Chris Hann interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 14th May 2010

0:05:07 Born in Cardiff in 1953; my mother's father was a native speaker of Welsh but the language died in my family with his death in 1958; I was five at the time so never got to know him; he married a lady from Sligo in Ireland and they could only communicate in English; that was fairly typical of Cardiff at the beginning of the twentieth century; the Hanns originate, according to my father, in north Somerset but I have not taken any interest in the details of family history; they moved from Somerset to Cardiff just as the coal boom was getting underway in the later nineteenth century; most relatives on both sides of my family are still concentrated in Cardiff; I spent a little time with my maternal grandmother, a Catholic from Ireland; it is because of her that large numbers of her descendants are Catholics, but we are a minority in South Wales; she was a matriarchal figure who was ill much of the time and could not leave her house; as young children we had to visit her every weekend and during holidays, so I knew her better than any of my other grandparents; my mother's family was lower middle class and I don't really know what they did - something to do with the sale of insurance possibly; I don't think that my grandmother had to go out to work, so they were comfortably off, owning a small terrace house in Cardiff; my father's side is more emphatically working class; his father worked for Cardiff City Council in the plumbing or water engineering department; he was also a life-long member of the ground staff of Cardiff City Football Club; he was the grandparent I was most proud of because we could get used, very heavy old leather footballs that Cardiff City no longer needed for their practice; they were passed on to me while I was still at primary school; my father was sixteen in 1940, was grammar school boy at Cardiff High School, and that is where he lost all traces of a Welsh accent; the school was open to working class children but the policy was not to speak Welsh, or to speak English with a Welsh accent; my father was bright enough to be taken aside for officer training in the Navy; he spent six years in the Royal Navy and that undoubtedly changed his life; in 1946 when he was demobilised he was expecting to be sent to university, but he had spent a few months before going to the Navy working for Cardiff City Council; according to the regulations the council could draft him back if they needed him urgently in post-war rebuilding; that is what they did, and the compromise they worked out was that my father would study at night school, taking some classes at University College, Cardiff; he eventually obtained qualifications as a civil engineer including membership of the Institute of Civil Engineers; he was the first member of his family to obtain any higher qualification, and I was the first to go to university; he didn't stay long in Cardiff; I think he fell out with the Chief Engineer, and in the early 1950s there were plans to develop a new town some twenty miles north-east of Cardiff at Cwmbran; it was the only new town set up in Wales though many others were set up in England and Scotland; my father took the opportunity to become a surveyor, development engineer, and a little bit of everything in transforming four villages in the eastern valley of Monmouthshire into what nowadays in Cwmbran New Town with a population of about 60,000; he was designing houses, roads, the sewage network, between the early 1950s and retirement with local government reorganization some time in the 1970s; he is my only living parent now, still living in Cwmbran, working in his garden; he has mellowed as he got older; he did stay with the Royal Navy as a reserve officer for several decades after being demobilised; he rose to become Captain of the South Wales branch of the Royal Naval Reserve; this meant dressing up in uniform once a week and driving to Cardiff for an evening that was a mixture of enjoyable socializing as well as pursuing the goals of the Navy; he went on extended trips to sea every summer, the longest of which took him to the West Indies for two months; it was so casual in those days that it was not difficult for him to take me when still a schoolboy on the mine sweeper on trips to the Mediterranean; when I was a university student we made a trip to Canada when he was the Captain of a flotilla of mine sweepers; I was then officially an Ordinary Seaman doing jobs on board; I didn't really get to know my father very well in those days; he was quite a stern figure, very different from my mother; my mother died in 2002 and since then my father has softened; he lives alone but does pretty well with his large garden, and my sister living not too far away; it is a pleasure visiting him these days and getting him to talk about his boyhood in Cardiff and the class structure of the suburb of Splott Docklands, which no longer exists; my mother inherited a deep Catholicism from her mother; she was the home maker and did not go out to work after they moved to Cwmbran; she had four children of whom I am the oldest, spaced out over twelve years; she was always there, a typical British housewife of that time; my parents were very supportive of my going to university and were pleased when I got a scholarship to Oxford; for some reason it was my mother who would drive me the hundred miles from Gwent to Oxford at the beginning of each term that I was an undergraduate

10:37:12 I was brought up in the community of Cwmbran, when I remember the whole vast centre of the valley was still green fields in the 1950s; today it is a shopping centre, originally designed by my father, which serves a much larger community in the once flourishing industrial zones of Gwent; I grew up with green fields and parks, but it was an urban settlement that was growing rapidly; like Cardiff earlier, it was attracting people from everywhere; almost all my school friends originated in England, many in the Midlands; English was the only language we used at school although the place names were thoroughly Welsh; I went to Croesyceiliog School, a new establishment at the end of the 1950s; it was a good school and I had a successful time there; my earliest memory is when I was aged four, going to school, and being away from my mother; I could already read as she had taught me, but I hated being away from her and screamed my head off, and she had to come and collect me early; I haven't thought about that for some time but I fear other early memories will have been distorted by photographs; we were Catholics and had to go to a Catholic primary school even if it meant inconvenient travelling; for my first year I went north to Pontypool, to St Albans, but after that I was sent down the valley to Newport, to St Joseph's Convent, where I was taught by nuns until I passed the 11+; at that point I think I was very lucky as other Catholic parents sent their children twenty miles to Cardiff; my parents thought that too extreme and allowed me to go to the local grammar school, which meant I could walk

