Second Part

0:09:07 Having decided to accept the Morocco offer, talked to James Woodburn who said they would re-register me for a PhD but as he knew nothing about Morocco I should find a different tutor; the obvious person at that time was Ernest Gellner although he was in the sociology department; he became very important to me and was a big influence in many ways; Bob Holt was the sponsor and critical guide to the research; the other post was filled by an Arabic speaker, Raymond Jamous, who was of Iranian-Jewish origin and had been brought up in the Lebanon; he was quite happy to learn Berber; he and I developed a very exciting, interesting relationship in the two years we were working in Morocco; we both went to North-East Morocco and lived about fifteen to twenty miles apart, he working among Berber speakers and I among Arabic speakers; we were trying to explore a thesis - Holt had written a book with a man called Turner, 'The Political Basis of Economic Development', their thesis was that you could distinguish between France and China on the one hand, and England and Japan on the other; whereas in France and China it had always been possible to buy your way into the aristocracy, to convert wealth into political status, in England and Japan that was not possible; as one was obliged to accumulate wealth, this was the foundation in England of the bourgeoisie and in Japan to a similar economic class; think there were enormous problems with the thesis, but Holt's reading on the history of Morocco suggested that whereas the Berbers were able to buy themselves status, that was not possible in the Arab world; he thought we would find that the Arabs were more keen to invest and accumulate whereas the Berbers would spend on displays and largess; we soon felt that the thesis could not be sustained, but we had been funded for two years to do detailed research, I learned Arabic and Raymond, Tamazight; at the end of it I had the material for a good PhD thesis; rather like going to South Africa, it was a turning point, confronting a totally different situation, in a society where privacy was really non-existent - very demanding, but very exciting at the same time; before going out to the field there were all the so-called preparations for fieldwork and seminars; I was at the L.S.E. for about six months doing preparatory work; you were there, and there seemed to be an interesting crowd who had come in from other walks of life; particularly remember Nancy Chodorow, Helena Lipstadt, Zoe Woods, Peter Loizos, and a whole range of other people; also the lecturers were interesting, and towering above them for me was Raymond Firth; I found him not only engaging as an individual, but his Friday seminars were always something worth going to; I came across Lucy Mair quite a lot as I had originally worked on African material - a difficult, interesting, problematic person; Isaac Schapera was there, and Maurice Freedman, and bright young sparks like Robin Fox; found this all very stimulating but not exciting enough to provide an overall framework; the fieldwork seminars were very practical so went out to the field without much theory; I found the learning of the language quite straight forward and became pretty fluent within four or five months; I found that I had access to a certain amount of local literature on the region, so found the fieldwork itself very exciting; I had a guiding theory which was not my own to test, but apart from that we were free to construct what we wanted; found myself increasing working on how this group of people had changed over the last hundred years, so an historical analysis of transformation; when I got to Morocco they were just beginning a large program of irrigation which was going to transform the dry plains areas; up till then people had been engaged in farming barley, wheat, and so on as settled farmers; in the period before, when the Spanish had arrived and before that, the people I was working with were mainly pastoralists living in tents, so I had a kind of ready-made picture of what was happening, but that didn't become clear until much later; I talked to old men about what they did when young and their eyes lit up as they described raiding; was able to compare this with Somali literature on the same sort of thing; they became settled agriculturalists during the Spanish era, and now there was the just-emerging irrigated agriculture with the possibility of growing crops for export to Europe; I tried to collect material on all of this; I found that although my Arabic was good, it was much easier to collect information on people's material life - what they were growing, crops, and the social and economic relations around that; politics was more difficult and complex, as were people's ideas and thoughts, and religious beliefs; thus my thesis was very much a materialist analysis; Westermarck was a major figure, and I have written pieces on marriage since, but it wasn't a central feature; I lived for eighteen months in a village which was very exciting and rewarding; you make friends and go back, and live their lives; came back in 1969 to London and found it extremely difficult to re-enter; I had not appreciated how difficult reverse culture shock would be; I was lucky to be able to apply for and get a lectureship in anthropology at SOAS immediately; this meant that I had to start giving lectures and teach, so the process or writing the thesis was made more difficult; I then experienced a major problem with how to structure the material I had; we wrote a report for Holt to show that the people did not conform to the way he suggested, so we completed that work; however, I had a