Peter Worsley

Interviewed by Alan Macfarlane, filmed by Sarah Harrison, at his home on 25th February 1989, using a video 8 camera.

[Later additions in 2004 by Peter Worsley in square brackets, and in notes at the end]

Part 1: From childhood to Australia (60 mins)
Birth, childhood, school

0:00:28 Born in 1924. Parents and early life. Merseyside. Lower middle class background [we lived in middle-class Wallasey, but father’s business was in proletarian Birkenhead, so I knew a divided society) misery around, old blind men selling matches, proletarians, class injustice, the Orwellian world, a growing sense of injustice

Sent to a Catholic school, father a [very tolerant] Catholic

0:02:30 Catholic discipline at school; physical punishment; Jesuits, storing up merit in heaven, thinks extremely immoral, [see note 1 at end] made me unhappy and physically sick, then went to another marvellous [Protestant, liberal] school and stimulating. So became early aware of two cultures.

0:04:20 became head boy at Wallasey Grammar school in 1940/1, always aware of democracy and inequality and the rights of minorities because of Catholic background, and sensitized to other cultures. [see note 3 at end]
First part of University education and the army

0:05:10 went to University, partly due to inspiring masters in English and history, ruined for natural sciences [see note 2 at end]. Went to Cambridge to read English [because of my wonderful English teacher] – a Leavisite in 1942. Social criticism of Leavisites by Eliot, Lawrence and Raymond Williams

0:07:00 the effects of Stalingrad siege. The Red Army stood between us and conquest. A huge influence on me. So it was not long before I joined the Communist Party in Cambridge [since discovered that the Cambridge University Socialist Club had c.1000 members – the biggest in Cambridge]. Not in the spy generation. We were young people who had anti-fascist enthusiasm. Very respectable and patriotic.

0:08:17 Went into army, straight into Officer’s Training School in Wales, the Royal Artillery. Surrounded by older and more mature people [see note 4 at end]. Got into trouble in guard duty, [because I’d never done it before].

0:10:20 The time of Alamein. The blitz over [so need for AckAck]. Converted into the infantry. Volunteers were needed for East and West Africa and chose East Africa. Marvellous out there [after the austerity of wartime England and the blackout]. Egypt a revolting experience, mind blowing poverty. We are very racist – realized through experience in Egypt and India. We blamed them for their poverty, an attitude which continues to this day.

0:11:40 I was a Red, I went to India and made contact with the Indian Communist Party as did people like John Saville. [Communists in the forces in Italy] were selling the Daily Worker to the troops [on trains]. There was an elected Forces Parliament in Cairo and the Communists won one quarter of the votes.

0:13:17 I was entranced with Black Africa and learnt Swahili. Got interested in African languages and culture and got to know the African troops through language. [Taught myself Nandi].

0:14:30 Went to Orissa in India, nearly went to Malaya [one week later, we would have been in invasion], where I would with others have been butchered by the Japanese. But the war ended, which I heard from jungle drums [returning to camp one night].

0:15:00 Back to East Africa, taking African troops back to their villages. [A wonderful, happy time. Saw a lot of East Africa, from Sudan to S.Tanganjika. The demobilized soldiers were, of course, full of joy!] So I determined to be an anthropologist. I read a lot of anthropology.

Second undergraduate education: anthropology

0:16:21 When I returned I wanted to change course at Emmanuel College. I asked, timorously, for sociology [but was told they hadn’t any, but I could do anthropology – which was what I actually wanted! Welbourne told me 90% of ex-Army changed courses!], so I did anthropology.

0:17:04 Anthropology was in a shocking state generally. Prof. Hutton on caste and Nagas, mostly about soul stuff, head-hunters etc. for hours on end. The material culture very funny. Bushnell and practicals on ways of making fire (fire drills) and spear throwers being hurled around in Downing Street. Godfrey Lienhardt was the Examiner and prompted my answers. Hippo killing spear.

0:19:15 Physical anthropology and Archaeology – don’t believe they are linked to anthropology, irrelevant. Much of my time dis-education.

0:20:02 Anthropological studies proper. I found a hoard of books, but they were like dirty or banned books behind an iron grill [in Prof. Hutton’s room!], [e.g. Rhodes Livingstone Institute publications]. One needed special permission to read them. “Modern” anthropology hardly born.

