Second Part

0:09:07 They hadn't heard about the disintegration of the caste system but they worried about me disintegrating it; the barber was very garrulous and he wanted to talk about everything and everybody; his wife was a midwife, and barbers are traditionally associated with wedding arrangements and deliver the invitations; thus he was a goldmine of information; he was happy to be hired, especially that I would pay in cash and he offered to wash dishes and collect water too; the next day he came and said he had to leave because his Brahmin patrons would be polluted by him washing my dishes; this had great implications because his best customers were Brahmins; he had a daughter to marry and she would not be able to marry anybody through his pollution; the Brahmins were very upset with me because I was going to destroy their service system and invalidate the whole caste of barbers; the reason why it was a bigger village - it had eight hundred and fifty people in it - was that they were servicing all the smaller surrounding villages; I was threatening all this by asking this man to wash my dishes; the Brahmins were very hostile because they thought I would eat meat and throw bones around and sit with untouchables; there were terrible rumours of what I had done; I learnt this through my interpreter; I also kept the barber around but didn't make him wash my dishes; it had happened that in another village ten miles away another anthropologist had arrived - a woman student of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead named Gitel Poznanski Steed - who had come from Columbia University; that university programme in other cultures had been financed by the Office of Naval Research; she had been intending to work in China, as had my professor, Robert Redfield; having terminated the China programme it was decided to go to India instead; they had been working in Gujarat for a year on a Hindu village; they wanted to work on a Muslim village so chose an Aligarh district; she had come with a fairly large team

6:02:08 I did all the usual anthropological things; I tried to get acquainted with every family in the village and did genealogies; of course I got a lot of false names and crazy information just as Geoffrey Gorer had said I would; there were rumours that I was going to take all the children and put them in orphanages as the missionaries had done during famines; these farmers had never seen an American before, and most had not even seen a European before as the village was isolated and far from any regular lines of communication; my colleague Gitel Steed was rather naive; she didn't have any Indian language at all; she was a psychologist and had done a lot of work with Margaret Mead; Mead and Maurice Carstairs were on her staff initially in Gujarat; she solved the rumour problem for me because they had developed a technique in Gujarat for collecting rumours about themselves; they would then read them back to the villagers every night; their next neighbours knew they were false and would be amused by them; that's what I did and it worked wonderfully; we had a lovely time with evening parties reading rumours about ourselves; the only idea of America that these people had was from little peep shows and had seen pictures of skyscrapers in New York; thus they thought that I was going to build skyscrapers in the village, and other crazy things; other researchers were coming to India at that time; Maurice Opler from Cornell had set up a programme in east U.P. and then set up another in the west; apparently he didn't get on very well with the Lucknow people and they ultimately made it very unpleasant for him and he had to leave; he had some students and some of them got into trouble; his team built a big bungalow in one of the villages to house the fieldworkers; I think that was a mistake because they weren't living the life of the people or doing participant observation; they went in and studied topics; I was in a small community trying to do everything; my idea was holistic research; ultimately I did try various social psychological questionnaires and things like that which were focussed but focussed as part of the whole thing; I asked people to describe each other as I was interested in the terms they used; I generally asked open-ended questions; I used picture stories but didn't find them very useful as the people were so full of stories anyway; it was not difficult to get them to talk

11:26:07 Robert Redfield was working on designs for India as he wanted to study civilizations; he had been an ambulance driver in World War I in France; he was a pacifist and so sick of war and he wanted to do anything with the new United Nations being formed then to promote mutual understanding among nations; that was his major motivation; he got a big Ford Foundation grant and with Milton Singer, philosopher turned anthropologist, they were just taking over; before I went back to Chicago, Redfield was writing me letters; I had gone to some of his seminars but had never taken a course with him; he was not my advisor but he was my guru in another sense; I was a teaching assistant for him the year before I went to India; he then began asking big questions about the civilization as a whole; he and Milton developed the idea of the great and little traditions, which I did not think a good idea but nevertheless it was clear that I could answer a lot of the questions; at the Sanskrit level, M.N. Srinivas the Indian sociologist, had been very cordial to me; he had just taken over the professorship in Baroda when I came to India; I called on him and he was very welcoming; then Srinivas and Singer got together; Singer was working in India for almost a year; that got me acquainted with the whole question of the issues concerning the great and little; I liked the holism idea - cosmology from the village up - I could see lots of evidence for that; I could supply anything they wanted regarding leads, information and suggestions; we had a very cordial relationship

