Caroline Humphrey interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 5th August 2010

0:05:07 Born in London in 1943; my paternal (Waddington) grandfather was a tea planter in India in the Nilgiri Hills so my father, who was a scientist, was born in India and remembered it with great affection; I never met my grandfather as he died in India but I saw letters that he sent to my father when he was at school; I do not know much about that side of my family but I was influenced indirectly by the thought of India as a wonderful land; on my mother's side, my great-grandfather was quite a high official in New Zealand - Pember Reeves; he was a reformer who brought in things like votes for women before they happened in Britain; my grandmother was a Fabian and quite an intellectual - Amber Pember Reeves; she read moral sciences at Newnham and she was a big influence on my life: she had an affair with H.G. Wells when she was a student which was a big scandal at the time; she became pregnant so my aunt is her daughter by H.G. Wells; as he was not going to marry her, to her rescue came a nice young lawyer, my grandfather, who made her respectable; his name was Blanco-White, and in the family there was a legend that Blanco was a Spanish Jewish family who fled from Spain and ended up in Britain, and took the name White to explain the Blanco; I later discovered that this probably is not true, that White was an Irish sea captain who went to Spain and took the Blanco to explain the White; this family was very Catholic and some time in the late nineteenth century a rather famous Blanco-White took exception to this religiosity and ran away from Spain and settled in England; he was an anti-religious figure and a poet and pamphleteer; he was, I think, my grandfather's ancestor; I knew both these grandparents well; my grandmother was a very intellectual figure and quite scary; she used to say that the only respectable academic discipline was mathematics, and things like music were positively disgraceful; she used to teach in Morley College in London, an adult education college; she taught philosophy so was very logical; my grandfather was a much more cheery, rosy figure; he was a family lawyer and used to enjoy talking about cases

5:34:04 My mother was one of Amber's three children; she was very artistic and became an architect; she also had some of her mother's rigour and was an architect in the Bauhaus, modern, stylish mode in Britain; she did build a couple of houses in Cambridge; however, after the War, very little was being built of that kind; she became an architect for Edinburgh City Council; she worked all through her life so I had this example of a working woman as my mother; she was a loving mother but she admired elegance and style, and it was the same with thoughts and ideas; my father, C.H. Waddington, came up to Cambridge and I think he read geology; he was very friendly with people like Bernal and other well known Cambridge people of the 1930s, Needham was another friend of his; he moved into genetics after graduating as a geologist; I think he had a research fellowship at Sidney Sussex; both he and my mother were rather on the left; my mother was actually a member of the Communist Party, my father was not, but they were both in that group of intellectuals; I must have met Bernal as a child, I met Gregory Bateson who was a great friend of my father's, also Margaret Mead who was influential on me; she was terrific and I met her in my teens; I think my father always thought anthropology an interesting subject; at that time it was difficult to travel but he did so when he could, to Africa and so on; part of this was Margaret Mead arriving with stories of islands in the Pacific; I remember her saying to me once that if I wanted to be an anthropologist, not to worry about it too much as six weeks was enough to learn any language - not really very good advice; she was full of energy and I would have thought quite attractive, especially in her youth; my father was quite a shy man but he had a great sense of fun; he loved new things and was always travelling; he went to America, he listened to jazz, and liked things like John Cage's experimental music which consisted of almost nothing; I remember him telling me about one of John Cage's art ideas which was to do with water and the different taste of different waters; this art object consisted of tasting about fifteen different waters; he was intrigued by things like that; he wrote a book about abstract painting in the fifties and sixties, and the influence of scientific visions on that; what was suddenly available as an insight into the structure of something through science, and how that opened the eyes of painters during that period; my own connection with the Fitzwilliam Museum and my own interest in art stems from my parents 11:50:15 I grew up in Edinburgh; I remember the house we moved into after the War when I must have been about four; it was in effect a kind of commune; it was a large eighteenth century mansion outside Edinburgh which my father's institute rented for the entire institute; it was a new institute and was just being set up, and as people did not have enough money to buy houses everybody was in it from the lab technicians to the professor; it was wonderful for us children because there was a separate dining room for us and we had lots of other children to play with; it was a huge estate with a great garden around it with statues and fountains, so we had an absolutely wonderful time there; I have a younger sister and a half-brother from my father's first marriage; this place, Morton Hall, may be one of the things that lies behind me being an anthropologist; it was more fun for the children than for the adults; I think the notion of people living in a commune was