14:11:03 I think it was an excellent school, though I am not sure that I thought so at the time; we had a headmaster who was an Oxford graduate, a chemist, Mr Summers, who was quite strict and determined that as many pupils as possible from this not particularly prosperous setting should go to the best universities; he organized a system which was designed to produce kids who could apply for Oxford and Cambridge; I was certainly not the first to follow that road in the 1960s; he did not have the power to prepare us for exams in Greek, an certainly my Latin was a bit shaky, but we did 'O' levels after four years instead of the usual five; I was privileged to have very good teachers in the subjects I chose for Advanced level work - history was one of them, French and English were the others; I had several history teachers, but the one I owe most to was a very devout Welsh non-conformist; we had to study the Tudors and Stuarts, so debated Geoffrey Elton's views month after month; for European history  we had a younger, more relaxed, teacher; we could chose projects and somehow I came do one on Calvin; I wrote a detailed study after doing a lot of extra research in local libraries, and ended up with something which was infused with my Catholic background, about their being an inherent connection between the dissolution of the monasteries and the construction of a similar number of workhouses for the poor three centuries later; this was so outrageous to my non-conformist teacher when he got to hear of the thesis that I was putting forward, that it led to some controversy; but we were also very good friends, and he did instil some kind of dedication to scholarship in me; his name was Watkins and he looked a little like the comedian Frankie Howard, but with a completely different temperament

18:08:16 I was not very good at games then, being too small to be very good on a rugby field which was the grammar school game; I did play football but that was not an option at school; I never competed for my school in any sport; I don't think I had any real hobbies; I inherited a stamp collection from my father which informed my sense of geography; in later school years there was a group of friends with whom I went youth hostelling regularly in the wonderful countryside around South Wales; I rode my bicycle around Cornwall aged fourteen, with a couple of friends; I was passionately devoted to the popular music of the time; when, as good Catholic children, around ten or eleven we had to prepare ourselves for Confirmation, I had to think what my Confirmation name would be, I had no hesitation in choosing George because George Harrison was my favourite Beatle; my own efforts to strum a guitar were frustrated, and I shall never forgive my parents for not giving me the kind of guitar I wanted at that age; they did give me a little record player and I do spend a lot of time listening to music still; I still listen to the Beatles occasionally, but I did come to recognise other kinds of classical music at a relatively early age; I remember a somewhat awkward conversation in my 'O' level Italian oral - I forgot to explain that I had some good language teachers, and one in particular, Idris Jones, a native Welsh speaker, but because our headmaster did not approve of Welsh it was not taught; I could do French, German and Latin and even Italian as a two year extra 'O' level; I had never been to Italy so my oral Italian was absolutely dreadful, but in my oral exam I had a long discussion with my examiner about Mahler's Fourth Symphony, which I knew well enough to impress him; I listened to the music that I could find on record in the chain stores in Cwmbran; we had no concerts or theatre life; once or twice a year the school would take us to Stratford or Bristol Old Vic; I don't think that music has any direct influence on my work; now I can listen to Mahler, quietly, while working, but not when writing; I did publish an article in Cambridge Anthropology in the nineties, which was very carefully structured around the lyrics from a famous song by The Who, another of my favourites from early on; 'Don't get fooled again' is one of the more sophisticated analyses of the post-Socialist predicament

