David Parkin interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 17th March 2009

0:09:07 Born in Watford in 1940; father's father was a freemason but kept it secret; mother's father once went to Los Angeles with Charlie Chaplin and knew him quite well; was in a circus and used to box kangaroos; maternal grandmother had married "up" initially and then widowed and married my grandfather; he later became a carpenter; paternal grandfather was a tea-buyer and worked for Brooke Bonds; he fought in the First World War and was wounded at the Somme; maternal grandfather fought in Greece in the same war; my father worked as a company secretary after serving in the Second World War; my mother was a housewife and later worked in a hospital; parents were tolerant, fair and liberal, and let me do what I wanted to do; they never pushed me although my paternal grandfather did a bit; initially I wanted to act and did a little at primary school; I became interested in sport but was hopeless at primary school; later became better coordinated and managed to play games; first school was the local primary and I stayed there until I went to grammar school in Watford; remember a teacher at the primary called Tommy Tucker who was kind and encouraging; at that time the class size was forty-eight but was sometimes doubled to ninety-six, because there were not enough teachers from 1945 onwards; a couple of us managed to get to grammar school; Tucker taught the three 'Rs' as was usual in such schools; the teachers were dedicated but many not fully trained; people returning from the army with relevant skills were encouraged to teach; Watford Grammar School was very good; the grammar schools were often, quite rightly, regarded as elitist, but they were a fantastic opportunity for people like me; it had the trappings of an independent school and the masters wore gowns and all had university degrees; we played sport very competitively; on subjects, there was always a tension between science and languages and unfortunately in those days you couldn't do a bit of both; I did languages, which I was good at; have been interested in linguistics from an early age; my father had managed to learn some French and German during the War, and I was influenced by hearing him speak; the most notable teacher was the Headmaster, Harry Rée, who was an extraordinary man; he had been a French resistance fighter and was honoured for that, but never spoke about it; he arrived at the school at the same time as I did; he was inspiring for his unusual educational methods; he later went on to become Professor of Education at York University; another teacher, Taffy Hughes, who was also an incredible man, directed me to the subject I took at university; he taught economics and economic history, but he was very perceptive and looked at all the boys in the sixth form and seemed to be able to match them to their likely future; I had thought I would continue in the modern languages stream and do German and Russian at university, but he suggested I should do something else; both he and Rée drew my attention to the School of Oriental and African Studies that was just opening up to undergraduates at that time; I went to SOAS in 1959 when they had one or maybe two intakes of undergraduates; they had various degrees on offer and one was in African studies which combined anthropology, which was taught at the LSE, with Bantu or other African languages; I took Swahili with Bantu linguistics; they had shown me a brochure and I thought it very exotic and a route to get out and see the world

11:44:13 At school I played cricket and it became a passion which has remained with me; in rugby I could only survive as a scrum half in the early years, but I was too small by the sixth form; I ran and did athletics instead; I did not continue acting as there was no provision for it; I learned the clarinet and played in the orchestra; music still means a lot to me, particularly eighteenth-century composers; also interested in jazz; I can work to music but not if there are words; on religion - my mother was Catholic with a partially Irish background, and remained so all her life; my father was not an active believer but was from a Protestant background; his father and mother were religious; my mother encouraged me to think religiously but both parents were relaxed about it; I did go to church until I was about fifteen - was confirmed and sang in the choir; at fifteen I realized that I couldn't accept any beliefs so it was a fairly radical break; from then on I have been a rational humanist; it has struck me as odd that Evans-Pritchard could have remained a practising Catholic; I find it difficult how people can subscribe to organized religion when they are also anthropologists; I can believe in some kind of transcendental force which you could then ascribe to physics or some branch of modern science; I do find it difficult that people like E-P, Pocock, Mary Douglas, the Lienhardts, and Victor Turner did apparently believe in what the Catholic Church ordained, if it is the case that they really did believe that or that there were other factors at work; I have never been able to understand what the rationale was; I can understand how both Catholics and Jews could believe that it made them better anthropologists; sometime the only way you can reconcile inexplicable occurrences is to appeal to some higher force, but on the whole I have resisted this and preferred to see it as something we don't yet know about; it that sense I am agnostic rather than atheist

