(0.00.05)
Alan: What other groups did you visit, you mentioned the Bhotias?
(0.00.12)
Christoph: Well after I had more or less, after I finished with the Sherpas, or let us say I had completed my work among the Sherpas I did a kind of exploratory tour through Eastern Nepal where I visited Rais and Limbus and the people of the Upper Arun and the Arunchung(?), and again in order to encourage students then to go these areas, in the West I did myself a little more intensive work among the Thakalis of Thak Khola. And then also visited Mustang which again is an area under Tibetan cultural influence which was very interesting, and then Dolpo, which is where the villages, the permanent settlements are even higher than Sherpas villages, I toured there. And then I made a fairly extensive, several quite extensive tours into Western and North-western Nepal, and again there for instance in Humla, I did some work on the Bhotia people, again on the closure of the Tibetan border, and made there some kind of study of the trade and the system of the trade, exchange of grain against salt etc. So it was mainly the areas in high altitude - which I had once done a bit of exploratory work among the Newars because nobody had worked there, but that was in my first visit.
(0.02.08)
Alan: You worked among these high-altitude peoples, many of whom were Buddhist or were influenced by Buddhism, and you noted among the Sherpas the very heavy influence of the monasteries, and the strong religious impulse. You don’t ever speculate, as I recall, why they should be so enthusiastic to set up monasteries and send so many nuns and monks.
(0.02.36)
Christoph: Well obviously one speculates but I can’t really have a very definite answer to that. I think the reason is that they are within the area of Tibetan Buddhism after all, they are, I mean they speak a Tibetan dialect, they undoubtedly, 300-400 years ago emigrated from Tibet into their present area of habitation across the border. So they brought already a Tibetan Buddhist civilisation with them, they continue to have close contact with Tibet, so they are really, it isn’t that they invented or decided to become Buddhist or were converted to Buddhism, they already came with that tradition and maintained that tradition by their constant contact with Tibetan monasteries and also trade with Tibet, now that had changed now because in Tibet monastic life has more or less been destroyed by the Chinese, but the interesting thing is that the Sherpa monasteries seem to flourish, and that is something that also for me is a bit of a problem. About 10 years ago I spent some time with the Sherpas and I was a little disturbed because then I found that the monasteries seemed to have declined, the intake of new novices etc. had come down. Now to my pleasant surprise I find that the monasteries that I knew, like Tambut(?), seemed to have revived and they have quite a lot of young novices and the influence of the monasteries is quite strong again, although everything else has changed in Khumbu. It may be that the greater prosperity which recently has come there through tourism and mountaineering, made it possible to divert some economic resources again to the monastery. I mean it is quite expensive to keep so many people who are not involved in the economic process in monasteries, I mean they feed them there. And that is of course, I mean that is easier for a society which is quite well-off, and that seems to have happened again.
(0.05.26)
Alan: Well Christoph, we’ve travelled with you round to ethnographic, well several ethnographic areas, and I wondered if now if we could talk more generally about your work, your approach to anthropology. Firstly, about the approach, the fieldwork approach. As you know some anthropologists spend all their life studying one small island in the Pacific and then use this as a basis for vast theoretical schemes, or maybe a better example would be one small tribal group in South America. Others, like yourself, travels very widely. How would you advocate one approach or the other, to widespread fieldwork or more detailed?
