Second Part

0:05:07 I used to go to Edmund's house in Storey's Way for dinner every three weeks or so, and I got to know Celia quite well; she was a marvellous cook and they treated me like pseudo parents; in the Spring he said he was going skiing in Italy and invited me to go with him; I was in pretty good physical shape as I was playing rugby all the time; I encouraged him to go to the top of a mountain and he fell and broke his shoulder; I was horrified but he never blamed me; I had a wonderful first year though I didn't do much work; after that year, back in the United States, Jack Kennedy was President, his Senate seat was still empty, I still didn't know what I wanted to do and wondered about politics; I managed through connections of my father's to work for Teddy Kennedy, who was running for a seat; I had a wonderful summer learning about politics, but did not find it stimulating enough to hold me; I came back to Cambridge for a second year and then I began to get serious; that was when Adam Kuper arrived and we spent hours talking about anthropology, and we still do; he was preparing to leave for South Africa and we were both in King's; he knew much more anthropology than I did and would recommend books like Schapera's 'Tswana Law and Customs', which did not please Edmund; even by the middle of my second year I had not read 'The Nuer', yet I could see the others absorbing anthropology around me; I had other interests, playing a lot of rugby and tennis, and other sorts of reading; when I was finishing, Meyer said he could get some money if I would like to do some fieldwork in Thailand; I asked Edmund and he said it was CIA money; I was psychologically not ready to do fieldwork and still did not know what I wanted to do; I went back to the United States, and the Vietnam War meant that unless you were in school or college you would be drafted; I thought I might become a businessman so went to Harvard Business School; I did not like it; I did not like the people and their attitudes; I didn't learn economics there; the largest department was something on human relations - sociology out of the 1930s and 40s, equilibrium theories, and statistics, which I did enjoy; I was ready to leave but saw it through, and in the second year there I met George Cabot Lodge; he had run against Teddy Kennedy in the election and was a liberal Republican; he was a professor but we became friends; he was interested in development and that did appeal to me; there was this thing going on in Panama with an Archbishop who was starting up cooperatives; the Business School was going to set up another business school in Guatemala; we worked out a deal which was paid for by USAID that I would write business cases for Harvard Business School, would work with this cooperative movement, and do my fieldwork; I went back to Cambridge for a few months in the Fall - I was married by then - and set out a project on decision theory; I was going to analyse the agricultural choices of these peasants; everybody thought this was terrific; Edmund was to supervise me though he knew nothing about it; no one went to Panama then; I found within a day that swidden farmers are not making decisions like those I had envisaged; I did do an extensive household survey and a statistical survey of household flows, but I didn't know what I was going to do with it as I had no theory; because of Cambridge, I thought I had better look at kinship and family; however, there was nothing that would help me to analyse these messy households where people kept coming and going - the only thing at the time was some stuff on the Caribbean; I did discover godparenthood and got interested in it; within the Roman Catholic church there is Baptism, with godmother and godfather who are parents in the church; through the compadrazgo they form spiritual relationships with the baptised child and with the parents of the child, so you get an elaborate kind of network; you can have it over Confirmation, Marriage, none of which is recognised in the Church any more, and all kinds of variations; what I saw was that it was a reverse mirror of the nuclear family; they would say that you had to keep respect for them, which actually meant they had a spiritual relationship; at that time, kinship was thought of as biogenetic and not cultural, and it was very hard to think what a spiritual relationship would be; that took me to a different way of thinking about kinship; I did my dissertation on it; it was between households and nuclear families; they would not use the link for borrowing money as they said that compadre should never argue, but keep respectful; Mintz and others suggest they would use these links pragmatically but I found they didn't; I published a long essay after my dissertation, which won the Curl Essay Prize, then I put it down and have never worked on it since; I got into religious symbolism during fieldwork; the Bishop gave me four leather-bound volumes of Butler's 'Lives of the Saints' which I still have; the fieldwork was very hard; Panama is very hot and wet, a jungle area, that was physically demanding; Roxane, my wife, was with me; she was a PhD student at Harvard on a special program on development psychology; she was doing research on children's language acquisition before taking the full PhD course, which became a complication later on; she would find out things from the women, particularly on abuse by their husbands; she is a photographer so an enormous help; we came back to Cambridge where fairly soon she had our first daughter, and I was trying to write a PhD; Edmund was not much help; there were very few models for me; there was some stuff from Mexico and most of the writing was American which I have always found difficult to integrate with European models; George Foster had worked in a Mexican village with peasant potters, but the academic language was not what I was used to - also Eric Wolf and Sydney Mintz's work feels different; this difference has persisted so that my work must feel strange to them