18:13:17 SOAS was an extraordinary place; even at the interview when I first went there I was captivated by the place; the main building was where it is now, but the anthropology department was in 27 Woburn Square; Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was there, also Adrian Mayer, Michael Mendelsohn, and I think by then, F.G. Bailey; as undergraduates, for reasons I have never entirely understood, we were taught at the LSE for the first couple of years; it was only in the third year that I was taught regularly by one of the SOAS teachers; it used to be said that the anthropology teachers had a good time as they had virtually no students whereas the LSE had lots; subsequently it was decided that SOAS should teach its own students; I was lucky to be lectured by such people as Maurice Freedman, Raymond Firth, Isaac Schapera, Burton Benedict, Lucy Mair - Freedman was a particularly good lecturer; also Daryll Forde was at UCL and I went to lectures there; in the third year I came under the wing of F.G. Bailey and he was certainly a very formative influence; I have often felt I have never been able to thank him enough for that; he taught me to write English for a start; he was a person of extraordinary clarity and had just written 'Caste and the Economic Frontier', a Marxist analysis of caste mobility in Orissa; not only was it clearly written but it seemed to me to be an entry into a form of Marxism which you could actually study as an anthropologist; also he was a very good teacher; I did not get to know Adrian Mayer until I actually became a lecturer, nor indeed Christoph; Bailey had a somewhat clinical attitude; he had the capacity to analyse a situation and very quickly get to the raw bones; he could also size up people in no time; it is true that later on he developed a Machiavellian approach to society but that was after I knew him; the ‘Oriental’ did seem to dominate the ‘African’ at SOAS; earlier, Africa had only been represented by George Huntingford who was a former Kenya settler and had the attitude that went with many settlers; however, he did have an extraordinary knowledge of material culture and that is what he used to teach; John Middleton admired his scholarship; he was a bit of a paradox because of his racial views; later, after I had finished, Philip Gulliver arrived and we became friends while he was there

24:31:11 At the LSE there was no one that influenced me theoretically at that time; the lectures were aimed at explaining a trend in anthropology and criticizing it; they tended to be fitted to the syllabus and later some colleagues disapproved of that as spoon-feeding, but they did engage the students who, as undergraduates, perhaps needed to be given some guidance; Freedman, in particular, was an extraordinary exponent of kinship; he used to give his kinship lectures on Wednesday at 10am to a packed house; then he decided the following term to give lectures on advanced kinship, but at 9am; even in the London of those days it was still difficult to get in at that time, but again it was a packed house; he was such an inspiring lecture; there was no evident theoretical orientation but he was a tremendous scholar and made us want to run off and read what he was talking about; possibly F.G. Bailey later influenced me theoretically, but most theoretical influences came from reading, particularly about complex societies; there was already the so-called Rhodes-Livingstone school at Manchester publishing monographs, so I followed the route of Epstein, Mitchell, and, of course, Gluckman; I was mainly influenced by Max Gluckman whom I later got to know; I met him first in Zambia at a conference in 1971 or 1972; he decided we should take a trip to Barotseland which was fantastic; it was a little difficult as it was at the time of Smith's declaration of UDI for Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); as a result we had a few tense incidents, even in Zambia, certainly on the border with Zimbabwe; he was very outspoken and forthright and had very pronounced views; I could see why he was such a dominant figure at Manchester and part of me wishes that I could have spent some time working with him; no one ever refers to him now, of course, but I maintain to this day that his famous article 'Social Situation in Zululand' published in 1940 is still one of the best works on methodology in anthropology; think we owe Gluckman a great deal

31:04:16 As an undergraduate I lived in London; I used to play in a traditional jazz band; having done a double honours degree - Swahili and linguistics, also anthropology - I was ready to take advantage of both; because there was a large number of Swahili speakers living in London and working at Bush House for the BBC I got to know these people quite well as an undergraduate, and by the end of the degree was able to speak Swahili quite well; when I went to East Africa I spoke a very coastal form of Swahili as that is what the people in London had spoken; they thought it very odd in Kampala as they don't speak like that; I got a Commonwealth Scholarship to study there and was offered the usual doctorate award by the Department of Education, but you couldn't have both; as the former was much more generous I took it; I had no fieldwork training; had finished my degree sometime in June and before I knew the result I was actually in Kampala doing fieldwork; the Commonwealth Scholarship meant I had to be in Africa in July to register as an external London student at Makerere University College; remember flying over Lake Victoria and landing, then being driven by bus to the University; that was the introduction to a very optimistic Uganda; independence was only a year or two away, and it was Southern Uganda which in those days was quite prosperous through cotton and coffee growing; it was delightful; Makerere University College seemed to be new, and the spirit of optimism pervaded there too; one couldn't have wished for a better setting and I do think I was very lucky to be there at that point in time; I had decided I wanted to study a town and that would be part of Kampala itself; Aidan Southall was already there and he had published a book on parts of East Kampala and I wanted to do a follow-up study; his was a very ethnographic survey and laid the grounds for something a bit more politically charged; nationalism was in the air and nationhood was being granted, and I wanted to look at urban migration in the context of the expectations that independence would bring; it remained the theme; there were inevitably things I didn't anticipate; I went to Kampala using the lingua-franca which was Swahili, but I was almost literally captured by the Kenyan ethnic group, the Luo; they had this reputation for welcoming foreigners, and they almost insisted that I also learned some Luo; though the study was of a poly-ethnic migrant community and the extent that it was able to settle, it was also an emerging study of the Luo

