Wendy James interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 15th May 2009

0:09:07 Born in Timperley, Cheshire, in 1940; my parents were based in Rochester, Kent, where my father was a secondary school teacher; my mother had returned to her natal family for my birth; I was her first child; after I was born my mother returned to Rochester but it was an insecure area because the Second World War was starting and the shipyards and docks were being bombed; my father's school was evacuated to South Wales; we all moved to a tiny place in the Valleys; the problem of accommodation meant all the children and teachers had to find lodgings with the local population and as a newborn baby I was not very welcome; my parents decided that my mother should take me to Westmorland where she became an assistant to an old friend, Fay Henderson, who had a vegetarian guest house in the Lake District; by 1941 my mother and I were based there

2:04:13 My father's family a few generations back had been farmers in central Wales and his great-grandfather had spoken Welsh; the family had gradually moved southwards to the coastal areas of South Wales and the men married English-speaking women; my father did not speak Welsh but had a slight accent; his father was the chief gardener in the city of Penarth and laid out public gardens there that you can still see; my father was brought up as a strong rationalist agnostic; after graduating from Cardiff he did a master's degree in chemistry at Imperial College, London and then went into teaching; he was a very important influence on me in that he loved travelling; as a young man before marriage he spent a year in Canada and used to describe it as the best year of his life; later he made a point of travelling as much as he could especially to the tropics; he spent some time seconded to Makerere University College in Uganda in the mid-1950s, by which time I was a teenager; I found my father's stories and pictures of Africa very exciting; I don't know much about my father's family; he was regarded as a strange child because aged eleven he decided that he would no longer eat meat; as he got older he joined the Vegetarian Society; in those days they were very active and held Summer camps; it was at such a camp that my parents met; my mother in an equally important way has been an influence on me, partly because of the vegetarian connection through her family; I am a fourth-generation vegetarian through the matriline; both my mother's parents came from Quaker pacifist backgrounds; my mother's father was a chartered accountant in Manchester; he had quite a large firm and other members of the family were associated with it; my mother was the eldest of four children, and one of her brothers became a partner in the same firm; Manchester was a much more important family centre than South Wales for me; during the War my father moved up to Westmorland and we all lived in Grasmere; my parents bought the friend's guest house in 1943; my father got a job at the local Grammar School in Ambleside and became a science teacher there, while my mother built up the guest house, Beck Allans, which was right in the middle of Grasmere; in 1947 my father began to teach in Workington, in a technical school, and commuted there on a weekly basis; he then got a job at Rossall, an independent boarding school near Fleetwood; by about 1949 an old friend of his, Tom Jarman, who was already established in the Institute of Education at Bristol University, suggested my father apply for a job there and he was appointed; my mother was making a great success of the guest house and my parents had bought another called Rothay Bank (now the Rothay Garden Hotel); it was a large nineteenth-century family house and was where my brother Brian and I grew up; my mother eventually sold Beck Allans but then bought other smaller places for guests; my widowed grandmother from Manchester came to join us in Grasmere

9:21:16 I first went as a day-girl to a boarding school in Ambleside - Fairfield P.N.E.U. - where they put tremendous emphasis on literature; I remember that each term we had to learn two poems and two sections of the Bible and recite them at the end of term to a panel of staff; this emphasis has stood me in good stead ever since; we had a rapid turnaround of teachers there because a lot were student teachers from Charlotte Mason College; I started there in 1944 and stayed until I was eleven; meanwhile my father had become chief examiner for the 11+ examinations across Wiltshire and Gloucestershire from his base in Bristol; at this time he was commuting on a half-termly basis to the Lake District; he used me as a sort of guinea pig for improving the 11+ I.Q. test; by the time I had taken it myself he allowed me to mark them, which would be quite illegal today; I used to get 3d per paper; he used to encourage me to think in ways that opened my mind to the rest of the world; he had a telescope and would take us into the garden to look at stars; climbing the fells was also a great love of his

