce was in process, and I had to leave to get a divorce; I left at Christmas, and then Taylor asked me to come and work for the Nuremberg trial staff in Washington, but I said no; I did not go back to the law firm either; I had my eye on the UN because I wanted to go into the international world where I saw there was clearly an opportunity for a young person so I told my friend Max Lowenthal that I wanted a UN job; I also went to my old professors at Columbia Law School; Max said he had a good friend in the State Department who would be able to help but was in a little trouble at the time; this friend was Alger Hiss; the job at the UN never materialized because Alger Hiss's troubles with Nixon got worse and worse during that year; so while I was studying for my anthropology exams I was realizing that I was not going to be able to do this; I had gone into the PhD programme in preparation; I had told the Department that what I was interested in what was known in the social sciences about who had responsibility for what a group, tribe or nation did, and how was that explained - how was responsibility allocated and who had ideas about this; of course, anthropology is a complete blank on this subject, but it was even true of political science; the latter was studying the relationship between government, administration and population; sociology was about the family, but not about these political issues; what seemed to me to be possible was that maybe I would be able to work my way through the anthropology stuff and come up with some political material in the end; the faculty people at Columbia were very welcoming

57:34:13 At that time Alfred Kroeber was at Columbia and the linguist, Joseph Greenberg, Charles Wagley, Julian Steward, all notables; I took the measure of each of these people and I studied with them; I knew that I was not going to look at my subject for the first year as they had no way to adjust their requirements and I had to go through their usual paces; I thought that at the end of that year I would go to the UN; at that point, not going to the UN, I looked at other job possibilities and it seemed to me sensible to continue with anthropology; I continued to be interested in my original idea but ended up writing a dissertation on the Inca; by then I had linked up with my second husband, Cresap Moore; he did not want me to go and do fieldwork as he was not prepared to sit around waiting for me to come back; I decided I had to do a library dissertation; I was going to compare the Inca and the Aztecs and try and sort out the political systems the two empires had, how their tax system worked and how they managed their armies and labour etc.; so it had to do with the same kinds of issues that I was involved in at Nuremberg but in a documentary and rather ancient setting; the book I wrote was called 'Power and Property in Inca Peru. I had to give up the Aztec, Mexican comparison. It was too large a project to do both

1:01:08:18 It took me a long time to finally do the dissertation and there were some years between leaving school and doing it; in the meantime Cresap moved from one job to another in history; he did not have his PhD either, and there was nowhere for me to work in the universities where he went; they had nepotism rules and they couldn't hire the wife of someone who was already in the faculty; what I did was write and my dissertation won a publication prize at that time but could not get a university job; we were at a couple of small universities but there were no professional openings for me; I worked alone and had no contact with anybody; I had two children. I didn't go to meetings because I had to look after the kids, but I wrote in the evenings and a number of my first articles were produced that way; they were published in 'American Anthropologist'; my first publication was a history of the Department at Columbia because Kroeber had been asked to do that as he was the first PhD in anthropology in the United States and the first to be taught by Boas; he said he didn't want to be bothered but he would give me his notes and would I write it; my second publication was the Inca book; after that I wrote some stuff about kinship terminology because I observed that in Crow-Omaha terminology the women did not use the same terms as the men and it was not a mirror image, and that all the literature was about the men's terminology; it was published but did not attract much attention; then in 1963-4 I wrote another one which was related to a psychoanalytic interest; one of the puzzles about many of these tribal peoples is that they have an origin myth in which there is a first family; the big question is who do the children of the first family marry, and does this conform to their kinship system; what I did was tabulate statistically from many different peoples some of the surrounding myths; then came my first professional break which came from Laura Nader; she held a conference on law and anthropology sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and held at Burg Wartenstein, the castle they had bought for such conferences but have no longer; it was so cold in winter that it could only be used in summer; I wrote a couple of papers; again my rebellious self manifested itself; I was trying to make the point that the rules of kinship and descent which are frequently taken literally by anthropologists are very often bargained over and used symbolically or even undone by the very people who declare these as their rules; at the Wenner-Gren meeting there were all these older and better established anthropologists who seemed to take the categories literally; however, my paper went well and after that I was launched because then I knew all the people who were in law and anthropology, especially the English people; Schapera was there and Gluckman, Nader who had organised it, Bohannan, everybody who had a name in anthropology and law was there; my first academic job was in California after Cresap had got a job at UCLA, so I was simply following him up to that point because there was no possibility of employment; the conference in Austria was set up in a strange way; as most of the delegates were men the woman who ran it wanted them to be happy, so she supplied the equivalent of Geishas, young Austrian girls in costume, to sit at our tables at dinner; of course, they knew nothing about anthropology, so there was this strange element; Gluckman was interested in my work but I don't know whether it was so at that time; my own materials were very seldom cited; it had been a very odd and invisible career - distinguished and invisible; then the 'Biannual Review of Anthropology' asked me to do the first review of legal anthropology which came out in 1969

