Anne Salmond interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 19^th November 2004

0:00:05 Brought up in Gisborne on the east coast of New Zealand; fifty-fifty Maori-other community; father ran a textile factory with his two brothers; large family of eight children; idyllic childhood; mother a very generous person who has spent her whole life looking after others; sharply intelligent and reads enormously; spends her life keeping family networks active; I was eldest girl

0:02:04 Sent away to girls boarding school in Masterton at 13; found it quite hard; had an English teacher called Mr Bird whom I’ve kept in touch with; loved English; in 6^th form year won an American Field Scholarship and went from this small school to a largely Jewish school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio; extraordinary experience meeting others on the same scholarship; at the end of the year were taken round the U.S. on a bus; met Jack Kennedy at the White House; learnt about anthropology in that year; loved meeting people from other countries and seeing the complexities of cultures; decided that is what I wanted to do; realized how little I understood of the Maoris

0:04:13 As a Field Scholar I had to talk to community groups etc. and tell them about my country; I realized I knew almost nothing about the Maori and had to make most of it up; my great-grandfather was a film-maker, a fluent Maori speaker, who ended up as Director of the Dominion Museum; when I came back to New Zealand, in the middle of the academic year, started to learn the Maori language in Gisborne; worked in the local museum for six months cataloguing the Maori collection; met lots of Maori people and learnt more songs; fascinated by things I started to learn; hadn’t realized there was a whole Maori landscape

0:06:47 Applied to University of Auckland to do anthropology as that’s where I could learn Maori;  as soon as I got there I joined the Maori club; studied with Ralph Piddington  and Ralph Bulmer; Piddington was an interesting lecturer, a humane person and an activist about Maori issues; have always admired Ralph Bulmer’s fieldwork in New Guinea; liked the way he worked with people, eg. with Ian Saem on the birds

0:09:20 By the time I left Auckland and came to University of Pennsylvania to do my PhD, Piddington had drilled us in Malinowski; also had biological anthropology, linguistics as well as social anthropology; had worked with Roger Green, the Pacific archaeologist, Bruce Biggs, the linguist and through Andy Pauley had started to learn Chomskian linguistics; I wrote a Chomskian grammar of Ontong Java when I went there at 20 to do fieldwork; had to go to Honiara; went with Pita Sharples; both collecting linguistic material for Bruce Biggs; Honiara bifurcated town racially with people who had been kicked out of post-independence Africa ruling the place; segregated hotels and bars; she and Peter, who was Maori, chucked out of a restaurant; huge shock; thrown off a beach because talking with a local friend; as I was with Polynesian friends I was the wrong side of the colour bar; we used to call the people who walked round in white shirts and socks “white gods”; I learnt what it was like to be on the receiving end of racialism and didn’t like it

0:13:08 My Ontong Java grammar was published by Mouton; it had been a very intense experience; I became fluent in Leuangiuan and was dreaming in it in three months; but did not think a Chomskian grammar captured it at all; decided to study socio-linguistics and went to Philadelphia because Dell Hymes was there,  also William Labov,  Erving Goffman  and Ward Goodenough; Ward Goodenough was my supervisor; he was very paternal with his graduate students; very generous mentor for many years; logical thinker and a fine field anthropologist; also studied with Irving Goffman; an interesting lecturer but disconcerting; Dell Hymes was a philosophical anthropologist; I wanted to follow the work he was doing in language and culture; I wanted to  use the deep understanding of a language to understand the world of a peoples; got away from Chomskian grammar and started to think about semantics, language and power, ontology

0:18:08 First year at Auckland met a couple of eminent Maori elders, Amiria and Eruera, who became close friends; used to go to see them every week, spoke in Maori; Eruera an expert on tribal traditions and started teaching me; odd thing for someone of my background to study Maori then; they were like my grandparents in a parallel universe; decided to write thesis on Hui, the Maori ceremonial gatherings; taken by Eruera and Amiria to sixty or seventy gatherings all over the country; ancestors there, tapu was a power, mana was a presence; I was married by then and husband came and took wonderful photographs; wrote a book called ‘Hui’ where many photographs appear, which became a book for Maori people