0:20:29 Hutton on Freud, his mannerisms, ‘damn nonsense’. Reo Fortune appointed, a breath of fresh air, but the bizarreness of Reo.

0:21:50 Went to Heffers, learnt a little about lineage systems. Reo, powerful insights and both serious and crazy.

0:22:40 G.I. Jones really pedestrian ex-government official, though good on land tenure. Another dis-education.

0:23:06 H.S.Bennett told him not to go to Leavis’ lecture in the 1940’s. That period dreary in the extreme, arbitrarily leaving out huge chunks of literature. Bad English literature and bad anthropology. Only one’s fellow students were exciting.

0:24:11 Fellow students included Jack Goody, Frank Girling (in C.P.), Ramkrishna Mukherjee. They were married and rather remote and did not see much of them.

0:25:07 Kathleen Gough – adorable and intelligent, but remote as two years above

0:25:50 Evans-Pritchard used to come over, the only ray of light. He gave a course for colonial officers, marvellous, talking about African Political Systems. Also H.A.R.Gibb (non-anthropologist) on Islam was marvellous and learnt a lot

0:26:45 Graham Clark the archaeologist, wrote interestingly, but his lectures were dreary in the extreme, he had come from Libya and very boring. I’m anti-archaeology. It can be interesting in the wide sweep, e.g. Gordon Childe and Glyn Daniel (who was my tutor for a while).

0:27:35 Jack Trevor was my first tutor. He knew some social anthropology. Not a very effective teaching system.

0:28:03 I resent the arrogant upper-class and elitist assumption that Cambridge and Oxford are the centre of the world, much as I loved being there. I had two lousy dis-educations. They are good places to leave.
Africa

0:28:33 The ground-nut scheme in Africa was being launched. [I thought this sounded like a good program and went to Unilever House for interview. High powered scientists recommended pulling out bush and planting ground nuts.] I was hired to teach ‘Basic English’, the Africans were to be given decent education and health. A modification of IA Richards. Description of scheme and project. Why it failed. The equipment tried out in Berkshire, where the soil is different. The equipment soon collapsed.

0:31:19 Description of the Kongwa region, the Africans. The peanuts burnt up by the sun, a huge waste. To impress visitors, ground nuts were imported from South Africa.

A farce. Clergymen ran social programs. I abandoned language teaching. We ended up reproducing the colonial cultural division of labour, equipping whites to control African labour.

0:32:34 I was visited by the C.I.D. – my mail was opened regularly and they pulverized left-wing mail. There was one law for ‘politicos’, another for racketeers [for example a senior engineer in charge of the Training School, fired for embezzlement].
Return to England and contacts with Max Gluckman

0:34:00 went home, no job, no money, except what I had saved, aged 22. I still wanted to be an anthropologist, but there were no opportunities. [Whilst in Tanganyika, I had written] to the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and asked if there were any posts. [light getting poor] I had been to South Africa at the end of the time there and been to Johannesburg where I met Ruth First and, like others, fell wildly in love with her.

0:35:51 Coming back through the streets [from a Communist Party meeting]with an Indian we were jeered at by louts. C.P (Communist Party) meetings were curious. [Ruth showed me my first shanty-towns].

0:37:02 Went for an interview at the Colonial Office. Max Gluckman (M.G.) was one of the assessors. The job was to study race relations in Rhodesia. My answer untactful and I didn’t get job. But two weeks later a letter from M.G. to say that he had been appointed to Chair at Manchester and would I care to put in for Assistant Research Lectureship. I got a job on the basis of work in Africa. At week-ends I wrote on Hehe grammar. I had also done some recording on ‘wire’ recorder of music and language.

0:39:07 I went to Manchester and gave some lectures on Bantu languages. Victor Turner was there, and later R.Frankenberg, Freddie Bailey. Max said that ‘you’ve one great defect, that you were not trained at Cambridge and know no anthropology’. I had never read any Fortes, Evans-Pritchard etc. So read Fortes and being a Marxist I could not buy it. I was a primitive Marxist and economic determinist.

0:41:09 That is how I wrote my critique of Meyer, which won the Curl Prize. I don’t agree with my piece now, Meyer was an idealist, mystical.