11:57:24 I suddenly became conscious of the Lake poets; we knew that all the guests were wanting to look at Dove Cottage and daffodils, and it always seemed a bit of a bore; in about 1950 which was the centenary of Wordsworth's death there were special celebrations; at Fairfield we had a reading of parts of the 'Prelude' illustrated by tableaux and I do remember being a young Wordsworth; I got a prize at that time signed by one of the Wordsworth family; by 1951 my father was established in Bristol and was beginning to plan various trips abroad, seconded from the university; I then moved from Fairfield to the local Grammar School, Kelsick, in Ambleside; my parents both thought it would be better for me than staying on at Fairfield; as my father had once taught there, he knew the school and some of the teachers; that was the place where I was very much influenced by individual teachers; Walter Annis who lived in Windermere was the moving force behind the Kelsick Field Club; he organized trips, not only up the Lake District fells, but also to Derbyshire, South Wales, the Brecon Beacons; it was on a trip to the latter that I first came to Oxford as a teenager; we also went to Stratford and saw 'As you Like It' with Peggy Ashcroft; the school also took us abroad to Switzerland, so I had an outward-looking, outdoor experience from the school; there was also a lively dramatic society and I appeared in various productions; my love of the stage goes back to a performance by the Grasmere Players [in 1952]; Mr Hildrew, the producer, invited me to be Puck [in 'Midsummer Night's Dream']; it was performed in a garden with large trees, and the audience sat in the gravelled entrance area; it was very atmospheric and I remember my first entrance was jumping down from a tree; at the time the painter, Claude Harrison, was in the audience and one of his early paintings was inspired by that performance; my mother was going round the Lake Artists’ Exhibition the following year and saw an oil painting of a forest with strangely gnome-like figures; she recognized me and bought the painting and we still have it to prove my interest in acting at an early age

18:41:19 I went to piano lessons but never did very well; I was a bit scared of my teacher who was a refugee who had come to live in Grasmere; he used to try and make me sing and I have always been a bit shy of doing that; I did go to ballet lessons and my first ambition was to be a ballerina; I took a whole series of exams and was working towards an advanced series when I fell doing high-jump at school and tore the cartilage in one knee; that put an end to that career although later, as an undergraduate, I joined the ballet club in Oxford; I love listening to live music but I can't say that it has been more than that; I have a fairly passive interest in classical music; later, as an anthropologist in the field, I made an effort to try and hear the patterns of African music but I have never been much of an expert

21:35:00 My mother was brought up as a participating Quaker but she had lapsed by the time we settled in the North; she did take me to the Meeting House in Hawkshead sometimes but it was never forced; when I came up Oxford we had some friends who encouraged me to go to the Meeting House there, and I went a few times, but I don't claim to be an observant; I am agnostic verging on atheist but I can understand the richness and appeal of religious practice, especially when it becomes a matter of ingrained habit and perspective; I am interested in how that has shaped what we take human beings to be; in 'The Ceremonial Animal' I try to break down the Durkheimian dualism of sacred and profane as I have always tried to break down the dichotomy between society and individual, which I see as a connected field of patterned interaction; I see degrees of what Wittgenstein famously identified as ceremoniality in everything we do; we are having a structured encounter now but even an informal conversation has an element of ceremoniality about it because it is placed in a much wider context of expectation; in the context of religious ceremony, the deep emotional engagement which individuals can establish, there is the same quality of what human beings are capable of in terms of passion and emotion that one finds in ordinary life, but much deeper and more condensed; in 'The Ceremonial Animal' I try to draw out that argument; if one is to ask the root questions of the nature of humanity as a species it must lie somewhere in that quality of art, where in every action we are engaged in something wider than what is evident to a naive observer; that is why I am interested in the image of the stage and the artifice that lies behind ordinary behaviour; I like Kirsten Hastrup's book 'Anthropology in the Company of Shakespeare' in this context

