Second part

[The aspect ratio of the video film changes at this point]

0:09:07 Cresap was studying C19 politics [in England] in the period when they still had poll books which recorded the name, occupation and vote of every member of every community; that was until the 1870's; during this period, what was happening politically was always explained by what was happening in Parliament, when of course a great deal had to do with the social pressure that was put on people in the countryside to vote the way the landlord wanted them to vote; we lived in England while he did this research; in the early 1960's there were not Xerox machines or ways of reproducing what you found; Cresap found there was some kind of camera on a transparent pillow with which he could photograph the poll books; we then developed them in the kitchen; the apartments we were in were in people's houses and were very cold; during our second year in England Cresap got an offer from UCLA and we decided to go; in the middle of the year we moved to California; we stayed in an hotel while we started to look for a house; we found one which was inexpensive because the valley where it stood had had fires but it had been spared; by chance, the house was next door to that of Joseph Weckler, an anthropologist; he was separated from his wife so was not living there, but I met him; he was at the University of Southern California; at that time they had decided to make the anthropology department vanish; they had two anthropologists, one of whom was an archaeologist and the other was Weckler; the archaeologist moved to another university so Weckler was the sole anthropologist there and the department was amalgamated with sociology; he said he badly needed another anthropologist and that they would give him the position  if I would take it; without my doing anything he fixed the job of assistant professor there for me; I did not like being in a department of sociology but it was a job; unfortunately Weckler was an alcoholic and very depressed; five weeks into the term he killed himself, so I found myself the only anthropologist in USC in an alien department; I immediately started being political, trying to get the money for his position given to me to hire some young graduate students from UCLA to supplement the department; I did get two and began to feel that things were moving; later there was a vacancy in a senior professorship and I asked that it be allocated to anthropology so there would be a proper department; it was allocated to me; it was through that that I made my first contact with Harvard because I tried to get a Harvard person to take that senior job; this was the kind of university where you had to teach what was in the catalogue, not what you knew or were interested in; I taught things I had never heard of before like American Indians, and all sorts of stuff; it was a very arduous year, but at the same time things were beginning to make me happy; I was beginning to meet people at UCLA because Cresap was there; the first person I met was Michael Smith who had heard of me through Max Lowenthal's son, David, who was a professor of geography at University College, London; they had both worked in the Caribbean as Michael Smith was a Jamaican who had worked there and in Africa; Michael Smith had been encouraged by Lowenthal to read my book on the Incas and had thought it wonderful, so he got in touch with me; his good friend in the department was Hilda Kuper who had just come from South Africa, so with those two I had a good social life; we read many of the same things and I was invited to all the seminars and things of interest at UCLA, so although I was isolated at USC I did not feel alone; moreover, I decided that I had to do something at USC that would bring me and my two junior people together, so we ran a seminar with the three of us, and we would have the students doing work in Los Angeles producing materials for the seminar; one of them studied Alcoholics Anonymous, another gangs, yet another hippy communities, they were all interesting materials as these kids had personal connection with them; that was very satisfying; I was at the same time fighting the sociology department politically as they had their eyes on the professorship; we appointed a retired anthropologist, Kalervo Oberg, who had worked in Latin America and it was clearly going to be a short-term appointment; my thought was that we could then appoint someone younger and more lively, but by that time the sociology department claimed the professorship; I was outraged and decided to take a year of leave and go to the African Studies Center at UCLA; I was still not tenured at USC and had published as much as anybody there; I couldn't understand why they didn't tenure me or why they were taking this professorship away; the African Studies Center was headed by Leo Kuper and I participated in their seminars and all activities; they had a very interesting seminar going at that time on pluralism in Africa; there the questions were was ethnicity or class going to be the source of the break-up of the newly independent states; that seminar turned into a book to which I did not contribute, but people were brought in from Britain, France etc. who were in African studies; it became a way of connecting with a much wider professional circle; they were not all anthropologists, but very interesting people; at that time my relationship with Smith and the Kupers became deeper as they entertained all the visitors and I was always included