0:42:04 Life was luxurious in those days. The ESRC was not whipping people to finish their theses, people had time to think. So in six weeks I wrote the piece and turned it into an M.A. and got the Curl Prize.

0:43:04 I met Fortes in London, he introduced the award ritual at the R.A.I. ‘I don’t agree with this, he said’. However, we agreed to differ. Afterwards most positive relations with Meyer and we never discussed the Tallensi. Applied to Cambridge, but Jack Goody got the job.

0:44:00 Stayed with Max and applied again to Rhodes-Livingstone and got the job. A Research post in the Institute. But M.I.5 stopped me getting the post. [poor colour on film]. I was doomed. 6 years in Africa, but the end of the road. The R-L subject to much political interference.

0:45:17 Max himself was under a cloud because he had introduced the inauspiciously sounding ‘Three Year Plan’. Max was never a red, but a radical liberal. Mary his wife was a member of the C.P. Much of the political orientation was Mary’s.

0:46:05 Max was a fine anti-colonial, his hour of glory was when he took on the [Kenya] governor [Sir Philip Mitchell] on the Mau Mau and defended the Mau Mau. Supreme courage. He talked on the radio about it. He was very popular on the radio [indeed a celebrity]. Anthropology was a subject on the 3rd programme. He exposed the torture in the camps. I was very actively involved in anti-colonial movements, all to my undoing. It blocked me.
Australia: preparations for New Guinea

0:47:48 I was told [by Max] that I had better go to Australia. Nadel had just been appointed at Canberra. Firth interviewed me and I and Ken Burridge got scholarships. On the ship, news came over the radio that Menzies was having a referendum on outlawing the communist party. Much to everyone’s surprise it was rejected [but only by 100,000 votes]. I was planning to go to the Central Highlands of New Guinea. I read all the reports etc of the [Australian equivalent of the ]Colonial Office. It was run by the strange Freddy Rose [an ex-meteorologist] Freddy went up to Groote Eylandt to get near the aborigines. It was a seaplane base from England to Sydney. Rose studied the aboriginal kinship system.

0:50:51 These were bad times. I wrote an article on this [‘What CP policy should be’ in the Communist Review, (see my contribution to the Stanley Diamond festschrift), and was invited to present my arguments at the CP National Executive!]What happened with McCarthy in the U.S. happened everywhere in the 1950’s. It was awful and we thought they were going to arrest all the Communists. I buried my C.P. literature in the garden. It was provoked by a Soviet defection.

0:52:07 The first European to New Guinea was a Russian [of Petrov, a “diplomat”]. I had taught myself Russian, while travelling into Manchester and could read Soviet anthropology. I had some connections with Soviet Anthropologists, one of them poisoned by the secret police [in Dar es Salaam]. A nice story about how one had chosen his fieldwork. I got some early Russian writings on New Guinea. And I was not jailed, though Freddy Rose was on trial at the Royal Commission on Espionage. Nothing was proved.

0:54:57 The Australian Communists were lovely people, but living underground. Later I was in trouble and I would not admit I was a communist. I do not see why I should, because of Habeas Corpus. I would defend my denial and refused to make a statement. Freddy was fired and went off to Tasmania . He ended up in East Berlin and wrote a most exhaustive study of kinship among the Groote Eylandt Aborigines. A historical landmark.

0:57:48 I bought enough food for a year and prepared for a year in the Highlands of PNG and a day before I was going went for my entry permit and was refused.

0:58:39 I thought ‘to Hell. If I’m ruined, then I’ll pull the temple down’ and I went public. All Hell broke out – the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald etc. Parliament Debates. Many attacked me. I and others had set up a student association. Ten of us. It took up my case and lined up with all other Universities. It was pretty hellish, hounded by the paparazzi. A miserable time, on the phone all the time. Sheila in a bad way with it.

Some added notes by Peter Worsley on the above (written in 2004).

Note 1: The Jesuit teachers awarded ‘red bills’, written in Latin (and headed Ad majorem Dei Gloria), for good work and behaviour, e.g. homework. They had a numerical value (e.g. 6). This was the carrot. The stick was, literally, a whalebone ferrule – you were hit on the hand, say, 6 times for offences – very painful.

