David Seddon interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 19th February 2009

0:09:07 Born in Blackheath, London, in 1943; the clinic where I was born was run by Drs Pink and White who were vegetarians; they seemed to have an enormous impact on the women who gave birth there as my mother was very keen that I should be brought up as a vegetarian; curiously, I now find myself the owner of a flat in Blackheath, a curious cycle; only one of my grandparents was living when I was born; my mother's parents had both died young and so had my father's father; I remember my paternal grandmother as an elderly lady with a stick, which I tried to steal from her; remember visiting her at a home in Yorkshire which disturbed me as it seemed so cold; both my parents were born in Yorkshire and came down to London just before the War in 1939; my father was a physicist and had been a lecturer at Sheffield; my mother had left school at thirteen and had worked first in a factory, then done clerical work; they came to London as my father was offered a job as Director of Research with United Glass, a manufacturer with a factory on the Thames; my mother died in 2004 at the age of ninety-eight; I started writing about her life and in so doing have gone back in time and have found out more about my grandparents and back to the 1850s; my mother had an enormous influence on me; my father came from a professional family although he was the first to go to university but my mother's family background was different; her father had been a craftsman but very poor, so they were an odd mixture; my father, who died when I was eight, had a dry sense of humour but was austere and serious; my mother was always the life and soul of the party, entertaining and talkative, but also enormously warm and loving; I was their only child, so when my father died, my mother and I were a unit for many years, so it is not surprising that she is a very central figure, to whom I owe enormous gratitude for the way she encouraged me to go off and do things; she gave me confidence which has helped throughout my life; she followed my studies and whatever I was doing she tried to keep up with in some way; remember my mother's unhappiness after my father died, also the fact that we had no money except debts; my mother had never been trained to do anything but she had to go out to work, learned to drive a car and was very busy all the time; however she still found energy for me, and was a constant companion as well as a parent; unfortunately it was a very one-sided relationship as she felt I wasn't really interested in what she did; she recalled a sadness about this in her letters and diaries, so she led a selfless kind of existence feeding and nourishing me; my father having gone to university and having been head of Batley Grammar School, wanted me to have every benefit; he had hoped that I would go to a well-known private school, in fact he had Westminster in mind; by his death he had already got me into Westminster Under School and I had started going; when he died there was no money; my mother's family suggested she went back to Yorkshire but she decided to try to make it possible for me to stay in school and fulfil her husband's ambitions, and she did; don't know how she managed to do it but she worked in many jobs, all hours, and took lodgers; eventually I went up to Westminster where I was educated until going to university

9:25:19 At the time the Under School was located in the courtyard where Westminster school is now, in the shadow of Westminster Abbey; remember taking the entrance exam at about seven and a half, and my father and mother accompanying me; remember it was a very hot summer's day and I was expected to do a lot of exam work with other boys in one afternoon; I was accepted and then a year after the Under School was relocated and went to Vincent Square; I used to travel from Blackheath alone; remember that school very well; although I remember teachers I don't remember being particularly inspired by any of them; what I do remember was that the Headmaster was a man who believed in beating; we were shocked when a boy was taken out in front of the class and beaten with a rounders' bat; discipline was kept ultimately by corporal punishment, though I don't know how many of the parents realized or understood this; it continued when I went to Westminster School; I was beaten there and the memory stays vivid as I hate physical violence; you were not allowed into the dormitories during the day but four of us were found there, fooling around; the Housemaster was incandescent and we were taken down solemnly and beaten; it was painful and humiliating, and I had the temerity (at fourteen, as I was) to ask why he was doing this to us; he assumed we had been engaged in some obscene behaviour; from that time on I became rather rebellious and difficult because I found authority of that kind unacceptable; thus, schooldays were not the best of my life; I was a weekly boarder so saw my mother at weekends; I enjoyed the social life of school and being with other boys, enjoyed sport, and there were inspiring teachers; remember the English teacher, Mr Birt, whose lessons were always exciting; I was always good at sport though not outstanding, and enjoyed it; looking back, school was very important but it was a grind and difficult; probably the most difficult thing was that I was quite good at languages - French and German - and wanted to do them; had in mind to be a foreign correspondent or writer; for reasons that still elude me I was told that I couldn't, and my mother was somehow persuaded that I should do classics; I actually took A levels in Latin, Greek and ancient history, which I was not very good at and found difficult; leaving school and going to university was the beginning of an opening up which was revolutionary, and for the first time I was able to do what I wanted

