Ray Abrahams

Ray Abrahams interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 13th July 2015

[There are a small number of errors in the video which have been corrected in the text.]

0:05:06 Born in Liverpool in 1934; my father's parents were Jewish; my great-grandfather, whom I never saw, came from Poland in the 1860s and settled in London first, then Birmingham and eventually to Liverpool; my father's father was a lithographic engraver and I think it was through that that he met my grandmother; she was also a child of Polish immigrants in Birmingham; they settled in Liverpool and had several children of whom my father was the youngest; he was born in 1910; on my mother's side, her father was a glazier in Liverpool; his first wife died and probably through matchmakers he met my grandmother who was much younger than him; they were also Jewish; on my father's side, his grandfather was a religious Jew but his father had declared himself a free thinker; my mother's mother came from Lithuania; they had five children; my mother never referred to her father as father, but as the man my mother married, so she hardly knew him at all - she was born in 1908 and he died in 1912; my father moved to Manchester in the 1930s as work was scarce in Liverpool; he had trained as an artist, probably at Liverpool School of Art, and was also trained by his father in photography; he earned his living in photography and art work; at that time there was a lot of work copying and colouring old photographs; he became expert at aerographing, using an airbrush, but he was also a good painter and artist; I was three when he settled in Manchester; during the War he was unfit for military service; he opened a photographic shop and later added photographic and art materials; I was the only child; what might be interesting is that his father and mother were active members of a branch of the Comtian Positivists which existed in Liverpool and which ended in scandal about which I know little though it seemed to include a love affair; some people in Liverpool treated it as a sort of secret society, but anyway it closed down; that left us with a variety of Comte's texts and bits about the love of his life Clotilde de Vaux; we didn't have many books in the house but we had some of those, and occasionally I did look at them and it was one reason for my turning to anthropology

6:27:07 Both my father and mother were rather small; my father was extremely strong; he had liked wrestling as a youngster and also weight training; he could do things like one arm press-ups which I could never do; he was very humorous, argumentative, and a great man to have around; he had very little formal education but he was very interested in me, hoping that I would make something of myself, and did everything he could to help; he was very keen that I should get to the Manchester Grammar School; he took an interest in geometry when I was doing it at school, and we used to do a lot together like that; he learnt to read Greek script so he could test me on Greek vocabulary; he was a delight; I didn't always get on terribly well with him, but most of the time we did; he died quite young, but towards the end of his life we were really pretty close; my mother was rather different; they were a real love match in their way; her father was quite a religious man; she herself felt her Jewish identity quite strongly and was very keen that I should be Jewish; my father, a free thinker, put up with a lot because of her, so I was Bar Mitzvahed, circumcised as a baby, and things like that; to my mother's slight sadness I never joined Jewish clubs in Manchester as a boy and was quite keen to assimilate rather than to separate in that way; she had little formal education but became a keen reader and letter writer; she liked singing and had a very nice voice, and we had quite a bit of music in the house - not playing, but listening to gramophone records; my mother was very keen on opera and occasionally we went to see it in Manchester

9:55:02 The only one of my grandparents who was alive when I was born was my father's mother; my father didn't get along well with her; she was quite a tartar and rather favoured his elder brother; but I have memories of her; she used to take me around in a pushchair to see a horse with white socks; I must have been two or something like that as we were still in Liverpool; my first school was near to the first house we moved to in Manchester; they had been able to buy a little semi-detached house and went to Bowker Vale Primary School; I was only there for a couple of years as we moved again when I was about six; I have very few memories of that though I do have a photograph of our class; the Headmaster had a slight tinge of anti-Semitism about him and got on my father's nerves; the Headmaster said that the Jewish children were very noisy and the school was much quieter when they were on holiday; my father asked what proportion of the class were Jewish and I think it was about half; my father suggested very forcefully that the class would be quieter whichever half of the school was on holiday; we moved to a suburb of Manchester called Moston, between Manchester and Middleton, and I went to Moston Lane School; I got on quite well there and stayed until the age of about nine; then one of the teachers befriended my parents and vice versa; my parents were very hospitable as shopkeepers and invited people back if they took to them; this teacher advised them to take me out of the school and send me to a little private school called the Premier Academy which was in the nearby suburb of Blackley; my parents took her advice; the school was run by a German or Austrian called Mr Hoffman; he insisted on interviewing me; I remember him asking me how many sixpences there were in a pound and was pleased to take me; I took 11+ there and a separate exam for Manchester Grammar School, and I went there; my parents were very pleased about this

