Second Part

0:09:07 Theme of 'Palms, Wine and Witnesses' described; formal Head of Department for about four years and stood in for Adrian for one, but in some respects I felt I never ceased being so; I also did quite a lot of committee work for SOAS as well as the Department; started new fieldwork among the Giriama, Bantu speaking people on the East African coast; having studied a town I wanted to study a remote, rural people; little had been written about them except by one district officer over half a century before; I went to study them in 1966-67 for fifteen months; learning the language was not too difficult as it was quite closely related to Swahili; 'Palms, Wine and Witnesses' was the book based on that fieldwork; in 1968 I switched back to urban studies with the urban Luo of Nairobi, Kenya; amazingly, I spent almost all the 1960s in the field; I have read both Obama's books although they are not exactly relevant to anthropology

5:43:20 The book on the Luo - 'The cultural definition of political response' - described; on American linguistic anthropology, I was influenced by John Gumperz and later went to Berkeley as a visiting professor for a semester, also Dell Hymes; on the differences between SOAS and Oxford, SOAS anthropology was very much integrated with the other parts of SOAS; it was not just at the level of teaching, where we shared courses and degrees, but also at the level of research, and as it was a nice coherent set of buildings you can actually talk to people from other disciplines; it was very much a community based on the fact that regions were our primary object of study and not disciplines; when I got to Oxford there wasn't this; the reason I was attracted to go there was that Oxford had tremendous resources, not only the Institute of Social Anthropology, but also the Pitt Rivers Museum, Human Sciences and Biological Anthropology; all these were vibrant at the time, and although they had been amalgamated into one school just before I arrived, they had not really been brought together; I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to bring all these bits together as new holistic anthropology; I thought that social anthropology in the old sense was already beginning to look a bit weary and like a lot of other people I had become interested in material culture; there was the beginning of an interest in the possibility of biocultural evolution being acceptable, sociobiology as a term having been rejected before through Marshall Sahlin's denunciation; thought it was time to bring all these things together at Oxford as it had been very successfully at UCL and Durham, though not at Cambridge; we also had new archaeologists like Barry Cunliffe and Chris Gosden at Oxford, who were very keen on anthropology; of course, there was an archaeology and anthropology degree which had been set up; thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to bring them all together so I went for that reason; SOAS was a smaller place and was very well integrated with UCL especially through medical anthropology, where myself, Roland Littlewood and Murray Last had set up medical anthropology degrees in our two institutions; SOAS was well-integrated, Oxford anthropology was fragmented and I wanted to bring it together; at the moment of speaking I can say I succeeded; however, I am well aware from America that the so-called four fields approach develops cracks and schisms, and this could happen but was worth trying; it is very exciting at the moment; we have recruited Harvey Whitehouse and Robin Dunbar on top of other appointments in the last few years; coming to Oxford as an outsider is double-edged as you suffer the acrimony of those who disagree with your changes, on the other hand you don't have any previous loyalties, so on balance think it possible to break the mould, which is what we have done; some people will regret that; I think it better that we now recruit openly and no one thinks that we should just recruit from within Oxford

17:17:22 Intellectually, although people mainly work on their own in ISCA, individually they produced excellent work; there was a new professor of Biological Anthropology, Rick Ward, who did move more towards molecular genetics in his anthropology, and the danger there was that he would lose sight of society and culture as an aspect of biological anthropology; when he died prematurely, Stanley Ulijaszek and Elisabeth Hsu took over to run medical anthropology, and now Robin Dunbar for evolutionary anthropology; the Chair of social anthropology is assigned to All Souls; John Davis was Warden and I think he was amazingly good as head of college; it was a period of consolidation when the College was a happy place; on the whole he moved away from direct involvement in anthropology though he did write some articles; now he has more time he may be able to write up his very important data on Libyan marriage alliances; once he was Warden I don't think he ever went back to ISCA except for social events; Rodney Needham was a curious character whom I liked mainly for his reminiscences; one of his party tricks was to find out who guests were, look up something about their speciality and immediately ply them with a question in their field; thus he would come across as very learned and the guest would be pleasantly surprised; these meetings would happen in his flat as he never went into All Souls; three or four times a term there would be tea at Rodney's from 4.30pm until 6pm precisely; he would invite me on my own but if there was a new member of staff he would like to see them; he also had lots of visitors from the States etc., so he led a full life, living through other people's experiences, so he never needed to travel; I met Evans-Pritchard properly once when I was briefly at Sussex University; the meeting was arranged by David Pocock as there was a custom at Sussex that he would come down for a week to Brighton; Pocock would host him but this time, in the early 1970s, he asked Ralph Grillo and I to do so; we agreed and we spent the best part of a day with him; Pocock said we would recognise him as his white underpants were always visible above his trousers; told that he would take us to a pub, give us various things to eat and drink, and then expect us to pay; both proved to be the case; his conversation was stupendous though pure gossip; he seemed to know everyone at Cambridge, and was very articulate and shrewd, and slightly caustic; the only intellectual exchange was when he discovered I had worked among Luo, which he had also done; he said he would give me his field notes rather than give them to Aidan Southall as Aidan had once criticized him in his own work; I would have liked to have received those notes, but when he died I never discovered where they were; I was never heavily influenced by his work except through his implicit theory; my work on Luo was very much more influenced by Aidan Southall who wrote on lineage formation among the Luo, an amazing piece of scholarship

29:29:00 My wife, Vibha Joshi, has worked among Naga; her father was Chief of Police in Nagaland when she was very young, and she later came to realize that she would like to work among Naga; she has worked particularly among Angami Naga, so knew the works of Haimendorf, Mills, Hutton and Kauffman, very thoroughly by the time I met her; we had a common interest in Haimendorf whom, sadly, she never met; we are now engaged in the Nagaland University Anthropology Initiative to try and set up a department of anthropology; this is really her enterprise and I am helping; the Nagas themselves want it as they are well aware that, to some extent, Nagaland was one of the cradles of British social anthropology, and they want it for themselves; we have now heard from the Indian Government University Grants Committee that they will now set up a department with a professor and two lecturers; that has got to go through, and meanwhile we have applied to various foundations to set up an exchange relationship; we have already drawn up a memorandum of understanding between Oxford University and Nagaland University, and the Museum of Culture in Basel; it is quite ambitious, and as in any part of the world these things can come to nothing but so far so good; it is a lot of work, but we want to do it; I have become interested in holistic anthropology as was shown in a book published a few years ago where I tried to bring together biocultural evolutionary anthropology and material culture, as well as social anthropology; have become interested in issues of cognition, evolutionary psychology and the evolution of human social groups, and in particular the role of language; what I would write I don't know as there is such a vast literature, so it is just like starting at the beginning with all the pleasures of being a novice; also will continue to visit East Africa and Nagaland