Bernd Lambert

0:00:09 Introduction; born in 1932 in Frankfurt; parents lived in Bulgaria where father was a bank director; left Bulgaria two weeks after German invasion; father had lost his job in 1936; got to America by way of Trans-Siberian Express and Japan; by the time we reached San Francisco parents money had almost run out so did not reach preferred destination, New York, but grew up in California; at home we discussed politics so I thought I would be a lawyer; first three semesters at Berkeley was a political science major; realized could never become a lawyer; took an introductory course in anthropology

0:04:00 After collecting a lot of genealogies in Gilbert Islands (now Republic of Kiribati [pronounced Kiribas]) decided to look into my own genealogy; mother’s brother had survived World War II in Amsterdam so collected their genealogy; then asked my father; unlike Gilbertese, they knew cousins but not ancestors very well; father’s side, think great-grandfather was a kosher butcher, grandfather had a shoe store; mother’s father, murdered by Hitler, had a dry goods store near Mainz; he had originated in the Rhine Land; father had attended Gymnasium, a classical high school, but dropped out of school at about 16 and went to Frankfurt and found a job in a bank; father didn’t like to talk about the past; drafted into German army October 1914; incidentally, I was drafted into the American army exactly forty years later; he felt that younger men who had not experienced the war could not understand what happened; Jews were not in segregated units in the German army, but in the wider world if you wanted to succeed had to do so in certain lines of business in certain parts of the country; during Weimar Republic father got a job handling foreign currency and was sent to Sofia; by about 1930 he was director of the branch; as he was not in Germany, managed to hold on to job until 1936 when someone from headquarters came and told him it was impossible for a Jew to manage a German bank; mother got four places in the German quota for immigration to America; came to San Francisco beginning of May 1941; father couldn’t get job in banking so went to night school and became a public accountant; 1947 parents started a knitting store

0:14:10 Mine was a typical immigrant story; original surname was Levi; while in Japan encouraged to change name to Lambert; sister born 1936 in Sofia; while in Europe the family spoke German though sister and I learnt Bulgarian when we started school; in America we children spoke English to each other and parents spoke German to us; mother stopped speaking German after husband died; no Yiddish spoken as German Jews only spoke it until the middle of the nineteenth century when they were assimilated; Germany was a good place to be Jewish then as career prospects better than further east; German Jews a tiny minority of the population, only 1%, unlike Poland, for example

0:19:47 In Bulgaria parents had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends; more of a Jewish milieu in San Francisco as many refugees; mother had graduated from high school in Mainz; parents were not like the highly educated upper middle class Jews; took it for granted that their children would go to college; encouraged us to read; at that time parents tried to avoid discussing worries in front of their children; when we left Bulgaria we travelled to Odessa, then to Moscow and on to Vladivostok; remember seeing women doing heavy manual work; father was approached by a young Jewish man in Moscow who had been lured back there by his mother on the promise of own apartment; he wanted to get to Palestine; father walked away and NKVD men asked what young man had said; father careful to say nothing; family talked politics at home; when sister was in kindergarten in Bulgaria she said in a streetcar, in German, that the Germans had come to Bulgaria to help the Italians who were being defeated by the Greeks; there were some German soldiers on the streetcar and father grabbed sister under his arm and jumped off and ran up the street; dangerous to talk of such things in public

0:27:03 We went where we could, if it had been impossible to get to America my parents would have tried to get another visa; had a preference for U.S.; John Borneman, now at Princeton, asked me what effect being a refugee in America had, thought it was a basic American patriotism; growing up in California it was not easy to make friends; anthropotherapy, doing fieldwork to find out about yourself; in the early years of anthropology a lot of people with non-American backgrounds, a lot of Jews; similar in England

0:32:07 Until college knew nothing of anthropology; took course in anthropology to fill science requirement the easy way; about that time read Ruth Benedict's ‘Patterns of Culture’; John Rowe taught introduction to cultural anthropology, a charismatic teacher for me; talked about the possibilities of anthropology; decided to become an anthropologist; Kroeber and Lowie had retired, Theodore McCown taught physical anthropology, Robert Heizer archaeology, David Mandelbaum, Ronald Olsen, John Rowe and Edward W. Gifford were the department