14:29:09 M.G.S. was fine; the teachers varied a lot, some of them were quite outstanding; I went there in 1945 and quite a lot of the teachers were middle-aged; some of them I developed great affection and respect for; I think the one I liked most I last saw when he was eighty; I was in Churchill by that time and heard he was coming to Cambridge for an old-boys gathering for another school where he had taught after retirement; I invited him to my room in Churchill and was very pleased to see him; when I was in the field in Uganda in 1967 I wrote to him and got a very nice letter back; his name was R.T. Moore; after he retired he moved to teach at Gloucester where his son was Headmaster, and Nick Mascie-Taylor was at that school; I think it was he who told me that they were having this old-boys gathering and that Moore was coming; he taught classics, particularly Latin; he interested me greatly; a few years ago I sent a letter about him to the Manchester Grammar School old-boys magazine; he had a strong London accent, which another teacher confided to us had cost him one or two headmasterships; he was very kind to me; I think Keith Hart knew these people too because he followed me about nine years later; another one of them, Simkins, was again very kind; one of the things that happened at school was that I suddenly thought that I wanted to be a dentist but I was studying Latin, Greek and other Arts subjects; my father wrote to the school saying that I wished to become a dentist and the school agreed that I should change to the Science side; then I decided not to and Simkins was always supportive, perhaps mostly so when it came to the time for applying to Oxbridge; I had a number of friends who got into Cambridge and I missed; I applied to St John’s but missed; I had taken 'A' levels and got creditable but not outstanding results; I knew it was possible to stay on and redo them; my father wrote to the High Master, as he was called at M.G.S., who wrote back that it was possible but in their experience it didn't make much difference in the end; then Simkins was fantastically encouraging and I did stay on and did really well; I think I got the best 'A' levels in the school that year; I took Latin, Greek and Ancient History; at that point I had heard that Sidney Sussex also took people on the basis of their 'A' levels; they said they would be glad to have me but would I sit the scholarship exam; I did so and got a Minor Scholarship and went on from there

20:10:17 At M.G.S., apart from work, I did some music; some years ago the Master of Churchill, John Boyd, who was a keen musician and viola player, invited his old friend Yehudi Menuhin to come to talk to the students; Menuhin said he was sorry for so many young Jewish boys whose mothers were very keen that they should follow in his footsteps; I talked to him later and said that I was one of them; my mother was very keen that I should play the violin; I had really wanted to play the piano but she insisted, and I was no great success; I played in the school orchestra in the second violins and decided to give up; R.T. Moore told my parents they should not allow me to do so, but I did; when I came up to Cambridge I decided that I would like to play the guitar and bought myself one at Millers; I tried to teach myself which was a mistake as you learn very bad habits; I was quite good at racquet games; I played for the school tennis team and eventually captained it, though there were some very strong players in the school; I played table tennis; when I came up here I played squash

22:50:22 I was like my father with regard to religion; the Bar Mitzvah was just done for my mother; it was quite a chore; you have to dress up and sing Hebrew in the Synagogue and learn bit of the Torah; that was quite hard; you went to Jewish school in the evening called ‘chayda’ which is also Yiddish slang for a prison; I had to learn one of the shorter books of the Old Testament and learn to sing it, not always correctly I suspect; since then I sometimes call myself a Jewish atheist; I think I am more conscious these days of being Jewish, but not sure what lies behind that; I suppose it is partly through the Yesterday channel on television as I watch quite a few of those programmes; there is such a lot about the Holocaust and so on; I don't think that it was my Jewishness that made me an anthropologist; I encountered a certain amount of anti-Semitism at school; I reported it to my father once; I never had Kosher food at school just ordinary school lunches; whatever food taboos I followed were just because of my mother's cooking rather than anything else; I was sitting at lunch where the pattern was that they would pass plates down; there was one obnoxious lad called Walkden who said "Don't touch my plate, Jew!"; I reported this to my father who wrote a very angry letter to the High Master; he summoned this guy Walkden and me and gave him a hell of a telling-off; it was not tolerated at all in the school; but there were very few incidents like that and all my friends were non-Jewish, including those who came up here the year before I did; I wonder a bit about E.P.'s statement about the best anthropologists being either Jews or Catholics; Raymond Firth, Edmund Leach and Aidan Southall were Protestants of one sort or another

