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Alan: The Apa Tanis had a very sophisticated economy, but they lacked a number of features of more developed economies. What features did they lack?
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Christoph: Well they didn’t have the principle of animal traction for instance, although they have cattle, the cattle were neither used for ploughing nor for carrying, so their economy was really very sort of in a way Neolithic, not stone age because they had metal.
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Alan: Do they use wheels?
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Christoph: They did not use wheels. I think the first wheel the saw was on the first Indian aeroplane when the Indian army made an airstrip there. They had no wheels.
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Alan: You worked among the Apa Tanis, but quite soon after you visited with your wife, another white lady visited them, namely Ursula Graham-Bower. Did you meet her?
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Christoph: I had met her before but actually her husband was then appointed there as Political Officer. That was not immediately after I had finished there, there was a kind of period in between when the Apa Tanis again were left to their own devices, then already after Independence, the Indians established there a much more complicated administration. Now Ursula Graham-Bower who had worked independently in the Naga hills, she then came to the Apa Tanis and also then wrote a book on them called “The Hidden Land”, and her husband was a Political Officer, so a certain amount of anthropological material was also provided by her.
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Alan: The people you worked among, the Apa Tanis, and also among the Nagas, were they physically an attractive people?
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Christoph: The Nagas were very attractive, particularly the Konyak Nagas, they were really quite beautiful people there were all these wonderful figures - girls were very attractive. They are Mongoloid but are also sort of like Malays or Indonesians, and very good looking. The Apa Tanis were also Mongoloid, they were perhaps not quite as attractive as the Konyak Nagas but still I would say that on the whole they were attractive people - they looked attractive.
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Alan: And what about the place itself - the physical landscape?
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Christoph: The Naga hills are absolutely beautiful, the landscape, they are not very high and the villages are lying between the altitude between 3,000 and 6,000 feet. So beautiful rolling hills and with that pattern of shifting cultivation, I mean forest here and there, golden rice fields - very very attractive. The Apa Tani valley as such is also a beautiful place - it’s set in between wooded hills, the valley bottom is about nearly 5,000 feet high, the hills left and right are about 6-7,000. And apart from the area which is under rice and is accordingly sometimes pale green and sometimes golden and so on, they have quite a lot of orchards and in the spring it is absolutely beautiful when all these fruit trees are in blossom. So the whole area is extremely attractive, on clear days you see the Himalayan peaks at the back.
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Alan: Later we would like to return to the question of how the Apa Tani economy changed, but I wondered if we could now turn from Assam and the NEFA to the other area where you did a lot of work, chronologically going backwards. You first went to work in Hyderabad among some very simple people - hunter/gatherer people - called the Chenchus. What made you study them and what were they like?
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Christoph: Well the whole position in Hyderabad was, I mentioned before, that I was sort of caught there by the outbreak of the war, and allowed by the Hyderabad Government, Hyderabad was then under the Nizam of Hyderabad, to work among the tribal populations and it was a fairly obvious choice. There was one tribe not well-known and not well-described, known as Chenchus, they were one of the few tribes of hunters and food-gatherers left still in peninsular India, so it was reasonable to start among them. It was a great contrast to the highly advanced Nagas with their huge villages and their very beautiful people, Chenchus are rather, one would say, rather unattractive and very dark skinned and have nothing of all the beautiful clothes for instance which the Nagas have. So it was a disappointment for my wife, she had always seen the lovely photographs of the Nagas and this was the first time that she accompanied me on fieldwork and there there were these very poor Chenchus who live under windscreens or little huts and had really very not much which was visibly attractive. But they were very interesting because they were one of the few tribes who still lived on collecting - food collecting - digging up roots in the forest and some forest fruits etc. Hunting - there wasn’t much hunting left because their territory is quite small and people had come from outside with guns etc. who had more or less wiped out all bigger game. So they just managed to survive as they were, but that type of life-style was probably as in India hunters and food-gatherers were for centuries if not thousands of years. We know that in South India there were Palaeolithic cultures and those makers of these Palaeolithic scrapers and hand-axes must have lived on the same kind of forest produce as the Chenchus did. So from that point of view it was interesting.