In theory, you could evade the punishment by ‘cashing in’ a red bill. But in fact, there was indeterminacy – you never knew whether they’d accept it or not! This disgusted me – both the brutality, and the notion of ‘exchanging’ (cancelling) ‘sins’ by merit stored up in red bills. (I thought you should be sanctioned for bad deeds (though not via a ferrule!) and rewarded for good ones. See how this institution affected me – I’m still going on about it 70 years later!

Note 2: When I transferred schools, I was 3 years ahead in Latin and way behind in maths. This shaped my entire academic trajectory (even now). At the RC school (St. Francis Xavier’s) we were constantly made to attend ‘sodalities’ (religious society meetings at the end of the school-day (and to bring pennies for various religious causes).

Note 3: An important factor was the sectarian division on Merseyside into Roman Catholic and Protestant. People kept off the street during rival ‘processions’ – bricks might be thrown (we were told). I became Head Boy at Wallasey Grammar School in 1940/1, but, despite this eminence, as I was a Catholic, wasn’t allowed to attend morning Assembly, which had some religious content. So the Catholic and Jewish boys waited in a room off the main hall (where we did our homework and told dirty jokes – I can still remember one of them!), but were let out into the Hall to hear the end part of the Assembly which deal with (non-religious) notices – sports, etc.

Note 4: In wartime, you were not called up for about a year, but had to join the training corps (and attend training sessions). You then passed ‘Certificate A’, and Cert B. This gave you automatic entry into Officer Training. I came over from Cambridge, to join guys who were years older, married, and sometimes working class (& so unhappy in this middle-class environment).

Part 2: Australia onwards (60 mins)

Fieldwork among Australian aborigines: Groote Eylandt

0:01:00 Attempted entrapment. No support from the Department. Some sympathetic and nice people like Richard Storry the Japanese specialist at ANU. Nadel washed his hands of it, wouldn’t do anything. Firth found me a dreadful embarrassment. We were poverty stricken, forced to live in the University Hostel. I was hired for interviewing on a project and my boss Jean Craig was furious with me [because my political scandal might prejudice her project]. I had little support from senior colleagues.

0:03:00 Freddy Rose suggested that I study Australian Aborigines and go to Groote Eylandt. Fred Gray’s life and career and his setting up of an Aboriginal reserve with financial support from the Government.

0:04:50 work in Groote Eylandt; remonstration at beating of boys and ordered off, but did not leave

0:06:15 converted from Africanist, overnight an Australian aboriginal specialist; the complicated kinship systems an intellectual magnet – so difficult.

0:06:30 Stanner my supervisor – cracked the kinship system I think. Discussion of Aboriginal kinship systems and theories about, including Rose, Gray and others. Four and eight section systems.

0:08:17 young men’s marriage systems and the mechanisms for keeping young men inferior; riven with structural inequalities of age and gender

0:09:15 I worked through the language and spent some ten months in the field, ghastly difficult topic

0:10:28 women as pawns etc. , the logic of algebra cannot work; no available women, have to manipulate kinship terms. Not pure algebra.

0:11:20 Others showed the politics of bestowal. The argument goes on. The sociological work of David Turner still seems to me algebra - four or five different accounts might need to be reconciled! Josselin de Jong tried. I was interested in all dimensions of the lives of the 450 people there – very rich.

0:13:10 I read the Berndts’ work; they record just a small part of one of the ritual cycles, only a segment; incredibly complex. An order of complexity similar to Griaule on the Dogon, even though a hunter-gatherer people. Incredibly sophisticated and I couldn’t penetrate into that, as the Aboriginal ritual specialists were at the Mission and I could not go there as a Red.

0:14:50 various negative things about the CMS; puritanical, useless etc., story of having to dress up when missionaries visited. They had no interest in the aborigines

0:15:26 an exception is the absolutely marvellous recent book, which could only have been written after the deep immersion of a missionary, Dr. Julie Waddy, a 2 volume work on plants and animals - superb. No anthropologist could do this.