(0.06.28)
Christoph: Well I would say that I prefer and would also advise any student starting a career of anthropology to see various areas and not to concentrate on one or two only. I mean, I think its quite essential that you get used to work for a long period in one society, I did that for instance among the Gonds, I spend initially about 3 years there. And certainly if you do that, you get used to looking at all the details and you also realise that what you learn in the first 3 months you can largely discard, because as you go on, you learn more and more about that society. So I think that one should have once that experience, and it need not be 3 years, it is financially nowadays often impossible, on the other hand I think that it is very important to know many different societies - as different as possible - as different for instance Gonds and Sherpas, of Nepal or Chenchus and Nagas because then you realise that you just cannot generalise about human behaviour. And you can’t even say if you study an institution - let us say like polyandry - that polyandry is like that, because the polyandry of the Nairs of Malabar is quite different from the polyandry of among the Sherpas. So I think that it is really very important for an anthropologist to know a lot of different societies, and then there is of course another consideration too, I think as one gets older, I think you need continuously the stimulation of something new otherwise you can get very sort of, I wouldn’t say bored, but you can, if you do not get the stimulation, you, your appreciation diminishes. I mean I feel that now sometimes, only a few weeks ago, I went into Bihar to Ranchi, not to do anthropology but to visit a university, giving a talk etc., and I was taken around to some of the Munda villages, and I thought “My God, how lucky I don’t have to work there”. I really couldn’t sit down here and again study all the details, it’s seemed so familiar, not that I worked among the Munda, but similar to others, while if I go to something new, let’s say if I could start to do something in Bhutan which I have only visited twice but never worked, I think I would have this kind of stimulation of something new. Then there is of course another consideration, I think any anthropologist who spends a great deal of time in the field, let us say almost half of his working time, I think will almost more or less remain a better or worse ethnographer but basically an ethnographer, and somebody who aspires to be a theoretician, of the type of Levi-Strauss and so on, then he probably should only see one little society because then he hasn’t got material in front of him which will combat his theory, his conclusion, and he will be quite happy to spin this kind of lovely fantasy which you can create if you have a very narrow base and finally really do philosophy. Philosophy stimulated by some experience with one or two people, but which is very different from a sort of comparison of a dozen of different societies belonging to different cultures, like Tibetan Buddhists and Hindus and so on. So I think it depends on your own personality, what is good for one student of anthropology may be bad for the other.
(0.11.12)
Alan: Thank you. Well you advocated there a comparison in space as a basis for work. I wondered what you felt about a comparison in time, particularly the idea, which you seem to have practised, of revisiting again and again and again over long periods the same society, at least the same-named peoples, yet not always the same society. Do you feel that is something that is valuable?
(0.11.40)
Christoph: I think its extremely valuable. I am always amused if I let’s say I go to Kathmandu in Nepal, young man comes from Berkeley or Yale or whatever, and I ask him “what are you going to do”, “Oh, I’m going to study social change among the Newars”. He comes in 1982 or 1983, wants to study the change, the change from what because he hasn’t seen what there was 20 years ago. So I think that if you really want to study social change, you must allow a certain period to elapse to that you can see the stages of change. Now I think it is very revealing to go back to the same society, see a different generation, possibly also the same people and see how are they when they are 30 years older or 40 years older, because we don’t remain the same and so naturally Apa Tanis or Nagas and so on, don’t remain the same either. So I think this is very revealing and I think it’s quite important. I am always rather surprised that on the whole, relatively few anthropologists have done that. There are some who have, but the urge among senior anthropologists to go back to their old areas doesn’t seem to be very great. It is particularly noticeable for instance among Indian anthropologists who are so near and for them there is no expensive air fares and so on, they could easily monitor the development of one society over a long period, but it’s not done much. I think people find it perhaps a bit boring because they know what to expect. I don’t think it’s boring, it might be depressing because you go back and you find they were much better off 20 years ago and now they are worse off, or they are very depressing people who were beautifully dressed in their original dress and now you always see them in jeans and bush shirts. But even that of course is an observation which is relatively perhaps important if we talk about, even diffusion, diffusion of western customs, diffusion of western dress, of all that. And then we have the possibility of seeing it with your own eyes, so I think this is important. Of course one factor is that one has to live long enough, and you can’t say that somebody who dies at 35 will go back, in his next reincarnation perhaps.
(0.14.35)
Alan: I wondered, in fact, if you thought that if you hadn’t made earlier visits, for example, I mean, you are a very good person to test this, if you hadn’t visited the Sherpas as one of the first people to have visited the Sherpas, or the Apa Tanis or the Nagas, you were always the first in all these cases. If you had in fact been a modern anthropologist who had gone there 30, 20 years later, do you think that given the absence of historical records you could have recreated by oral history or any other means, what the society had been like, 20-30 years before?