24:22:11 The school pushed us to think about applying to Oxford and Cambridge; because Oxford is nearer to South Wales, every year most students would put Oxford ahead of Cambridge; in particular we would apply to Jesus College because of its Welsh connections with scholarships reserved for applicants from Wales; I applied and got a scholarship to read PPE; I do remember thinking about reading Intellectual History at Sussex, which looked exciting, but Oxford did not have intellectual history and my teachers told me that PPE was a very well-known combination; we had no economics at my school so were not really prepared for any of those disciplines, but I certainly did not want to continue with any of the subjects that I had taken at 'A' level; if I had chosen one it would probably have been history because I had done an 'S' level in it; I think that that was when I first came across Maitland and Evans-Pritchard on history being anthropology and anthropology being history; E.H. Carr's 'What is History?' was the bible for many of those classes; on the academic side, I don't think Oxford was very well organized; at Jesus I had a very conscientious economics tutor as my moral tutor, Donald Hay; he had recently arrived from Nuffield College with a Cambridge background; he had studied geography and wanted something more rigorous, therefore had switched to economics; he was a good Christian who always told us when we had had enough of reading Samuelson or Lipsey, much more important was the Gospel of St Mark, which I am afraid fell on deaf ears at the time; there were only three in my year, the cohort was very small, and we all chose different options; I was farmed out for politics teaching to Nuffield College, to Philip Williams, a nice man who was a tutor there; my area option specializing in Eastern Europe took me to St Anthony's College; in my final year I took the option in Marxism which took me to Hertford College; it was all rather fragmented and the lectures were not very good; my good memories of Oxford, apart from getting a good result at the end, are mainly of football and summer balls, and making friends that I still have today; I did not go to many lectures, certainly not in my final year; I remember thinking Peter Oppenheimer was quite good on economics in my first year; I also had John Plamenatz for politics but he was not very inspiring; in general I don't think the standard was very high; I was taught by Dick Smethurst at Worcester College in my final year; I was covering my options, having done Marxism one term which associated me with a certain type of undergraduate; we are talking about the early 1970s when students were occupying the examination halls and a lot of students were very political; I was the President of the Junior Common Room, by no means an extremist, but going to a lot of the meetings where the International Marxist group was arguing with the International Socialists; it was a very political struggle, but with an eye on my future I chose to do the money paper the following term, and that is how I got to know Dick Smethurst; at that time he was a Junior Proctor and was interested in talking to me as a junior common room president for inside information about when the students were planning to occupy a building that he was responsible for; he was a very nice guy, full of energy and enthusiasm, and I think already a little bit bored with teaching well-bred young men whose only interest was in landing on their feet when they went to the City of London after graduating; I think he realized that I was unlikely to follow that path, but I thought I was keeping my options open by taking a paper which would potentially have enabled me to make a lot of money

31:32:09 I was brought up as a Catholic; we had special classes for those children not going to Catholic schools and I had more than my share of sitting on benches listening to priests who all came from Ireland; South Wales was missionary territory; all I got out of it was the opportunity to be with boy scout groups, to play football in the Church team, and I lost any last semblance of religious faith around the age of twelve or thirteen; from then on I don't think I was ever particularly militantly secularist; I was influenced at school by people like Albert Camus and that kind of non-Christian philosophy; if I take religion seriously nowadays, as I do, leading a number of recent projects at this institute, it is very much as a social scientist interested in what holds communities together; I am also interested in the spiritual commitment that individual human beings are capable of; I find that extremely interesting, but I can't identify with any of it myself; fortunately the category of agnostic is flexible, so I would still place myself there rather than atheist; the latter has such a bad taste, especially if you work on socialist countries where this was required for such a long time - scientific atheism was the Soviet Union's peculiar form of religion and ideology; I find the category of agnostic, helpful, useful, but I don't personally connect to religion; I do not have mystical moments and I am married to a lady who is cynical about all forms of organised religion, as indeed is my father; it was always my mother who would go to church with us on Sundays whereas my father would boast that he was an old-fashioned pagan so was allowed to stay at home and dig his potatoes instead

34:39:00 I have thought about whether it is helpful as an anthropologist to have a faith background; it may explain why for most of my career I have stuck with the harder areas of economic and political anthropology, and even when I have looked at religion I have been interested in its social aspects - religion and civil society rather than meanings and interior states; I would not claim to have the religious sensibility of an Evans-Pritchard, or T.S. Eliot before him; this is not the sort of person that I am so obviously it has had some effect on the kind of anthropology that I have tried to do; of course one needs to be careful because you don't want to end up saying that only a Catholic can study the Catholics; I am not up to date with the arguments in Britain, but right now in Germany, organised religions are under enormous public pressure, mostly because of sexual scandals in the Roman Catholic Church; I have a certain glee as more revelations come forward because the power that has been abused over centuries is fairly clear to see; at the same time I do not share the slightly more militant stance of my wife in this respect; we discuss this at home and have many debates here at the Institute, but the role that different forms of religion have played in many post-socialist societies can help people to deal with all kinds of stressful situations; I think I have learned to respect that more over the last couple of decades; that has to do with the evidence that we have been collecting on religion in post-socialist countries; I have a sneaking respect for people who take their faith seriously and see it as ultimately what holds communities together; I always thought  that the much heralded demise or redundance of Durkheimian sociology was exaggerated - I have been listening to this from the 1970s and I still have sympathy for the school, despite the moral didacticism of Durkheim; you may not like his political sympathies either, and clearly some of his models of religion mirroring social organisation are grossly exaggerated; Pickering's very detailed book on Durkheim and religion shows it is not only relevant to simple Australians, but that the fundamental insights of the Durkheimian tradition are relevant to social cohesion in modern conditions; for me, Durkheim has his place in the pantheon of anthropology as well as sociology