16:19:08 Strangely, music, drama, and politics don't seem to figure at all in my schooling; I played the piano and learned the trumpet but I wasn't very good and it didn't excite me; since then, music has become more important, but I have always been a listener rather than a player; I like everything, from opera to chamber music, but also jazz; I don't write to music although it maybe playing in the background; there was a period when I was involved in a certain amount of theatre, for instance, the Latin play; perhaps I have always enjoyed playing a part in real life, in later life as a lecturer; from childhood was aware that through life we play many parts, and people behave very differently in different circumstances; curious, looking back, that school seemed to pass with me as a passenger; I did not enjoy school much, though I never admitted so to my mother; I managed to get A levels and go to university, but I never shone in any respect; I became politically active later, but not at this time at all; I read a great deal, partly to escape from school; there was a public library near the school where I would go and read Freud and all sorts of bizarre things; I did like the classics when they weren't being taught as a school subject; there was a world outside that intrigued me but I wasn't really part of it; school didn't open up wonderful vistas but seemed to close them down; it gave me a foundation of some kind but life started when I left school

21:23:03 I loved the language in classics, and read Homer in the original, and really enjoyed ancient history; the normal procedure was to go on to Oxford and read classics but I decided not to, but to go to Cambridge and do something like ancient history; I then discovered you could do archaeology and anthropology there and thought it sounded exciting; I applied to Sidney Sussex College where my mother had a friend; I took an open entrance exam and in the general paper, wrote about the balance of nature; I had an interview with the classics don and remember talking about Suetonius; he tried to persuade me to do classics, but I was accepted to do archaeology and anthropology as I had wanted; Cambridge in 1961 was liberating because no one told you what to do; I could go to lectures or not, read recommended texts or not, it seemed very open and flexible; from almost the first day I found it absolutely fascinating - enjoyed the archaeology, the physical anthropology and the social anthropology; at the end of the first year I had enormous difficulties in deciding which of these three I wanted to do; I enjoyed living in College, I was able to get into the football and cricket teams, I rowed for the College; the next two years were the same; I remember friends from the College; in the first year I shared rooms with David Hayes, who was reading law; he had a good tenor voice and would sing arias from Puccini to entertain me, and we had very good conversations; in the vacation between our first and second year, David and I and two other friends drove across Europe, through Turkey and into Iran; David incidentally is now a Circuit Judge in North Norfolk; I specialized in the second and third year in archaeology but I do remember the lecturers in the other two subjects in my first year; in anthropology, in which I specialized afterwards, the notable figures were Meyer Fortes, the Professor, and Edmund Leach, then Reader; the opposing views of descent theory and alliance theory, and different views of kinship and marriage were heightened when you found that Edmund Leach was lecturing in one lecture theatre and Meyer Fortes in another, both criticizing each others views implicitly and explicitly; I tried to listen to both but I found Leach's lectures more entertaining and exciting because he was a very good lecturer; at the time alliance theory and Levi-Strauss were the things which linked to structuralism and a whole set of ideas which descent theory seemed not to have; I remember Jack Trevor who used to lecture in biological anthropology whose lectures became increasingly difficult to follow in the years that I was there; Reo Fortune was also lecturing and also rather difficult to understand; most of what we knew about him was his relationship with Margaret Mead and others; I chose archaeology as I was very much excited by the earliest archaeology, so opted for prehistory; Charles McBurney was my supervisor and Eric Higgs, and these two became very important figures in my working life; in the second summer I was privileged to be selected as one of a team to go with Charles McBurney to Iran to look for the origins of homo sapiens; I was chosen partly because I could drive a Land Rover, but I was the only undergraduate in the team; we drove mainly in the north-east of Iran and McBurney had a theory that homo sapiens and Neanderthal man came together in Western Europe but that homo sapiens came from further east; what we found were remnants of Neanderthal in the caves where we dug; Charles had a squeaky voice and was subject to constant imitation and he had made his reputation by digging an enormous cave in Libya; he was quite sharp and acerbic and could be quite unpleasant at times, but he was extraordinarily excited by his subject, and to me this was what mattered; he got us enthusiastic about flints; remember in Iran digging through layers of the most beautiful pottery but he told us to keep digging to get down to the prehistoric; archaeology is about imagination, and rather like reading the classic literature, you could see into another world; during an Easter vacation we dug somewhere on the Gower peninsula, sitting in a cave, digging up not just bones and stones, but mammoths' teeth and the remnants of animals that had clearly been around at that time; suddenly it was very easy to think of yourself as a prehistoric man; this ability to recreate an imagined past was what appealed to me; later, when I actually became an archaeologist this began to pall as I realized that you could construct an enormous range of possible social situations on the basis of very little which I then found unsatisfactory; at the end of my third year Charles was very keen for me to do research and offered me exciting possibilities which I turned down at that point; when I left Cambridge, instead of going to look for the origins of early man in South Iran, I chose to take a job teaching archaeology in Cape Town