(0.15.13)
Christoph: I would think you could not have done that. Because certainly, for instance Sherpas society, has now changed so much. Of course, certain features like the clan system or inheritance, things like that, but you couldn’t have got the sort of atmosphere, you couldn’t have re-found or found at all, discovered at all, the kind of spirit of the society. Similarly, for instance, among the Chenchus, I mean I still saw them when they were hunters and food-gatherers. Today they are still gatherers, but they don’t gather for their own consumption, they gather for contractors, and they gather forest produce which is then used by pharmaceutical industries. So, both are gathering societies but they are quite different. So I think, what, anything, any society we don’t study today, a tribal society, relatively simple, a society which was isolated, you can’t say it can’t be done now, but perhaps there is no particular hurry, it could be done in 20 years. Therefore, this I think is an argument when anthropologists have to fight for funds, competing perhaps with archaeologists. Now, archaeologists they can wait whether they dig out something which has been there for 10,000 years or 500 years, that can be dug out and studied any time, while the anthropologist who doesn’t study the society now, he cannot do it in 30 years time. I mean he can still do a study but then it’s something totally different.
(0.17.23)
Alan: This fact that you were the first in many of these societies and that you did detailed studies makes these studies very very valuable, nearly as records of civilisations which have now disappeared, many of them very early forms of society as you explained, therefore I wondered if I could ask you about what in fact you collected in the way of a record and what recording there is, in other words the fieldwork techniques you used. When you first went to the field there were no movie cameras or tape recorders, but did you just have notebooks or diaries, did you take still photographs?
(0.18.09)
Christoph: From the very beginning I always took still photographs and I took quite a lot of photographs, always. So that of course, these records are in existence now. Then I had always hardback reporter diaries, and they still, not diaries, ordinary for current fieldwork, I also had large diaries, also hardback, where I wrote every evening a diary, but otherwise these reporter notebooks, they are still in existence now, and so even those notes which I did not use, for instance we talked before that I did some work among Bondos and Garabas, also Asiatic-speaking people in Orissa. Now I didn’t do, I didn’t publish much about them, I think 2 articles, but the notebooks are there and I recently went back to the same village after 40 years and the people said “Oh yes, can you remember you camped under those trees there” and then of course when you go back it is absolutely invaluable if you have your, let’s say the house list, when I went now to Sherpas village Khumjung, 92 houses, now I took my old notebook with me. And I said “what had happened to (?), what had to happened to (?), what had happened to his son”, because I had all that there. So I could in a very rapid time, I mean very rapidly, I could reconstruct so to say, what had happened in between to those families. So it’s very important to keep your notebook and not to keep to keep your notes on loose pieces of paper or type it out and on loose, you have to have something which is fairly solid because none of us are so terribly careful with pieces of paper, but if you have it in solid notebooks and then diaries of course, you can then keep it over a long period. Whether it is then very useful for other people in maybe in 50 or 100 years time, I mean if it is kept in a library, an archive, maybe useful. I doubt whether anybody would be very interested reading such things after 10 years, although I have when I suggested to students, my own students to go to a particular place in Nepal, I usually leant them my notebooks for a few weeks so that they could take note of that and knew what might be interesting and for what they may look. So that is one thing. Otherwise I think that the method of fieldwork probably cannot be taught because everybody has slightly different ways of approaching people. There are certain features which I think is important: when you come to a village or any kind of group of people, I think you have to go and spend the first weeks on the boring job of making lists of the houses and finding out who is who and how are they linked and how do they fit together. I think that you must have because as your fieldwork goes on, and things happen in the village, you can always ask “who is that” and then you can put them into that slot, it belongs to this family, this clan etc. That is important, therefore it is (?) when one gets used to it for instance, I worked in India and they were always societies which have unilineal descent, I mean either patrilineal or matrilineal, then I went over to the Philippines, only for some comparative work, there they haven’t got that you see, there is no unilineal descent, it is all sort of bilateral, so you can’t, it is very difficult then when you are used to doing it one way then to switch over to quite a different way, because there you can’t easily find out how is A related to B and X and so on, because they don’t belong to the same clan, they have totally different and complicated network, so therefore I think it’s quite complicated if you move to something totally different.
(0.23.12)
Alan: That is very helpful for people who are going to go out to do fieldwork, I wondered if there was any other advice, looking back over your fieldwork, which you would give to a young fieldworker who was going out to work?