14:57:05 The paper I produced later on ethno-sociology was certainly a Redfield idea; when I was working with him as an assistant learnt the importance of working with indigenous logics and categories; I kept that in the back of my mind; I did a lot of statistical research at first when trying to record the village; one of the amazing things that I saw right away was that people from different castes were friends whereas, according to the literature they never talked to each other; that wasn't the case at all as they were all doing things together, albeit in special ways; it wasn't just A and B talking, but A talking first and then B, A sitting and B standing - the niceties of social relations; so I had to learn their ways, asking what they had seen, but mostly just listening; did ask questions when taking the census or getting land records

17:37:22 Did go back nineteen years later because of the green revolution; the first time I stayed in the village over a year; when I came back I was quite focussed and had by then worked up all the basic facts about the village; then I could see the tremendous changes going on; they had got electricity - indeed I had helped them to get it, despite preferring the old ways; they could light the houses and pump wells; there was so much going on as they were having the first national elections during my first visit and then again on my second visit; on my first visit they were doing land reform they were giving bonds to farmers who for ten times the rent could become owners; this wiped out the landlord class; I had known a lot of the landlords, so it was a tumultuous time; in that first year also my house was burgled; that turned out to be fascinating because the village had to go into action to try to solve my crime; of course, they were full of hypotheses about who had done it; I had planned to do an economic survey in the fields at the time, and everywhere I went people would suggest a suspect; so I got wonderful field notes on crime; after several months the villagers said that it gave a  terrible reputation to the village that a guest was robbed, and as they had failed to solve it, I should go to the police; initially they had told me not to as the police would just take a lot of bribes; when I went to see the police they asked for help; I should bring my jeep at night and take them to the village; that did not sound a role that I wanted as an anthropologist; I did agree only if I could stop the car a mile from the village; they then offered me a disguise and that is what I did; we arrived about 2am and tried to round up the usual suspects, but I just stood in the shadows observing; they got one scallywag, the village joker, who was one of my best informants; they tortured him and he named the son of the landlord as the thief; the police went to the landlord and got a great big bribe; I learnt about this from the village children; the houses were series of closets in open courtyards, and the children were going over the roofs listening; they had seen the landlord paying the bribe and seen where the stolen goods were stored in the grandmother's chest; then I actually had photographs of many parts of the procedures so I could go to the police and accuse them of taking a bribe and jailing the wrong man; I had offered a reward which they had taken and I asked them to return it; through this I got information on how the police operated, but I began to feel a bit worried as they had guns and I didn't; I was glad to be leaving; the villagers did not seem to worry that the wrong man was in gaol, but he ultimately died in gaol; he was not a member of an important kin group in the village but when I went back nineteen years later I feared trouble, however nobody thought about it at all; I had learnt some of his poetic orations which were very comical; when I went back I lived in the headman's house; they were really cordial to me, entirely different from the first time; everybody wanted to come and see me and to tell me about all the things that had happened during my absence; it was a lovely time

25:48:08 I had some wonderful students; I went to the Behavioural Sciences Center at Stanford for a year and was able to learn a lot of math that I hadn't learnt in high school; by then there was a lot of stuff that wasn't just ordinary statistics but was formal relations; I was very impressed; Harrison White at Chicago had inspired me by suggesting I use graph theory and formal relations to do what I wanted to do with caste; I learnt scaling and other non-parametric stuff; I liked to draw pictures and I began doing three-dimensional graphing; among other people in the University who inspired me was David Schneider, attracted by the simplicity of his American kinship work; thought it would be interesting if I could do something as revealing with modelling Indian civilization, but it became clear that it wouldn't work; Schneider was affected by Levi-Strauss but what I had read of Levi-Strauss didn't work; Indian things were not two by two, not dichotomous, you couldn't talk about oppositions; you could talk about differences and comparisons but they didn't have any parametrics to them at all; most things in the world don't and the Indian groups certainly don't, in fact are philosophically against; my colleagues here in Indology were very important Hans Van Buitenen, for instance, an expert in Sanskrit and in Sankhya, the most elemental, pervasive, and comprehensive philosophy in that it structures all of Indian life; it deals with the five elements - earth, air, fire, water and ether; I am finding right now that all of these are really very important because they build a whole lot of social categories on it - the mind, human action, sensation, everything in politics, food, religion - everything is built on these three dimensions plus space and place; I have now been working on interpreting these things in the five or six different Indian schemes that are all parallel; none of the Indologists had seen that they were all parallel; I am finding them in peasants and in everyday life; this is very exciting for me; I was working with A.K. Ramarajan, then later Hans Van Buitenen, who unfortunately died; [he was an expert in Sanskrit, Vedic ritual, and in Samkhya philosophy, and was later translator of the Mahabharata];