36:30:11 I had developed no interest in politics during my time in Cambridge as all happened because of South Africa; I remember hearing John Selwyn Gummer in the Conservative Society and being very impressed; I also went to hear people speak at the Labour Society, and almost joined the Liberal Democrats, so you can see I was nowhere politically; I think I was very aware what was happening; I liked Harold Wilson and was quite impressed by his knowledge and ability, but was not politically active; again, it was a sort of continuation of school in the sense that my involvement in other areas of life seemed to have been very limited; I didn't get involved in theatre, played sport as it came, tried fencing and did all sorts of things, but just at college level; the centre of my life was very much my work; I have never talked about religion as it has not been an important part of my life at all; my father was a Baptist and my mother was never anything particular; I do remember at a fairly early age, having come home from Crusaders aged eight or nine, saying I wasn't sure if I believed in God, but it was not a major issue; when I was at Westminster there was a point at which routinely everyone was confirmed in the Abbey, and I refused; I do remember in an R.E. lesson asking the teacher whether, if I didn't believe in God I would go to hell; he said that was a stupid question, and I remember being disturbed by that because I thought that if you were going to take it seriously then this does matter; I think from that moment on I thought I was just not interested; religion was never important, I was very much a pragmatist, a materialist, and maybe this laid the foundation for later inclinations towards a basically materialist approach to life; I think I have always been an atheist though not one who had wanted to pursue it; I get excitement, pleasure and amazement from how the world is, and I don't see the necessity to invent or create an elaborate structure; as a social scientist later on in my life, one of the puzzles has been why people in many cultures feel it important to create elaborate systems of belief in things one can't see, or feel, or touch; an agnostic might be a safer position to take but I think I do know that there is no God, so atheist seems fair enough; I am not a supporter of Dawkins and have found his writings quite tedious after a while as it is almost a fervour; to me there is no fervour, it just isn't an issue; however, I am interested in people and how they think, and in that area I am interested in religion