lot of material but no thesis; the process of crafting the material into a thesis took a long time and I did not complete it until 1975; I left SOAS in 1972 to go to East Anglia, and again had teaching responsibilities which also limited my time; on finding a thesis, had come back at a time of political agitation at the L.S.E.; own political radicalization came with the discovery that there were people writing within a conceptual framework that I found increasingly helpful; the first thing I read was Andre Gunder Frank's 'Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America' which Signe Arnfred gave me; it helped me to understand Morocco in its broader context and gave me the beginnings of a framework for looking at my own material; I then discovered some of the French Marxists, like Godelier, Meillassoux, Terray, and a whole number of others writing in the late 1960s, early 1970s, which I read voraciously; I even got so excited that I edited a collection of French works which came out as 'Relations of Production' in 1978; the framework I found was Marxism of a kind that helped me organize my own material in a way that I found very productive; thus in the early 1970s I became a real enthusiast for the Marxist anthropology and thinking that was coming out of France; Maurice Bloch had not yet started on this and in 1971 nothing had been translated; Joel Kahn and Josep Llobera began to work on it in the mid-1970s; my thesis was very heavily influenced by the French Marxists and Gunder Frank

18:05:07 I felt there were very few people who understood this literature; Ernest Gellner was clearly not a Marxist, but he was also somebody who had read and knew what Marxist theory was about and was very intelligent about it, not just a rejectionist; the other person whom I thought had also read and thought about it was Raymond Firth - 'Sceptical Marxist' at least engaged with it, which was more than most anthropologists at that time; then I discovered the whole Manchester School whom I'd not really been aware of despite my time in South Africa, like Gluckman, Turner, and particularly Peter Worsley; they had been writing with an awareness of Marxism which I found very rewarding; through these influences I found a way in which I could write my own material and I think it is one of the few PhD theses of the period that were explicitly Marxist analyses; found Ernest frustrating as a supervisor, I had read most of what he had written, and had a lot of difficulty with his work on the Middle East, 'Saints of the Atlas' in particular, which was clearly the closest to what I was writing about; felt he had produced a rather idealised work which didn't apply to where I was working; so we clashed intellectually at that point; a lot of the early part of my thesis was devoted to a critique of segmentary theory showing that it was one among several kinds of political ideology; it appeared to be a critique of Gellner and  was rather frustrated that he didn't take this on, the feedback was limited; when the thesis was complete he took it away to read; I went down to his house at Petersfield and he met me at the gate, told me he had read it and said I had blown it with all the references to Marx and very little to Gellner; suddenly realized that it was one of his little game plays, but it was a bad moment; he said he didn't agree with it but thought I had handled the subject in an interesting manner; we then had, probably for the first time, a discussion on the material; Talal Asad was my external examiner and the thesis passed, but I had had a huge struggle in creating it; the book 'Moroccan Peasants' which came out of it was not about tribalism or peasants, although the people I worked with called themselves children of the ogress and clearly had a segmentary lineage notion there; the thesis was a major first step into anthropology from archaeology; then, almost as soon as I had got into anthropology I found I was increasingly interested in the sorts of arguments that people like Gunder Frank had developed; I began to realize that what I had struggled with as a thesis was partly because it was so small-scale, and my interests were how the people I had studied were part of a much wider transformation of Morocco and North Africa during the colonial period; when a new school of development studies was set up at East Anglia I applied, because I felt that I was veering towards an interest that went beyond what anthropologists were really interested in; I was then part of a process over the next ten to fifteen years of building a new School of Development Studies at East Anglia, which was multi-disciplinary, in which I found myself; I found the anthropology and even the archaeology with its long-term perspective became very relevant in looking at development; I stayed there until I retired in 2006; although I had a PhD in anthropology I would hesitate to say that I was one, but I am informed in all the work I do by the anthropological approach - critical, sceptical, confrontation with detailed events and actualities at the grass roots - but framed for me in a much broader perspective; now, in retirement, my interest is very much global, in international movements of migration and remittance-flows