very difficult after the War; the women especially felt that they couldn't express themselves as women because there was no kitchen, just communal eating; they couldn't be wives in the way they thought they ought or wanted to be; I didn't know about it at the time but I gather there were all sorts of rumours of affairs and so on; it fell apart after about four or five years, and we moved into Edinburgh; my first school was a P.N.E.U. school which was thought to be progressive; it was a pleasant place; I remember a lot of emphasis was placed on art and painting; it wasn't very hot on learning to read and write so I didn't really learn to do so until I went to my next school; that was a standard Edinburgh high school and I went there between seven and eight; I remember coming into the bottom class not knowing how to read and write; one thing we did in our family was quite a lot of painting and sketching, so I guess I was taught from an early age to look at landscapes, trees or places, and to think how you might capture them; the other thing I did was music; when we moved into Edinburgh we were living in the same street as a refugee composer from Vienna called Hans Gal; his daughter became a very close friend of me and my sister, and almost immediately we all had lessons in playing instruments and started playing in little trios and quartets; that was a very strong element all through my childhood; I played the piano, and still do; I was annoyed because my sister played the piano and the cello and because of that she could play in many more things, and play in an orchestra; I wanted to learn the violin but my mother forbade me because I was not actually very good at school and was always tailing along the bottom of the class; I think she thought I couldn't handle two instruments and school work

17:46:21 Classical music has been very important throughout my life; it is not that I don't like other music but I play classical music; I came to have a very good teacher from the age of about twelve, but when I went to university I practically gave it up; there wasn't a teacher here and I was doing other things, and when I was away in Russia doing fieldwork, it became impossible; although I had a piano at home I didn't do very much, but when I was in my forties I got a two year readership and had a bit more time, so I took piano lessons again; more recently, in the last five years, I have again been taking lessons; it is the most wonderful thing because it is completely apart from academic work as you use a different part of your brain; it is a question of honing your listening and making that coordinate with your physical movements - tiny things, and very fast, so you have to be completely in control, aware and alert; since it is so engaging of the mind it is a real break from the obsessions of writing; I play Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, all the greats; I suppose it indirectly feeds into my writing in so far as music has a structure, and a phrase of music has a shape; perhaps one would try to emulate that in one's writing so that it is not too lumpy and awkward; more directly, I suppose, because I loved music it was one of the main reasons why I went to Russia as an anthropologist; when I was still at school I had a great passion for the Russian cellist Rostropovich, at the time when people like him had just come to the West, and the Russian pianist, Richter who became an abiding hero because he is such a great pianist; one of the reasons I was so happy to choose Russia was because all these wonderful musicians were there

22:00:04 The high school was a girls' school and quite strict; I remember loving English, history, art; I don't think it was a distinguished school and a lot more of my education came from being in the kind of family I was in, meeting people my parents knew, the fact that there were books everywhere in the house and the fact that one could be reading something they had never thought of at school; I was a keen reader; I remember reading Proust at the age of sixteen - perhaps not the whole lot, but several books; my parents had sent me away to France when I was quite young; at fourteen I went on an exchange, and then did so three summers running with a group of French families; that made me love French culture and the language, so was a good thing to have done; I don't think I am a good linguist as I treat languages as working tools and have never done a really formal course in Russian, for example; Mongolian was not really something one could do anything very formal with, so I don't think I speak them very correctly, but I am reasonably fluent in French and Russian, and more or less in Mongolian; I stayed at that school until I was eighteen; I must have got the average number of Scottish Highers and was desperate to go to university, but not to Edinburgh because I wanted to avoid my parents; I said that I wanted to go to Cambridge but the headmistress said I was not up to that standard and would make the school look bad if I failed; that really annoyed me and I started to work for the first time in my life; my mother helped by getting me extra tuition, so I got some 'A' levels - history, English, and history of art - and got into Cambridge; I remember my English teacher, my art teacher and my history teacher, Miss Pearson, who was an enormous influence; I was most influenced by my piano teacher, Miss Edna Lovell; it was a hearty school and I tried my best, but I was no good at it; I was in the third hockey team for my house; theatre, debating, and that kind of thing I did at Cambridge, not at school; when I came here I entered Girton College; I mostly gave up on music, though I did keep up the flute; I did a lot in the theatre in my first two years, doing scenery design and stage management.