27:09:03 I went up to Sidney Sussex where undergraduate life was not brilliant in those days; I was reading Classics first of all, as Keith did; I went up in 1953; I immediately took up with my old friends so I had no shortage of social life; I eventually made friends with my first-year room mate; I suppose the first thing I noticed in that regard was that coming up to Cambridge knocked a lot of rough edges off people; he was a Public School boy; we had two beds in a single bedroom in the set; I remember lying there one night and he said "I don't suppose you are really English are you?"; he then received a long whiplash from my tongue; as an undergraduate the thing one was conscious of was the lack of women here in the university; that was quite unenjoyable; at school I was quite a good chess player and captained the school chess team; when I came here I played chess as well; chess these days in the university is much stronger than it was then, but I was somewhere in the top fifteen; I made friends through that as well; I didn't get involved with politics or the Union; the only person we knew from Cambridge was the father of my best friend at school who had been an undergraduate at Clare at more or less the same time as Edmund Leach; his son followed him to Clare and we talked a lot of politics between us; his father had told him to join the Union and to get a life membership; thus I have a life membership but I very rarely go in there; we didn't really go to debates at all but we talked a lot; we were deeply interested in social issues in a sort of embryonic sociology; we talked about the individual in society and things like that; that was one of the things that attracted me to social anthropology; we didn't get actively involved but I think we joined the Labour Party for a term or so

31:33:22 In classics, no lecturer really inspired me; people did not go to lectures all that often; my Supervisor in Sidney Sussex, Malcolm Willcock, I rather liked; I think he became Dean of the Arts Faculty at University College, London, and I last saw him when my eldest daughter graduated there; he was a charming man and I used to play chess with him; in my first couple of years I used to get involved, arguing about religion with my fellow students; I was a convinced atheist and one met a lot of freshmen who were not; I became quite skilled at it; I worked out for myself something that I realised later medieval theologians had also thought about, the question of how God can be both omniscient and good if there is some idea of free will and hell, so I used to belabour fellow undergraduates with this sort of argument, and they didn't have any answer; I did try talking to the Dean of Sidney Sussex, an American, who was also into psycho-analysis; he told me that all my interest in these questions related to my relations with my father; I don't think I was rude to him but was tempted; I changed in my third year to Social Anthropology; I had met a Nigerian called Eke, a student in Social Anthropology and I talked to him about the course and I decided then that I wanted to change; my friend's father again gave very good advice; he suggested that I should apply during the Lent term of my second year as that would give the College time to consider it and to see that I was serious