27:51:14 My association with Nepal was like so many things in my life, rather by chance; I had arrived at East Anglia with my thesis incomplete; almost as soon as I arrived I was told that the group as a whole had managed to get a big research contract to work in Nepal, but they didn't have an anthropologist; despite coming from a department headed by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, with Lionel Caplan and others who were interested in Nepal, I had never been interested in Asia at all; in planning the project I became more involved and eventually I was encouraged to join my colleagues and to go to Nepal; we went in 1974 as a vanguard of four to look at the effects of road building in Western Nepal; I was lucky enough halfway through to take time off to finish my thesis, but was launched in a new endeavour; it was exciting because it was a team project; I was working closely with an agricultural economist (David Feldman), a geographer (Piers Blaikie), an economist (John Cameron), and a little later, a French anthropologist (Alain Fournier); we had quite a large amount of money from the Department of International Development; very soon we felt the impact that people had argued roads should have were wrong; our work was on trying to understand why this should be so, what were the dynamics in the rural areas of Nepal that caused this, and the unexpected impacts that the roads did have; became an attempt to understand the dynamics of a whole rural society; found it extremely exciting as we could almost do as we liked; we fulfilled our terms of reference, but when we wrote our report for the O.D.A. it created a great storm; firstly, it was not what they had expected, secondly, we were very critical about the programme of road building at that stage, and thirdly, it was a much more complicated and multi-faceted analysis that they had anticipated; we had a great battle with them, produced a summary to try to explain what we were arguing about, there were battles within the development group that produced the report as not all our colleagues were in favour of the kind of line we had taken, and it was also formative because, out of the team, three of us could work together and the other two did a different report; eventually we parted ways and the three of us, Blaikie, Cameron, and myself, really thought we had something interesting to say; we revised the report, got agreement from the O.D.A., and got Oxford University Press to publish a reworked version of that fieldwork as 'Nepal in Crisis' in 1980; it had its own impact as the first comprehensive critical analysis that tried to look at Nepal as a whole; we were certainly told by the British Embassy that we were persona non grata, so throughout the 1980s none of us spent much time in Nepal

33:43:16 We both loved and hated being in Nepal; we were living in Pokhara which at that time was not incredibly well-resourced with food and vegetables; we were living there with our families and people got ill a lot; Blaikie's daughter was bitten by a dog and had to have rabies injections, but the team, wandering round the hills were also sick a lot of the time; we had a whole team of Nepalese researchers so it was a very sociable activity unlike my Moroccan experience; in that sense it was rewarding and a valuable intellectual experience; I love working with other people intellectually although it is quite rare to be able to do so; we three were able to work together over a period of ten years although we have gone our separate ways since then; Nepal was the third main place that I had lived in but I don't think it struck me as being particularly different from South Africa or Morocco; it clearly was more complex in many ways than Morocco, partly to do with notions of realities of caste as well as ethnicity, as well as class and social division; we were working on a bigger territory so there was much more difference than in Morocco; I tried to spend as long as I could in particular places but it was never longer than a month; I hope that the anthropological insights and understandings were there; we also had other people's work to draw on whereas there was very little on Morocco that I could use; however, we were the only ones adopting the particular theoretical framework from a Marxist perspective; the work I have done since has been informed by that but have very few colleagues working with the same approach; it is true that it is a materialist analysis, goes against the grain, and assumes a lot of things; think there are problems there but it also has great strength and we thought we could understand the main dynamics of what was happening; what we failed entirely to do was to look outside this region and see the dynamic that was building up outside which led eventually to the Maoist insurgency; ours was a radical pessimistic view at the time, based on the realities we had seen and analysed; in a later book I revised the thinking and it was about ten years later on and did see the parlous state of poverty, and did foresee some sort of political development but not quite the insurgency; it was an exciting place to work and allowed us to debate with Nepalese in a way that I had not been able to with Moroccans; I have written a number of things with Nepali colleagues; Jagannath Adhikari is a man I have great respect for as he is a man who had actually done fieldwork, and the villages he had worked in round Pokhara he knows very well indeed; he and I put together a book that he had begun to write on Pokhara, which again is one of the few on an urban area and its hinterland; I have also worked with him and Ganesh Gurung on labour migration and remittances and we wrote when nobody else seemed to the paying attention to what seemed to me to be the most dramatic change in Nepal's history, with large numbers of people working abroad; remember the IMF people being most surprised and realizing there was more money in the system than they had thought; I have been back to Nepal almost every year, teaching, talking and engaging in debate with Nepalese with a view now to influencing discussions on where things go next