0:16:30 I pioneered that field. It came about through a school test when I asked children to draw the island and was amazed at the trails which they could see [and called ‘roads’] and I could not – so I started to ask about plants and animals and to write articles. I got very excited and read the work of Vygotski and was blown away. I thought this is the answer, the classification system

0:18:20 the social structure helps to classify, intra-myth connections, how animals occur in myths, the four frames [see the chapter in my book Knowledges (1997)]. Edmund Leach used the original article in his teaching.
The Hungarian Revolution and the New Left

0:20: I blew up at the Hungarian Revolution. I was going out there on a motorbike when it happened. I couldn’t stand it. It set up new resistance within the CP, led to the Reasoner, the New Reasoner and finally the New Left Review. I was a founding member of the NLR

0:21: Hungary was the first great shock. Stalin was not unmasked to me before then. I withdrew from academic talks in Budapest; I got a telegram in reply to mine expressing appreciation. The horrors only became patent later.

0:23: we revolted with the Hungarians, we started to ask questions, what was wrong with Marxism and the Soviet Union?

0:24: the change from the original New Left movement and the New Left Review today; became a ‘Mandarin’ journal under Perry Anderson. Perry not far short of genius, but converted NLR into an arid and esoteric journal. It was part of a movement and used to be sold in all sorts of places and discussed everywhere.

0:25: it was linked to the start of CND with which we immediately identified; the New Left became the biggest protest movement since the Chartists

The journal at first attracted people like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and covered arts, films and others. Later E.P.Thompson said it was converted into an arcane and specialist and highly Marxist journal. EPT exploded.

0:27: the disappearance of the CP(Communist Party) in England, which scarcely now exists. Asked about Orwell and Koestler. I’d read them and I would have been more sympathetic, but E.P.Thompson very hostile to both of them and influenced me. I deferred to the immense charisma and power of EPT, an amazing guy, so we never gave them much attention. We thought of them as unspeakable right-wingers, and they were of another generation.

0:29: What was the central doubt about communism after Hungary? That the entire state of society and the role of the party was in doubt, the brutal Stalinism. We were blinded to this before Hungary. I have become more humble since. We made a total re-examination of our own culture and of Marxism and the development of the (rival) concept of ‘socialist humanism’. My main role was as a commentator on colonial affairs, especially Africa. I wrote an article on Mau Mau which later converged with writing on cargo cultures. I tried to explain MM, the brutal rituals of induction and the horror of the Kikuyu themselves [at the taboos which Mau Mau deliberately broke in their initiation rituals].

0:31: I also wrote an article against Albert Schweitzer, not a saint. This brought the house down on my head. AS a bloody old colonialist, though dedicated. This takes us to 1966-7

[rest for a few minutes – break of 4 seconds]

0:32: Further reflections on Stalingrad and the feelings about loyalty to Russia. There was nothing to stop the Germans except the Red Army. It showed us that the Soviet Union was real and that we had been fed a load of myths about how weak it was, the people would rise up against Stalin etc. Hence my loyalty to the people who had saved us.

0:34: return from Australia, with a Ph.D., looking for a job. I was not very proud of my Ph.D., because of the conditions of writing, a new baby and written in five months. My wife in the field and very stoical, worked with the people and always busy but not directly involved in my work. Awful climate in the monsoon. The living conditions described. The aboriginals were in the open. I was given a room in the bungalow and hence living in a quasi-colonial relationship. Went out often for sheer sociability or when significant things happened.

0:37: my daughter is a ‘classificatory’ member of the West Wind clan, Deborah, and has a territory [by virtue of my own ‘brother’-like relationship to my chief informant]. I have never been back and still wonder whether I would even now be allowed in.
Return to Manchester and Max Gluckman

0:39: I got back and looked for jobs. I had gone out as the protégé of Max Gluckman. MG’s intellectual power. He could turn anthropology to anything and had ten ideas before breakfast. He started up sociology of Britain, e.g. Tom Lupton, Allcorn and others. The intellectual centre was Max, he infused people with a strategy for looking for certain clues, though he did not provide the answers. This was different from sociological work but the tradition he developed did not persist.

0:41: Max could turn his mind to current social and political issues, e.g. in his very popular radio broadcasts which ordinary listeners found illuminating and exciting. Imagine, best sellers about the Zande etc, Max made them exciting, they could see common problems and the rational ways in which people in other cultures faced universal human problems. The classic anthropological message. A superb lecturer and teacher, even on themes, (e.g. when Srinivas came) – which were far from his expertise.

0:43: another who had the same gift was Victor Turner. At Brandeis VT gave a lecture in a Mexicanist department on pilgrimages etc. Often his lectures went on for 2-3 hours, difficult to stop, entrancing, often went on into the night. When he talked to Mexican experts they said it made them look at their familiar topics they had been studying for decades in a new way.