0:35:21 Berkeley insisted that an anthropology graduate student should pass examination in archaeology and biological anthropology; specialized in Californian Indians under Kroeber’s influence, and North American Indians generally; Bob Smith and I started Cornell’s first course in North American Indians in 1972; while I was in the army for two years the department expanded and Robert Murphy, David Schneider, Edward Norbeck and William Bascom arrived; when I returned the department was quite different and found it difficult to adapt as original teachers had an aversion to theory, heavily factual, so for the cultural anthropologist it was ethnography; the new department was much more theoretical; I took some of the works by Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski and Nadel on my first field trip which was quite long, two and a half years; found these easy so probably fact that we found theory difficult at first was due to stress; advise students that in time seminars will make sense; for most theoretical ideas there are certain basic works

0:40:43 Military service; trained as a medic; in Germany put into military intelligence in Berlin; thought it useless; sent people with East German identities to spy on Russians and East Germans; turned out after the fall of the Berlin Wall that all of these spies had become double agents or put in gaol; decided that we had been given useless jobs keeping Russian spies busy; did this for one and a half years; not as professional as the army is now; for me advantage was that after I got out of the army they paid for my education; didn’t want to take money from parents; not a good soldier

0:47:43 Later got the first Lowie fellowship; Sputnik launch by the Russians encouraged a number of scholarship programs; just beginning by the time I finished my PhD in June 1963; money for fieldwork came from Tri-Institutional Pacific Program – Yale, Hawaii and Bishop Museum in Honolulu; getting coverage of Pacific areas that hadn’t been much studied; got money beginning 1958 on condition I went to the Gilbert Islands although I didn’t want to go to a Christianised place; real interest was Africa but went to the Pacific; later came to Cornell into American Indian program

0:52:03 Excitement during pre-fieldwork period though no introduction to field methods; before first field trip asked David Schneider what made me different from a traveller or missionary; told he would figure it out; took books that contained good information of books about the Pacific – ‘We, the Tikopia’, Sahlin’s ‘Social Stratification in Polynesia’, Goodenough ‘Property, Kin, and Community of Truk’; read these and thought about how they could be applied to Makin; got to field site from Australia where Harry Maude, the great man of Gilberts research, invited me to Canberra where he showed his own notes and Arthur Grimble’s; from Brisbane took a ship to Tarawa; stayed in rest house; 1960 Magistrates conference on Makin and needed the house so moved to house of high chief of Makin; in 1963 chieftainship abolished and the house was taken apart; since then I’ve stayed with “relatives”

0:59:38 Parents never visited, just wanted to hear from him; mother later went to Kiribati; when given independence, Ellice Islands wanted to separate from Gilberts; massive vote in favour of separation; a string of other islands joined Gilberts; American cruise ships stop at these islands which is how mother got there; have not been back for 17 years; need to get research permission; Kiribati one of the least developed countries; depends on foreign aid and remittances

1:03:30 Learnt language using book written for colonial service officers; nuclear Micronesian language; dictionary; Hiram Bingham; do write letters – about 95% literate in own language; people who knew wrote down esoteric knowledge; literacy restricted to certain activities

1:08:35 Focus on fieldwork; reason for study was partly because they hadn’t been studied; also Ward Goodenough had spent some weeks on Onotoa and on basis of this wrote on non-unilineal descent; Murdock at Yale wanted to find out how a cognatic descent system would work; from way it was described wouldn’t work at all; learnt that in the past only people who lived on land could use it; I wrote on how a cognatic system might work; like most Pacific Islanders they practised several kinds of adoption; first thought that any child living in house not with parents must be adopted; not so; found there was hereditary fosterage which worked like Leach’s matrilateral cross-cousin marriage; child-givers and child-takers were different and seldom exchanged; child-givers generally of higher rank or seniority than child-takers; so all of the high chief’s children were at least partly brought up by someone else; I collected histories of fosterage through census work in return for family photos; also asked me questions; would 2000 be the end of the world?; avoidance between co-parents in law described as old law of shame, new law of love allowed contact; but parents will resist child marrying another whose parent is acting as a kinsman; got culture shock at beginning; Catholic mission had policy of trying to separate their adherence from Protestants; would excommunicate those that married or lived with a Protestant; couldn’t stay in the meeting house if Protestants were performing as main Protestant dance was prohibited for Catholics; Catholics could not belong to a club with Protestant members; I hated this; by 1980’s most of this had lapsed as the French priests had mostly retired or died; problem was that priests were sent to an island for life and their horizons narrowed; argued with Protestant pastors

1:18:19 Shared field site with missionaries; these the only foreigners; with Father de la Croix had to wait until I could speak Gilbertese; found missionaries very kind people who welcomed conversation; for a while there was an Australian priest who was supposed to start a school as Catholic children were not supposed to government school; he wondered why the French fathers were so hostile to Protestants; French mission came in 1889 when the Protestants were already established; later there was a commissioner, an orange-man, called Telford Campbell, who was very hostile to Catholics; strangers well treated