Second part

[The aspect ratio of the video film changes at this point]

0:09:07 Cresap was studying C19 politics [in England] in the period when they still had poll books which recorded the name, occupation and vote of every member of every community; that was until the 1870's; during this period, what was happening politically was always explained by what was happening in Parliament, when of course a great deal had to do with the social pressure that was put on people in the countryside to vote the way the landlord wanted them to vote; we lived in England while he did this research; in the early 1960's there were not Xerox machines or ways of reproducing what you found; Cresap found there was some kind of camera on a transparent pillow with which he could photograph the poll books; we then developed them in the kitchen; the apartments we were in were in people's houses and were very cold; during our second year in England Cresap got an offer from UCLA and we decided to go; in the middle of the year we moved to California; we stayed in an hotel while we started to look for a house; we found one which was inexpensive because the valley where it stood had had fires but it had been spared; by chance, the house was next door to that of Joseph Weckler, an anthropologist; he was separated from his wife so was not living there, but I met him; he was at the University of Southern California; at that time they had decided to make the anthropology department vanish; they had two anthropologists, one of whom was an archaeologist and the other was Weckler; the archaeologist moved to another university so Weckler was the sole anthropologist there and the department was amalgamated with sociology; he said he badly needed another anthropologist and that they would give him the position if I would take it; without my doing anything he fixed the job of assistant professor there for me; I did not like being in a department of sociology but it was a job; unfortunately Weckler was an alcoholic and very depressed; five weeks into the term he killed himself, so I found myself the only anthropologist in USC in an alien department; I immediately started being political, trying to get the money for his position given to me to hire some young graduate students from UCLA to supplement the department; I did get two and began to feel that things were moving; later there was a vacancy in a senior professorship and I asked that it be allocated to anthropology so there would be a proper department; it was allocated to me; it was through that that I made my first contact with Harvard because I tried to get a Harvard person to take that senior job; this was the kind of university where you had to teach what was in the catalogue, not what you knew or were interested in; I taught things I had never heard of before like American Indians, and all sorts of stuff; it was a very arduous year, but at the same time things were beginning to make me happy; I was beginning to meet people at UCLA because Cresap was there; the first person I met was Michael Smith who had heard of me through Max Lowenthal's son, David, who was a professor of geography at University College, London; they had both worked in the Caribbean as Michael Smith was a Jamaican who had worked there and in Africa; Michael Smith had been encouraged by Lowenthal to read my book on the Incas and had thought it wonderful, so he got in touch with me; his good friend in the department was Hilda Kuper who had just come from South Africa, so with those two I had a good social life; we read many of the same things and I was invited to all the seminars and things of interest at UCLA, so although I was isolated at USC I did not feel alone; moreover, I decided that I had to do something at USC that would bring me and my two junior people together, so we ran a seminar with the three of us, and we would have the students doing work in Los Angeles producing materials for the seminar; one of them studied Alcoholics Anonymous, another gangs, yet another hippy communities, they were all interesting materials as these kids had personal connection with them; that was very satisfying; I was at the same time fighting the sociology department politically as they had their eyes on the professorship; we appointed a retired anthropologist, Kalervo Oberg, who had worked in Latin America and it was clearly going to be a short-term appointment; my thought was that we could then appoint someone younger and more lively, but by that time the sociology department claimed the professorship; I was outraged and decided to take a year of leave and go to the African Studies Center at UCLA; I was still not tenured at USC and had published as much as anybody there; I couldn't understand why they didn't tenure me or why they were taking this professorship away; the African Studies Center was headed by Leo Kuper and I participated in their seminars and all activities; they had a very interesting seminar going at that time on pluralism in Africa; there the questions were was ethnicity or class going to be the source of the break-up of the newly independent states; that seminar turned into a book to which I did not contribute, but people were brought in from Britain, France etc. who were in African studies; it became a way of connecting with a much wider professional circle; they were not all anthropologists, but very interesting people; at that time my relationship with Smith and the Kupers became deeper as they entertained all the visitors and I was always included