28:56:18 At school I was best at maths and English which I took at 'A' level, together with geography; I took scholarship exams in English; I did not do particularly well in geography but I wanted to travel; teachers were keen that I tried for Oxbridge which meant staying on for a third year; I did not satisfy the Cambridge entry requirements as I did not have an appropriate science subject to do geography; Oxford did not mind as long as I had the required Latin so I applied there; John Mander, the son of the Headmaster, was already at Oxford but this was not a school where people were groomed for entrance exams; I did these in the Headmaster's study in his house and got an Exhibition at St Hugh's; I had already heard about Marjorie Sweeting the geographer at St Hugh's, and that it was a good college for geography; by the time I was accepted I had done one term of the third-year sixth; by this time my father was in the Caribbean on secondment to the University College of the West Indies; my mother, who had spent some time working for the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the mid-thirties, suggested I should learn German and go to Germany as she still felt that help was needed there; I started to learn German but then my father wrote from Trinidad to say that he had found a school that needed a geography teacher, and suggested I go there; this was a wonderful idea which I accepted; by the time I left England my father was in Jamaica were I went first; in those days air travel was very special so I went by a banana boat; I spent a week with my father in Jamaica and then went by another boat to Trinidad; there I taught geography in Bishop Anstey High School for Girls in Port of Spain; I stayed with the family of a sixth form student; while there I took the girls on trips; one was to a forest area where they grew cocoa which was very different from the towns and the sugar growing areas; people there were very reminiscent of West African forest dwellers; I then came up to Oxford in the Autumn of 1959; I wrote a short dissertation on Trinidad; Marjorie Sweeting, my main tutor in college, was a geomorphologist with the reputation of having explored limestone caves all over the world; my interests were much more on the human side of geography; during the first year I discovered the subject of anthropology through lectures at the Pitt Rivers Museum by Audrey Butt and Ken Burridge; week by week we would look at various groups; I remember Audrey Butt lecturing on the Nuer; I thought the subject interesting; back home in the Lake District I bought 'Teach Yourself Anthropology' and found I was most interested in the family and kinship systems of Australian Aborigines; also remember going to the bookshop in Grasmere to order a copy of Evans-Pritchard's 'Social Anthropology'; Kelsick had wanted to give me a prize and wondered what book I wanted so I asked for this; I fell in love with E-P's writing and with anthropology; in the Summer vacation of 1961 I went to East Africa; this was through following up contacts made by my father at Makerere, but by now I had also met many African students in Oxford; this was a boom time for foreign students from Africa and Asia where there were new universities but without graduate facilities; there were many student societies including the Africa Society, which doubled itself up to become two, the East African and West African Societies; as many of the former colonies were becoming independent there were parties everywhere; friends suggested I visit their families in East Africa; I managed to arrange to spend the Summer of 1961 mainly in Tanganyika; I passed through Uganda and Kenya seeing friends; I had arranged to have a part-time teaching job at Machame Girls Secondary School on the slopes of Kilimanjaro; I hired a little car so that every week I could go up to the school, teach for two or three days, then come down to the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union which was the centre of social life in Moshi town; I had a room there and from that base I gathered material for my undergraduate dissertation on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro; I would drive around and talk to people, extending my own networks to people growing bananas and coffee; I visited some Greek farmers who were still there though the land was in the process of being nationalized by Nyerere's government; Tanganyika had not yet got independence but there was euphoria in the air, it was an exciting time to be there; this experience confirmed me in my ambition to change from geography to anthropology; in early 1962 I made my application to come to the Institute of Social Anthropology; remember being interviewed by Evans-Pritchard and I was accepted and following on from my existing support from Westmorland County Council got a State Studentship