0:44: Max was authoritarian but democratic, surrounded by a group of apostles, we spent all our time together, worked in his garden, constant face to face inter-action, made us inter-act, a constant flow of people were coming from the field like Turner, Ian Cunnison, Bill Watson, we had a sense of collectively working on joint problems.

0:45: I remember sitting in on a Srinivas seminar on what turned out as the Coorg book – I knew nothing about India, but we all contributed. The senior people treated us as intellectual equals; Max was very supportive and encouraging.
The Trumpet Shall Sound and other works

0:46: Reflections on The Trumpet Shall Sound. I went back and I’d written my Ph.D. and published a little. I was still frustrated about New Guinea but I’d collected a lot of material and discussed it in that book together with the latest findings of Peter Lawrence and Ken Burridge.

0:47: One week-end Max, like yeast, played his stimulating role. He had become interested in movements of protest among colonial peoples. He arranged a special week-end, not on the Mau Mau. Eric Hobsbawm came to talk about the materials which later became Primitive Rebels, Norman Cohn on medieval movements and me on cargo cults. One of the most exciting week-ends I remember, marvellous, out of which came three cracking books.

0:49: Eric Hobsbawm in those days had a bit of a blockage about writing, though known to be a genius and a polymath. Not many articles. He started to write this book and never looked back. E.H. was incredible and marvellous and gets better as he goes on, e.g. The Invention of Tradition is a mind-blowing and funny book and iconoclastic. Also, like me, a jazz man. I myself (like EH) nearly became jazz critic for the New Statesman! He, Perry Anderson and others like Christopher Hill were my great heroes among living Marxists.

0:50: I later wrote The Third World and Christopher Hill reviewed it enthusiastically in the Guardian, commenting that I was really a historian as well as anthropologist and intellectual sociologist. My historical interest stemmed from a wonderful history master at school. Life does not start at University, it starts at school. My great debt is to that master, also influenced by others. But my real trio of greats is Edward T, Perry Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. Which is the greatest? Perry is still young…

0:51: I decided I would not continue to write just about one area, as E-Pritchard had done on the Nuer, so I would not go on about Groote Eylandt. Max G. was approached by a young leftish publishing firm, McGibbon and Kee, to write a book about the Mau Mau. He said no, but referred them to me and that is how ‘Trumpet’ came about.

0:53: It is a book about colonial resistance, the disintegration of colonialism, on the eve of the ‘Winds of Change’ in Africa in particular. Millenarianism was the dominant form of political action on the part of ordinary people in places like Melanesia, a very different phenomenon from revolution in Russia or China. We had to try to come to terms with it.

0:54. An auto-criticism of ‘Trumpet’. It was too heavily political economy. This can be seen when compared to Peter Lawrence. I started with pol. econ., Peter with the Melanesian world-view. This is how I come to see it now. The amazingly different impacts of colonialism. How does one explain these different responses? All kinds of response. Not dictated by the colonialists themselves.

0:56: the inherent logic of political economy is threaded through my book, the Melanesian perceptions are there but not so obvious; I should have planted them at the start.

0:57: a similar auto-critique of my work on the Tallensi, which over-emphasized the material dimensions of life and ignored the lineage ideologies etc. It was a base-superstructure model which is inadequate.

0:58: Alan talks of the recent Sahlins lecture at the British Academy which fits with this re-assessment of local resistance, the McCartney Mission account of the Chinese Emperor being the classic statement. Yes, the heliocentric arrogance and contempt for the West of the Chinese is classic. The core-periphery models are nonsense and can be answered by one word: Iran. How does c-p explain the Ayatollahs? We have got to start talking about Islam.

0:59: I wrote the ‘Trumpet’. It was very successful. Reviewed by Geoffrey Gorer in the Observer as a wonderful book, and other very good reviews. I myself became a reviewer for the Guardian and did numerous reviews and became quite well known (and earned quite a lot of money).

Part 3: Mature years and sociology (50 mins)
Sociology and the Third World

0:01: I always wanted to write for a popular audience. One of my ambitions, which has never been realized, is to write a book that will be sold on station bookstalls. I thought I had done it when I came back from China and wrote a book on it, but it was not so successful.