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Alan: What was the most striking about the Chenchus. Is there anything that you found most extraordinary about their way of life?
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Christoph: Well I think probably again it was, the striking thing was that they too, as I mentioned before about other people in Northeast India who had no kind of judicial system, no authority system, but they seemed to manage to live peacefully without conflicts largely because I think the communities were so small, the areas of conflict were so few because nobody had any property, and everybody went out in the morning and collected roots and fruits from the forest, so there was not much reason for any kind of conflict, apart from that if two people in the group didn’t get on, then one would probably move to another group, because nobody had any property in land, so there was great mobility. I mean, if you saw a settlement of 8 or 9 huts at one time and you came perhaps 2 months later there, you may find 3 or 4 families may have moved from there and settled somewhere else because they are never settled for very long in one place. So that was interesting, this great flexibility.
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Alan: Moving from that very simplest of social organisations, although very complex as well, to your next piece of fieldwork in Hyderabad. You worked among the Reddis, in the hills, what sort of society was that and why did you choose it?
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Christoph: I went there again because nobody had studied them, the whole area which was in the Eastern Ghats(?), about where the Godavari river breaks through the Eastern Ghats, and in these some people lived who were shifting cultivators rather than the Konyak Nagas were shifting cultivators too but much more advanced with large settlements etc. The Reddis lived in small settlements, again great mobility, they lived for 2 or 3 years in one place and then they shifted their fields and very often also their huts. So they were really in a way the next stage after the Chenchus, the Chenchus were only food gatherers and hunters, the Reddis were also still lived a good deal on what they gathered from the forest but in addition they also had slash and burn cultivation and grew millet and pulses, and not rice because it’s too dry there and they had no wet fields, but perhaps they lived on the grain which they reaped could live for about 5-6 months, the rest of the time they had to look for food in the forest. So they were on really in the state of transition between food gatherings and cultivation. Also they had begun to have some income from forest labour - they were used by forest contractors to cut bamboos. In that way they were very often rather badly cheated in that they didn’t know how many bamboos they had cut, and they were only paid perhaps after some weeks and they were told “well, you delivered this many hands of bamboos” and it was kind of piece work, and they were not very well treated by the outside world, but somehow they subsisted on a bit of wage labour, a bit of slash and burn cultivation and still some hunting and gathering in the forest.
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Alan: What sort of settlements did they live in?
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Christoph: Well, they lived partly in settlements in the forest where there were perhaps 4/5/6 houses in forest clearing, that was in the hills. Some had moved down near the banks of the river and there they had, there were villages of perhaps 15/20/25 houses, and there they had began some permanent cultivation, there was some flat land and they had begun there to use ploughs and cultivate sorghum and other crops. The tragic point in that was they had been advanced to permanent cultivation but in more recent years they nearly lost all their permanent land because outsiders, mainly from the coastal areas came in, non-tribals, Telegu-speaking people and so the Reddis lost most of that land again.
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Alan: You then moved on having done enough fieldwork for most anthropologists for their lifetime, but you then went on to work among a more economically settled population, the Gonds, but they were still slash and burn. [zoom out]
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Christoph: No, the Gonds were already proper plough cultivators. There are different types of Gonds, some but those I mainly worked with which were also in Hyderabad State in a District known as Adilabad District, they also lived in forest areas but they all had permanent land, and cultivated with ploughs and bullocks and were much more settled than the Reddis. Of course, the Gonds have an old history, there were Gond rajas and even in the middle-ages, Gond states and they were in many ways on a level with Hindu population, perhaps economically. So it was quite a different scenario and also the Gonds were very numerous, there were alone in Hyderabad there were nearly 100,000 Gonds, altogether in India there are nearly 4 million Gonds and they are divided into different tribes. For instance Gonds were also studied by Verrier Elwin?, I mentioned before his book on the Youth Dormitories, the Muria Gonds, in Basta, which is adjoining to Hyderabad. Well each of these tribes has its peculiar system, and these so-called Ray Gonds that I studied were very different to the Basta Gonds and in a sense economically more advanced. But they were then also under threat, namely their land was quite attractive, the rich soils was particularly suitable for growing cotton - black cotton soil- so there had already begun a process by which Gond land was alienated by more advanced people who came from the plains. The Gonds in the highlands of Adilabad - in the hills, I mean not mountains but sort of on plateaux and areas a bit different from the big river valleys like the Godavari valley. And people from there then were infiltrating into the highlands and the process had begun whereby some of the Gonds lost their land.
