Anne-Christine Taylor

Anne-Christine Taylor interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 4th May 2015

0:05:07: Born in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, U.S.A. in 1946; I have no memories of it as my parents then moved to Connecticut where I grew up until we moved to Paris when I was about seven, and I have lived there ever since; I come from a hybrid family because my father was American of distant French ancestry; he came from a Huguenot family that emigrated first to the Caribbean and at the Revolution went to the States and settled in Southern Missouri; what little I know of his family came from his mother, a wonderful old lady, imbued with southern American values; she was sent as a young girl to Paris; she used to tell me wonderful stories; her father apparently raised alligators, he was a slave-owner and there were still some black people living on this alligator farm; they would come and put warmed bricks next to the alligators in cold winters so that they wouldn't freeze; when she went to Paris she brought a small alligator with her which upset her French relatives; her parents had insisted that she be given fresh milk every day, so her father sent a cow with her; she was widowed very early; my father grew up in Missouri but left school soon after high school having decided he wanted to be a journalist; he started as a cub reporter for the St. Louis Dispatch. then little by little moved up the ranks and ended by working for the Chicago Tribune; he was sent to Europe to cover the Spanish Civil War in 1935; he covered both sides, perhaps more the Fascists though he had no sympathy at all for Francoists; after the Spanish war he settled in Paris and that is where he met my mother; she was Swiss, born in Italy but mainly brought up in Geneva; she was a student at the time working at Sciences Po as a trainee journalist; they married shortly before the War; both my parents are dead now so there are a lot of holes because I didn't think of asking them the right questions at the right time; when the Germans invaded France my father was following the Government; my mother joined the exodus and eventually they got together again in Bordeaux and managed to board one of the last boats back to the U.S.; my father was then recruited by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and this is actually one of the roots of my interest in anthropology as it was a hotbed of anthropologists; it was founded by a legendary character, Bill Donovan, and was in effect the ancestor of the CIA.; the OSS had a department of psychological warfare that was steeped in the culture of culturalism, and was convinced that you needed anthropologists to develop efficient techniques of psychological warfare; my father (Edmond Taylor) was recruited because he had been to Germany in 1937 and had written a book called The Strategy of Terror about Nazi propaganda techniques; at the time a lot of famous American anthropologists had also been recruited - Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, etc; their job was to devise techniques of psychological warfare; apparently, Gregory Bateson was endlessly inventive but highly impractical; he had, with Ruth Benedict, come up with this idea that there were a lot of Japanese myths about luminous foxes which when seen in the night were a very bad sign; so they tried repeatedly to paint unfortunate foxes with phosphorescent paint, and the idea was that they would let them loose behind the Japanese lines; but of course the poor foxes never survived; when the States declared war my father was enlisted and sent to Ceylon where he was a liaison officer between the American and British troops; he spent most of the war there and in India; after the war my parents settled in Chesapeake Bay because my father wanted to write about his experience in Asia and also raise black pigs; he did write a book, Richer by Asia, but I don't think the black pigs venture got very far; my mother came from the Engadine area of Switzerland bordering Italy, from a large, quite wealthy family; my father and his brother, who became a high-ranking military person, didn't see much of each other, and I have very little memory of my cousins in the States; my Swiss family is much more familiar to me and I grew up with most of my cousins as we always went to Switzerland for vacations at my grandparents place; my mother did have a job initially but when my parents came back to Europe in 1954 she stopped working and was just a housewife, though she helped my father a great deal

13:41:11: I had a very happy childhood and was very close to my parents; something in this family set-up did predispose me towards anthropology because I grew up with several languages; I used to speak English with my father and when we came to Europe he insisted that I go on speaking English with him so I wouldn't forget it; I spoke French with my mother and, of course, went to a French school; so I grew up with two languages and two cultures though my smattering of American culture is much smaller than the European component; on education, I don't have much to say in comparative terms as I only have vague memories of kindergarten in the States; it must have been in a small town but I have vivid memories of the countryside, mostly of the animals; I loved animals and always have, and was an avid animal collector; my mother having been brought up on Rousseauist principles firmly adhered to the idea that one should not teach children to be afraid of animals so I would pick up snakes, for example, and keep them in my room; my first primary school was in a small French village because they lived for two years out in the country before moving back to Paris; there again I have very little memory of actual teaching though I do remember wandering around the countryside catching birds with the local kids; then I went to a French school in Paris and did all my schooling in the French system; at the end of primary school I entered a school which at the time was very progressive called l'Ecole de Seine, a school of Protestant tradition but which prided itself on being much less dogmatic and more innovative than most French Lycée were; I have very happy memories of the French schooling system and didn't suffer from it; my children did, on the other hand, so I do see what it does, good and bad; I was at that school until my Baccalaureate; unlike English schools, sports were definitely not something that educational establishments valued, in fact you learn at the Lycée that sports are for idiots and looked down upon; music is also a very weak spot in French education; it struck me when we spent a year with our kids here in Cambridge; I could see what my daughter was learning here and was very impressed with the music training; in France if you learn to play an instrument you learn at the Conservatoire and you learn to enter the highly competitive Conservatoire National in Paris; you don't learn to play an instrument for pleasure; that is very typical of the whole French educational system; it is extremely competitive and encourages a highly elitist outlook

