Jonathan Parry interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 5th December 2008

0:09:07 Born in London in 1943; father was a civil servant, trained in classics at Cambridge, wrote novels; died when I was young; mother's father was a tailor in Swansea, a fact concealed from me; [Since your interview, however, I had a long conversation with my sister (who admittedly knows much more about family history than I do) and she glosses it as 'cloth merchant'. Her story is that he was in partnership with another man, and when World War I broke out they drew lots as to which should volunteer. My grandfather came back from the War suffering from the effects of mustard gas poisoning and to find the business had gone bust. He never worked again. Anyway the essential point about my mother's family being a good deal less posh than my father's is valid. The wedding certificate of my maternal grandparents describes my MFF as 'retired manure dealer' and my MMF as a railway clerk (which is all news to me!). By contrast, the wedding certificate of my FF describes his father as having the occupation of 'gentleman'! None of that is of any interest to anybody but me, but for historical accuracy I just wanted to declare that 'tailor' is disputed, and this is symptomatic of the interesting sociological fact that my mother's (relatively) humble origins were always kept a secret from us children]; the marriage broke down when I was six; brought up by my mother; father interested in books but had very little contact with him beyond six as the marriage break-up was acrimonious; have an elder sister for whom it was much more traumatic; mother had been a sickly child and left school young; not well-educated in the formal sense but very pretty when young; the marriage was disapproved of by my father's family and she was not treated well by them; she was socially insecure; later on she went to live in Italy on a small income; she became fluent in Italian and went to art classes; she was a strong-willed woman; as a mother she was supportive, warm and affectionate; her relationship with my sister was not easy; my mother's parents were dead by the time I was born; my father's father must have died about the time of my birth; I did know my grandmother as a child; she was a dragon

7:03:06 My first proper school was a boy's prep school; I was still only six or just seven; I was manic about learning to play cricket; on the whole had a reasonably happy school life; academically not very distinguished and I was more interested in sport; only at sixteen did I start reading people like Bertram Russell and thought I would like to be an intellectual; first school, in Kent, burnt down after I had been there a couple of years; it temporarily closed but then moved to Wiltshire; I was always interested in history; in my later school had very good history teaching; as a small boy I was keen on stamp collecting and may have had something to do with later interest in anthropology; after preparatory school I went to Sherborne in Dorset; have rather jaundiced memories as the aspiration was to become an army officer in Sandhurst, or the Stock Exchange; few went to university; at that time it meant going to Oxford or Cambridge, the fall-back being Trinity College, Dublin; they didn't send students to London or Reading; my memory of it was of a snobbish school; Derek Jarrett and Graham Stephenson both taught history and they were the most charismatic teachers that I had; at A level I did a special paper on the unification of Italy which appealed to my imagination; did no science after O level and was never good at it; had an undistinguished academic career but was just good enough to scrape into Cambridge; did become interested in politics at school; even at school became interested in CND though it was partly rebelliousness against the conservative institution at that stage

14:24:15 I was brought up as an Anglican; at about eight or nine became a religious enthusiast for a little while; I was confirmed, but from the age of about sixteen have been an agnostic; in later years I became a somewhat dogmatic atheist; I think my personal attitudes to religion were hardened by doing the Banaras study; my inclinations were literary, and I was interested in writing; I dabbled briefly in writing poetry; my advise to a young anthropologist is not to read anthropology but to learn how to write, not something many anthropologists so well, the exceptions being Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey Lienhardt, André Béteille; Edmund Leach wrote forcefully, if somewhat angular in style; I would still recommend Bertram Russell's essays, which got me into anthropology; think he wrote with admirable clarity; George Orwell would also be an excellent model; since the advent of computers, I write by hand, put it into the computer, print it out, rewrite next draft by hand, and do so until it is in a shape that is acceptable; write even a short review by hand as I find it easier to work on the balance of sentences with paper in front of me

20:17:13 I came to King's, Cambridge; I had an entrance exam and was interviewed by Edmund Leach as I had expressed a slight interest in doing anthropology; I came to do archaeology and anthropology and it was a revelation to be taught by Edmund; what I remember is the incredibly meticulous comments on essays, and how he would pick books off his shelves for you to read; he was a brilliant undergraduate teacher, very charismatic; I realize the commitment of time and effort he put into his teaching; he was also incredibly helpful when I was writing up my PhD although in the first year he would leave us to sink or swim; when I was just going off to do fieldwork, senior students like Maurice Bloch and the Stratherns, Jim Farris and Adam Kuper, had just come back; they organised a seminar and Carrie Humphrey and I were just beginners; I gave a paper at one of these, a critique of Edmund's 'Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse'; I showed it to him and he was infuriated; when I came back from the field, the first thing that I wrote was a critique of Edmund's introduction to 'Aspects of Caste'; I showed it to him and got wonderful comments back; there were four or five of us undergraduates who went on; Carrie was one, another was Jane Bramley, later Bunnag, who did fieldwork in Thailand and married a Thai, Enid Schildkrout who did fieldwork in Ghana, and Keith Hart; Keith had done classics so was technically a year above us; I didn't know him well until later; apart from Edmund, among the teachers was Tambiah, who came when we were undergraduates; he was young and joined the third year undergraduates socially; he was a good lecturer; don't think I got to know Meyer Fortes or Jack Goody until later; there was evident antagonism between Leach and Fortes, and we were encouraged to support one or other of them; the good lecturers when I was an undergraduate were Edmund and Tambiah; I also found Ray Abrahams lectures clear, but I didn't go to many lectures while here; Edmund would give me books which I would read

