Maurice Bloch interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 29th May 2008

0:09:07 Born in Caen in Calvados in 1939; family comes from two areas of France, one lot from Lorraine and the other from the Bordeaux area; the Bloch side came from Lorraine where great-grandfather was a miller; grandmother's family were from Bordeaux, were Sephardic Jews, originally from Portugal; during the eighteenth century they were very rich but their fortunes declined and the marriage with Bloch was an attempt to improve them; still have many cousins in South-West France; my mother's father was a school teacher in the Massif Centrale and her mother was a niece of Durkheim and a first cousin of Mauss, and came from a little town in Lorraine; my mother knew Durkheim quite well as a child and I met Mauss several times; he was very old by then and more or less off his head; he lived in the same block of flats as my grandparents so my grandmother used to take food to him; my father was killed in the War; he got into Polotechnique and then the French Army and was arrested by the Germans early on and was killed; my mother was a marine biologist; when my father was captured she went to the Gestapo headquarters to complain to Heidrich; of course, they never let her out and she was deported and sent to Auschwitz but because she was a biologist she was put with a number of scientists slightly outside and managed to survive; the Germans were trying to obtain rubber from dandelions which have latex and got all the biologists together in a kind of lab. nearby; towards the end she was put back with the others but was in Auschwitz most of the War; I was more or less adopted during the War by a Polotechnique friend of my father's who included me in his family under a false name and brought me up; I have remained very close to them; then my mother came back and after a while married a British biologist called Kennedy which is how I came to England at the age of eleven; John Kennedy worked at the Agricultural Research Council; my mother had other children; my mother was incredibly hardened as a result of her experience and not easy to have much contact with; she was tough and had been a mountaineer before the war; my step-father had much more influence on my intellectual development and I was interested in natural science as a result

8:15:02 First of all I went to the Lycée Carnot in Paris and then to the Perse in Cambridge; I did not like the Perse; I hated being taken to England and so I was extremely uncooperative; I was very influenced by a history teacher, John Tanfield, and wanted to do history at university; also influenced by an English Literature teacher who was a member of the 'Scrutiny' group, Douglas Brown; I was not a games player and had a dislike of cricket because it was English, though I quite liked rugby; I had been very good at boxing in France but did not continue for long in England because the games master thought it was a good idea; I became a very keen brass rubber as a child; I like music and regret never having a chance to do it; I like standard classical music plus Messiaen and Britten; I did well enough at school to just manage to get into university; went to the L.S.E. where I did anthropology; at that time Maurice Freedman was there and Burton Benedict who influenced me; also went to University College and was a fan of Mary Douglas; I liked Adrian Mayer very much at S.O.A.S.

13:52:09 I spent a lot of my time at university acting, largely in French plays; I had not acted at school; my tutor was Burton Benedict who was very supportive;  I admired Firth and Adrian Mayer; I heard Mary Douglas first in my third year and thought her really interesting and exciting; I was interested in linguistics and followed lectures at S.O.A.S.; at that time I was also politically involved; both my parents were in the Communist Party though they left very early, and I never had anything to do with it; I spent time in France in opposition to the Algerian war and before the Vietnam war; I was quite passionate about these colonial wars which influenced my working in anthropology; at the end of my undergraduate course I was interested in India, influenced by Adrian Mayer; I got the chance to come to Cambridge; Meyer Fortes was setting up a research project with the French, with Germaine Dieterlen, and offered to find me some money to come as a research student, partly because he thought I could act as a kind of bridge between the French and the British; my parents vaguely knew him; I came and agreed to work in West Africa although my heart was really set on India; then the whole programme collapsed so he was landed with me as by then I had got a research studentship; he said I could do what I liked as long as it was in Africa so I went to the part of Africa which is most Asian, Madagascar; I still had a tie to history and knew the history of Madagascar

19:48:16 My contemporaries as Ph.D. students were Caroline Humphrey whom I supervised in her last year as an undergraduate, Andrew Strathern, Marilyn Strathern who was also an undergraduate in her last year, Adam Kuper, Jim Faris, Jonathan Parry came later when I came back from Madagascar; all these people have remained friends although I am in contact mostly with Johnny Parry and I like the anthropology he did; started with Meyer as supervisor but when the project fell apart he lost interest in me; the graduate students were, to a certain extent, the clients of different members of the faculty; Kuper was close to Fortes, a man called Geoffrey Benjamin was close to Leach, Andrew Strathern was close to Jack Goody; I was not close to any of them which I rather enjoyed, partly because Madagascar was between Africa and Asia; Audrey Richards became interested in me and I liked her; at the end I was supervised by Tambiah and he was the first person that I felt understood what I was doing, and understood Madagasi society; I was working in the Merina Highlands with rice cultivators; as a supervisor he was the only person who really helped me in Cambridge although I got lots of ideas from the others; I began to get to know some of Levi-Strauss's work then; I still had Firth and Adrian Mayer in the back of my mind, and the very different influences of Leach and Fortes here; my work was a combination of these two influences as well as French Marxist writers who were totally unknown then in Cambridge; for a long time I felt that nobody was interested in what I was doing but at the end, they were all interested in my work; Fortes, not much, but Jack and Edmund were interested; they read odd chapters and made useful comments, but it was Tambiah who really helped me; at that time there were notable differences between Fortes and Leach; the person who seemed most bitter about it was Jack, but I may be wrong

