Peter Riviere

Life in general:

0:00:05 Introduction by Alan Macfarlane; father a soldier, mother’s father was M.P. for Helensborough in 1920’s; after the army, parents farmed in Sussex for ten years, then back to Wiltshire for the rest of their lives; paternal grandfather organ-master in Wells Cathedral; some ambiguity of whether family was Huguenot or came to England later; Prep school, Sandroyd, which had been evacuated from Surrey to General Pitt-Rivers house in Wiltshire; house surrounded by evidence of his excavations; then Stowe and National Service in the Air Force for two years; then Magdalen, Cambridge

0:05:30 At Sandroyd and Stowe influenced by two classics masters; at Cambridge accepted to read geography but changed to archaeology and anthropology for part II; had read classics at school and hoped that archaeology would link to classical archaeology but it didn’t; G.I. Jones was his tutor; he was last of the ex-District Officers who had moved into teaching anthropology as had Hutton and Hodson; not a very demanding tutor; also there was Burkett and Bushnell who was happy to allow students to use spear throwers on the Downing site; still did an examination in identifying objects from the museum

0:09:50 Ray Abrahams a contemporary as an undergraduate; lectured by Meyer Fortes on West African kinship; for Marett lecture used the same slides as shown in the 1950s; Reo Fortune there part of the time – a strange man; after degree spent a year on a filming and botanical expedition in South America; met Audrey Butt (Coulson) in Georgetown [sound glitch]; aroused interest in South America but also very keen on cars and became a motoring journalist for ‘Autocar’ for three years

0:13:50 Michaelmas 1962 went to Oxford; as a journalist learnt to write to time and length; had to take B.Litt. first; thesis on the native peoples of the Amazon Guyana divide; examined by John Beattie and John Middleton; then fees were very low and easy to support oneself; for doctoral research got grant for ‘Research Institute for the Study of Man’ in New York; Audrey Coulson was in Oxford and was an influence; Cambridge not really interested in graduate students at the time and The Institute at Oxford dominated graduate work; supervisor was Rodney Needham as assumed that Audrey Coulson would also help but she was in the department of Ethnology and Pre-History; demarcation disputes over departments not resolved finally until the early 1990s

0:19:40 Memories of Rodney Needham; efficient but demanding supervisor; strong theoretical influence if you let him; 1965-66 doing tutorial work and then got a two –year research fellowship at newly opened Institute for Latin American Studies at London University; part of that time spent in Brazil working on ranching communities of North Brazil; after this spent a year in Harvard as a visiting lecturer; then replaced Audrey Coulson for a year, during which time was appointed as an assistant lecturer in the social anthropology of Latin America at Cambridge; ostensibly shared room with Leach and Tambiah but nobody ever used it but mainly used a room in the new history building; miserable building to work in as either too hot or cold etc.; during that year applied for John Beattie’s post in Oxford and have been here ever since 1971

0:26:07 In Cambridge lectured on myth and habitat, economy and society, and kinship to first year undergraduates during that year; memories of Evans-Pritchard in Oxford in the 1960s; in decline but still a formidable mind; used to get up very early and have finished his day’s work by midday and was looking for people to take to the pub; remained extraordinarily energetic if a little absent minded up to his last days; some people found his idiosyncrasies difficult to cope with, and could take against people rather unpleasantly; Godfrey Lienhardt seemed to have inherited this trait; Evans-Pritchard could have got money to endow the Institute in the 1950s but never bothered to follow the potential donors; place run in a lackadaisical manner and when appointed in 1971 was the first person ever to have been appointed as a result of an interview, before that people were just nominated; Edwin Ardener was the last person to have been just appointed; after Maurice Freedman died, inherited his desk and at the back of a drawer found the paperwork relating to the post I got with my application and letters of reference; Leach’s reference negative because he wanted me to stay at Cambridge

0:33:35 Memories: Edmund Leach, preferred communication by letter rather than face to face; Godfrey Lienhardt, a formidable mind; could be incredibly unkind or kind; Mary Douglas refused to believe he was a lapsed Catholic; Mary Douglas, previously Mary Tew, had been at Oxford; got to know her well in the year in London; Ioan Lewis had gone to L.S.E. by then but Daryll Forde was still professor

0:39:00 Social Anthropology committee of the Social Science Research Council; became chairman of committee; later became Economic and Social Science Research Council which was increasingly bureaucratic; was once a passive obstacle to research now actively seems to prohibit it; was put as chairman of the review committee of CAMPOP which the E.S.R.C. wanted to close down despite its success; we wrote a report saying it should be kept open but told we could only put in another saying it should be closed down; refused to do so and threatened to resign; original favourable report presented but the Council decided to ignore it

0:42:25 Memories: David Maybury-Lewis; first met him in central Brazil in 1958, then at Harvard; has family in Oxford so comes here occasionally; will probably retire in US; Stephen Hugh-Jones got the assistant lectureship at Cambridge when I left; in my year in Cambridge he and Christine had just come back from fieldwork in Colombia; Christine’s lecture to the department seminar; I examined both their theses

0:46:00 Reflections on changes in academic life; used to talk about academic matters, now only of money; goes hand in hand with extraordinary bureaucratisation of academia; spent half our time justifying the work that we do in the other half, rather than getting on with it; worry slightly about the future of anthropology; the trend towards N.G.O. studies rather than philosophical ideas; fewer people are interested in remote fieldwork studies; range of questions has narrowed