(0.23.21)
Christoph: I think perhaps the most important advice is not to go with preconceived ideas and think “now I must find out data to prove the theory of Professor so and so” because I am very interested in that theory, and also not only interested, I think that is a marvellous approach to anthropology and so on, so I must find material which will prove that theory or fit in. I think this is, I think you must allow your theory to come out of your material, I think you must go knowing obviously as much as you can about that part of the world, that those societies, I mean if you go to one Naga tribe, if you read the books about neighbouring tribes, obviously, but not to go with preconceived ideas that you want, just study one particular part of that culture, in to follow up one specific theoretical line. Later on when you have all your material, then of course you can do that, but I think it is very essential to come with a sort of very, to have a very broad approach. Of course you must have a reasonable time to sort of learn about all aspects of a society or culture, but I think this is a piece of advice I would give to anybody.
(0.25.13)
Alan: You mentioned the hard and strong and durable notebooks, and also that you took a lot of photographs. Did you use any other recording devices, like tape recorders or movie cameras?
(0.25.19)
Christoph: Yes. Movie cameras I used very early, already in 1940. I didn’t have a movie camera among the Nagas when I was there in 1936, then I could have, they were not so light and easy to handle, but I could but I didn’t. But then I had a movie camera in 1940 and did quite a lot of films, and I think this is after all a very useful way of documenting because whatever you see and write, it’s quite different from when you see people moving. Also if there is some complicated ritual, if you can, if you can actually take a film of it you can actually see what is happening, what the sequence is. And in that respect, for instance, I found the help of my wife very useful because I was taking the film and she in the was meanwhile doing, I mean describing, I mean taking notes and so on. For one person this is rather difficult. So, then of course there is the question of tape recording. Tape recorders came in much later than film cameras, tape recorders I didn’t have in all my early work and that was a great handicap for instance when I was recording the mythology and epics and so on of the Gonds because it took endless to transcribe it all by longhand, to, in their language which is difficult enough, to listen to it and write and you would have to interrupt the narrator all the time. While with a tape recorder you can it down and you can play it to your informant and get the translation of the individual sentences. So that, I found also tape recorders also very useful to record a conversation with somebody who is quite voluble and who talks, who tells you a lot, but you can’t always take it down.
(0.27.51)
Alan: Christoph, you said that in justification of taking a whole lot of different societies in different cultural regions and religions and so on, one of the justifications was that it prevented you from making any rash generalisations about human nature and so on. And this fits in with one of the roles of anthropologists which is to show that almost everything is culturally determined and that almost nothing is natural. I wondered whether you could say something about 2 of the distinguished lectures which you gave and which were subsequently published, in relation to general concepts. The first was the Henry Myers Lecture on Concepts of Sin, and I wondered what your main conclusions from looking at sin and the concept of sin in the tribal belief systems was.
(0.28.55)
Christoph: Well this is a very wide subject but I could only say that it confirmed me that different societies have very different concepts about morality, and that the very idea of sin in the Christian way, for instance, or in the Islamic way, is absent among many societies. Because in a society where for instance, the gods, as nearly every society has some ideas of supernatural beings, gods, deities, well they don’t really take very much interest in human morality. Obviously, there is not the concept of sin in the Christian way, this is an offence vis a vis the deity. So that I think came out of this comparative work quite clearly.
(0.30.01)
Alan: Did you find any correlation between a concept of sin and the idea that doing something would automatically anger some supernatural powers, any correlation between that and the type of society, in other words that very simple tribal societies, like the Chenchus, didn’t have a concept of sin and yet stratified, settled, agriculturalists did, or did you find any correlation like that or not?
(0.30.37)
Christoph: I would say no, nothing very obvious. I think one would have tried perhaps to look at many more societies and find out whether some correlation could be found. That you could do in a littlish study, I mean go to all of them, but I don’t think so. I think perhaps the way to come to very complex societies, sophisticated societies, there it’s more likely that there is a correlation because there is the idea that if you in some way offend a supernatural being or deity, it’s perhaps something you would also offend some authority in your own society. But on the other hand, I think for instance if you take, even a society like Hindu society, which is quite obviously extremely sophisticated with a complicated philosophy, the very idea of evil in the Christian sense does really hardly occur, there is no sort of figure of Satan, and yet you cannot say that Christian society is more sophisticated than Hindu society. I think it’s very difficult to, one need perhaps be a philosopher of religion to say something very definite about this. But I think it’s very worthwhile to do this comparisons.
