0:00:05 Introduction by Mark Turin; born in Philadelphia but parents moved almost immediately; father worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps under Democrats; when Republicans returned to office he worked in foreign aid until retirement; grew up in liberal family; Mother librarian at Pennsylvania School of Social Work where she met father; had been principle of a school in Lebanon after the World War I for a Mennonite foundation; father from a Presbyterian family; mother also a published poet under her maiden name, Violet Bender
0:03:13 Eldest of three children; brother is an investigative journalist, and sister an administrative law judge; mother's mother was very much part of our early life; father had five sisters; had lots of cousins; grew up as part of a large family; Mennonites are very international; mother's Mennonite colony had started in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, then travelled to Ontario and back down to Indiana; maintained contact with Mennonites all over the world; mother's brother collected Anabaptist family bibles where genealogical material written; these groups had been persecuted by Maria Theresa of Austria
0:07:28 Own family travelled much in the U.S; early politicisation; went to public schools but then got a scholarship to an English public school, St George’s, Harpenden, Hertfordshire; stayed for a year, then went to Harvard; both parents had done English literature and had some British friends; socialists
0:14:31 Hated American high school and junior high; American culture conformist; McCarthyism; English school very different; snobbish; upwardly mobile social ethos; intellectual culture; enjoyed rugger; I liked the “product” but disliked the politics it came from; teacher a Leavisite from Cambridge; very intensive and extraordinarily stimulating experience; did keep contact with a few friends made then; competitiveness between England and America at that time; only seven years after World War II; lots of English cities still in ruins; food rationing
0:20:31 Not socially very well prepared for Harvard; orientation was political; became president of the Harvard Liberal Union; at Harvard from September 1952 when liberal politics in decline; otherwise, Rugby, and became captain of the Harvard team; some classes stimulation, others dull and some bad; ended up majoring in history, also did literature where there was a discipline in the reading of texts; informed later ideas on anthropological research
0:25:07 As a child interested in archaeology and history; felt they were an antiquarian indulgence at Harvard; did modern history but took no courses that focussed on World War II though relevant to political interests; started an anthropology class but awful so quit; taught by Clyde Kluckhohn who spent his time apologising for his poor lecture skills
0:27:50 Graduated 1957 with no idea what to do; had student deferments from army; by that time universal military service had been modified so that one could do active training for six months, then be in the active reserve for five and a half years; opted for this; during this time read trying to decide on direction; social science most interesting; decided to go to graduate school; chose Berkeley to do modern European history; this was the year before the free speech movement, 1958-9; Berkeley a culture shock; like a glorified high school where everybody obeyed the rules except for group who later formed the free speech movement; was peripherally involved; started social and economic history; David Landes and Henry Rosofsky, later Dean of Harvard, good seminar; enjoyed academic work but not history; toyed with sociology and psychology, but decided that anthropology held most intellectual promise; didn’t like California or Berkeley so went back to Harvard to the department of Social Relations where combined sociology, anthropology and social psychology; took PhD in social relations with anthropology
0:38:34 I had an independent scholarship for four years so was not bound to Berkeley; Social Relations was primarily formed by Talcott Parsons who was attempting to synthesise constituent subjects into a general theory of action; rejected psychological anthropology as practised in US, exemplified by John Whiting and wife at Harvard; they had ignored the European influence of Weber etc.; worked initially with Parsons where possibly to read everyone but Marx
0:44:15 Memories of Talcott Parsons; my politics at that time social democratic, not Marxist; the anthropology students took some courses in the anthropology department which covered biological anthropology, archaeology and cultural anthropology; social psychologists not interested in Parsons though he used some of their ideas; when Parsons retired, Social Relations fell apart
0:49:12 PhD was on the Kayapo; at the end of my first year had taken another disastrous course with Kluckhohn in anthropological theory but at the same time had learnt more about British anthropologists from Radcliffe-Brown to Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, even a little Leach; could see the continuity between them and the French; the social anthropology introductory course in Social Relations was run by Evon Vogt who would assign the total works of an anthropologist to one student who would then have to report to the class; as the only member of the class who could read French I was given Levi-Strauss, virtually unknown at that time; found his work interesting but repellent, felt there was something wrong with structuralism; found it attractive to try and amalgamate structuralism with social contextual approach; following year David Maybury-Lewis came to Harvard from Oxford, a student of Needham, committed to social critique of Levi-Strauss; took his kinship course; he had worked with Akwe-Shavante people in Central Brazil, and suggested I should do something like that; I had thought of going to France to study some sort of industrial suburb, comparing new life to old life in provincial villages
0:55:15 In first year had the idea of working in France influenced by Lawrence Wylie but Maybury-Lewis suggested studying the Kayapo; memories of David Maybury-Lewis and wife, Pia; thought it would be really interesting to work on an entire society; another important influence was structural linguistics; Chomsky, Sapir, micro-analysis of semiotic forms; lectures at M.I.T.; Roman Jacobsen’s lectures
1:00:22 Preparation for fieldwork entailed learning Portuguese; absorbing theoretical issues; kinship analysis; development cycle of Ge groups; David anti-pathetic to field methods; idea that you learn a contact language, learn local language, do a genealogical census, but from there develop own analysis; thought the questionnaires developed in Social Relations irrelevant
1:04:17 Fieldwork agenda – study of moiety systems; irrelevant as found Kayapo moiety system had collapsed; no descent and no exogamy but bilateral kindred system with age sets; elaborate ceremonial systems; needed to start again; difficult to discuss with Maybury-Lewis as went against assumed patterns; became interested in Kayapo bodily decorations as a reflection of life cycle events; feedback system from family group to wider group; influence of Marxist theory; social production; relations of exploitation; not an acceptable theory for other anthropologists who thought they could cross-compare Jai groups; Maybury-Lewis project between Harvard and National Museum, Rio de Janeiro; resulted in book ‘Dialectical Societies’
1:13:39 Tensions with Maybury-Lewis over difficulties in interpretation; negative comments on thesis; got PhD and a job at Cornell; job recruitment method; recommended by Allan Holmberg; also got Fulbright award to go to work in Paris with Levi-Strauss but chose security at Ithaca; Harvard PhD had left sense of disgust with bad teaching, lack of intellectual commitment and theoretical banality; never thought he could get a job there
1:22:10 Often met Levi-Strauss after coming to Cornell; taught 1966-68, then went to Chicago University; during this time in Paris fairly frequently and would see Levi-Strauss; he had read my thesis; prodigious memory and widely read; loved to discuss the Ge Brazilian ethnography; he liked speaking Portuguese so we spoke in Portuguese
1:24:32 In 1962 went with wife, Joan Bamberg, to the Kayapo; she also wrote a thesis on conceptions of the natural world; divorced after seven years, though still friends; pleasant to have her there as Kayapo not easy to work with as had only recently made peace with the Brazilians; Indian Protection Service; had initially joined Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira’s seminar at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro; improved Portuguese and learnt how to get into the interior via the Brazilian Air Force mail service to Indian Service Posts, one of which was Gorotire; took three days to get there; apart from Indian Service there was a mission post and there had been German anthropologists studying another group of Kayapo, now extinct; among the German anthropologists was Kurt Unkel; found his untranslated fieldwork books among others
1:34:33 Fieldwork was exciting and challenging; healthy in the field though got ill in Rio; food was good with much game and fish and garden produce; Kayapo had become poorer with peace and subject to epidemics though they had become dependent on manufactured goods prior to peace, through raiding