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Alan: You describe in your book on the Gonds, because this was a society that you worked on longer than on any other society - nearly 3 years in their villages you spent, you describe a sort of contradiction between a society which has a very free association of equal peoples combined with a sort of feudal system. I wondered how what, how their society worked?
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Christoph: Well the feudal system was a kind of remnant from the days of the great Gond Rajas. There was a kind of hereditary aristocracy. At the time when I came to the area they really held no more political power because that was taken over by the administration of the Nizam’s Government. But the descendants of the former Raja they had still some status and not material privileges but they were still highly respected. They, in a sense, their word counted more than other people - if there were drawn-out disputes then very often preferred, people went to one of the Gond Rajas and asked him maybe to mediate. But basically it was an egalitarian society so that we find that in the villages there were really no status difference except for the few members of the Gond Rajas.
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Alan: Was this a beautiful area that you were working in, I mean physically?
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Christoph: Not as beautiful as the Naga hills but quite attractive. I mean at that time there was still a lot of forest so the villages were enclaves in the forest. And it was, I would say, it was an attractive area without having beautiful scenery.
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Alan: And what of the people, the same, - the Gonds?
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Christoph: The Gonds are, one can’t say that they are very handsome, but they are attractive people. They are not spectacularly dressed or undressed like the Nagas, they were more or less like Indian villagers in dhotis and saris. But I, they are very pleasant people and I was quite enjoying my stay there, but at that time there were already endless problems over questions of land and exploitation.
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Alan: After your purely anthropological research among the Chenchus, Gonds and Reddis, I understand that you were employed by the Hyderabad Government in an administrative capacity. I wonder if you could say what you did in that work?
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Christoph: Well the Hyderabad Government, the Nizam’s Government at that time, Hyderabad as you know was the largest of the Indian Princely States, had…was aware that there were problems in the tribal areas and as I had worked among the tribes by that time for about 4 years and also had been employed by the Government of India on the Northeast frontier, they decided to offer me a position as Advisor for Tribes and Backward Classes, as the position was called. But actually it was an administrative position where I had not only to advise but I was then head of the Department - a kind of Tribal Welfare Department - now it is called like that and dealing with all the problems which are faced by the tribes. And the main problem was to secure them in the possession of their land. So I started among the Gonds, with a sort of large scheme of land reform that the Gonds were actually in possession in occupation of land but only few of them had any permanent rights, so the first step was to provide them with rights to the land they had and those who were not in occupation of land, to give them land and at that time the idea was to provide every family with anything between 15-20 acres which is quite adequate, of dry land. That was sort of the essential foundation for any kind of improvement in their economic position, because the idea was that from then on nobody could acquire tribal land. Legislation was passed, large areas. The major part of the districts inhabited by tribals were made sort of Scheduled Areas as it’s called in India, where only tribals could acquire land and no outsiders. And I held that position for 4 years and at the end of this period it seemed that the tribal problem from that point of view had really been solved, of course it wasn’t known at that time that Hyderabad State would be incorporated into India, that the Nizam’s administration would come to an end, and that quite a different kind of government would come in - a government which was not so interested in the affairs and welfare of the tribals and when I now go back to Hyderabad, which I do quite often, I find that much of the land which in my days was given to tribals had again been alienated by an extraordinary influx of non-tribals from the neighbouring areas, partly even from outside the State - from Maharashtra there was a great immigration. But that is part of that mobility in India which also has recently created all that trouble in Assam where so many people from Bangladesh and Bengal entered Assam. And in Hyderabad too, Hyderabad of course now only the town is called Hyderabad now, the area is called Andhra Pradesh, the tribals have suffered very badly from the influx of non-tribals much more advanced, much more experienced in dealing with the administration, so that actually the situation - the economic and political situation - of the tribals is not particularly good now. But at the time of the Nizam’s rule I was able not only to carry out that system of land reform but also to start schools for tribals, and schools in which they were first taught in their own language - Gondi is a Dravidian language but it is quite different