0:23:41 After PhD became a lecturer at University of Auckland; had three children in five years; also writing; Amiria had told me all sorts of wonderful things about her life; spent about six months taping her and published it as ‘Amiria, the Life Story of a Maori Woman’; won a literary award; I aimed to produce a text that sounded like her talking, her family think it does; she was ruthlessly honest but I did leave some things out so other members of the family would not be upset; it was a domestic book, about her life, but when I started working with Eruera faced problem with tapu knowledge; with him had to go away from food, he would chant a prayer before we started, it was very serious; he only told me the things that could be released; he passed on quite a bit of knowledge to his younger son; very reflective, philosophical book on political movement and change among the Maori; book published in the same year as the Springbok tour (1981); riotous year, lots of people thought they shouldn’t have come because of apartheid; coloured the reception of the book as it was a statement from an important Maori elder; only problem was that Maori tribal knowledge belongs to a particular kin group, and the claims of one group could be denied by another

0:32:00 The work on travels and exploration started in Cambridge in 1980; I was here for a year on a Nuffield scholarship; ‘Eruera’ was proofread here; needed to step back; went to seminars; listened to Edmund Leach, Meyer Fortes, Jack Goody; started to wonder about how the relationship between Maori and European people started; wrote a paper on the voyages of Tasman and Cook; thought the way they had been understood was monocular, only being understood from a European point of view; Peter Gathercole took me to the museum to look at the Cook collection; just looked at the painted paddle again; Ami [daughter] is now looking after that collection

0:35:12 On 1980 visit, met Marilyn Strathern who was then the honorary editor of ‘Man’; we had children of the same age and talked while children played; thought she was brilliant; Edmund Leach was incredibly kind and arranged for me to be at King’s; we lived in his house in Storey’s Way; I gave a paper on the engagements between Maori and Europeans and Meyer Fortes took me out to lunch and said I was a dangerous young woman; took it as a compliment; have not spent long periods in U.S. just back for conferences as found I liked European anthropology more; it is more philosophical; feel that anthropology addresses philosophical questions of what it is to be a person in the world and the varieties of ways of being

0:37:35 Have not taken any formal course in history but read a lot; started working with documents as they held the things I wanted to understand; I have always used oral tradition and collected oral histories; Keith Sinclair the New Zealand historian as a friend and former student of Maori language, very supportive; don’t see any conflict between history and anthropology; they are trying to understand the same things; three books have come out of this: ‘Two Worlds’ about the first encounters between Maori and Europeans in New Zealand, then ‘Between Worlds’ on a later period up to the arrival of the missionaries; recently ‘Trial of  the Cannibal Dog’ about Cook and the Pacific; method of writing when comparing multiple accounts; felt that there was something that happened to Cook on the third voyage that had not been properly explained; events concerned killing and eating of crew members and  perceived failure to deal harshly with main protagonist reflected in trial of the cannibal dog; destabilised relations between Cook and men eventually led to his own death

0:46:00 Now working on a project about voyaging; interested in replica voyages; new encounters; working on major project on first 200 years of European voyaging in Polynesia; think I shall write on European discovery of Tahiti

0:48:00 I have loved being an anthropologist in my own country; equally I have loved to get away from it to think; know that Maori people will read what I write; there have been challenges about a white person writing on Maori life; violent debates, but creative for an anthropologist as can’t take anything for granted; can’t take an authoritative tone; gives a grounding and humility; realize one’s information is always second hand; think of Maoris as my teachers not as informants; in many ways they have shaped the way I think as an anthropologist; I think about reciprocity, respecting the mana of the people I write about, of tapu as a power in the world; have experienced tapu myself; challenges own presuppositions on how the world works; can lead to madness; I know I love and admire Maori things but I am not a Maori