Second Part

0:09:07 First fieldwork was an attempt to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the principle of hierarchy and its penetration within castes, following Dumont; how the language of hierarchy is used to describe other forms of social relationships; ideas of equality rooted in notions of brotherhood; most important ethnographic finding was about unequal marriage and internal contradictions within the system; work influenced by Leach and Levi-Strauss; I am conscious of the parallels with my own parents unequal marriage; I did a lot of work on local level politics, too, but André discouraged me from pursuing it; I think he was right in saying that I was too ill-informed to use such data; no conflict between supervisors as I had only one letter from Edmund during fieldwork; I had written a piece on politics for an Indian journal 'Seminar' and had sent him a copy when published; it was the time that Edmund was becoming Provost of King's so was busy

6:05:08 I found it quite difficult to come back to Cambridge; I had valued my experiences as an undergraduate but didn't like it afterwards; partly because all my friends had moved on; Carrie was still doing fieldwork, Keith's had been much shorter; I didn't know people very well and in fact I went to live in London; I came back at the end of 1968 and suddenly the world of youth culture and political landscape had changed and all felt quite alien; as I recall there were not writing-up seminars; there were regular Friday seminars and I gave at least two papers there; I remember them better before I went to the field as ritual jousts; I was attached to the Delhi School of Economics and I found the sociology seminars there were better and more engaged and articulate; after that I looked at the Cambridge seminars with a more critical eye; while I was writing-up Tambiah was running the South Asia class and he used to have Roger Ballard and I to help him; it took about two and a half years to write the thesis and I found it agony, but also satisfying; I was examined by Meyer Fortes and David Pocock and they were complimentary; I remember the viva as a slightly trying experience as Meyer sometimes used to speak in the way he wrote - long sentences, many parentheses

12:56:05 At that point I already had a job at Edinburgh but had promised to finish the thesis before starting; I handed in the thesis the day before I started teaching in 1971; stayed there for three years; it was pleasant; I liked the city and my boss, Littlejohn; the department was not in a very good shape and I was quite glad to get out of it; I then moved to the LSE in 1974; it was headed by Julian Pitt-Rivers and Ioan Lewis, also there was Jean La Fontaine, James Woodburn, Stephen Morris, Peter Loizos, Joanna Overing joined the same year as me; there were intellectual tensions, but on the whole people talked to each other; thought it was a very engaged intellectual atmosphere; there were people who worked together more than others, so there was a degree of apparent exclusiveness but I didn't actually experience it; when I first went Maurice Bloch was still quite junior but enjoyed a reputation as an iconoclast; what I enjoy most are graduate supervisions; at the LSE graduate students have two supervisors and Chris Fuller and I tend to take those working on South Asia; we form a harmonious team which has worked quite well in recent years; I have taught between thirty-five and forty PhD students; I have done all the routine administration, including graduate admissions; did four years as the convenor which I did not like, not because of my colleagues who were supportive, but hated dealing with LSE bureaucracy; in my first three years as convenor we had several inspections and reports which I found a strain; it was in the early 1990's when departments were becoming cost centres and you ran your own budgets

21:26:03 Margaret, my wife, and I were living together when I was writing-up my PhD thesis; we married shortly after taking the Edinburgh job; she is a documentary film maker; her films are on politically engaged topics; my latest fieldwork has been on industrial central India; to begin with I did it on my own because of the stage the children were at; Margaret set up an access training programme for teaching documentary film to twelve local kids in India, and has developed an interest in that place; I started the Banaras fieldwork in 1976 after going back very briefly to Kangra in 1974; felt I had written all I wanted to say on Kangra so I went to look for another possible site in 1974; I did fifteen months fieldwork in Banaras to start with, then kept going back until the middle of the 1980's; it was a study of death, and the various caste groups of mortuary specialists; it was also a study of representations of death and mortuary rituals; I found the Banaras fieldwork very interesting and challenging; found a number of the ideas underlying what people were saying deeply disturbing and unpleasant; work on gifts and debts and the remuneration of priests, resulted in a reinterpretation of Mauss's work

31:32:21 Work with Maurice Bloch on morality of money; had done an earlier book 'Death and the Regeneration of Life' which gave a profile to LSE anthropology; followed this with a similar collection 'Money and the morality of exchange' which is still used by students; I have found it quite easy to work with Maurice although he could be very critical; memories of Alfie Gell

36:29:10 I needed a shift of scene from Banaras; André had for a long time encouraged me to look at modern India more seriously so I was sympathetic to the idea of doing something on industry; the work in Bhilai was on steel workers in a Soviet built steel plant which had been constructed on a green field site; Alfred had a PhD student, Chris Pinney, and I was involved with supervising him at some stage when Alfred was ill; Pinney had been studying a company town in Madhya Pradesh; he influenced me, but also Michael Taussig's book 'The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America'; thought Taussig's work interesting but his ethnography was not very rich; opened up a field that I thought I would like to get into; I went in 1992 to look around; Alfie Gell suggested I might look at Bhilai; I went there for a day and thought I could really imagine making something of it, so that is why I went there; my question was really non-academic but I wondered what a peasant who had lived in the villages around it would have experienced having lived through an industrial revolution; I started working with workers in the steel plant who are the aristocracy of labour; then realised that as a public sector factory it would be different from one in the private sector, so felt I needed to do some work in a private factory; then felt I should look at the informal sector at the bottom; so it has gone on expanding; feel now of an age where I have got to draw it to a close; I have written quite a number of articles about it but there are still things I want to write in monograph form; I would love to do more fieldwork in a different kind of setting but I have been going there since 1993 and have incredible amounts of data to write up

43:20:33 A man called Ajay became my research assistant in Bhilai; he comes from Kerala and his family had moved to Bhilai late 1950's early 1960's; when I met him he had been an agent for a very small company in Calcutta selling gear boxes to the steel plant; he hated the job so became my assistant; later he worked with Margaret as one of the students on her documentary film project; he got involved in the civil rights movement, documented some police atrocities and he was picked up and put in gaol for 93 days, eventually letting him out without charging him; very important to my ethnography has been the experience of working with research assistants of whom Ajay was one; he is still a very good friend as is the person who in my second year in Kangra was my research assistant there; I have worked with these people who have become personal friends and with real intellectual interests, but not at all educated in formal terms; they have been so important to the ethnography I have been able to get; I am ambivalent about how involved one should become if witnessing injustices; I somewhat mistrust anthropology that goes over too much into social activism; there is an incompatibility between the anthropologist/sociologist's task and the partisanship of political activism; however, when your good friends, people in whose houses you have lived, on whom the success of your project depended, then get picked on and imprisoned, and all their friends desert them, what else can you do?

48:40:00 On the future of India, I feel deeply concerned about the proportion of the Indian population that are left out of the economic upsurge, and whose basic rights are effectively denied - education, health etc. - and for whom the democratic system and legal apparatus does not work at all; I feel gloomy; the study that I have been doing is quite relevant to this; you have a working class in a place like Bhilai, part of which is a real aristocracy of labour, enjoy privileged conditions, are upwardly mobile, with decent education and medical facilities, but have no interest in the informal sector or in becoming politically active on behalf of those below them