44:07:15 I had already met the brothers Lienhardt at the Colonial Services Club in South Parks Road; remember Godfrey saying that I should do anthropology; in fact he became my first tutor for the Diploma in Anthropology; it was not social anthropology in those days so we spent quite a bit of time at the Pitt Rivers Museum; I think I was one of the last generation to see Beatrice Blackwood demonstrating there; we also had classes with Geoffrey Harrison, looking at blood spots on slides and seeing if we could taste grapefruit; it was a happy time working as a graduate student; St Hugh's was good for me as an undergraduate but it was only as a graduate in anthropology that I felt I was becoming part of the main stream of the University; Godfrey was a wickedly inventive, gnome-like character, who wouldn't let you just close a conversation but would always jump in and continue it; he never complained of being tired, was always in excellent health, never ate much, but had a terrific appetite for talking and gossip; I rate highly his book on Dinka religion; it is not condescending in any way; as a Catholic convert when he went to the field, any anthropological condescension had gone; there was an acceptance on equal terms of the capacity of the Dinka for spirituality and wisdom which you don't find in most other books of that kind; I did not know Evans-Pritchard very well personally; I respected him enormously for his writings on Africa and his insights; remember as an undergraduate when I was secretary of the Joint Action Committee against Racial Intolerance, we invited him to give us a talk; he replied rather negatively but a friend suggested we asked John Beattie instead, who agreed; I felt a bit nervous about E-P after that; after my first term's tutorials with Godfrey he suggested I went to E-P for the next term; it was quite formal, he would suggest a topic which I would write on and then read in the tutorial; the third term I went to Rodney Needham; at that time I didn't quite understand how ambitious he was but he was meticulous and extremely focussed in his notion of what the subject was about; one day when it was hot he suggested going for a walk in the park; he upset me by asking me about the social structure of the Masai; I had mistakenly started to mention pastoralism but then tried to talk about age sets; he then asked me if I was really planning to be an anthropologist, and did I not intend to get married; I told him that I had recently avoided getting married and didn't intend to do so in the near future; after this encounter I went home and cried; soon after we had the exams and he was one of the examiners with Ken Burridge; I made a stupid mistake; we had objects put out in front of us and had to say what they were; one was an ostrich-eggshell belt which I mistakenly said was from Australia rather than the Kalahari; however, I was allowed to continue and Needham was my internal examiner for my B.Litt. thesis; it was on representations of animals; at that time we had been blown over by Lévi-Strauss; I even had a copy of 'La Pensée Sauvage' with some violets pressed in the front which Godfrey Lienhardt had picked for several of us as we were walking down the road to take the Diploma exams; when it came to the B.Litt. exam I remember Needham noting that I claimed to be influenced by the works of Lévi-Strauss but said he failed to see anything in my thesis to show this; much later on when I was given a post at the Institute he was not happy with my appointment; he made life difficult for a number of my generation

57:08:13 During the B.Litt. year [1963-4] I started looking for money to do field research for a D.Phil.; I wanted to go back to Africa and made various applications for grants and research attachments; it was a time when the research funds which had supported so much anthropological work in the colonial period were drying up, at the same time as the number of anthropologists was rising; in the Institute we were encouraged to think of ways of doing fieldwork either by taking employment or by other means as there were not enough research funds to go round; a job was advertised in the University of Khartoum and E-P suggested I apply for it; both Godfrey and Peter agreed; I applied, there was an interview in London and I was offered the job and accepted; by the following September I was in Khartoum University on a lectureship; it was a time when universities were expanding, especially in Africa; in Sudan it was a time of optimism and euphoria; it was not thought that things would get so bad in terms of civil war as has happened since; there was a feeling of working together - Sudanese, British and other colleagues - trying to make academic life suitable for the glorious future of the country; while I was teaching there I was able to do field research which had been part of the understanding from the beginning; our Department of Social Anthropology and Sociology had a grant from the Ford Foundation to which members of staff could apply to do field research; I didn't go off on my own straight away though I had experience of going with another colleague and some students in the first few months to Port Sudan where the authorities had asked us as a department to supply them with some reports on the state of the slums; I was not yet committed to anything in particular so I did undertake to do that and one of my senior colleagues helped me get started