15:13:03 I decided in the course of this that since most of the work on legal anthropology had been done in Africa; colonial governments had been interested as they wanted to control their own legal systems and that was how anthropologists were drawn in; I decided I must work in Africa; I studied Swahili at UCLA and identified an area I thought interesting, namely Tanzania, and to go to the Chagga who had one of the first cooperatives in the continent that was run by Africans and had come into being in the 1920's; Nyerere had brought socialism to Tanzania and thought that the Chagga would be very enthusiastic about him; needless to say, they were very anti Nyerere and anti socialist, but I didn't know that until I got there; found out that I couldn't be sponsored to work there by the anthropology department and all the African universities had banished them; however, the Law School at Dar es Salaam was happy to sponsor me and it was as a lawyer that I got there, although they knew that I was an anthropologist; I did not know any Chagga and the first time we went Cresap would not let me go by myself, so we all went as a family; I started off by going to the local court which was a quarter of a mile away and asked the magistrate if he would let me sit in hearings; also asked if he could find someone who would explain what was going on; it was one thing to understand the language, albeit imperfectly, but to understand what the people meant to each other needed explanation; he knew of a man from another village who had worked in courts, I found out what a white-collar person was paid, and despite what I had been taught at Columbia about not paying, I decided to pay him; we made an arrangement and I am still in correspondence with him and his family; at that time he was quite a young man and it went well; he spoke enough English to explain things to me which was just what I wanted; we started in the nearby court but very quickly started to go to his village, meet his family, and go to the court there; from this experience has come a great deal of what I have written over the years; it has many dimensions and I hired other people over the years, to teach me more Swahili, for example, but it turned out that this first man was the best of all; after that I went many times; at first I had read the account of Chagga law which had been written by a missionary, Gutmann, in the early 1900's and published in 1926; it is full of strange interpretations but also information; I thought they would have rejected all the superstition as they appeared to be part of the modern world, but it turned out that a lot of this stuff was still believed; a brother jealous of his brother might well work witchcraft on him and prevent his wife from bearing children or make his goats die; any misfortune could have such an explanation; it isn't that people were sure, they never were sure, but they thought it a real possibility; I was surprised, but learnt a lot about their intra-lineage disputes; it turns out that the population doubles every twenty years or so, so the Chagga who had a population of about 100,000 in 1900 are now somewhere round 7-800,000 and the land shortage is extreme; a father can no longer guarantee his sons enough land to grow enough coffee and bananas to support himself and a family; what I also found was that if you do genealogies you begin to understand that people leave; half of the young people now go to the cities whereas in previous generations they had gone up or down the mountain to settle on available land; so one is looking at what appears an intact kinship dominated society that can only remain so because it sloughs off all the inconveniencies; it was very exciting to learn about these things because in the beginning I felt very unsure of myself; unsure that I wasn't being led by the nose, and wondering whether it was because they thought that white people were interested in witchcraft so they were telling me this stuff, but didn't really believe it; so I worked in more than one village, more than one family, to try to verify what I had; the book gave the full account because what I did there was first to give an historical account of what happened and put the Chagga in the middle of a trading entity in the C19 that went between Lake Victoria and the coast, trading ivory, hoes, slaves and all kinds of things; all that business was stopped by the colonial power as they wanted to get a monopoly on trade, so the Chagga were left high and dry; somebody had written a history of Chagga chiefdoms and how they fought each other, so there are specialist things like that, but I was able to put that together with very different kinds of information; then I looked at the courts and some of the cases in various periods; I made a chronicle of a lineage that I knew well, from the first man that came to help me, as it was his lineage