38:06:12 I had been struck by another of Gluckman's methodological pieces of advice that one should not presuppose that migrant communities were affected by their rural, traditional, ethnic backgrounds, that you could not start your analysis of a town by looking at the individual differences of custom and that first and foremost they were involved in organizations like mines, housing areas, where they had common problems; thus it should be the common problems that were the starting point; I certainly accept that to this very day; however, it became clear to me that while that was true, it was also clear that the rural, traditional, customary backgrounds were vitally important in shaping the way that they would interact, not only with each other, but politically and with the authorities, cut across by the issues of emerging nationalism; this became the overarching theoretical frame; I certainly was pretty confused at times wondering where all this research would lead to; I think I was confused by all the detail that would have to be written up at some stage; I enjoyed parts of it; I was never lonely, and was lucky to have been captured by the Luo as they are very welcoming people; Aidan was my external supervisor; I did not have an internal supervisor when I left London but eventually it was Philip Gulliver; Aidan is a remarkable person and is one of my heroes; he went out to Africa in 1946 to Makerere and he stayed there continuously until 1964; this meant that he had had nearly twenty years there; while other people in Britain would have done their fieldwork and come back to jobs, he stayed on; he was linguistically very gifted and it meant that he knew various Nilotic dialects; he also spoke French; he was a man of few words and I would see him about my work once every three months; not much was said, and I would do the talking; at the end he would say one thing which would be crucial; the bits of advice he gave didn't amount to much but were all very important in shaping the thesis; with Philip Gulliver I formed a friendship on the basis of squash; much of our conversation on anthropology was over a beer or coffee between squash games, but we never actually discussed my thesis; I think he felt that an urban situation was not something that he could say anything about as he had done fieldwork in quite remote places; I showed him a draft of my thesis and he just changed the spelling of one word