15:13:03 I decided in the course of this that since most of the work on legal anthropology had been done in Africa; colonial governments had been interested as they wanted to control their own legal systems and that was how anthropologists were drawn in; I decided I must work in Africa; I studied Swahili at UCLA and identified an area I thought interesting, namely Tanzania, and to go to the Chagga who had one of the first cooperatives in the continent that was run by Africans and had come into being in the 1920's; Nyerere had brought socialism to Tanzania and thought that the Chagga would be very enthusiastic about him; needless to say, they were very anti Nyerere and anti socialist, but I didn't know that until I got there; found out that I couldn't be sponsored to work there by the anthropology department and all the African universities had banished them; however, the Law School at Dar es Salaam was happy to sponsor me and it was as a lawyer that I got there, although they knew that I was an anthropologist; I did not know any Chagga and the first time we went Cresap would not let me go by myself, so we all went as a family; I started off by going to the local court which was a quarter of a mile away and asked the magistrate if he would let me sit in hearings; also asked if he could find someone who would explain what was going on; it was one thing to understand the language, albeit imperfectly, but to understand what the people meant to each other needed explanation; he knew of a man from another village who had worked in courts, I found out what a white-collar person was paid, and despite what I had been taught at Columbia about not paying, I decided to pay him; we made an arrangement and I am still in correspondence with him and his family; at that time he was quite a young man and it went well; he spoke enough English to explain things to me which was just what I wanted; we started in the nearby court but very quickly started to go to his village, meet his family, and go to the court there; from this experience has come a great deal of what I have written over the years; it has many dimensions and I hired other people over the years, to teach me more Swahili, for example, but it turned out that this first man was the best of all; after that I went many times; at first I had read the account of Chagga law which had been written by a missionary, Gutmann, in the early 1900's and published in 1926; it is full of strange interpretations but also information; I thought they would have rejected all the superstition as they appeared to be part of the modern world, but it turned out that a lot of this stuff was still believed; a brother jealous of his brother might well work witchcraft on him and prevent his wife from bearing children or make his goats die; any misfortune could have such an explanation; it isn't that people were sure, they never were sure, but they thought it a real possibility; I was surprised, but learnt a lot about their intra-lineage disputes; it turns out that the population doubles every twenty years or so, so the Chagga who had a population of about 100,000 in 1900 are now somewhere round 7-800,000 and the land shortage is extreme; a father can no longer guarantee his sons enough land to grow enough coffee and bananas to support himself and a family; what I also found was that if you do genealogies you begin to understand that people leave; half of the young people now go to the cities whereas in previous generations they had gone up or down the mountain to settle on available land; so one is looking at what appears an intact kinship dominated society that can only remain so because it sloughs off all the inconveniencies; it was very exciting to learn about these things because in the beginning I felt very unsure of myself; unsure that I wasn't being led by the nose, and wondering whether it was because they thought that white people were interested in witchcraft so they were telling me this stuff, but didn't really believe it; so I worked in more than one village, more than one family, to try to verify what I had; the book gave the full account because what I did there was first to give an historical account of what happened and put the Chagga in the middle of a trading entity in the C19 that went between Lake Victoria and the coast, trading ivory, hoes, slaves and all kinds of things; all that business was stopped by the colonial power as they wanted to get a monopoly on trade, so the Chagga were left high and dry; somebody had written a history of Chagga chiefdoms and how they fought each other, so there are specialist things like that, but I was able to put that together with very different kinds of information; then I looked at the courts and some of the cases in various periods; I made a chronicle of a lineage that I knew well, from the first man that came to help me, as it was his lineage