(0.32.30)
Alan: Having shown that there is no indigenous concept of sin, they are subjects which many anthropologists including Robert Hertz(?), who you mentioned, was interested in, connected to this was the subject of your Frazer Lecture at Cambridge on the “Afterlife in Indian Tribal Belief” because obviously the idea of sin is very related to your ideas of what happens to you after your death, particularly in Christian eschatology. Did you, what were the main features of the concepts of afterlife which you found in, particularly in the Nagas, and Apa Tanis and the other tribals groups you worked with?
(0.33.14)
Christoph: The interesting thing is that certain concepts, for instance, would be within a culture area which I think Apa Tanis and Nishes and Nagas are, there would be certain similarities, even if the tribes are otherwise not so similar. So certain motives you would probably find. But again we have here the question: “what produces good results for the life after death?” And, take for instance, the neighbours of the Apa Tanis, the Nishes, because there is particularly clear. If you have killed many people, if you have married many wives, if you have taken slaves, if you have been successful in war, all the things which are not considered particularly good in our society, our Christian society, then you have a better chance in the next life because you did something which was admired on this earth, in this world, and would be also admired in the next world. While the person who didn’t do any of these things would be a sort of considered of no importance. So I think there is great difference between a society like western society where the idea is that your fate in the next world is not necessarily the same as here, if you acquired a great deal of wealth among the Apa Tanis you would have a great deal of wealth in the next world. Here, if you gave away your wealth or didn’t acquire much, so that is a kind of promise for perhaps you are rewarded for the things you didn’t have, in tribal society where the next life is really a repetition of this life, you will live again as you were living in this life. I mean the big man will be a big man, the slave will be a slave etc. These are the differences.
(0.35.50)
Alan: One of the main features you found was that, as Durkheim might have predicted, the afterlife was almost an exact, a direct reflection of this world. Even down to the physical details of the afterworld. Whereas in more, in different systems, it’s often an inversion of this world or it has no relation to this world at all. Well, was that the case in the Himalayan, the Nepalese areas you worked in as well, or was that just?
(0.36.27)
Christoph: Of course, in the Nepalese areas where I was working was very much influenced by Buddhism. Whether they were actually like the Sherpas, just sort of Tibetan Buddhists with all the concepts of Buddhism, or whether they were only influenced, nevertheless there was very much the idea of you gain(?) married, and if you have gain(?) married which is very much like the sort of Christian type of married, by leading a good life and doing charity, and doing all those things, then you will have a better chance in the next life, either having a good reincarnation or going towards the paradise in the western world etc. So there I think it was very clear that the ideas were influenced by one of the great historic religions, and I think wherever that is, now the Apa Tanis are getting a bit confused because some of their students have gone to universities like Shillong and Gauhati etc., where there are Christian Khasis and Christian Assamese and so on, so they hear a bit about that. And among the Apa Tanis there was the idea that the good, I mean the desirable life, is in an underworld where everything is as it was on this life and if you, not because of sins, but if you died of an accidental death, drowning, being killed in war or eaten by a tiger or something like that, then you go up into a sky-world which is not so desirable. Now these people who have seen Christian pictures of heaven with clouds and also pictures of hell down below, they get confused of course, and one elderly Apa Tani said to me “I’m not so sure whether I really want to go down into the underworld, I think perhaps in the life in the sky may be, among the clouds, may be better”.
(0.39.02)
Alan: Could I turn from that afterlife aspects to, you wrote a book on Morals and Merit, which was drawing together many of these features and you had a chapter on the morality of war and vengeance discussing the Naga morality and the blood-feud and what you talked about in relation to the Daflas. There seems to be a very strong contrast between two of the areas you worked in anyway, the Dafla/Naga area where you get a lot of war, vengeance, blood-feud and honour an esteem emerges from killing, and the Sherpas/Bhotia area where you might have predicted, one might have predicted from other anthropological areas like the Pathan area or the Atlas of North Africa, that pastoral peoples living in the inhospitable mountain terrain, away from central government and so on, might also have been violent, sheep or yak-stealing and vengeance-filled, as in other parts of the world, yet you describe them as, I think, very peaceful. I wondered whether you could say something about the contrast between the mentality and the social organisation of these two areas and why you think that it might be why one is so peaceful?