1:21:04 There was not really a sense that as an anthropologist I should be an activist for the natives; however, aware that whatever one writes will be read there; they are suffering from Japanese and Korean fishing fleets in the Pacific using long line nets which scoop up everything; Japanese want tuna and this depletes the number that people live on and the chance of a viable commercial activity; global warming – atolls will disappear; as an anthropologist one can say this but the forces are much more powerful than one could oppose; not like opposition to Summer Institute of Linguistics or local missionaries; what really affects these people are global events which will be unavoidable unless larger countries take responsibility for them; also what people want is often not what their Government wants; on first field trip they thought I was an advance agent for the American Government; Butaritari and Makin had often tried to be annexed to U.S. before the British Protectorate was established in 1892; High Chief at that time had gone to U.S. to offer Butaritari as a coaling station for the American fleet; he didn’t get beyond San Francisco and when he got back the British flag was flying; wanted me to bring the American Government

1:25:04 Got ill at the end of fieldwork as had amoebic dysentery but didn’t realize; I was evacuated with pneumonia; originally I had been told by the British Government to bring a six-month food supply; got an entire case of corn beef in Sydney, for example; there was a store on Tarawa; later I just ate local food such as bread fruit, a local type of taro, lot of fish, coconut; domestic animals included pigs and chicken; at first there were a few ducks but they died out; they use tilapia to kill mosquitoes and said the guts of tilapia are poisonous to ducks; long before they had used horses for carrying, now done by bicycle or truck; didn’t miss home food much; on first field trip tried to join in every form of fishing I was capable of; excluded spear diving; there were more than fifty different ways of catching fish; exploit every niche; wanted to link local fish with scientific names

1:30:17 One of the first things written was a Gilbertese word list but not published; got PhD in 1963; couple of publications on fosterage; feel I should have published more; have published on bilateral kinship in the Andes; feel urgency to return to Kiribati to update my field notes

1:32:12 Turned towards native peoples of the U.S. as there was no course at Cornell; Bob Smith and I decided to run such a course in about 1972; there are about thirty students taking it every year; in the department everybody has a joint appointment or participates in a program outside; mine in the American Indian Program which started in the 1980’s; would have liked to have staffed it with native peoples but not possible; not part of Einaudi Centre as an ethnic studies course rather than international; American Indian Program under the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; know I haven’t published enough but I enjoy teaching; did no fieldwork but became fascinated by American Indians; tricky to do fieldwork among them

1:37:15 Have been at Cornell since 1964 when Allan Holmberg the chair of department; most unforgettable character was Victor Turner; seminars held at his house; had some of his most important ideas when teaching here like notion of communitas; students flocked to him; course on myth, ritual and symbol; inspiring for graduate students; also on a lot of committees, like self – at one time I was on 40 in early 1970’s; Turner wanted department to go in another direction into symbolic anthropology; people who ran the department interested in other things; before I came Applied Anthropology (Development Anthropology) was supported by Holmberg, Lauriston Sharp and Morris Opler; I came here as a social anthropologist because Cornell had got a grant from National Institutes of Health to organize a department of general anthropology with Tom Lynch for archaeology and Kenneth Kennedy for biological anthropology; graduate program expanded with money from the grant; at that time Sharp beginning to retire (had to at 65);

1:44:05 Allan Holmberg was a gentle man but only knew him for a couple of years as he died shortly after I came; Lauriston Sharp was a pioneers using networks (like Gulliver in Britain), Opler had started by trying to catalogue cultures to find general themes; rising star in department when I came was Bill Skinner, working on China; worked with Arthur Wolf who was also here; Skinner was intense and difficult to get along with; Jack Roberts here when I came; one of his great contributions was on styles of games linked to culture; department now much bigger

1:48:44 Used to be an inter-departmental archaeology program which has been administratively merged with anthropology; there was strain between archaeologists and anthropologists as the former felt there were not enough of them to have a viable graduate program; should improve as increase in staff; biological anthropology in similar situation as few of them; friction over posts; this department compared to Berkeley and Pittsburgh has been much more democratic – one person one vote over hiring decisions; lot of emphasis on consensus but very difficult to achieve; campus troubles in late 1960’s; now routine matters are dealt with routinely rather than elevating them to great moral issues

1:56:25 Own commitment to the department; Uncle Fritz survived the war hiding in Amsterdam; I inherited money from him and as I was grateful to the department I gave money, first for a seminar room, then continued to give money annually; department already had a small endowment and this money has become part of it; money used to help students do things not covered by grants.