43:32:06 Before going to university I had spent three months in East Africa doing a whole variety of things, among which I had been involved in some archaeological excavation; Louis Leakey was digging at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and I worked there for a while, Merrick Poznanski was excavating on the Kagera River and I joined him; I had found Africa exciting; in 1964 there were not many jobs in archaeology in Britain, so I like many of my contemporaries looked for jobs abroad; one of my closest friends, David Calvocoressi, took a job in Ghana; another friend went to Tasmania and I went to South Africa, to the University of Cape Town; I went by boat which took two weeks to get to Cape Town; I was joined by Ray Inskeep as senior lecturer, and for a year I was in the School of African Studies there; that was very exciting in lots of different ways; my arrival was dramatic, at dawn with the sun coming up over Table Mountain, and spectacular to look at; looking down there were just hundreds of black men unloading cargo and a few white men telling them what to do; somehow that was very shocking; I was met at the boat by Ray Inskeep and we drove up to the University where a lot of the students were demonstrating against the introduction of ninety day detention; I remember that also as quite striking; my life in Cambridge had been almost without politics and I had never seen a demonstration; the students were pretty much all white and it was clearly a different world that I was in; over the period of two years that I stayed there, I was transformed and became aware of the politics of Apartheid and of a different kind of society where the divisions were very acute and inescapable; intellectually it was quite challenging; I had to give lectures for the first time; the School of African Studies was very interesting, it was interdisciplinary and Monica Wilson was Head of Department and it was again quite dramatic to have a woman head of department; she had great authority and warmth, and was very welcoming; she was even then an amazingly impressive person; Jack Simon was there, a political scientist, very much involved with actual African politics; from the beginnings the School itself was not just about the study of archaeology, but about anthropology, the Cape and Africa; a totally new environment for me and very exciting; I was a year in Cape Town and again there was a major choice; I had visited the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Zambia where a number of important anthropologists had worked, but it was also a centre of archaeology and was interested in the possibility of doing much more field work; at the same time as that came up as a possibility for me, a lectureship at the University of Witwatersrand came up (I was a junior lecturer at Cape Town), so I had a choice; I applied for both but did not get the position at the Rhodes-Livingstone which went to Brian Fagan, but did get an offer at Witwatersrand so I moved up to Johannesburg, with the support of the people in Cape Town and Monica Wilson was my referee; even at that stage I had begun to think that maybe I would not stay in archaeology as I had become more involved in trying to understand South African society, make sense of race and class and issues that were very visible; there I became involved in other things, I taught African night school, and teaching archaeology there was politically exciting as I was teaching about the iron age settlements in the Transvaal before the Dutch arrived; this denied the myth that they had moved into an empty country and suggested that the Africans had a deeper prehistory than was thought; I also gave a series of lectures for the South African Broadcasting Corporation on human evolution and prehistoric development; it seemed straight forward until I started to receive hate mail and realized that I was in a society where what I had taken for granted was contested; the Dutch Reform Church still believed in creation so what I was saying was not acceptable; I was teaching Africans their own history which was controversial, so increasingly I became politically aware; in Johannesburg I shared a house with a number of other young professionals one of whom was the editor of 'Drum', an active multiracial magazine in South Africa, again quite controversial; this was the time of the trial of Nelson Mandela and others, so through people that I knew I became more politically aware; at the end of this I came to the conclusion that I wasn't prepared to spend my life in prehistory but wanted to know more about race, class, and how South Africa had developed in the way it had; through this time I also had a very important relationship with a young woman who was an anthropologist and was planning to do an M.A. in Chicago, Renée Hirschon, whose father was Jewish; through her I also became more politicised; she had had an African boyfriend, which was a pretty startling thing to do, who was Archie Mafeje; he later became quite a major militant, both in South Africa and elsewhere; thus everything changed my view of what was important and I began to cast around for how I would pursue this; she was keen that I go to Chicago, but I also applied to the L.S.E. to do a Masters in race relations; found I could get a scholarship in London but was not sure I could get the money to support me in Chicago, so went to the L.S.E.; a lot of people at Wits were very cross that I was leaving archaeology but I explained that this was what I wanted to do; the upshot was that I left South Africa in 1966; my mother had been out to South Africa but I was also influenced by the fact that she lived in London

57:09:16 I arrived back at the L.S.E. and found that as there had only been three applicants they were not offering the course; instead of a one year Masters I was offered a two year M.Phil in anthropology, so I registered for it; at that time Tanzania was going through its experimentation in Ujamma under Nyerere and I thought I would like to go there; James Woodburn was the man who knew about Tanzania so I was assigned to him; James was interested in hunters and gatherers and not really interested in race and class; for about six months I read voraciously on Africa and Tanzania in particular, and about African socialism; the next stage was to apply to do fieldwork but was told by the Tanzanian Embassy that I was not eligible for a visa, so could not get in because I had lived for two years in South Africa; I was frustrated, having given up a job, and living at home with my mother; out of the blue an American political scientist, Bob Holt, arrived at the L.S.E. and was looking for a research student to offer a fellowship to do some research for him in Morocco; desperate at this stage, and running out of money, I decided to apply; he was offering two places and had a thesis about development and change; he gave me one of the fellowships and the choice of working with a Berber-speaking or Arabic-speaking group; chose to learn Arabic as I thought it was more likely to get my into Tanzania eventually