Second Part

0:09:07 My interests were in East Africa rather than the Arabic-speaking Northern Sudan; research in Southern Sudan was not possible because of civil war and I began to realize that Northern Sudan was not just Arabic-speaking, but full of all kinds of linguistic diversity; I thought at first I might go to the Nuba Hills; Ian Cunnison who was head of department discouraged me for various reasons, one being that Jim Farris was coming to the department particularly to work in that area; I decided to make a preliminary trip to the southern part of the Blue Nile following which I decided to work there; I had a five-year contract with the University and used vacations and periods of research leave to continue my work; I decided to focus on a particular language group - Uduk - partly because they had had missionaries and as a result there were language materials including primers for children to learn their own language; I was able to hire a young person, Shadrach Peyko Dhunya [whose school had been closed because of the war in the south] to help me with the language; we used a tape recorder to create a language course that allowed me to work on my own; he later managed to continue his schooling in Khartoum and during termtime we would meet at weekends to work on translations; when I left the Sudan in 1969 and came back to Oxford it was then that I wrote up my D.Phil.

3:17:10 The question was forming in my mind while I was in Khartoum University teaching; if you live and work in a country you get to know the place in a more rounded way than if you simply arrive in some rural society and study it; I was aware of links between the remoter areas and the centre, and the complications of living in an insecure zone close to the edge of a war, as it was at that time; the missionaries had recently been deported because they were blamed for the war in the south; one could not have done a closed ethnographic study of the Uduk-speakers; arriving in such a marginal place you are aware of different languages and disturbed history; very soon after I started this work I knew that I would have to take a much more historical line than many colleagues were taking at that time; the very first thing that I wrote up and published was a comparison between what informants told me about the disturbed conditions of the late nineteenth century, the end of the Ottoman occupation, during the Mahdist period before the Anglo-Egyptians came back in 1898 and re-established law and order; what my informants remembered of that period was raiding both from the Ethiopian Highlands and the central Nile valley, and the need to seek security; this was the world that my informants were describing to me in the 1960s - in a few cases, people who personally remembered the late nineteenth century but most were those who remembered stories from their parents and grandparents; I was able to compare those oral accounts with the archives in Khartoum; one of the advantages of moving between the Blue Nile and the city on a regular basis was that I could follow things up in the historical archive though the archivists would not let foreigners look at any file called 'slavery'; my very first article was comparing the archival with the oral accounts of the late nineteenth century; from that point on I have become very conscious of memory and the way that a political memory can carry a great emotional load; this can create a strong sense of independence among peripheral communities; I came to see the way in which memories of the past affect the future; this original research helped me understand the later civil war between 1983 and 2005; I think my family background has helped me have a conspiratorial sense of understanding peripheral mountain groups; even in the Lake District, Manchester is the big city far away; more particularly, the experience of being brought up in a vegetarian family, which was not common at the time; the idea of living in a protected community with a special way of life and people from all over the world coming to stay in our guest house because they were vegetarian; as a child I had some sense of what it is like to be part of a Jewish family because we had many families coming to stay with us who were Jewish as they would not have to worry about kosher food; some of my childhood friends were from these Jewish families; it was in that way that Jonathan Webber and I first met as his family used to come regularly to our guest house; therefore, the sense of belonging to a very particular kind of community I had from childhood; in the Sudan I wanted to move to a peripheral area as I felt sympathetic; I have tried to follow the fortunes of the people there since then in my writings; at the end of my time in Khartoum there was hope for the future and foreigners were still very much appreciated as staff in the University; I was offered a new five-year contract but I wanted to spend more time with my family; I came back and finished the thesis

11:29:09 I was supervised by E-P though I did not see much of him in the context of my thesis; I gave him half to read which he thought was fine but a bit short; he did occasionally say that he had discovered the Uduk; I learned more from talking with Godfrey and with all the Sudanese guests who would pass through Godfrey's house - Northern and Southern, but especially Dinka; I then had the chance to teach briefly at Aarhus in Denmark where E-P had been a visiting professor; he had been due to go back again in Summer 1970; there had been a postal strike and he'd written to say he'd not been well and would not be coming that year; two days before he had been due to arrive in Aarhus there was a phone call asking if he was coming or not as they had failed to get his letter; I was a Research Fellow at St Hugh's at the time and was invited to go in his place; taught for about three months there; one of the reasons that people thought I would be suitable was that I had been already been signed up to teach in Norway in Fredrik Barth’s department at Bergen; I had met him in Khartoum when he was working on Darfur; it was from Norway that I applied for a job in Oxford connected with a fellowship at St Cross; this was because St Cross had had Ken Burridge as a fellow; he had gone to Australia but the College liked the field of anthropology and decided to associate itself with a new University Lecturership that Maurice Freedman had secured for the Institute