35:53:02 I did two years of social anthropology; got a letter from myTutor saying that he had arranged for Mr Leach to be my Supervisor; life changed completely moving into Social Anthropology and under Edmund's wing; before that I had been asked to meet Meyer Fortes; he was very keen to avoid too many "remittance men" whom senior tutors were trying to dole out to Social Anthropology when they couldn't find anything else for them; Meyer interviewed me, to vet me as it were; he was very impressed that I had been to Manchester Grammar School; Edmund didn't try to influence you, unlike Max Gluckman who tried to bully people into following him; it was partly directly through him, partly because of the size of the student numbers, life suddenly changed from being part of a large group of Part 1 classics students to a small group of Part Two social anthropology students; you felt very special, and here with someone like Edmund who was quite brilliant in his work, conversation, and supervision, but listened to what you had to say; he was such a meticulous supervisor that I don't think there has been his like before or since; there were copious notes on your essays and on a seminar there would be copious notes too; I see it as something special about Cambridge but I think that Lucy Mair was something like that at L.S.E. - a life-long loyalty to past students; Edmund was very charismatic, helpful, encouraging, sometimes funny; I wrote an essay for him on the structure of Trobriand villages, and setting out my method I said that I first divided the population into male and female; I got a marginal note: "God did that" (which was very odd for a godless Edmund); he took quite special care of me in the sense that I was part of a class of two, and he decided after the first term that he wanted me on my own; again one felt very chuffed by that; in my second year he was on leave and had a Ford Grant to write 'Pul Eliya'; he was an interesting lecturer, he could lecture without notes quite easily, but actually lectured to a very tight text as an undergraduate lecturer; I suppose quite often there was a book in the offing; he was a very practical lecturer; I remember him lecturing on Australian kinship and marriage systems, and, common sense, he used different coloured chalk on the board; he must have been one of the first to use magnetic recording and such things; Fortune was there; I was with him one day, probably when I was already on the staff, when he said: "What would you have done?"; I said: "About what"; he told me that when he was sitting on a hill in New Guinea a runner brought him a telegram saying: "Sir, we are no longer married", and it was from Margaret Mead; again he asked what I would have done and I said I didn't know, but what did he do; he said: "there was a man on the opposite hill and I picked up my rifle and shot him!"; Reo was a first-class shot, a competitive rifleman, and I think he must have taken quite a lot of care not to kill this chap; the story goes that he spent quite a lot of time paying compensation and being sorry, but it was a fairly mad thing to do; [ADDED NOTE by RGA after interview: ‘The story is in fact more complicated than this. It appears to have been local custom to attack others when in grief, and there is even some suggestion in more recent texts that Fortune actually hit the man’s quiver rather than the man himself. (see Dobrin and Bashkow’s aptly titled paper, ‘The Truth in Anthropology Does not Travel First Class’, Histories of Anthropologies Annual, Vol. 6, 2010, 66-128.)]; I went to see him at one stage in my final year; I had been talking to Edmund about an idea I had had about field research, and that if you could learn to understand the jokes they would give a key insight into what was going on; he encouraged me to go and talk to Reo; he was quite interesting to talk to about ‘berdache’ groups and marginals in society; the strange thing about Reo was that as soon as he retired he became sane; I have written a little on his mathematics; G.I. Jones was there and he supervised me in my final year; I remember him supervising me about age organization among the Ibo; I only really came to appreciate G.I. after I had joined the staff and got to know him more as an equal, because the basic impression we all had was that Reo was nuts and G.I. a dry old stick; it was only much later that one learnt that he had been a fairly early Sahara crosser in a car; he seems to have supported Meyer quite a lot, for instance over the Ethel Lindgren affair; I got to know him later and in his retirement used to go and play chess occasionally with him, and saw quite a lot of Ursula [his widow] more recently; Meyer was away for a time; I think he went back to South Africa for a time when Sonia died; Meyer was a more distant character; he ran a seminar for us and one was a bit scared to pick an argument with him; he was a pater familias; this interest of his in pietas and fatherhood went very deep in him; he had a ghastly childhood apparently with a violent father; Jack Goody was there, and my main supervisors were Jean La Fontaine, who was a research student, and Jack who had come back in the Summer of 1956; Jack was a chimerical figure; in those days he was a very good supervisor, very helpful; he was a bit taken aback as Meyer already had plans for me to go to Ghana; David Tait who had worked with the Konkomba had died in a road accident, and had been planning to work among the Dagomba, and Meyer was keen that I should do that study; Jack supervised Peter Wilson who was a good friend of mine, and when we graduated he gave us presents; the department was very much a gemeinschaft in those days, with small numbers; there were three or four research students that I knew, Fred Barth, Nur Yalman and Jean, and they mixed with us as final year students as if they were just a year or so ahead, although they had all come back from their fieldwork; there was a tremendous atmosphere about being part of a community; I have sometimes wondered about that, and I suspect part of it was that the colleges weren't much involved; people were part of the same place and there weren't college loyalties to divide them

