Philip Gulliver interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 7^th July 1983

0:00:05 Introduction; stationed in Middle East during the war and began to learn Arabic and to look at Fellahin villages and later Bedouin; after the war did a sociology degree and became acquainted with Malinowski; Social Science Research Council  grant to go to East Africa and a year for study at L.S.E. to learn anthropology; Firth, Nadel, Leach and Audrey Richards all there; chose to go to Northern Kenya to work among pastoral nomads, the Turkana; tough but exciting; 2 years fieldwork and a further 8 months in Uganda

0:03:40 Turkana lived in semi-desert environment; study became  ecological although he had intended to study politics as the environment dominated everything; Raymond Firth told students to study everything which he tried to do; concentrated on kinship

0:06:50 At that time most influenced by Malinowski and Fortes whose books on the Tallensi had just been published; later influenced by Max Gluckman because of own interest in legal anthropology; not really influenced by Evans-Pritchard; also influenced by Victor Turner

0:11:00 Gluckman was a very generous man; egocentric in part, but supportive, like an elder brother; respected his work on legal anthropology though disagreed with Gluckman’s emphasis on courts and authority figures as models; more influenced by social psychological work on dispute management and non-court situations; moving away from the structural-functionalist model to transactionalism and exchange theory which fitted own data better; Gluckman a great letter writer

0:17:05 In own work most interesting find was that the dispute processes were resolved in a similar way to Western society and could produce a model of interaction to cover both; this lifted it from the anthropological study of a remote society to  something that was universal

0:19:30 Currently working in Ireland; wanted to study a Western culture but without the problem of learning another language; working on archival material from 1840-1983; have already amassed more than 10,000 pages of data; also using newspapers which have been published since that time and extracting everything on Kilkenny county and wider afield; from 1900 possible to go through selected stories with informants to flesh out the news report; also trade union records which are similarly fleshed out; traders development association minute books; some farm records but the estate records no longer exist; 1901 and 1911 censuses; building up genealogies; labour books and farmers lists etc. for a flour mill and similar for a tannery; both now closed by a new factories and a confectioner whose records have also been examined; also checked migration of workers; interviewed people and done participant observation

0:28:15 Participant observation in a society with records has not undermined belief in efficacy but has encouraged more thought on historical perspective; research in Ireland starts just before the great famine; wants to understand how society has become as it is today

0:31:20 Sees history and anthropology as very similar; believes that anthropologists must take an historical perspective and adopt the techniques of the historian;  not quite sure that Turkana could be studied with historical perspective but salutary that a historian (John Lamphear) did do research on the Jie, which he’d also studied, and found a lot of “history” which had eluded him; at the time believed that history was unimportant to them and to him

0:35:00 Equivocal about whether the Turkana and Irish are the same or very different; some of the old people interviewed in Ireland are not dissimilar to old Turkana.