(0.40.36)
Christoph: I think that this would definitely be the influence of Tibetan Buddhism. That they are so, that the mild person is admired, and that the person who acquires merit by being nice to people, I mean where killing even of animals is considered as sinful. So I think even if these people were perhaps a bit war-like before, I think they probably were, under that dominating influence of Buddhism, I think they became what we might say was better in a sense, they had much more regard for the other person. That they also they had the idea that it would be evened out in the next life, it was not necessary for instance, to take revenge here, because the person who has harmed other people, he would suffer in his next existence. I think it may be that.
(0.41.50)
Alan: Could it also be related, if you, if one was more economically deterministic, to the different economic systems in that in the north Assam is really a pocket with mountains round it with very little traffic and trade through it, and it’s forest-cultivating societies, and it’s usually in these forest areas that you find very considerable head-hunting and warfare and vengeance, whereas one of the features of a trading people, like the people along the Himalayan areas, if you engage in too much vengeance, blood and so on, your trade tends to decline, because people can’t move around, they can’t move through your territories. Do you think that a combination of Buddhism and the need to maintain quite amicable relations over long-distances?
(0.42.46)
Christoph: That may be something, but on the other hand you have the situation of the Pathans who are pretty fierce in vengeance etc. who also had some trade and indeed depended on some trade. So a similar economy does not necessarily mean similar attitudes over such matters and altogether I once did a comparative study because the Nagas have sometimes been compared with the hills tribes of northern Luzon in the Philippines, and indeed so much in the material culture is so similar in these two areas. So many people had seen the Nagas, and many people had seen the Ifugaos etc. in the Philippines, but there was no one person who had seen both so I thought well it’s not so far, I will go and spend a few months among these, they were also head-hunters etc. in the Philippines, and really I mean the economy and the material culture down to textiles and irrigated rice on terraces were so similar. I would say if I had been dropped there by a helicopter I would have thought “I am in a Naga village, I don’t know which Naga village, it looks so”, so all that was true, it was so similar. Then I came down to the social systems, and attitudes etc. Totally different. You couldn’t imagine 2 systems, I mean the succession into the family, and the bilateral system and so on - totally different. So that really gave me the idea that societies can have almost the identical economies, they can have almost the identical material cultures, but for reasons we can’t really understand, they are quite different in their social attitudes.
(0.45.16)
Alan: Yes. I wondered if I could end up by just asking you about one or two other people whose works you refer to or knew. Firstly, Brian Hodgson who was, as you know, British Resident in Kathmandu and whose works you must have seen. Could you just say something about Brian Hodgson.
(0.45.35)
Christoph: Well of course he died a long time ago, so I have no personal experience of him, but I think anybody who has worked on Nepal admired him for having been virtually the first who had attempted some kind of linguistic and some kind of ethnological work there. I mean his early writings, they are quite important and he was one of the few people who could go outside the Nepal valleys sometimes, so I think he is an important figure. But we hadn’t really, we don’t know much about his personality as far as I know. I have never seen anything which would be diaries which would show his character. So one can only say that he was obviously one of those highly scholarly British officials, as they were in that period quite a number, who made a basic contribution, but more I really wouldn’t dare to say.
(0.46.47)
Alan: Thank you. The next person is not an anthropologist, but is a plant collector who is very widely esteemed now, one of the earliest explorers in the region, that is Kingdom Ward, who was buried in Granchester near Cambridge here. I wonder if you knew Kingdom Ward?
(0.47.00)
Christoph: I knew him quite well because I met him socially at the Royal Geographic Society and so on. He was a very pleasant person and he had of course a wide experience, particularly in areas which interested me, like in NEFA and he had travelled there in areas which are of considerable interest to anthropologists. He must have been a really intrepid traveller and it must have been very difficult to keep really pace with him because I think he undertook these travels with very little equipment and he was very tough. And he wrote very well, I mean his book, for example, “Assam Adventures”, it very vividly written and I found it quite interesting because he mentions things he saw on the Tibetan side of people who were very similar to tribals I saw on the Indian side and it seemed to be quite similar and so on. So he had very good sort of power of observation without being an anthropologist. But he was a remarkable man, there is no doubt about it.
(0.48.36)
Alan: I think that would be a very good epitaph for you as well Christoph, as we are ending, a remarkable man who is an intrepid traveller and who wrote books of great power and interest. Thank you very much indeed for speaking to us.