52:13:13 The debates between Edmund and Meyer over structuralism were after this period; the debate over alliance and descent was going on while I was in the field, after 1957; Tambiah has told some of that story in his biography of Edmund, receiving help from Susan Drucker-Brown who had interviewed Edmund about it; Edmund had said that he didn't trust Meyer when Meyer had failed to get him a fellowship as promised when he recruited him; I talked a little about that at the Fortes conference recently because it did strike me that Meyer did know more about the system than Edmund gave him credit for; what really had happened was that Meyer had to get rid of Ethel Lindgren in order for Edmund to come here at all; I think Meyer was caught by surprise at Cambridge; he had already known what Oxford was like so perhaps he should not have been caught by surprise, but I suspect neither of them knew the worst parts about how the system works here; Glyn Daniel in his autobiography 'Some Small Harvest', tells how Hutton had unforgiveably appointed Reo and Ethel Lindgren before Meyer came; the Lindgren appointment was pretty well immediately before Meyer came, Reo a couple of years before, and I think Glyn might have got that a bit wrong in terms that Meyer was already due to come; Meyer expected to have a lot of power when he came and found himself restrained; the story that sticks in my mind about that is a story of John Barnes' that when Meyer was appointed he immediately phoned John and offered him a lectureship; that was the one that Lindgren got that Hutton appointed her to, and he didn't really have a lectureship to offer him at all; John, as it turned out, had written that he didn't particularly want it; G.I. told me that Meyer had really run out of street cred by the time he got rid of Lindgren because a lot of people didn't like it; people have suggest that this was behind the intellectual debate between Edmund and Meyer, but I don't know; my first reaction when I heard it was how horrible, if that is what we take as intellectual debate turns out to be about fellowships, lord help us; it did also strike me that that was a typical anthropological line, "the natives' say X and Y but really they are talking about A and B", and it was that sort of debate; that is how the story goes and how Tambiah tells it; my feeling is that Meyer couldn't do anything for anybody for quite a long time, in fact nobody except Meyer had a fellowship until 1960; it was only with the Bridges Report and the University threatening serious force major against the colleges, that they opened their doors; then G.I. became a Fellow of Jesus, Jack, of St John's, Edmund, joined King's; I knew Audrey Richards after I came back from the field although I had met her before; Meyer's plans to go Ghana fell through; I was told by him that Kofi Busia who was a student of his would be my supervisor while I was in Ghana, and he was Leader of the Opposition; so my applications for money, particularly to Goldsmiths' Company, were turned down; I think they were quite worried, and that came out in the Goldsmiths' interview; it was a very odd interview; there was a group sitting on the other side of the table with me on my own facing them; there was one old guy with a trumpet earphone, and he started pursuing this line about Busia; I said I didn't think that the question of politics should get in the way of academic research; this old guy asked me what were my politics; I said, "eclectic", and my answered had to be bellowed into the trumpet for him to understand; Edmund suggested I applied to the East African Institute Fellowships, which I did; Audrey was one of the interviewers; she was very kind and friendly; they had had some problem with people going out who were too shy to ask people questions when they got there, so she asked me if I was shy; I answered that it depended who I was with; then when I got one of these Fellowships I went out to Kampala and she was just packing up as Director of the East African Institute; she took me into town in the little car she had and terrified me with her driving; all I can remember about that was her telling me she had never yet killed anyone; when I came back from the field in 1960, Derek Stenning was my supervisor first of all; then he went to Makerere himself; Aidan Southall was out there during my fieldwork and then I think he must have gone to Syracuse; Audrey here to Newnham as Vice-Principal and started the African Studies Centre, but she was my supervisor and then I got to know her really very well