40:24:23 In 1974 I went to Cambridge to do the Certificate in Anthropology; I could have stayed in Oxford and done a year's conversion course but I decided it would be more exciting to sample the 'other place'; by that time I had read Edmund Leach's introduction to Levi-Strauss and was immensely stimulated; it was a very exciting way to discover anthropology; Polly Hill was appointed as my supervisor because of my economics background; I got on very well with her; I was a deferential student wanting to learn about anthropology; one of the first books she got me to read was Abner Cohen on Hausa migrants; I should say that the Cambridge introduction was just as chaotic as most of my teaching in Oxford had been; I would go to lectures here, there and everywhere; I came to Corpus College because my economics tutor in Oxford had a connection with it, which was how I came to a college that had no close links with anthropology; it was all a little arbitrary, but I learned a lot just through going to classes organised for us; Stephen Hugh-Jones and Caroline Humphrey were the joint convenors of the meeting which was the most important weekly session for the students doing the Certificate; it was a nice little community that year so I learned a lot from all of them; Cambridge was very different, above all because of Corpus Christi College; I was living at their graduate centre off Grange Road at Leckhampton; it was very posh compared to what I had known at the Welsh college in Oxford; everything was much more hierarchical; when you went into Corpus Christi, the porter called you 'Mr' and 'gentlemen'; the relationship between porter and students was totally different from what I had known in Oxford, so it was in that context that I really noticed a difference; of course, I was a graduate student and that was a very different experience too; there were obvious continuities - I joined the football team again as I had as an undergraduate - but the Cambridge colleges that I was exposed to, King's being the other, were of a scale and atmosphere that were both very different from my rather intimate Welshness as a Jesus scholar in Turl Street, Oxford

46:01:09 You were lecturing about English kinship which went down very well, we also had Jerry Leach who was a gifted lecturer, but other lecturers were not all equally inspiring; it was always intended that I would go on, what was not clear for quite some time was what kind of a PhD would I go on to do; I took the Melanesia option which was run by Jerry in combination with Gilbert Lewis; Gilbert was also my advisor in the very first term; I was so excited by all the materials they were presenting, not to mention the wonderful film, 'Trobriand Cricket', which was the first ethnographic film I ever saw; we were all attracted to that area, but Jack Goody suggested that I study Eastern Europe; I had already been to Hungary several times although I did not speak the language; from 1975 onwards I was applying to the British Council to work in Hungary; I had first gone there at the end of my first year in Oxford on an interrail ticket as I had wanted to explore a part of Europe that I knew nothing whatever about; I visited Prague, Budapest and Vienna, travelling alone for a month; I discovered Hungary, met a girl in a train between Vienna and Budapest, and corresponded a little with her in German; that was the reason why I enrolled for a Summer university course at the end of my time in Oxford; I spent a couple of weeks in very stuffy classrooms learning about Hungary's new economic mechanism; it was intellectually quite exciting to be in Hungary at that time; they were reforming classical central planning models and they offered an English language international Summer school; Jack knew that I had done these things which was why he encouraged me to go to Hungary to do PhD work in anthropology; by that time I was already less enthusiastic about the structuralist things I had been reading by Edmund Leach, and I quickly came round to the idea of a fieldwork project in countries that I had already been researching in economics as well as politics; the anthropologist, using the methods of participant observation, could generate fresh kinds of knowledge about what was really going on in those societies that would go beyond the stereotypes of totalitarianism; none of the popular images really fitted Hungary as I already knew the place in the early seventies; it also seemed an attractive place to go with a good climate

50:51:24 I was never close to Jack Goody as a graduate student; he was officially my supervisor, but that was because somebody had to put their name down to take responsibility; I am grateful to him for doing that, but I don't think he read a word of anything I wrote about the Hungarian village where I ended up spending a year; I think I was very lucky to get through my PhD in such a casual way, I am sure it would not be possible nowadays; I wrote an occasional letter to him but don't think I prepared any text while I was in the field; later when I was in Cambridge, he was the Chair of the writing up seminar, so he would hear me talking about this and that, but I don't think I had much constructive academic supervision from Jack; it was somehow tacitly understood that if you were good enough to be given a free hand to go to a country where nobody had been doing anthropology from Cambridge before, that you would be getting on with it in your own way; I am grateful to Jack for letting me get on with things; it would be an enormous risk nowadays and we would not take on students in this Institute in such a manner, but in those days I can only feel grateful looking back; I did get to know him much better later on; obviously I owe him everything because in the year in which he retired I was appointed as an assistant lecturer, having in the meantime spent a few years at Corpus as a research fellow; I started work in the Department in 1984 which was the final year of his tenure of the William Wyse Chair; it was after that, even though he was away from Cambridge most of the time as he was determined not to interfere in any way with the regime of Ernest Gellner, that I saw him more frequently; he has been here at this Institute; I don't pretend that I read all the books that he writes because there are just too many of them, but his fundamental arguments that has driven most of his work, comes back to Eurasia, to the contrast with Africa as shown in his early works; the best synthesis, which I did not appreciate at the time is 'Production and Reproduction', which he published in the mid-seventies, obviously tied together a lot of the things that he had been working on since his own dissertation published ten years before; I remember asking him why hadn't he followed up those particular themes, but he had said all he wanted to say and had taken it as far as he could; however, all of the later work, though it might look as though he was interested in engaging with people like Pomeranz on the great divergence, is actually all about the agenda which he was setting up in the 1970s; it was an agenda, deriving from Childe, contrasting Eurasia East and West since the urban revolution of the late Bronze Age, with all that he knew from his years in the field in Africa; there is a consistency with almost all that he has done; even the apparently obscure things like flowers, they all fit into this agenda; I respect that enormously but intellectually I still think that those relatively small books of the 1970s will be the books that will continue to be read by future generations of anthropologists; on the pantheon of anthropologists, for me, he and Ernest Gellner are the two I know best, not only because of their works but through sitting in their kitchens, drinking red wine with them, watching football with them, so I can't begin to give an objective answer; those two would be at the top of my pantheon, but I recognise that my reasons are inevitably subjective; I have criticisms of the work of both of them; Jack clearly exaggerates his contrasts, though I don't think I would accuse him of technological determinism which he was accused of in the 1970s, but I see weaknesses in the theoretical edifices exhibited by both of my local heroes; at the same time, I think that both Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner are going to stay key figures in the pantheon; it is true that both of them published so furiously in their later years that it is sometimes hard to separate wheat from chaff; I would like somebody to do a selection from Jack's work in the way that James Laidlaw and Stephen Hugh-Jones did for Edmund Leach; of course, Leach's writing was very different but I would place him with the other two; I did not know Meyer Fortes at all, but he would have to be there too as part of the Cambridge pantheon