20:24:10: My parents didn't practise any religion and I was not baptised; my mother comes from a Protestant background, and protestantism is something that seeps well beyond devotional practise; if anything I was more influenced by that although my father's was a Catholic background; I did go through a period of thinking about religion at about thirteen, fourteen; I remember trying very hard to establish some sort of relationship with God by praying, but nothing ever came of it; I have never felt any twinge of it; as Lévi-Strauss said, I have never been touched by the wing of transcendence, and have never felt the need for any religious practice or attitude; the multifarious world is enough to keep me happy; I am not a militant atheist but I guess an agnostic; I did not feel the need of a religion to understand the Achuar, but you could say that it is precisely the Jewishness of Durkheim, Mauss, or the Catholicism of Evans-Pritchard and others, that was in a sense an expression of existential marginality which is more important for feeding an anthropological vocation than in having religion; in that respect probably not belonging entirely to one world or another predisposes one to have a spontaneous observer's view of other cultures, rather than religion; coming from America to France as a child did give me that sense, and I liked the idea of being partly American

25:00:03: As a child I loved to disguise myself; I had a long Bedouin period and would build elaborate tents with chairs and sheets, imagining riding through the desert; before that there was an American Indian period; I never did any drama; I was a shy child and my make-believe was entirely solitary; it lasted until I was about twelve; I read avidly as well; there was a famous French series La Petite Bibliotheque Rose and I remember reading books about young Indians and their heroic deeds and such like; my parents nurtured this taste for literature, and I remember with what absolute delight I read Rider Haggard's books which my father gave me when I was about twelve or thirteen; I also loved Kipling, especially Kim; I still do read a lot but tend to read fiction more than I should, and I still, for preference, read in English which is part of childhood memory; French schools do divide arts from sciences and I was taking the literary side; I remember a teacher of French literature who encouraged me to write in a literary manner; I loved writing and was good at the subject and languages; my philosophy teachers were not particularly good; often in France the philosophy teacher is a revelatory figure but mine were not particularly distinguished; I enjoyed philosophy in my last year at the Lycée, but I was terrible at mathematics

30:11:00: After leaving the Lycée I spent a year at Oxford; I had already formed a taste for anthropology as due to his OSS experience, my father had a lot of anthropology books in his library; I had read people like Levy-Bruhl and of course Margaret Mead, and I decided that I wanted to be an anthropologist; it was decided that I should spend a year in Oxford, partly to improve the fluency of my English, both oral and written; there was something called the External London Degree at the time, and that was what I was supposed to be doing in anthropology; I had tutorials with a rather fierce lady whose name I forget; I was living in a boarding house for young ladies, the idea being, according to my parents, that this good lady would keep an eye on us; but this was in 1968 and Oxford students were heavily into sex and drugs, and this I did with enthusiasm, rather more than I did anthropology; my parents got a little worried and decided that I should come back to France rather than finish my three-year degree; also, I did not get on with my tutor; I had read Lévi-Strauss in my philosophy class and was bowled over by it; when I spouted Lévi-Strauss to my tutor it was not at all what was expected of me; I did not go to many lectures though I did follow of few lectures of John Beattie's; to be honest I found it rather boring and very remote from what I thought anthropology would be; nothing to do with Lévi-Strauss, and Triste Tropiques was everything that I thought anthropology should be; I came back to France and started a licence in sociology at the Sorbonne as you couldn't do anthropology as an undergraduate in France at the time; you had to do either sociology or history, then eventually in your last year you could specialize in anthropology, which is what I did; there I did my licence under George Balandier; but this was a time of troubles and intellectual excitement and ferment; as students we spent more time discussing in cafes and demonstrating than studying, but still I managed to pass my licence; I then did my M.A. which was also done at the Sorbonne; this was before the Paris university was divided into big campuses; this was under the patronage of a bizarre French Oceanist, Jean Guiart, who had rigid views of what ethnography should be and who couldn't stand Lévi-Strauss; we had lectures in all sorts of different subjects from various people, and then went on to start graduate work at the Ecole des Haute Études in a thing called la formation à la recherche en anthropologie which were general training courses for one or two years for doctoral students in anthropology which was terrific; there we were taught kinship by CHECK, CHECK would teach European ethnology, Jacques Barrau ethnobotany, Maurice Godelier economic anthropology; he was very charismatic and a wonderful teacher; Pierre Clastres, equally charismatic but a much more daunting and fierce character, who strongly disliked being criticised or questioned; in a sense we were incredibly lucky because we were given a very good grounding in various branches of anthropology by some of the major figures of French anthropology; we used to do field trips which were great fun; then we had to do a final month's fieldwork on our own and write up a final report before we were actually allowed to start dissertation work; this had been a two year course but was shortened to one year in the year I came