0:50:00 Work in retirement; volume for Hakluyt Society on Robert Hermann Schomburgk and a history of anthropology in Oxford for the centennial celebrations of the Institute in 2005; other memories of bureaucratic life in Oxford; Linacre College; Paul Slack

Research on South America

0:00:05 Why study the Trio? Maybe influenced by Audrey Coulson in 1957; by 1960’s easy to go to Surinam and Trio were accessible by airstrip; even today Trio isolated from the rest of the population

0:03:40 What field site would you choose today? Would try to find peoples that were slightly more ritualistic in Xingu or Upper Amazon; streak of puritanism among the Trio; lack of enthusiasm among students for fieldwork of this sort in Latin America; last person I supervised who did fieldwork on that level was Tom Griffiths

0:07:30 Levi-Strauss’ ‘The Raw and the Cooked’ published while in the field. What did it mean for your work? Didn’t read it in the field and the literature then was extraordinarily thin; later Irving Goldman ‘The Cubeo’; [1963 came back from fieldwork very ill and sent to hospital for tropical diseases in London for tests and took ‘The Cubeo’ in to read. Woman came and asked if I was an anthropologist and introduced herself as Rosemary Firth; she was also present when I had my first attack of malaria]; huge influence of the ‘mythologiques’, hinted at in Francis Huxley “Affable Savages”, made one think of the Amerindian in a completely different way; Levi-Strauss a terrible ethnographer and did very little fieldwork but work was of pure intellectual power

0:13:05 What was impact of Levi-Strauss on British anthropology? Debate on kinship and elementary structures dominated a lot of anthropology in 1960s; Edmund Leach was the conduit for structuralism but difficult to say whether this was his own interpretation or Levi-Strauss’s; Leach perhaps used structuralism to make him a better functionalist; in both the Hugh-Joneses books on the Barasana is the influence Leach or Levi-Strauss? Rodney Needham was influenced by “Elementary Structures” but doubt that he read any of the ‘mythologiques’; he and Levi-Strauss fell out over interpretation of prescriptive systems; Peter Gow’s recent book does show the influence of Levi-Strauss; heard Terry Turner say some time ago that Levi-Strauss was irrelevant but anthropologists tend to absorb ideas into their armoury;

0:19:30 British anthropology very small in scale when compared to US and has been staggeringly influential with regard to its size; some suggest that present anthropologists are rudderless but think the monographs suggest that we are becoming increasingly sophisticated in analyses; look at the Oxford monograph series and most are good ethnography which pay little attention to the most recent “ism” so not much use of fashionable ideas

0:22:40 If you were to rewrite ‘Individual and Society in Guiana’ would you do it differently? Yes I would. When the Portuguese translation was being done I was asked to rewrite the preface and realized that I’d written a piece on why the book was not worth reading any longer; main thing that happened was the idea of ‘house’ which I would now use at the main hook on which to hang the comparative study; this would allow me to incorporate the social and cultural aspects of the area which is probably my main failing

0:25:00 Why has Amerindian anthropology been focused either on materialist or mentalist lines of interpretation? Materialist interpretation almost entirely American and didn’t lap outside; the war there was between the Harris ‘materialists’ and the sociobiologists; from Europe have watched with some amazement; last Yanomami scandal part of this war; both sides claim to be doing real science which is a bit of anathema to Europeans, however, funding agencies like E.S.R.C. like to think this is part of “big science”, but in anthropology the larger the project the less that gets done;

0:29:20 What do you think is the area we should really focus on? Unfortunately the only way one can get funding to work in Amazonia asking fundamental question is to dress it up as being something else; how does one feed Amazonian material into the wider anthropology? On the whole British anthropologists don’t read Amazonian material, even here in Oxford those doing the masters will get very little as so difficult to fit it into the syllabus; also as anthropology has got closer to home the less relevant this exotic material seems; the danger is that theoretical anthropology develops from the ideas of people you are working on which are developed and turned into theory, eg. Malinowski’s theory of myth comes directly from the Trobriand; is the idealist position of many Amazonian peoples where they live in a world of ideas, it too remote to be actually useful? We can understand Azande witchcraft but the Amerindian unseen world is difficult to import; You are saying that Amerindian peoples are so different from us that we can’t cope with them; argument of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

0:37:36 Has your position on anthropology and history and the relation between them changed over time? There are some intriguing ideas of history amongst Amazonians; Robin Wright argues that in the absence of a chronological framework of history they use a spatial one; European historiography uses a temporal framework but there is always a spatial one in the background ie. events take place somewhere, and there are all sorts of questions one could ask about this; I have become extremely suspicious of oral history because of the selective nature of the human mind, and with Amazonians one is dealing only with oral history and doubt that their memories are all that better than ours

0:43:00 What do you think of the way Neil Whitehead and John Hill are historicizing Amazonian anthropology; I sometimes wonder if Neil doesn’t try a bit too hard with his analyses so not totally convinced; thinking of his introduction to the new edition of Raleigh where there are more readings between the lines than I am willing to accept; historical ecology does seem to be more open minded; other writers on early accounts of the Amazon; should be closer working with archaeologists; Amazonia needs some comparative studies; current work on Schomburgk for the Hakluyt Society incorporates anthropological knowledge in annotations, also having to learn about nineteenth century botany; first piece of historical work was ‘Absent-Minded Imperialism’ and the first time I used archives and questioned how you know in an archive what is important unlike anthropological fieldwork where everything is important.