28:20:06 I arrived in Madagascar knowing absolutely nobody; I put myself in a cheap hotel and after a while went to look for a place to study; found my field sites in weird ways; after a while I just used to go to bus/lorry stations around the capital and just go in any of them; had a number of adventures but, on the whole, people were extraordinarily nice to me; met people indirectly like that and then I found the region where I did fieldwork; I really enjoyed doing fieldwork; I suddenly felt for almost the first time in my life that I was quite good at it; I was understanding new things which were different from the anthropology that I had been taught; I was good at getting on with people and learning the language; I had the advantage of being able to compare myself with a few totally useless French anthropologists who were around, and knew that what I was doing was infinitely better; it gave me a boost to my self-esteem; by the time I came back to Cambridge I felt, I think for the first time in my life, that actually I was really quite good; my interests were originally economy, economic anthropology, partly from a Firth background, big questions about kinship; did realize early on that the Madagasi type systems were quite different from what I had been taught; the focus was on tombs and where they were buried rather than who their ancestors are; became interested in ritual which was partly Edmund's influence; I could see the significance of the overall schema of 'Elementary Structures'; I had been interested in linguistics and that became much more important later; the link between linguistics and the social structuralism of Levi-Strauss meant a lot to me in a way that I think it didn't to most British anthropologists at that time; I had done a subsidiary degree in linguistics at the L.S.E.

34:01:12 My internal Ph.D. examiner was a rather grey figure, G.I. Jones, a rather nice man although I did not know him at all; the external was Adrian Mayer; they liked the thesis; it was published shortly afterwards and fairly well received; it was published by Seminar Press; both Marilyn Strathern and I were outside the Cambridge orbit; those inside had their work published by Cambridge University Press; I got some really good reviews, from John Middleton and Gulliver for example; I began to write other things; Jack had been doing a seminar on literacy and he asked me to take part in it; Audrey Richards asked me to take part in a thing on councils; both articles were published as Cambridge Papers and were quite different from my thesis work; I got a job in Swansea; I was married by then and my wife had a job in London; as soon as there was a job available in London I applied and got one at L.S.E.; my year in Swansea was nice, partly because I made good friends, although the department was not all that brilliant

38:49:23 Went to the L.S.E. in 1969; Freedman was still there although Raymond had retired; it was rather a poor period; Lucy Mair was still around but Robin Fox had gone; Jean La Fontaine came at the same time as me and we got on well personally, not so much intellectually; Ioan Lewis came later that year; Peter Loizos came at the same time as I did; Alfie Gell was a graduate student; I was not very impressed by the staff at that time but I was by the graduate students, like Gell and Olivia Harris, with whom I spent time and with whom I had more in common intellectually; L.S.E. took a while to pick up again but did so when Johnny Parry came about six or seven years after; Chris Fuller also came later as did Gell; think his work was brilliant although a lot is wrong and terribly muddled; the best is his book on art; his book on time is muddled; a lot of his essays are brilliant; he was somebody like Mary Douglas for me; admire Johnny in a different way as I trust what he writes; think that he is the best to have come out of the British sociological tradition; it was very good to do books together; he is also a brilliant reader and seminar leader; Raymond was good at seminars and I have admiration for his work, but I don't think he is brilliant; I was in touch with Mary Douglas and she was very generous about my work

44:20:03 The year after I came to L.S.E. I was invited to Berkeley; it was important because in Berkeley the people who influenced me were not anthropologists but mainly linguists and philosophers; I began to get very interested in cognitive science; so became interested in the work of Searle,  Lakcoff etc.; began to read quite a lot of developmental psychology and also Chomsky; was not tempted to stay although I was offered a job, but my wife was not; also politically uncomfortable because of links to Marxist movements, mainly in France; came back to L.S.E.; had been interested in Marxist ideas since about sixteen and knew a lot about it; 'Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology' is an historical book; I knew the French Marxist anthropologists and was impressed by them, particularly Godelier and Terray; I knew much more about Marxism than my contemporaries and also about structuralism and linguistics; my developing interest in them and in cognitive psychology linked to my interest in Marxism; I began to do work with Susan Carey who was at M.I.T. at that time, now at Harvard; also got to know Dan Sperber; I wrote an article on ritual which contains a criticism of semiotics called 'Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation'; it came out at the same time as Sperber's book on symbolism appeared; we did not know each other at all but there were similarities in our point of view

52:49:08 Enjoyed Ph.D. supervising and have done between thirty and forty in all sorts of areas; I was very lucky with the graduate students that I had; four of my students are now on the staff at the L.S.E.; there are others that I admire; I like lecturing very much; I write a lot and then just write notes to lecture from; I like taking new topics as a way of thinking forward and learning new things; lectures feed into my writing as well as the ideas from interaction with graduate students; I hate administration; I was Convenor of the Department for nine years and think that I did a pretty good job, in that I renewed the Department with the help of others; I felt it was a period when the L.S.E. picked up again; this was from the late 1980's to the middle 1990's; it was an exciting period and has remained good until recently; don't know what the future will bring

1:00:20:09 In terms of writing most interesting work possibly a series of articles 'The Past and the Present in the Present', 'Symbol, Song and Dance'; more recently the work on memory, the article on cognitive science and anthropology; the book 'From Blessing to Violence' I think is unusual and interesting; the latest article in New Scientist [on ‘Why religion is nothing special but is central'] - description of the argument; overlap and differences with Pascal Boyer; bookbinding; I have been very interested in child development and have benefited a lot from working with people like Susan Carey, Dan Sperber, Paul Harris, another psychologist - these people I find much more exciting than many anthropologists; I think of anthropology ultimately as a natural science while I find a lot of other work in the social sciences now what I call dissecting shadows; I am philosophically a naturalist like Dan Sperber, which sets us apart really fundamentally