1:01:29:06 When I applied to go to East Africa part of the application had involved writing a research project; I innocently thought that they just wanted to see that I could write a research project, so I asked Jean La Fontaine for advice; she said they were trying to get ethnographic coverage and that the Nyamwezi was a good area, a big area where they might be interested to have someone; I applied to go there, to a multi-chieftain tribe as they were called then; I put in a research project and received a letter accepting that I should go there; I didn't know much about them except what I had been able to read; there was a manuscript ethnographic survey which the International African Institute had decided not to publish; I went out to Makerere and went to that area; I nearly didn't get there; I took a driving test very quickly having tried to take one in England first of all; the Makerere place was very good for fieldwork as it gave you a loan to buy a car, field assistants' money, a salary; I drove a land rover down to Tanganyika as it then was, but forgot to budget for petrol; I found I could either afford a place to sleep or to drive on; I did get there, saw the local District Commissioner in one of the districts, and he recommended that I work in a particular chiefdom and that is where I started; that was remarkable, it was just good luck really that it is one of the most hospitable areas on the globe; they are renowned for looking after visitors so I had a very good time on the whole with fieldwork and got on very well with local people; I was just looking today at some of the things I did there; I suppose the main thing for my future was that I became very impressed with neighbourhood cooperation while I was living in villages there; I did a study of the chiefdoms and their history, structure, but I was very impressed with the neighbourhood threshing groups, courts and so on; that stood me in good stead right up to the present; it was part of the template that informed later developments of vigilantism; I studied their kinship system as one did, and as Audrey put it later when I came back from the field, people want to see that you can teach and lecture both comparatively and on a range of topics; one didn't have in those days just going to the field and studying anything, it was a general holistic study; I made friends though most of the people I befriended were older, and they have all died; I had no difficulties though there might have been if I had gone three or four years later; after a time I got a local girlfriend; nobody knew anything about HIV in those days and people were very friendly; my parents were fed up with me because I didn't communicate very often with them; they wrote to Aidan Southall asking if I was still alive; he wrote to me telling my to write to them to show I was indeed alive; I was quite absorbed by it all; I worked in two parts of the area within about twenty miles of the local towns; I used to go into town, particularly Kahama which was the northern place where I started, so I became quite friendly with one or two of the Government people but felt I really had to keep my distance as well; I used to sometimes stay with them but whenever I could I tried to make sure that I woke up in my own bed in the village; I had a gut feeling that people would want to feel that you hadn't come from the outside but that was where your home was; I became aware that I had successfully distanced myself while retaining friendly relations with Government people; on one occasion the District Commissioner came to visit the chiefdom and then drove up to my camp; by this time I think I had a hut which my neighbours had kindly built me, and they brought him a present; it was a cunning old boy, seemingly humble, who made the presentation, and the poor District Commissioner was quite touched and thanked him profusely; this old guy then said ‘it is really for him’ and pointed at me; the District Commissioner was a bit taken aback when the man told him that when one of their neighbours had to entertain an important guest, they had to help out.

1:09:34:00 I returned to write up mainly under Audrey's guidance; she was helpful in all sorts of ways and read stuff carefully and commented; I decided to write mainly about chiefdom organization but did include stuff on neighbourhood, also some historical background material; I worked to some extent on the basis of Schapera’s 'Government and Politics'; I met him toward the end of my time writing-up when I went to work at University College under Daryll Forde; Schapera was someone whom I thought would never be short of a job as a stand-up comedian; he had the sharpest wit I have every come across; I went to UCL as a Research Fellow where Daryll had some research posts; it was supposed to be for three years but the job here in Cambridge came up, so I went in October 1961 and left in January 1963; the Cambridge post was Martin Southwold's; I think he was here for a couple of years, and Derek Stenning had been in post before; Meyer was still Head of Department; I was Secretary of the Faculty Board when the departments split up; there was a lot of argument about it and the archaeologists were not terribly happy, except Glyn; he played a very cunning hand; he made a long speech at the Faculty Board, starting by setting out all the reasons why they shouldn't do it; then there came the but.., and he set out all the reasons why one should; I think Jack must have been a prime mover in that, to set up our own fiefdom; this must have been about the end of the sixties; the original idea was that there should be two departments, archaeology and social anthropology, and a sub-department of bio. anth., but the Old Schools said why not give them a department as well; Jim Garlick must have been there by then; when I came back from the field the department was still a gemeinschaft though the difficulties had already started; as far as the undergraduates were concerned they were still about alliance and descent; Edmund had already given his Malinowski Lecture, 'Rethinking Anthropology', and that was interesting in terms of a gemeinschaft because Edmund mentioned to me the fuss caused by the lecture, where he had been very rude about people; he described Jack as inventing two societies to sort out a discrepancy in his field notes; Edmund said it was very difficult when things go into print as it is so different from the spoken word, where you are speaking to a group of friends and colleagues, smiling and making rude comments; then it comes out in print and it all looks horrible; when I came back I saw him and he said that I would find things a bit strange, and clearly there was a certain amount of friction at that point; then I decided to re-tool; I came back in the Spring and went to some of Edmund's lectures, and could see things were a bit odd; slightly childishly he was talking about Meyer's 'Web of Kinship' and queried the silly title; that must have been the crucial point when people started to become Fellows of colleges; then later on as one saw the thing fizzled out, as Edmund in that printed volume in 'Rethinking Anthropology' says that it is really a regional matter, alliance in India and descent affiliation in Africa; the students were very parti pris, going to one set of lectures and not the other; I remember going to a class or two and saying that in East Africa people really do have mother's brothers, and they are not just father's brothers-in-law; Steve Gudeman objected to that; Tambiah and I became very good friends; he was older than me and obviously very able; he was best known at that time here for the work he was doing on Ceylon, a very powerful intellect, but I think being older he wanted to get on; Meyer decided there would be a question of upgrading, and Edmund was putting pressure on Meyer to get a lectureship for Tambiah - we were both Assistant Lecturers; Meyer took me for lunch and said that although he was keen to have us both as lecturers, he had to treat Tambiah as a priority; I just accepted that and could see the point; so Tambiah became a Lecturer and later was a candidate for the Chair when Meyer retired, but Jack got it; Edmund was a strong supporter of Tambiah in the election, and the result was probably why Tambiah then went back to the States; I heard quite recently that he died last year