27:43:08 My parents were atheists so I had no religious education except what happened at school; for me, churches were mysterious places with possible glamorous goings-on, because I never went into them; I suppose I was aware that other people would go to Sunday school, but I do remember in my teens thinking I ought to sneak out and actually go to churches to see what went on in them; I did try to look inside some churches in Edinburgh, but it was a pretty frosty city and the churches were not places you could drop into; I suppose I was rather ignorant of all that and remain so to some extent; when, here in Cambridge, people go to chapel, and I have to do so now for various reasons, everybody lustily sings hymns that they all know, but I don't know them; I think perhaps this thwarted early interest was why I became interested in shamanism and other religious faiths; I also did become interested in Christianity, and for a period was quite religious; I did get Confirmed in the Church of England in middle-age, so it is a dimension of life that I have some feeling for, though I am not very active now; I suppose I would think of myself as agnostic; I think the culture of religion, or what religious people have done in our history, is so enormous that it is part of the background of being a European; you cannot ignore it, and to understand it you have to have some feeling for what it means to be religious; I think science can disprove many of the claims of people who are religious - the absurdity of particular dates of creation, or miracles - but I don't think science could do anything about what people feel about essential mysteries which we don't understand and may never understand, yet we have intimations that there are things that maybe our brains are not capable of appreciating; at any rate there does seem to be some order behind things that we don't have an explanation for; all of that kind of thing is part of being human, and I don't think that science is going to disprove it or prove it; some of the things shaman do are very extraordinary in terms of creating transformations in other people, which you might call curing or reviving; I don't have any explanation for it; the people who believe in it see it as religious in some sense, and it is very remarkable; I do think there are some very gifted people, gifted in some ways that our culture left in abeyance; I have always thought the idea that you have individualism in the West, and that elsewhere people conform to cultures, just ridiculous; the most in a sense individualistic people in my experience are shamans; they have the most extraordinary personalities, absolutely riveting and strange, and they can do things with their ways of talking, looking and addressing people; I have had experience with one particular shaman whose ability was to sense other personalities within people that were not obvious; the way she put this was not in terms of personality, but about a spirit you might have that you don't know about, or a previous life; she said she was capable of drawing this out of you; she did this for me and several friends - who knows what there was about it? - but it didn't appear haphazard or meaningless; she described it as former existences

36:42:21 Just before I left my school in Edinburgh a new headmistress arrived who had been a don at Girton; she suggested that I apply to Girton and that is why I came to Cambridge; I wanted to read English as I wanted to be a writer, but English at Girton was full that year so they gave me a place to read anthropology; it was accidental, but I have never regretted it; I remember Meyer Fortes who was seemingly strict and quite dry; I came to appreciate him later but at the time his lectures seemed old-fashioned; far more exciting at that time were Edmund Leach and Stanley Tambiah, who was also there; Maurice Bloch was a graduate student at the time and also supervised me; all of them were doing a different kind of anthropology than Fortes, and I was much more excited by it; I was perhaps dimly aware that there were tensions between Leach and Fortes, but one was much more aware that they just took a different line on anthropology, and might almost have had different definitions of what it was; Jack Goody was there but I didn't have much to do with him; he was associated with Fortes and African studies and I was more interested in Asia; Maurice was not especially interesting as an undergraduate supervisor; I knew him better and discovered his research work when I was a graduate student; there was a woman at Girton who was a very good teacher, Doris Wheatley, and Audrey Richards was a wonderful supervisor; those people had a passion for anthropology and made it seem exciting as a subject; I never regretted doing it instead of English; my student contempories included Jonathan Parry, Enid Schildkrout, Keith Hart, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Marilyn Strathern was a few years older, and Susan