Second Part

0:05:07 On Ernest Gellner, the clarity of his writing and his basic position as he formulated it late in life - 'The Enlightenment Fundamentalist' - actually I think his position was rather more subtle than that simple label would indicate, but pushed as he was into these endless polemics through most of his life, always fighting causes with such wonderfully lucid prose; he was obviously not the greatest of ethnographers though I am told that the Morocco monograph is respected by those who know Morocco, but I think Gellner outperforms everybody in anthropology in terms of his range; coming from his secure background in philosophy, having found his roots in the eighteenth century with David Hume, in particular, also Kant, he knew what he was talking about; when anthropologists nowadays dabble in philosophy, very often they have not got even the faintest of backgrounds in that discipline; the authority of Gellner's voice over so many years warning against the seductions of the post-Geertzian generation in particular; up to a point I think he respected Geertz, but I remember Gellner telling me of the respect that he had for some of Geertz's more substantial work, and bemoaning the fact that Geertz's work helped to open up more of the indefensible post-modern excess of the end of the last century; I see Gellner as a spokesman for a certain rationalist, rigorously comparative, empiricist - many of the labels that I am sympathetic to, though somewhat ironic that he is doing this from a background in Central Europe; I miss him enormously; the silencing of his voice so prematurely was a great loss for all of us; Popper was fundamental and Gellner acknowledged that on many occasions, but he is a lot more interesting than Popper because he does have an appreciation for what makes societies and cultures different from each other; he had the sensitivity to the problems of understanding other cultures; of course, it helps that he had an interest in those parts of the world where I have an interest; I have not engaged much with his work on Islam, and I know that it is still intensively criticised, but the fact that people in that field still engage with his model shows you the value of putting forward a kind of ideal type, which he drew together in 'Muslim Society'; for me, it is more his work on socialism, and the problems addressed by Marxism, and interest in debating the living conditions of societies following some kind of Marxist-Leninist path while that was still open; on this I had a particular reason for engaging with him though we very seldom agreed on much; of course, his own background would make it very unlikely that he would see things as I saw them, but it was also typical of him to take my points seriously as I had done fieldwork in Hungary; he was charitable and generous to me

8:23:13 After four years as a research fellow at Corpus, became a lecturer in Ernest's department; with Keith Hart, taught economic anthropology; he is very much my older brother and knew very much more about economic anthropology than I did when we shared the teaching in the department in the 1980s; he was already disillusioned with quite a lot that was going on, including work on development in which he had made major contributions in the past whereas I was still the enthusiastic novice; we didn't always get on well together but we have done some books together; the jointly written 'History of Economic Anthropology' will appear quite soon with Polity Press, following the 'Market and Society' volume that came out last year; it has been very rewarding to produce these volumes with him; he has visited Halle once or twice and we correspond intensively; that is an ideal way to work with Keith; sometimes when you are too close to him in daily interaction, he doesn't suffer fools gladly; you need a thick skin sometimes, but the benefits of working with him, profiting from a mind that is as lively and creative as any of the others we have discussed; we were appointed at the same time, but in a sense in a department where Ernest Gellner had the status of the William Wyse Chair, again and again Keith would want to debate with him as an equal which led to friction between them on numerous occasions; in the end he put so much energy into teaching activities in Cambridge, which I respected but also regretted that it gave him less time to publish his own work; since retiring he has come to be more productive; I don't pretend to understand his psyche; we have a good joking relationship - I am the lad from South Wales and he's the Manchester man; he can't dismiss the things that I do, while on some occasions he will resort to referring to a certain social background or political stance to explain views that he disagrees with; we manage to hit it off pretty well; we had a great week together at the Polanyi Jubilee Conference in Montreal where we made the plans for the book on the history of economic anthropology; we shared a hotel suite for a whole week and it was a great experience; I could only wish I had other similar lively intellectual exchanges with other colleagues over the years, but it is easier to do this at a distance using the Internet than to be in continuous daily interaction with Keith