from Telegu and other Dravidian languages, so the idea was to have schools in which the children at first would be taught in their own language. There were of course no books so the books had to be special readers and primers had to be composed and printed. So that was again an attempt to kind of secure the Gond culture which is quite complex, I mean Gonds have a large fund of myths and legends etc., but they had no script - they had no literature, so that was an attempt to create a kind of Gond literature. Unfortunately, again, the changed political situation has really more or less wiped out those advances. Now there are no more Gondi school books used, but the tribals have to have the same kind of education anybody else has. So this again was an attempt made that didn’t lead to very much, it would have led if there had not been very great political changes, but the anthropologist can’t know that. But I think to go the, I think inherently, it is a very important function of anthropologists who have spent perhaps 3 or 4 years to learn about a group of tribal people that then they should become able to put in a position where they can do something concrete for the tribe. But nowadays it’s not very likely that many western anthropologists can do, I mean Indians can do that, because it’s the end of the colonial period. There are not many parts of the world where anthropologists actually are entrusted with the administration of tribal people.
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Alan: Could I ask, on the administrative side, I know that you admire greatly the philosophical and theoretical system put forward by a man who combined anthropology and administration, Verrier Elwin. You knew Elwin, and you worked on many of the same societies as Elwin, could you say something about him?
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Christoph: Well Elwin was a very wonderful person. He came to India as a missionary, then he found out, and worked first among Gonds of the Central Provinces, which is now Madhya Pradesh, and he found that Gonds didn’t really need a new religion but what they want is help in practical matters. And he really set up some sort of welfare centres first, entirely privately with some funds which he collected, and later on however, he was employed by the Government of India again as Advisor in the NEFA, in between however, he had done a lot of anthropological work in areas such as Basta and he had written books like “Maria Murder and Suicide” etc. He was perhaps the greatest sort of anthropological idealist I had ever met, he was a very well-educated person with a very wide and broad outlook on life. And he was absolutely fascinated by tribal people and he collected for instance a great deal of their myths and epics etc. He also married twice tribal girls, one Gond girl and another later on, and then finally he lived in his last years in Assam and Shillong. He died relatively early, but not before he had made a very great contribution, not only to anthropological literature also in sort of inspiring people- for instance he had close contact with the Prime Minister Nehru, pundit Nehru - and I think that much of what had been done is due to the influence of Verrier Elwin who said we must protect tribal people, we must not think that they must be totally assimilated to the culture of the advanced sections of the population. So he had, I think he served a very healthy influence on the thinking of that generation of Indians like Nehru. Again, much of that has disappeared, but not completely because in the NEF, which is now called Arunachal Pradesh, in that territory, the situation of the tribals is far better than anywhere else. Because there is the so-called “Inner Line” Policy, namely a policy that there is a line drawn between the tribal areas and other parts of the country, in this case between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, and whereas the tribals cane move across that line, I mean can come out and go in again, outsiders - also Indians - are not allowed to cross that line without special permission from Government. The idea is to avoid what has happened for instance in Andhra Pradesh that so much tribal land falls into the hands of outsiders, that has not happened. The Apa Tanis for instance, they might have been overrun by people - because they have quite fertile rice land - if that had not happened, if they had not been protected. Also the Apa Tanis, when they then, after my first experience with them, they came into close contact with the Indian administration and with the people of Assam because Apa Tanis could go to Assam, when they started to develop, for instance, some trade with the rest of India - with Assam - they were not at once, they didn’t have to fight the competition of the ordinary trading castes, there were no money-lenders in there, so they could really develop in a modern way but, and also develop on their own. And there also the education which was then introduced was very successful, so that very many Apa Tanis got good education, first in their own area and then young people, promising young people were sent away to Indian universities. So you have now large number of Apa Tani graduates, and some in Civil Service, and Apa Tani Doctors and veterinary surgeons etc. There is hardly any other area in India where tribals are…have been as successful, and they have been successful because during the essential period of development they were protected from the competition with more advanced outsiders, so they could also become advanced. Being more or less left on their own, but yet given them, I mean they were given the possibilities for education, for development etc.