27:53:05 Michael Smith did not want his son to be drafted to fight in Vietnam so decided to leave UCLA and was eventually given a professorship at University College,  London; in the many trips to England I went regularly to the seminars there and even had an appointment there as a visiting scholar; I also went with Schapera to the seminars at LSE; also invited to others, including Manchester because Gluckman was interested in me and my work; he used to stay with Cresap and me when he came to London; he was a man of immense self-conscious dignity, and was a presence when he came into a room; he would dominate the conversation and at academic meetings he would always take the lead; he would hold his head in his hands and appear not to be listening, but he would hear everything; people were very angry with him a lot of the time, partly because he was so insistent on his own points of view; they were also irritated by his personality; certainly, a number of young anthropologists found him intolerable; the ones he favoured forgave him everything and became acolytes; he was always a mixture and was very British; politically there was this strange mixture as his wife was a Communist, and he flirted with communism but never belonged; at the same time he was very understanding about the position of colonial administrators; many of them were in difficult situations and were not bad people; in this period, when people here became aware of the liberation of the colonies, they became so anti-colonial that it was considered intolerable and Gluckman was considered to have been a servant of the colonial administration; the story of his fieldwork was very sad; at one point, after he had done a great deal of it, he was in a canoe and was attempting to shoot a bird; a man sitting in front of him in the canoe stood up at that moment and was shot; Gluckman had to leave and there was a lot of trouble; there were other things that people hated about him, that Nader and others differed with him about, and I tried always to make peace; he did the first study of a court in Africa; the court was run by Africans but of course it was a colonial court with African personnel; he both acknowledged and ignored that and it doesn't enter his theoretical frame; he looks upon the court as a place that expresses and determines the norms of society, and that in each case they are using some norm to determine the result; sometimes he says quite candidly that he doesn't know how they decide, but it is as if he was using analogy to Western legal ways of behaving and transposing it to this court; he did that not only about their procedure but also about their concepts; he saw them having concepts of property, wrongs and rights, etc., very analogous to things in the Western world; his father was a lawyer so learnt some of his father's conceptions; also he started out with the idea that when he went to the Barotse courts he was going to illustrate one of Sir Henry Maine's theses about primitive law; all this is rubbish, a mistranslation of one system into another, but you can winnow out the interpretations and look at what was actually happening because he describes it clearly, and you don't have to take his overlay too seriously; but he was insistent on it , it seems to me, for very nice political reasons, because he wanted to show that Africans were as rational and logical as Westerners, and their system was really much more like ours than unlike; you can understand why he was a controversial figure

36:05:00 I my own work I emphasised the way courts had been modified and altered, and had adjusted what they were doing for their own purposes; in the courts that I went to, they could appeal to higher courts, but the way that the judges prevented this from happening was that the judge was also the stenographer and fact-finder and would say that the evidence did not support the contention of the plaintiff; it was usually on the factual account that they made their decisions, so it was impossible to appeal; there were exceptions but this was the general style; this kind of thing, either Gluckman didn't observe or it didn't happen in the courts that he was looking at; I saw much going on that I couldn't fit into the kind of framework that he had posed, but I didn't use it to attack him; this was a difference in style, I wanted him to like me and I also respected him for what he had done; anyone who had read my book would have seen that the material did not support his ideas; many anthropologists have advanced their careers by attacking somebody in his sort of position, but that was simply not my style; what I did in a recent article was to try to characterize the kinds of comparisons that were being done in the C19, then in the 1940's and 50's, and then today, trying to show that the items being compared are completely different; this plays into my whole interest in process; if one is interested in the process of economic development or political corruption, you can't easily compare the way you could to find out whether a particular people was matrilineal or patrilineal, so there has been a complete revolution; that is very much connected with a time conscious anthropology, concerned with the passage of time and an anthropological moment, and not an object

40:05:12 Now, apart from trying to settle a book I have assembled with some university press, an archaeologist at Manchester, Timothy Clack, who is editing a volume on the archaeology of Kilimanjaro, has asked me for a general article; I said that I had written a book on Kilimanjaro, and if I could get permission from the owners of the copyright, then I will try to produce a compressed version for his book; I am engaged on that at this moment but it is very difficult to compress a 350 page book into forty pages; I should never have said yes; before that I did an article for a book of John Borneman's on chance simultaneity, on what goes on in the anthropologist's life while he/she is doing anthropology, that is not directly germane to the anthropology but is germane to the general situation; I included anecdotal material about what happened in the strange climber's lodge that I lived in when working on Kilimanjaro; there was a Tanzanian General who came every year to climb the mountain, very handsome with polished boots;  I asked him what does the army do in a place like Tanzania when there is no war; he said that the purpose of the army was to keep the Government in power; I thought this astounding, such a candid answer; some of the things that were happening in connection with this paper - there was a Chagga who went to Yale at the same time as I was; he was in political science, and I helped him to write his dissertation because he didn't understand what was expected academically; he got his PhD and has had excellent positions in the international development world since; one of the times I was in Tanzania he was the chair of a development section in the university, which was really an espionage front where they were looking at all the money that had gone into development projects, and to see whether any of them had succeeded; he was powerful in Government in this way because he had his hand on all development projects all over Tanzania, though his actual position was in the university; he told me where to go if I was in trouble; that he should have anticipated that I might have trouble, that I had not thought of, made me realize that it could happen, and it did