15:26:06 I enjoy teaching, not so much the formal lectures but tutorial work; a lot of things that have found their way into my published work have come partly out of conversations with students;  with the new degree in Human Sciences in the early seventies, I taught the undergraduates from the very beginning; it was designed to be balanced between the social sciences and humanities; as the years went by it was weighted more to the science side with the rise of genetics and one found oneself engaged in real discussion and argument with students; I learned a lot from teaching them over decades; I also learned a lot from teaching in the anthropology and archaeology degree which began in 1990; this helped me personally to have confidence to write about things which were not social anthropology in the narrow sense; I have now found myself working with people in the evolutionary and archaeological world; the most recent book 'Early Human Kinship' which I helped to edit with Nick Allen, Robin Dunbar, and Hilary Callan; in it we have distinguished archaeologists and evolutionary scientists as well as social anthropologists; what has given me the confidence to engage in a new generation of conversations is the experience of long conversations with undergraduates

18:42:05 I like writing in a quiet place and get criticised by members of my family for occupying too many rooms; I tend to need to go through many different drafts which is seductively easy with a computer; early drafts that I wrote in the past I would go through literally cutting and sticking with tape several times to get the argument in the right order; nowadays I work more quickly but I still do it in bits and pieces; the use of a computer makes one too sure that one can assemble it correctly at the end; I have always worked by assembling points and putting them together rather than starting on page one, but I have never felt happy about putting them together until I have a clear sense of what the argument is; having read so many things by students that don't hang together I have developed an editorial eye which has helped in my own writing; after gathering bits together I do try to put them into a structure which often means leaving bits out; I have done a lot of PhD supervising - about thirty-two in all

22:37:04 Apart from 'Ceremonial Animal', I have written three books that are very closely connected; the first was a descriptive ethnography on the Uduk that came out in 1979 called 'Kwanim pa: (which is their self name) the making of the Uduk people', in which I tried to explain that their life had grown out of a particular history, having to reassemble themselves after periods of dispersal and loss and having to remake their homes; that was followed by 'The Listening Ebony' which I think is the best book that I have written; I really tried there to explore the inner poetry and feeling of stories, songs and ritual practices, including dancing, and the impact of the Christian mission teaching upon them; the understanding they had of what it meant to be living on the edge of the Islamic world and to see the ways both Christianity and Islam are able to exercise influence and power and spread into their world, and how they maintained a sort of protective barrier around themselves; you can see this in their hymns and music; they have a wonderfully rich tradition of their own music using instruments such as the five-string lyre in which they are very inventive; many of the songs I recorded in the 1960s; just last week I was able to watch some video footage taken by an Uduk fellow I once knew who now lives in North Dakota; it includes a lot of songs by a blind singer whose songs I recorded in a refugee camp in 1994 and 2000; they are accompanied on the lyre and about a dozen are all new; some produce laughter, others are listened to solemnly because they are about recent war; I collected songs in the 1960s that were probably first sung about battles in the late nineteenth century; to find that more than a hundred years later battles are still being sung about in basically the same style I thought was wonderful; the big contrast is with the church music; in the 1940s the missionaries produced a hymn book; I first noticed at Christmas 1965 a very rigid, schoolroom tone, to these hymns; in the refugee camps in the south of Sudan which I visited in the early 1990s this hymn singing had got harsher; in the recordings that I have just seen of Christmas Day 2008 it is even worse, almost a military chant; on the footage there is a male choir, probably formed from ex-combatants, singing 'Onward Christian Soldiers', standing almost to attention while singing; when I went to refugee camps I would ask whether they had any new hymns; there was one man who used to select passages from the New Testament and put them to music; I have recorded one or two examples, but they were finding it difficult to remember as these new items were not normally used in the church services; they had the same kind of solemn, marching rhythm; the contrast between the hymns and the liveliness of the traditional music is very marked - a brittle crust of Christian practice that is sitting over another world of creativity that is their own; the dancing is part of the non-Christian world; it was explicitly banned by the old missionaries; even now it is seen as the immoral behaviour of youth

31:49:19 In 'The Listening Ebony' I tried to do a sort of layered analysis of what belief might be at the community level where there can be a strong but implicit sense of its internal connections; the third book in the trilogy is 'War and Survival in Sudan's Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile' (2007) which has a web site which Judith Aston and I prepared to accompany the book [http://www.voicesfromthebluenile.org]; in this book I tell the story of an extraordinarily robust capacity for hanging together; during the period from 1987 when most of the villages were burnt and the Uduk were displaced, crossing and re-crossing the international border between Sudan and Ethiopia; this was a convincing story of social interdependence, through matrilateral family links as much as anything else, despite the bureaucrats of the UN and other agencies trying to sort everyone out into separate households; in the comparative work I did in Western Ethiopia, in 1974-5, I have similar ethnographic portraits of close-knit minority groups; they speak different languages but share many musical traditions, and there is an echoing between what one group produces at one time and what another produces; there is a lovely instrument played by Uduk girls; when the rainy season has just begun and the ground is a little damp you can make holes that preserve their form and you can play them by beating; it is called the ‘pumbulu’ but in another couple of days it rains and the instrument is gone; I was sitting in a village in Ethiopia in 1975 when I saw a girl playing what looked like the same instrument, however the holes were in a different pattern though the sound was the same; it is that kind of echo through a peripheral set of linked minorities; however distinct they seem, they share more than might be apparent; that is what I try to evoke when using the notion of a cultural archive in 'The Listening Ebony'; I tried to follow that through in the latest book by concentrating on the dancing and songs, and the transformation of ritual elements although the ‘whole ritual’ may have gone

