Stephen Gudeman interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 14th May 2010

0:05:07 Born in Chicago and lived in a suburb of the city until I went to college; father was a merchant, a high executive, and we lived a middle-class life; my maternal grandfather did not go to college as his father had died early; he was an architect and was extraordinarily successful in Chicago; about three years ago there was a book written by an anthropologist on the Chicago Board of Trade; around 1919-20 there was a competition for the design of the building; the architectural drawings submitted included one by my grandfather; we are, in fact, both mentioned in the book; my paternal grandfather died before I was born; he was a chemist with a PhD from Columbia; he was an industrial chemist and I think was quite successful for a time although by the time of his death he was pretty broke; this spurred my father on to make sure that he succeeded; we were a large family on both sides, living in Chicago; most of them had come from Germany though one part descends from Rabbi from Prague; they arrived in America mainly in the 1850s and 60s; Chicago was the home of pragmatism and Dewey and others had a profound influence on the schooling system, so I was lucky to move through progressive schools; my maternal grandmother was a very strong woman, into psycho-analysis, but a difficult mother; I knew her but was wary of her, and my mother kept her distance; my paternal grandmother died when I was 12-13, and I remember her funeral; she was also involved in charitable work in the Chicago area; to me she seemed much older and more constrained than my other grandmother; she seemed to me to personify the protestant ethic, and passed on to my family a sense of the value of thriftiness and discretion; my mother never really settled happily into anything; in retrospect I think she was supportive, but could be quite critical of us; my father was quite different; he was a very bright man but a businessman; I don't think that either of them valued academic achievement beyond good schooling; they could never quite understand anthropology or why I should want to do it; my father would play with me and was an excellent athlete; he was very organized and creative in his business; I remember him showing me how I should organize my desk when I was a child, and it stuck in my mind; I have always been organized in my work ever since; he encouraged hard work but also to have fun and enjoy life, and I have tried to do that with my own children; he would be disappointed if you didn't work hard, but he was always supportive and proud of me and my older brother; in my twenties I had some difficulties with him as we didn't agree politically; he was a very high executive, but for anti-semitic reasons failed to get the top job; this had a profound effect on him and he left the company that had been his life until then; within six months he went into the Kennedy administration - Jack Kennedy had just been elected; he was there for two years but was not a politician; he then went to New York and became a partner in Lehman Brothers, when Bobby Lehman was alive, but left after ten years; my father had wanted me to go into business with him and I did go to Harvard Business School at one point; he had had a little training in economics but it was not the kind that I do; I did a course in economics before going to Cambridge but didn't find it very interesting; my father was a charming man who could talk on any subject; he was not out to make a profit but wanted to bring goods to people at a good price; it was a time that the economy was expanding in the United States

15:20:20 My earliest memory was of lying in a cot, trying to put a shoe lace into a roll of paper; my father came and did it and I remember thinking that he could do anything; my grandmother had been promoting nursery schooling so I went to a nursery school aged three and then a kindergarten at the age of five; both were public schools as it was a period when the public education system was strong in the United States; I went through elementary school, middle school and high school, and graduated at eighteen and went to college; I was lucky that all these schools were highly rated; I had a very good cohort of friends; we had a jazz band in high school; it was not fee paying but was supported by local taxes; early on I started playing the clarinet but then switched to the saxophone and played it through high school; by the age of about sixteen I had switched to classical music; although my father was not musical he would bring home classical LPs and I would lie listening to Beethoven, for example, in bed, and was entranced; it has been an enduring and lasting love; I have always been interested in maths and at high school  there was a four volume, 'World of Mathematics', in which I found an essay on music and maths and the relation between harmony and mathematics; I have always thought there was a link between maths and the kind of music that I enjoy - a sense of symmetry, pattern, organization; I do not listen to music when I am writing, driving or walking; it is precisely being quiet that works for me when I am thinking; after returning to the United States after finishing my PhD at Cambridge, I was in my first year of teaching, trying to solve a difficult problem about godparenthood, I suddenly had the solution when driving home; I find that when walking I may not be trying to think about a problem but a useful thought will come into my mind; ideas also come in the middle of the night which is rather frustrating; I advise my students to trust the mind and let it solve a problem in its own time rather than pushing it

28:44:09 Ours was not a religious household; I was not bar mitzvahed; I recognise that I was growing up at a time when Jews still felt uncomfortable and were keen to assimilate; my father's uncle was born in the United States and was a good classicist; however he could not get a job so went to Germany; could not get a job there either, was there during the First World War, failed to get out of Germany in 1932 as he was not allowed back into the United States, and died in the camps; in my father's case, the chairman of the board said that my father could not head the company as he would not be allowed to join the most influential social clubs; it has changed quite a bit now; as a child I would occasionally go to a Sunday School but that seemed to me to be a waste of time; it has never been of great interest to me personally; ironically, when doing work on godparenthood I found myself reading St Thomas Aquinas and learned much more about theology than I even expected, and was fascinated by it; in my first fieldwork in Panama I did quite a bit on the people's theology; I wrote some of it up and gave it to the bishop so that he would know what I was doing; he was amused and also tried to help me as he believed I was trying to do something for the people; I say that I am agnostic because I don't know how the universe started; on the recent attacks on religion - there are all sorts of reasons for aggression, not just religious; believers form communities very naturally but on the negative side they can become exclusive and totalitarian; the difficultly is seeking a balance between the two; it is fine that people have their beliefs as long as they are liberal enough to accept other opinions