18:51:00 It was good to return to the United States, and my first book was a rewritten dissertation; I did not have any connections there; Vogt said there were jobs at Indiana and Minnesota and I was offered jobs at both; it turned out that Minnesota had an outstanding department of child development which was relevant to Roxane; I like the politics as it was a very liberal State, so I went there; Roxane shifted her degree work there; we had a second child, so life got more complicated for everybody and it slowed down her progress; I then got interested in economics, read Joan Robison and Sraffa, and got very interested in Marx and the transformation problem, then dependency theory which originates in Latin America and was coming out; within a year or two my economics material made sense and I sat down and wrote a book; ‘The Demist of a Rural Economy’ came out very well and is still in print; it was influenced by political economy in the classic sense from Adam Smith through Ricardo to Marx; I liked it because it started with the class structure - who owns what - and that was much more anthropological than the neo-classical one; I thought this was going to solve everything, but then it didn't; one of the things that I think from early on in anthropology, I have always tended not to get what people say in meetings; I would have to work hard to understand their intellectual language and this got me into a more cultural kind of analysis; I met Clifford Geertz in the seventies and he invited me to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton; Albert Hirschman was handling it that year and they were really focussing on economics with people doing wilder stuff; the economists were very nice and let me attend their seminars; Joe Stiglizt was working on information theory, Ollie Williamson was there and has recently got the Nobel Prize, too; I would sit, like I did at Cambridge, and just listen to their questions; I got into some fierce fights but, on the one hand, it helped me to get a much better grasp of economics, and on the other, I got into culture; from Marx I got into these people called the physiocrats and was entranced and wrote about them; I then tried to think about economics as culture which does lead to a more relativist position about economics, an began a book on the subject while at the Institute; I have had difficulties with economists from time to time, but also with other economic anthropologists

28:34:19 In economic anthropology, formalism is really neoclassical theory, certainly not Marxism, maximizing economic goals; it is the easiest model for anthropologists to apply as Raymond Firth's work shows; substantivism, as exemplified by Polanyi, claimed that the two things that make society are land and labour, and when you put these on the market and sell them they are, what he called, fictitious commodities; the more you do that the more you destroy society, and it becomes disembedded; formalism is very rationalistic and deductive; substantivism is classical empiricism; Polanyi had trouble with another form, the household economy, which he had witnessed in Hungary where he grew up; I have had to look at those and they don't really fit into a nice typology; there has also been the Marxist approach which gained great favour in the sixties and seventies; I have worked more in the domain of, what I call, local models - what are the people's models - which gets more Weberian; I went back to Colombia with a former student and got their model for the household economy; I then tried to develop a more cross-cultural comparative economics which was not formalist nor substantivist; I finally published a book in 2001, 'Anthropology of Economy', which was not very satisfactory; I wrote another book, 'Economy’s Tension' which tried to clarify it further; examples of increasing abstraction of economic models in the banking and investment world

47:24:18 Keith Hart and I have a long relationship; he has supported me but we do sometimes disagree; I liked his Malinowski Lecture on the two sides of the coin because that obviously fits what I believe; I like his work on trust and the building of trust; we take a different approach on the subject of money; the question of what advise to give to a young student is very difficult today; firstly you have to work on what interests you, to want to listen to others and to try to see patterns in their behaviour; don't see how you can be an anthropologist without a feel for it; Clifford Geertz's book 'Interpretation of Cultures' is a wonderful book; his work took me to the Institute; I have not followed all his work since then; my own work is in trying to make sense of people's practises which is rather different; I read Sahlins 'Culture and Practical Reason'; I have not read his latest work, but 'Stone Age Economics' was a wonderful book and had an enormous influence; our daughters have been a central part of our life; two of them are lawyers, the third daughter is a soccer coach at Carlton College in Minnesota; they all went to Harvard, and it was there that I met Roxane