14:17:22 The book published last year has the subtitle 'The Great Transformation' and we think that the message, however exaggerated it was (and it is not a model that many historians would defend), has fundamental insights of Polanyi and the substantivist school do make a lot of sense; its most important argument is that the world does not have to be run on the basis of the principals of English utilitarian liberalism - economic man, the Formalist idea of the individual utility-maximizers, driving all human behaviour; I see an obvious link here with economic theory and rational choice theory more generally; what attracts me in the substantivist critique is the idea that humans are capable of more than that, and that people often evoke to support the individualizing economic man approach individuals like Adam Smith, when you look more carefully at their work are countering that aspect with the moral sentiments, an understanding of human capacity for empathy with others as well as maximizing only utility; this is what I would try to explain to a colleague in Bangladesh or anywhere else in the world; this is actually a long running internal debate in European philosophy and social thought which has been grossly simplified in our era, the so-called neo-liberal age; I was a junior lecturer in the decade of Mrs Thatcher and it is still somehow fresh in my mind, and those are still ideas that command large sections of the intellectual landscape here in Germany today; it is still hard to argue against those intellectual positions, but I think the counter-arguments of Polanyi, despite the polemical excess and inadequate attention to a lot of historical detail; the critique of market logic is not fundamental in the sense that he denies the importance of markets or that kind of selfishly motivates economic action, but he insists that it must be embedded in other forms of action, human behaviour; you may disagree with the labels that he used - reciprocity and redistribution are very vague general types that he sets up, based on his own reading of the ethnographic literature available to him in the 1930s, drawing heavily on Malinowski, Mauss and Thurnwald - I think Polanyi's critique and that whole debate between the substantivists and the formalists is still very important for the syllabus of economic anthropology, but also for public debate more generally about the kind of world we live in which parasitical finance markets can do so much damage to the real economy; Polanyi generated those views in the age of the Great Depression, it would not have been possible without his own background and upbringing in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his experience in the First World War, the biography is extremely important in understanding how he came to put forward those ideas; the main thing is to see the value of those ideas, and in fact, as Keith and I point out in the book, this Formalist substantivist debate is not so different from the debate that was going on inside German history in the later nineteenth century where people like Karl Bucher, also very important for the history of economic anthropology, were trying to find their own middle way between the universalizers, arguing that there must be universal laws to explain human economic behaviour;  we would now look to the evolutionary psychologists as the exemplary representatives of these universalists, that there is one hard-wired human brain, and on the other hand, historians and anthropologists much more interested in documenting different forms which that universal hard-wired brain can lead to in different local settings; it is an old debate, and I am not saying that Polanyi won all the arguments, but I would still insist that his side of the argument always needs to be listened to and it is nowhere more important than in our own countries nowadays with fresh financial crises hitting us almost every month

20:40:16 Having experienced Oxford, Cambridge then the University of Kent, and now the Institute in Halle, Germany, there are of course major differences between them; although Kent was set up with a collegiate model it was very different from Oxford and Cambridge; the founding professor of anthropology and sociology was Paul Stirling; I knew him quite well through my work in Turkey and that was one of the attractions of going to Kent, for although he had retired he was still active; I also enjoyed working in a department where sociologists had a major presence; of course, conditions were very different from those I had known in Cambridge, still they were happy and productive years for me; the German scene is very different; here German scholars themselves often joke that not much has changed since the nineteenth century; the institution of the ordinarius, the Professor, who once appointed recruits staff at various levels; a department of anthropology at a German university may have only one professor, the other staff will be directly subordinate to this professor and generally expected not to complement this professor in their expertise and teaching range but to do things for the professor in his or her field of interest; there is a degree of hierarchy to a degree of exploitation that I have never come across in the British system where even a very junior assistant lecturer is treated as an academic equal in a community that is fundamentally collegial; it is collegiality versus hierarchy to put it crudely; we try very hard at this Max Planck institute to respect principles of collegiality because I really believe that to be more fruitful of good academic work, but even within Max Planck things are set up by directors who expect then to appoint subordinates, and it is difficult to generate the kind of intellectual community which I always used to take for granted in Britain; I know managerial pressures are leading to new forms of hierarchy in Britain, but in Germany, despite a lot of efforts to improve things - for example, they have talked for many years about abolishing habilitation degrees, a second PhD which allows you to qualify for chairs; quite a lot of people never get around to writing a second degree, and the joke used to go round that dissertations are not read but weighed - if you don't write a couple of kilograms then it won't go through; that is no longer the case, but you do have to subject yourself for gruelling examination rituals, typically in your forties, in order to qualify then to apply for chairs; it is then not so surprising in human terms that people who still have to go through those rituals then appoint junior staff in the same way that they themselves were appointed a generation before; the system reproduces itself despite the efforts of some reformers in ministries to abolish habilitation, informally it continues to exercise the same pernicious effects that it has done since the nineteenth century; as a foreigner in this country I have to be politic about such matters and have to interact constructively with people that have to operate within this system