45:36:24 My contemporary at SOAS was Lionel Caplan who became a very dear friend; his future wife, Pat, worked among Swahili speakers and was also very linguistically gifted in that language and in French; Janet Fitton was also based among Swahili, who was at LSE and then came to SOAS; she married Abdullah Bujra who worked in Yemen, also a very close friend at SOAS; his first language was Swahili but also spoke Arabic; writing up at SOAS was quite lonely; Adrian Mayer later introduced a system whereby you were expected to pass chapters of your thesis round your peer group for comments; soon after returning from fieldwork I was offered a job - it was advertised as a fellowship but was changed to a lectureship at SOAS; told that it wouldn't affect my research, and this was at a time when SOAS was very research-orientated; I had come back in 1964 and by 1966 I was back in the field, urged to do so by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf; I was the third Africanist at SOAS; Abner Cohen also came there in a research capacity, so there were four of us; Abner became a tremendous influence; he was carving out what he would have called a Mancunian approach to politics though it was distinctive enough to call it his own, reflected in his book 'Two Dimensional Man'; both Lionel and I were influenced by this, and also by his sheer imagination; I was influenced at the time by what people said about Marxism; I always had trouble between Weber and Marx as aspects of both seemed relevant; I wrote a book 'Palms, Wines and Witnesses' in 1972 which reveal that tension; the Marxist influence actually came from my room-mate Stephan Feuchtwang, whom I found quite inspiring at times; he was full of ideas and energy and very outspoken, which were qualities I certainly appreciated; it was rather diverse, and if you had rounded up all the Marxists in one room at the time you would get different answers; it was a subject that was opening up but was not entirely coordinated, but it was certainly an important moment; French structuralism came later for me when I spent a year or two at Sussex University and met David Pocock; he was not an unswerving admirer of Levi-Strauss but certainly was able to pick up those ideas that might be of interest; that was in the early seventies when I did take an interest in the subject; at the same time I became interested more thoroughly, not just in language but in linguistics, structural linguistics in particular; SOAS was affected by the événements of the late sixties and I think that was one of the hardest times in my life; we had difficulties both in the School and in relation to the outside institutions; the students were often divided themselves; there were sit-ins and lock-outs, lots of recriminations, many of them misunderstood, with the wrong people being accused, it was certainly a difficult time; my own view is that Christoph sympathised much more with Stephan than people give him credit for; it is well known that I tried to defend Stephan at a special tribunal at SOAS; it seemed to be fairly conducted, but he was nevertheless asked to move; I think that Christoph was caught in a difficult situation and I don't think that he wanted Stephan to go; I had defended Stephan at the tribunal and certainly did not suffer from doing so, and Christoph did not change his attitude towards me one bit; I can only assume that Christoph felt he was under pressure to adhere to an emergent policy along the lines that Stephan suggests; I think that Phillips as the head of the institution was responsible for the policy and Christoph was just carrying it out; as Head of Department he was just what the department needed at that point in time; he let people get on with their work and was especially clever at recruiting and managed to hand-pick not only some good anthropologists but people whose interests were compatible with each other; it was a very happy department on the whole except for that unfortunate period; most of the people stayed in the department; he would delegate so that the administration ran smoothly; the person to whom he delegated most was Adrian Mayer who later succeeded him, and that was a very safe pair of hands; as an anthropologist Christoph was fairly remote as I was not then particularly interested in India; the partial exception to that was his book 'Morals and Merit' which had a much wider appeal, and is one of the few books in which he does actually generalize and make some very insightful statements; he had a very smooth way of writing; he wrote by hand and never to my knowledge ever crossed anything out; as a fieldworker and ethnographer, has written material that will last forever; I remember at his retirement celebration he said he never expected anyone to recognise him for his theoretical contribution but more for his ethnographic work, and I suppose that is a fair comment; I knew his wife, Betty, very well; she was the power behind the throne and looked after us all as well; Adrian was pure gold in the sense that he took on the administration; that coincided with the emergence of the ethos of accountability of universities to the authorities; he also brought in innovations such as special writing-up groups for post-fieldwork students, and generally reorganised the place so that it was much more efficient; another good thing, though we didn't realize it at the time, was that he took on the whole burden of this so the rest of us could continue to write and do fieldwork; I succeeded him as Head of Department and it was only then that I realized how much he had been doing; I owe a special debt of thanks to both those people

Second Part

0:09:07 Theme of 'Palms, Wine and Witnesses' described; formal Head of Department for about four years and stood in for Adrian for one, but in some respects I felt I never ceased being so; I also did quite a lot of committee work for SOAS as well as the Department; started new fieldwork among the Giriama, Bantu speaking people on the East African coast; having studied a town I wanted to study a remote, rural people; little had been written about them except by one district officer over half a century before; I went to study them in 1966-67 for fifteen months; learning the language was not too difficult as it was quite closely related to Swahili; 'Palms, Wine and Witnesses' was the book based on that fieldwork; in 1968 I switched back to urban studies with the urban Luo of Nairobi, Kenya; amazingly, I spent almost all the 1960s in the field; I have read both Obama's books although they are not exactly relevant to anthropology

5:43:20 The book on the Luo - 'The cultural definition of political response' - described; on American linguistic anthropology, I was influenced by John Gumperz and later went to Berkeley as a visiting professor for a semester, also Dell Hymes; on the differences between SOAS and Oxford, SOAS anthropology was very much integrated with the other parts of SOAS; it was not just at the level of teaching, where we shared courses and degrees, but also at the level of research, and as it was a nice coherent set of buildings you can actually talk to people from other disciplines; it was very much a community based on the fact that regions were our primary object of study and not disciplines; when I got to Oxford there wasn't this; the reason I was attracted to go there was that Oxford had tremendous resources, not only the Institute of Social Anthropology, but also the Pitt Rivers Museum, Human Sciences and Biological Anthropology; all these were vibrant at the time, and although they had been amalgamated into one school just before I arrived, they had not really been brought together; I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to bring all these bits together as new holistic anthropology; I thought that social anthropology in the old sense was already beginning to look a bit weary and like a lot of other people I had become interested in material culture; there was the beginning of an interest in the possibility of biocultural evolution being acceptable, sociobiology as a term having been rejected before through Marshall Sahlin's denunciation; thought it was time to bring all these things together at Oxford as it had been very successfully at UCL and Durham, though not at Cambridge; we also had new archaeologists like Barry Cunliffe and Chris Gosden at Oxford, who were very keen on anthropology; of course, there was an archaeology and anthropology degree which had been set up; thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to bring them all together so I went for that reason; SOAS was a smaller place and was very well integrated with UCL especially through medical anthropology, where myself, Roland Littlewood and Murray Last had set up medical anthropology degrees in our two institutions; SOAS was well-integrated, Oxford anthropology was fragmented and I wanted to bring it together; at the moment of speaking I can say I succeeded; however, I am well aware from America that the so-called four fields approach develops cracks and schisms, and this could happen but was worth trying; it is very exciting at the moment; we have recruited Harvey Whitehouse and Robin Dunbar on top of other appointments in the last few years; coming to Oxford as an outsider is double-edged as you suffer the acrimony of those who disagree with your changes, on the other hand you don't have any previous loyalties, so on balance think it possible to break the mould, which is what we have done; some people will regret that; I think it better that we now recruit openly and no one thinks that we should just recruit from within Oxford