27:53:05 Michael Smith did not want his son to be drafted to fight in Vietnam so decided to leave UCLA and was eventually given a professorship at University College, London; in the many trips to England I went regularly to the seminars there and even had an appointment there as a visiting scholar; I also went with Schapera to the seminars at LSE; also invited to others, including Manchester because Gluckman was interested in me and my work; he used to stay with Cresap and me when he came to London; he was a man of immense self-conscious dignity, and was a presence when he came into a room; he would dominate the conversation and at academic meetings he would always take the lead; he would hold his head in his hands and appear not to be listening, but he would hear everything; people were very angry with him a lot of the time, partly because he was so insistent on his own points of view; they were also irritated by his personality; certainly, a number of young anthropologists found him intolerable; the ones he favoured forgave him everything and became acolytes; he was always a mixture and was very British; politically there was this strange mixture as his wife was a Communist, and he flirted with communism but never belonged; at the same time he was very understanding about the position of colonial administrators; many of them were in difficult situations and were not bad people; in this period, when people here became aware of the liberation of the colonies, they became so anti-colonial that it was considered intolerable and Gluckman was considered to have been a servant of the colonial administration; the story of his fieldwork was very sad; at one point, after he had done a great deal of it, he was in a canoe and was attempting to shoot a bird; a man sitting in front of him in the canoe stood up at that moment and was shot; Gluckman had to leave and there was a lot of trouble; there were other things that people hated about him, that Nader and others differed with him about, and I tried always to make peace; he did the first study of a court in Africa; the court was run by Africans but of course it was a colonial court with African personnel; he both acknowledged and ignored that and it doesn't enter his theoretical frame; he looks upon the court as a place that expresses and determines the norms of society, and that in each case they are using some norm to determine the result; sometimes he says quite candidly that he doesn't know how they decide, but it is as if he was using analogy to Western legal ways of behaving and transposing it to this court; he did that not only about their procedure but also about their concepts; he saw them having concepts of property, wrongs and rights, etc., very analogous to things in the Western world; his father was a lawyer so learnt some of his father's conceptions; also he started out with the idea that when he went to the Barotse courts he was going to illustrate one of Sir Henry Maine's theses about primitive law; all this is rubbish, a mistranslation of one system into another, but you can winnow out the interpretations and look at what was actually happening because he describes it clearly, and you don't have to take his overlay too seriously; but he was insistent on it , it seems to me, for very nice political reasons, because he wanted to show that Africans were as rational and logical as Westerners, and their system was really much more like ours than unlike; you can understand why he was a controversial figure

36:05:00 I my own work I emphasised the way courts had been modified and altered, and had adjusted what they were doing for their own purposes; in the courts that I went to, they could appeal to higher courts, but the way that the judges prevented this from happening was that the judge was also the stenographer and fact-finder and would say that the evidence did not support the contention of the plaintiff; it was usually on the factual account that they made their decisions, so it was impossible to appeal; there were exceptions but this was the general style; this kind of thing, either Gluckman didn't observe or it didn't happen in the courts that he was looking at; I saw much going on that I couldn't fit into the kind of framework that he had posed, but I didn't use it to attack him; this was a difference in style, I wanted him to like me and I also respected him for what he had done; anyone who had read my book would have seen that the material did not support his ideas; many anthropologists have advanced their careers by attacking somebody in his sort of position, but that was simply not my style; what I did in a recent article was to try to characterize the kinds of comparisons that were being done in the C19, then in the 1940's and 50's, and then today, trying to show that the items being compared are completely different; this plays into my whole interest in process; if one is interested in the process of economic development or political corruption, you can't easily compare the way you could to find out whether a particular people was matrilineal or patrilineal, so there has been a complete revolution; that is very much connected with a time conscious anthropology, concerned with the passage of time and an anthropological moment, and not an object

40:05:12 Now, apart from trying to settle a book I have assembled with some university press, an archaeologist at Manchester, Timothy Clack, who is editing a volume on the archaeology of Kilimanjaro, has asked me for a general article; I said that I had written a book on Kilimanjaro, and if I could get permission from the owners of the copyright, then I will try to produce a compressed version for his book; I am engaged on that at this moment but it is very difficult to compress a 350 page book into forty pages; I should never have said yes; before that I did an article for a book of John Borneman's on chance simultaneity, on what goes on in the anthropologist's life while he/she is doing anthropology, that is not directly germane to the anthropology but is germane to the general situation; I included anecdotal material about what happened in the strange climber's lodge that I lived in when working on Kilimanjaro; there was a Tanzanian General who came every year to climb the mountain, very handsome with polished boots; I asked him what does the army do in a place like Tanzania when there is no war; he said that the purpose of the army was to keep the Government in power; I thought this astounding, such a candid answer; some of the things that were happening in connection with this paper - there was a Chagga who went to Yale at the same time as I was; he was in political science, and I helped him to write his dissertation because he didn't understand what was expected academically; he got his PhD and has had excellent positions in the international development world since; one of the times I was in Tanzania he was the chair of a development section in the university, which was really an espionage front where they were looking at all the money that had gone into development projects, and to see whether any of them had succeeded; he was powerful in Government in this way because he had his hand on all development projects all over Tanzania, though his actual position was in the university; he told me where to go if I was in trouble; that he should have anticipated that I might have trouble, that I had not thought of, made me realize that it could happen, and it did.