Drucker Brown; the myth that everyone mingled and went together to the bun shop was not true of me; I felt being stuck out at Girton that there was probably a little inner group based in King's because both Fortes and Leach were fellows there, and that perhaps students there did that kind of thing; most of my time in Cambridge I was in the ADC theatre and not very devotedly doing anthropology, although I was interested in it; Levi-Strauss was the thing in those days; I remember reading 'La PensÈe Sauvage' and various other books by him and found them really exciting; that was the kind of research Edmund was doing and Mary Douglas was writing her great works at that time; Tambiah was also involved; it was opening up a whole new world, and one was aware that anthropology was also interesting to those outside the subject; any educated person would be reading Levi-Strauss at that time and people would be interested in anthropology, which has completely disappeared now; perhaps people now think there is nothing left to discover, but I think it was more that Levi-Strauss and the structuralists in general had a theory of looking at culture which was much wider, more philosophical than than purely anthropological; it was taken as an approach in literary studies and all sorts of different areas of academia; it was also a universal idea, something that told you about humankind that people had not thought of before; I suppose a lot of theories in anthropology now have become so relativistic and tied to specifics, that it has become much less interesting for people in general.

45:28:17 I got a 2:1 but it was good enough at that time to do research; I had decided I wanted to work in Russia, so as soon as I graduated I enrolled in a course in Russian language which was done on the Sidgwick site by some ex-army tutors; it was a very efficient course where they just barked it into you; you were not allowed to speak a word of English for six weeks and by the end it was possible to get along in Russian; for some reason Meyer was appointed as my supervisor but he was very against my working in Russia; he said it was too closed and propagandized and that nobody would talk to me, and that the last anthropologist who had tried to go there, James Woodburn, was thrown out; I was put down to study peasants in Poland, but I still wanted to go to Russia; it so happened that during that academic year Meyer was off on sabbatical in America, and while he was away I started working on some people called Yakut, now called Sakha, living in the north of Siberia, and preparing myself to go and do fieldwork there; I spent a year reading every single thing I could on them and in registering for the British Council exchange scheme with Russia; I managed to get a studentship from them, and by the time Fortes came back it was more or less a fait accompli that I was going to Russia; during his absence I had not been supervised by anyone else; in those days it was much more free and easy; there was no pre-fieldwork training and no advice was given on what to do; we were even told that we should avoid going to the field with too much theory ('preconceptions'), so as to keep ourselves open to every kind of experience; we did have a sort of training from the Foreign Office before going to Russia because this was at the height of the Cold War, and it was reckoned we would come under scrutiny from the KGB; about twelve of us went to this place in the Foreign Office and they told us of the various ways we could be entrapped by the KGB; I remember we all came out laughing thinking it was rubbish; but in fact it all happened more or less as they predicted; it was lucky for me that the Russian KGB was rather sexist; there were not many women in our British group but a lot of the men had problems; we women were left much more alone; the men would be made drunk, or drugged on one occasion, and would wake up in bed with some woman and a photographer would burst in, that kind of thing. At that time in the 1960s my mother was no longer a member of the Party; she had left in 1956 at the time of the Hungarian uprising. But that background did mean I knew what these professors in Moscow University were talking about; there must have been in my youth some kind of notion of respect for the working class or more disadvantaged people, and equality, all those things that are supposed to matter, and do, in a socialist society; I suppose Soviet Russia was much less strange to me than it would have been to a lot of people from Britain; I don't remember my parents ever discussing Lenin or Marx, it was more, I suppose, a general attitude and an absence of what you might get in a lot of middle-class English households - a sort of horror concerning Russia; I did also have a Latvian nanny at one point in my childhood who was a refugee, and she told me lots of folk stories of forests and fairytale lands. From her and my mother I also heard about cruelties and invading armies.