40:17:01: I met Philippe Descola at the F.R.A. as we were both students in the same year; before I started I was hell-bent on doing fieldwork in Central Asia as I had travelled there in the early 1970s on the hippy route at the time, through Afghanistan, Pakistan and so on; I was bowled over both by the landscapes and people; probably fortunately for my career, for needless to say it soon became utterly impossible to do any kind of fieldwork there; having met Philippe, we initially wanted to do fieldwork in Mexico, he because of his Hispanic family connection; we went to Mexico and did some fieldwork in Chiapas and then got discouraged because this part of Chiapas was part of a huge Harvard research project under Evon Vogt; hundreds of American students would turn up in the area and occupy the terrain; we decided we couldn't face this kind of competition and came back to France; that is when we went to see Claude Lévi-Strauss and asked him if he would take us as doctoral students and allow us to switch from Jacques Soustelle who was our former supervisor to him, and start working on the Amazon; why did we choose the Jivaroans? That was to a large extent due to Lévi-Strauss's advice; of course we had read a fair amount of literature on the Amazon, but Amazonian studies were pretty much of a backwater in theoretical terms in anthropology at the time; there were very few really notable Americanists' work being discussed except, of course, Lévi-Strauss himself, though at that time he was not thought of as a specialist of Amazonia but a general anthropologist; Clastres was just beginning to publish, but there was nothing like the long tradition of theoretically prominent books such as those for Africa and South East Asia; the Amazon was an area we felt needed to be investigated by serious anthropologists; two books had a marked influence on us and gave us the idea of a model that we should follow - the books by Stephen and Christine Hugh-Jones which came out just as we were starting in the field; these were the two great really serious monographs on the Amazon according to us; Peter Rivière had not yet produced anything and since we were starting and wanted to produce a classical monograph, Stephen and Christine's works were the kind of model; this was the new standard; we had read a little about the Jivaroans but precisely because they were so notorious as cartoon figures, in a sense, that we thought there was nothing to say about them; Lévi-Strauss told us that there were a few very bad books about them but that they were people crying out for good anthropological investigation and suggested that was what we should do; in 1976 we spent a long summer in that area and exploring, and that was when we decided that it was what we wanted to do; the only monograph on the Jivaro at the time was Michael Harner's work but was still pretty much in the old-fashioned style of relatively unsophisticated and highly unreflexive work; in retrospect this was unfair as there was a lot of stuff - Irving Goldman's work particularly - which we underestimated at the time; now I would certainly not have the same opinion of it; at that time, particularly as French students, we thought that everything had to be ultra-theorized, and this stuff to us was just basic description rather than analysis

48:08:23: I was at the meeting with Lévi-Strauss that Philippe described; we were both sitting in two armchairs, both very low, and he sat in the middle like a vulture looking down on us; he was a daunting presence, very benevolent, but just such an awesome figure; throughout the year he remained daunting for me; not just for us; in later years it always struck me how isolated he was in any meeting; people didn't dare to go and chat with him; we were going against the trend of anthropology at the time; there was an almost explicit opposition as it was thought old-fashioned to go and work in the Amazon, and therefore politically suspect; at that time political commitment was most important, and Africa was the place where politically committed young anthropologists would find the right kind of material to feed the Marxist approaches to anthropology; this was precisely the moment when Clastres was beginning to produce his work; he was not strictly anti-Marxist, but certainly anti-Stalinist and close to a movement called Socialisme ou Barbarie which was an anti-Communist, left wing, relatively libertarian, somewhat anarchist current of thought, and he was close to philosophers like Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet at the time; Clastres didn't hide his opinions and provoked strong reactions from the traditional Marxist anthropologists to the extent that a book was published Le Sauvage à la Mode written by Africanists against Americanists which is a very peculiar set-up when you think about it; you can't see that sort of thing happening here; so wanting to do anthropology in the Amazon was a package deal and one which came with all sorts of implications that you had to deal with