(0.35.59) [pan down]
Alan: Well thank you very much for explaining that. At this point you had done a lot of fieldwork in two different areas, which is more than most anthropologists have done, but you then came back from your administrative post here London to become Professor of Anthropology. At what date did you become Professor at The School of Oriental and African Studies?
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Christoph: Well, I came back, I was offered a job at The School of Oriental and African Studies in 1949, when then I left, I mean I resigned from my post at Hyderabad, and I felt that really that was not a period in India when a non-Indian could effectively work in quite a controversial position, namely having to do tribal administration is always controversial because there are always the vested interests who try to acquire tribal land, who try to exploit the tribals, so I think an outsider here in the present set-up in India could not effectively work. Apart from that, I though also from the point of view of my anthropological career, that 10 years continuously in India, most of it spent in fieldwork, were about enough, and that it was time to go back to a university, also to catch up with everything which has happened for 10 years in anthropological thinking and theory, so that position at The School of Oriental and African Studies seemed very attractive and I was able, then gradually, in the Department, the newly created Department of anthropology, to build up a type of interest in the areas in which I was interested and also expand my own field perhaps. The School of Oriental and African Studies has the great advantage that they were very research oriented and that meant that it was not necessary to wait for a sabbatical, one could quite often go to the field. So I was able, very soon after I has established this Department, not only to encourage my students and members of the staff etc., to spend a good deal of time in fieldwork, but also myself to go. And once, that was in 1953, when I had actually gone back to Andhra Pradesh to see what had happened to the Gonds, that was just the time that Nepal was opened for outsiders. Nepal which had always sort of interested me because I had worked a bit in the Eastern Himalayas among the Apa Tanis, Daflas etc., but Nepal seemed a wonderful field for anthropology but it had been closed at the time of the Rana rule. And only when the Rana rule came to an end was it possible for westerners and western anthropologists to work there.
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Alan: So in 1953 you went into an entirely, yet another, emerging territory so to speak, and spend a shortish time there, revisited in 1957 and at other times. Where did you go to work in Nepal?
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Christoph: Well I started with the Sherpas. At that time that particular area had become quite famous through the climbing of Mount Everest and also one had heard about the Sherpas, and I thought now after having been for so long in the tropical areas, I mean of South India, it would be very interesting as a contrast to go to an area of high altitude. Now the Sherpas live in valleys, in villages, from between 12-14,000 feet, and also I thought it would be very interesting to start in an area which was under Buddhist influence, I mean not only, they were actually Buddhist, of the Tibetan type of Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism. So I expected something totally different, and I think this is very important for anthropologists, not just to stick to one area. Of course, of which you can get the complete expertise admittedly, but the comparison of such people as different on the one hand the Chenchus, the Konyak Nagas and the Apa Tanis and so on, and then in Nepal I found the Sherpas who were of course, compared to the people like the Gonds, and so on, highly civilised people. Among the Sherpas, for instance, certainly more than 50% of the adults - particularly adult men - could read Tibetan because they needed that for their ritual performances in their Gompas. And then there were these interesting Buddhist monasteries. So it was something totally new. And so although I continued, and even now I usually spend some time of the year in the one or other area of my previous interest in India, actually since 1953 - certainly for about 10 years - I concentrated almost entirely on Nepal, and in the course of that, I walked really through the length and breadth of Nepal, and then found areas which seemed worthwhile of study so that I could encourage students of mine to go to those areas and do a much more detailed study than I had been able. But I did manage, not only to do some work on the Sherpas, and write a book on the Sherpas, a kind of first book…monograph on any people in Nepal.
(0.43.18)
Alan: what did you do then?
