Interview of Raymond Apthorpe by Alan Macfarlane, 16th April 1989

0:00:05 Birth and parentage; schooling; planned to become an architect but realized the course was too long and expensive

0:05:00 Memories of the war years; parents’ opposition to him going to university

0:07:55 Newcastle University; degree in geography with additional anthropology; Rheinhallt and Sheddick encouraged him to do anthropology

0:10:10 Oxford in 1953; Paul and Dusty Bohannan; ‘Return to Laughter’; Evans-Pritchard; attitude towards fieldwork

0:16:35 Louis Dumont first tutor, then John Peristiany; problems in understanding Dumont; own work on hierarchy used by Dumont

0:21:25 Use of mescaline to sharpen ideas

0:24:33 Louis Dumont as a person and teacher; Peristiany; own work on honour and shame; fellowship in Corsica; wanted to do fieldwork in Portugal but not possible to get funds to work there

0:31:16 John Campbell; ethnography and theory

0:32:48 Own thesis – ‘Social Change: formal and empirical study’ on comparative method; first examined by Edmund Leach and Peristiany; Leach’s report very poorly done and University rejected it so re-examined by Max Gluckman as external and passed

0:38:41 Own ideas used in Leach’s Malinowski lecture and published as ‘Rethinking Anthropology’

0:42:54 Went to Lusaka as research secretary at the Rhodes Livingstone Institute.

(uncompleted)