42:16:10 I did a collection of essays with Arjun Karki on the peoples' war in Nepal and out of that has come work on what has life been like in the rural areas during the insurgency where people talk about fear, anxiety and compromise; where things will go now is very hard to say; many of us were very excited in 2006 when the fighting appeared to be coming to an end, and there seemed to be potential for a major transformation; that was two years ago, and although the King's position has been somewhat marginalized, there really doesn't seem to have been the drive or vision among any of the major politicians to force through a process if progressive change; I am very disappointed, there is a great jockeying for positions in a very small arena, and at the same time the situation in Nepal is not radically improving; they don't have a constitution or a unified political command, and nobody is really in control, so Nepal remains in crisis and one can only be hopeful that some sort of coherent alliance comes out to allow them to move forward; I would love to see a Maoist/UML alliance moving forward, without recourse to violence, it is not clear that that is going to happen; there are risks of falling back into a conservative alliance so the future is unclear, meanwhile ordinary Nepalese strive to make a living; they are making no progress in the development field or with tackling the issues of caste and untouchability; turning to the North is something that has happened; in the North-West already those remote areas are closer to Tibet, and there will be structural and infrastructural changes; roads and railways do make a big difference, but that will not be in the next five years which does worry me; the return to some sort of violence will be devastating, but social science is not predictive; this is where the old materialists, like me, suffer, as we think we can perhaps find a clear way to explain how things will happen, although there are still parameters; I am clearer in my mind about how things will go than I was, but I am certainly less optimistic than I was two years ago

47:40:15 One of the ways I found to unblock the difficulties I had with the Moroccan thesis was reading work by people who were beginning to develop what came to be called the world-systems approach; I find that essential now; there are very few parts of the world where you can make sense of what is going on locally without linking it into wider developments; I was very lucky that Andre Gunder Frank came to East Anglia and was a colleague of mine for about four years, and we taught a course together from 1981 onwards called Contemporary World Development; he had written two books on this in about 1980; when he left to go to Amsterdam I continued to direct the Masters programme which taught those courses so was led into thinking much more than I had done about looking at the whole; I taught that for twenty years; an exciting thing was that it took me outside the rather conventional notion that most of my colleagues shared, that development is about the Third World; my course was about three worlds - in America, Russia and Africa - so pretty ambitious; also meant that I extended my own reading and attempted to understand in some way how the whole world was moving; have written on flows of remittances in international terms; clear from Gunder Frank's work that the Second World was being absorbed into the First through banks etc. and by 1989 it was obvious to all of us that State Socialism in the Soviet Union was no longer viable in a political sense; the end of the Second World also suggested this was true of the Third World as well; people like Nigel Harris had foreseen this in the 1980s; thus by the end of the 1980s all are aware that there is one very complicated world; a lot of my work has been in terms of that global dynamic; I have returned more in the last few years to the Middle East as an arena; there was a period when there looked as if there was an emerging challenge to American dominance from Europe and Japan, but in the last ten years the emergence of China and India as major economic powers has made the landscape very different; problem of how to handle the singularity of the world and its complexity, and understand how that plays out in the immediate locality is a huge challenge that not a single discipline is able to deal with; I come back to team work simply because aggregate brain power is greater than singular; am struggling at the moment with the most recent crisis of where the credit crunch came from and why has it taken so many people by surprise; remember the crisis of the 1970s which was like this in reverse where Keynesianism was dead, but now looks as though it is back again; the Obama inauguration is a singular moment for reflection about where the world is going; think it still true that the United States dominates more than any other what happens elsewhere, but it is not a single hegemonic power; we have seen how a single administration can change what happens; the Bush administration has taken the world to war in certain regions in ways that need not have gone that way, where there were real alternatives; the world does depend on the way the new presidency moves and one is optimistic that a group of determined people in the right position can change the world to some extent at least; the trouble is that it doesn't always evolve in the way that they anticipated; I guess I am disappointed as an old Marxist materialist that one can't just see the steps up to heaven through the clouds, but so be it; one recognises that it is just too complicated