25:48:17 On my experience in Corpus, I have a great nostalgia for the college model though I don't like every aspect of it; Corpus was a very peculiar place in those days and I have been told that it hasn't changed that much over the years; there was a lot of trouble recently with the election of a new Master; for me it was quite an exotic social world bearing in mind the world that I come from in South Wales; I played a very active role in it in the 1980s; when I was a junior lecturer in the department my salary was not very high, and simply to make ends meet, with small children and a wife who was finishing her PhD, I ended up doing quite demanding jobs inside the College; I was the tutor for advanced students at Leckhampton doing a job that my predecessor had done full-time, paid a full salary by the College; in my case they supplemented my University salary; I don't regret doing it because I did enjoy many elements of what we called, the Leckhampton community;  I sometimes had to rush away from the anthropology seminar on Friday evenings for a governing body meeting at college; sometimes the discussion at that meeting was just as interesting as the seminar I had left; I made some good friend there; the college had some obvious advantages in that it provided you with hot meals, Corpus Christi being right next to the anthropology department; I organised JRF competitions, I put in quite a lot of work for the college but I also got a lot back from it; I would definitely end up defending the college system against its critics; I am sure it can be improved and made to work better; Ernest Gellner used to joke when he came to lunch at Corpus with me that the college felt like a gemeinschaft whereas King's, being so much larger, the hall itself being a much more impressive building, felt anonymous; he appreciated the smaller community of my college; on his induction at King's he joked that it was the only time he knelt to a linguistic philosopher, Bernard Williams

29:23:23 I would not put myself high up in the pantheon of original thinkers; if I have done something to remind today's anthropological audiences of the insights of a Polanyi or even of a Malinowski - I  have written about him, not only in relation to his Polish roots, but more generally the importance of ethnographic analysing; I have an immediate reservation about trying to identify key ideas in my work; there is not one central theme; I think I would claim that a lot of things hang together, in certain senses at least in a process of accumulation so that I have learned a lot from different fieldwork experiences; I have probably done fieldwork in more places and in greater depth than many anthropologists; if I just think of the early projects comparing the situation in rural Hungary with the very different situation in the countryside of rural Poland; that was very important in helping me get beyond some limitations, largely conditioned by political orientations and strong sympathies which took shape in my student years, to help me resist the temptation to write books as the academic observer who knows better than the people I am writing about; I had a lot of that arrogance in my younger days and I like to think I have become less so over the years through paying more attention to interpreting as distinct from the social scientist's explanation; I think that anthropologists should keep their own values and preferences out of the way however difficult it is to write value-free social science; in recent years I have been constantly asked to write about civil society; this is not my idea, and my criticism of it is not very original either; it is an eighteenth century term which was reinvented in the late twentieth century; that had a lot to do with the experience of Eastern Europe in those years; when Ernest Geller, (and this was one of many topic on which I could not agree with Ernest), published a book called 'Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals', he is at his most Euro-centric; it is the wonderful invention of some parts of Europe only, and what they are struggling heroically to establish in some places like Prague; you can only respect someone like Gellner, given his childhood in Prague, that he admires people like Havel and intellectual dissidents, but this was not the society that I knew as a fieldworker in Eastern European countries; I thought that I had some authority, and in other moods he would acknowledge this and admit that his civil society was an idealistic construction of the kind that he didn't really approve of, but he found civil society a more useful concept than democracy to theorise what was going on; my basic problem is that when anthropologists pick up this term as it starts to appear in the political science literature and in sociology, and I have read anthropologists' accounts of Eastern Europe where civil society means nothing more than a review of the new non-governmental organisations; there are anthropologists who no longer learn local languages but study NGOs and do multi-sited fieldwork by jumping from one NGO to another; you can get by with just the English language if you do that kind of study, but to end up with a dissertation entitled 'Contemporary Civil Society in....' is just farcical, an impoverishment of our discipline; I have been very critical of other disciplines where the term civil society creeps in as a replacement for the discredited term, totalitarianism; very often "society" on its own is enough, we don't need "civil"; if we do use it we should be very careful that a term from the eighteenth century can be of very much help in theorising the problems of the late or post-industrial societies; mine is a negative contribution but has been cited even outside anthropology; the most extreme formulation of my critique is where I mimic some of Gellner's work; I say that paradoxically we now have a church, in his sense of a closed community, of scholars who talk about civil society, and Gellner himself had contributed to this unfortunate new orthodoxy; a term that I feel much more positive about is E.P. Thompson's "moral economy"; again it has eighteenth century origins, picked up by Thompson, and again by James Scott in the 1970s, to oppose notions of political economy; what is the moral economy depends very much on who you read; Thompson was quite sympathetic of the use that James Scott made of the concept even though Scott used it of peasantries in South East Asia whereas Thompson was talking about the urban crowd; as a shorthand for getting at some of those Polanyi issues we talked about, the way in which the economy is embedded in the social context and the moral context that most of us would like to live our lives in, and feel that relations of trust and communal sentiment, or Adam Smith's "fellow feeling"; it also has an eighteenth century pedigree and anthropologists have a long record of promiscuously borrowing their concepts; I think there may still be some mileage in using that shorthand, moral economy, to engage with issues in today's world economy; I have written also on ethnicity theory, and have tried over the years to bring studies on nationalism and ethnicity theory together, based on my own empirical work on Central Europe and also on the Black Sea coast of Turkey; here I am broadly consistent with Gellner's approach, emphasising the modern nature of the new identities; in a way, Gellner, like Polanyi, is a "great divide" man who wants to have sharp lines between what came before and what came after - traditional, modern; most historians, many anthropologists, devote a lot of their energies to qualifying those sharp, great divide, theories, but we can still benefit from those models and the notion of punctuated equilibrium; it is not the case that everything proceeds through human evolution by gradual, incremental change; sometimes things do seem to accelerate, and it does make sense to use terms like revolution; I find the models of Gellner and Polanyi very useful to theorise with even though I am aware of the criticism I have made; when you start looking more closely of course there are continuities in so many areas, resilience of some practices even while others are being radically transformed; in a way that is what we are doing now in all this work on post-socialism; I suppose that will be another term that is associated with my articles and edited books, but we have been trying very hard for some time to get away from the term "post-socialism" which we never intended to become a label for a sub-discipline in the way that some people seem to see it; I was recently invited to do yet another survey of anthropological work in post-socialism, but for some time now I have declined as I am no longer interested in using that term; it made some sense when we were first defining our activities here, but it was never intended to become a label; we are interested in analysing the balance between continuity and change in the years after the fundamental institutions of socialism were swept away; it was a radical institutional change by any standards, and yet in all sorts of areas there are deep continuities, in social practices as well as in people's heads

