Peter Riviere interviewed by Laura Rival  9^th September 2001

Research on South America

0:00:05 Why study the Trio? Maybe influenced by Audrey Coulson in 1957; by 1960’s easy to go to Surinam and Trio were accessible by airstrip; even today Trio isolated from the rest of the population

0:03:40 What field site would you choose today? Would try to find peoples that were slightly more ritualistic in Xingu or Upper Amazon; streak of puritanism among the Trio; lack of enthusiasm among students for fieldwork of this sort in Latin America; last person I supervised who did fieldwork on that level was Tom Griffiths

0:07:30 Levi-Strauss’ ‘The Raw and the Cooked’ published while in the field. What did it mean for your work? Didn’t read it in the field and the literature then was extraordinarily thin;  later Irving Goldman ‘The Cubeo’; [1963 came back from fieldwork very ill and sent to hospital for tropical diseases in London for tests and took ‘The Cubeo’ in to read. Woman came and asked if I was an anthropologist and introduced herself as Rosemary Firth; she was also present when I had my first attack of malaria]; huge influence of the ‘mythologiques’, hinted at in Francis Huxley “Affable Savages”, made one think of the Amerindian in a completely different way; Levi-Strauss a terrible ethnographer and did very little fieldwork but work was of pure intellectual power

0:13:05 What was impact of Levi-Strauss on British anthropology? Debate on kinship and elementary structures dominated a lot of anthropology in 1960s; Edmund Leach was the conduit for structuralism but difficult to say whether this was his own interpretation or Levi-Strauss’s; Leach perhaps used structuralism to make him a better functionalist; in both the Hugh-Joneses books on the Barasana is the influence Leach or Levi-Strauss? Rodney Needham was influenced by “Elementary Structures” but doubt that he read any of the ‘mythologiques’; he and Levi-Strauss fell out over interpretation of prescriptive systems; Peter Gow’s recent book does show the influence of Levi-Strauss; heard Terry Turner say some time ago that Levi-Strauss was irrelevant but anthropologists tend to absorb ideas into their armoury;

0:19:30 British anthropology very small in scale when compared to US and has been staggeringly influential with regard to its size; some suggest that present anthropologists are rudderless but think the monographs suggest that we are becoming increasingly sophisticated  in analyses; look at the Oxford monograph series and most are good ethnography which pay little attention to the most recent “ism” so not much use of fashionable ideas

0:22:40 If you were to rewrite ‘Individual and Society in Guiana’ would you do it differently? Yes I would. When the Portuguese translation was being done I was asked to rewrite the preface and realized that I’d written a piece on why the book was not worth reading any longer; main thing that happened was the idea of ‘house’ which I would now use at the main hook on which to hang the comparative study; this would allow me to incorporate the social and cultural aspects of the area which is probably my main failing

0:25:00 Why has Amerindian anthropology been focused either on materialist or mentalist lines of interpretation? Materialist interpretation almost entirely American and didn’t lap outside; the war there was between the Harris ‘materialists’ and the sociobiologists; from Europe have watched with some amazement; last Yanomami scandal part of this war; both sides claim to be doing real science which is a bit of anathema to Europeans, however, funding agencies like E.S.R.C. like to think this is part of “big science”, but in anthropology the larger the project the less that gets done;

0:29:20 What do you think is the area we should really focus on? Unfortunately the only way one can get funding to work in Amazonia asking fundamental question is to dress it up as being something else; how does one feed Amazonian material into the wider anthropology? On the whole British anthropologists don’t read Amazonian material, even here in Oxford those doing the masters will get very little as so difficult to fit it into the syllabus; also as anthropology has got closer to home the less relevant this exotic material seems; the danger is that theoretical anthropology develops from the ideas of people you are working on which are developed and turned into theory, eg. Malinowski’s theory of myth comes directly from the Trobriand; is the idealist position of many Amazonian peoples where they live in a world of ideas, it too remote to be actually useful? We can understand Azande witchcraft but the Amerindian unseen world is difficult to import; You are saying that Amerindian peoples are so different from us that we can’t cope with them; argument of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

0:37:36 Has your position on anthropology and history and the relation between them changed over time? There are some intriguing ideas of history amongst Amazonians; Robin Wright argues that in the absence of a chronological framework of history they use a spatial one; European historiography uses a temporal framework but there is always a spatial one in the background ie. events take place somewhere, and there are all sorts of questions one could ask about this; I have become extremely suspicious of oral history because of the selective nature of the human mind, and with Amazonians one is dealing only with oral history and doubt that their memories are all that better than ours

0:43:00 What do you think of the way Neil Whitehead and John Hill are historicizing Amazonian anthropology; I sometimes wonder if Neil doesn’t try a bit too hard with his analyses so not totally convinced; thinking of his introduction to the new edition of Raleigh where there are more readings between the lines than I am willing to accept; historical ecology does seem to be more open minded; other writers on early accounts of the Amazon; should be closer working with archaeologists; Amazonia needs some comparative studies; current work on Schomburgk for the Hakluyt Society incorporates anthropological knowledge in annotations, also having to learn about nineteenth century botany; first piece of historical work was ‘Absent-Minded Imperialism’  and the first time I used archives and questioned how you know in an archive what is important unlike anthropological fieldwork where everything is important