53:19:03:Initially it was not difficult at all to be doing fieldwork together; working alone with the Jivaros would have been difficult, psychologically, physically, so it was easier to do it as a couple; the difficulty came a bit later because we were both interested in everything and committed to the idea of a kind of holism, that we had to account for everything, tie up everything, this was a system; we had to find a way to deal with both working on the same material and parcelling out our subjects; we had to find a way of solving the problem if we both wanted careers in the discipline; I toyed with the idea of doing the women's side but I did not find this at all satisfactory, partly because I wasn't a good feminist and couldn't imagine what the resources in theoretical terms in feminism could be; I hadn't yet read Strathern or realized what enormous resources certain kinds of feminism could be for anthropological theory in general; I also thought that working on women as such was meaningless; what is interesting is the relationship between the genders; for French anthropology at the time women's affairs were a secondary field; the solution we came up with was that we would have different focuses; Philippe was interested in doing a full-scale study of the way the Achuar related to the environment, in fact a very sweeping one because he covered just about everything in his doctoral thesis which became his first book; I decided that I would use a broader lens and study the Jivaroan group as a whole and the variations between different tribes which was a very ambitious project; the idea was that it would not be only in contemporary terms but also historically; I have always been interested in history and this was the beginning of the boom in so-called ethno-history in South America; I was very impressed by Nathan Wachtel's book and wanted to work on the Jivaroan groups as well; so when we came back and started working on our respective dissertations I went to see Lévi-Strauss with the first sort of outline; he thought it very interesting but crazy to try to do as a thesis; he suggested I did it but switch over to a thèse d'Etat which at that time you could do in France; you could directly enrol for thèse d'Etat which are these massive works which French historiography is particularly famous for; it is something that one might produce at the end of one's career as there was no time limit, but it did allow time for historical research so I did switch and happily started working on archives; I spent four or five years on archival research in Rome, Spain and Quito; then the thèse d'Etat was suppressed in France, so I am at the tail-end of a generation of French anthropologists who managed to become career anthropologists without formally holding a doctorate; this is the case too with Maurice Godelier and Françoise Héritier, who didn't do doctorates as you didn't have to; I had the great luck to be recruited on the CNRS with my publications

1:01:38:07 Fieldwork was taxing; there were difficult periods when we fell ill; Philippe got hepatitis and that was very difficult because it was very difficult to get the Achuar to accept the fact that he couldn't drink manioc beer because it made him even more ill; they would laugh, and looking back it is entirely understandable why the fact that we should fall ill would make them laugh; at the time it was upsetting; he also had a bad case of falciparum malaria, and we had various physical woes, which were again either treated with humour or contempt by the Achuar who were themselves stoical to pain and incredibly tough; beyond that there were long periods of boredom which you only understand are important in what is going on long after you have left the field; when you just see people hanging around doing nothing it is very difficult to see that they are actually doing something important; it is these moments of peaceful doing nothing that are vital in producing kinship in Amazonian groups; so long periods of boredom but also moments of incredible joy at the beauty of sunset and birds flying around, and also of comradeship and great fun with the Achuar; they all live separately in isolated households, though now a lot of these households have gathered along small airstrips; nevertheless they liked to go off into the forest all together and camp out for several days, to hunt and fish; Jivoroans are fairly rigid in their interactions but these were moments when people would completely relax and pile in together under roughly-built lean-tos, hang around the fire, eat and chat; these were lovely moments; there were lovely moments also when we went back with our children; it was like joining with relatives that have we not seen for a long while, very different from our first period of fieldwork when we were just on our own; the first time we took them back they were eleven and ten and a half; my son, the younger, adored it; we had told him we were going to the Indians and he was very excited, but he had firm ideas about what Indians were like; the first thing he did after we got off the small Cesna that brought us to the community that we worked with was to throw off all his clothes and prance around naked; this amused the Achuar immensely; they understood what it was all about; they have an acute sense of irony and found this screamingly funny; they immediately baptised him with a word meaning savage, which is a word applied to them by whites in many cases; within a few hours he disappeared with the other kids and spent the rest of the month we were there paddling around with the small boys, playing in the river and so on; my daughter found it a little more difficult; she was tall in relation to Achuar girls of the same age and they thought she was older than she was; young girls are not treated like children but as potential sexual partners, so they bent over backwards to be very reserved with her; she was a child and couldn't really understand why people were so stand-offish; I think it was more difficult for her than for him

