Peter Gathercole

Second Part.

0:00:05 Early experiences in Otago Museum and reminiscences of Skinner

0:03:40 Otago Anthropological Society

0:06:00 1962 Senior Lecturer in University in anthropology

0:08:10 1964-5 sabbatical in Cambridge University. Sat in on Edmund Leach’s lectures, and asked his advice on developing the Otago programme

0:10:31 Reasons for splitting museum from the university department

1968-70 Lecturer in Ethnology, Oxford

0:15:07 lectureship attached to the Pitt Rivers Museum. “You could say I was an ethnologist, in the old-fashioned sense – a specialism that was a non-specialism by then”.

0:18:20 Grahame Clarke visiting Professor at Otago, 1964

0:21:25 Worcester College

1970-81 Curator, University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University

0:22:16 Arrival in Cambridge and difficulties with the museum

0:25:25 British social anthropology wasn’t interested in museum collections – wasn’t interested in history in  that sense. “I think the big point was that social anthropologists in the British tradition didn’t see archaeology in the broad sense that we saw it in the Pacific – as part of the overall tradition”.

0:27:40 Assistant curators, Malcolm Mcleod, Mary Cr’aster, then Pat Carter and Debbie Swallow; advice from Edmund Leach on how to reorganise the museum

0:31:20 Reasons for resignation, involvement with Darwin College

0:31:30 Reo Fortune

0:36:57 Meyer Fortes, Raymond Firth,  E.E. Evans-Pritchard,

0:43:26 publications; V.Gordon Childe

0:53:25 W.H.R. Rivers

Connecting threads in career

0:54:30 It all goes back to schooldays, when I read Marx and Hill – how do you link a theory of history with contemporary political action? “It’s the conjunction between history, anthropology and archaeology that’s always fascinated me, and, in the Pacific, if you’re working on ethno history, then you’re working in a cross-disciplinary way”.