0:02: I applied to Cambridge, but there were no posts in those day. There was very slow expansion. Max said that with my political reputation I would never get a job in anthropology. So I thought of other possibilities, including studying schizophrenia at the Maudsley. Max said I should switch to sociology, which was just beginning to take off. I got the first job I applied for, at Hull, against strong competition. I don’t know why I was picked, though two days before the interview I did a BBC interview on 3rd Program on Cargo Cults. I then tried to read a lot of sociology.

0:03: I also used a lot of anthropology and gradually we built up a very popular course. The social sciences exploded after the Robbins Report. We ended up with a huge department. I finished there in 1964. I was there for eight years. Quite prestigious. I was Head of Department.

0:04: Max managed to get a Chair in Sociology at Manchester a year before I left it all and after a year I was appointed to that new Manchester Chair and went there. The expansion of sociology was exponential. This caused great problems with Max who saw sociology as an ancillary part of his empire and tried to restrict it. It turned into a nasty territorial battle, which we won and then the Department was split. There were 10 new Universities a year. I was offered many other Chairs.

0:07: Teodor Shanin came a little later. In 1965 I was recruited onto the British Economic Commission on Tanzania, and got interested in co-operatives, the predecessors of Ujamaa. So I got interested in co-operatives in the 3rd World and this drew the attention of Teodor. An amusing story of their first meeting and Teodor’s personality.

0:10: Teodor taught me more about peasants in two hours than I had ever learnt. I became a patron of Teodor and together we worked on peasant studies, including promoting the work of Polish scholars like Galeski. Teodor got the second Chair at Manchester. A larger than life man, a great guy.

0:11: The Third World was written at the end of my time at Hull. The Press lost the first copy of the index, which I had to completely re-do. It was published just after my arrival in Manchester and was well-reviewed and made me the ‘Third World’ person in the Anglophone world, (though the French had invented the concept). I travelled all over the world with the book – there were 8 editions in Mexico alone. Mainly in South America it took off. It was never translated into French. There are still huge barriers with France.

0:14: One thing I resented about the NLR was that they worshipped everything on the South Bank in Paris. Only very recently has there been a French translation of ‘Trumpet’, nothing else, not ever invited to France or Germany. The term ‘Third World’ was coined by Alfred Sauvy in 1952, taken up in France and probably I learnt about through the contacts of NLR.

0:15: our motto was ‘neither Moscow nor Washington’ (Trotsky), and this idea fitted well, but more positive. CND and the Third World worked together, a new entity was forming. The publishers put in the sub-title ‘A vibrant new force in international affairs’. It was indeed a new, and important, force. A new force in the world.

0:16: It was written in a burst of steam, in a couple of summer vacations. White heat. Philip Larkin described it as a passionate book. I do not like to write unless I have something to say. Unlike today, when people have to write – publish or perish – and hence churn out an exponentially increasing amount of rubbish.

0:17: I now feel the germs of a new book, a kind of sexual itch of another book coming up inside me.

0:18: reflecting on The Third World, I couldn’t re-write it as the great non-aligned movement has died back, though it still persists. Now there is the non-aligned group in the UN. The Americans cannot control the UN any more. But then it was a political force.

0:20: Nyerere and new leaders were just realizing the problems of taking over the emerging countries, in particular the power of the multi-nationals. The African countries found they could not do anything. In many areas the situation is getting worse. They began to see the problem as a global one – the first UNCTAD conference, predominantly a resistance to the economic power and hegemony of the West.
The Three Worlds, South America and World Systems

0:22: I waited a long time to find out about Latin America, and also felt [that the ‘Third World’, by virtually ignoring Latin America, was not good enough an intellectual job. My chapter on nationalism was not very good. I gradually equipped myself to write another book, helped by Brian Roberts and Teodor and finally wrote it after 14 years.

0:23: I was sentenced to be Dean at Manchester for two years, the final degradation. Sterility, though I quite enjoyed it. I got a year off and decided to go to Ecuador and learnt Spanish and Portuguese. It opened up a new world. A rich intellectual tradition, Chile etc., the time before the dictators. Mexico with its revolutionary heritage.

0:24: I encountered Gunder Frank and swallowed him at first. But as I looked around at the traffic filled cities etc. I began to wonder if this was really ‘underdevelopment’. I started to study industrial things. But I remained deep down in my fibres an anthropologist. I’m never happy with purely sociological totalities and I’m most interested in cultural things.