1:09:20:20: When we came back from our original fieldwork we lived in what had been my parents' house; my mother had already died and my father no longer lived there; it was a house way out in the country in the middle of the woods in the Loire Valley; we went there as we were a bit daunted by the noise in the city, but sensory saturation in a sense; there was a reverse culture shock as you listen to everything in the forest and everything is potentially meaningful where here, of course, you are bombarded by meaningless sound and if you listen to everything it becomes absolutely terrifying after a while; when you are in the field you live these long periods of slow time and the sudden acceleration of time is upsetting and very tiring at first; when we came back the job was to start writing up the dissertations and producing articles, and looking for a job; we had decided that if at all possible Philippe and I would try to work in completely different institutions because we did not want to work as a couple in the same one; it turned out that we had the possibility to do this because I was recruited to the CNRS in 1983 and Philippe a few months after, by the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, so from then on we had separate careers which was an extraordinary privilege; for a while we did not read what the other wrote; now I usually read what he has produced in English under the rather wrong assumption that my English is better than his; it is true that we don't monitor each other's writing very closely; on the other hand we do talk about our work a great deal and bounce ideas off each other

1:14:13:16: I am an anthropologist with a very narrow register; my length is the article and whatever books I have written is with other authors; to this day the format I prefer is that of the 25-30 page article; I get an idea very fast of the general structure and argument and I can easily write a first outline; I then write a first draft non-stop which can be up to 15 pages and then I spend hours, days or months tinkering with it; basically it comes as a block with the argument already structured; one article which is still read by students is a paper I wrote in French Des fantômes stupéfiants subtitled language and belief, though I certainly wouldn't use that word now in Achuar thought; it was published in L'Homme in about 1993 and is about an episode which struck us considerably, which was unsettling and endlessly fascinating; we went visiting a small community two days hard walk from the place where we were staying where there were a couple of congenital deaf mutes; the Achuar friends who were travelling with us told that the deafness was inherited; in that community they use sign language which interested us; we met this elderly couple, delightful people, very kind and nice who communicated through sign language; two days into our stay there, Philippe and I were living in an abandoned house, suddenly there was a terrible ruckus and the deaf mute man suddenly appeared in our house, very agitated, and we understood from his signs that he wanted cigarettes; fortunately one of the local boys showed up because of the noise and translated for us; the man said his wife had met a ghost in the forest on her way back from fetching water and had fallen very sick; he needed a cigarette to blow tobacco smoke over her head to cure her; needless to say we gave him cigarettes but this story intrigued us; we asked what this ghost did and it turns out that the ghost in question had the peculiar property of appearing as a normal human person when you meet him in the forest; his normal prey are children and lone women; if you have the misfortune to engage in conversation with him, when you go back to your own community and meet one of your own people you are suddenly struck with deafness and muteness, so you can't communicate with them; the fact that a deaf mute person had met a ghost like this was endlessly intriguing; I thought about this episode a lot and eventually wrote an article about it; it is a very structuralist paper in many ways though perhaps its originality in terms of structuralist analysis is the fact that it is a structural analysis of the pragmatics of communication than in the content; it turned into an exploration of Achuar implicit theories on truth and modes of communication; it is an article which I think still holds up; I wrote another paper which is often quoted, which is published in English in MAN Remembering to Forget; the title is both the name of a classic blues song but it was also inspired by a remark of Kant's about the death of his valet; this paper is about the very peculiar and striking mourning practices and attitudes among the Achuar, particularly their stress on forcibly forgetting the dead; it is that conundrum or paradox between forcibly forgetting and the act of voluntarily trying to forget which I found peculiar and tried to explore; these are the two papers which are most often quoted; the much longer article I wrote the The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of South America on the history of the Upper Amazon between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries is probably the most balanced and interesting of the historical papers that I wrote

1:25:38:12: If I was advising a young student on anthropological research I would repeat what Lévi-Strauss told us before we set out for the field; he said let yourself be carried by the field; when you work with another community as an anthropologist the people you are working on or with are going to immediately put you to some sort of test which will be most deeply revealing of what they themselves care about; the trick of an anthropologist is not to fight against this and allow yourself to be manoeuvred by the people into the position that they want you to occupy as an observer, outsider, because this position will tell you something central about what they think they are and what really interests them; you mustn't miss this because if you do you may do good anthropological work but you will probably have missed what most preoccupies the people at that time; even if it is highly unpleasant and you think it is not leading anywhere, don't fight it; I could have talked about the eight years I spent at the end of my career at the Musee de Quai Branly which was an extremely interesting experience for me and leads us into the whole subject of museums and anthropology.