53:00:21 I first went to Russia before I intended to do anthropology, on camping holiday there as a student; we had a car and we drove from Finland; I remember disembarking at Leningrad and it did seem unlike any country in the West, even Finland; Leningrad and Vyborg immediately give an impression of incredible greyness and drabness; everybody dressed differently, the houses were dusty, concrete edifices; parts had been bombed during the War and not rebuilt; the food was rough and sour, so it did have a feeling of being another world; you had to adjust all your sense of colour and what people's personalities might be like, the tone of life was utterly different; Russia isn't like that now but it was then; when I went to do fieldwork, I was in Moscow University, sharing accommodation with a Russian girl who I later realized had to report on what I was doing; I do remember the feeling that somehow everything was different, the smell, taste of food, clothes people wore, the books people were reading in the University, the way the professors behaved, was just another world; I was initially planning to go to North Siberia to work on the Yakuts and I was very interested in the notion of these people who had arrived from the south, they were horse-breeding, Turkish language speakers, had come from way down in Central Asia and found their way up to this place, beyond the Arctic Circle; they were living as semi-nomads with herds of horses and cattle in an inconceivably harsh environment; I was very interested in how you could make a life in such a culture in a place that was so utterly difficult and dangerous; but when I got to Moscow my Professor said that I couldn't go there; I don't know what the real reasons were but he said that it was not possible to travel there in spring and autumn because the land became a big swamp, and in the winter it was inconceivably cold - the coldest place in the world, which was true - and in the summer it was full of mosquitoes; so then I had to find somewhere else for my research; we had a bargaining session; my plan for work had to be inserted in the plan for their department as everything in Russia was done according to a plan; it was decided that I would go to the Buryats as they were quite similar to the Yakuts, but living in the south of Siberia as oppose to the north; I then had many months in Moscow waiting to get permission to go and do fieldwork, about nine months; the whole period was important to my research as I spent nine or ten months reading about the Buryats, everything I could find; the result was that I now have a really good historical knowledge of them, I spent every day in the Lenin Library reading about them from dawn to dusk; it was incredibly useful, and I think living in Moscow was part of the research as I learnt a lot about Soviet life more generally; I stayed two months in the field in Buryatia; it was not like the fieldwork that people do now as it was planned and had to be negotiated every step of the way; it wasn't just that I had to get permission from Moscow University to leave Moscow but had to get an invitation at the other end for them to receive me; I only did this by sheer luck really as somebody from Buryatia came to Moscow and dropped in on my Professor who had become a good friend of mine; I managed to impress this woman as to what a nice, innocent person I was; she very kindly issued the invitation, otherwise I never would have been able to go; people really didn't do such things; no foreigner really went anywhere outside their designated city for research, and no British student had done anything like this before; the field site was far away beyond Lake Baikal; when I got there I found they had a schedule for me, that I should go to this collective farm for one month and another for the second month, so I didn't have any choice about where I went; but it was fine - the whole area was interesting to me and I had many questions I longed to find an answer to; the Buryats had been well studied by Russians; one reason is that they lie on the direct route between Moscow and China and Mongolia; all the great Russian explorers, who were mostly army officers, would have to go to Buryatia, and they used the Buryats as assistants on these expeditions, so it was very well studied by Russians