(0.43.20)
Christoph: Well while I was working among the Reddis I thought that I should know something about their neighbours too, and then I did a trip into Orissa, into the hills, the Eastern Ghats, where there were 2 tribes which had never been really described at that time, one is called Bondo and the other is Gadabas. The interesting thing is that they were quite different from anything I had seen in Hyderabad and they reminded me in a way of the Konyak Nagas. Linguistically, they also don’t really belong to the South and they don’t speak Dravidian languages but they speak Austro-Asiatic languages, and these Bondos and Gadabas they in some ways they have cultural similarities - I don’t think connections - but similarities to the people in the Northeast. And I found, I did not do a detailed study there, but they also for instance had a very developed megalithic culture, and they had - you mentioned before - youth dormitories, and similar institutions perhaps in a way as the Nagas. So I found that that was only a short interlude, but they were again something quite different from anything that I had seen before and of course they gave me some comparative material, rather than that I made a detailed study of them. I think that we can cut now and move back to the Sherpas.
(0.45.21)
Alan: Could I ask you, before we go look at the Sherpas themselves, I noticed that you dedicated your book on the Sherpas to your wife Elizabeth, and you mentioned her frequently and you said that she helped you gather the statistical data and she helped you in the medical work and so on. I was wondering if you could say something about her part in your anthropological fieldwork?
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Christoph: As soon as we got, my wife and I went to India, we were always together in the field and so she naturally took a very considerable interest in it. Indeed I mean there was nothing else, if you are married to an anthropologist and you are sitting among, in a little village, you obviously, either you go mad or you have to take an interest in the people you are living with. So, it is very difficult to say what the one or the other contributes. I mean I did the more sort of professional part of it, but she always was, made perhaps partly the public relations work, I mean she always treated anybody, people who work sick, had any problem, and distributed medicine and so on. So I think it was quite an important co-operation in the field and I think it is, I have the feeling that it is probably easier for two people who are not exactly doing the same. I think that couples who are both professional anthropologists, it is more difficult to work together in among the same people. If one is an anthropologist and the other is, looks at the people from a different, purely human sort of point of view, I think that works very well. Later on my wife of course, as you may know, went into anthropological bibliography, all those bibliographical works on the bibliography of South Asian anthropology.
(0.48.10)
Alan: You talk, since you are talking about fieldwork, many of the areas you went into were extremely remote and without any kinds of modern facilities, and what did you find the most difficult aspect of fieldwork? You mentioned, particularly among the Apa Tanis, the lack of privacy, the constant, being watched and being surveyed, even your private most private ablutions and so on were watched, and you gauged the age of the watchers by the height of the small holes they bored in the wall, was that the most difficult part of fieldwork?
(0.48.54)
Christoph: Well I think that is, if you are, come to people like the Apa Tanis who are very many people living in one area, so it’s a large population and they have never seen any outsider, and you are surrounded virtually during daylight hours by large crowds all the time, I think this is difficult. One gets used to that too. The other difficulty is I think purely, what shall I say, purely physical hardship, for instance the Chenchus, these people in Hyderabad there, hunters and gatherers who don’t produce anything that is very edible for you, nevertheless you have to move with them through the forest, you can’t really carry much with you. So there, I mean, and you live there more or less in the open because they have no houses, and well you can have a tent but in the Indian summer it’s simply the climatic difficulties and so on. I mean everything has its own advantages and disadvantages, I mean Nepal has the enormous advantage that the scenery is so beautiful and there are houses to live in etc., on the other hand, while you suffer from the heat in the Deccan in South India, the cold can be very troublesome too if you are travelling. I have just now been, about a month ago I was back among the Sherpas and even in the houses it was very often sub-zero temperatures.
(0.51.00)
Alan: We’re back in Nepal so perhaps I can ask you about Nepal and about the Sherpas further. What struck you most about living among the Sherpas, were there any features of their society which surprised you most?
(0.51.21)
Christoph: Let us say, which didn’t surprise me very much because I expected it, but features that I had previously not encountered, I mean I had no personal contact, for instance one was their marriage system - polyandry - and I was surprised to see that - polyandry which means that one woman has two or three husbands, that seemed to work so much better than polygamy - namely one man having 2 or 3 wives doesn’t seem to run as smoothly as one woman having 2 or 3 husbands. Now these are sort of little experiences that one has in a sense, you find what, something that you don’t expect.