37:17:00 I don't remember any remarkable teachers in my life until I got to Cambridge when the world exploded for me intellectually; I had teachers who were nice to me; at Harvard I was a bit entranced with Parsonian sociology but I got over that; I always enjoyed math, but did a full range of subjects through school; I don't feel that one subject stood out from the others; I did not know what I wanted to be; at Harvard, where I went to college, I remember that at the end of my first year there was an evening where people talked about their subjects; there was one man who looked like a dried fish, and talked about anthropology; as I walked out I still did not know what I wanted to do except I knew I would never want to be an anthropologist because it was so boring; I did more sociology at Harvard and social psychology; Vogt had a big project in Mexico and I did go there for six weeks one summer, but I didn't do any other anthropology; at the end of Harvard I still did not know what I wanted to do but applied for a Marshall scholarship given by the British Government for a fellowship; it was very competitive, but I got one, despite not knowing what I wanted to do; there was little sociology offered in the UK and the only undergraduate course in anthropology was at Cambridge, which was Part II of the tripos; I knew there was a Cambridge college with a beautiful chapel and that there were some anthropologists there, so I went to King's; I went there in 1961; I was put in the Garden Hostel, which was fine; it was arranged that I should meet my supervisor; I had hoped it would be Fortes but I was assigned to Leach; we met at the Porters' Lodge and we walked around; he was giggling which was one of the things that he did when he was nervous; he was not sure what to do with me, but showed me to the library; I went to his office on the Downing Street site a couple of days later; we were both wearing gowns which I thought was bizarre; another man came in, similarly dressed, wanting to borrow a book; Leach told him that he could not as he hadn't returned an earlier loan, and they started tugging and wrestling over the book; that was Reo Fortune, who I later got to know and appreciate; Edmund throughout encouraged me to read what I wanted to read; it was a most wonderful year; I would read, and he would agree with my interpretations, but then come out with much wider observations; I would come out of supervisions feeling that I was studying the most important subject in the world, like Keynes felt when leaving supervisions with Marshall; Leach had tremendous charisma, and he, more than any other teacher, encouraged me to think independently; I loved being in the College and spent hours talking to people on all sorts of subjects; the difference with Harvard was that it had courses with exams, and much more based on lectures; at Cambridge at that time there were lectures, perhaps once a week, but it was not intensive and you were supposed to learn a lot on your own with the advice of your supervisor; also, there were no exams; looking back, I wonder if I should have worked harder, but I began to feel a sense of discovery in anthropology, which I still feel; I was lucky that it was Edmund's high time and Levi-Strauss was just coming in; I arrived just after the publication of 'Rethinking Anthropology' which we all read, and thought was the key; Edmund's publications were enormously popular at the time, but I don't think they have lasted that well; he was certainly an entrancing writer; I always had the feeling that whatever he said there was more to discover behind it; I think that 'Political Systems of Highland Burma' is beautiful; I couldn't find a copy and Edmund gave me the last copy he had of the first edition which he affectionately inscribed to me; I still think his essay on matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is marvellous; I don't assign his work to students now as it is out of favour in the United States, but it will probably come back

55:27:02 Being a student of Leach's, everything that Fortes did was wrong; there was also Jack Goody, and everything that he did was wrong; I would never say that now as I admire both of them; I went to Fortes' lectures; Meyer was very nice to me and allowed me to attend the seminar for post-graduate students; this was originally held in the Gibbs Building, and I think I learned a lot of anthropology by listening to the questions people asked; Meyer's responses where always in a certain vein, but very good; Jack was writing 'Death, Property and the Ancestors' at the time, and I went to his lectures, and again I would learn from questions; Reo's questions were very obscure; I didn't know at the time that he was also going off to lectures on physics, and that there is a whole mathematical deduction named after him; he would try to encourage me to go into physics; I went to Gwilym Jones's lectures on development but I didn't get to know him until much later; Ray Abrahams was just coming in, and Martin Southwold was off for a number of years; I never got to know Audrey Richards but have come to admire her work; I remember going to a series of lectures on methodology by her and she was very wise; 'Land, Labour and Diet among the Bemba' is a very fine work; my contemporaries in the tripos year were Andrew and Marilyn Strathern, Nick Peterson was in King's with me, Geoffrey Benjamin; I went back to the Harvard Business School and did two years there, and when I came back, people like Jonny Parry and Caroline Humfrey were there; I went out right away to do fieldwork, and when I came back Jonny and Caroline were there, so was Keith Hart; in my second year of the tripos, Adam Kuper had arrived to begin his dissertation, and above all others we have remained great friends ever since