36:58:01 I was aware of R.G. Collingwood's writings from the time I came to the Institute; I read 'The Idea of History' and his ‘Autobiography’ when I was a graduate student; in 1977 I married Douglas H. Johnson who is a historian who worked mainly in Sudan, but we met in Oxford; as a historian he was a fan of Collingwood and his writings on peripheral areas in the context of the Roman Empire and Hadrian's wall; we saw the same sort of things going on in Southern Sudan when we spent a whole year based in Juba as a family with our two children; Douglas and I talked quite a bit about Collingwood at that time; we got back to Oxford to find that there was a conference being held in Pembroke College to mark the centenary of Collingwood's birth; it was organized by a newly-formed Collingwood society which we then joined; through it got to know Teresa Smith, the daughter of Collingwood's second marriage; she became a leading figure in the field of applied sociology; through that interdisciplinary conference we met people interested in him; David Boucher, Philip Smallwood and I eventually managed to produce an edition of what was then known as ‘the folk tales manuscript’ which had been deposited by Teresa Smith in the Bodleian in the late 1980s; after that there was a further flowering of interest in the folk tales; various people had toyed with the idea of editing the manuscript but we managed to do it; there are further plans for more of Collingwood's work to come out with introductory essays

43:42:23 On Evans-Pritchard’s manuscripts, there is no light; Godfrey, as literary executor, swore that there was nothing in the way of academic or personal papers that came to him; various papers were physically left in the Institute, mainly notes on his Zande texts which are not yet fully translated; some notes have been written on them by Margie Buckner; the standard story concerning his papers is that he had a bonfire and burnt them all as he was irritated by an American colleague who suggested doing a biography of him; I don't know how true this is but the question is still active; we did approach the family when we had the centenary celebration of his birth in 2002; his elder daughter, Shineen Galloway, presented the Institute with a specially printed volume of 'Zande Witchcraft' interleaved with blank pages on which E-P had been able to write the Zande texts opposite those parts where there are the translations; Shineen said she did not know of any other relevant papers; there may be things that will surface; just recently, Susan Drucker Brown who is working on Meyer Fortes' papers, has come across a dozen letters from E-P to Meyer; she has been asking me whether I can suggest where Meyer's letters to E-P could be; so far we have not got very far; I am interested in this myself; I wrote a piece on the Evans-Pritchard period in the book that Peter Rivière edited, 'A History of Oxford Anthropology'; for that I did quite a bit of reading in the University archives; the story is still that there are no papers but we have not systematically followed this through with Deirdre or with his sons

47:44:02 When I left the Sudan in 1969 I didn't plan to go back; I thought I would go to Ethiopia so when I had a sabbatical leave I got an SSRC grant and went to Western Ethiopia and started on what I hoped would be a three-year programme to do an ethnographic survey on the western border adjoining Sudan; I was not yet married when I went in 1974 and was attached to the University of Addis Ababa; I saw this as not simply just another set of tribal studies so when preparing for Ethiopia I found some other people who wanted to learn Amharic and we organized some classes which we did quite regularly for six months; I was a bit frustrated when I got to Western Ethiopia because [the majority Oromo] people there didn't want to speak Amharic; the government of Haile Selassie was not liked; I found myself in a Gumuz village for the first time with my assistant being an Amharic speaker with also a little English; the young men in the village wanted my assistant to teach them Amharic because they wanted to go to Addis Ababa; the project came to a premature end because of the revolution in 1974-5 and I couldn't go back in 1976; I would have liked to have worked on the wider region as a whole; back in Oxford, together with Douglas and other colleagues we did organize a weekly seminar every term on North East Africa; the work I did in the 1970s enabled me to make more sense of my trips in the 1990s when the people from the Sudan side had become refugees on the other side; I kept being drawn back because of the interconnections in that region between one side of the border and the other, and centre and peripheries; I hope that has fed into all my writing, the sense of historical linkages across parts of a wider region; I think it has forced me to think much more like an historical witness and even an historian than I ever thought possible when I first came into social anthropology

54:10:18 I have still one or two things that I am engaged in quite actively, one is the Collingwood essays; next month giving a paper where I suggest that some of Mauss's ideas on the dramatic quality of social life are relevant to some of the things that have interested me on the evolutionary side; particularly the work of Robin Dunbar taking forward the notion that the very size of population groups has been a selective factor in the evolution of the size and complexity of the human brain, especially the frontal lobes where the story telling and imagination lies; the way that archaeologists deal with remains from the past is becoming much more social; the main thing I want to achieve in the next couple of years is to sort out my material, both textual and audio, also an increasingly large amount of visual material, all of which would fit into a multi-media archive