31:19:00 I chose archaeology and anthropology partly because of a Bertrand Russell essay, 'Marriage and Morals'; it starts with Malinowski and the Trobriands and the nature of the family; in my late teens had a lot of freedom to travel in the summer; had been to Turkey and Morocco on my own; I came across Westermarck; I had heard of anthropology and it seemed exotic, and the idea appealed to me; on a pragmatic level felt I had a better chance of getting into King's to do anthropology than history; came up in 1962; Annan was Provost; it had a liberal reputation compared to other colleges; it was relatively relaxed and I made some good friends; anthropology and girlfriends took me over, above all anthropology; it was the first time I had seriously engaged in intellectual activity and got obsessed with it; one of the things that has always appealed to me about anthropology is that it is a discipline of relativising and questioning the assumptions of other social science disciplines; there is something about the democracy of anthropology and the interest in ordinary lives or living people

36:53:22 I did disastrously in my first year exams because I ignored archaeology and physical anthropology; in the second and third years I got firsts; won a State studentship to go on to do a PhD; when I was preparing for my finals I had to fill in forms to continue and Edmund suggested I apply to work in India; it quite appealed to me; I knew I did not want to work in Africa; intuitively I wanted to work in a society with a rich recorded history and an ancient culture; South East Asia and Japan have also attracted me; I originally said I wanted to work on polyandry in an area of the U.P. hills, and indeed I thought I would do it until I went to India; part of my decision was the desire to be supervised by Edmund; during the pre-fieldwork period we were very much left to our own devices; I read a lot about India; remember a seminar on councillors that Audrey Richards ran with Adam Kuper that I used to participate in; as an undergraduate had been to seminars that she ran; never knew her well but she was warm and friendly; the pre-fieldwork period was October until June, then I went to India by boat from Marseilles

42:28:13 Remember landing at Bombay and hit by the crowds and heat; took a train to Poona where I met up with a fellow Cambridge graduate student, Tony Carter; he introduced me to village India; he took me off for about a week to stay in the village where he was doing fieldwork; it was an amazing confidence boost because I learnt the practicalities of how one might live in the field; this was very important as I realized I could cope; I then went in the summer heat without any train reservations in a third class carriage to Delhi; stayed in a small hotel and reported to M.N. Srinivas at the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics; during the preparatory year, André Béteille, who was then a Simon Fellow in Manchester, had come down to see Edmund and I was detailed to show him around; Edmund then persuaded André to become my supervisor while I was doing fieldwork; that led to a very important academic and personal relationship; I never got to know Srinivas particularly well; he was gracious, helpful, good-humoured, but a little distant; André is a man of almost frightening honesty and integrity, extraordinarily bright, quite reserved, loyal to his friends, and perhaps the most distinguished Indian social scientist of his generation; I have always thought of him as a product of Calcutta and Bengal rather than someone with dual ancestry; it is interesting that he has written about social inequality from so many different dimensions but that one aspect he has written much less on is race

49:33:02 Srinivas asked me why I was going to work in a very atypical polyandrous pocket of the U.P. hills; Majumdar had written a book on the area; he lived in Lucknow and had used the area as a place to send his students to do bits of ethnographic research; Srinivas suggested I look elsewhere and I selected Kangra; it was a beautiful lush valley with snow-capped mountains up one side of it; I found it easy to meet a few people who were encouraging and suggested a few villages; having abandoned work in a polyandrous area, another interest I had at that stage was local level politics; I had been influenced and impressed by Freddy Bailey's work and Tony Carter was also interested in factional politics; was told of Kangra villages where political rivalries looked interesting though I never actually wrote about that at all; I think it was the most difficult fieldwork that I have done; I have worked since in two other areas and have got to enjoy it more as I got older; the first three months were somehow a terrific relief; I was living with a nice family and the people were friendly; the next period I remember as traumatic; there was a general election going on and because I was interested in politics I was making quite a lot of enquiries; people suddenly became rather suspicious and I was reaching a linguistic plateau and appeared to be making little progress; after six months I got into a routine and was much clearer about what I was doing; I was in India for two and a half years and in the field for twenty-six months; this was longer than nowadays; we were sent off in a much more open-ended way; I think it is still viable if people have enough time but in the present funding climate it is not possible; I was lucky in that I ended up writing about caste and kinship though I hardly knew of Louis Dumont's work when I went to the field; André had been reading Dumont and would ask me questions, so somehow I was collecting data that was relevant to Dumontian questions without properly having read him; I did meet him a few times; I esteem him highly although he has become increasingly unfashionable; I think any Indianist of my generation has had their career and intellectual agenda set by Dumont; I think he has been unfairly criticised and was right where it is conventional now to say that he was wrong; the theory about the substantialization of caste which is still trotted out I feel is deeply problematic; he was a powerful figure who represented to people of my generation the very exciting possibility of being able to bring together the very diverse studies that have been done in India and make sense of them according to a small set of unifying principles; exciting to relate what Bailey was saying about Orissa with something that was going on in Tamil Nadu