0:25: I was brought back to culture by people like Marshall Sahlins, the big influence of ‘Culture and Practical Reason’, which has never been answered by Marxists who cannot take M.S. to pieces. I read early Geertz etc. But I think Geertz mystifies and absolutized culture and reifies it and is unsatisfactory. So I persisted and wrote Three Worlds.

0:27: A critique of ‘World System Theory’. Of course there is a world system, from at least 1885 on, but I fell out with it on a particular occasion in Berlin. [better light] Wallerstein and Frank were on the platform and we were discussing ‘One World or Three’. Gundar was very rude and I was piqued. So I went home and read Wallerstein comma by comma and decided to write a critique and it was published by the Socialist Register. Zero response from Immanuel. Wallerstein is much better than Gunder Fr’s polar model. Revolution is no longer an option. Comments on Wallerstein.

0:30: I visited Hong Kong and was shattered by the transformation in 16 years. I went back recently. Is HK a 3rd World country any more? Clearly not. The ‘Little Tigers’ are clearly not 3rd World, so impressive, though vulnerable. But the end of the 3rd World a bit premature and I began to read about a new international division of labour, Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs). Dependency was exaggerated.

0:32: It is a sleight of hand that the 3rd world has disappeared, a recent visit to Peru shows that there is still a 3rd world. Peru is broken backed and with tremendous problems. [nice close ups and good light]

0:33: Black Africa is going backwards in conventional terms, a 6% decrease in exports etc. Dropped off as a basket case by the west, we don’t care a damn. The World Bank has divided countries into poor, middling poor, very poor, degrees of poverty. These are our perception, they also see themselves as 3rd World.

0:34: I do not believe in any immanentist models, e.g. like those of Nigel Harris.

Anthropology, culture and knowledge

0:35: Alan asks about Wallerstein, how much was your critique determined by your being an anthropologist? Absolutely, a brilliant man, but I was by then moving back towards anthropology. For instance, Hong Kong cannot be understood without understanding its Chineseness, culture.

0:36: China is very different in its communist ideology from Russia. Ideologies and social structures do not correspond 1:1, cultures and histories exist and have to be taken into account. Most political scientists and economists have no understanding of this or realize the relevance of this, not in their intellectual universe.

0:37: I now want to write a book about other knowledges, influenced by Dr. Waddy [since done – Knowledges]. I want to take the Australian Aboriginal knowledge system, their elaborateness, also others like the Micronesian navigators. This is related to the wider theme about how other cultures work, e.g. Chineseness, Iranian Islam etc.

0:39: the Chinese quarrel with the Soviet Union is not just about Marxist ideology, but to do with Russians and Chinese society and culture.

0:40: Alan asks about the abandoning of base/superstructure model and the turn to Weber. Views about Weber, what is attractive about him, he raises interesting questions. Weber a great genius. Better than Marx who stressed production too much.

0:42: Alan asks about the move from economic determinism towards ideas, aesthetic. Why? Most significant was the death of Marxism, the disastrous pluralism and faction-fighting of the Marxisms, the clash between Promethean and determinist. This exploded into savage wars and undermined by Stalin, Pol Pot, Sendero Luminoso and other horrors.

0:45: Now the Salman Rushdie affair and the re-emergence of Islam, regenerated, not the original Islam, the Koran re-interpreted, it had not put the mullahs at the top. But it is an example of the persistence of historically rooted cultures themes. A huge change in the world.

0:47: Asked what most proud of. Story of Bertrand Russell – three women. But I think it was ‘Trumpet Shall Sound’ and my other books. Also, as a political animal, though sickened by subsequent history, of my early work for NLR, the New Left, CND etc.

0:48: What would you have liked to have done which you did not? What avenues did you not go down? Further work in Australia. I quite enjoy public bureaucracy. I could have done industry and business. Also something practical in the 3rd World. We are so involved in our own culture, we lose interest in the rest. I have noticed that anthropologists who go to the field then return and, having had children, mortgages etc, suddenly become interested in their own place which “must be studied”. They argue that it is imperative to study the West. This is false consciousness.

0:51: Have you ever been bored? Yes, in the Army at times. Otherwise not.