1:19:27:06 I became less happy as time went on of my career in general, but the major piece of my work that I have done most recently, over the last thirty years or so, is the work on vigilantism; I think that has been really powerful as I have become an expert in that field, so I get cited a lot; I have been in recent correspondence with people who are interested in what I have done; oddly, it is almost a personal thing, but I have never enjoyed working on a book so much as on that book which was published in 1998; part of it was having to do a lot of research on the American West, and I was one of the generation that grew up liking cowboy pictures; the vigilante stuff was really something that I didn't write just because I had done fieldwork in a place and it was something I was self-starting with; I remember Aidan Southall saying that he thought a lot of my writing was almost contingent on events; some of the things have been for festschrifts, for Audrey, John Barnes, Meyer and so forth; but two things that I have written for that sort of occasion - my paper on levirate I still find interesting; I was very pleased when a year ago I attended Marilyn's lecture on new technologies and found my work on organ transplantation the main focus of what she was talking about

1:23:08:13 I knew John Barnes reasonably well; he was difficult to know well as he was a very subtle man, and in his last years I used to visit him pretty regularly in the nursing home where he was; he was a very able chap and extraordinarily intelligent; I think part of the subtlety of his character used to come out in his anecdotes; he wrote some very interesting things about New Guinea, Africa, and so on; he obviously had great difficulty when he came back here as the first Professor of Sociology; his philosophy had always been that the difference between sociology and social anthropology is the difference between names on departmental doors; the sociologists here, particularly those in economics here thought his appointment was a real stitch-up; my view was that if sociologists don't know how the system works then they ought to get another profession; but they did feel that he was an anthropologist being foisted on them, and he was very careful to try and avoid that later; I felt his heart was politically very much in the right place so one could talk to him and occasionally get good advice

1:25:47:06 When I started to plan to do social anthropology and had met Meyer he gave me a list of books to read; I suppose the most influential of those books, and the influence really did last a lifetime with me, was Durkheim's 'Suicide'; as a youngster I had been interested in the individual and society and Durkheim's study threw a completely new light on it; the idea that the individual was a social person, and that informed my thinking for a long time; I was saying recently at a conference on Meyer that he was a thorough-going Durkheimian and no worse for that; then when I came to be writing about vigilantism I found myself turning to Max Weber; I think over the years Weber was really the most sensitive of the founding fathers, sensitive to the problems of trying to make sense of the social world and of the relationship between action and structure, personality and so on; I found myself in my vigilante work leaning very heavily on the idea that one needed an ideal type of vigilantism, that classification was going to get you nowhere, so I worked from that perspective.