43:28:11 I only know Pomeranz through Jack's work but see him cited regularly; he seems to rely on Tony Wrigley's work to explain the particular circumstances of having coal that made the difference between China and Europe in making the radical breakthrough; I have done fieldwork in a number of places, have put energy into language learning and background reading, but have done little archival work; at the moment I am writing up materials from China and hope to produce a book, for the second time with my wife as we did a book together on the Turkish work; there was not much historical depth to the Turkish study, but for this book I hope there will be more historical depth; in each of the places I have worked I have lived for a couple of years and feel that I have some insider appreciation of what makes those places tick, a fundamental requirement for writing an anthropological monograph; at the same time, as the head of this institute, I am also interested in broader definitions of anthropology and we have just started a new group for historical anthropology; here we will be exploring ideas of social evolution, perhaps training students to get degrees in anthropology without needing the obligatory twelve months in the field, learning a new language, which is at present obligatory in German universities; in my own case I have gone to these places and struggled to learn the language; I have never worked with interpreters, and nobody at this institute will need interpreters to do their fieldwork; that would be an unacceptable lowering of standards

48:39:24 Ildiko Beller-Hann, my wife, trained in archaeology, English and Turkish studies at university in Budapest; I met her first on an archaeology dig, but it was the Turkish connection that became most important in her academic career; when we lived in Cambridge she completed a PhD in the Oriental Studies faculty, with Susan Skilliter - that was in philology in which she was trained in Budapest; over the years she became much more interested in social science and anthropological work; she moved away from philology, and her own habilitation thesis - coming to Germany she was obliged to go through these rituals followed by German scholars - and she now has a job in Turkish studies at the University of Copenhagen, specializing on the eastern end of the Turkic world rather than Anatolia; she covers a very wide range and we lived in Turkey together for two years; I devised that project in order to fit in with her interests in improving her Turkish, and it was interesting for me to work in a state which in some ways resembled the socialist states of Eastern Europe; in terms of rural development, for example, it was very much top down; the state was transforming the lives of most of its citizens in a very aggressive, interventionist way, but it was doing so in a capitalist context; comparisons between Turkey and Eastern Europe were very interesting for me and I still find them a useful foundation when I am teaching or writing, to have that experience of capitalist transformation; the Xinjiang study that we are writing up at the moment, was a place that both of us wanted to go; she has far better knowledge of the local languages than I will ever have, but I can get by; Uighur, although a nation of some 10,000,000, have not been very much studied so there is a lot to be done in that part of Central Asia; we have a daughter and a son

52:31:24 Now Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute in Halle and have been here for eleven years; luckily, I do not have to do much administration as we have excellent administrators who cover every aspect of the Institute's activities, the idea being to free the Directors to get on with their research; there is obviously a lot of time managing other people's projects; inevitably, if you are the native English speaker and English is the dominant language of your discipline, but most of your colleagues do not have English as a native language, you are constantly wondering if the time you spend correcting other people's bad English is a good investment of your own time; what I really should stress is a remarkable network, and it is intended to give the academics selected for these appointments the best possible conditions to get on with their research agenda; they are not expected to become bureaucratic administrators; there is a widespread understanding in Germany that when you get to be Professor you will spend much time on committees, and many German professors will not publish another book once they have got their Chair; they are not expected to, and the climate of the Research Assessment Exercise in Britain has not yet reached German universities; in Max Planck,  we are evaluated and people would ask very searching questions if a director was not productive as an individual as well as supporting all the work of colleagues appointed by that director; I cannot complain about conditions here; on the contrary we are very privileged