(0.52.16)
Alan: Since many people are interested in polyandry and it is a special feature of that area, could you explain why you think (a) the system works so well and why it’s there at all? Is there any rational to it?
(0.52.29)
Christoph: I think it works well, perhaps that, perhaps one may say that on the whole men are a little less jealous than women are. Perhaps because, among the Sherpas particularly, these men have other interests in the sense they move about a great deal, they have to go with the yak up to the high altitude, someone needs to look after the house so it is quite useful if your wife is not alone in the house but your younger brother is there because he’s also married to her, that may be one of the reasons. But another is, I think in Indian families where there is polygamy, very often the women are jealous of each other for the sake of their children. If the son of one wife seems to be favoured by the husband, then the other wife gets jealous. Now that doesn’t happen in polyandry because nobody knows who the father is of the children, the children all belong to the brother, the husband, usually there are two brothers of a husband, together, so there is not that extra possibility of becoming jealous, because jealousy over the attention given by the husband to the children. But why, you may ask, how do I know it works better. Quite apart from the observation that there don’t seem to be many quarrels, I have never seen 2 men quarrelling, because sometimes in other polygamous societies you see the wives shouting at each other etc. But that in the folklore, legends and tales etc. of polygamous society there is very often the motive of the jealousy of the younger wife poisoning the elder wife, and the elder wife poisoning the younger wife etc. Now I have never found a single legend or story, fairytale, of the joint husbands being in conflict, so I thought that that might be a fairly good reason why one might say that it works more smoothly.
(0.55.23)
Alan: I wondered if you could say something about the economy of the Sherpas, when you first went there what was it?
(2.55.34)
Christoph: Well the economy of the Sherpas, indeed of other high altitude people, other Bhotia groups whom I then later on studied in a similar altitudes, the economy is based on the one hand on agriculture, although the period of cultivation of course is short, between May and September, the only time when this area is not under snow. So one part of the economy is agriculture, the other is animal husbandry and mainly the breeding of yak, and the third is trade because in these very high areas, without some kind of additional income the population really could not survive, so they have to also, apart from breeding yak and growing buckwheat and potatoes because much more you cannot breed at that altitude, so they also were kind of intermediaries between on the one hand the grain-growing areas of Nepal and on the other hand, Tibet. And they were placed favourably near the higher passes so they took the transported the grain from the lower areas into Tibet and they brought from Tibet such commodities as salt, mainly salt, and wool and various other things to Nepal. So they were really both agriculturists, and cattle breeders and traders, the difficulty arose of course when with the change of government in Tibet and the Chinese occupation of Tibet, for temporarily these frontiers were closed and then the Sherpas had to look for other sources of income and actually it just happened that tourism developed in Nepal and the Sherpas were able to make up for their shortfall by not only working for mountaineering expeditions but also becoming tourist guides. And that had really completely changed their whole social situation in the Sherpas area, in Khumbu, and the economy and as I have just mentioned, I very recently was in Khumbu and went back to the same Sherpas villages were I had worked in the 1950s and one can hardly recognise the society anymore because now the men who work as tourist guides, they are only spending about perhaps 2 or 3 months a year in their villages, the rest of the time they are in other parts of Nepal or in Kathmandu and so that the, certainly the social life is now no longer in balance in the villages, there are women and very old people and children and the able-bodied men are all away from there. It’s rather like the labour migration perhaps in Africa, so things have changed very much.
(0.59.26)
Alan: Yes, it is similar to quite a lot of those tribal groups with labour migration to the army.
(0.59.31) [zoom out]
Christoph: Yes for instance the Gurungs, whom you know so well, and where so many of them are in the Gurkha regiments in the British and Indian army.
(0.59.42)
Alan: Did you get to visit the Gurungs territories?
(0.59.44)
Christoph: Yes I did, indeed I think I was the first anthropologist who did a little trip through the Gurungs areas, and then it happened to be, you know the work of course of Pignede whom I met in Kathmandu, and I advised to go to the Gurungs which he did. But I never published on the Gurungs but I found them very interesting.