17:17:22 Intellectually, although people mainly work on their own in ISCA, individually they produced excellent work; there was a new professor of Biological Anthropology, Rick Ward, who did move more towards molecular genetics in his anthropology, and the danger there was that he would lose sight of society and culture as an aspect of biological anthropology; when he died prematurely, Stanley Ulijaszek and Elisabeth Hsu took over to run medical anthropology, and now Robin Dunbar for evolutionary anthropology; the Chair of social anthropology is assigned to All Souls; John Davis was Warden and I think he was amazingly good as head of college; it was a period of consolidation when the College was a happy place; on the whole he moved away from direct involvement in anthropology though he did write some articles; now he has more time he may be able to write up his very important data on Libyan marriage alliances; once he was Warden I don't think he ever went back to ISCA except for social events; Rodney Needham was a curious character whom I liked mainly for his reminiscences; one of his party tricks was to find out who guests were, look up something about their speciality and immediately ply them with a question in their field; thus he would come across as very learned and the guest would be pleasantly surprised; these meetings would happen in his flat as he never went into All Souls; three or four times a term there would be tea at Rodney's from 4.30pm until 6pm precisely; he would invite me on my own but if there was a new member of staff he would like to see them; he also had lots of visitors from the States etc., so he led a full life, living through other people's experiences, so he never needed to travel; I met Evans-Pritchard properly once when I was briefly at Sussex University; the meeting was arranged by David Pocock as there was a custom at Sussex that he would come down for a week to Brighton; Pocock would host him but this time, in the early 1970s, he asked Ralph Grillo and I to do so; we agreed and we spent the best part of a day with him; Pocock said we would recognise him as his white underpants were always visible above his trousers; told that he would take us to a pub, give us various things to eat and drink, and then expect us to pay; both proved to be the case; his conversation was stupendous though pure gossip; he seemed to know everyone at Cambridge, and was very articulate and shrewd, and slightly caustic; the only intellectual exchange was when he discovered I had worked among Luo, which he had also done; he said he would give me his field notes rather than give them to Aidan Southall as Aidan had once criticized him in his own work; I would have liked to have received those notes, but when he died I never discovered where they were; I was never heavily influenced by his work except through his implicit theory; my work on Luo was very much more influenced by Aidan Southall who wrote on lineage formation among the Luo, an amazing piece of scholarship

29:29:00 My wife, Vibha Joshi, has worked among Naga; her father was Chief of Police in Nagaland when she was very young, and she later came to realize that she would like to work among Naga; she has worked particularly among Angami Naga, so knew the works of Haimendorf, Mills, Hutton and Kauffman, very thoroughly by the time I met her; we had a common interest in Haimendorf whom, sadly, she never met; we are now engaged in the Nagaland University Anthropology Initiative to try and set up a department of anthropology; this is really her enterprise and I am helping; the Nagas themselves want it as they are well aware that, to some extent, Nagaland was one of the cradles of British social anthropology, and they want it for themselves; we have now heard from the Indian Government University Grants Committee that they will now set up a department with a professor and two lecturers; that has got to go through, and meanwhile we have applied to various foundations to set up an exchange relationship; we have already drawn up a memorandum of understanding between Oxford University and Nagaland University, and the Museum of Culture in Basel; it is quite ambitious, and as in any part of the world these things can come to nothing but so far so good; it is a lot of work, but we want to do it; I have become interested in holistic anthropology as was shown in a book published a few years ago where I tried to bring together biocultural evolutionary anthropology and material culture, as well as social anthropology; have become interested in issues of cognition, evolutionary psychology and the evolution of human social groups, and in particular the role of language; what I would write I don't know as there is such a vast literature, so it is just like starting at the beginning with all the pleasures of being a novice; also will continue to visit East Africa and Nagaland