 he took me into Ayurveda, which is Indian medicine; then I worked with Francis Zimmerman in Paris, who was a student of Dumont, and he was concentrating on Ayurveda; those were the principle people - Ramarajan, a poet, a dear friend; I owe so much to him as he was also a linguist and folklorist of South India; I also had some wonderful students; I directed about thirty or forty PhD's, most of them in India, and a large part of them my kind of people who wanted to do things in indigenous conceptual systems; our big difficulty was Louis Dumont himself; he was trained in anthropology but didn't have a PhD but he hung around Marcel Mauss, the sociologist, and got himself a job in anthropology; he had never done anthropological fieldwork; he had done some interviewing out of context with some members of a South Indian tribe; he had never studied the caste system but then he wrote a book on caste; this was crazy; he tried to do a community study in U.P. but he fell ill and left after a couple of months; he had only informally studied kinship and he knew nothing about rank; the first article I ever wrote I published by accident because it was a field report that I had written for Lloyd Warner; he sent it to Professor Eggan who was just starting a new magazine and decided to publish it; he never asked me but it appeared in the first issue of 'Economic Development and Cultural Change'; it had the real name of the village in it and I was trying to do it under a pseudonym; it blew my cover in the very first publication which was bad as I wanted to publish all kinds of things that needed a cover; in that article and the one following that was published with my approval, I had focussed it all on hierarchy which was used in American sociology just to mean asymmetrical relations between people; I had met Dumont in Oxford when he was writing up his South Indian kinship material; I was fascinated to see what he had picked up, probably from Levi-Strauss, that marriage was not about extending the lineage but about getting affinal relations; that was fascinating, and I loved the article that he had published on this; he didn't understand the idea of hierarchy as described in my article, or the idea of higher and lower relations which were so striking in India for an egalitarian American; then he amazed me by making this the topic of his book; he had no fieldwork on it and he was using old reports as he didn't have any students working in the field; he took some ideas from Adrian Mayer who had done very well but had not systematized it, or theorised the high-low stuff; so Dumont got it terribly wrong, but he insisted that it was all French sociology; he told me that he had to get a job in Paris; he had been a prisoner of war and had then learnt Sanskrit while a prisoner; however, he did not know much and had never done any in context, and was writing in terms of Brahmins; he had three months in a Brahmin household where he was sick all the time there; thus he got the Brahmin view, published it; it was pure French sociology and the hierarchy he was talking about was the French Catholic church; he says that hierarchy is all religious, but it was not religious at all where I was; it was ownership, power, high and low, and class; but the world wanted to study that because it was so European and that was a big problem for me; my students were attacking Dumont, so we had a lot of wasted time on polemics; however, the students were great and each went and did really proper fieldwork, living in a community for a year or two; I was very pleased with a lot of the results; many of them were women as it was a time when a lot of women were coming into anthropology; they were doing things that had never been done before on Indian kinship and families; at the Social Science Council in New York there was a person called David Szanton who had done a PhD on the Philippines at Chicago with Fred Eggan; he had become the person who dealt with most of Asia; he came here and asked us what we were doing and what should be done; Ron Inden and Ralph Nicholas were my students and they had been working on Bengali kinship and were using indigenous ways of talking about kinship; their book was really exciting; they were working with Schneider but having a fight with him; Schneider was a difficult man; I liked his ideas but he started a cabal against me and I had some terrible years as Chairman while he was trying to besmirch my reputation; nevertheless, I had Nicholas and Inden's Bengali book to work with and that was a great asset; the Social Science Research Council picked up this idea of indigenous conceptual systems that they were working with and they gave me six years support so that I could run a seminar here; instead of doing it in one big blast we decided we had to train people because the anthropologists had to learn a lot of Indology and the Indologists we worked with had to learn some anthropology; it was an ideal situation as we had a growing programme here on South Asia; it was a very happy time with visitors coming in and writing interesting things - Val Daniel from Columbia, Sherry Ortner - just a great lot of people; I was able to get a whole bunch of dissertations done which would then feed back into seminars